The Mystery of Jane Austen: What Mansfield Park Really Hides About Slavery.

According to Vox: There is one mysterious problem in Jane Austen's legacy that scholars have yet to find an answer to.

Austen lived during the time of the British Empire, which actively traded slaves. What were her thoughts on this? Can we perhaps understand her position and see how ordinary people reconcile with terrible circumstances?

These questions are particularly relevant in a scene from her third novel, Mansfield Park, published in 1814. Although this novel is one of her least favorite works, it is the only one where characters openly discuss slavery — and attentive reading reveals numerous hints about the slave trade and slave economy throughout the text.

The scene in question features the heroine Fanny Price conversing with her cousin Edmund Bertram about his father — the stern Sir Thomas Bertram.

Fanny is slightly afraid of Sir Thomas, since he took her into his luxurious country house when she was just 10 years old as a gesture of charity. Now, as a teenager, she is the most righteous and morally upright person in the Bertram household, yet both Sir Thomas and Edmund know that she sees herself as inferior to her wealthy relatives and therefore rarely speaks with him.

The scene begins with Edmund telling Fanny that she should talk more to Sir Thomas. Then suddenly Fanny begins talking about slavery: “[…] Haven’t you heard how I asked him about the slave trade last night?”

'I heard — and hoped the question would be supported by others. Your uncle would have liked it if he were asked more.'

'And I very much wanted to do that — but there was such dead silence! And while my cousins sat there without saying a word and showing no interest in the topic, I didn't want to — I thought it would look as if I were trying to stand out at their expense by showing an interest and delight in the information he probably wished for his daughters to feel.'

Literary critics raise important questions: what role does this scene play in Mansfield Park? Is it related to the strange, sad, and educational character of the novel? What can be said about the “dead silence” that responds to Fanny’s question? Perhaps it is a true reflection of what ordinary people spoke about at that time? What were Austen’s thoughts? These questions resonate particularly in light of recent events — for instance, Donald Trump's announcement of plans to remove mentions of slavery from museum exhibitions, as well as actions by conservatives trying to downplay slavery's impact on American history.

Some historians suggest that Mansfield Park is Austen's apology for slavery. This interpretation initially stunned me, just as the realization that the founders were slave owners did.

Austen has always been characterized by moral clarity. Her works are inextricably linked to her philosophy. What a disappointment it was, I thought, if such a meticulous scholar could justify the ideas of the empire so deeply that they tainted the very mechanisms of her novels.

‘No one, I believe, has ever considered it possible to love the heroine of Mansfield Park.’

Contemporary readers find Mansfield Park to be a strange work among Austen’s other novels. Compared to her more popular works, such as Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park stands out with its somber, moral tone that is lacking in her other works.

Although Mansfield Park underwent various stages of recognition, it shocked its first readers. Austen’s other novels received responses almost immediately, but Mansfield Park went six whole years without any reaction. Austen herself was curious about the family's opinion, and her mother remarked that Fanny was a “boring” character.

In 1954, literary critic Lionel Trilling noted that Mansfield Park is the only novel by Austen in which her characteristic irony is absent. “No one, I believe, has ever considered it possible to love the heroine of Mansfield Park,” he stated.

Fanny Price is indeed a complex heroine. Unlike Austen's other characters who are witty, clever, and break traditions, Fanny focuses on her morality. Her principled stance is her main strength.

Ultimately, she rejects Henry and eventually marries the good Edmund, the only Bertram who ever showed her kindness, becoming the mistress of Mansfield Park. It might be hard for us to love Fanny, yet Austen shows that she is right and receives her reward for this righteousness.

“Dead silence when it comes to slavery.”

The first critic who truly raised the issue of Sir Thomas’s slave plantations was postcolonial critic Edward Said in his 1994 essay “Jane Austen and Empire.” He argued that since Austen lived in a colonial state that held slaves, her worldview and works were shaped by the ideology of the empire, even if it remained outside her awareness.

In Mansfield Park, the Bertrams hide their niece Fanny partly out of good intentions and partly out of practicality. They believe a girl like Fanny can be useful in the household. Said asserted that the dynamic encouraging the import of poor relatives to the countryside may be related to the consequences of exporting agricultural labor to the colonies, where slaves work.

'I believe Austen sees what Fanny does as a domestic or small-scale movement resonating with the more open colonial movements of Sir Thomas, her mentor, whose estate she inherits,' Said wrote. “Both movements rely on each other.”

This essay laid the foundation for the development of postcolonial literary criticism, opening new horizons for analyzing the influence of colonialism in literature. Said argued that slavery became the lacuna that Austen consciously ignored, demonstrating her sense of guilt.

“All evidence points to the fact that even the most commonplace aspects of life on a West Indian sugar plantation were brutal. And everything we know about Austen and her values contradicts the brutality of slavery,” Said wrote.

He believed the key to understanding how Austen reconciled this contradiction lies in the memorable scene where Fanny asks about the slave trade and receives a “dead silence” in response, as if one world cannot be connected to another due to the absence of a common language.

For Said, reading Mansfield Park with an emphasis on the source of Sir Thomas’s wealth became a radical attempt to focus on an uncomfortable truth, just as Fanny resists Henry Crawford.

The New Plantation Aristocracy

When Austen published Mansfield Park in 1814, slavery was a key element of the British economy. The theme of the slave trade was politically charged, and the new aristocracy, whose wealth derived from slaveholding, was well represented. As always, new money looked down upon the old nobility, considering them crude and uneducated, and in this case — morally monstrous.

Researchers believe that Austen caricatured this new typology through the Bertram family. Lady Bertram, lazy and carefree, along with the moral disorder of her daughters and reliance on Fanny’s imported labor, serves as a critique of the slaveholding aristocracy. By the end of the novel, it becomes clear that the treacherous Maria Bertram has taken a house previously belonging to the Lascelles family, significant plantation owners.

Names associated with the slave trade become increasingly prominent. Mansfield Park shares its title with William Murray, the first Earl of Mansfield, a judge who had an adopted daughter of mixed race. Lord Mansfield is known for the 1772 ruling that made it illegal to ship slaves from England without their consent, laying the groundwork for the abolition of the slave trade.

Mrs. Norris, the strictest and most impoverished aunt of Fanny, bears the name of the notorious slave trader Robert Norris, whose cruelty made him a villain in history. Austen emphasizes this sympathy, mentioning him in her letters.

Throughout the novel, Sir Thomas travels between Mansfield and his estates in Antigua, where he has to deal with the difficult matters of his slaves.

What Do We Really Know About Jane Austen and Slavery?

Austen left no explicit traces of her thoughts on slavery in the preserved documents. However, being a very moral writer, even Said considered it unlikely that she supported slavery.

In Wild for Austen, Luzer presents a series of historical contexts suggesting that Austen was likely an advocate for the abolition of the slave trade. In one of her letters, she wrote that she had finished a book by an abolitionist and “fell in love” with the author. Three of her brothers actively fought for the abolition of the slave trade after her death, indicating the traditions of anti-slavery thought within the Austen family. As Fuller notes, women of Austen’s social status typically supported abolitionists, just like educated young women today.

But if Austen was against slavery, why is it so difficult to notice in Mansfield Park?

One popular theory, recently articulated by author Lauren Groff in the New York Times, suggests that Austen wrote Mansfield Park with encoded anti-slavery messages to avoid condemnation from her readers. Groff quotes literary critic Henrietta Kelly, author of Jane Austen the Secret Radical, who asserts that by the early 19th century, Austen wrote under circumstances that could today be deemed totalitarian.

Kelly approaches Austen’s works as a detective, trying to 'decode' their content. She cites examples such as the appearance of the Moor Park apricot tree or the symbolism of the cross made by Edmund. According to her theory, Austen tries to indicate that the Church of England, like other wealthy institutions of the time, had close ties to slave plantations, and that the church itself symbolizes hypocritical heroic morality.

“It is the Church of England that dirties; the church that sullies,” she writes.

Other researchers note that contemporaries wrote directly about slavery, and this did not prevent them from facing repression from the government. “Discussion of the West Indies and slavery was commonplace even in educational literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries,” notes researcher George E. Bulukos in 2006, stating that literature actively did not shy away from these issues, but rather considered them relevant and even fashionable.

Another, possibly most convincing theory posits that Austen wrote in support of the abolition of the slave trade while allowing the existence of slavery itself. This position was quite common in her time, trying to find a compromise.

This idea is appealing because, no matter how immoral it is to abduct people from their homes and treat them as goods, slavery became an integral part of the British economy. In this context, if a slave owner is humane to their slaves and does not enslave anyone who was not born into this system, they are likely fulfilling their moral duty.

This theory explains why, in the scene where Fanny and Edmund talk about Sir Thomas, people believe he would gladly listen to Fanny when she raises the question of the slave trade: likely, they all agree that the trade in human beings is wrong. “Fanny perceives Sir Thomas’s journey to Antigua as fulfilling his moral duty to provide humane treatment to his slaves,” Bulukos notes.

According to this interpretation, Austen is not guilty of silencing the question of slavery, as Said asserts, nor is she a secret abolitionist, as Kelly believes. She is rather a hypocritical centrist, characteristic of her time.

In any case, this is mere speculation. Much remains unknown. And perhaps it will remain so.

We Do Not Know What Mansfield Park Says About Slavery, but We Know It Speaks about Morality.

I am genuinely tempted to simply cast aside Mansfield Park. I don’t particularly like this novel, and I am also not thrilled by the strict, instructive Fanny Price. If I could dismiss her as a symbol of empire and Mansfield Park as a novel marred by its time, I would keep the other works of Austen and her inexhaustible genius.

But this is precisely the trap that Mansfield Park warns us about so clearly. It does not require special knowledge to understand.

Each character in the book, apart from Fanny, is ready to embrace the charming Henry Crawford and his sister, the witty Mary, despite numerous warning signs indicating their indifference to the sufferings of others. Reading Mansfield Park and not loving the Crawfords, despite all their flaws, is as difficult as, as Lionel Trilling notes, reading Mansfield Park and liking the bad, boring Fanny.

However, when Fanny refuses Henry Crawford, the energy around her in the text seems to ignite. For the first time, something attractive emerges in her that captivates us. When she tearfully explains to Sir Thomas that she cannot accept Henry “if I could help it ... but I am so sure I can never make him happy, and that I will be unhappy myself,” there is an unspeakable strength in her words that is missing in other characters, including the Crawfords.

The main aim of postcolonial literary criticism is to explore old literature from the perspective of what the people living in morally unacceptable systems thought. Whatever Mansfield Park’s stance on slavery might be, it clearly addresses this question. The troubling message of Mansfield Park is that one must tread carefully amidst the confusion between charm and intellect and true moral resilience; and that people who are kind when it is convenient may prove less inclined to act rightly when it disrupts their comfort.

To uphold highly unacceptable practices, if they are deeply integrated into the economic and political system in which one lives, is very convenient. Yet the choice to resist this requires true strength of character. Many alluring and sympathetic people in history have made this same judgment and have sided with the silencing of terrible truths.

So in the end, we definitely cannot know what Jane Austen truly thought about slavery and the empire. She was far too careful with her words for us to clarify this. But it is clear that she understood: acting against one’s own knowledge of wrongness, because it may be too difficult or uncomfortable, is a problem that requires addressing.