Negotiating Patriarchy: Women’s Emancipation and Moral Agency in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

Abstract

In Mansfield Park (1814) Jane Austen offers a complicated view of the patriarchal social systems of Regency England and the situation of women. Whereas myths of female emancipation predominantly portray freedom as an act of open rejection of domesticity, Austen shows women’s agency as a practice of negotiation within limiting social, economic, moral, and gendered conditions. This study analyses the relations among patriarchy, women’s emancipation and moral agency in Mansfield Park, with a focus on the novel’s key female character, Fanny Price. The interpretation of Fanny’s apparently tranquil and subservient character has often been debated by critics, who ask whether she should be seen as a product of patriarchal ideology or as an emancipated woman. The article argues that Fanny’s agency cannot be measured by the standard measures of independence: economic power, public authority, or revolt. Instead, her resistance is achieved through the preservation of human integrity, refusal, self-determination and moral judgement. One key element of female agency is her refusal to engage in relationships that are in conflict with her ideals and her rejection of Henry Crawford. However, Austen does not present Fanny's liberation as simple, or complete. Her reliance on Sir Thomas Bertram and the lack of social and economic prospects accessible to women highlight the structural limits under which her decisions are made. Austen uses the characters of Fanny, Mary Crawford, Edmund Bertram and others to explore alternative notions of female identity and to reveal the contradictions between individual desire and patriarchal expectations. Therefore, the article claims that Mansfield Park should be seen as a complex study of negotiated female emancipation, in which moral autonomy is an important mode of opposition to patriarchal power