I think your reading of MP too schematic. But then I do find this the least engaging or critical of Austen's novels. I think Fanny is very unlikeable, and her 'dependence' does not excuse this. Austen is an excellent writer when it comes to acknowledging ambivalence in social relations, and yet there's little of this in MP except in the Crawfords, and then very little. How this manifests is interesting, and I'll think about it some more. It's the Austen novel I know least well because I don't really enjoy it, but I will have another look and see if I can constitute a more interesting position on all this.
Catherine
----- Original Message ----- From: "Christian Gregory" <christian11 at mindspring.com> Date: Sunday, February 18, 2001 2:10 am Subject: Re: Catherine, can't you read? was Re: No Sex Please - We're Post-Human!
> >
> > Exactly -- that is what the book is about --
> > how mansfield park (the place) crushes, poisons,
> > corrupts the sin qua non of human as opposed
> > to merely animal life, the mutual dependency
> > which defines us as human.
> >
> > Carrol
>
> Bzzzt. Sorry, no. But we do have lovely parting gifts. _Mansfield
> Park_transcodes the Burkean idea of political transformation as
> _conservation_into a family melodrama about marriage and estate
> improvement. Fanny and
> Edmund, the two most noxious prudes in the novel, are held up as
> the models
> of sense and reason (i.e. progress), while everyone who proceeds
> accordingto the idea of liberal (secular) self-interest is
> represented as stupid and
> indolent (the lady Bertram), dogmatically stern (Thomas Bertram
> elder),libertine (Thomas the younger), impudent (Maria Bertram)
> or just cynical
> (Mary and Henry Crawford).
>
> ". . . mutual dependency that makes us human"? How Harold Bloom
> can you get?
>
> Christian
>
>