by Ibn Warraq (July 2007) in New English Review
Edward Said’s most egregious misreading of a literary work concerns Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park [1814]. Even before mangling Austen, Edward Said was responsible for having created an atmosphere of hostility and prejudice against the West and Western culture—from painting to literature. In such an atmosphere, Jane Austen is unlikely to get a fair trial. This is important, since the pusillanimous have accepted without question or qualm the terms of debate set by Said.
There are several references to Antigua and Sir Thomas’ plantation in Mansfield Park, but only a single explicit reference to the slave trade. From such flimsy textual evidence it is unwise to deduce authorial intent. Certainly one cannot conclude that Austen condoned slavery. But Said, realizing that there is little textual justification, brings other novels written later, in some cases a hundred years later, to bear upon Mansfield Park:
“We must first take stock of Mansfield Park’s prefigurations of a later English history as registered in fiction. The Bertrams’ usable colony in Mansfield Park can be read as pointing forward to Charles Gould’s San Tomé mine in Nostromo, or to the Wilcoxes’ Imperial and West African Rubber company in Forster’s Howards End [1910], or to any of these distant but convenient treasure spots in Great Expectations, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea [1966], Heart of Darkness—resources to be visited, talked about, described, or appreciated for domestic reasons, for local metropolitan benefit. If we think ahead to these other novels, Sir Thomas’s Antigua readily acquires a slightly greater density than the discrete, reticent appearances it makes in the pages of Mansfield Park.”[1]
So Jane Austen’s “discrete” reticence must be filled out by reading ahead a hundred years. In other words, there is nothing that would justify describing Austen as condoning slavery, but we must look to works written by others, not Austen herself, and written a hundred years later to do so!
Said covers his tracks, using a common ploy laid bare by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in Intellectual Impostures. Intellectual impostors often, in willfully vague language, try to have it both ways. “Indeed, they offer a great advantage in intellectual battles: the radical interpretation can serve to attract relatively inexperienced listeners or readers; and if the absurdity of this version is exposed, the author can always defend himself by claiming to have been misunderstood, and retreat to the innocuous interpretation.”[2] Here is how Said does it, denying his own thesis:
“All the evidence says that even the most routine aspects of holding slaves on a West Indian sugar plantation were cruel stuff. And everything we know about Jane Austen and her values is at odds with the cruelty of slavery. Fanny Price reminds her cousin that after asking Sir Thomas about the slave trade, “there was such a dead silence” as to suggest that one world could not be connected with the other since there simply is no common language for both. That is true.”[3]
In a recent article, Susan Fraiman, takes to task Said’s lazy and unwarranted reading of Jane Austen:
“Yet had Said placed Sir Thomas Bertram, for example, in line with the deficient fathers who run unrelentingly from Northanger Abbey through Persuasion, he might perhaps have paused before assuming that Austen legitimates the master of Mansfield Park. If truth be told, Said’s attention even to his chosen text is cursory: Austen’s references to Antigua (and India) are mentioned without actually being read, though Said stresses elsewhere the importance of close, specific analysis. Maria Bertram is mistakenly referred to as ‘Lydia’ [p.104]—confused, presumably, with Lydia Bennett of Pride and Prejudice. And these are just a few of the signs that Mansfield Park’s particular complexity—including what I see as its moral complexity—has been sacrificed here, so ready is Said to offer Austen as ‘Exhibit A’ in the case for culture’s endorsement of empire.”[4]
Gabrielle White devotes an entire book to defending Jane Austen from Edward Said. She examines Austen’s last three novels, and sets them in the context of the world of the abolitionists. Ms White writes, “The last three novels, the so-called Chawton novels [Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion], were written in the decade after the 1807 Abolition. Amongst Jane Austen’s favourite writers were people who were passionately anti-slavery, such as William Cowper, Doctor Johnson and Thomas Clarkson. One of her naval brothers was known to be abolitionist. I use the term ‘abolition’ in connection with both the slave trade and slavery. Cowper’s tirade against slavery in lines 37-39 of Book Two of his epic poem The Task is severe, and leads up to the question: ‘We have no slaves at home—then why abroad?’ Jane Austen would have been aware of the popular campaign for abolition.”[5]
