4 - Two Mansfield Parks: purist and postmodern

Summary

Response to the 1999 Miramax film of Mansfield Park, as well as to the 1983 BBC television series, reflects the negative critical response to Mansfield Park the novel. Easily Jane Austen's most controversial work, Mansfield Park has been least appreciated among the six novels by Austen's readers during this century, although critics have recently received it more favorably as her most politically radical work, dealing with imperialism and the slave trade. Austen's choice of the self-conscious, oppressed, anxious adolescent Fanny Price as heroine, however, has never met with much approval, starting with Austen's own friends and family, some of whom found her as “insipid” and unlikable as many moderns do.

The 1999 film met such views and objections head on and, partly as a result, was well received by most reviewers. Written and directed by Patricia Rozema, this version flaunted a connection between gentry life at Mansfield and the brutality and exploitation of slave plantations; more radically, it grafted Austen herself onto Fanny. The rebellious and assertive Austen of the juvenilia addresses the camera and the audience directly, satirizing male versions of history and female stereotypes; this Fanny Price is so strong that no viewer can doubt her eventual triumph. By contrast, the 1983 television series, directed by David Giles, predated a general critical focus on Sir Thomas as a slave owner in Antigua. This version does not mention slavery, offers a self-conscious, oppressed, anxious Fanny Price, and sticks close to the text.