EL2 – Essay 2 Angela BathgateTutor – Julie Marney How does Mansfield Park interrogate the relationship of power and gender?Mansfield Park by Jane Austen is a classic realist text, which is almost exclusively focused on a small strip of society, namely the upper-middle class of rural England; the class to which she herself belonged. Throughout her novel, Austen portrays the disadvantaged position of woman, presenting the issues of gender stereotyping and marriage choice as the main problems they have to confront. “Gender came to be seen as a construct of society, designed to facilitate the smooth-running of society to the advantage of men”1, proving that men gained power throughout the socially constructed subordination of woman.Taking a post-structuralist approach to Mansfield Park, we can see that there is a “pretence that bourgeois culture is ‘natural’…to limit meaning in the interests of control, repression and privilege”2. Austen’s writing embodies middle-class values, and portrays an ideology that emphasises patriarchal rule, along with social and economic power, with little reference to the hardships of the working class. This text is therefore a form of oppressive ideology, in which women are kept in their socially and sexually subordinate place. When Sir Thomas Bertram discovers that Fanny will reject Henry Crawford’s proposal, the cruelty of male power is evident, enforcing the gender role. He does not understand her refusal of a secure marriage, and attempts to change her answer by redefining what she says. Sir Thomas is an authoritative male, 1_______________________________1 Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton (Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1996), p1142 Literature in the Modern World, Dennis Walder (Oxford University Press, 1990), p306 EL2 – Essay 2Angela BathgateTutor – Julie Marneyand represents the male-dominated system that tries to...
