Although not explicitly stated in the novel, allusions are made to the fact that Sir Thomas Bertram's home, the titular Mansfield Park, is built on the proceeds of his slave plantation in Antigua. It is not described as an old structure like Rushworth's Sotherton Court, or the estate homes described in Austen's other novels, like Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice or Donwell Abbey in Emma.[12]
The Slave Trade Act (which abolished the slave trade) had been passed in 1807, four years before Austen started to write Mansfield Park, and was the culmination of a long campaign by British abolitionists, notably William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson.[114] Slavery itself would not be abolished in the British Empire until 1833.
In chapter 21, when Sir Thomas returns from his estates in Antigua, Fanny asks him about the slave trade but receives no answer. The pregnant silence continues to perplex critics. Claire Tomalin, following the literary critic Brian Southam, argues that in questioning her uncle about the slave trade, the usually timid Fanny shows that her vision of the trade's immorality is clearer than his.[115] Sheehan believes that "just as Fanny tries to remain a bystander to the production of Lovers' Vows but is drawn into the action, we the audience of bystanders are drawn into participation in the drama of Mansfield Park ... Our judgement must be our own."[10]
It is widely assumed that Austen herself sympathised with the cause of abolitionists. In a letter to her sister, Cassandra, she compares a book she is reading with Clarkson's anti-slavery book, "I am as much in love with the author as ever I was with Clarkson".[116] Austen's favourite poet, the Evangelical William Cowper, was also a passionate abolitionist who often wrote poems on the subject, notably his famous work The Task, also favoured by Fanny Price.[117]
Analysis of slavery in Mansfield Park
In his 1993 book, Culture and Imperialism, the American literary critic Edward Said claimed Mansfield Park demonstrated Western culture's casual acceptance of the material benefits of slavery. He cited Austen's failure to mention that the estate of Mansfield Park was made possible only through Bertram's ownership of a slave plantation. Said argued that Austen created the character of Sir Thomas as the archetypal "good master", ignoring the immorality of slavery by failing to cast Bertram's ownership of slaves as a blight on his character.[118] He accepted that Austen does not talk much about the plantation owned by Sir Thomas, but contended that Austen expected the reader to assume that the Bertram family's wealth was due to profits produced by the sugar worked by their enslaved property. Said further claimed that this reflected Austen's own assumption that such a fact was merely "a natural extension of the calm, the order, the beauties of Mansfield Park".[119]
Paradoxically, Said acknowledged that Austen disapproved of slavery:
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.[120]
The Japanese scholar Hidetada Mukai noted the Bertrams were a nouveau riche family whose income depends on their plantation in Antigua.[121] The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 had imposed a serious strain on the West Indian plantations. Austen may have been referring to this crisis when Sir Thomas leaves for Antigua to deal with unspecified problems on his plantation.[121] Hidetada further argued that Austen made Sir Thomas a planter as a feminist attack on the patriarchal society of the Regency era, noting that Sir Thomas, though a kindly man, treats women, including his own daughters and his niece, as disposable commodities to be traded and bartered for his own advantage, and that this would be parallelled by his treatment of slaves who are exploited to support his lifestyle.[121]
Said's thesis that Austen was an apologist for slavery was again challenged in the 1999 film based on Mansfield Park and Austen's letters. The Canadian director, Patricia Rozema, presented the Bertram family as morally corrupt and degenerate, in complete contrast to the book. Rozema invented numerous scenes not present in the book, including one where Fanny is travelling to the Bertram estate and hears the cries from Africans on board a slave ship off the coast. She asks her coachman what is happening. In addition, Fanny also condemns slavery in the film, unlike the book.[122]
Gabrielle White also criticised Said's characterisation of Austen's views on slavery, maintaining that Austen and other writers admired by Austen, including Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke, opposed slavery and helped make its eventual abolition possible.[123] The Australian historian Keith Windschuttle argued that: "The idea that, because Jane Austen presents one plantation-owning character, of whom heroine, plot and author all plainly disapprove, she thereby becomes a handmaiden of imperialism and slavery, is to misunderstand both the novel and the biography of its author, who was an ardent opponent of the slave trade".[124] Likewise, the British author Ibn Warraq accused Said of a "most egregious misreading" of Mansfield Park and condemned him for a "lazy and unwarranted reading of Jane Austen", arguing that Said had completely distorted Mansfield Park to give Austen views that she clearly did not hold.[125]
English air
Margaret Kirkham points out that throughout the novel, Austen makes repeated references to the refreshing, wholesome quality of English air. In the 1772 court case Somerset v Stewart, where Lord Mansfield declared that an enslaved person could not be transported out of England against his will (something which was incorrectly interpreted by the British public to be explicitly outlawing slavery in England), one of the lawyers for James Somerset, the slave in the case, had said that "England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in". He was citing a ruling from a court case in 1569 freeing a Russian slave brought to England.[126] The phrase is developed in Austen's favourite poem:
I had much rather be myself the slave And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him. We have no slaves at home – then why abroad? And they themselves, once ferried o'er the wave That parts us, are emancipate and loosed. Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free, They touch our country and their shackles fall.
— William Cowper, "The Task", 1785
Austen's references to English air are considered by Kirkham to be a subtle attack upon Sir Thomas, who owns slaves on his plantation in Antigua, yet enjoys the "English air", oblivious of the ironies involved. Kirkham claimed Austen would have read Clarkson and his account of Lord Mansfield's ruling.[126]
Anti-slavery allusions
Austen's subtle hints about the world beyond her Regency families can be seen in her use of names. The family estate's name clearly reflects that of Lord Mansfield, just as the name of the bullying Aunt Norris is suggestive of Robert Norris, "an infamous slave trader and a byword for pro-slavery sympathies".[12]
The newly married Maria, now part of a family with a greater income than that of her father, gains her London home in fashionable Wimpole Street at the heart of London society, a region where several West Indian planters had established their town houses.[127] This desirable residence is the former home of Lady Henrietta Lascelles whose husband's family fortune came from the notoriously irresponsible Henry Lascelles. Lascelles had enriched himself with the Barbados slave trade and had been a central figure in the South Sea Bubble disaster. His wealth had been used to build Harewood House in Yorkshire, landscaped by "Capability" Brown.[13]
When William Price is commissioned, Lady Bertram requests that he bring her back a shawl "or maybe two" from the East Indies and "anything else that is worth having". Said interpreted this line as showing that the novel supports, or is indifferent towards, profiteering by Europeans in Asia. Others have pointed out that the indifference belongs to Lady Bertram and is in no sense the attitude of the novel, the narrator or the author.[13]
