England; creating humans

England; creating humans

It is indeed sad that once the victory celebration of one human gender’s (female) emancipation from another gender (the infamous male) end, we begin to dedicate our focus to the enslavement of one civilization (the colonies) by the Superior race (British) and start lamentations again. Sad, indeed! But for the things one does for courses, grades and superb instructors we’ll read Mansfield Park in light of the presupposed empire and reinforcing colonial rule. Traces of dominance, authority and the right to control are presented as obvious, as Said points out ‘empire was a universal concern’. Fanny’s character of being meek and submissive was offered as organic and inherent to her (quite like how tea/cotton/jute plantation is JUST what a colonized land has to offer) where there must be permanence and inevitability in her slavery. She can never be sovereign. Eventually we find out that the salvation of Fanny too is in the apparent happy ending of her marriage with Edmund which is further complimented by the fact that the inherited estate is to be shared because Tom falls sick- a disease caught in the Indies! Said’s precision of judgements and analysis is commendable when he says that ‘the book is about how English culture has dealt with land, its possession, imagination and organization’. But this discussion begs another important distinction. While the parallel of Fanny as another colony under Lord Bertram’s government is plausible, we must categorize here that she is a peculiar and special case for Mansfield Park. The Indies were properties in the form of a land, while Fanny is in the form of a human. Investment in the lands were that of parliamentary and industrial sort; ‘relocating England’. Fanny while was subject to deeper and intimate investments; of virtue, morality and Christianity. This is exactly how England establishes its supremacy, above the French, Dutch and Portuguese, while all the acquired land doesn't last for the colonizers, the immortal humans exits the realm of time and adapt the divine-like traits of THE empire that turns out to be even more powerful than what a blood relation can produce. Such is the manufacturing ability of the government that it creates a human from the ordinary raw material of Portsmouth and declares it of worth. The power of Britain hence is so magnificent for Austen that she creates this timeless character, the job of every good writer, and keeps her standing erect to announce the superiority of the Empire’s righteousness and the consequent mediocrity of the rest of the world.