The Colony in Mansfield Park

    Though the colonies are never seen in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, the dependency of the Bertram estate on Antigua for is upkeep is clear from the beginning. Though a baron, Sir Thomas’s lineage as being particularly old is never mentioned, and his constant attempts at contact making, first with Mr. Rushworth (a man of little merit other than his money) and later Henry Crawford, depicts a man who is still in the process of solidifying his foothold in the British elite. His house too is described as a “modern built house” suggesting that his is a family of new money. Thus the house, and the Bertram name has been built on the income generated in the colonies in the West Indies, a source foreign to Europe. Thus implying, as Edward Said writes in his essay Culture and Imperialism, a “wanting within”. Thus the colony in Mansfield Park, though mentioned a handful of times, is implicit as it is the basis on which the foundation of it titular setting has been built. This invasion of the foreign is particularly interesting, as there seems in the characters a general hesitancy to accept anything that seems un-British, for examples the French sexuality exhibited by Mary Crawford and it is only one who mirrors the morals and social attitudes of Thomas Bertram that can be accepted. It is for this reason that Fanny, another foreign element, is at the end the one who is assimilated into Mansfield Park.

    Both the money generated in Antigua and Fanny one bought to Mansfield Park are used to build up a front that holds true to British values of the time and neither holds in it any signs of its roots. Thus the colony is unapparent in the novel, as are signs of Portsmouth in Fanny.