The heathen Folly of the Bertrams

         In Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” the protagonist Mr. Kurtz screams of the horror that he had been plagued with during his travels in Africa, just before he succumbs to his last horror, that of death.  His companion, Marlow, who had been sent in search of him exclaims “But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad”. The white man had been rendered uncivilized by that which he was sent to civilize in the first place.

      Throughout Austen’s work Mansfield Park, there is consistent acknowledgement of this very civilizing mission. The very condescending nature of Fanny price’s removal from her home and all that had been hers, on the whims of her uncles and aunts is in itself indicative of this fact. They felt it incumbent upon them to “send for the child” feeling that “they [could not] do better”, relieving themselves of the burden of their degenerate poor relatives, by taking in their eldest daughter and “introduce her properly into the world”. This condescending attitude reminds us of Kipling’s famous poem the White Man’s burden where he exclaims:  

“Take up the White Man's burden, The savage wars of peace--

Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought,

Watch sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hopes to nought.”

          Mrs. Norris’s references to “breeding” Fanny up with the Bertram children, falls little short of this colonial narrative. She says that they must prepare themselves for her “gross ignorance, some meanness of opinions and a very distressing vulgarity of manner”, which can be compared to Kipling’s version of the “sickness” that must be ceased. She encourages a “smallest degree of arrogance” in the Bertram children in their conduct towards their less-fortunate cousin, as fundamental to civilizing her and showing her her real place in the family.

             However with the end of the novel we see the ascent of Fanny to the very position Mrs. Norris held in the household, due to her marriage to Edmund. The burden of the White man had been fulfilled and Fanny had been civilized. But the other Bertram children, who had been given all the world had to offer, had been uncivilized by these very worldly exploits. The fate of Maria and Tom Bertram is particularly reminiscent of Kurtz’s degeneration in the Heart of Darkness. On the other hand, unlike Kurtz’s who had been overpowered by the horror of the colony, Maria had been shunned to the country with Mrs. Norris and Tom was left to assume his secondary position in the household, due to the “heathen Folly” that was their own creation, as opposed to a colonial import. The domesticated and civilized Fanny, in my opinion serves as a critique of the White Man’s burden, as at the end she is the very voice of propriety that was so missing in her civilizers in Mansfield Park.