'It could have all turned out differently'

Ideological Censorship of the Marriage Plot in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

Abstract

This paper examines the marriage-plot convention of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in the context of the conservative ideology of the “middle-class aristocracy” in early nineteenth-century England. It argues that despite Mansfield Park’s apparent endorsement of the patriarchal values of domesticity and femininity represented by the protagonists and the narrator, the novel does contain on equally valid yet utopian alternative offered by Henry Crawford, an alternative of difference and vitalistic openness necessarily suppressed by the regulatory pattern of the marriage plot.