ABSTRACT
Mansfield Park is Jane Austen’s rejoinder to the Evangelical fiction that emerged to critical and popular acclaim in the years she was establishing her place as a professional novelist. Although Austen expressed mixed opinions regarding Evangelicalism, in Mansfield Park she unequivocally resists the model of male subjectivity and gender roles endorsed by the movement and broader conservative ideologies. Arguably Austen’s most political novel, in Mansfield Park the greatest test of masculinity lies not in men’s public and professional responsibilities, but in the roles that Edmund Bertram, Henry Crawford, and Sir Thomas Bertram play in the courtship narrative of Austen’s model of conservative femininity, Fanny Price. Determined to reinstate in Fanny a model of modest, passive womanhood, each man proves the failure of his masculine identity through his dependence on ideologies of sexual difference and his search for redemption in the heroine. In Mansfield Park, Austen resists the threat Evangelical and broader counter-revolutionary genres presented to the courtship romance and its unique capacity to rewrite masculinity.
