ABSTRACT

The 1996 Miramax film version of Emma opens in outer space, hurling the viewer towards Earth, moving in on Europe, then closer to England, and finally focusing on Highbury, in this case, the purported center of the Universe. With this particular opening, these filmmakers suggest the significant relationship between geography and Emma. Highbury is the center of the Universe for Emma-and for just about everyone else in the novel. The characters can hardly move outside of it (and its satellite estates) without something unsettling happening to them. In many ways, Mansfield Park shares a similar position in Austen’s novel of the same name. Although a large estate, instead of a village aspiring to become a town, Mansfield Park also acts as the center of the Universe for its characters, and characters moving outside its confinements find themselves in a virtual state of exile. They are always brought back, in memory at least, to that center of the Universe, “a description of the people, the manners, the amusements, the ways of Mansfield Park” (419).