ABSTRACT
Mansfield Park reveals Jane Austen as an arch-ontologist, foregrounding how assumptions about being had become entangled with the Enlightenment always-developing subject. Austen’s explorations of objects may come to a head in Mansfield Park, but they emerge from Northanger Abbey’s Gothic obsession with castles and laundry lists as well as Sense and Sensibility’s meditations on Marianne’s illness and Elinor’s stoic inertia. One of Austen’s favorite writers, Thomas Clarkson, wrote aptly on the relation between the oppressor and the oppressed, including the endemic damage done in tandem to the oppressed and the oppressor. Austen has often stood as a metonym for the progress of the realist novel itself, as a genre that develops from the episodic picaresque toward the Bildung’s teleological education or modern growth.
