ABSTRACT
As critics have noted, many of Austen’s happy marriages are very nearly incestuous, taking place between close relatives or people related by marriage, who also live in close proximity to one another. The match that comes nearest to incest takes place in Mansfield Park: Fanny and Edmund are first cousins who have been raised as brother and sister for half their lives. Discussions about why Austen would engage in this brush with incest have focused primarily on the ideological significance of this marriage. The ending of Mansfield Park has been read variously as an affirmation of traditional family values, which are being threatened by corruption and worldliness (Brissenden; Hudson; Palmer; Schaffer); a challenge to the patriarchal status quo (Corbett); a marker of anxiety concerning the effects of globalization on national identity (Pollak); and a turning inward of the family towards self-enclosure and inertia, a retreat from the challenges of a changing world (Brown; Johnson; Smith).
