Mansfield Park | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 36 pages of analysis & critique of Mansfield Park.
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Mansfield Park | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 36 pages of analysis & critique of Mansfield Park.
This section contains 10,165 words
(approx. 34 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Ruth Bernard Yeazell

SOURCE: “The Boundaries of Mansfield Park,” in New Casebooks: Mansfield Park and Persuasion, edited by Judy Simons, Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997, pp. 67-92.

In the following essay originally published in 1984, Yeazell presents an anthropological study of Mansfield Park, focusing on the novel's concern with transgressed boundaries, such as the anxiety associated with the taint of spiritual pollution.

The Dirt at Portsmouth

Immediately before the climax of Mansfield Park, in the last chapter of Fanny Price's exile at Portsmouth, comes a passage extraordinary for Jane Austen—extraordinary both in the concreteness of its details and in the sense of revulsion it records:

She felt that she had, indeed, been three months there: and the sun's rays falling strongly into the parlour, instead of cheering, made her still more melancholy; for sun-shine appeared to her a totally different thing in a town and in the country. Here, its power was only...

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This section contains 10,165 words
(approx. 34 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Ruth Bernard Yeazell
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Critical Essay by Ruth Bernard Yeazell from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.