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in much the same terms as Austen herself is now critiqued by critics in our own day. The critic Raymond Williams, for instance, in The Country and the City, has famously indicted Austen for failing to represent, or perhaps even failing to see, the agricultural labor on which the country house depends. She can be quite vague, he notes, about the number of acres in a particular estate, but far more precise about the number of pounds it is worth every year; in much the same way, she has a keen eye for timber, which can be cut down and sold, but a curious blindness when it comes to the woodsmen. What this means, Williams argues, is that Austen understands the estate as both a source of wealth and a repository of legible social signs, but not as a site of labor. Indeed, the function of the country house, he suggests, is to transform working-class labor into gentry-class gentility. Williams makes this argument most elegantly through a play on the double meaning of cultivation: The cultivation of land is converted into money, which must then be converted once more into the cultivation of manners and accomplishments. What the country house does, Austen’s country-house novels do as well—namely, blind us to the working classes and to the crucial labor that they do.
    The critic Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, has more recently commented on an odd blindness of Williams’s own, a failure to see the slave labor on the Bertram’s plantations in Antigua. The fact that the novel refers to Antigua so obliquely is, in Said’s account, both a sign of Austen’s reluctance to acknowledge the brutal facts of imperialism and proof that the imperial project has already been achieved. For what the novel’s scattered references to Antigua demonstrate most powerfully is that the colonies, and their relation to the metropolitan centers of England can be taken entirely for granted. Said goes on to argue that this presumed relation of center to periphery not only organized economic and political realities in the nineteenth century, but also underwrote the very form of the nineteenth-century novel. In Mansfield Park, we see the beginning of a novelistic tradition that locates value in fixity, immobility, and, above all else, centrality and that sees the periphery as “resources to be visited, talked about, described, or appreciated for domestic reason, for local metropolitan benefit.”
    Williams and Said are persuasive in arguing that Mansfield Park does not merely reflect the contemporary realities of labor and empire, but indeed helps to create structures that erase working-class and marginalize imperial subjects. What I want to emphasize, however, are the moments when Austen points to the gaps where those subjects should be. One such moment comes when Henry Crawford and Edmund debate the improvements that might be made to Edmund’s parsonage. Henry’s proposals are typically extravagant, involving the turning around of the house, the exchanging of meadow and garden, and the purchasing of nearby stands of timber. Edmund, by contrast, presents his own plans as properly modest. “‘I must be satisfied with rather less ornament and beauty, ”’ he says, and further hopes only to give the parsonage “‘the air of a gentleman’s residence’” (p. 210). In the conversation that follows, however, it soon becomes clear that what the “air of a gentleman’s residence” requires is the total removal of the farmyard and all its works, including the blacksmith’s shop. Austen, here, makes precisely the point that Williams will make more than a hundred and fifty years later, by cataloguing the various forms of necessary labor that her own country-house vision requires her to erase. Elsewhere, too, Austen draws our attention to otherwise forgotten forms of labor. The moment of Fanny’s great ascendancy at Mansfield, the proposal of marriage she receives, is marked by Baddeley, the butler, calling her into Sir Thomas’s study, the