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only time in the entire novel that any servant speaks. The most famous gap in Mansfield Park, however, is the “‘dead silence’” that follows Fanny’s questions about the slave trade (p. 171). Critics debate whether this silence would be filled by a condemnation or a defense of slavery, but surely the significance of the silence is that it could never be filled in a novel like this—and that it thus registers all that the novel cannot accommodate.
    The critic D. A. Miller helps us to see that Austen understood the costs of conservatism to be finally as much formal as political. And here we return to where we began, to the opposition between Fanny and Mary. Miller begins with the claim that marriage, in an Austen novel, enacts what he calls the “ideology of settlement” (Narrative and Its Discontents, p. 50), an ideology that resembles Burkean conservatism in crucial ways. Not only does marriage settle characters socially, by fixing them in their proper sphere, but it can be brought about only, he argues, by a prior settling of other domains: the cognitive, the moral, and the linguistic. A man and a woman can marry only after each has come properly to know the other, has come properly to judge the other, and, what is nearly the same thing in Austen, has found the proper language in which to speak of and to the other. It is this search for knowledge, judgment, and conversation that Austen’s courtship plots narrate. But because the search must be a search, it requires that her heroines be taken in by lying suitors, be tempted by glamorous wrongs, even speak intemperately or injudiciously—all on their way to finding a proper mate. In making this argument, Miller articulates a crucial distinction between narrative and closure, between the forces that drive a story forward and the forces that bring it to an end; moreover, he draws attention to the paradoxical relationship between the two. The requirements of narrative are at odds with the requirements of closure, and Austen’s novels, as a result, must contain many elements, many errors and confusions that their endings cannot endorse.
    In Mansfield Park, Austen subjects this paradox to intense and painful scrutiny. She does so, Miller argues, by creating two possible heroines—one, Fanny, who is the embodiment of closure, and the other, Mary, who is the embodiment of narrative itself. Miller is helpful not only in making sense of our otherwise perplexing dislike of Fanny, but also in suggesting that this dislike might have been felt most strongly by Austen herself. For just as readers find themselves loving Mary despite her faults and disliking Fanny because of her virtues, so Austen must have recognized that while Fanny would have made an excellent model for a conduct book, she could never have been the author of Mansfield Park. It is Mary, with her energy and vivacity, her sharp eye and keen wit, who most resembles Austen, and Mary who signals Austen’s lingering attraction to the mobile and the changing, perhaps, even, to the revolutionary. Mansfield Park may be the most obviously ideological of Austen’s novels, but it is by no means unaware of the consequences, indeed the costs, of its own ideology.
     
    Amanda Claybaugh is Assistant Professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. She is currently at work on a project that considers the relation between social reform and the literary marketplace in the nineteenth-century British and American novel.

Mansfield Park

CHAPTER I

    A bout thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of a handsome house and large income. All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match; and her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand