Incest in Victorian Literature - Johanna M. Smith (essay date 1987)
Johanna M. Smith (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: “‘My Only Sister Now’: Incest in Mansfield Park,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XIX, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp. 1-15.
[In the following essay, Smith regards the happy ending of Mansfield Park to be a dismal failure and contends that the incestuous overtones of Fanny and Edmund's relationship reveal the crippling effects of sister-brother relationships within a constricted, hierarchical family structure.]
Regarded as a happy ending to Mansfield Park, the marriage of Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram is a dismal failure. Jane Austen, I believe, intends this failure: as Fanny settles into smug seclusion at Mansfield, “the daughter that he wanted”1 to Sir Thomas and sister-wife to Edmund, her marriage reveals the constrictions of family in the novel. The incestuous overtones of Fanny's relationship with Edmund suggest an approach to these constrictions that...
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