Incestuous Relationships: Mansfield Park Revisited
Glenda A. Hudson, California State University
Volume 4, no. 1, October 1991
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ABSTRACT
A number of Jane Austen’s novels end with marriages that have incestuous overtones. In Emma the heroine marries her brother-in-law, Mr Knightley, who throughout much of the novel shares a fraternal relationship with her. In Sense and Sensibility Elinor, like Emma, marries her brother-in-law, Edward Ferrars, and Colonel Brandon tells Elinor of his desire to marry Eliza Williams, a sister-in-law brought up as his sister. But the most prominent incestuous relationship of Austen’s fiction appears in Mansfield Park, where the first cousins, Fanny and Edmund, have been brought up as brother and sister. Jane Austen’s sister Cassandra attempted to persuade her to change the outcome of Mansfield Park. According to Cassandra, Austen’s failure to allow Henry Crawford to marry Fanny, and Fanny’s cousin Edmund to marry Mary Crawford, constituted a major flaw in the work. But clearly Cassandra Austen’s assessment, like that of many critics, overlooks or fails to appreciate the significance of the incestuous marriage of the cousins, Fanny and Edmund.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Austen” include:
Why the Show Must Not Go On: ‘Real Character’ and the Absence of Theatrical Performances in Mansfield Park
by KATHLEEN E. URDA (ECF 26.2, Winter 2013-14)
Jane Austen’s “Excellent Walker”: Pride, Prejudice, and Pedestrianism
by OLIVIA MURPHY (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
Adolescence in Sense and Sensibility
by SHAWN LISA MAURER (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
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