Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The main narrative line of Mansfield Park (1814), for example, is to follow the fortunes of Fanny Price, who leaves the family home near Portsmouth, at the age of ten, to live as a poor relation/companion at Mansfield Park, the country estate of the Bertram family. In due course, Fanny acquires the respect of the family, in particular the various sisters, and the love of the eldest son, whom she marries at the end of the book, becoming mistress of the house. Said, however, concentrates on a few almost incidental remarks of Austen’s, to the effect that Sir Thomas Bertram is away, abroad, overseeing his property in Antigua in the West Indies. The incidental nature of these references, Said says, betrays the fact that so much at the time was taken for granted. But the fact remains, ‘What sustains life materially is the Bertram estate in Antigua, which is not doing well.’⁹⁶ Austen sees clearly, he says, that to hold and rule Mansfield Park is to hold and rule an imperial estate in close, not to say inevitable association with it. ‘What assures the domestic tranquillity and attractive harmony of one is the productivity and regulated discipline of the other.’⁹⁷

It is this tranquillity and harmony that Fanny comes to adore so much. Just as she is herself an outsider brought inside Mansfield Park, a ‘transported commodity’ in effect, so too is the sugar which the Antigua estate produces and on which the serenity of Mansfield Park depends. Austen is therefore combining a social point – old blood needs new blood to rejuvenate it – with a political point: the empire may be invisible for most of the time, but it is economically all-important. Said’s underlying point is that Austen, for all her humanity and artistry,

implicitly accepts slavery and the cruelty that went with it, and likewise accepted the complete subordination of colony to metropolis. He quotes John Stuart Mill on colonies in his Principles of Political Economy: ‘They are hardly to be looked upon as countries, but more properly as outlying agricultural or manufacturing estates belonging to a larger community . . . All the capital employed is English capital; almost all the industry is carried on for English uses . . . The trade with the West Indies is hardly to be considered an external trade, but more resembles the traffic between town and country.’⁹⁸ It is Said’s case that Mansfield Park – rich, intellectually complex, a shining constituent of the canon – is as important for what it conceals as for what it reveals, and in that was typical of its time.

Both Kipling and Conrad represented the experience of empire as the main subject of their work, the former in Kim

(1901), the latter in Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900) and Nostromo (1904). Said pictures Kim as an ‘overwhelmingly male’ novel, with two very attractive men at the centre. Kim himself remains a boy (he ages from thirteen to seventeen in the book) and the important background to the story, the ‘great game’ – politics, diplomacy, war – is, says Said, treated like a great prank. Edmund Wilson’s celebrated judgement of

Kim had been that ‘We have been shown two entirely different worlds existing side by side, with neither really understanding the other . . . the parallel lines never meet . . . The fiction of Kipling, then, does not dramatise any fundamental conflict because Kipling would never face one.’⁹⁹ On the contrary, says Said, ‘The conflict between Kim’s colonial service and loyalty to his Indian companions is unresolved not because Kipling could not face it, but because for Kipling there was no conflict.’ (Italics in the original.) For Kipling, India’s best destiny was to be ruled by England.¹⁰⁰

Kipling respected all divisions in Indian society, was untroubled by them, and neither he nor his characters ever interfered with them. By the late nineteenth century there were, he says, sixty-one levels of status in India and the love–hate relationship between British and Indians ‘derived from the complex hierarchical attitudes present in both peoples’.¹⁰¹ ‘We must read the novel,’ Said concludes, ‘as the realisation of a great cumulative process, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century is reaching its last major moment before Indian independence: on the one hand, surveillance and control over India; on the other, love for and fascinated attention to its every detail . . . In reading Kim today we can watch a great artist in a sense blinded by his own insights about India . . . an India that he loved but could not properly have.’¹⁰²