The Importance of Mansfield Park

This blog is designed as part of my internship with the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition lab through Michigan State University to record my thoughts and moments on interest when working in/with the lab (http://dhlc.cal.msu.edu/about/). Right now, we are working on examining literary attention through experiments on pleasure and close reading with Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

When first instructed to look for moments of interest within the lab, I was afraid. I started to work with this lab because it was interesting to me; the experiments and findings are new, and everything that we learn as the experiments progress fascinates me, so I was afraid that I wouldn't be able articulate the moments that were the most interesting, the ones that really made me think. 

I was making my way through the essays the other right and comparing them to the "Quotes for Cross-Analysis" document (where we record intentional and unintentional quoting from the essays) just to get an idea of what moments the participants focused on, or even moments that made me think. And while all of the essays made me pause, there was one in particular that was really engaging. 

In their essay, subject #9 says, "Austen typically titles her novels after main characters, critical themes, or, in the rare events of Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, after places. Like the purloined letter, Austen’s titles provide us with a useful clue for interpreting her texts, if we notice them. Considering the title of Mansfield Park, we are invited to reflect upon the importance of place and architecture on our main characters." I've always been a fan of titles and why author's have chosen the particular one they did. I get excited when I run across the title word written someone in the text, but for Mansfield Park, it was different. Austen simply used the name of the house for the title, is what I thought. And then it hit me, after reading this quote, that I never bothered to ask why she used the house name.

Before it was the people in the house and the space in the house that was making Fanny uncomfortable; now it is the house itself and what it encompasses. The house holds the people, the house is made of the too-big rooms for Fanny, and there the importance lies in the house.