Buried in Plain Sight: Jane Austen's Gothic Critique of Interiority in Mansfield Park and Persuasion

摘要

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818) famously satirizes the excesses of gothic fiction while revealing a patriarchal oppression all the more dangerous because of its subtlety. Although later novels do not so directly translate the drama of the gothic into the drama of the domestic, Austen does continue to suggest how women may be quietly isolated and imprisoned. This article proposes that in Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1818), Austen gothicizes the very interiority that her heroines have cultivated as an apparent refuge. Austen's portrayal of interiority and its implications for feminism have already been complicated by many critics, but this article demonstrates that Austen herself was well aware of how female interiority could become a trap, a place into which a woman might be forced and cut off from others as assuredly as she would be in any hidden chamber.