SOURCE: “‘A Little Spirit of Independence’: Sexual Politics and the Bildungsroman in Mansfield Park,” in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 3, Spring, 1984, pp. 197-214.

In the following essay, McDonnell evaluates Mansfield Park as a Bildungsroman that deals authentically with feminine childhood experience.

Mansfield Park has never lacked detractors. Kingsley Amis is typical, if a little intemperate, in calling it an “immoral book” and the character of Fanny Price a “monster of complacency and pride, who under a cloak of cringing self-abasement, dominates and gives meaning to the novel.”¹ Others have criticized the book for being too severely moral, for its serious and even pietistic tone which militates against the familiar Austen virtues of liveliness and wit.² And even those critics who praise the novel tend to see it as a thesis book, a book where character and action are subordinated to ideology, whether that be the “war...