SOURCE: “The Boundaries of Mansfield Park,” in New Casebooks: Mansfield Park and Persuasion, edited by Judy Simons, Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997, pp. 67-92.

In the following essay originally published in 1984, Yeazell presents an anthropological study of Mansfield Park, focusing on the novel's concern with transgressed boundaries, such as the anxiety associated with the taint of spiritual pollution.

The Dirt at Portsmouth

Immediately before the climax of Mansfield Park, in the last chapter of Fanny Price's exile at Portsmouth, comes a passage extraordinary for Jane Austen—extraordinary both in the concreteness of its details and in the sense of revulsion it records:

She felt that she had, indeed, been three months there: and the sun's rays falling strongly into the parlour, instead of cheering, made her still more melancholy; for sun-shine appeared to her a totally different thing in a town and in the country. Here, its power was only...