Ironizing Free Indirect Discourse in Mansfield Park : Austen's Technique of Psycho-Narration

Abstract: The critical obsession with Jane Austen's use of free indirect discourse (FID) has led scholars to overlook the complexity of Mansfield Park's narrative technique. Attending to the full range of methods of psycho-narration (as defined by Dorrit Cohn) in the novel reveals that Fanny Price's point of view isn't always its narrative–or moral–center. Mansfield Park 's narrator has a distinct voice, and uses intrusive, ironic comments to undercut FID, especially moral judgments, from Fanny's perspective. Contra D.A. Miller's contention that Austen's style depends on self-erasure, the narrator identifies with the author and has a highly ironic voice similar to Austen's in her personal letters. Acknowledging the degree to which Fanny, Edmund, and Sir Thomas are ironized in the novel calls into question the tendency to read the novel as dour, moralistic and patriarchal, and to read Fanny as unlikeable, oppressively correct, conformist, or even, as Nina Auerbach contends, monstrous.