Resistances: Austen and Wedderburn

Abstract

In this chapter the most famous writer of (female) affective individualism, Jane Austen, and her canonical third published novel Mansfield Park featuring her supposedly most unpopular heroine Fanny Price is juxtaposed with orator Robert Wedderburn’s much more obscure pamphlet The Horrors of Slavery. The chapter also revisits Edward Said’s famous theory of counterpoint in his reading of Austen and proposes instead a focus on entanglement. By contrasting the two texts and their relation to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, readers get a better understanding of how writers used the affective means of prose writing to introduce more resistant entangled tonalities of familial feeling. Austen presents wilful female subjectivity in a family that invested in slavery and Wedderburn, the unruly planter son, claims familiarity with both his enslaved mother and his slave-owning father, challenging the formula of the “horrors of slavery”. Via internal focalization and incendiary rhetoric respectively both texts tonally also create a more intimate familiarity with their readers. They thus aesthetically resist writing conventions and introduce more ambivalent nuance: pushing the limits of the genre of the country-house novel in Austen and refuting the demure tone of abolitionist writing in Wedderburn.