Capability Jane (original) (raw)

Oxford University Press eBooks, 2020

Abstract

The chapter contends that Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, through its rhetorical and conceptual overlaps with eighteenth-century landscape design, does not align its realist project with representing reality so much as with revealing reality’s capabilities, thereby associating Austenian realism metaphysically and medially with the ecological consciousness and experimentation of landscaping. Contrary to familiar leftist critiques of landscape gardening’s political meanings and abhorrent social effects, the chapter uncovers the conceptual overlaps between, on the one hand, the ecological consciousness and design vocabulary of eighteenth-century landscape theorists like Humphry Repton and Richard Payne Knight, and, on the other hand, contemporary formalism and Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the virtuality extant in any reality. The chapter then traces how Mansfield Park reworks this ecological consciousness and design vocabulary (affordances, allowances, capabilities), arguing that Austen theorizes the novel form as a design medium wherein narrative is just a contingent ecological experiment.

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