“Undiverted Hearts”: Domestic Alienation and Moral Integrity in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Henry James’s Washington Square

Abstract

My aim in this article is to argue that Henry James’s Washington Square (1880) is an unacknowledged reworking of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). To this purpose, I have analyzed both narratives as fictions of domestic alienation in which the heroines refuse to allow their individuality to be subdued by; (a) patriarchal authority and parental mismanagement; (b) the interferences and meddlings of their manipulative aunts; or (c) the libertine corruption of their deceitful suitors. Although they have been subjected to coercion and manipulation, Fanny Price and Catherine Sloper rebel against the pressures of parental authority and emerge as the true preservers of moral integrity.