Kierkegaardian Inwardness and the Good Life in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park

Abstract:Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park can be read through the lens of a Kierkegaardian interpretive option that allows us to see the novel as endorsing inwardness, a choice for the internal over the external, for that which is identical to our selves over that which is distinct from our selves. There is freedom in choosing inwardness, Kierkegaard maintains. So, since Fanny Price, Mansfield Park’s beleaguered protagonist, chooses a life lived in pursuit of inwardness, we can see her as securing her own emancipation: she is free, liberated, in a way that distinguishes her from other characters in Mansfield Park.