The Quest for a Home: Acculturation, Social Formations, and Agency in British Fiction.
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When Jane Austen, in Mansfield Park, has Sir Bertram send Fanny Price back to Portsmouth, Fanny has a moment of "rapture." I The narrator states: "The remembrance of all her initial pleasures, and of what she had suffered in being torn from them, came over her with strength , and renewed it seemed as if to be at home again, would heal every pain that had since grown out of the separation."1
This feeling, thus, does not last long. Within three months, Austen has Fanny express an equally intense desire to call Mansfield home. While Claudia L. Johnson, in Jane Austen: Women, the Novel, and Politics sees this incident teaching Fanny "to value the advantages of wealth and comfort Mansfield gives,"2 I see something else at work. In placing Fanny between the "cultures" of Portsmouth and Mansfield, between her social upbringing and biological origins, Austen creates a space in which Fanny will belong to neither. Fanny's quest for a home does not only symbolize conservative or liberal politics, but also an attempt to evaluate cultural standing.