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Women's Studies: An interdisciplinary journal

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Jane Austen, The Architect: (Re)Building Spaces at Mansfield Park

P. KEIKO KAGAWA
a a

Corvallis , Oregon, USA Published online: 15 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: P. KEIKO KAGAWA (2006) Jane Austen, The Architect: (Re)Building Spaces at Mansfield Park , Women's Studies: An inter-disciplinary journal, 35:2, 125-143, DOI: 10.1080/00497870500488081 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497870500488081

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Womens Studies, 35:125143, 2006 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 online DOI: 10.1080/00497870500488081

1547-7045Studies 0049-7878 GWST Womens Studies, Vol. 35, No. 02, January 2006: pp. 00

JANE AUSTEN, THE ARCHITECT: (RE)BUILDING SPACES AT MANSFIELD PARK

P. KEIKO KAGAWA Corvallis, Oregon

Jane P. Keiko Austen: Kagawa The Architect

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It is our positioning within space, both as the point of perspectival access to space, and also as an object for others in space, that gives the subject a coherent identity and an ability to manipulate things, including its own body parts, in space. However, space does not become comprehensible to the subject by its being the space of movement; rather, it becomes space through movement, and as such, it acquires specific properties from the subjects constitutive functioning in it.

Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion

About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronets lady, with all the comforts and consequences of a handsome house and large income. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

Most decidedly, the narrative plot of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen is about marriage, the successful or failed attempts at marriage of its heroine, Fanny Price, her mother and aunt, nee the Ward sisters, her cousins, Maria and Julia Bertram, and their neighbor, Mary Crawford. Central to the plot is how each of these women find suitable housing through marriage. To be married is to be well-housed in the ideal materialization of the matrimonial state that is the space of the country house. As Mary Crawford, unabashedly exclaims, Oh! Yes, I am not at all ashamed of it. I would have every body marry if they can do it properly; but

Address correspondence to P. Keiko Kagawa, Pkkagawa@att.com or Kagawak@wou.edu

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every body should marry as soon as they can do it to advantage.1 Doing it to advantage of course means to be coupled with a gentleman, and a house commodious and well fitted up (31). For Mary Crawford as for the unattached women of the Mansfield Park household, matrimony becomes nothing more than a pragmatic commercial enterprise; in other words, marriage is a manoeuvering business (34). The goal of each woman, then, is to maneuver through her spaces in order to gain entry into a house as its mistress by way of marriage to a potential husband vetted according to his income and property. Hence, Austens domestic plot outlines the typical country-house plot of a womans lucrative maneuvers to acquire both a house and a husband. As the builder of narrative plot in her textual space, Austen the author, rebuilds the architectural plots of her domestic space. In our consideration of Austens country-house plot, a number of important questions arise remarkably modern in their implications, questions that articulate complex notions of space and bodies in the spaces of domestic architecture. For instance, why does architecture seem to figure so significantly in Austens novel? How does Austen build her architectural spaces and why does she narrate them with such detail? How do these spaces interact with her heroines movements and use of space? In other words, why does Austen place Fanny in specific spaces and what makes Fanny maneuver through and use her spaces in the way that she does, in order to achieve her final goal of matrimony and to arrive at her final destination in a handsome house? This article attempts to answer these questions by arguing several points at once. First, Austen in her role in material culture as a narrator is an architect. Her literary representation of space in fiction creates for us the lived experience of built spaces. For Austen to construct the novel, Mansfield Park, textually is to construct its buildings architecturally. While she is no trained architect, her notions of landscape architecture and interior design are suggestive of architectural theories that go beyond mere delineations of a spaces location, size, and construction. Second, to understand Austens notion of space, the body in space and the
1 This citation is from Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1998), and all those hereinafter will be made parenthetically by page number.

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uses the body makes of its space, is to acknowledge her implicit understanding of architecture as a material production which accommodates social behavior. For Austen, space and bodies are constitutive and exist in a dialectical relationship; her constructions of domestic space are simultaneously constructions of the ideal domestic female, her body and her subjectivity. Third, and attesting to the dialectic of body and space, Austen and her heroine (re)construct spaces and bodies by the way in which they use and maneuver through their built spaces; in so doing they are able to rectify the asymmetrical power relations in class and gender. Austens articulation of space as a novelist coincides with the awareness that early nineteenth-century architects had with respect to how space and bodies in domestic architecture are built upon the prescribed hierarchies of power which typify her period, those of age, class, and gender. My methodology for presenting Austen and Mansfield Park as text-cum-space is to examine different architectural styles, landscapes, and floor plans, in order to understand the material spaces that come to be reconstructed in Austens novel, taking into consideration their designers, builders, and inhabitants. The renderings of architectural floor plans and maps that I include herein are meant to make visible internal relations with respect to how the plot of Mansfield Park is constructed, and how its main character, Fanny Price, is developed vis--vis her interior and exterior domestic spaces. Certain scenes and characters in the novel, such as Fanny in her little white attic and East room, already lend themselves to visual representation. The fact that I can draw or map these scenes because of the abundance of material detail relating to furniture and fixtures, their spatial distances and proportions, attests to an author who already perceives spatially like an architect. As Rodolphe el-Khoury claims, architecture is a deciding component in literary narrative. A novels narrative format is calibrated to the spatial hierarchy of spaces describing actual rooms, details of furniture, and decoration.2 Austens self-conscious interest in the material determinants of human behavior suggests that for her the imbrication of space and body is inextricable. All the more so since her homes, their landscapes, and furnishings, both in her life and in her fiction, are partly about bodiesabout womens bodies
Rudolphe el-Khoury. Introduction. The Little House: An Architectural Seduction by Jean-Francois de Bastide. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996. 2223.
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often sequestered in specific spaces, the construction of those spaces and the practices that a body performs within them. Austens Architectural Know-How Austen and J.C. Loudon By way of background, let me first give you some cultural history with respect to the architectural milieu surrounding Austen. All but forgotten, but still one of the nineteenth centurys prominent landscapists and architects was John Claudius Loudon. Loudon was most well known for his monumental work, An Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture and Furniture. The Encyclopaedia was a compilation of prototypes of cottages, villas, suburban gardens, country houses, and farm buildings Loudon had collected from different architects and landscapists throughout England, supplemented by his editorial comments espousing his social and aesthetic philosophy. If the purpose of Loudons Encyclopaedia was to educate young persons in Architecture as an art of taste, especially those of the female sex then there would have been no better student of architecture than Jane Austen (1).
Teach the young what architectural beauty is, and they will admire it; show them how it may be produced in their dwellings, and they will desire to possess it. Architecture is the only fine art open to the inspection of all, and interesting to all; and could we only succeed in raising the taste of mass society in this art, we should not only effect a universal improvement in Architecture, but materially contribute towards the universal adoption of correct and elegant habits of thinking and acting generally. (2)

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Loudons architectural ethos was well established by the first decade of the nineteenth century and was concurrent with Austens most productive literary period. Austen would have been familiar with Loudon, already a household name. It is not surprising then that architecture as a significant means of artistic and material expression in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would be a prevailing concern in Austens novels. Moreover, both she and Loudon as contemporaries attempting to represent middle-class culture shared a common social and class milieu. Like the authors of etiquette books, they both chose to instruct and reconstruct the life of the gentry, one literarily, the other architecturally. In Mansfield Park, Austen practices the definitive notions of space carefully crafted in accordance with Loudons school

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of architecture and landscape as well as that of his rival, Humphry Repton. Austens construction of domestic space in the novel is based upon the three common architectural principles of her timewhat Loudon would later delineate as The Fundamental Principles of laying out a Villa, including the House and the Grounds.3 The first principle was the importance of site placement and topography; the second, the arrangement and design of the exterior buildings and grounds of a villa; and the third, the architectural style and interior arrangement of the house built to accommodate the domestic practices of its inhabitants.4 Sotherton: Reptons Country House? Austen reserves specific delineations of country house architecture and landscape for the two neighboring estates of Mansfield ParkSotherton and Thornton Lacey. Take, for example, her narration of Sotherton as described by its owner, Mr. Rushworth:
Now, at Sotherton, we have a good seven hundred [acres], without reckoning the water meadows; There have been two or three fine old trees cut down that grew too near the house, and it opens the prospect amazingly, which makes me think that Repton, or any body of that sort, would certainly have the avenue at Sotherton down, the avenue that leads from the west front to the top of the hill you know, The house was built in Elizabeths time, and is a large, regular brick buildingheavy but respectable looking, and has many good rooms. It is ill placed. It stands in one of the lowest spots of the park; in that respect, unfavourable for improvement. But the woods are fine, and there is a stream, which, I dare say, might be made a good deal of. (41)

Her description, in its accuracy to building dimension, placement, and landscaping, could have been included in any number of architectural treatises of Austens day, emulating the picturesque schools of Capability Brown, Sir Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight. Her designation of geographic site, topographical landscape and placement, and exterior design of the Rushworth
3 Loudon, An Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture, Vols. 12. Shaftsbury: Donhead Publishing Ltd., 2000. 763. 4 Loudon, Encyclopaedia 763773.

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house accords with Loudons fundamental principles of architecture.5 But more conspicuously, such a meticulous description of Sotherton makes known to us Austens architectural preferences. Critical to Austens passage are the words Repton and improvement. Alistair Duckworth, in his extensive 1971 study of Mansfield Park, entitled, The Improvement of the Estate, builds his argument around the term improvement as an architectural practice made fashionable by Humphry Repton and common to Austens period; a practice which Duckworth asserts is more than just structural improvements to a building and landscape. To be sure, Austens description of Sotherton and its need for improvement provides her with a useful literary motif using the venue of landscape architecture, while simultaneously revealing her dislike for the Reptonian school of improvement. Duckworth explains that [i]n [Austens] view, radical improvements of the kind Repton made were not improvements at all but innovations or alterations of a destructive nature (4748). But if Austen did not prefer Reptons altered landscapes, who and what were her preferences among the different schools of landscape architecture during her period? I suggest another source for Austens architectural propensities. Thornton Lacey: Austen/Loudons Country House? Austen may have preferred J.C. Loudon himself and his school of the Gardenesque or Natural style, as evidenced by her description of Thornton Lacey. Thornton Lacey is the future estate of Edmund Bertram, the principal love interest of the novel. Also critical of Repton, Loudon states that the leading principle [of the Gardenesque] is to create or heighten natural character [] planting a plant, shrub, or tree, in such a position that it shall be at liberty to develop itself completely in its natural form. [] The other styles [such as the Repton School] effect directly the
5 A.A. Tait, Loudon and the Return to Formality. In Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium of the History of Landscape Architecture VI. (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Trustees for Harvard University, 1980. 61. Tait also notes that Loudons 1806 A Treatise on Forming, Improving, and Managing Country Residences had little to say that was new. They already contained much of the vast and infinite knowledge that was characteristic of his later Encyclopaedias (61). No doubt, Austen would have taken into account these already established principles of architecture and landscape in her treatment of Sotherton.

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reversethey produce a monotony of artificial character.6 Loudon further specifies that the modern system of the picturesque [such as Reptons] is to render a residence separate from the country; whereas Loudons preference is one where the Natural style would seek to harmonize the two. Its plantations were to be designed to effect this transition, farm and office buildings were not be hidden, the lake or water was to be natural rather than conspicuously artificial, the contours of the park left as they were, kitchen gardens small and useful, and so on.7 Austens landscape of Thornton Lacey is designed to follow the specifications of Loudons Natural style, as described by a neighbor of Mansfield Park, Henry Crawford, even though Crawford himself is a Reptonian. Crawford wishes to improve Edmund Bertrams future home employing Reptons schematics. In so doing, his proposed improvements call for the estates complete renovation, transforming the architecture and natural landscape into an artifice of ornamental beauty. Buildings must be moved and removed, including the house, so that it be turned to front the east instead of the norththe entrance and principal rooms, I mean, must be on that side, where the view is pretty, a view attainable only by removing the farmyard, to be cleared away entirely, and planted up to shut out the blacksmith shop (166). Crawfords proposed alterations, in an attempt to persuade Edmund to support his plan of improving the estate, utterly transforms it; [f]rom being the mere gentlemans residence, it becomes, by judicious improvement, the residence of a man of education, taste, modern manners, good connections (167). Nevertheless, for Edmund and for the author Austen, danger lurks in such radical change. Changing the physical landscape will change the social landscape of its inhabitants. The estate as an ordered physical structure is a metonym for society as a whole, a society constituted by social structures such as codes of behavior and morality that when altered or improved differentiates right action from wrong.8 Austen fears that improvements to the physical
Loudons descriptions of the Gardenesque are layed out in his work, A Treatise on Forming, Improving, and Managing Country Residences, 2 vols. London: Longman 1806. Reprinted, in facsimile, Westmead, Farnborough, Hampshire: Gregg International Publishers Ltd., 1971. II, 644, and as quoted in Taits Loudon and the Return to Formality, 6162. 7 See Loudon, A Treatise 650 and Tait 64. 8 Duckworth ix.
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landscape of Edmunds estate in the way Crawford suggests will result in alterations to Edmunds social and moral character, making him as unsavory and objectionable as the Reptonian Crawford. Understandably then, Edmund Bertram shuns Crawfords improvements. He prefers a residence with rather less ornament and beauty, more in the Gardenesque/Natural style of Loudon where the grounds and buildings harmonize in their original, natural states. Fanny Price also joins Edmunds camp of architecture, silently disapproving of Crawfords renovations by a mere look, as her eyes were turned on Crawford for a moment with an expression more than grave, even reproachful (168). Edmund and Fanny become spokespersons in theirs and Austens predisposition towards Loudons Natural style. Moreover, their exchanges with Crawford explicitly reveal Austens understanding of the principles and practices of the major architects of her day, as she disputes questions of site placement and the topography of her landscape. Thus, landscapes as built spaces take on specific definitions in Austens abiding preoccupation with architecture. Austens Interiors Design and Theory Austens propensity for interior architecture, its arrangement and dimensions, becomes apparent as she moves from exterior sites to domestic interiors. One need only to examine the many references in her letters to domestic buildings, their interior design, and the daily activities for which such spaces were designed, to conclude that Austen was indeed a student of architecture.9 In a letter to her sister, Cassandra, Austen narrates house hunting in Bath, describing the architectural merits of domestic interiors in a fastidious fashion to include spatial proportions and furniture. These details follow the Loudonesque narrative genre adopted by architects throughout the nineteenth century, a genre characterized by its attention to detail:
When my Uncle went to take his second glass of water, I walked with him, & in our mornings circuit we looked at two Houses in Green Park Buildings, one of which pleased me very well.We walked all over it except into the Garrets;the dining room is of a comfortable size, just as large as you like to
9 All excerpts from Austens letters in the paragraphs to follow are from Derdre LeFayes third edition of Jane Austens Letters and are identified by date. See Derdre Le Faye, Jane Austens Letters. Oxford University Press, 1995. 8283, 55, 301.

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fancy it, the 2nd room about 14 ft square;The apartment over the Drawingroom pleased me particularly, because it divided into two, the smaller one a very nice sized Dressing-room, which upon occasion might admit a bed. The aspect is South-East.The only doubt is about the Dampness of the Offices, of which there were symptoms. (Tuesday 5Wednesday 6 May 1801)

Austens notes the rooms important in the conduct of a domestic lifestyle commensurate with the ideal, middle-class family, the dining room and most certainly the Drawing-roomrooms wherein the social structure of the family and its larger cultural community are constructed. Successful social interactions amongst family members and guests depend in large part on physical spaces to be both commodious and comfortable; hence Austens constant attention to room dimensions. The location and design of the rooms are equally important criteria for Austen, given her partiality for a Dressing-room above the Drawing-room large enough to include a bed as well as accommodations for an upstairs sitting room or boudoir. Finally, as physical comfort includes spaces amenable to good health, crucial to Austen are the availability of her spaces to sunlight and an avoidance of damp sites. Coordinating the position of the house with respect to the sun in order to insure the physical well being of its inhabitants is as much a requirement for an Austen habitat as it is for a Loudon country villa.10 In these early letters we can already hear the voice of Loudon echoing through the walls of Austens architectural descriptions. Moreover for Austen, rooms are configured so as to enforce a certain daily regime and a range of activities and behaviors appropriate to individuals of a certain class and gender. Architecture and interior design become the means by which the middle class asserts its control and power over its members. As if mimicking Loudons method of painstakingly setting a scene of architecture, Austen prescribes certain behaviors to occur within specific spaces, thereby delineating the ideal schedule in the daily lives of a gentleman and lady of the affluent middle class:

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According to Loudon, given Englands predominantly wet environs, a salubrious climate for the ideal country house is one that promises the most dry, warm, physical circumstances; the most suitable surface, one that allows for good drainage, namely, sandy or gravel surfaces such as limestone or sandstone with clay being the least desirable. Ideally, a house should be situated on a high hillside or ridge facing north so that the direct influence of the sun is limited to three to four months a year. (Encyclopaedia 764765).

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So much for the morning; then came the dinner & Mr Haden who brought good Manners & clever conversation;from 7 to 8 the Harp;at 8 Mrs L. & Miss E. arrived& for the rest of the Evening the Drawing-room was thus arranged, on the Sopha-side the two Ladies Henry & myself making the best of it, on the opposite side Fanny & Mr Haden in two chairs (I beleive [sic] at least they had two chairs) talking together uninterruptedly. Fancy the scene! (Sunday 26 November 1815)

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Designated activities such as dining, conversation, and harp-playing performed in good Manner and cleverly occur at specific times, morning or evening, in rooms where the furniture of Sophas and chairs are arranged to allow for these actions to take place amenably. In such a setting, Austen builds an architecture of space to include its bodies and domestic practices, not only enabling Cassandra to conjure up in her imagination a scene at which she cannot be present, but also constructing for us an art(ifice) for living in much the same fashion Loudon intends the form of his space to adhere to its function. The idealized practices of middle-class gentility in early nineteenth-century culture become the common social discourse from which both Austen and Loudon materialize such practices into narrative and architectural space, respectively. Architecture for both Austen and Loudon functions as an instruction guide to proper behavior to be practiced by the ideal gentleman and lady. Loudons architecture may codify the practices of gentility in a male voice into an archi-gentility, but it is Austen who narrates for us an alternative version in the voice of a female. Theory of Architectural Interiors Turning from exterior landscapes to interior domestic spaces, we see from Austens epistolary descriptions that spaces and bodies closely intertwine. A number of critics including Laura Mooneyham White, Francis Hart, and John Skinner pay close attention to Austens interior material spaces as sites for constructing the private interior spaces of her heroines interiorityspaces that shape and construct subjectivity. The implication is that there is an architectural determinism at work here. These critics claim that intimate domestic spaces come to express the intimate interiors of the self, an awareness which Austen builds into the spatial imagery almost

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exclusively associated with Fanny.11 I would further refine the construction of Fannys subjectivity and psychic interiority as postulated by these critics to suggest that both are constructed by way of a bodys external experience of its spaces. My emphasis here is on how a body moves, uses and feels its spaces; body and space operate dialectically, not as deterministic singular forces. The primacy of the body to Austens construction of space and body accords with contemporary theories of the production of space formulated by Henri Lefebvre in the late 1970s in his work entitled, The Production of Space. Lefebvre posits that space produces the body just as the body produces the spaces it inhabitsa production following the onset of the Industrial Revolution tied to economic concerns in the Marxist sense. This is to say that Austens and Loudons built spaces are made possible because of the success of large-scale capitalist production emerging during the nineteenth century. Industrial capitalism created a market for country houses (8083). But the production of space seems something more specific. In Lefebvrian terms, a person within interior spaces is always living corporeally, constructing space through the use of the body: the use of hands, members and sensory organs, and the gestures of work, thereby transforming space to lived space (40). In other words, space is made social by the way bodies use that space to engage in social practices. Lefebvres insistence on the experiential is an important component of Austens spacesa how a body moves, uses and feels its space.12 Living bodies for Austen are what make her space social. Rather than follow the designs that her architect contemporaries have
See Laura Mooneyham White, Traveling to the Self: Comic and Spatial Openness in Jane Austens Novels, Critical Essays on Jane Austen, ed. Laura Mooneyham White. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1998. 199; Francis Hart, The Spaces of Privacy: Jane Austen. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30 (1975): 306, 310; John Skinner, Exploring Space: The Constellations of Mansfield Park, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 4.2 (1992): 132. 12 I would like to make clear that I am not claiming that Austens late eighteenthcentury and early nineteenth-century vocabulary and rhetoric anticipates twentieth-century theoretics of space. Rather, her notion of space and body shares a common dynamic with postmodern theories of space and architecture and thus lends itself to current theoretic interpretations. Austens understanding of space and body is literally and literarily a function of a woman confined to certain specific spaces, and as such share similar issues with present-day constructions of space and body. My remaining impression of Chawton House, which I recently visited, is the low-ceilinged, claustrophobic spaces in which Austen had to live and work, only making more real how her body functioned in its spaces and why her novels were often about woman in confined spaces, caught in a power dynamic designed by male architects to house the female.
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prescribed, Austen, through the living female bodies of her heroines in their textual-architectural spaces, inscribes her own spaces appropriating or even subverting male-designed space to meet her own ends. She attempts to give herself as an author and her heroines some sort of agency thereby creating some leverage in the unequal power dynamic between the writing female and male authors and architects. The female body in domestic space becomes Austens clearest formulation of a dialectical energy which affords her heroines this agency.13 Examining Austens interior architecture through Lefebvres notions of space offers a powerful means of getting at the primacy of the female experience by way of the corporeality associated with the female body during a period when female subjectivity remained suppressed. Austens literary representation of space and body in her fiction makes palpable the lived experience of built spaces. She synthesizes space, body, and experience in the use and construction of domestic interiors at Mansfield Park. Inside Mansfield Park Using Its Spaces Austen moves Fanny through specific interiors in the Mansfield house. She begins by placing Fanny in the attic room, furthest from the houses domestic center, moves her down the attic stairs to the East Room which will become her sitting room, and ends by securing Fanny a position in the familys central roomsthe drawing room and the ball-room. Each move brings Fanny physically closer to Edmund, as well as closer to the attainment of her social goal of marriage. Moving through her spaces also means Fanny experiences her spaces by way of her activities. The acts, gestures,
Current architectural theory provides that clearly it is the use of space, the kind of activity and the manner in which the activity is carried out, which is at issue in the construction of any built space. How space is used is instrumental in communicating and asserting status and power suggests Amos Rapoport. See Amos Rapoport, Systems of activities and systems of settings, Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space: An Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Study, Susan Kent, ed. New York; Cambridge UP, 1990. 1011. Susan Kents interdisciplinary examination of the relationship between architecture and social practices includes a compilation of essays by architects one of whom is Rapoport, as well as archaelogists and anthropologists. A central debate amongst architectural theorists is whether architecture is a reflection of behavior or the use of space, which, in turn, is a reflection of culture or does human behavior or cultural practices determine the design and use of space? Kent concludes, somewhat ambiguously, stating that all architects in general, find some aspect of culture as the variable most influential in affecting the interaction between the use of space and architecture; see Kent 3.
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and positions of her body within rooms designed to house the female become a means of constructing her as a subject; the social practices of writing, drawing, playing music, embroidering, taking tea, or playing cards construct the subjectivity who is Fanny and the larger social space that is Mansfield Park. Socially, as Lady Bertrams niece, Fanny is at once included within the family circle as a newly adopted member but excluded as she is neither a daughter nor a social equal, only a poor relation. Fanny is the issue of a badly conceived marriage between Ladys Bertrams sister and a Lieutenant of Marines, without education, fortune or connection (5). In an effort to properly place Fanny in the world by let[ting] her home be in this house (9), Lady and Sir Thomas Bertram discover that always at issue are questions of Fannys placement and movements within the house. Undoubtedly for them, social positioning hinges upon spatial positions. Fannys physical location in an interior space is a social and class measure of her proximity to the family. The rooms in Mansfield Park are coded signs for placement, spaces once interpreted or decoded indicate how much Fanny has insinuated herself into the hierarchy of family relations. The closer Fanny moves to the center rooms of the house, the nearer she is to spheres of influence and power both cultural and economic. The East Room Take, for example, the East Room of Mansfield Park where the simultaneity of Fannys self-construction and the construction of her physical spaces become all the more apparent. It is here in the East Room where she reverses the traditional power relations between male and female spaces of knowledge. Fannys East Room is her library, the private space she builds and reserves for knowledge-making.14 Daphne

14 Nineteenth-century architects of the country house mark the library as a private reserve for male occupancy to be decorated with handsome, noble furniture designed for intellectual activity, the kind undertaken by eminent scholars, distinguished authors or statesmen. The majority of vacant wall space including either side of the fireplace, doorway, and the lower half of the bay window, is filled with bookcases, while sofas, stools, large easy chairs, movable desks, and tables of various sizes abound. Table tops and parts of bookcases covered with wainscotted doors hold valuable books, prints, maps, and drawings. A globe usually stands in one corner. (Loudon, Encyclopaedia 797799).

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Spain theorizes on the relationship between spatial arrangements and the distribution of knowledge and power. The arrangement of space articulates the intrinsic rules governing social relationships, especially those between men and women. Asymmetrical organizations of spaces results in or testifies to an unequal access to intellectual know-how. Spain posits that spatial arrangement is one of the mechanisms by which a group with greater power can maintain its advantage over a group with less power. By controlling access to knowledge and resources through the control of space, the dominants groups ability to retain and reinforce its position is enhanced.15 The nineteenth-century library as male space denied female access serves as such a mechanism. Hence, Fanny builds her own space of knowledge-making in the East Room, formerly and appropriately the old school room. As she constructs and arranges her spaces, Fanny neutralizes the power differential between Edmund and herself. Moreover, she becomes judge and moral counselor to Edmund, thereby confirming her fully formed agency in matters of self-conduct. At eighteen, Fanny moves from the childhood space of her attic to spend most of her time in her self-designed sitting room, the East Room. The little white attic, which had continued to be her sleeping room ever since her first entering the family, proving incompetent to suggest any reply, she had recourse, as soon as she was dressed, to another apartment, more spacious and more meet for walking about in, and thinking, and of which she had now for some time been almost equally its mistress (105). Fanny presides as mistress of her space, able to use and experience space as self-built for her own purposes. Where the female members of the family, Lady Bertram, Julia, and Maria are mistresses of their own space in the drawing room, the East Room is Fannys sitting room and like her female counterparts she is equally its mistress. More than in any other space in the house, in the East Room Fanny is free to arrange the room and choose her own pastimes unencumbered by the expectations of other family members. She is able to walk and think at her leisure as the only individual in the Bertram family who is both self-reflective

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Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992. 1516.

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and introspective, faculties which various members of the household, in particular Edmund, come to rely upon.16 Not only is she mistress of her space but also mistress of herself as she self-constructs an identity in this space, a space once reserved for learning:
It had been their school-room; [] The room had then become useless, and for some time was quite deserted, except by Fanny, when she visited her plants, or wanted one of the books, which she was still glad to keep there, from the deficiency of space and accommodation of her little chamber above;but gradually, as her value for the comforts of it increased, she had added to her possessions, and spent more of her time there; and having nothing to oppose her, had so naturally and so artlessly worked herself into it, that it was now generally admitted to hers. (105106)

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The deficient attic space, reflecting the earlier diminished condition of Fannys adolescence, needs to be enlarged. Her increase in self-knowledge requires an increase in space to accommodate an ever-expanding nature and intellect. Fannys self-possession now fully developed provides her with the power to work herself artlessly into her space so unopposed and so naturally that the East Room space becomes hers. Here in the East Room Fannys self-construction seemingly continues unopposed by the strictures of class or gender. As a more developed self, she is able to extricate herself consciously from any thing unpleasant below and tactically withdraw to her East Room at will.17 Her plants, her booksof which she had been a collector, from the first hour of her commanding a shillingher writing desk, and her works of charity and ingenuity, were all within her reach (106). Fanny in command of herself is in command of her room. As architect of her selfhood now harmoniously constructed in its entirety, Fanny constructs and designs her nest of comforts placing the table between the windows cover16 Duckworth distinguishes Fanny as the only member of the household capable of inner searchings, by virtue of her instinctive morality and innate qualities of virtue which help to account for the role of judge and moral counselor she finds herself reluctantly assuming in the eyes of others. See Duckworth 74. 17 Duckworth also observes that Fannys ability to withdraw to her East Room in order to avoid the unpleasantries occurring below is a deliberate tactic on her part to protect her moral self from the corruption of its environment. Fanny is the only family member to note the corruptive influences of the play to be performed by the Bertram siblings in their improper use of Sir Thomass personal study as a makeshift theatre. See Duckworth 74.

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ing it with work-boxes and netting-boxes (107).18 When Edmund comes to Fanny to solicit her opinion about the theatrics of the Bertram siblings acting scheme [which] gets worse and worse to be performed in Sir Thomass study-cum-theatre, he comments, I admire your little establishment exceedingly (109). For Edward, the redesigning of Sir Thomass study into a temporary theatre is seemingly less successful and more unsettling than Fannys rearrangement of the East Room into a stable space of sanctuary. Equally as noteworthy, Austen, the narrator, describes Fannys establishment in Loudon-like architectural idioms, paying close attention to the details of the rooms aspect, orientation to sunlight, and arrangements for comfort. The aspect was so favourable, that even without a fire it was habitable in many an early spring, and late autumn morning, to such a willing mind as Fannys, and while there was a gleam of sunshine, she hoped not to be driven from it entirely, even when winter came. The comfort of it in her hours of leisure was extreme (106). The rooms furnishings, their design, and placement also contribute to its comfortable ambiance, creating a spatial milieu complimentary to Fannys aesthetic sensibilities and intellectual pursuits. Austens degree of architectural detail is easily draftable into a floor plan of Fannys room, while her decorative detail gives us insight into Fannys aesthetic sensibilities. Fanny decorates her room with transparencies of Tintern Abbey and sites from the Cumbrian Lakes following the romantic sensibilities of Loudons Naturalesque school. Loudon favored scenes of natural beauty captured by his favorite poet Wordsworth, in Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, and by his favorite painter of picturesque tours of the Lake District, William Gilpin, artists whom Austen herself admired. Crucial then, is the rooms favorable orientation that allows Fannys full enjoyment of these pictures drawn on transparent material and placed on the window panes so as to be illuminated from behind by the suns light. Austens design of space works in tandem with the designs of Fannys subjectivity. As Fanny becomes more at home in her space so does Austen. In addition, Fannys intellectual interests are accommodated by her use of the East Room spaces where she can sit at her table and engage in the favorite activity of reading. Edmund comes upon
Note the similarity in design and dcor of Fannys sitting room to Loudons delineation of male counterspace, the library. See footnote 10.
18

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Fanny in the East Room envious of her ability to follow her independent pursuits in a private space of her own. You in the meanwhile will be taking a trip into China, I suppose. How does Lord Macartney go on?(opening a volume on the table and then taking up some others.) And here are Crabbes Tales, and the Idler, at hand to relieve you, if you tire of your great book (109). Exploration and travel are traditionally male enterprises. The fact that Fanny partakes of such activities, albeit through books, becomes an attempt by her to control access to knowledge and resources thereby achieving parity in one of the nineteenth centurys greatest disparitiesgender. That Edmund comes to seek the now-valued opinion of a fully developed subjectivity who is Fanny in the space of the East Room is no mere coincidence. Unable to reconcile his own notion of right conduct with the misconduct of acting in his brothers play, Edmund implores Fanny, I want to consult. I want your opinion [.] Give me your approbation, then, Fanny. I am not comfortable without it (107, 109). Duckworth asserts that here in the space of East Room, Fanny first comes into prominence as a moral force.19 I would go even further than Duckworth to say that Fanny comes into being as a moral force by the way she designs and uses her spaces. The way she has fixed her furnishings adds to the rooms stabilizing ambiance in addition to her quotidian social practices making the East Room a sanctuary, both secure and stable, a stability that is now present in the person of Fanny. Edmund comes to the East Room looking for solace and impressed by her intellectual acumen, relies upon the fixed moral groundings of Fannys nature that she has developed in this room. As such, Fanny is able to move closer to Edward in his admiration of her establishment or space as well as in her person. In the East Room, Fanny exerts her power over Edmund making her one room or plot closer to the center of the house. In their now famous polemic, The Madwoman in the Attic, critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that not only did a nineteenth-century women writer have to inhabit ancestral mansions (or cottages) owned and built by men, she was also constricted and restricted by the Palaces of Art and Houses of Fiction male writers authored (xi). For Austen, novels are just such an attempt to write about and write out of the confined spaces of the
19

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Duckworth 75.

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nineteenth-century female author, and to that end, she begins to write a history of women building architectural spaces. As I have claimed, Austen (re)writes her life and the lives of her heroines through and in the spaces of the text both as author and architect. In so doing, she reconfigures the material spaces of her life and her texts, as she sits in her houses writing, thereby simultaneously (re)building female subjectivity. Austen becomes an agent in her own self-representation. She (re)presents the architectural spaces previously built by male architects, the Loudons and Reptons, and those of her contemporary male authors. By writing herself out of confined spaces, Austen initiates the evolution of the ongoing feminist projectwoman as builders of their own spaces both textual and architectural. Looking at Austen in the way that I do as a builder of both narrative and architectural space makes visible for the first time women who are consciously acknowledging, talking about, and representing their spaces. Second, both the overt and covert (re)constructions of space, albeit through fiction on the part of women writers like Austen, suggest that they themselves are architects, participating in a gendered process that has remained a predominantly male enterprise. Critics in both literature and architecture have explored the notion of female agency, but few have looked to architecture and the architectural prowess of female authors and builders as the source of their agency. To that end, this examination only emphasizes that a history of women building needs to be continued insofar as space is always already about women, insofar as the paucity of women controlling their space, whether in the public or private domain, still remains an issue. Works Cited
Duckworth, Alistair M. The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austens Novels. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971. el-Khoury, Rudolphe. Introduction. The Little House: An Architectural Seduction by Jean-Francois de Bastide. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1966. 1924. Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies. New York: Routledge, 1995. Hart, Francis R. The Spaces of Privacy: Jane Austen. Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1975): 305333. Kent Susan, Ed. Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space: An Interdisciplinary CrossCultural Study. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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Le Faye Deirdre, Ed. Jane Austens Letters. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Loudon, John Claudius. An Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture and Furniture. Shaftsbury, Dorset: Donhead Publishing Ltd., 2000. Loudon, John Claudius. A Treatise on Farming, Improving, and Managing Country Residences; and On the Choice of Situations Appropriate to Every Class of Purchasers. 2 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1806. Mooneyham White, Laura. Traveling to the Self: Comic and Spatial Openness in Jane Austens Novels. In Ed. Laura Mooneyham White, Critical Essays on Jane Austen. New York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1998. 198213. Rapoport, Amos. Systems of Activities and Systems of Settings. In Ed. Susan Kent, Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space: An Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Study. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 920. Skinner, John. Exploring Space: The Constellations of Mansfield Park. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 4 (January 1992): 125148. Spain, Daphne. Gendered Spaces. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina. Tait, A. A. Loudon and the Return to Formality. Dumbarton Oaks Colloqui um of the History of Landscape Architecture VI. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Trustees for Harvard University, 1980.

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