Mansfield Park (review)

I read this book and simultaneously thought of Harold Bloom's student who voiced her opinion that she didn't have to read Mansfield Park in order to argue that it was about the corrupting influence of patriarchal society and Austen's view of the desultory influence of male desire on the lives of women in early modern world. However, now that I have read this beauteous novel, in my opinion Mansfield Park is a personal story, a model for women to emulate rather than a cautionary tale about the debilitating constrictions associated with a patriarchal world. Jane Austen offers the story of Fanny Price as the story of a woman who attains full maturity and finds her place in society, as she traces the psychological solidification of a woman who successfully navigates the hazards of an early 19-century coming out as a coming-to-be. I feel I feel these types of Marxist renderings of classic literature entail a twisting of meaning and a lack of ability to experience pleasure in reading, as the experience of the text is placed under a regime of signs regulated by an absolute value in terms of the velocity of money. I have thought long and deep about how this kind of thinking has influenced the women I have known and my conclusion is the following: to me it is a sign of how love has become alienated as a result of our superficial contact with politics in daily life. (This paragraph is too compressed for a short review, but it contains my basic reaction to the text.) The danger of a superficial reading of philosophy stems from an overly logocentric, semiotically surface-level, interpretation of the Bible. The retreat or detour into the surfaces is wrong-headed because the wholly conceptual realm of Truth is imageless and why God is invisible to us. This is my philosophy, January 23, 2021 - Andrew B. Noselli