Brian Southam, “The Silence of the Bertrams”
In this essay, Brian Southam builds on the influential analyses of Mansfield Park by Lionel Trilling and Edward Said (both included elsewhere on this website) to demonstrate the importance of an accurate chronology to a full understanding of the novel’s colonial context. Southam situates the novel in the period of 1810–13, when slavery was legal and the British slave trade, though technically abolished, continued in illegal form. A brief conversation in the novel, Southam claims, suggests the Bertrams’ discomfort with their financial dependence on slavery at a time when its legality and morality had been called into question.