In the Wilderness

W.J.T. Mitchell

Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said
Chatto, 444 pp, £20.00, February 1993, ISBN 0 7011 3808 4

The Foundation of Empire is Art and Science. Remove them or Degrade them and the Empire is no more. Empire follows Art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.

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Vol. 15 No. 7 · 8 April 1993 » W.J.T. Mitchell » In the Wilderness (print version)
pages 11-12 | 4049 words

Letters

From D.G. Wright

In his perceptive review of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (LRB, 8 April), W.J.T. Mitchell endorses Said’s remark that Jane Austen ‘in Mansfield Park sublimates the agonies of Caribbean existence to a mere half-dozen passing references to Antigua’. She offers rather more. In Chapter 21, when Edmund Bertram chides Fanny Price for being too passive towards her Uncle Thomas – the plantation-owner – and for not talking enough to him, she replies that she loves to hear her uncle talk of the West Indies and adds: ‘Did you not hear me ask him about the slave trade last night?’ Her question met with ‘such a dead silence’. Hence Jane Austen, fierce Tory that she was, acknowledged the public debate on the morality of the slave trade, if not slavery per se. True, she has Fanny admit ‘but then I am unlike other people.’ Yet that is precisely why Fanny is Jane Austen’s heroine and the moral centre of her masterpiece.

D.G. Wright
Shipley, West Yorkshire