Genre
Mansfield Park
by Jane Austen

Mansfield Park: Genre 1 key example

Genre
Explanation and Analysis:

Like all of Jane Austen’s novels, Mansfield Park can be considered a novel of manners, meaning it is a book that focuses primarily on its characters’ subtle behaviors that signal their particular positions within a social hierarchy. Much of the novel focuses on Fanny’s obsession with behaving in a way that is well-mannered, and how she is simultaneously chastised for being too well-behaved and not well-behaved enough by the people around her. She is easy for other characters to mock because she is typically the only lower-middle-class person in a scene (surrounded, as she normally is, by the more well-off Bertrams and Crawfords) and, as such, has to accept other people’s criticisms of her without pushing back.