Otherness, Transgression and the Postcolonial Perspective: Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park

Abstract

The genesis of this paper was an invited keynote address at an international conference, 'From Janespotting to Trainspotting', convened at the University of Gottingen to assess the current state of the heritage film. The heritage film has assumed an important status within film studies in recent years and has led to considerable debate concerning its formal features and ideological significance. In this paper I wanted to examine a film that had been oddly overlooked and use it to test some of the prevailing ideas governing the analysis of the heritage and, indeed, ‘post-heritage’, film. The research was motivated by a concern to reject the still-prevalent charges that the genre is inherently conservative in ideology , and to indicate how heritage conventions could be inflected in a radical direction in terms of form and content. In examining Mansfield Park, I was particularly concerned to interrogate the ways in which the film went against the grain of heritage cinema and to ask new questions concerning the representation of gender, sexuality and economics. In this respect, my discussion sought to examine the ways in which the film’s departure from the original novel led to an unusual treatment of gender, sexuality and colonialism. I sought to explore the usefulness of situating the film in relation to debates concerning post-colonial and – significantly - ‘queer’ cinema, rather than simply those around heritage cinema. The primary sources of the research are the film itself and relevant critical texts; the analysis involves a combination of close textual analysis with theoretical work, drawn from cultural studies and literary theory, particularly the work of Edward Said and Maaja Stewart.

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