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In May 2000, "The New Critereon" carried an article by Australian writer and historian Keith Windschuttle titled "Rewriting the History of the British Empire," which opened with a discussion of Patricia Rozema's 1999 film "Mansfield Park." Windschuttle censures the film on the grounds of infidelity to both historical fact and to textual "truth," the "domestic quintessence" of Jane Austen's novel "Mansfield Park."

I

In May 2000, The New Criterion carried an article by Australian writer and historian Keith Windschuttle titled "Rewriting the History of the British Empire," which opened with a discussion of Patricia Rozema's 1999 film Mansfield Park. Windschuttle began by referring to an early scene in the film "that is not in the book" (1), where the ten-year-old Fanny, traveling by coach from Portsmouth to Mansfield, hears someone chanting on a ship that is anchored just off the coast. "Black cargo, miss," says the coachman. Windschuttle's commentary is worth quoting at some length:

The ship is a slave transport and it is meant to remind the audience that around 1800, when this scene takes place, England was still a slave-trading nation. It is also a portent of what the heroine will eventually discover is the dark side of her new home. Many among Jane Austen's legions of readers will be upset at the film taking such license with the novel because it imposes a controversial political issue onto the quintessentially domestic concerns of their favorite author. Those with a little historical and geographical knowledge will also find the scene outlandishly incongruent. Portsmouth is a harbour on the English Channel and, at the time, the transportation of slaves went by the "Middle Passage," that is, directly across the Atlantic Ocean from the Guinea Coast of Africa to the Americas. To be anywhere near the coast of England, a slave trader would have to be thousands of miles off course.

The scene is in the film because the literary critic Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism persuaded many readers that Mansfield Park and its author are deeply implicated in the question of both slavery and imperialism in the islands of the Caribbean, the location of the sugar plantations that funded some of England's grand estates, including that of the novel's title. (1)

Windschuttle, that is, censures Rozema's Mansfield Park on the grounds of "infidelity" to both historical fact and to textual "truth," the "domestic quintessence" of Austen's Mansfield Park. As regards the former kind of "unfaithfulness," even a cursory glance at Peter Fryer's thoroughly documented Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain cannot fail to undermine the charge. Fryer demonstrates that black slaves were regularly brought into Britain over the eighteenth century by slaver captains, returning planters, government officials, and army and navy officers (67)-as the coachman himself points out to Fanny in Rozema's film, in fact-and that there was a very publicly conducted trade in slaves in the slave ports, including, of course, no other than Portsmouth (58-64, 50-52). However, Windschuttle's historical sensitivity is offended, for he claims that slavery and the "imperialist imperative" are things of the past, and that it is only the "postcolonial literary critics and the gurus from cultural studies" who perversely insist on the centrality of such concerns to current historical, cultural, and literary debates at large, and to Austen's Mansfield Park in particular, thus distorting the novel's "quintessential" meaning ("Rewriting" 2-3).1

II

It is precisely with the second kind of "infidelity"-to textual "truth"-that much of the rest of this article is concerned. The notable increase in the attention devoted by academics to the study of adaptation since the early 1980s has given great prominence to the notion of "fidelity," in particular when it comes to the classics (Cartmell 27; Kaye and Whelehan 4; Sheen, "Introduction" 2-4; Stam; Whelehan 3). An important, much-cited contribution is Brian McFarlane's study, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. As is well known, McFarlane's book has been instrumental in unsettling the primacy of fidelity as a major criterion for judging film adaptations. He rightly points out that "Fidelity criticism depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single, correct 'meaning' which the filmmaker has either adhered to or in some sense violated or tampered with" (8), a notion that has been thoroughly problematized by poststructuralist theory. Further, the focus on fidelity has obscured an awareness of issues that are fundamental to the study of adaptation, such as the need to distinguish between ". . . what may be transferred from novel to film [transfer] as distinct from what will require more complex processes of adaptation [adaptation proper]" (10). However, McFarlane's narratological approach, based on this (problematic) distinction between transfer and adaptation proper, has been shown by Naremore (9) and Whelehan (9-11) to be narrowly formalistic in its marginalization of the bearing of cultural and industrial conditions on the process of adaptation. Indeed, although McFarlane does seek to counter the pervasiveness of the fidelity criterion on the grounds that "The fidelity critics . . . inevitably premiss their reading and evaluation of the film on the implied primacy of the novel" (197), his proposed methodology for the study of adaptation privileges questions of narrativity-and hence, ultimately, the source text-because they can be formalized, to the detriment of other aspects-i.e., cultural and industrial conditions-for which " . . . it is difficult to set up a regular methodology" (22).

In a suggestive attempt to shift the debate to more productive terrain, Sheen has recently argued that there is surely room for a kind of fidelity criticism which, rather than taking a formalist perspective, analyzes " . . . the way in which [the fidelity criterion] performs within particular events of reception" (Sheen, "Garment" 15). In other words, a response to an adaptation in terms of whether it is "faithful" or not is in itself a phenomenon worthy of some critical attention, especially the way in which adaptations which are perceived to be "unfaithful" often give rise to "incoherent animosity" (Sheen, "Introduction" 3)-witness Windschuttle's historical faux-pas above. Sheen suggests that fidelity criticism should be seen as "a rhetoric of possession" ("Introduction" 3). The literary-critical community lays claim to "ownership" of the literary text, especially the classic, by performing its own distinctive version of adaptation, i.e., interpretation. Setting itself up as the "authorized" guardian of the text's "true meaning," it decries any adaptation that is seen to be "unfaithful" to it-fidelity criticism is thus also an "articulation of loss" ("Introduction" 3).

III

Windschuttle's discussion of Rozema's Mansfield Park may be seen as a prime instance of the performative nature of fidelity criticism as both an articulation of possession and an articulation of loss-the film, he claims, misconstrues the original text by "impos[ing] a controversial political issue," slavery, onto its "quintessentially domestic concerns." Windschuttle was part of a larger chorus of disapproval denouncing Rozema's Mansfield Park as a travesty and a betrayal of Austen's novel (see, for example, Sragow and Walker). According to this view, the "true meaning" of Mansfield Park and its heroine is that popularized by such influential critics as Tony Tanner (Austen, Mansfield Intr. 7-36) and Lionel Trilling among others-Sragow actually quotes from Tanner's introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel. From this perspective, Mansfield Park is indeed a domestic novel, devoid of Jane Austen's characteristic irony, where Fanny, and ultimately Mansfield itself, embody the values of stillness, fixity, and adherence to principle in a world that privileges motion, activity, and, indeed, duplicity and acting. Rozema's film is then reproved because of its "infidelity" to this kind of reading of the novel. The film, it is claimed, "unfaithfully" highlights slavery as the source of the Bertrams' wealth, foregrounds sexuality, and transforms Fanny into a robust woman in possession of a sharp tongue, a racy imagination and an ironic, powerful gaze.

Windschuttle's reference to Said ironically operates as a reminder of that which he seeks to deny-and which, regrettably, Sheen ("Introduction") overlooks in her discussion of fidelity criticism-namely, that other readings of Mansfield Park are possible. Indeed, when it comes to the classics, "the adaptation process . . . is already burdened by the weight of interpretations which surround the text in question, and which may provide the key to central decisions made in a film's production" (Whelehan 7), and inquiry into those changing critical responses may be seen as one of the "legitimate areas of interest" for the student of adaptation (Whelehan 14). However, Windschuttle's reference to Said is misleading. Whereas in Culture and Imperialism Said set out to demonstrate that Mansfield Park is "more implicated in the rationale for imperialist expansion" (100) than may seem at first sight, that is not the point the film seems to be making. In fact, as the director herself has acknowledged, the film's greatest debt is not to Said but to Margaret Kirkham's 1983 feminist revision of the novel in her groundbreaking Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction.

Kirkham, as is well known, reads Jane Austen's novels as exponents of Enlightenment anti-Romantic feminism alongside Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). As regards Mansfield Park, she contends that " . . . far from being the work of conservative quietism that much twentieth-century criticism has turned it into, [it] embodies Jane Austen's most ambitious and radical criticism of contemporary prejudice in society and literature" (119). Her claim rests on a careful tracing of the novel's patterns of ironic allusion and reversal, which enables her to demonstrate, among other things, that "Jane Austen follows an analogy used in the Vindication between the slaves in the colonies and women, especially married women, at home" (117). She points out that the title of the novel alludes to Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, who stipulated in 1772 that slaves could not be forced to return from Britain to the Caribbean, a judgment that gave rise to long-lasting controversy, since it was interpreted by some to mean the emancipation of slaves in Britain, while at the same time the slave trade and slavery itself continued to exist in the country (Kirkham 116-18; Fryer 120-26, 205). She highlights Austen's familiarity with the arguments against the slave trade, which were widely rehearsed at the turn of the eighteenth century and led to the passing of the Act of Abolition (of the British slave trade) in 1807, as well as her having read Thomas Clarkson's anti-slavery tract, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade (1808), while she was working on the plot of Mansfield Park (117). The novel's chronology, extending from 1808-or 1781, if Maria Ward's marriage to Sir Thomas is taken as a starting point-through 1809, makes these allusions highly resonant (Sales 89-90).

Needless to say, Kirkham's reading of Mansfield Park has been expanded and/or queried by subsequent critics. Moira Ferguson, for one, reads Fanny's relation to the plantocratic values that Sir Thomas embodies as operating ambivalently " . . . on the axis of two opposing discourses: complicity and rebellion" (73), where Kirkham emphasizes the latter. At the same time, Ferguson offers further evidence that Mansfield Park may be read as intervening in the contemporary debate on slavery-thus, "Mrs. Norris's surname recalls John Norris, one of the most vile proslaveryites of the day" (70), a name Austen would have been familiar with from her reading of Clarkson. And, again like Kirkham, Ferguson detects a crucial moment in the novel when a critique of slavery is, paradoxically, powerfully audible through silence: the "dead silence" (Austen, Mansfield 213; my emphasis) greeting Fanny's unreported inquiry to Sir Thomas about the slave trade soon after his return from Antigua (Kirkham 118; Ferguson 85). It is precisely in relation to the much-debated issue of Austen's silences that Julian North (40) poses the question as to what extent recent adaptations have manifested an "impatience with the conservative Austen" that was certainly, by the late 1990s, in evidence within academic criticism, by making her omissions, allusions, and indirect commentaries speak eloquently.2 Her conclusion as regards Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility (1995), as well as other contemporary Austen adaptations, such as the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice, is that they " . . . capitalize on the subversiveness of [Austen's] work, but more so on the fact that [it] may be so safely contained" (49), thus dulling the more radical edge of the novels (46). Asking the same question about Rozema's Mansfield Park will take us, initially and necessarily briefly, into another "legitimate area of inquiry" for students of adaptation (Whelehan 14), the synchronic comparison between various adaptations (e.g., of one single author), and the search for explanations as to their relative success with audiences (Whelehan 15-17). "Fidelity," as will shortly be seen, plays a significant role in such a search.

Lee's Sense and Sensibility is remarkably "unfaithful" to the source text, notably in its "romancification" of Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon, its inclusion of a final celebratory double wedding, or its omission of Willoughby's nocturnal visit to Elinor during Marianne's illness (North; Flieger Samuelian; Kaplan). Yet Sense and Sensibility's "infidelity," unlike Mansfield Park's, caused no uproar, but rather on the contrary, the film won widespread acclaim and was, unlike Mansfield Park, an unqualified box office success.3 Following Sheen's lead, it seems pertinent to ask what kind of an act of possession was performed when reviewers found Sense and Sensibility's "infidelity" to Austen's text unexceptionable. Lee's film is arguably informed by the main features of what Andrew Higson ( 1993, 1996, 1997) has identified as "heritage cinema," that range of contemporary quality costume dramas, many of them adaptations of classic literary texts, whose emphasis on visual spectacle and nostalgia ultimately works to downplay the ironic perspective and the social critique that are often present in the narrative (Higson, "Re-presenting" 119-20). This may account, to some extent at least, for the unalloyed success of Sense and Sensibility with reviewers and audiences alike.

In contrast, Rozema's Mansfield Park certainly departs from the "heritage" aesthetic; arguably, that departure is symptomatic of the film's project to give a voice to some of Austen's silences and indirect commentaries. Both in her review of the film and in her introduction to the published screenplay, Claudia Johnson, the renowned feminist critic of Austen,4 notes that although Rozema used the same cinematographer as Lee did in Sense and Sensibility, Michael Coulter, the effect was strikingly different: "Filmed at Kirby Hall, which is not inhabited, the country house in Mansfield Park . . . is shot mostly in cream and yellow tones, and it looks cold, at times scarcely furnished, and in disrepair, corrupted by the moral crime on which it subsists . . ." ("Run Mad" 16; see also Johnson in Rozema, Screenplay 3-4).5 Slavery, then, alluded to in Austen's novel and present in some of its silences, is made to speak eloquently in the film. It is foregrounded through the physical decay of Mansfield Park itself and through the presence of the slave ship, mentioned above. Additionally, Rozema sets the film in 1806, as opposed to the novel's 1808-1809, before the abolition of the trade, and has Edmund remind Fanny that they all live off the profits of slavery. Indeed, for a brief moment, as the family listens leisurely to Mary Crawford's harp, we catch a glimpse of a statue of a black slave. The film also registers Fanny's horror as she looks through Tom's sketches showing the colonizers', including Sir Thomas, brutal treatment of the slaves, as well as Fanny's challenging Sir Thomas's views on slavery by reference to the Mansfield controversy and to Clarkson, while Sir Thomas simply ignores her remarks, praises her improved complexion and figure instead, and proposes a ball to place her on the "marriage market."6 All of this undoubtedly emphasizes the powerful critique of Sir Thomas's (mis)rule that Kirkham suggests is central to the novel.

Nor-to move on to the film's representation of sexuality, that other area where it was greeted with accusations of "infidelity"-is the ball scene, "a staple of Austen movies," shot as "a set piece of Regency manners, but . . . as a semi-private scene to bring out Fanny's awakening to the pleasure of her body and the circulation of erotic interest between and among the principal couples," part of the film's depiction of sexuality as a "bewildering" experience (Johnson, "Run Mad" 17).7 Thus the film carefully records Edmund's dual attraction to both Fanny and Mary; Maria's passion for Crawford and her rejection of her father's offer to break off the match with Rushworth; Fanny's stumbling onto Maria and Crawford in bed together; Fanny's acceptance of Crawford's proposal in Portsmouth and her retraction the next morning;8 and, of course, the notorious "lesbian" scenes involving Fanny and Mary Crawford.9 Johnson suggests that it is surely ironic that:

Scores of viewers who gasped with pleasure at a glimpse of Colin Firth's extra-textual derriere in the BBC's . . . Pride and Prejudice denounce Rozema's movie on the grounds that there's no sex in Jane Austen, a conviction egregiously inapt with respect to Mansfield Park, which is suffused with frustrated, illicit, wayward, or polymorphous sexuality. ("Run Mad" 17)

But objections to Rozema's film in the area of sexuality are not only indicative, as Sheen would have it, of a rhetoric of possession as regards the "proper"-in both senses of the word-reading of Austen's novel; beyond that, I would argue, they reveal a struggle for possession of the author, namely, of Jane Austen herself.

IV

Underlying the preceding discussion of the "fidelity" issue in relation to Rozema's Mansfield Park is a view of adaptation akin to that put forward by John Wiltshire in Recreating Jane Austen (5-7), where an adaptation is seen as a reading of the source text, which, like critical readings, throws light on the very nature of the process of interpretation. Robert Stam also proposes "reading" as an illuminating trope (62), while he further claims that the Bakhtinian concept of intertextual dialogism can help us "transcend the aporias of 'fidelity'" by suggesting that, rather than an attempt at resuscitating the "original text," an adaptation should be seen as "a turn in an ongoing dialogical process," where "every text forms an intersection of textual surfaces" (64). In this light, Rozema's film, as shown so far, is a response to Austen's Mansfield Park that is intertextually inflected by previous responses-be they critical readings of the novel, or cinematic adaptations of the same as well as other Austen novels. This in turn undermines any rigidly formalistic concept of "fidelity" and of adaptation as a one-to-one relationship between source text and film.10

Now, I suggest that, above all, what Rozema's film reads in a certain way is not only Mansfield Park, but also the author of Mansfield Park, the cultural icon-cum-commodity "Jane Austen." 11 As has been repeatedly noted, the film highlights the presence of the author it adapts. 12 It does so, firstly, through the adscription to Fanny of the novel's ironic narrative voice, as is the case when, reading from a letter to her sister Susan straight to camera, she utters the narrator's acerbic comments on Maria Bertram's marriage to Rushworth: "In all the important preparations of mind she was complete: being prepared for matrimony by a hatred of home, by the misery of disappointed affection and contempt of the man she was to marry" (Austen, Mansfield 216; Rozema, Screenplay 70). In addition, Fanny articulates Austen's own views about slavery, and the film credits not only Mansfield Park but also Austen's "early journals" (the Juvenilia) and her letters as source material. The net result is that Fanny is transformed, as mentioned earlier, from a sickly, timid lover of literature, into a spirited young woman who is a writer in her own right-and what does she write but fragments borrowed from Austen's letters and her farcical, irreverent early writings, many of which she reads directly to the camera. 13 The film actually begins and ends by foregrounding Fanny as "Austen." During the opening credit sequence, the ten-year-old Fanny tells Susan parts of "Love and Freindship [sic]" while at the end a series of scenes briefly freeze the action as Fanny's voice-over describes the fate of the various characters, remarking repeatedly and ironically, "It could have turned out differently, I suppose . . . but it didn't." The phrase echoes Austen's own comment about Joan of Arc in "The History of England," "They should not have burnt her-but they did" (Austen, Catharine 135), which Rozema's Fanny herself reads to camera earlier on. This is followed by Fanny and Edmund discussing the publication of her writings by no other than Egerton, Austen's own publisher for Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Mansfield Park (1814). 14 As regards sexuality, Fanny's acceptance and subsequent rejection of Crawford parallels the Bigg-Wither episode in Austen's own life (Le Faye 497). And the "lesbian" scenes may be framed in the context of the heated debate on Jane Austen's sexuality that took place in the Letters section of the London Review of Books between August and October 1995. 15 The debate was kicked off by Terry Castle's review of Deirdre Le Faye's 1995-revised edition of Austen's letters, which read the correspondence in terms of Austen's homophilic fascination with women and passionate homoerotic bond with her sister Cassandra (Castle).

The presence of the author in Rozema's film raises fascinating questions at a time when poststructuralist criticism and aesthetic theory have forcefully challenged the concept of the author as the transcendental presence behind the text and the ultimate source of its unitary meaning. In this respect, John Caughie claims, in Theories of Authorship, that a "renewed" theory of authorship is required, involving "a consideration of the position of authors within specific histories . . . and a conceptualization of how the author functions as a figure within the rhetoric of the text, and of how we use this figure . . . in our reading, and for our pleasure" (1-2). Now, Rozema's film clearly-and, once again, intertextually-positions itself within the history of Austenian reception by articulating a discourse where "Jane Austen" is not understood as a synonym for gentility, decorum, domesticity and quietism-the spinsterly, prim "Austen" of the "elegiac tradition" (Johnson, "Sister-Sister" 4)-but as the much more transgressive, even radical, proto-feminist social commentator of the "anti-normative" or progressive tradition (4). The film's transferal onto Fanny of Mansfield Park's ironic narrative voice and of the jaunty sarcasm of the Juvenilia or, in Caughie's terms, its conceptualization of the author's rhetorical presence in her texts and the use it makes of that, is part and parcel of that kind of reading of "Jane Austen." Which finally takes me to the question of pleasure and, in a circular move, back to Windschuttle and other severely displeased critics of Rozema's film. Their reaction indicates that, pace Caughie, it is just not possible to speak of pleasure as a universally shared experience, and that, in constructing both Mansfield Park and "Jane Austen" for the pleasure of some but certainly not all her readers and critics, Rozema's film is undoubtedly performing its own act of interpretation. Ultimately, it is the film's flaunting of this fact that is crucial. Unlike other recent Austenian adaptations, Rozema's Mansfield Park self-reflexively points to itself as intertext, as an intervention into contemporary debates on Austen and authorship. Above all, it effectively and openly acknowledges that the very process of adaptation is necessarily founded on an act of reading and "unfaithful" possession.16