Mansfield Park The Home Quotes

How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #7

[Mary was] startled from the agreeable fancies she had been previously indulging on the strength of her brother's description, – no longer able, in the picture she had been forming of a future Thornton, to shut out the church, sink the clergyman, and see only the respectable, elegant, modernised, and occasional residence of a man of independent fortune [...] (25.47).

Mary creates a fantasy home, and a fantasy future, with Edmund that doesn't reflect reality and she's really disappointed to have her bubble burst. Home here is both a physical place and an imaginary place.

Quote #8

The living in incessant noise, was, to a frame and temper delicate and nervous like Fanny's, an evil which no superadded elegance or harmony could have entirely atoned for. It was the greatest misery of all (39.11).

Fanny's home environment in Portsmouth is miserable to her – Sir Thomas was actually right in that Fanny was rather spoiled by the nice environment of Mansfield.

Quote #9

When she had been coming to Portsmouth, she had loved to cal it her home, had been fond of saying that she was going home; the word had been very dear to her; and so it still was, but it must be applied to Mansfield. That was now her home. Portsmouth was Portsmouth; Mansfield was home (45.8).

Home is not a static concept, or a concept that always stays the same. The fact that the idea of what home can and does change is an important theme in this book. It's interesting that Fanny could only recognize Mansfield as her home after returning to, and subsequently letting go of, her childhood home.