Jane Austen Summer Program
Mixed Spirits and Contested Unions: Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, and the Missionary Marriage Dilemma
"Mixed Spirits and Contested Unions: Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, and the Missionary Marriage Dilemma" explores how Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë grappled with the paradoxes of universal kinship in an age of empire. It uncovers the troubled history of missionary intermarriage in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and it shows how this brief period of controversy ripples through the treatments of family, marriage, and moral corruption in Mansfield Park, Sanditon, and Jane Eyre. Examining their representations of endogamy, interracial union, and Christian universalism within the context of missionary debates, I suggest that the "domestic" fictions of Austen and Brontë prove to be profound meditations on religion, imperialism, and the anxious policing of kinship in the global context.
Winter Jade Werner is Associate Professor of English and the Jane E. Ruby Chair for the Humanities and Social Sciences at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. She is the author of Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (2020) and, with Joshua King (Baylor U), the co-editor of Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue (2019). Her essays appear or are forthcoming in journals including Comparative Literature, MLQ, Romantic Circles Praxis, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Dickens Studies Annual. With Sebastian Lecourt (U of Houston), she is co-editor of a forthcoming special issue on "Religion, Empire, and the State of the Field" in Victorian Literature. Werner's current research examines the role of foreign missionary presses in the development of the nineteenth-century idea of "world literature."