Queering the Fop: Masculinity of James Rushworth in Austen’s Mansfield Park and Count Cassel in Inchbald’s Lover’s Vows

Abstract

Jane Austen is an author who plays with gender roles in all of her novels. Mansfield Park is also not different. However, in Mansfield Park she takes up a play called Lover’s Vows by Elizabeth Inchbald and makes it a central focal point in this novel. What happens in this play similarly happens to the characters in the novel as well in not the same but a similar manner. Younger characters in Austen’s novel decides to stage Lover’s Vows after lengthy discussions. When they distribute the characters among them, similarities between the characters in the plays and in the novel start to appear too. In Inchbald’s play, there is a fop character named Count Cassel. James Rushworth decides to take up this role in the play becoming the fop in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. According to Melikoglu, the fop character was used in theatre to “show that the notion of the born gentleman and his inherent prerogative is ultimately not tenable” (Melikoglu). This effect is achieved through mocking the masculinity of the fop character which is seen both in Inchbald’s play and Austen’s novel respectively.The intention of this paper is to examine James Rushworth in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Count Cassel in Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lover’s Vows as fop characters. The role of masculinity in the eighteenth century and in the beginning of the nineteenth century will be discussed. We will also try to conceive how the notion of masculinity is reflected upon the fop characters in the play and in the novel mentioned above. It will be seen that by mocking the fop characters Count Cassel and James Rushworth, the norms of masculinity at the time were supported by the literary works as well. The analysis will be made with the Queer Theory.

Keywords: literature, gender

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/52-09