FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN “MANSFIELD PARK” AND “NORTHANGER ABBEY”

Abstract

This conference paper explores free indirect discourse as a poetic mechanism in Jane Austen's “Mansfield Park” and “Northanger Abbey”. Drawing on a translation-oriented study of free indirect style in the two novels, it shifts the focus from translation loss to literary interpretation and asks how narrator-character ambiguity helps represent gendered authority and female subjectivity. The paper argues that free indirect discourse is important not only when a heroine's consciousness is represented directly; it also becomes gender-relevant when the evaluative idiom of male authority enters the narrative voice. The examples of Henry Crawford in “Mansfield Park” and General Tilney in “Northanger Abbey” show how desire, command, and social power can be narrated as if they were impersonal necessity. Against this background, Fanny Price's moral refusal and Catherine Morland's interpretive maturation acquire greater structural significance. The study combines close reading, narratology, and comparative analysis and proposes that Austen's new female image is partly produced through the heroine's ability to distinguish, resist, and reinterpret socially authoritative voices.