Mansfield Park places civilizing processes at the heart of the family. No other Austen novel addresses the question of civilized subjectivity with greater insistence than her third published novel. The plot itself is themed around the raising of a young woman, her education and introduction into civil society, and her inculcation with civilized values.

Mansfield Park anticipates what Norbert Elias stresses time and again, namely the family as the ‘primary site’ where civilizing processes are set in motion. Within the figuration of the family, the parent–child relationship plays a highly formative role, so that Elias speaks of parents as ‘the primary agents of conditioning’ through which the figuration of an entire society exerts pressure on the shaping of the new generation. Elias writes this early in his career, while working on a theory of Western civilization, but his considerations of the parent–child relationship and especially childhood appear in later works as well. The most explicit example is his ‘The Civilizing of Parents’, a lecture given in the 1980s, where he addresses the changes undergone by the parent–child figuration. What Elias opposes in this sketch ‘of the broad contours of the civilizing process of the parent–child relationship’ is a static idea of ‘family relations as something which is more or less given by nature’.