SOURCE: “Personal Identity in Mansfield Park: Forms, Fictions, Role-Play, and Reality,” in SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 27, No. 4, Autumn, 1987, pp. 595-608.

[In the following essay, Bevan discusses acting and fiction-making as inauthentic forms of self-expression in Mansfield Park.]

Two papers which deal pertinently with acting as a rhetorically crucial theme in Mansfield Park are those by Lionel Trilling and Thomas R. Edwards.¹ Of these, Lionel Trilling's seminal essay fails to observe the pervasiveness of the theme of role-play in the novel as a whole. Professor Edwards, though he deals cogently with the whole question of acting and its relationship to emotional reality in Mansfield Park, tends to focus his attention almost exclusively on the personal relationships explored and developed through the novel, and to ignore the wider significance of such relationships placed as they are within a broad thematic context of personal identity in its relation to a reality which includes but goes beyond the emotional to embrace phenomena, language, and art.

This paper sets out to examine the importance of acting, and of fiction-making, as themes in Mansfield Park. It will be argued that acting is used both as an illustration of, and as a metaphor for, invalid attempts to express and define the self. Such attempts are shown to be invalid because, ultimately, they deny the self they seek to create. They deny, also, important realities of the external world in which the self must exist, substituting for them forms, fictions, and material values. To this false art of life, exemplified at its most extreme by the Crawfords, is opposed a true art of life, consisting in a harmonious relationship between the perceiver and all that is perceived, where the objects of perception are the self, others, natural phenomena, and artefacts. The exemplar of this true art of life is Fanny Price. Her creative tools are two personal qualities, delicacy and associative memory, and these qualities are opposed throughout Mansfield Park to the fictions, forms, and role-play by means of which the Crawfords, and others, seek to create their own reality.

At the time of the rehearsals for Lovers' Vows Fanny makes a revealing statement. Tom has asked her to act Cottager's wife. She replies: “Indeed you must excuse me. I could not act anything if you were to give me the world. No, indeed, I cannot act” (p. 145). Again, a little later, she explains: “It is not that I am afraid of learning by heart but I really cannot act” (pp. 145-46). This would seem to be a crucial comment by Fanny upon herself, for we are made strongly aware from the first that Fanny, unlike almost all those by whom she finds herself ignored or patronised at Mansfield, is incapable either of creating fictions or of performing in them. Furthermore, as is so often the case in Jane Austen,² the performing arts, acting and music, are opposed negatively, in Mansfield Park, to nature and to rational conversation. At one point Fanny, left alone with Edmund at the drawing-room window, turns to the scene outside and observes the brilliant unclouded night and the contrasting colour of the woods. “‘Here’s harmony!’ said she, ‘Here’s repose! Here’s what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what poetry only can attempt to describe’” (p. 113).

Nature provides the truest and best art, all else is imitation. Those who have been taught to “think and feel on the subject” (italics mine) have been well taught. But having himself acknowledged the value of Nature, Edmund moves towards the fortepiano, away from nature and from rational conversation to performance and the rendering of applause. What he has done is to follow with his person what he has already followed admiringly with his eyes, the appeal of artifice in appearance, whether the appearance in question be an attractively composed woman or musical glee. “She [Mary Crawford] tripped off to the instrument, leaving Edmund looking after her in an ecstasy of admiration of all her many virtues, from her obliging manners down to her light and graceful tread” (p. 112).

That Fanny “cannot act” is seen as the expression of her contact with nature both human and phenomenal. When she first arrives at Mansfield we are told, by the author-commentator, that “Her feelings were very acute.” It is a result of her education at Edmund's hands that these “feelings” are developed in the direction of the understanding of herself and others so that they become “sympathetically” acute. It is just this “sympathetic acuteness of feeling,” or delicacy that is missing from Fanny's treatment by the Mansfield relations, by all of whom Fanny is viewed less as a person than as one who must fulfil a preordained role. To Mrs. Norris, Fanny is a poor relation who is to be used. To Sir Thomas it is, not altogether improperly, Fanny's household and social roles that matter. To Maria and Julia, Fanny is to be judged by her possessions and her lack of accomplishments, while to Lady Bertram Fanny has one role only, that of helper. What all these attitudes reveal is the absence of a sympathy which arises from feeling and seeks knowledge. Fanny's emotional reality is denied by people who themselves habitually cast others, as they cast themselves, in roles. Role-casting is presented as the polar opposite, and as the inhibitor, of that “sympathetic acuteness of feeling” of which Fanny, as the result of Edmund's educational care, is to become the exemplar. A term used frequently in Mansfield Park to describe this quality is “delicacy,” and it is in terms of their lack of delicacy that the human incompleteness of other characters is often expressed. Thus Mr. Yates is “without discernment or diffidence, or delicacy, or discretion enough” to understand that Sir Thomas had rather leave the topic of theatricals alone. Henry Crawford's unwelcome perseverance with Fanny's affections is regarded by her as “a want of delicacy and regard for others.” Fanny considers that Sir Thomas, “He who had married a daughter to Mr Rushworth,” can have no “romantic delicacy” which might enable him to see beyond merely factual information, into her real feelings concerning Crawford. The term “delicacy,” then, would seem to connote sympathetic discernment, of the kind demonstrated by Edmund when he finds the child Fanny crying on the stairs, and of the kind shown by Fanny in her constant concern with the workings of the minds and feelings of others, and of herself. It is a measure of Edmund's falling off from excellence, during his pursuit of Mary Crawford, that he allows his prepossession in favor of her brother Henry to blunt the delicacy of his perceptions. Having assured Fanny “you did not love him—nothing could have justified your accepting him,” he immediately exhorts her.

“But (with an affectionate smile), let him succeed at last, Fanny, let him succeed at last. You have proved yourself upright and disinterested, prove yourself grateful and tender-hearted; and then you will be the perfect model of a woman, which I have always believed you born for.”

(p. 347)

Edmund is here asking Fanny to dispose her emotional reactions to Henry Crawford much as she is in the habit of disposing her active life in the service of others. But Fanny, in pursuing her life of service, is being emotionally true to herself. She cannot, and herein lies Edmund's lack of delicacy, assume emotional roles, because to do so would mean being untrue to the grounds of feeling within her. She “cannot act.”

What Fanny demonstrates, in direct contradistinction to the Crawfords, and to the other role-players and role-imposers, is a state of being grounded in feeling, not in role-play, in actual, not in imagined experience. This state of being consists in a harmonious relationship between the inner and the outer life, and between self and others. Thus she is constantly engaged in the effort to see both herself and others as they really are in terms of motive, feeling, and moral intention, not as she would have them be. When Fanny and Edmund are in conversation, or when Fanny is employed in speculative meditation, one notices frequent evaluations which are themselves the subject of doubt and enquiry. In an early discussion of Mary Crawford (p. 63) moral judgments are qualified by such expressions of doubt as “I think,” “I do not know that,” “It must be difficult,” “I do not pretend to know,” “Do not you think.” Fanny, whose “own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions,” tries to exercise them in honest enquiry even when her own pride is under attack as, from a distance, she observes Mary Crawford's competent horsemanship and Edmund's apparently eager attentions. “She saw it, or the imagination supplied what the eye could not reach. She must not wonder at all this; what could be more natural than that Edmund should be making himself useful, and proving his good-nature by any one?” (p. 67). Fanny's approach to all experience is to question it and, she hopes, to discover meanings. Inferences are recognized for what they are and are qualified by reasonable doubt.

Unlike Fanny, Mary Crawford deals with experience not by trying, through sympathetic feeling, to understand it. Instead she creates out of it fictional anecdotes, and her language is characterized not by doubt and enquiry but by assertion and by a conscious pattern-making designed to delight the listener and to distort the truth. The devotional life of the Rushworth forebears, the wilderness at Sotherton, the Owen girls, the sensation that Fanny's marriage to Crawford is to make in the fashionable world, are all entertaining fictions which satisfy Mary Crawford's urge to create rather than to know. What her brother's plans for radical improvement are to Sotherton, so Mary Crawford's fictional renderings of reality are to reality itself; imposed re-creations. They are not developments of what is in fact there, but falsifications. This disjunction between reality and the Crawford fictions receives expression in the language Mary Crawford uses. Frequently we observe an incompatibility between the syntactic forms she employs and the semantic function these forms actually perform. Most typical of her speech is her use of the attributive clause.³ Thus when she declares clergymen to be motivated by “indolence and love of ease—a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable,” the qualities she attributes to clergymen are, clearly, not factual but merely expressions of her own feeling. Underlying the formal syntactic realization here is a function which should appropriately be expressed in a reactive clause. She uses language, in short, to manipulate truth and to falsify it, not, after the fashion of Fanny and Edmund, in order to discover it.

The relationship of Fanny to reality is, then, harmonious, for she is always seen trying to come to terms with it by discovering it. That of the Crawfords is disharmonious, for they are shown always to recreate it and thereby to falsify it.

Fanny's harmonious relationship to reality receives further expression, and rhetorical reinforcement, in frequent accounts of the importance to Fanny of people, places, and possessions, and in the nature of their operation upon her memory. At Sotherton, while Mrs. Rushworth is lecturing Fanny and Mary Crawford on the ancestral pictures, Mary Crawford had, we are told, “only the appearance of civilly listening,” while Fanny listened eagerly, “delighted to connect any thing with history already known.” Her pleasure at William's visit is thus accounted for:

All the evil and good of their earliest years could be gone over again, and every former united pain and pleasure retraced with the fondest recollection. An advantage this, a strengthener of love, in which even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal. Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply.

(pp. 234-35)

Earlier, after she has been upset by Tom's insistence that she act, Fanny goes off alone to her east room.

The comfort of it in her hours of leisure was extreme. She could go there after any thing unpleasant below, and find immediate consolation in some pursuit, or some train of thought at hand.—Her plants, her books—of which she had been a collector, from the first hour of her commanding a shilling—her writing desk, and her works of charity and ingenuity, were all within her reach … she could scarcely see an object in that room which had not an interesting remembrance connected with it.—Everything was a friend, or bore her thoughts to a friend.

(pp. 151-52)

The function of memory here is to blend together events, people, possessions, and emotional experience, into a totality of harmonious association. Through memory, Fanny's loved ones and her possessions become a part of the self, inseparable from it. Upon them her self depends, and from them it receives definition. In contrast the Crawfords are, to use a term often employed in Mansfield Park, “unfixed,” having no attachment to people, places, or things. Thus, “To any thing like permanence of abode, or limitation of society, Henry Crawford had, unluckily, a great dislike” (p. 41). He is “every thing to every body and seemed to find no-one essential to him” (p. 306). That his sister's predicament is identical with his is demonstrated at the time when Fanny and Mary are together in the parsonage shrubbery. Fanny observes:

“Every time I come into this shrubbery I am more struck with its growth and beauty. Three years ago, this was nothing but a rough hedgerow along the upper side of the field, never thought of as any thing, or capable of becoming any thing; and now it is converted into a walk, and it would be difficult to say whether most valuable as a convenience or an ornament. … How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind … If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory.”

(p. 208)

Memory at once locates in time and links in time, links the shrubbery as it was to the shrubbery as it is, and links also the human perceiver to the inanimate objects that are perceived. Mary Crawford, however, who is without fixed location and thus without the associative capability that felt memory provides, “untouched and inattentive, had nothing to say.” Shortly afterwards she remarks, “I see no wonder in the shrubbery equal to seeing myself in it.” There is surely more to this than a bald revelation of egotism. What her remark reveals, more importantly, is her isolation from the phenomena which, through the action of memory, give people communal roots in experience. To be free, as Mary Crawford and her brother are, is to be alone. It is an important irony in Mansfield Park, perhaps the most important, that it is the Crawfords, who appear to be the most socially adept of all the characters, who are in reality the most alone, whereas Fanny, the most socially isolated, is in other and crucial senses the most fully integrated. The isolating nature of the Crawfords' freedom is revealed in another incident. Mary Crawford expresses surprise at the difficulty of hiring a horse and cart to convey her harp from Northampton to Mansfield. Being unrooted in a community, she cannot see that horses and carts have their necessary function in the seasonal rhythms upon which the Mansfield community must depend (it is the time of the hay harvest), and that the London maxim “every thing is to be got with money” substitutes artificial and material for natural bonds. Again, in the discussion on Sotherton and improvement, Edmund counters Henry Crawford's radical suggestions with the remark “I would rather have an inferior degree of beauty of my own choice, and acquired progressively.” Here change, as in Fanny's observations on the shrubbery, is viewed as developmental not radical, progressive not sudden.

What the Crawfords are being shown to lack, and Fanny to possess, are delicacy and seminal memory. Of these two qualities, delicacy, or sympathetically concerned interdependence between people, creates harmony on the personal level. Seminal memory further establishes that harmony, as in the case of Fanny's love for her brother William, and extends it to comprehend both the natural phenomena upon which communities depend, and the possessions which, by association, link past with present feeling into a unified whole. It is these qualities of delicacy and memory which anchor Fanny in the real world. Their absence from the Crawfords' experience unfixes both from necessary links with people, places, and phenomena and, consequently, from any community of felt experience. It is for this reason that, having but slender links with reality, they live by fictions.

But the Crawfords are not fiction-makers only, they are performers also, interpreters, that is to say, of those fictions by which they aim to manipulate reality into the form most appealing to their creative imaginations. In the parsonage shrubbery, Mary Crawford addresses Fanny who has suggested that Mansfield and its environs are perhaps too quiet for Mary. “‘I should have thought so theoretically myself, but’—and her eyes brightened as she spoke—‘take it all in all, I never spent so happy a summer.—But then’—with a more thoughtful air and lowered voice—‘there is no saying what it may lead to’” (p. 210). Speech and gesture are here represented in the manner of stage dialogue, with gesture expressed as stage directions. These directions are emphasized by their placing, for when they occur they break, each time, a syntactic unit. This emphasis draws the reader's attention to them and thus to Mary Crawford's communication as an exercise in studied elegance, a means of enabling the speaker to fulfil an assumed role, in this case that of hopeful lover. A similar technique is used a little later with some utterances of Henry Crawford. He is talking of Rushworth and Maria, and his aim is to impress Fanny.

“Poor Rushworth and his two-and-forty speeches!” continued Crawford. “Nobody can ever forget them. Poor fellow!—I see him now;—his toil and his despair. Well, I am much mistaken if his lovely Maria will ever want him to make two-and-forty speeches to her”—adding, with a momentary seriousness, “She is too good for him—much too good.” And then changing his tone again to one of gentle gallantry, and addressing Fanny, he said, “You were Mr. Rushworth's best friend.”

(p. 224)

Stage-directions are used again to suggest the staginess of the speaker, whose tonal gestures are shown to be successively manufactured with a view to creating conversational effects, rather than as a means of expressing genuine feeling.

The Crawfords are actors who invent and perform their own dramas as a substitute for the reality of which they have, ultimately owing to a faulty education,⁴ been deprived. Jane Austen cleverly reduces the art they practice to triviality in a single episode in volume one, when Mary Crawford is ready to play on her harp to a receptive audience.

A young woman, pretty, lively, with a harp as elegant as herself; and both placed near a window, cut down to the ground, and opening on a little lawn, surrounded by shrubs in the rich foliage of summer, was enough to catch any man's heart. The season, the scene, the air, were all favourable to tenderness and sentiment. Mrs Grant and her tambour frame were not without their use; it was all in harmony; and as every thing will turn to account when love is once set going, even the sandwich tray, and Dr Grant doing the honours of it, were worth looking at.

(p. 65)

Such conscious patterning in such an emphatically homely context is delightfully absurd. In this comic little arrangement of people and setting, people are indistinguishable in function from place, for both are important only insofar as they contribute to the harmonious visual impact of the scene. Mary Crawford is, with rhetorical appropriateness, first deindividualized, becoming merely “a young woman,” and then dehumanized, as elegant as—her harp. The entire description presents an epitome, which is at the same time a reductio ad absurdum, of the Crawford world view, in which people exist merely as objects to be disposed to the most agreeable, and convenient, advantage.

The Crawfords, then, are creative artists, actors, and producers. They are creative artists in that they invent the fictions by which, and in which, they choose to live; they are actors in that they exercise their skill in order to present these fictions persuasively, and they are producers in that they aim to regulate the reactions of others to conform with the roles they envisage for them in the Crawford drama. Thus, for Henry Crawford, people, like landscapes, are assessed on the grounds of their capabilities. Of Fanny we learn that “he was no longer in doubt of the capabilities of her heart” (p. 235).

I have earlier observed how it is that Mary Crawford falsifies reality by manipulating language. Language too has “capabilities,” and her use of it must be further considered, for there is more than one feature of her language use that exemplifies what is for her, as for her brother, the primacy of rendition over truth. First there is her use of the modal auxiliary must. This she uses, as an attributive intensifier, simultaneously to express prediction, obligation, and, often, logical necessity. Tom must be preferred to Edmund; it must be the case that almost everybody is taken in when they marry; she must “look down upon any thing contented with obscurity when it might rise to distinction.” Here, as frequently elsewhere in Mary Crawford's speech, language is chosen and arranged so as to suggest the certain accuracy of the fictions she invents. Her style has other functions, all wittily inventive and falsifying. She may aim to give a comic elegance, and hence an appeal, to the morally unjustifiable. Alternatively she may invest the trivial with a spurious dignity. Two of her aphorisms, both of which have a marked Wildean quality, may be adduced as examples of the first category of linguistic creation. 1. “Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure” (p. 68). 2. “I am very strong. Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like” (p. 68). In both these cases the inventive wit, and the appeal, reside in linguistic falsification. In the first, “selfishness” is given an additional selectional feature (+ disease), and in the second, “fatigue” is given two simultaneous features (+ physical and + boredom), which, in orthodox usage, it may possess only separately depending upon whether the term is used literally or figuratively. The wit lies, in other words, in skilled semantic trickery. It is this that, incidentally, seems to distinguish Mary Crawford's speech from that of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.⁵ Unlike Elizabeth, Mary Crawford consistently exploits the falsifying surface of language in order to communicate fictions which, through the choice and organization of the language in which they are presented, give appeal to untruth. But, in the case of Mary Crawford, Jane Austen ensures that although rhetoric aims at concealment within the action, it simultaneously highlights for the reader those truths it aims to hide. The conversation in the shrubbery between Mary and Fanny provides a case in point. Mary begins to elaborate upon the pleasures offered by country residence:

“I am conscious of being far better reconciled to a country residence than I had ever expected to be. I can even suppose it pleasant to spend half the year in the country, under certain circumstances—very pleasant. An elegant, moderate-sized house in the centre of family connections—continual engagements among them—commanding the first society in the neighbourhood—looked-up to perhaps as leading it even more than those of larger fortune, and turning from the cheerful round of such amusements to nothing worse than a tete-a-tete with the person one feels most agreeable in the world.”

(p. 210)

In this case, the trivial is dignified by a syntactic arrangement of parallel post-modifying phrases and clauses, which magnifies triviality into dignity through the emphasis of repetition. At the same time the evident contrast between emphasis and moral meaning, form and content, highlights the shallow insignificance of the speaker's views. Edmund's appearance very soon afterwards is used in order to place Mary Crawford's views in negative contrast with Fanny's. To Mary, the name Edmund, signalling that its owner is a younger brother, is pitiful. For Fanny, it is Mr. Bertram that is “cold and nothing-meaning,” and Edmund which has “nobleness,” being “a name of heroism and renown—of king's, princes, and knights; and seems to breathe the spirit of chivalry and warm affections.” The difference between the two young women is located in the kind and quality of association made by each. Fanny's words function in such a way as to draw attention to the large areas of emotional experience that Mary Crawford's judgment excludes. To judge people, as Mary Crawford does, by the standard of social position is, of course, to judge by form. Her language, like her judgments, is formally conceived with a view to appearance, not substance.

To the organic patterning of Fanny's emotional and moral life is contrasted patterning of a purely social and linguistic kind. The contrast may be seen as one between two opposed conceptions of art. In the one, that embodied in Fanny Price, order is created by the sympathetic imagination, controlled by moral principle, which responds to and thereby coheres the animate and inanimate world by which it is confronted and through which it lives. In the other, that embodied in the Crawfords, order is created by an imposition of the will upon reality. The world is, as it were, reshaped, and its real constituents ignored at the wishes of the “improver.” Such an aesthetic cannot, and in the case of the Crawfords does not, take into account the emotional life of others, for to view experience with “sympathetic acuteness of feeling” would be to lay one's art of life open to modification by external and unpredictable forces. The creative will would no longer be free. The Crawford art of life is as unreal in the artificiality of its patterning as the invented world of Millamant, whose hair must be pinned up with love letters in verse, never with those in prose.⁶ Like Millamant, the Crawfords invent their own alternative to reality, and similarly delightful in its outrageous patterning it often is. But such invention, appropriate though it is to comic art, is inappropriate to life, for comedy demands emotional distance and, with the Crawfords, emotional distance becomes emotional impoverishment, a debility far more crippling than Fanny's merely physical frailty.

The Crawfords' emotional impoverishment is a consequence and an expression of their lack of involvement with people and places, of their unwillingness to “fix” themselves. Their threat to Mansfield lies in their encouragement of these selfsame destructive forces, all of which are shown to exist at Mansfield already, before they arrive. Thus Tom, like Henry Crawford, is unfixed both in place and in his affections. Sir Thomas, after his return, perceives as we have already perceived, that Rushworth is “as ignorant in business as in books, with opinions in general unfixed, and without seeming much aware of it himself” (p. 200). Maria and Julia are likewise unfixed in moral principle and in emotional contact with their family. In consequence they follow the formal constraints and expectations their society imposes without being capable of giving felt consent to these constraints. Thus Julia, at precisely the permitted time in her life, “was quite ready to be fallen in love with” (p. 44). Mr. Rushworth “was from the first struck with the beauty of Miss Bertram, and being inclined to marry, soon fancied himself in love” (p. 38). To Maria, as to Rushworth, marriage is merely a proper step in life's pre-ordained ritual. “Being now in her twenty-first year, Maria Bertram was beginning to think matrimony a duty.”

In these cases, formal expectation decrees that feeling be fabricated; there are no emotional realities, only ritual procedures. That this is so is shown to be in great part the fault of Sir Thomas who, man of principle though he be, is damagingly unable to move beyond form to feeling: “and would he only have smiled upon her and called her ‘my dear Fanny’ while he said it, every former frown or cold address might have been forgotten.” His immediate reaction to Rushworth is also revealing. “There was nothing disagreeable in Mr. Rushworth's appearance, and Sir Thomas was liking him already.” Even his newly awakened concern over Fanny, after his return from Antigua, seems to arise only from her improved physical looks. Sir Thomas unwittingly begins what the Crawfords deliberately continue when they provide those formal conditions, the theatricals, which function as the sanction for unprincipled conduct. Where forms, not felt principles, are the springs from which behavior arises, then morality becomes dependent upon formal conditions alone.

The Crawfords' preference for fiction-making and for linguistic patterning over enquiry and the search for truth is exemplified in Mrs. Norris, whose foolishness functions as an oblique evaluation of these qualities in the Crawfords. It is through language manipulation, though of a naive kind, that Mrs. Norris creates the world she clearly does not, in reality, inhabit. In Mrs. Norris's case, self-concern masquerades as concern for others. Linguistically, this contrast between role and reality is, typically, given simultaneous expression. Role is projected through hyperbole—excessively, vast, every thing, prodigious, always (pp. 53-54). These hyperbolic terms suggest the intense, though notional, activity to which Sotherton inspires Mrs. Norris. Reality is conveyed in the structure of her discourse. Its movement from Sotherton to Mrs. Norris in her parsonage reveals her egocentricity, and its lack of ordered cohesion her foolishness.

It is not, of course, that Jane Austen meant to persuade readers that a life lived according to forms is necessarily less than fully human. At Portsmouth we see a combination of formlessness and egotism that makes Fanny reflect with longing upon the formality of Mansfield life, where “there would have been a consideration of times and seasons, a regulation of subject, a propriety, an attention towards every body which there was not here” (p. 383). It is simply that formal regulations should be informed by conscious moral principle rooted in feeling. Without such moral principle, forms, so the action of Mansfield Park demonstrates, may become divorced from feeling, and function as the weapons of pretense and self-seeking in the armory of the emotionally and morally isolated self. Thus it is that the selfishness of the Crawfords, disastrous practically though its consequences are, is primarily significant as a contradiction of true, integrated selfhood. The self, without contact through sympathetic feeling with others, without those roots in place nurtured by memory through association, becomes an empty shell seeking substance through those forms, fictions, and invented patterns which, ironically, display its emptiness.

If this is so, then the Mansfield theatricals must be regarded as thematically central. The point is not that acting itself is morally wrong. Professional actors, whose performances may be considered “good hardened real acting” are in control. For the “hardened” actor the self is forgotten in the role but remains intact to be later resumed. But the Mansfield actors, encouraged by the Crawfords, conflate role and self, so that the role becomes the self. The theatricals are thus an exercise in deracination, cutting away those values which root the characters, morally and emotionally, in their community. In displacing their father's furniture they are devaluing associations, the formative importance of which is made clear in Fanny's reflections on her own possessions in the east room. In allowing her allotted role to give free rein to her desire for Henry Crawford, Maria is moving even further away than her misguided education has already placed her from the harmonious life in which social forms, moral principle, and feeling are conjoined. In compromising his moral principles by agreeing to act, Edmund is allowing appearances to supercede moral realities, as he has already begun to do as a result of his attraction to Mary Crawford. In allowing the desire for display to displace feeling for each other, to displace delicacy, in a word, the entire company is denying harmony. “Every body had a part either too long or too short—nobody would attend as they ought, nobody would remember on which side they were to come in—nobody but the complainer would observe any directions” (p. 165). This harmony, the denial of which the Crawfords exemplify and encourage, is presented throughout Mansfield Park as a harmony of nature, not of artifice. It is principle that is the harmonizing force, linking the self to other people, to places, and to possessions.

Much of the importance of the theatricals lies, then, in their figurative relationship to the novel as a whole. In theater, what is required is effective rendition, not personal sincerity or feeling; fiction not fact; role not reality; form or effect, not truth. The Crawfords bring to Mansfield a manner of personal living in which the self is lost in the role, and truth in fiction and rhetoric. The only major character undamaged by them is Fanny Price, and Fanny “cannot act.”

Notes

1. Lionel Trilling, The Opposing Self (New York: Viking, 1955), pp. 207-30. Thomas R. Edwards, Jr., “The Difficult Beauty of Mansfield Park;” NCF [Nineteenth–Century Fiction] 20 (1965):51-67.

2. See Pride and Prejudice, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford Univ. Press, n.d.), p. 25.

3. See M. A. K. Halliday, “Types of Process” in his System and Function in Language (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 159-73. Halliday distinguishes three clause types, those of action, of mental process and of relation. The attributive clause is a clause of relation containing two terms joined usually by the verb to be, as in the clause, “Goldsmith was vain.” In this attributive clause, as in all attributive clauses, the relation between the two terms, here Goldsmith and vain, is one of class inclusion. The reactive clause is one of mental process, consisting, as in the clause, “Mary Crawford likes music,” of processor (Mary Crawford), phenomenon (music), and a verb of reaction (likes).

4. The crucial importance of education as a means of handing down, and thus of maintaining, values whose existence is objective and divinely validated, is implied throughout A. M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971).

5. See Lionel Trilling, p. 213. Of Mary Crawford, Trilling observes, “Irony is her natural mode, and we are drawn to think of her voice as being as nearly the author's own as Elizabeth Bennet's is.”

6. William Congreve, The Way of the World, II.ii.

All quotations from Mansfield Park are taken from the edition edited by R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1923).