SOURCE: “Mansfield Park: Ideology and Execution,” in New Casebooks: Mansfield Park and Persuasion, edited by Judy Simons, Macmillan Press Ltd., 1997, pp. 19-36.

[In the following excerpt originally published in 1975, Butler explores the ideological conflicts—particularly between Fanny Price's Christianity and the Crawford's materialism—in Mansfield Park.]

With the possible exception of Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park is the most visibly ideological of Jane Austen's novels, and as such has a central position in any examination of Jane Austen's philosophy as expressed in her art. It is all the more revealing because here she has progressed far beyond the technical immaturity of the period when Sense and Sensibility was conceived, to a position where she can exploit to the full the artistic possibilities of the conservative case; and, at the same time, come face to face with the difficulties it presents. By far the most imaginative and accomplished of received anti-Jacobin novels, Mansfield Park reveals all the inherent problems of the genre.

The superb draughtsmanship of the opening chapters of Mansfield Park makes it easy to forget that they present a set of themes which are entirely commonplace in the period. Its beginning must have encouraged contemporaries to believe that here was yet another novel by a female about female education.¹ Mrs West's novels, from The Advantages of Education (1793) on, had hammered the theme. Mrs Inchbald had dealt with it more elegantly and idiosyncratically in A Simple Story, and Fanny Burney had made it a very substantial subsidiary interest in Camilla. Since the turn of the century it had retained its place as perhaps the most popular of all themes of women novelists, notable examples being Mrs Opie's Adeline Mowbray (1804) and Hannah More's Coelebs (1808). Maria Edgeworth, whose literary career was dedicated to the proposition that early education makes the man, had recently given it more extended treatment than ever before in Patronage (1814). The last-named novel has indeed innumerable incidental resemblances to Mansfield Park, which appeared later in the same year,² for not only is its virtuous and well-brought-up heroine, Caroline Percy, compared with her foils, the fashionable Arabella and Georgiana Falconer, who strongly resemble the Bertram girls; but one of the most important sequences concerns the performance of a play, in which Georgiana Falconer displays herself, and Caroline Percy virtuously refuses to take part.

The reader of 1814 thus knew broadly where he, or perhaps more typically she, stood. The novel of female education criticised superficial qualities, particularly accomplishments, which were too narrowly aimed at giving a girl a higher price in the marriage-market: accomplishments and mercenary marriages tended to be coupled together. The debate was linked to, indeed was the female aspect of, that common eighteenth-century topic of educationalists, the inferiority of ‘wit’ or ‘cleverness’ to judgement. Hence the relevance of showing that the Bertram girls' education had been spent not only on their appearance and accomplishments, but also on superficial information designed to make them appear clever and well-informed in company—‘… the Roman emperors as low as Severus; besides a great deal of the Heathen Mythology, and all the Metals, Semi-Metals, Planets, and distinguished philosophers’ (pp. 18-19).

The structure of Mansfield Park is as severely built round the contrast between the girls' education and its consequences as the see-saw structure of A Simple Story or Patronage, though Jane Austen's artistry does much to soften the outlines of the antithesis. (Technically she is now a world away from Sense and Sensibility, where the parallels were so much laboured.) The first part of Mansfield Park, until Sir Thomas's return facilitates Maria's marriage, is about the entry into life of the two Bertram sisters: their education, their values, and, especially, their inability to resist the worldly baits proffered by the Crawfords. In the second, slightly longer part, Fanny, the exemplary heroine, encounters in her turn the temptation of Henry's love, and Mary's friendship,³ and prevails. Her endurance sets right the wrongs done at Mansfield by the older girls, just as in the second part of A Simple Story Miss Milner's daughter restores the family which was shattered by her mother's lapse from virtue.⁴

Maria Bertram especially is a girl according to the female moralist's common formula. Having demonstrated her vanity and superficiality in adolescence, she grows up with the typical ambition of marrying for money. ‘Being now in her twenty-first year, Maria Bertram was beginning to think matrimony a duty; and as marriage with Mr Rushworth would give her the enjoyment of a larger income than her father's, as well as ensure her the house in town, which was now a prime object, it became, by the same rule of moral obligation, her duty to marry Mr Rushworth if she could’ (pp. 38-9). This ‘duty’ is one of the few Maria acknowledges, for as their father's daughter neither she nor her sister Julia feels any obligation. They are not fond of Sir Thomas Bertram, whose role as parent has hitherto been a negative one, and accordingly they feel nothing but a sense of release when he departs for Antigua. ‘They were relieved by it from all restraint; and without aiming at one gratification that would probably have been forbidden by Sir Thomas, they felt themselves immediately at their own disposal, and to have every indulgence within their reach’ (p. 32).

But, though the Bertram girls resemble other novelists' shallow females, the ideal figure set up in opposition to them is slightly more distinctive. In characterising her heroine, Fanny, Jane Austen illustrates her ideological disagreement with Maria Edgeworth. Caroline Percy of Patronage, like Belinda, Leonora, and other Edgeworth model characters, is essentially a rationalist. Fanny Price is a Christian. The clue lies in those characteristics in which the Bertram girls are deficient—‘It is not very wonderful that with all their promising talents and early information, they should be entirely deficient in less common acquirements of self-knowledge, generosity, and humility’ (p. 19). Immediately afterwards, Fanny, in conversation with Edmund, is shown to have the qualities her cousins lack. Humility is obviously an appropriate virtue for the Christian heroine; but equally important in Jane Austen's canon is, as always, the impulse towards self-knowledge. Fanny's sense as a Christian of her own frailty, her liability to error, and her need of guidance outside herself, is the opposite of the Bertram girls' complacent self-sufficiency. For Jane Austen ‘vanity’, the characteristic of the fashionables, is a quality with a distinctly theological colouring. It means both an unduly high opinion of oneself, and a pursuit of worldly goals, ‘vanities’. Such an error arises from an inability to place oneself in a larger moral universe, a context in which the self, and the self's short-term gratifications, become insignificant. As an ideal this is wholly different from the Edgeworthian belief in individual self-realisation, leading to greater—not less—personal independence.

The entrance of the Crawfords soon extends and enriches the didactic case. The Crawfords are sophisticated, fully aware disciples of a worldly creed to which the Bertram girls merely veer unconsciously, on account of the vacuum left in their education. Mary Crawford has actually been instructed, by her social circle in general, the marriage of her uncle and aunt in particular, in a wholly sceptical modern philosophy. Her doctrine includes the notion that there are no values but material ones, and that the gratification of the self is the only conceivable goal. Mary's comments about marriage, uttered to her sister Mrs Grant in the first scenes in which we meet her, are obviously meant to be compared with Maria Bertram's reflections about Mr Rushworth. Where Maria is confused as to her values, and barely half aware of the moral implications of what she is doing, Mary sounds, and is, knowingly cynical. ‘Everybody should marry as soon as they can do it to advantage … Everybody is taken in at one period or other … It is of all transactions the one in which people expect most from others, and are least honest themselves’ (pp. 43-6). Even more clearly, Henry Crawford's amoral determination to make the Bertram girls fall in love with him compares with their vague, complacent, and far less formulated readiness to be fallen in love with. The Crawfords, who know precisely what they are doing, are infinitely more dangerous than the Bertrams. More than that, the Bertrams are peculiarly vulnerable to be made the Crawfords' dupes, since their attitudes to life already half incline them to throw off restraint and pursue the self-gratification which the Crawfords' creed allows. It is dangerous to be exposed to worldliness without the worldly-wisdom which goes with it.

The triple contrast, of three kinds of education, three kinds of moral attitude, is maintained in every early scene. The cynical Crawfords, planning their pleasures with cold selfishness; the Bertram girls, equally selfish but more naïve; Fanny, who alone after a few days retains enough insight and objectivity to see that Henry Crawford is still plain. Whatever the topic of dialogue, the moral landscape of the various characters is what really receives attention. Mary, for instance, brings up the question of whether Fanny is ‘out’ or ‘not out’, so that Jane Austen can contrast two widely diverging ideals of young womanhood. Edmund considers whether, out or not out, young women act with any real modesty; Mary, whether they act in accordance with convention (p. 50). Similarly, when Mary borrows Fanny's horse, the thoughts and actions of three principals, Edmund, Fanny, and Mary, can be examined in turn. Edmund, who has always been considerate of Fanny, is now seduced by his physical delight in Mary into forgetting her. Fanny, after detecting her own jealousy, and struggling with motives of which she is suspicious,⁵ can at least display some genuinely objective concern for the horse. Mary correctly ascribes her own behaviour to selfishness, so gaily that she proves the vice has little meaning for her.

Mansfield Park is the first Austen novel to be conceived as well as executed after the appearance of Maria Edgeworth's social comedies.⁶ Jane Austen had deployed lesser characters in a stylised pattern around her heroine before, but she had not exploited in any sustained way the typical Edgeworth intellectual comedy. The brilliant dialogue in Pride and Prejudice is the natural culmination of a technique Jane Austen had used since Catharine: it gives the reader and heroine simultaneously an objective insight into character. In the first part of Mansfield Park a new element is added: the subject-matter of a conversation becomes as important as the insight it offers into character, because conversation becomes the occasion for the clash of distinct systems of value. Three key topics recur, all of them often found in anti-Jacobin novels of the 1790s. The first is Nature, and is illustrated by contrasting the attitudes of different characters towards living in the country. All late-eighteenth-century moralists of whatever colouring prefer the country to the town,⁷ but Jane Austen's Fanny does so as a typical conservative: because she associates it with a community, in which individuals have well-defined duties towards the group, and because physically it reminds her of the wider ordered universe to which the lesser community belongs. Urban life, on the other hand, has given Mary selfish values: she betrays her egotism when she laughs at the farmers who will not let her have a wagon to move her harp, and her materialism when she comments that in London money buys anything. The second issue that will recur in conversation in the novel, though sometimes allusively in association with Nature, is religion; the third is marriage. All three come to the fore in the sequence that provides an ideological key to the book, the visit to Sotherton.

The Crawfords' indifferent and even destructive attitude to the country emerges when the visit to Sotherton is first projected, for they go there as improvers. Essentially their feelings are negative about the external scene they propose to deal with. Utility is not a criterion which concerns them.⁸ Nor do they respond to the sentimental connotations of a feature of landscape, the link with the past provided by Sotherton's heavy, ancient avenue of trees. It is actually Mary who first voices the idea that change must temporarily at least mean disequilibrium: she remembers the time when her uncle improved his cottage at Twickenham as a period of anarchy. But she is restless for novelty, and improvements are fashionable; in the arbitrary name of fashion she urges Mr Rushworth to employ a landscape artist such as Repton. It does not occur to her, as it does to Fanny, to regret the destruction of the trees, since she is scarcely aware of inanimate nature, or the wider physical universe beyond herself and the few people she cares for. Sotherton itself is, or ought to be, a Burkean symbol of human lives led among natural surroundings, man contiguous with nature and continuous with his own past. Fanny finds it both these things, when she sees the grounds and begins to walk around the house. But Mary is bored and even hostile (p. 85).

In interpreting the meaning of the house within its grounds, and the chapel within the house, the two minds are joined by a third, Mrs Rushworth's. She has learnt her speech parrot-fashion from the housekeeper, and her interest is far more in the grandeur of the outward appurtenances than in the quality of the life lived. Her casual remarks about the chapel—that the seat-covers were once less tasteful than they are now, and that it was her husband who discontinued the religious services—show clearly enough how superficial her values are. ‘“Every generation has its improvements”,’ remarks Mary: and between Rushworth senior, who gutted the house in the interests of modernity, and Rushworth junior, who with Henry Crawford's help proposes to do the same for the grounds, there is morally little to choose.

The scene in the chapel, where Mary is offensive about clergymen, brings out for the first time in full the gulf between the Crawfords and religious orthodoxy. In discussing the suspension of chapel services, Mary thinks only of the immediate convenience to individuals who might have had to attend; while Fanny and Edmund have two concerns—the well-being of the individual, sub specie aeternitatis, and the social validity of established forms of worship:

‘It is a pity’, cried Fanny, ‘that the custom should have been discontinued. It was a valuable part of former times. There is something in a chapel and chaplain so much in character with a great house, with one's ideas of what such a household should be! A whole family assembling regularly for the purpose of prayer, is fine!’

Mary in her individualism cannot even begin to apprehend the social value Fanny sees in religion:

‘At any rate, it is safer to leave people to their own devices on such subjects. Every body likes to go their own way—to choose their own manner and time of devotion. The obligation of attendance, the formality, the restraint, the length of time—altogether it is a formidable thing, and what nobody likes. …’

Such an argument demands to be answered in terms of the individual, and Edmund does answer it:

‘… We must all feel at times the difficulty of fixing our thoughts as we could wish; but if you are supposing it a frequent thing, that is to say, a weakness grown into a habit from neglect, what could be expected from the private devotions of such persons? Do you think the minds which are suffered, which are indulged in wanderings in a chapel, would be more collected in a closet?’

(pp. 86-7)

The double function which Fanny and Edmund see religion as serving is important in the novel, and is developed more fully in subsequent conversations between Fanny, Edmund and Mary. In the wilderness Edmund speaks of the social role of the country clergyman, his influence by example and precept on the minds of his parishioners (pp. 92-3). Later, when Fanny discusses Dr Grant with Mary, it is she who raises the more private, spiritual aspect:

‘I cannot but suppose that whatever there may be to wish otherwise in Dr Grant, would have been in greater danger of becoming worse in a more active and worldly profession, where he would have had less time and obligation—where he might have escaped that knowledge of himself, the frequency, at least, of that knowledge which it is impossible he should escape as he is now.’

(pp. 111-12)

Mary is clearly equally indifferent both to the social aspect of religion (‘duty’ and ‘morals’), and to its spiritual demand of self-knowledge, since she accepts no reality outside her own sensations. But to Fanny and Edmund the two meanings of religion are interdependent, and ‘knowledge of the self’ and knowledge of a reality outside the self cannot be disassociated from one another.⁹

The theme of marriage is first glanced at in the chapel when Julia spitefully refers to Maria's coming marriage to Mr Rushworth. In the hollow sham of a chapel the full emptiness of the proposed ceremony is felt. Afterwards, in the strangely diagrammatic sequence in the wilderness, we see sketched out the shadowy future, or at least tendency, of the various sexual relationships which are developing in the novel. Edmund and Mary walk up and down, supposedly for a finite time, and within the wilderness; but Edmund, not for the first or last time, forgets his promise to Fanny and strays further than he meant. Henry and Maria arrive with Mr Rushworth at the gate, and while he (their future dupe) is away fetching the key, they escape through the palisade into the liberty of the park. Julia, who acts with the same impatience of restraint as they, and to the same end, is less guilty because she is not escaping from an acknowledged fiancé in the company of a desired lover. And so on. In any other novel such a miming of future events would seem an intolerable contrivance; but, extreme though it is, in Mansfield Park it does not seem illegitimate. The action of the novel is so entirely bound up with the value-systems of the various characters that they are always to a greater or lesser extent illustrating, acting out, their beliefs.

The sequence in the grounds, with Fanny still and alone on the seat, the others walking about, is especially expressive in terms of their relative roles. The worldly characters are the real subject of the first half, and Jane Austen is ingenious in letting them occupy the centre of the stage while Fanny as yet remains in the wings. Her consciousness is deliberately left slightly childish and unformed. Instinctively she tries to tell right from wrong, but as yet she lacks the ability; by contrast the Bertram sisters have the decision that comes with greater assurance and maturity, but they have no moral discrimination. Fanny's turn to act is to come, but her role of wondering observer of her cousins' doings is in itself expressive, suggesting as it does the virtuous person's struggle towards judgement and knowledge that is being neglected by the active characters. She has the role which often carries so much prestige in eighteenth-century literature, that of the thoughtful bystander. Like Gibbon's ‘philosopher’, she strives to interpret, to make some sense out of the superficial chaos of events. However unformed her opinion and inarticulate her expression of it, her anxious vigil on the bench in the park is enough in itself to remind the reader of a long tradition of men who have been wise in retirement, whose ascendancy lay in detachment from the actors and the common scene.

The conclusions Jane Austen tries to direct her reader's attention to are encouraged by Fanny's demeanour, yet not dictated by her at all. Jane Austen is not interested in impressions conveyed by subjective identification with a heroine. While Sterne or Mackenzie induce the reader to act the part of the man of feeling,¹⁰ she casts the reader as a moral arbiter. If there must be identification, it is with Fanny's role, not with her individual responses, which (at least as they affect Edmund) are depicted with ironic detachment. Meanwhile the reader's judgements are guided by other, more objective means. References to familiar issues are no doubt among the most important. But equally interesting, and in actual practice more original, is the extremely detailed presentation of what, after all, Jane Austen wants us to value. For the first time she gives her external world a solidity and scale which eventually belittles individual characters.

Although the scene at Sotherton is stylised, it is also very natural—in its setting, as far as concerns the house and grounds, and in the sense it conveys of the day as a rather unsuccessful outing, an occasion felt in mixed and on the whole uncomfortable ways by the many people involved. The result of this curious blend of stylisation and naturalism is to give flesh to the conservative case as no one else had done except Burke. As in the Reflections on the French Revolution, with its reiterated references to hearths, homes and families, so in the scene at Sotherton society takes on visible shapes.¹¹ The house and grounds are old, impressive, handsome, but under the rule of the Rushworths hollow, without the core of belief (symbolised by the chapel) which could give meaning to so much pompous grandeur. The cynical Crawfords have appeared, like Satan in the Garden of Eden, hostile to the old ethos of the place and bent on destruction. Every detail of what they say and do suggests their self-willed lawlessness: Mary, irrationally challenging the dimensions of the wilderness because she happens to feel tired; Henry, defying the restraint imposed by the limits of the ground and the locked gate. Yet the Crawfords' encroachment at Sotherton, dangerous though it seems, remains in the end curiously ineffective—for, like Burke, Jane Austen not only locates the enemy but diminishes him. In the Bertram sisters and in Henry there is an odd, wilful capacity for self-destruction. They are more likely to reject a momentary restraint than to attack restraints systematically. In escaping into the park, Henry, Maria, and Julia go off in a different direction from their supposed objective, the avenue of oaks; which accordingly survives the threat they originally offered it. Sotherton, although an empty shell, remains intact. By the end of the story it is only individuals, Maria and to a lesser extent Henry, who have destroyed themselves. A little through direct description, more through our sense of the weariness of the characters, we retain an impression of the heaviness, the largeness, but also the age and endurance of Sotherton, which is an important part of the moral framework for what follows.

Although some of its meaning has become obscured by purely historical difficulties of interpretation, the play-sequence remains the most masterly part of Mansfield Park. Unlike the account of Sotherton, where the naturalism and the scheme sometimes jar, it is equally fine on its many levels. Best of all is the presentation of that distinctive technique of the first volume of Mansfield Park, the serial treatment of several consciousnesses. At the beginning of volume i, chapter xii, for example, we enter successively the minds of Mary Crawford, the Bertram sisters, Henry Crawford, and Fanny. The next chapter, the thirteenth, takes us into and out of the consciousness of Mr Yates; through the views of all the characters involved, first directly in dialogue and then in reported speech; to the silencing of Edmund when Mary joins in, and the happy concurrence of Mrs Norris. There is no other comparable sequence of a Jane Austen novel so independent of the heroine. It is as though the movement of the sentimental period, towards distinguishing the central character by special insight into his inner life, has been put into reverse. The characters in this part of Mansfield Park each have their speeches, their scenes, like characters in a drama.

This, since it is a play they are rehearsing, is wholly appropriate. But what amuses Jane Austen—and even amuses Fanny—is that each actor continues to be selfishly absorbed by personal feelings, in spite of the corporate activity they are engaged in. Fanny is ‘not unamused to observe the selfishness which, more or less disguised, seemed to govern them all’ (p. 131). Many of the actors—Mr Yates, Tom, and Mr Rushworth, for example—clearly think in terms of the effect they will make in acting their own parts. Maria and Henry, though not motivated by the vanity of the actor, are bent on self-gratification of an even more culpable kind. Mary, and even Edmund, focus intently upon the significance to them of their own scenes. Apparently comic dialogues, in which plays and parts are argued over—and the selfishness of the actors revealed—have simultaneously a serious level of meaning. Not one of the actors, not even Edmund, has a proper sense of what it is as a whole that they are doing. When issues of propriety arise, even the more intelligent of them persist in looking at their own speeches: Mary admits that some of hers should be cut, Edmund is embarrassed by his. Only Fanny, the detached bystander, reads the play through and reacts to it as a whole.

Fanny's most important function here is that she alone perceives something pitiful and wrong in solipsism. ‘Fanny saw and pitied much of this in Julia; but there was no outward fellowship between them. Julia made no communication, and Fanny took no liberties. They were two solitary sufferers, or connected only by Fanny's consciousness’ (p. 163). As at Sotherton, she never directs the reader's opinions in detail: her watchfulness gives the necessary clue. When it comes to discussion of the general issue, to act or not to act, she can seem maddeningly inarticulate. Her general opinion about the play is the bald conclusion, ‘everything of consequence was against it’. Pressed to take part herself, she is merely depicted showing the outward signs of confusion and distress (p. 146). Later, when she is alone in the East room, the reader has his first real insight into her attempts to sift right from wrong. But these do not in fact throw much light on the general issue. What is important about Fanny's cogitations is that they involve scrupulous self-examination, the critical mental process that everyone else in the novel neglects.

For a general judgement of the play-acting, therefore, the reader must not rely on Fanny's articulation but on an independent understanding of the issue, informed as at Sotherton by a subtle network of allusion. The reader's efforts to understand are expected to parallel Fanny's, but to be more mature, more experienced about the world and its pitfalls. There seems to be no doubt, for example, that Jane Austen takes as read our familiarity with the common contemporary arguments against amateur acting, even though no one in the novel alludes to them plainly. By 1814 the increasingly strong Evangelical movement had sufficiently publicised the link between upper-class immorality and its rage for private theatricals.¹² A common and important leading objection is that play-acting tempts girls especially into an unseemly kind of personal display. In his Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, 1797, which Jane Austen read with approval in 1805, Thomas Gisborne declares that acting is ‘almost certain to prove injurious to the female sex’.¹³ Even granted that the chosen play ‘will be in its language and conduct always irreprehensible’ (a condition certainly not met by Lovers' Vows), Gisborne believes that acting will harm a young woman through encouraging vanity and destroying diffidence ‘by the unrestrained familiarity with the other sex, which inevitably results from being joined with them in the drama’.¹⁴ Fanny's principal doubts seem to relate to the women's parts of Amelia and Agatha (p. 137). Unquestionably Jane Austen expects us to see the play as a step in Maria Bertram's road to ruin.

For the four principals, Maria and Henry, Mary and Edmund, the play represents an elaborate exercise in ‘encouraging vanity’ and ‘destroying diffidence’. Unlike Mr Rushworth or Mr Yates, not one is vain in the trivial sense of seeking self-display; but all are after the kind of worldly ‘vanity’ that concerns Jane Austen in Mansfield Park, since all equate the pretended stage love-making with real love-making. Lovers' Vows gives them a licence for what would normally be entirely improper. Their scenes together permit physical contact between the sexes (as when Henry holds Maria's hand) and a bold freedom of speech altogether outside the constraint imposed by social norms. Lionel Trilling has ingeniously but anachronistically suggested that Jane Austen objects to the insincerity involved in acting a role.¹⁵ This is surely near the opposite of the truth. In touching one another or making love to one another on the stage these four are not adopting a pose, but are, on the contrary, expressing their real feelings. The impropriety lies in the fact that they are not acting, but are finding an indirect means to gratify desires which are illicit, and should have been contained. The unbridled passions revealed by the play-acting are part of the uninhibited selfishness which it has been the purpose of the sequence to bring out. The point is underlined by the casting, for the actors play exaggerated versions of themselves. Mr Rushworth plays Count Cassel, a foolish and rejected suitor. Mary plays the forward and free-thinking Amelia. Edmund plays a lovelorn clergyman. Maria plays a fallen woman. The stage roles of all these imply not insincerity, but liberation.

The imagined free world which comes into being on stage is a comprehensible entity, the clearest image in all Jane Austen's novels of what she is opposed to. And meanwhile the ‘real’ world of Mansfield, which is suddenly neglected and at risk, also begins to take on solidity. As at Sotherton, the most eager disciples of the dangerous activity—there it was improving, here play-acting—are those who should be the guardians of the place. Tom is the play's producer, while Mrs Norris happily (and economically) presides over the physical damage caused to Sir Thomas's property. Yet at Mansfield Park, as at Sotherton, the really dangerous figures are the Crawfords: a fact which we see fully only if, like Fanny, we look at the play as a whole.

Ideologically, the choice of play is crucial. Kotzebue's Lovers' Vows counterpoints what the rehearsals have revealed of the actors' selfishness and reckless quest for self-gratification, since its message is the goodness of man, the legitimacy of his claims to quality, and the sanctity of his instincts as a guide to conduct. It is, in fact, the dangerous foreign reading-matter which so often appears in anti-Jacobin novels, though wonderfully naturalised. Nor could any literate reader of the period be unaware of the connotation of the play. Quite apart from its successful runs at Covent Garden, Bath, the Haymarket, and Drury Lane between 1798 and 1802, the name of Kotzebue, by far the most popular, or notorious, of German playwrights in England at this period, was quite enough to indicate what Lovers' Vows was likely to be about.¹⁶ He was the most sanguine of optimists about the beauty and innocence of human nature left to follow its own instincts. One of his heroines¹⁷ marries her brother and has children by him, until her happiness is unnecessarily destroyed by the revelations of a meddlesome priest. Another innately virtuous victim of prejudice is the pregnant nun sentenced to death by an alliance of king and priestly hierarchy (in The Virgin of the Sun); she is made touchingly innocent, and her persecutors either cowardly or bigoted. This play was not well known in England, but Sheridan scored a tremendous success with the less controversial sequel, Pizarro, in 1799. A third Kotzebue play as often seen as Lovers' Vows, and even more notorious, was The Stranger, in which the heroine is a guilty runaway wife, who is (rightly, the play makes clear) forgiven and reinstated by her husband. There could thus be no doubt in the minds of Jane Austen and most of her readers that the name of Kotzebue was synonymous with everything most sinister in German literature of the period. A sanguine believer in the fundamental goodness and innocence of human nature, the apostle of intuition over convention, indeed of sexual liberty over every type of restraint, he is a one-sided propagandist for every position which the anti-Jacobin novelist abhors.¹⁸ Unless the modern reader feels, like Fanny, the anarchic connotation of the whole play—rather than, like Edmund and Mary, the daring of individual speeches—he is in no position to understand its significance in relation to Mansfield Park and its owner, Sir Thomas.

Like other plays in the Kotzebue canon, Lovers' Vows attacks the conventions by which marriage upholds existing rank, and exalts instead the liaison based on feeling. In the main action Baron Wildenhaim, who has endured years of loneliness and remorse since refusing to marry the peasant girl whom he seduced, is persuaded to think more rightly by their illegitimate son, Frederick. In the subplot the Baron's daughter, Amelia, persuades the clergyman, Anhalt, to overlook the fact that she is a woman—by convention passive—and a noble—by convention debarred from marrying a bourgeois; her argument is that in defiance of convention they should obey their impulse.¹⁹ Thus Frederick and Amelia are the two characters in the play who expound Kotzebue's message of freedom in sexual matters, and defiance of traditional restraints. They are played by the Crawfords, who thus again in their play-acting adopt not an assumed role but a real one. During the rehearsals they have often seemed almost diffident. It is only in relation to their parts in the play that they are revealed once more as the advocates of social and moral anarchy.

The affront felt by Sir Thomas has puzzled some observers more than it should. He returns home to find some material damage to his house, and his study in confusion. After discovering this, he steps out on to the stage for an irresistibly comic moment, his startled confrontation with the ranting Mr Yates. Because our insight into the scene is through Tom's eyes, we interpret it as Tom does—in the spirit of pure comedy—and are liable to miss the underlying point of the meeting. The head of the house, upholder in the novel of family, of rank, and of the existing order, is confronted at the heart of his own terrain by a mouthing puppet who represents a grotesque inversion of himself: the dignified baronet meets the ‘Baron’ whose play-function is to abandon his dignity and to legitimise his mistress. Sir Thomas and Baron Wildenhaim are the heads of their respective worlds, and the sudden meeting emphasises their significant relationship. In the future, the fact that Sir Thomas both resembles and differs from the Baron appears even more ironically, for he is called upon to deal with Maria's real-life lapse from virtue. At the time it is sufficient that a character who is central to the play's ethos makes a direct challenge to the house and its owner. Even the Crawfords, who have abstained from general discussion of the propriety of acting, know immediately that this father will not permit the play to go on. They retreat, as at Sotherton. And, though, as at Sotherton, they appear at first to have done little harm, this time they have made more significant inroads than ever before into the fabric of the Bertram family. The individuals who have sampled what the play means, who have thrown off restraint, are the more likely to do the same again. Much later, after Maria's flight with Henry, Tom describes the ‘dangerous intimacy of his unjustifiable theatre’ as an ancillary cause of his sister's fall (p. 462).

But this is not the story of the whole book. After the climax created by Sir Thomas's return early in the second volume, a major change occurs. The cast narrows dramatically: Maria and Mr Rushworth, Julia, Mr Yates, and Tom depart, leaving a much quieter world, and a smaller scene. From being a bystander, Fanny becomes the active heroine. Henry turns his attention from the Bertram sisters to her, and the rest of the book requires her to make a positive stand: to discern the true nature of evil, to choose the future course of her life, and, through a period of total loneliness, like a true Christian, to endure.

Notes

1. See Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford, 1975), pp. 54-5.

2. Patronage was published in December 1813, although 1814 appears on the title page; Mansfield Park about five months later (it was advertised in the Morning Chronicle on 23 and 24 May). Mansfield Park was finished in the summer of 1813, and was not influenced by Patronage.

3. For the frequent reappearance of the lover and the sentimental friend as tempters, see Mrs West's novels and Jane Austen's Catharine and Northanger Abbey.

4. See Butler, War of Ideas, p. 54.

5. As usual in Jane Austen, an awareness that one is influenced by ulterior motives is a sign of grace, not weakness. See the discussion of Elinor in Butler, War of Ideas, pp. 199-200.

6. But cf. Mrs Q. D. Leavis, ‘A Critical Theory of Jane Austen's Writings’, Scrunity, X (1942) and XII (1942).

7. See Butler, War of Ideas, pp. 97-8 and 110. The Rousseauist of course preferred the country for very different reasons, because it enabled him to be morally independent and left him free to cultivate the self.

8. Cf. Henry's later cavalier dismissal of the farmyard at Thornton Lacey, Mansfield Park, p. 242.

9. The question of Fanny's religion is generally dealt with indirectly, for reasons of taste. The nearest suggestion to a religious experience is the occasion when she contemplates the stars and reflects that there would be less evil and sorrow in the world if ‘people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene’ (p. 113).

10. See Butler, War of Ideas, p. 19.

11. For a more detailed discussion of Jane Austen's handling of her two great houses in Mansfield Park, and the implicit parallel with Burke, cf. Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate (Baltimore, MD, 1971), pp. 46 ff.; and Avrom Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park (Minneapolis, 1967), p. 23.

12. David Spring, ‘Aristocracy, Social Structure and Religion in the Early Victorian Period’, Victorian Studies, VI (1962-3), 263-80. Some critics see special significance in the fact that by acting the Bertrams are aping the aristocratic friends of the Hon. Mr Yates—himself a typically profligate representative of his class. The case against acting as given within the novel is an example of Jane Austen's Tory preference for the sober mores of the gentry against those of the Whig aristocracy. See D. J. Greene, ‘Jane Austen and the Peerage’, PMLA, LXIII (1953), 1017-31, and Fleishman, A Reading of Mansfield Park, p. 29.

13. Quoted by Frank W. Bradbook, Jane Austen and her Predecessors (Cambridge, 1966), p. 36. Cf. Jane Austen's Letters (Oxford, 1979), ed. R. W. Chapman, p. 169. In two of the best known novels of the same year as Mansfield Park, Fanny Burney's The Wanderer and Maria Edgeworth's Patronage, the heroine also has scruples about acting for reasons similar to those given by Gisborne.

14. Quoted by Bradbrook, Jane Austen and her Predecessors, p. 39.

15. Lionel Trilling, ‘Mansfield Park’, The Opposing Self (New York, 1955), pp. 218-19.

16. For an allusion to the plot of Lovers' Vows which assumes that the public still knows it well in 1812, see Butler, War of Ideas, p. 93. Information about performances of the play is given in Walter Sellier's unpublished German thesis, ‘Kotzebue in England’ (Leipzig, 1901), pp. 19-20.

17. In Adelaide von Wulfingen, trans. B. Thompson, London, 1801.

18. For discussion of the relationship of Jane Austen's novel with Kotzebue's play, cf. E. M. Butler, ‘Mansfield Park and Lovers' Vows’, Modern Language Review [MLR] (July 1933), and the reply by H. Winifred Husbands, MLR (April 1934); and William Reitzel, ‘Mansfield Park and Lovers' Vows’, Review of English Studies (October, 1933). On the whole critics have concentrated on whether the reader of Mansfield Park is expected by Jane Austen to know the roles of individual characters in Lovers' Vows. I believe, and have tried to show, that some passages in the novel are enriched by our perceiving a connection between play characters and novel characters, yet it seems to me that Austen does not rely on our knowing so much. What she does expect (more reasonably) is that we will have a general impression of the ideology of the play.

19. For a summary of the play's attack on rank, see Crane Brinton, The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (London, 1926), p. 39: ‘Society—cultivated society—is always wrong. The individual who has courage to act against it is always right.’

[All references to the novel are given in parentheses in the text. Ed.]