"Eden" of Mansfield Park like two corrupting, and very charming, serpents. They represent city values: Mary, for example, cannot understand why it is so difficult to hire a cart in the middle of the harvest to bring her harp to the parsonage, as she has no concept of the difficulties of a harvest. Mary, more significantly, laughs at rural ways, likens Mansfield Park to an old, outdated "engraving," and belittles Edmund's sincere desire to become a clergyman. She hesitates to marry him because she wants him to pursue a career that is more glamorous and lucrative.

Likewise, Henry engages in a heartless and destructive romance with Maria Bertram, and he also wants to leave a "hole" in Fanny's heart by making her fall in love with him. Both he and Mary represent the shallow, flirtatious, and deceptive ethics of the city. Though some of the people of Mansfield Park are damaged by the Crawfords, especially Maria when Henry runs off with her and then abandons her, the virtues and values of Mansfield largely withstand the assault of city corruption.

Mansfield Park is an elegant country house in a prosperous area of southern England, of the type emblematic of what people of the period would have held up to be a centre of the peculiarly English virtues of moderation, good taste, noblesse oblige, modern latitudinarian Church of England religiosity, etc. Its presence in the title indicates that the story, unlike many that Austen names for the heroines or their characters, is about the nature of the place. As a place, it can be the site of either culture and order or vice depending on its inhabitants. The ease with which it is turned to bad purposes, and the fact that the only person to really resist the Crawfords is the evangelical Fanny Price suggests that England itself can be similarly disrupted  and that if the Price house represents the disruption of the state from below, Mansfield Park indicates that the lethargy of the upper classes allows such disorder to flourish.