Immorality Plays
Sinful Atmospherics in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park
It might seem that the novels of Jane Austen have nothing to teach a society that scorns all she values, but her most complex novel, Mansfield Park, has salutary shocks for modern readers. Reading it joltsus first when we recognize that its core concern is moral conflict. We get a secondary shock when we realize that modern literature is seldom really about right and wrong. In modern novels, when there is a conflict over what characters ought to do, the choices often are crudely drawn, even cartoonish. In much literature, such choices are raised only so they can be ridiculed.
The real question in such books isn't about what is right and wrong; the real question is whether the protagonists will be happy, or liberated, or self-actualized, or whatever. In plenty of modern fiction, the characters wander from experience to experience, without any sign in them or from the author that some choices might be better than others. Mansfield Park, however, takes moral choices to be of supreme importance. The storyis not really about whether the characters achieve their goals, though it does have a "happy ending" whose very unlikelihood undercuts how seriously we should take it. The book instead is about how the people in it cope with moral challenges.
An Atmosphere of Sin
And they have to wrestle with them, for sin does not merely comprise specific acts but is an atmosphere in which the characters must live. Sir Thomas Bertram and his family are embroiled in a society whose very virtues have rendered it corrupt. The Bertrams' country estate, Mansfield Park, c. 1808, seems at first to display aristocratic success and decorum. It soon becomes clear, however, that the family is on the brink of emotional and social ruin.
Sir Thomas's stiff-upper-lip devotion to dignity and propriety actually undermines all he strives to do. His dutiful attention to his wife only reinforces Lady Bertram's sloth and ennui. His coldness has alienated his children, stunting their development. The heir, Tom, is a useless twit who would be at home in Bertie Wooster's Drones Club. Edmund, the younger son, slated for the church, has good intentions. But they are built on sand; his judgment is unsteady and his resolve weak. The older daughter, Maria, accepts the proposal of a wealthy dolt she can barely tolerate, yet she flirts recklessly with an obvious cad. The younger daughter, Julia, is just as vain and foolhardy.
The Bertrams have inherited wealth, position, good manners, even good looks. Yet they are frittering it all away. The children are bungling the only real jobs they have—finding suitable mates. Even the Bertrams' financial situation is precarious. Their wealth is tied up in a colonial economy undergirded by the slave trade. Yet despite that sordid advantage, their finances are in such a shambles that Sir Thomas undertakes a dangerous journey to the Caribbean to untangle the mess.
Even their well-intentioned gestures backfire. For instance, the Bertrams congratulate themselves on taking in their impoverished nine-year-old niece, Fanny Price. But the timid, bewildered little girl is out of place at comfortable, stuffy Mansfield Park. The Bertrams are so securely ensconced at the apex of the social order that they don't even notice how Fanny suffers loneliness, anxiety, and humiliation.
The Problem with the Play
Many modern readers surely find themselves rooting for this corrupt, dysfunctional order to be overthrown. But Austen insists that, although the order is riddled with corruption, so is disorder. As always in an Austen novel, the delicate equilibrium of country life is upset by outsiders—in this case, a brother and sister, Henry and Mary Crawford. Affluent and indolent, they are witty and charming, but they are blithely unconcerned about how their bright amiability toys with the fates of the people they encounter. Matters come to a head in a diversion modern readers are likely to regard as innocuous.
While Sir Thomas is on his perilous trip, the Bertram siblings and the Crawfords decide to put on a play in his study. Our modern age says, What's the problem? But we fail to understand how mimicking behaviors changes us. The Mansfield Park troupe chooses to put on a piece of melodramatic trash called Lovers' Vows.
James Tynen is a former journalist. He lives in Cary, North Carolina, with his wife, Marnie. They are parishioners at St. Andrew the Apostle Catholic Church in nearby Apex.
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