This is the main thematic link between two of the novel’s most celebrated episodes, the visit to Sotherton and the project to put on a play at Mansfield. There is no better example than the Sotherton outing of the way Jane Austen can charge the trivialities of commonplace social events with a weight of significance that turns them into moral drama. The couples pass through the rooms of the old house, pause for a few minutes to look at the chapel, then go out to wander in the grounds. Nothing could be more ordinary, and yet by the end of the visit Sotherton has become a moral map on which we can chart with grim precision the course of the various characters as they take a serpentine path through the woods, or edge round a locked gate into the park, or allow themselves to be tempted by an unfastened side-gate into the wilderness. Actions that seem the merest small change of social life resonate with moral implications.
The same is true of the theatrical fiasco. We know that private theatricals were an accepted form of entertainment at Steventon Rectory in Jane Austen’s childhood, so why all the fuss about them at Mansfield Park? To some extent, no doubt, it can be attributed to changing moral fashions. Jane Austen’s was an eighteenth-century childhood. By 1814 not only had she herself changed, so had the climate of the age. Though the reign of Queen Victoria was still over twenty years away, the Evangelical movement heralded many of the values that were later to be associated with Victorianism. It would hardly be surprising if Jane Austen’s views had changed by the time she came to write Mansfield Park. But the novel is not really concerned with the rights and wrongs of private theatricals in themselves, any more than in the earlier episode with the rights and wrongs of squeezing round a locked gate into a park; it is concerned with what they mean here, to this group of characters in this particular context. In both cases they represent an attempt to bypass the permissible limits of expression, to find a way of doing what you ought not to do or saying what you ought not to say. As such, they are condemned. It is this steely refusal to countenance the pleasurable at the expense of the proper that governs the tone of Mansfield Park. And it is this that perhaps makes it a book more often admired than loved.
But though Mansfield Park stands out from Jane Austen’s other novels by the sternness of its moral emphasis, there is much else that it shares with them. We have only to read the first sentence to recognize the familiar lines of force that run through each of the books:
About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.
With practiced economy we are given in a few lines the crucial details that define a character’s place in the scheme of things: social rank, marital status, income and place of residence. It’s a sentence that perfectly expresses the social contours of Jane Austen’s world. Much of the criticism directed against her in later years has taken this as its starting point. When she wrote to her niece that “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on”, she summed up the aspect of her novels that has most often been attacked. The charge, in brief, is that her world is too narrow, that its interests are too petty, that it takes too little account of what was going on outside the Country Village. It’s of course true that one looks in vain for much evidence of the Napoleonic wars that were being waged on and off through most of the time she was writing her novels; but that is a naïve complaint. To those who deplore the absence of large political events in her work, there are two points to be made. First, the sort of social issues with which Jane Austen was dealing are by no means trivial. They have to do with the vital questions by which our lives are determined. Far from being unimportant, the minutiae of social behavior are for the most part the only evidence on which we can base our judgements of other people—whom to love, whom to trust, whom to marry. If we are to chart our way through the intricacies of everyday social life, then we must know how to read the signs. And reading the signs correctly is what Jane Austen is all about.