What are the consequences of this new seriousness? The world of Mansfield Park is not markedly different from that of her other novels. The focus is again on a small section of the landed gentry, their neighbors, their visitors and the social texture of their lives. But to talk of the social texture of life at Mansfield Park is at once to highlight the novel’s difference from its immediate predecessor. What Jane Austen is primarily concerned with here is less the social than the moral texture of life at Mansfield Park. Or rather, she is concerned to show that the one is dependent on the other. And this concern is clearly figured in her presentation of the various characters.
Running through the central sections of the book is the tension between Henry and Mary Crawford on one side and Edmund and Fanny on the other. The Crawfords are rich, witty, socially adept; they have all the graces that make for pleasing company; they are full of life. Fanny and Edmund, on the other hand, can claim none of these graces. When Fanny is introduced at the start of Chapter 2, it is almost entirely in terms of negatives—not much in her appearance to captivate, nothing to disgust, no glow of complexion, no other striking beauty, etc.—and this emphasis continues through the greater part of the novel; life, the physical business of living, always seems slightly too much for her, whether it is a question of gathering roses or riding a horse. Edmund fares little better. “There is not the least wit in my nature,” he says, and few readers would be inclined to disagree. No other hero and heroine in Jane Austen have quite so little humor, quite so awkward a social presence. If she was worried that Pride and Prejudice had been “rather too light, and bright, and sparkling”, as she suggested to her sister, she has certainly found the antidote in Edmund and Fanny.
The distance we have travelled from Pride and Prejudice can be measured in the repeated use of the single word “lively.” It would be an instructive exercise to trace it through the novel. When applied to Elizabeth Bennet, it had carried the full force of the author’s approval, but in the case of Mary Crawford the connotations are altogether different. “Your lively mind can hardly be serious even on serious subjects,” Edmund tells her in one of several exchanges that draw attention to the conflict between liveliness and moral propriety. It comes as no surprise towards the end of the novel to hear that Maria’s disastrous liaison with Henry Crawford began after she had gone to Twickenham with “a family of lively, agreeable manners, and probably of morals and discretion to suit.” To have lively, agreeable manners in this novel is no recommendation. The phrase neatly sums up the opposition at the heart of Mansfield Park between what is socially agreeable and what is morally right.
Ranged around the central quartet are all the other characters who manifest in one form or another the besetting sin of Mansfield Park—a concern for social proprieties that is unsustained by any moral foundation. There is Lady Bertram, a picture of elegant decorum, but too enervated to have any sort of moral existence at all; Mrs. Norris, surely the nastiest of Jane Austen’s creations, who voices the appropriate sentiments for every occasion but whose words bear no relation to her actions; Julia and Maria, the Bertram daughters, who have acquired grace of manner but not of character. It is Sir Thomas himself, in an important passage at the end of the novel, who finally acknowledges what has been wrong with his daughters and, by implication, with his own direction of Mansfield Park. “He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting”:
They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily practice. To be distinguished for elegance and accomplishments—the authorized object of their youth—could have had no useful influence that way, no moral effect on the mind. He had meant them to be good, but his cares had been directed to the understanding and manners, not the disposition.
If readers end up asking what has become of Jane Austen in Mansfield Park, it is because she has raised the uncomfortable possibility, which was to be more and more widely canvassed in the nineteenth century, that social style might be crucially at odds with moral substance. The Crawfords are intended to be attractive, Fanny and Edmund are intended to lack sparkle. That’s the whole point. To choose virtue may mean choosing the less attractive option. One could divide the book’s characters into those, the majority, who are governed by their wishes and those who are governed by their obligations. For Jane Austen there is an iron law of moral obligation that cuts clear across considerations of personal desire or social attraction. Again and again the book sets what people want to do against what they ought to do and judges them according to their response. Fanny alone consistently makes the right choice.