Character is revealed through these parallels, and it is further revealed through the many debates over whether the play should be staged at all. Tom, Maria, and Julia defend the theatricals as a fashionable diversion, while Fanny, and later Sir Thomas, condemn them as a grievous wrong. Austen clearly sides with Fanny and Sir Thomas. Such anti-theatricalism is remarkable enough to the present-day reader, for whom nothing could be more innocent than a group of young people amusing themselves by putting on a play. What makes it even more remarkable, however, is the fact that Austen herself had avidly participated in theatricals during her youth, writing the prologues to plays that her neighbors and siblings would perform. To be sure, social mores had changed somewhat in the years between Austen's youth and the writing of Mansfield Park, as a growing evangelical movement began to condemn activities that had formerly been seen as innocent, and there is reason to believe that Austen had come to view evangelicals with some sympathy. But the evangelicals condemned novels along with the theater, and this fact alone is enough to remind us that Mansfield Park is no evangelical tract. All this is to say that the judgments Austen will pass on the theater are quite particular: They are not the unthinking expression of custom or belief, but rather the self-conscious exploration of political ideology.
It is worth emphasizing that both the author of Lovers' Vows and the translator were notorious in England for being political radicals. Moreover, the play itself was taken to be a Jacobin text. Its explicit theme, after all, was the irrelevance of rank, and its implicit theme was the priority of individual desire over custom and law. The play ends, in defiance of Burke, with the inheritance going to an illegitimate son. Austen suggests, however, that it is not merely this particular play, but acting in general, that poses a radical threat. For the conservative conception of authority is organized around stable identities or repertories of identities: the lords, laborers, and tenant farmers of "To Penshurst," or the "brother, landlord, master" of Pride and Prejudice. The theater, by contrast, imagines protean selves, whose various identities are assumed and cast off at will. Henry Crawford, who proves to be by far the best actor in the novel, captures the theater's dangerous possibilities when he announces himself ready to play "any character that ever was written, from Shylock or Richard III, down to the singing hero of a farce" (p. 109)--any character, that is to say, other than the one he has been given by birth, the owner of the Everingham estate. The theater thus functions in this novel as the art form of unbridled ambitions and abrogated duties, as the art form of revolution.
To put this another way, the theatricals are a threat because they transform the country house into a theater. Returning from his travels unexpectedly, Sir Thomas discovers that his study has been made into a dressing room; worse, he finds himself standing face-to-face with a feckless young man who plays baron to his own baronet. This is "'taking liberties with [the] father's house'" (p. 112), indeed. In response to such liberties, Sir Thomas orders that the stage be disassembled and the scene painter dispatched, and he himself burns all copies of the play. The "infection" of the theater cannot, however, be so easily contained (p. 159). The stage curtains find their way into Mrs. Norris's house, and Henry Crawford is permitted to stay. With this, we come to the second, more insidious danger posed by the theatricals: They reveal that the country house has been a theater all along. The critic Joseph Litvak, in Caught in the Act, has argued that with the return of Sir Thomas the novel shifts its attention from theatricals to theatricality, from a discrete instance of acting to those forms of acting that pervade, indeed constitute, social and political life. We will later see Sir Thomas staging little theaters of power, as when he commands Fanny to leave a ball early in order to display to potential suitors her remarkable tractability. Nor does the novel, in Litvak's view, imagine any alternative to theatricality. The word "appearance," first associated with the Crawfords, soon takes over the narrator's own discourse, until it is difficult for us to distinguish the seeming from the real. Not even Fanny can escape. Her famous resistance to the theater is articulated in the theater's own language. "'No, indeed, I cannot act... I really cannot act'" (pp. 128), she says again and again, like a latter-day Cordelia in a novelistic King Lear.
The first volume of Mansfield Park thus demonstrates that Mansfield is a country house in need of improvement, seduced as it is by the glamour of mercantile London and hollowed-out by the blurring of appearance and reality. The second and third volumes of the novel will explore what improvement should entail. Austen draws our attention to this question by using the word "improvement" again and again, until it pervades the discourse of the narrator, as well as the characters. Edmund works toward the "improvement" of Fanny's mind (p. 20), while Sir Thomas commends her "improvement" in beauty and in health (p. 154). Sir Thomas hopes that his son-in-law Rushworth will "improve" in knowledge and wit (p. 174), and Edmund hopes for Mary Crawford's "improvement" in piety and morality (p. 318). At Portsmouth, Fanny seeks the "improvement" of her sister Susan's conduct (p. 346), and Henry Crawford effects some "improvement" in the way their father treats Susan and Fanny both (p.351). Henry and Edmund approve of the "spirit of improvement" that has taken over the clergy (p. 294), while Mary, upon hearing that the custom of family chapel has been abandoned by the Rushworths, slyly remarks, "'Every generation has its improvements'" (p. 76).
The problem of improvement is thus raised by the novel's discourse, but it is more fully explored in the novel's other great set piece, the day at Sotherton, the Rushworth family estate. Having visited a friend whose estate has just been "improved" by a landscape gardener (p. 46), Mr. Rushworth is suddenly filled with a desire to have his own estate be similarly improved; he invites the Bertrams and Crawfords to come to Sotherton and give him advice. Landscape gardening provides Austen with the perfect opportunity to explore what improvement requires; for not only is it the most concrete instance of making changes to the country house, but it was also an activity that was understood at the time in explicitly political terms. A generation before Austen's birth, Capability Brown had developed a gardening style whose natural forms were said to exemplify a specifically English liberty, as opposed to the rigid patternings said to exemplify the absolute monarchy in France. In Austen's lifetime, Humphry Repton (1752-1818) had taken Brown's place as the most influential landscape gardener of the day, but the politics of his gardening style are more difficult to characterize. On the one hand, Repton warned, in An Enquiry into the Changes of Taste in Landscape Gardening (1806), against "moderniz [ing] old places... and [then] alter[ing] them again on the morrow" (p. 27), a recognizably Burkean caution against excessive change; on the other hand, his actual designs tended toward rather radical "innovations." As the critic Alistair Duckworth has demonstrated in The Improvement of the Estate, Austen knew both sides of Repton, for she not only read widely in theories of landscape and the picturesque, but she also saw, at first hand, the changes Repton had made to Stoneleigh Abbey, the estate of her mother's cousin. Repton had, as was his wont, opened new vistas by tearing down trees and walls, even going so far as to redirect the nearby river Avon, and there is reason to believe that Austen felt that these changes had gone too far.
In the episode at Sotherton, however, Austen is less interested in judging either Repton's theories or his practices than she is in condemning those landowners who choose to hire an improver, any improver, to do work that would better be done by themselves. Sotherton, that is to say, dramatizes both the need for the country house to be renovated if it is to remain vital and the imperative that the responsibilities of authority be borne by those who exercise its powers. In Sotherton, we see a country house that has fossilized from lack of change: The furniture is fifty years out of date, and its portraits no longer mean anything to anyone; the family chapel has fallen into disuse and the laborers' cottages into total disrepair. And in Rushworth, we see a landowner totally unequipped to make the necessary changes. His plans for Sotherton begin and end with the idea of calling in Repton, and his
wish to consult with others rather than making plans himself is merely the first sign of a thoroughgoing abrogation of authority. For the failures at Sotherton can all be attributed to absent or inadequate guardians: The death of the elder Mr. Rushworth has forced his widow to turn to the family housekeeper for knowledge of the family traditions; the younger Mr. Rushworth is ready to chop down that familiar Austen trope for continuity, a flourishing stand of trees; and his future wife, Maria Bertram, rejoices that the church is far enough away from the manor house that she will not be troubled by its bells. The inheritance of the past, the requirements of the future, and the moral and religious duties of the present--all are betrayed at Sotherton. And the betrayals at Sotherton throw into relief that far subtler betrayal the Crawfords threaten at Mansfield. The day at Sotherton gives rise to much talk about improvements, and it quickly becomes clear that improving is, for Mary, something that one hires others to do, while it is for Henry a kind of hobby worth indulging until the pleasure begins to pall: The sister would have improvements undertaken only when she is away from home, and the brother would undertake them for the sheer love of "'doing'" (pp. 50-51). Edmund, on the other hand, would "'rather have an inferior degree of beauty, of [his] own choice, and acquired progressively'" (p. 50), but he alone speaks for the Burkean values of familial responsibility and incremental change.
These, then, are the values that will come under attack as the Crawfords begin seducing first one than another of the residents of Mansfield. And this is the struggle that the rest of the novel will unfold: the struggle to preserve the local, the reciprocal, and the continuous in an increasingly cosmopolitan, cash-mad, fashion-driven world; the struggle to find a stable place in a world of restlessness. This is a struggle over the fate of the country house, but Mansfield Park suggests that the country house might have already been lost. For only once is Mansfield celebrated as Donwell and Pemberley are celebrated--and then only with significant qualifications. Toward the end of the novel, Fanny returns to Portsmouth to visit her family, and the contrast between their home and the Bertrams' prompts Fanny to recognize Mansfield's virtues at last:
The elegance, propriety, regularity, harmony, and perhaps above all the peace and tranquillity, of Mansfield, were brought to her remembrance every hour of the day, by the prevalence of everything opposite to them here.... At Mansfield no sounds of contention, no raised voice, no abrupt bursts, no tread of violence, was ever heard; all proceeded in a regular course of cheerful orderliness; everybody had their due importance; everybody's feelings were consulted. If tenderness could be ever supposed wanting, good sense and good breeding supplied its place (pp. 340-341).
Tenderness had indeed often been wanting, and Fanny's tacit acknowledgment of this fact is the loose thread that unravels the passage as a whole. It reminds us that while other country houses in Austen compel love at first sight, Mansfield can be loved only from a distance, only through a veil of faulty memory. And the more closely we look at this passage, the more clear it becomes that Mansfield remains what it had long been: a place of "propriety" from without and invidious distinctions from within, of apparent "harmony" and actual dissent, of "good sense and good breeding," but bad morality.
The failures of Mansfield seem to be beyond improvement, and it is in this context that we can best understand the novel's shift in focus from country house to parsonage. Austen famously described Mansfield Park as "a complete change of subject--Ordination," but the novel proves to be less of a change in subject than we might at first expect. For what interests Austen about the duties of a clergyman is their close resemblance to the duties of a landowner; what interests her about "ordination," that is to say, is its possible implications for other forms of order. As a younger son, Edmund cannot hope to inherit Mansfield, but his understanding of what it means to be a clergyman is held up as a model for what the heir to Mansfield should and must be. And what it means to be a clergyman, for Edmund, is to settle in one's parish. Edmund must explain to the Crawfords that he will not, as they expect him to do, visit his parish church on Sundays and spend the rest of the week at Mansfield. For he understands that "'a parish has wants and claims which can be known only by a clergyman constantly resident.... that if he does not live among his parishioners, and prove himself by constant attention their well-wisher and friend, he does very little either for their good or his own'" (pp. 214-215). With this passage, Austen joins the contemporary chorus attacking the rampant abuses in the Church of England, such as the relatively common practice of clergymen hiring curates to perform the duties of a parish while themselves continuing to receive its tithes. But the passage also implies that residence is a virtue for landowners as well as clergymen, and it reminds us of the "very little good" that was done during Sir Thomas's two-year absence from home. The fact that it is Sir Thomas himself who has spoken this passage, with his customary sententiousness, further emphasizes the total separation between the appearance and reality at Mansfield.
By retreating from country house to parsonage, Mansfield Park acknowledges that the landed elite is often incapable, or unworthy, of upholding the country-house ideal. But the novel also suggests that this ideal is more problematic than Burkean conservatives are willing to admit.
More specifically, Mansfield Park critiques the landed estate in much the same terms as Austen herself is now critiqued by critics in our own day. The critic Raymond Williams, for instance, in The Country and the City, has famously indicted Austen for failing to represent, or perhaps even failing to see, the agricultural labor on which the country house depends. She can be quite vague, he notes, about the number of acres in a particular estate, but far more precise about the number of pounds it is worth every year; in much the same way, she has a keen eye for timber, which can be cut down and sold, but a curious blindness when it comes to the woodsmen. What this means, Williams argues, is that Austen understands the estate as both a source of wealth and a repository of legible social signs, but not as a site of labor. Indeed, the function of the country house, he suggests, is to transform working-class labor into gentry-class gentility. Williams makes this argument most elegantly through a play on the double meaning of cultivation: The cultivation of land is converted into money, which must then be converted once more into the cultivation of manners and accomplishments. What the country house does, Austen's country-house novels do as well--namely, blind us to the working classes and to the crucial labor that they do.
The critic Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, has more recently commented on an odd blindness of Williams's own, a failure to see the slave labor on the Bertram's plantations in Antigua. The fact that the novel refers to Antigua so obliquely is, in Said's account, both a sign of Austen's reluctance to acknowledge the brutal facts of imperialism and proof that the imperial project has already been achieved. For what the novel's scattered references to Antigua demonstrate most powerfully is that the colonies, and their relation to the metropolitan centers of England can be taken entirely for granted. Said goes on to argue that this presumed relation of center to periphery not only organized economic and political realities in the nineteenth century, but also underwrote the very form of the nineteenth-century novel. In Mansfield Park, we see the beginning of a novelistic tradition that locates value in fixity, immobility, and, above all else, centrality and that sees the periphery as "resources to be visited, talked about, described, or appreciated for domestic reason, for local metropolitan benefit."
Williams and Said are persuasive in arguing that Mansfield Park does not merely reflect the contemporary realities of labor and empire, but indeed helps to create structures that erase working-class and marginalize imperial subjects. What I want to emphasize, however, are the moments when Austen points to the gaps where those subjects should be. One such moment comes when Henry Crawford and Edmund debate the improvements that might be made to Edmund's parsonage. Henry's proposals are typically extravagant, involving the turning around of the house, the exchanging of meadow and garden, and t
he purchasing of nearby stands of timber. Edmund, by contrast, presents his own plans as properly modest. "'I must be satisfied with rather less ornament and beauty, "' he says, and further hopes only to give the parsonage "'the air of a gentleman's residence'" (p. 210). In the conversation that follows, however, it soon becomes clear that what the "air of a gentleman's residence" requires is the total removal of the farmyard and all its works, including the blacksmith's shop. Austen, here, makes precisely the point that Williams will make more than a hundred and fifty years later, by cataloguing the various forms of necessary labor that her own country-house vision requires her to erase. Elsewhere, too, Austen draws our attention to otherwise forgotten forms of labor. The moment of Fanny's great ascendancy at Mansfield, the proposal of marriage she receives, is marked by Baddeley, the butler, calling her into Sir Thomas's study, the only time in the entire novel that any servant speaks. The most famous gap in Mansfield Park, however, is the "'dead silence'" that follows Fanny's questions about the slave trade (p. 171). Critics debate whether this silence would be filled by a condemnation or a defense of slavery, but surely the significance of the silence is that it could never be filled in a novel like this--and that it thus registers all that the novel cannot accommodate.