Mansfield Park (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

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