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Essay on Mansfield Park
Mansfield Park is an enormously complicated novel, even by the standards of Jane Austen, who creates characters and situations of unusual complexity in all her novels. Like other Austen novels, this one is concerned with a young woman trying to find her place in the social order. Fanny comes from a poor family but is being raised by her rich aunt and uncle. She prefigures the orphans of later Victorian novels in her separation from her parents, who will not be the primary determinants of her eventual status. Like other Austen heroines, Fanny will, in part, determine her status by marrying. Since women could not enter the professions, marriage was the only way, in the nineteenth century, to ascend or descend the social ladder.
Fanny's mother has fallen downwards quite a bit through her own marriage to a sailor who turns out to be a drunk; her aunt Lady Bertram and her cousin Maria, on the other hand, do fairly well by marrying. While the marriages of others have been formulated based on beauty and family connections, Fanny is to "earn" a marriage partner based on her character. Virtue is definitely rewarded in this world, and it is the primary determinant of an individual's eventual fate.
Mansfield Park is interested in far more than just the settling of social status, though. In part, it takes up the age-old debate over whether "nature"--one's innate qualities--or "nurture"--the environment in which one is raised--is the primary determinant of character. Fanny and her siblings, and Mary and Henry Crawford, are ambiguous figures in this regard; all of them are shuttled between different households growing up, and it is never clear whether it is their underlying personalities or their situations that have made them what they are. This makes for much interesting debate in the novel, particularly as Edmund struggles with his feelings for Mary and tries to justify her behavior......
