One barrier that prevents some modern readers from appreciating Mansfield Park is that the manners of today are very different from those in Austen’s time, so the things that Fanny and Edmund object to as being improper make them seem prudish and priggish. They criticize Mary Crawford for making a light, passing, disrespectful reference to her uncle in company. Fanny is “quite astonished.” Who would be shocked today by a young person making disparaging remarks about their elders? Possibly where I now live and work, mainland China, where Confucian mores still prevail to a great degree, but not in the Western world!
In another episode, the young people are on a pleasure excursion to Sotherton, the stately home of Maria Bertram’s fiancé. Julia, the younger Bertram daughter, winds up lagging behind the other young people and she’s stuck with Mrs. Rushworth, (the fiancé’s mother) as her walking companion. Austen scolds her for chafing at this.
The remaining three, Mrs. Rushworth, Mrs. Norris, and Julia, were still far behind; for Julia… was obliged to keep by the side of Mrs. Rushworth, and restrain her impatient feet to that lady's slow pace, while her aunt, having fallen in with the housekeeper, who was come out to feed the pheasants, was lingering behind in gossip with her. Poor Julia, the only one out of the nine not tolerably satisfied with their lot, was now in a state of complete penance….. The politeness which she had been brought up to practise as a duty made it impossible for her to escape; while the want of that higher species of self-command, that just consideration of others, that knowledge of her own heart, that principle of right, which had not formed any essential part of her education, made her miserable under it.
Wouldn’t most young people today just walk away and join the other young people without a backward glance, regardless of the fact that Mrs. Rushworth is their hostess and she’s just fed them a nice meal and taken them on a tour of the house?
It would still be shocking today for a newlywed woman to run away with her lover, but it would not ordinarily result in her exile from society and her own family for the rest of her life, as is Maria’s fate in Mansfield Park.
By modern standards, virtually nothing Mary Crawford says is objectionable—whether she is making a joke about sodomy in the Royal Navy, insulting the clergy, or complaining about her uncle or Dr. Grant, her brother-in-law. One exception which may be more disturbing today than when Mansfield Park was first published, is that Mary jokes about being suspected of trying to murder Tom Bertram, so that Edmund can become the heir: “Fanny, Fanny, I see you smile and look cunning, but, upon my honour, I never bribed a physician in my life.” To joke about this to Fanny, to imply that Fanny would laugh along with her, while Tom is struggling for his life! And to do this in a letter which, after all, Fanny could show to anybody. The passage effectually illustrates Mary Crawford’s moral blindness, her artificiality and the hollowness of her professed friendship for Fanny, whom she doesn’t begin to understand. “[A] mind led astray and bewildered, and without any suspicion of being so; darkened, yet fancying itself light.”
Regardless, many readers of Mansfield Park prefer the lively, witty Mary Crawford to the more stolid, timid, humourless Fanny. Some Mansfield Park fan fiction has been written in which the Crawfords are redeemed and take their supposedly rightful place at centre stage as the hero and heroine. In my variation, I have “amped up” their sociopathic qualities to make it clear that they are dangerous people who don’t care what havoc they create in other people’s lives.
The central example of how modern manners and morals have changed since 1809, is the private theatricals which the young people stage at Mansfield Park, a key part of the plot. Many readers can’t understand, as Lionel Trilling put it, “why it is so very wrong for young people in a dull country house to put on a play.” In my variation, I have explained more about the play, Lovers' Vows, and have included some of the actual dialogue, which should help the reader understand why Sir Thomas, the absent father of the house, would have objected to it. (While reading the actual play, Lovers' Vows, I realized that Mrs. Norris is actually paraphrasing the entry line of the character of Cottager’s Wife when she scolds Fanny for refusing to take the part: “What a piece of work here is about nothing!”)
In addition, modern readers might miss how cleverly Austen chose this play and cast the characters in her novel in the various parts. The dullard Mr. Rushworth plays a Don Juan type, while Mansfield Park’s real Don Juan, Henry Crawford, is busy seducing his fiancée. Edmund is cast as an earnest young clergyman who shaped and formed the mind of his protégée, Amelia, who falls in love with him, just as, in real life, he guided Fanny’s tastes and she secretly loves him. Finally, Maria plays a fallen woman, and becomes one herself when she runs away with Henry Crawford.
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While some of the morals and manners of the Regency era were stricter than ours, there are other aspects of their life which we find incongruous and unjust—slavery for one! Here Sir Thomas scolds his oldest son for going heavily into debt, which obliges him to give a “living”—that is, the income attached to the local parsonage—to someone else, instead of holding it for his second son:
You have robbed Edmund for ten, twenty, thirty years, perhaps for life, of more than half the income which ought to be his. It may hereafter be in my power, or in yours (I hope
