Theatricals and Theatricality in Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park"

Abstract

Theatricals and Theatricality in Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” Abstract “Mansfield Park” is one of the Jane Austen’s novel that deals most directly with theatrical subjects. Themes in the novel are strongly connected with the choice of the popular eighteenth-century play, “Lover’s Vows”. A performance of that play as a home-theatrical covers a significant place in the first volume of the book. In the novel, The Bertrams, her cousins and their fashionable new neighbours Mary and Henry Crawford, decide to set a staging of a popular drama to spend joyful time, while patriarch Sir Thomas is on business trip in Antigua. “Theatre” at Mansfield Park extends from billiard room to all places, Sir Thomas’s Study. The episode in the first volume that describes Sir Thomas’s return from Antigua, is the point when theatricality in this novel is destroyed by his order to burn every copy of Lover’s Vow. Despite the destruction of theatre as place, theatricality as a topic turns out to spread over the novel. Even though the theatrical content occupies a dominant position in the novel, the vision of the theatre presented in the novel might be considered complicated, even negative. The theatricals initiate acts of moral degradation that the novel ultimately condemns. Furthermore, the theatre and the specific play chosen are criticized and resisted on moral grounds by main characters that are identified to be positive characters (Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram), and celebrated by those who are considered to be characters with lower moral values (Maria Bertram, Tom Bertram and The Crawfords). Additionally, by paying attention to the description of the theatricals indicated by Fanny Price and Henry Crawford, it is possible to examine the similarity of their language. Although each of them states their opinion in a completely different way, both Fanny and Henry characterize theatricals in terms of “discontent” or “anxiety”. For them, the theatre is not just an object but the very site of anxiety. In “Mansfield Park”, the theatre which colonizes the rest of the novel, becomes strongly connected with unavoidable social existence and political postures. As a novel about theatricality, “Mansfield Park” describes theatrical forms as a danger threatening the interests of a certain period society. This paper aims to demonstrate the effect of the theme Theatre and Theatricality in the novel of “Mansfield Park” by Jane Austen by providing a deep literary analysis and approach to the topic from different perspectives.