Mansfield Park Themes

Like other Jane Austen novels, Mansfield Parks observes—and scathingly satirizes—the fickle hearts and courtship rituals of members of England’s genteel class as they fall in and out of love. Like so many other novels of its day, Mansfield Park organizes itself around a marriage plot, meaning that the action of the story drives toward a wedding as the plot’s culmination and fulfillment. The book’s characters talk about marriage obsessively, and as they do, they repeatedly…

Throughout Mansfield Park, Austen explores the complex relationship between manners and morality. Austen’s view of manners is difficult to identify, in part because Austen’s characters do not clearly define what they mean when they refer to “manners.” The meaning of manners in the book seems to be somewhat fluid, sometimes referring to knowledge of etiquette, sometimes to general politeness, sometimes to modesty, or gratitude, or pleasantness of personality, or social grace. Looked at more…

Throughout the book, characters in Mansfield Park move between their country homes at Mansfield and the surrounding property and cities like London and Portsmouth for business and for pleasure. Over the course of these travels, and through the characters’ discussions of these two different kinds of environments, Austen expresses a difference in how she and her characters view rural spaces versus how they see urban spaces, and how, although city-spaces are viewed as more sociable…

Throughout Mansfield Park, issues of inheritance and meritocracy recur as Austen explores how characters’ different positions in families and society affect their incomes. Austen models the inheritance system in the novel on that of real-world England in the early 1800s, when inheritance worked through the system of male primogeniture, meaning that a father’s entire fortune goes to his first born son. Often, childless uncles’ would set aside money for younger male children. Otherwise, younger sons…