Money and Marriage Theme Analysis

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 articulate a view of marriage as, ideally, a love match. For example, Sir Thomas worries about Maria’s loveless engagement to Mr. Rushworth, and Edmund tells Fanny that she should only marry for love as Henry courts her.

Marriage, moreover, seems to be the only socially acceptable form that love is allowed to take—extramarital affairs are roundly condemned in the book. Most notably, the characters express unanimous horror after Maria and Henry disappear together to pursue their adulterous affair. Mary even suggests that Maria and Henry’s affair must end in a marriage, because otherwise there would be no saving them from total social disgrace.

But despite the characters’ professed commitment to marital love-matches, marriage in practice throughout the book serves primarily as a means for economic or social advancement, not emotional fulfillment. For instance, Austen shows the reader the transactional nature of marriage through the Bertrams’ open acknowledgement and acceptance that Maria married Mr. Rushworth for material comfort and social influence rather than love. Likewise, Fanny’s family enthusiastically encourages her to marry Henry Crawford because the match is socially and financially advantageous, despite the fact that Fanny repeatedly states that she does not love Henry. Meanwhile, Mary Crawford outright refuses to marry Edmund, despite her love for him, because she sees the marriage as being neither economically nor socially beneficial. So while Austen’s characters obsessively idealize marriage as a deep intimate connection between two lovers, in practice they carry out marriage primarily as an economic transaction.

The characters’ insistence on financially advantageous marriages makes their veneration of marriage bitterly ironic. The characters profess to cherish marriage as an institution, but they constantly degrade it by making it merely an instrument for achieving material, as opposed to emotional, comfort. That, in turn, renders the entire novel profoundly ironic, since the novel orbits around an institution that has clearly been hollowed out of any emotional or spiritual meaning. In a further irony, despite the novel’s commitment to a story that centers around marriage, and despite the characters’ insistence upon marriage as the only acceptable format for love, Austen gives the reader virtually no positive portraits of married life in Mansfield Park. Examples of messy marriages, on the other hand, are plentiful. Despite the fact that Maria married for money, Maria’s marriage to Mr. Rushworth is a disaster and, ironically, leaves her as a social outcast with a meager budget courtesy of her father.

Marriage seems to be particularly devastating for Austen’s female characters, even those who married “well.” Mrs. Grant, for example, is made miserable by her husband’s demanding expectations of her role as a housekeeper. Even Lady Bertram, whose marriage to Sir Thomas is not explicitly described as negative, suffers from such a profound sense of apathy in her marriage that she, devoid of any personality or passion, rarely leaves her couch.

Austen’s cynicism towards marriage, palpable in her depiction of marriage as a financial transaction, paired with her many portraits of unhappy marriages and their negative effects on women, ultimately renders the book’s “happy ending” somewhat sour. Even the marriages that are purportedly love-matches end poorly, like Mrs. Price’s marriage to Mr. Price, which produces a domestic life that is hectic, financially strained, and haunted by Mr. Price’s alcoholism. Even Edmund and Fanny’s marriage, supposedly a perfect match, and seemingly the desired ending to the book, is somewhat tainted. Edmund’s quick change of affection from Mary Crawford towards Fanny comes across as sudden and, as a result, unfulfilling and unconvincing. Likewise, though the narrator tells the reader that their marriage is happy, the book ends without showing any evidence of marital bliss. Both Fanny and the reader get what they are looking for, but Fanny’s nuptial success seems like far less of a triumph when put in context of dark view of marriage portrayed in the rest of the book. By making Fanny victorious in winning Edmund’s hand in marriage, but also showing how that accomplishment might not actually be such a happy one, Austen sardonically implies that the marriage plot, when carried out to its inevitable conclusion, is fundamentally unsatisfying because the institution of marriage itself is toxic.