Morality In Elizabeth Inchbald's Mansfield Park

imposed by social norms. (Butler 1975, 28)
Mansfield Park is a play that contains a play; the novel itself is a drama within the larger drama played out on the stage of human affairs. Acting of Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows is a moral and ethical matter, a matter of serious social consequence: by reading aloud something written and published by someone else, people may say to one another, and in public, what social convention would not permit them to say in ordinary circumstances unless they were willing to abide by the consequences of their speaking. Kelly Gray comments in this regard:
The subject matter of the play, sexual seduction and liberal social views, is relevant too, but it is the enacting of the play’s love texts without any consequence, or without responsibility for any consequence, that is improper and inappropriate. (Gray 1982, 38)
To make speeches of love to another person in private, let alone in public was a marrying matter. To speak one’s love was to undertake to accept the ethical consequences of such verbal action; to do otherwise, to speak love while not intending to accept the consequences, or to speak love that was not felt, was coquetry or mere seduction and did said, often, to social banishment.

It singles out the novel as the sanctuary of austere and unforgiving self-knowledge. The novelist’s omniscience imposes on all characters; and exposes the drama as the shoddier realm of evasive and corrupt self-dramatization. But this opposition is not blatantly stated in Mansfield Park. Although the drama is condemned, only implicitly is the novel proposed as an alternative, because the novel’s virtues are now the undemonstrative qualities of Fanny Price. The novel owes its power to its discretion in seeing through people who congratulate themselves on their impenetrability, in making the obtuse aware of their own shifty motives; it is superior because it is circumspect, stealthy and externally