Pulpit, Stage, and Novel: "Mansfield Park" and Mrs. Inchbald's "Lovers' Vows"

The point, she claims, is that the characters in the novel do not learn from the play; its lessons make no impact. One argument against this claim is Jane Austen's evident contempt for naive didacticism (Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick and wicked)2; her sense of the high significance of language and style in relation to moral effect. Inadequacy and affectation of language are likely to indicate the dangerous superficiality or hypocrisy with which social behaviour may be recommended. Her novels are instructive examples of the complexity, the fine shading, the relativity to context and practice, of values which can nevertheless be generalized in principle; understanding and judgement are not improved crude and sentimental fictions. Nor does Dr. Zelicovici's claim alter the force of Marilyn Butler's argument about acting in private, which uses as evidence Thomas Gisborne's account of the injuriousness of acting to the female sex, encouraging vanity and destroying diffidence by the unrestrained familiarity with the other sex which inevitably results from being joined with them in the drama.3 Jane Austen had read Gisborne's Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797) with approval in 1805, though should be said that being pleased with [Gisborne] (she does not specify the book) does not mean she endorsed everything in it; she had, for some reason, quite determined not to read it before Cassandra's recommendation.4 Dr. Butler counters the illuminating but misleading claim of Lionel Trilling that acting is dangerous within the novel because lures the honest soul into insincerity: