Abstract
Nearly every critical discussion of Mansfield Park deals with the private theatricals, and understandably so, since it is the most extensive and most crucial sequence in the first half of the novel. Yet little attention has been directed to the integral relationship between the novel and Kotzebue's play, Lovers' Vows, chosen by the would-be performers. The one significant exception is provided by E. M. Butler, who long ago pointed out the striking correspondence in structure and situation between play and novel. Butler, in fact, contends that Mansfield Park is 'nothing more or less than Lovers' Vows translated into terms of real life with the moral standards subverted by Kotzebue neatly reinverted. She goes on to argue, as H. Winifred Husbands points out, that Austen wrote Mansfield Park <chiefly, if not entirely, as a protest against the lax morality of Lovers' Vows.' More recent critics, while not sharing E. M. Butler's view of a point-to-point correspondence between play and novel, nevertheless agree that in Mansfield Park Austen is attacking Kotzebue's play. A. Walton Litz, for example, claims that Lovers' Vows stands as an emblem of those forces which threaten the neo-classical security of Mansfield Park: uncontrolled feeling, disregard for traditional restraint, and contempt for social form.2 For Marilyn Butler, Kotzebue is a one-sided propagandist championing every position the anti-Jacobin abhors. Kotzebue is supposedly the apostle of sexual liberty.3 If we lay aside preconceived notions regarding the playwright and his play, and attend to the action and dialogue, it becomes clear that in both of its plots (serious and comic) the libertine is under attack. Far from exalting sexual liberty, Lovers' Vows exposes the viciousness of immoral conduct and its miserable consequences. It does not condone and reward license, but requires repentance and restitution (not retribution). If anything, Lovers' Vows is a didactic play with an overinsistence on poetic justice and moral judgment. Neither feelings nor intentions are more important than or even equivalent to right actions.4 The general stan-
Published Version
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