JANE Austen sometimes suffers, as her heroines often do, from her friends' determination to abide by first impressions. Dazzled by the witty satire directed against the literature of sensibility in her early writings, they agree, despite their divergent approaches, that Austen is constitutionally anti-sentimental. John Halperin's biography of Austen reinforces this view, even seeing a hint of pathology in Austen's attitudes: "inherent cynicism," "cold-blooded judgment," "occasional malice," and "a pessimistic assessment of human nature." (1) If Austen is so viewed, then Mansfield Park becomes a problem text; for its heroine Fanny Price, as Austen's circle of friends recognized immediately, is "all sensibility," an unequivocal woman of feeling, moved to action primarily by her several sentimental attachments to places and people. The anti-sentimental school of Austen criticism tends to focus not on this heroine, whom they see either as art ironic or a flawed construct, but on the theatricals episode of the novel. To them, Sir Thomas Bertram's incineration of all copies of the sentimental German play that his children and their friends had planned to perform at Mansfield represents Austen's opinion: a "rejection of sensibility as a danger to the integrity of the self." (2) Such readings of the novel cannot do justice to Austen's habitual attention to nuance, or to her subtle appreciation of sensibility in general and, in particular, of one of its leading German exponents, Augustus von Kotzebue. Her treatment of Lovers' Vows in Mansfield Park is neither rejection nor simple endorsement of sensibility, but rather a subtle analysis of both the causes and effects of the play's remarkable popularity among the English at the end of the eighteenth century, an analysis quite similar in aim and results to modern reception studies. (3)

Edmund and Fanny, in contrast, demonstrate a more positive reader behavior. They are initially appalled by Lovers' Vows and reject it unqualifiedly, something that earns them the undeserved reputation of inflexible moral rigorists. But readers' first reactions, Iser would say, need not be their final ones. If at first they dismiss the play as a threat to their values, they gradually become willing to speculate about it. They anatomize scenes, players' motives, and their own motives; in the process, they become divided against each other and even themselves. Then, when they articulate their final thoughts on the subject, it becomes clear that both their norms and their relationship have undergone considerable strengthening. For them, Kotzebue's play has become a stimulus to ethical reflection, which, for Jauss and Iser, is one of the highest ends that any literary work can serve (TAR 39-45).

I.

In peopling her novels, as Gilbert Ryle notes in his "Jane Austen and the Moralists," Austen is a precise Aristotelian. She "pin-points the exact quality of character in which she is interested, and the exact degree of that quality, by matching it against the same quality in different degrees, against simulations of the quality, against deficiencies of it." (4) Her characters of sensibility are no exceptions to this modus operandi. The submerged tradition in Austen's novels is largely the earlier literature of sensibility (Richardson, Cowper, Radcliffe) (5) but by the end of the eighteenth century, moralists like Hannah More were distinguishing carefully between excess or counterfeit sensibility and "'right" or "true" sensibility; and even a cursory overview of Austen's literary characters suggests that she both understood the distinctions and subscribed to the golden mean. (6) For Austen, right sensibility, with its keen sensitivity to immediate contexts, is an indispensable prerequisite to the exercise of responsible moral choice. Jean Hagstrum has recently emphasized the centrality of such sensibility to Austen's protagonists (27); if anything, such characters—Catherine Morland, for example, or Mrs. Jennings—err in the direction of correctable excess feeling. Austen's antagonists, in contrast, often lack sensibility in varying degrees. At their worst, they feign its presence, as do the cruel Isabella Thorpe and Lucy Steele.

Just such distinctions still comprise the foundation of assumptions that constellates the characters in Mansfield Park. Mary Crawford and Mrs. Norris are both quite capable of false sensibility; the Price family demonstrate its excess, the Bertram parents its deficiency; and right sensibility is represented in this novel by Edmund Bertram, kind already as a boy, and his "tenderhearted cousin" Fanny Price (204). (7) They both bear all the signs of true sensibility: sensitivity to others, good literature, and nature; pity and kindness; and a profound modesty and a sometimes near-crippling tendency to taciturnity. Whatever else Austen's inclusion of the sentimental Kotzebue play in their story may mean, it simply cannot signify a wholesale rejection of sensibility.

II.

L. F. Thompson, author of one of the few full-length studies of Kotzebue's reception in his own time, stresses the fact that Kotzebue was a child of the eighteenth century, a "cosmopolitan and a rationalist." (11) He did not set new trends so much as participate in existing ones, and one of the most visible of those trends was sensibility. His Lovers' Vows represents a compendium of the sentimental literature of its century. Its main plot, with a persecuted lower-class heroine Agatha, a guilt-driven aristocratic libertine Baron Wildenhaim, and their emotionally saturated reconciliation late in the play, brings to mind Richardson's Pamela. Their story unfolds in a series of memorably affecting scenes: Agatha, returning home after a twenty-year absence, is turned out of the local inn when the landlord discovers that she is ill and penniless; her only son Frederick coincidentally discovers her on the highway on his leave of absence from the army to procure a birth certificate; these circumstances force her to confess that he is illegitimate; poor but kindly cottagers befriend them; the Baron, meanwhile, agonizes in frequent soliloquy over his youthful betrayal of Agatha; when Frederick discovers himself to be the Baron's son, the Baron's immediate wish is to locate and find forgiveness of the mother:

Baron. Agatha, Agatha, do you know this voice?
Agatha. Wildenhaim.
Baron. Can you forgive me?
Agatha. Forgive you! [Embracing him.]

Antecedents for the subplot, which, as E. M. Butler demonstrates meticulously, has parallels to the fortunes of all three of the young women in the Bertram household (Maria, Julia, and Fanny), can be found in early English sentimental drama; for example, The Conscious Lovers of Sir Richard Steele. It recounts the trials of a young hero (Anhalt) and heroine (Amelia), divergent in social background but equal in intelligence, affection, and sensitivity, who eventually persuade their parents to let(them marry. Kotzebue's special variation on this theme is the dominant role he grants to the Baron's daughter, Amelia: it is she who resists the advances of an aristocratic suitor Count Cassel; she who tricks a marriage proposal from the man she prefers, her tutor-chaplain Anhalt:

Anhalt. You misconstrue—you misconceive every thing, I say or do. The subject I came to you upon was marriage.
Amelia. A very proper subject for the man, who has taught me love, and I accept the proposal. (III.ii.39)

and she who pleads with her father, on grounds of affection, to permit their marriage. Sentiment clearly not only informs Kotzebue's techniques but underlies his subject matter: he presents it as an alternative ethic of the younger generation, one assuming the importance of the individual's—especially the female individual's—right to self-determination in questions of marriage.

III.

What should be clear by now is that, in speculating about Kotzebue, Austen was hardly alone. Her contemporaries worried about his damage to English values; critics since then have puzzled over the phenomenon of his English popularity. Mansfield Park addresses both these matters, both effects and causes, but does so by taking a characteristic Austen middle way. The causes, Austen's novel suggests, may be overrated, eradicable; and the effects, to some extent, may be positive. If German sentimental drama threatens certain English values in the immediate sense, in the long run it can bring about a clarification of those values, and chief among them is right sensibility.

IV.

Most commentators on play and novel have noticed Lovers' Vows' potential to lead the vulnerable astray. What they occasionally forget is that the characters, not the German play, are held responsible for this. Austen checkmates any reader impulse to view people as the mere products of their environment by allowing both Mansfield Park and Portsmouth to produce exceptionally good children (Edmund, Fanny, and William) as well as exceptionally bad ones. The "lawlessness" (94) of Mary, Maria, Henry, and Julia has already brought them to the brink of socially unacceptable behavior at Sotherton; the rehearsals simply further their seductive designs. The theatricals, however, do force certain people apart and others together in ways that have a permanent effect on the relationships in the book. Only because Julia gets no role in the play does she begin to admit the attentions of Yates, with whom she finally elopes. Only because frequent rehearsals allow Henry and Maria to hold hands and embrace do they gain the necessary audacity to elope after her marriage to Rushworth. And these elopements, so damaging to the reputation of the Bertram family, will in their turn force Edmund to measure the moral shallows of Mary Crawford's mind, abandon his courtship of her, and turn his attention to Fanny, who is, significantly enough, the only woman whose affections in this story do not waver.

The consternation of Edmun and Fanny over the theatricals is variously viewed by the critical community. Some see it as a reason to condemn hero and heroine as spoilsports, insufferable prigs. Others see it as reason enough to condemn Kotzebue and all he stands for, especially sentiment and theatricals or art. In the present context, the situation may be read another way: not as an attack on sensibility, either in the persons of Edmund and Fanny or in the form of Lovers' Vows, but as an anatomy of the effect of the false sensibility of the Crawfords and the other Bertrams on the true sensibility of hero and heroine, an effect more accurately described, as depicted in Mansfield Park, as a test than a threat. Edmund is, to be sure, temporarily drawn into the sentimental revel, and Fanny into the kinds of emotions that destroy Julia's prudence. At the same time, however, Austen's test shows hero and heroine rallying in the face of the challenge. The play does not tempt them, as it does the others, to a state of abandonment, of alienation from self, family, and society. It rather spurs them to sober reflection. It temporarily divides them from themselves and each other, forces them to question both their own integrity and that of the principles on which they base their actions: "Was she right in refusing ... ?" (153); "Her feelings ought to be respected. Does it not strike you so, Fanny? You hesitate" (155); "Could it be possible? Edmund so inconsistent. Was he not deceiving himself? Was he not wrong? Alas!" (156). As they ponder the problem, however, they eventually articulate their own values, and that with increasing conviction:

Edmund: As we are circumstanced, I must think it would be highly injudicious ... to be imprudent … with regard to Maria whose situation is a very delicate one. (125)
Fanny: ... so totally improper for home presentation.... (137
Edmund: It would show great want of feeling on my father's account, absent as he is, and in some degree of constant danger.... (125)
Fanny: ... the situation of the one [Agatha], and the language of the other [Amelia], so unfit to be expressed by any woman of modesty. (137)
Edmund: It would be taking liberties with my father's house in his absence which could not be justified. (127)

Ultimately their conscience-struck articulation and reflection are not in vain. As a result, they are enabled to meet Sir Thomas upon his return with some vestiges of self-respect, and they are demonstrably strengthened by the process as well. The fact that they bend under pressure is, in the last analysis, a positive sign; it proves them capable of that special combination of sensitive flexibility and principle that distinguishes Austen's protagonists. Each is strengthened privately, moreover, in a different way. Edmund gains self-knowledge, comes face to face with his own fallibility and courageously confesses as much in his candid (generous as well as truthful) remark to his father about Fanny: "Fanny is the only one who has judged rightly throughout, who has been consistent" (187). Fanny, on the other hand, discovers in herself an unrecognized strength, one underestimated frequently by modern critics. In a culture that prizes amiability in women above nearly everything else, one of the hardest things for a young woman to do is resist, say no. Fanny does so, however, twice in this book—once to the theatricals, and once to Henry Crawford's proposal, and the first experience, both in terms of gained self-knowledge and suspicion of Henry, trains her quite literally for the second.

Rousseau was accused by Hannah More of dispensing in the form of his Julie, Emile, and Confessions a "complicated drug" (VI.22). That drug was, needless to say, continental sensibility; and there is every reason to believe that Austen could have said something very similar about Kotzebue's Lovers' Vows. Yet the Mansfield Parks of England, she seems to smile and say, are not necessarily better off if they are never exposed to that temptation. Such an event indubitably represents a test of character and values; but any character or value worth preserving should be able to withstand such a test. If Mansfield Park is no apology for Lovers' Vows, no tribute, then neither is it a condemnation. Sentimental literature, for Austen, was a given, a reality she had dealt with since her earliest fictions and one which showed no sign of waning (and did not, for a century, as we know in retrospect). What she had wished to do from at least Northanger Abbey on was to teach her contemporaries how to read such literature, in order that they could properly value it. Mansfield Park is her one last and most eloquent lesson on that subject. (20)

Notes

1. Cf. Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminisn, and Fiction (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1983), xii, 46, 95 ff., who sees Austen as radical and anti-sentimental; Alistair Duckworth, The Importance of the Estate (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 8-9, who sees her as conservative and anti-sentimental; and John Halperin, The Life of Jane Austen (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 50, 54, 76. (back)
2. Two very helpful volumes, which contain between them many classic essays on Austen or Mansfield Park, are B. C. Southam's Critical Essays on Jane Austen (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968) and "Sense and Sensibility," "Pride and Prejudice " and "Mansfield Park": A Casebook (New York: MacMillan, 1976). They will be referred to hereafter as Southam 1 and Southam 2. The reactions of Austen's contemporaries to Mansfield Park are in Southarn 2:200-07; the phrase "all sensibility" is Denis Donaghue's in Southam 1:56. For other interpretations of the novel as anti-sentimental or self-contradictory, see Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1975); Marian E. Fowler, "The Courtesy Book Heroine of Mansfield Park," UTQ 44 (1974): 31-46; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 163-72; and Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 212-34. A compelling recent argument for self-contradiction is Joseph Litvak's "The Infection of Acting: Theatricals and Theatricality in Mansfield Park," ELH 93.2 (1986): 331-55 (here after cited in the text). He presents Mansfield Park as a highly complex document, "governed by a conservatism … riddled with internal contradictions" (331). A passing reference to Fanny's "claustral sensibility" (347) is the only direct attention Litvak pays to the underlying question central to this essay, that of Austen's stance towards the literary and cultural phenomenon of sensibility; but her attitude towards theatricality is clearly a related question. See section I of this essay and especially note 10 for further discussion of Litvak's article. (back)
3. The outlines of Jauss's new literary history were sketched in his Literaturgeschichte als Prvokations der Literaturwissenschaft (1967), now translated by Timothy Bahti as Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1982). He discusses the reading process more closely in Aesthetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (1977), also translated by the same press (1982). Jauss's theoretical model for the reading process compares favorably to theose of Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) and Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr. and Mark Bracher, "Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the Re-Formation of the Self: A New Direction for Reader-Reception Theory," PMLA 100 (1985): 342-54. Jauss's works will hereafter be cited in the text as TAR and AEIH. (back)
4. Ryle's remarks are in Southam 1:108; cf. Stuart M. Tave, Some Words of Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 182 and also P. Gila Reinstein, "Moral Priorities in Sense and Sensibility," Renascence 35 (1983): 269-83. Tave will hereafter be cited in the text. (back)
5. Austen's pervasive debt to the literature of sensibility can be inferred from Frank W. Bradbrook's discussion, Jane Austen and her Predecessors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966) and Kenneth Moler's Jane Austen's Art of Allusion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968) but is made explicit by Henrietta ten Harmsel's Jane Austen: A Study in Fictional Conventions (The Hague: Mouton, 1964) and Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic (Princeton University Press, 19870): ch. 3. Recent studies have just begun to emphasize the complexity of Austen's stance towards her predecessors. Hannah More's Works are cited from the American edition of Harper (New York, 1835). Volume and page number will hereafter be included in the text. (back)
6. This minority view is defended in Ian Watt's often cited 1961 essay, "Sense Triumphantly Introduced to Sensibility" (Southam 2:119-29); R. F. Brissenden's Virtue in Distress (New York: barnes and Noble, 1974), chs. 2 and 5; and Jean Hagstrums's Sex and Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 1-23, 268-74. Three exceptionally useful essays on sensibility are those of Stephen D. Cox, "The Stranger Within Thee": Concepts of the Self in Late Eigtheenth-Century Literature (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980); William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London: New Directions, 1951), 250-69, 306-10; and Raymond Williams, Keywords (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 235-38. (back)
7. Page numbers cited the text are to R. W. Chapman's edition of Mansfield Park, vol. 3 of The Novels of Jane Austen (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1934). Patricia Meyer Spacks' The Female Imagination (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976) which investigates Austen's character psychology, indicates her recognition of traits central to right sensibility, especially attending to others and concealing of feelings. (back)
8. Dvora Zelicovici, "The Inefficacy of Lovers' Vows," ELH 50 (1983): 531-40, hereafter cited in the text, may be profitably compared to E. M. Butler's earlier "'Mansfield Park' and Kotzebue's 'Lovers' Vows,'" MLR 28 (1933): 326-37 and William Reitzel's "Mansfield Park and Lovers' Vows," RES 9 (1933): 451-56. (back)
9. The citations are from the English translation of the play that Austen and her contemporaries favored, Mrs. [Elizabeth] Inchbald's of 1798, now available in vol. 7 of Eighteen th-Centu ry English Drama (Frankfurt: Minerva, 1969). It is also available in the Chapman edition of Mansfield Park. It will hereafter be cited in the text by act, scene, and page number. (back)
10. For the suggestion that Mansfield Park may be a self-conscious demonstration of comic theatricality, I am indebted to Vladimir Nabokov's essay on Austen's novel in his Lectures on Literature (London: Weidenfels and Nicolson, n.d.), 9. Litvak's article offers occasional support for inferences drawn in my essay (see esp. notes 13, 15, 16, 18), but as much as I admire Litvak's feminist interpretation, it would be disingentious of me to make light of our differences. His post-structuralist reading of the novel may not be easily reconciled with my phenomenological one. For an incisive discussion of the nature of the incompatibility of the so-called hermeneutics of suspicion and the hermeneutics of trust, see Paul B. Armstrong's "The Conflict of Interpretations and the Limits of Pluralism," PMLA 98.3 (1983): 341-52. My interpretation disagrees most significantly with Litvak's claim that the society at Mansfield Park relies on theatricality on an everyday basis, both before and after the Crawfords' visit, for its continued survival (346). As I read the novel, Sir Thomas, Fanny, and Edmund become increasingly aware that exclusive emphasis on external performance can lead to folly, and beyond that, to the very kind of destructive immorality it seeks to prevent. The theatricals episode, in other words, effects their cure (see especially my introduction and section IV). Litvak, in contrast, is fairly certain that the novel, whatever Austen may have intended, does not achieve such a cure: "the theatricals serve not as a homeopathic cure—although Austen might want us to view them as one—but as a 'diversion' ... from the subtler and more comprehensive theatricality that persists long after Sir Thomas Bertram has reclaimed his study" (343). (back)
11. L. E Thompson, Kotzebue: A Survey of His Progress in France and England (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1928), 54 will be hereafter cited in the text. Walter Sellier's dissertation stresses theater history, Kotzebue in England (Leipzig: Oswald Schmidt, 1901). (back)
12. Both of these statements are from the Monthly Review, generally known to be one of the more hospitable journals to German literature in the period: the first from vol. 27 (1798): 580, the other from vol. 29 (1799): 102-3. (back)
13. Two publications that fanned English fear of German literature and fuelled the publications of the anti-Jacobins were John Robison's Proofs of a Conspiracy (London, 1797) and Augustin de Barruel's Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobism (London, 1797-98). The story is usefully recounted in E W. Stokoe's German Influence in the English Romantic Period 1788-1818 (1926; New York: Russell and Russell, 1963) and John Mander's Our Gcrinan Cousins (London: John Murray, 1974). Cf. Litvak: "As in so much poison of theatricality is inseparable from the right wing literature of the period, the poison of foreignness" (338). (back)
14. J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800 (1932; Lincoln University of Nebraska Press, 1961): 317. (back)
15. A reception event in 1813 may have sitrred Austen's memories of the anti-German fears of the late 90s: it certainly did so among periodical reviewers: the publication of de Staël's de l'Allemagne. See Mander 40, 51, and the more thorough Emma Gerturde Jaeck's Madame de Staël and the Spread of German Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1915), 73-76. Litvak's discussion of Hannah Moore and Thomas Gisborne's Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797) suggests that some of the anxiety about the influence of theater on women had to do with the conviction that women's natural propensity to "imitate" and to "conform" rendered them especially vulnerable to corruption from imitations on the stage (335-39). (back)
16. This idea is admirably explored by H. C. Finsen, "Empfindsamkeit als Raum der Alternative: Untersuchungen am Beispiel von Goethes 'Die Leiden des jungen Werthers,"' DU 29 (1977): 27-38. Litvak attributes some of Fanny's unease in such scenes as these to her realization that reading, which she loves, including reading aloud, which she also loves, is not so very different from acting (347). (back)
17. David Lodge, "A Question of judgement: The Theatricals at Mansfield Park," NCF 17 (1962): 275-82 also insists that the theatricals are not bad in themselves but nevertheless do constitute a moral test for the characters involved in them. (back)
18. Cf. Tave, "Fanny … is drawn into the same whirl of unworthy emotions as the others" (191) or Litvak, "Fanny's composure is merely superficial, a defensive fiction" (334). (back)
19. The Myth of Fanny's Perfection has recently been revived by Fowler's article. (back)
20. I wish to thank the NEH and the Fulbright Commission for funding the research that made this article possible. (back)