The Importance Of Bad Education In Jane Austen's Mansfield Park

Jane Austen in her art of the transpersonalization of human emotions includes the universal pattern of the art and the cultural paradigms. In pursuance of the milieu of her times she satirizes the social setup foregrounding the inner darkness that pervades human psyche. Her art of characterisation is symbolic of a metamorphosis that her characters undergo shunning the evil and symbolising the triumph of reason.

The objective of present paper is to analyse the properties of social convergence and cultural changes. At the instance of language society too acts as an organic force and creates certain marks of its territories which mould the behavioural norms of the man who inherits it. The paper also envisages to examine the invisible threads that

Bad education is the root of the many problems that arise and is the central and comprehensive theme of Mansfield Park. Mary and Henry are only the most conspicuous proofs of bad education in the broad sense of religious, moral, and social environment. They are from London where, at the home of their uncle a dissolute, adulterous Admiral, they have received a bad moral education. Not only Mary and Henry, but also Maria and Julia- as the novelist says and as their father laments, too late-have had no proper upbringing. Their preparation for life’s duties has been left to Mrs.

The novel witnesses how the value of Church and Clergyman is deteriorated in the early nineteenth century. The clergy on the whole becomes an uninteresting profession as well of little ‘importance’ or ‘consequence’ for the society. As Lionel Trilling comments:

In nineteenth-century England the ideal of professional commitment inherits a large part of the moral prestige of the ideal of the gentleman. . . . The concern with the profession was an aspect of the ethical concept which was proponent in the spiritual life of England in the nineteenth century, the concept of duty. (Trilling 1959,215)

Even then there are people like Edmund and Fanny who thinks choice of profession as a social institution. The Crawfords should so disastrously lack a real understanding of the nature of sermons and preaching, which reveals their mental and moral deficiencies to Fanny and Edmund. In fact there is contradiction between the city people (Mary and Henry) and country one (Edmund and Fanny) about the choice of