In Mansfield Park Jane Austen is a staunch defender of the idea of conserving the way of life of the landed gentry that was threatened by changes in society. But her conservatism does not extend to her view of marriage. In terms of the relationship between men and women Austen's novel clearly conveys her sense of the need for an equality of relations as the basis of a marriage that works. The two people need not be the same or possess the same abilities and talents. But they must be complementary and one person, traditionally the man, cannot bear the entire weight. Her general outlook on gender relationships was not radical. She believed in marriage and she believed in it as the foundation of the life that she felt should be protected from the advance of the new spirit in society. Indeed the most radical thing about Jane Austen was that she believed that the colloquial domestic novel could be a vessel for serious thought and devoted her energies to producing a work that is complex, profound, reflective and conservative--a radical thing for anyone, especially a woman, to do in the early nineteenth century.
The novel makes both the point about conserving the way of life represented by Mansfield Park and the point about the importance of equal partners in a marriage by demonstrating, by implication, that a marriage between people who are unsuited, unsteady, or simply not in possession of the moral virtues does not preserve that way of life and cannot do so. This is a novel in which there is hardly a good marriage to be found and it begins with the introduction of the three misguided alliances that establish the situation in which Fanny Price will mature. The marriages of the three Ward sisters were all mistakes of one kind or another. Fanny's mother married "to disoblige her family," Lady Bertram proved worse than inadequate to the job of raising her children, and Mrs. Norris would have been impossible no matter who she had...