SOURCE: “Personal Identity in Mansfield Park: Forms, Fictions, Role-Play, and Reality,” in SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 27, No. 4, Autumn, 1987, pp. 595-608.

In the following essay, Bevan discusses acting and fiction-making as inauthentic forms of self-expression in Mansfield Park.

Two papers which deal pertinently with acting as a rhetorically crucial theme in Mansfield Park are those by Lionel Trilling and Thomas R. Edwards.¹ Of these, Lionel Trilling's seminal essay fails to observe the pervasiveness of the theme of role-play in the novel as a whole. Professor Edwards, though he deals cogently with the whole question of acting and its relationship to emotional reality in Mansfield Park, tends to focus his attention almost exclusively on the personal relationships explored and developed through the novel, and to ignore the wider significance of such relationships placed as they are within a broad thematic context of personal identity in its relation...