Why the Show Must Not Go On: “Real Character” and the Absence of Theatrical Performances in <i>Mansfield Park</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article revisits the question of why Jane Austen refuses to portray any theatrical performances within Mansfield Park (1814), even though much of the plot concerns a group of young people attempting to put on a play. While scholars have generally abandoned the idea that this choice reveals Austen’s puritanical distaste for the theatre, it remains unusual in the context of other roughly contemporary novels that also involve the theatre or theatricals. Looking at examples of such theatrical novels shows that their staging of performances tends to disrupt the idea of character as stable identity, in much the same way that Lisa Freeman has suggested theatre itself did at the time. Though her use of interiority has been much discussed as the tool Austen employs to construct a sense of essential identity for her characters, her decision to forego the direct representation of various theatrical moments while focusing readers’ attention on their consequences is another way Austen convinces us that the novel is able to distinguish “real” character from the performance of it.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".