"There is nothing awful here, nothing melancholy, nothing grand."

Chapter 9:

"They entered.  Fanny's imagination had prepared her for something grander than a mere, spacious, oblong room, fitted up for the purpose of devotion...'but I have not yet left Oxford long enough to forget what chapel prayers are.'"

Such a passage discusses the revolution in consciousness that had undergone in British society.  Grace, salvation, and authority lay no longer in Christ, but in the pound.  In Jane Austen's time, the gradations of society and its well-ordering seems now to lay against a wholly secular template, as evidenced by the opinions of Miss Crawford, as well as the exacting, monetary language that courses through the entire text.

A study of the shift from non-secular to secular society, as presented in Mansfield Park, can raise interesting topics in the close reading of mythological language specifically.  A lot of talk in the novel is focused on harmony and distance: with more distance, temporally (and perhaps spatially), characters in the novel are able to better understand the processes of harmony that characterize points of deferance [should I be using difference here, or should I leave Derrida alone, refresher please?!].  Likewise, we read MP from a vantage point of differance; our more liberalized state exposes the monetary myth latent in Austen's language.

This myth surfaces powerfully in the way that the narrator is not necessarily omniscient; while the narrator cannot really read private thoughts, the narration makes assertions which would depend on wholly submitting to a certain mythological system of reading the world.  By not making this recognition explicit, the mythological status of the language and the thoughts employed by the characters becomes ever stronger.  Oftentimes, disharmony arises when they, the characters, become lost in the heat of myth and are unable to take a distance from social norms and recognize the harmonizing attempts of that system.

So, in the initial disharmony between Edmund and Mary, we see Mary unable to step outside of her time and place and recognize the harmonizing effects of the church in a bygone Age.