Focusing on the well-known episode of the theatrical in Mansfield Park, this article relies on recent criticism as well as on Judith Butler's concept of performance in order to interrogate the way Austen makes it impossible for readers to adopt a safely binary understanding of play versus reality. In the modern post-Enlightenment England she describes, power implies a constant performance of consent in the social world. Her novel dramatizes the condition of women through a dialogue interwoven by Austen between forms of performances explicitly recognized as such and the author's own realistic style of fiction.