Issue 45: Spring 2019

OF VICES AND REARS or Why I’ve Stopped Reading Jane Austen

I’m sick of rereading Jane Austen.

I’m sick of rereading Jane Austen. Oh, I know, she’s a great writer. I don’t dispute that fact. I’m a fan. I’ve read all her novels many times. I continue to follow the literature about her—including Helena Kelly’s recent attempt to turn her into a twenty-first century, right-thinking feminist. It’s not that I don’t admire her lively characters, and the acuity of her observations, and the way her constant irony bristles with intelligence.

It’s her dirty joke.

There’s only one in the entire canon. It’s a pun, and it’s still elegant and funny, two hundred years on. It occurs in Mansfield Park, her longest and most difficult novel, the subject of which, she herself says in a letter to her sister, is “vocation,” and whose heroine is wholly passive, her only freedom the dearly-bought power to say “no.” It’s delivered at a dinner party given by Sir Thomas Bertram, owner of the estate that gives the book its title. The speaker is Mary Crawford, beautiful, accomplished, urbane—and dangerous:

Of various admirals, I could tell you a great deal; of them and their flags, and the gradation of their pay, and their bickerings and jealousies. But in general, I can assure you that they are all passed over, and all very ill used. Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices, I saw enough. Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.

This is a clear reference to sodomy in the British navy, along with the equally clear suggestion that some of the admirals who frequented her uncle’s house are practitioners of a “vice” that constituted a capital offence at the time.

In a seminal essay, “Buggery and the British Navy, 1700-1861” (go ahead, please, suspect me of a pun), Arthur N. Gilbert [i] tells us that the British navy prosecuted sodomy with particular rigour during the Napoleonic wars, and that was Austen’s period. More men were hanged for sodomy than for murder; and when, mercifully, a court marshal spared the unfortunate sailor the ultimate penalty, flogging was routine. That’s flogging: a thousand lashes—more for buggery than for other offences, such as striking an officer or desertion (six hundred lashes in those cases). To us, that’s unimaginable. Would there still be skin on your back after such punishment? Mary Crawford’s joke is therefore subversive. She is suggesting that the institution condoned within its highest ranks a practice that it treated with opprobrium and extreme penalties among the rank and file. In a novel that celebrates the virtues of established authority, she is revealed, in this single joke, as dangerously corrupt.

Edmund Bertram, Sir Thomas’ second son, is her principal interlocutor. He is falling in love with her, and ultimately must choose between this worldly woman and his priestly vocation. He gets the joke—and disapproves: “Edmund again felt grave, and only replied, ‘It is a noble profession.’” Fanny Price, the penniless niece to whom Sir Thomas gives a home, is also part of the exchange. She is probably too innocent to understand the joke. However, she does understand the disrespect with which Mary Crawford treats the royal navy, in which Fanny’s adored brother William serves. She is therefore offended. As she tells Edmund the next day, Mary Crawford’s uncle, the Admiral, deserved more “respect” from her—just as Sir Thomas Bertram and the established order that he represents will deserve more respect from his own daughters, as the plot works itself out and Maria Bartram runs off with Mary’s dissolute brother, Henry, the suitor whom Fanny refuses. The intensely passive, misunderstood and undervalued Fanny is the moral heart of the book, and that heart is deeply Tory.

But back to sodomy and the fleet.

Gilbert offers a few quotes from naval courts martial where sodomy cases were tried. The reality was awful. Closely confined quarters meant virtually no privacy for ordinary men in an all-male environment (That resolute landlubber, Dr. Johnson, compared a ship to a prison—“except with the risk of being drowned”). Yet despite the likelihood of detection, and despite onerous penalties, men still risked having sex with other men. The courts martial testimonies are very graphic—“he put his yard [that is, his cock] in my arse and wiggled it around and then he pissed inside me.” The data says a lot about the unquestioning opprobrium accorded homosexual activity. It also testifies to the irrepressible nature of the men who took those risks, despite the consequences.

I love Jane Austen. Yet here she dismisses all that human suffering and need in a witticism that is intended to reveal the questionable moral judgment of Mary Crawford—not of the slave-owning Sir Thomas, and certainly not of the Royal Navy. And when I dig deeper, I find that she must have been fully aware of the legal system that persecuted gay people, not just in the Royal Navy but in the market town next door. Local newspapers throughout the period regularly published the trials and punishments of men caught having sex with other men. Sometimes they were hanged, sometimes they got fines and a couple of days in the stocks or six months in an “iron cage” at a work house. It was part of the texture of ordinary life[ii].

Do we edit such references out of books like these, the way prudish Victorians cut out sex? Where would we stop?

Austen is not the only writer whose views make me uncomfortable. I can’t help loving Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s brave, lonely, alcoholic hero. His descriptions of Los Angeles and its light and the unreal quality of its buildings are brief haikus of existential despair. Yet Marlowe is homophobic and racist. Evelyn Waugh famously praises the timeless innocence and fresh prose of Chandler’s contemporary, P.G. Wodehouse. And he’s right. The characters are stock, the situations are familiar, and wouldn’t it be nice if, just for once, Bertie and Jeeves stopped the patter and got into bed together? Yet again and again, Wodehouse produces comedy of pure gold—until we stumble over references to blackface. And what about Waugh himself, whose sexual activity at Oxford was extravagantly gay?[iii] As a writer he denied that identity, first with easy mockery of gays in satires like Decline and Fall or Vile Bodies, and later, in the Sword of Honor trilogy (which he clearly considered his legacy book), the repugnant character of Ludovic is gay, a study in moral failure. Brideshead Revisited, the bestseller of which Waugh was always somewhat ashamed, is deeply marred by this denial: the student love affair between Sebastian and Charles remains incandescent; the one between Charles and Sebastian’s sister, Julia, is wooden and unreal. (In a lovely, but probably unconscious, irony the fictional Ludovic buys the Crouchback’s Italian villa with the proceeds of his own American best seller, The Death Wish.) Do we edit such references out of books like these, the way prudish Victorians cut out sex? Where would we stop? As a Catholic, I’m offended by references to “papists” in Sterne and restoration comedy. But I’ll never stop loving the smutty splendour of those plays.

One approach to the problem is assessing the depth of the prejudice. Is the troubling reference merely a kind of barnacle, an attitude from a different age that clings to the text almost by accident, a cultural hitchhiker? Or does it reveal something deeper that is intrinsic to the writer’s vision?

Recent scholars have focused on two themes in Mansfield Park: the institution of slavery in Britain’s imperial project and the role of women in an hierarchical, paternalistic society. Sir Thomas is a slave-owner with a sugar estate in Antigua. In the midst of the naval war with France, he makes a risky voyage to the Caribbean to settle problems with his plantation; clearly its revenues are critical to the established order of Mansfield Park. Austen was aware of contemporary debates over slavery. One of her naval brothers visited Antigua and reported unfavourably on the treatment of slaves. She began Mansfield Park in 1811, not long after Parliament outlawed the slave trade (but not ownership) in 1807. However, the book remains ambiguous on the subject. Fanny Price, the book’s shrinking heroine, directs a question about slavery to her uncle, on his return from Antigua; but we know neither the question nor his response. Some critics—Helena Kelly in particular—argue that the book is an anti-slavery tract. However, it’s hard to reconcile that argument with the fact that Sir Thomas keeps his profitable plantation, does not free his slaves, and that his own dominance in the microcosm of Mansfield Park is reaffirmed in the book’s conclusion. Further, that microcosm is presented as an ideal world.

In a similar way, the book affirms a passive and subservient role for women in a male-dominated moral order. I often think that the idealized world of Mansfield Park has much in common with the plantation society of Virginia: agrarian, aristocratic, rich, where white women enjoy a protected and privileged status and are expected to provide the kind of moral glue that justifies its institutions, including slavery.

 

In each of Austen’s completed novels, there is a contrasting pair of men: Mr. Wrong and Mr. Right. Mr. Wrong (Willoughby, Wickham, Henry Crawford, Frank Churchill, Mr. Elliot[iv]) is sexy, charming, and dangerous, the direct heir of Clarissa’s Lovelace, albeit sentimentalized. Frank Churchill has been domesticated by the influence of Jane Fairfax, and the threat of Mr. Elliot is more dynastic than sexual; but Willoughby, Wickham, and Crawford all ruin, or seek to ruin, the women who fall for them. In contrast, Mr. Right is sober, established, older, and safe. The heroine’s task—and the plot of the book—consists of distinguishing one from the other, and learning to love Mr. Right.

But how ‘right’ is Mr. Right? In Austen’s moral universe, we are invited to believe that Colonel Brandon, Darcy, Edmund, Mr. Knightly, and Captain Wentworth are as virtuous—that is, as virginal—as the women they marry.

Mansfield Park doubles the dilemma of the virtuous characters, male as well as female. Like Fanny, Edmund must distinguish between parallel opposites: she is Miss Right, while Mary Crawford is Miss Wrong. I think that Austen is referring to this dynamic (unique to Mansfield Park) when she tells her sister that the book is about “vocation.” The dualism echoes Book One of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a national epic better read in Austen’s day than ours, where the Redcrosse knight is seduced by Duessa (the false faith) but is reclaimed by the pure and Fanny-like Una (the true faith).

But how “right” is Mr. Right? In Austen’s moral universe, we are invited to believe that Colonel Brandon, Darcy, Edmund, Mr. Knightly, and Captain Wentworth are as virtuous—that is, as virginal—as the women they marry. In this, she’s following a cultural shift, under the influence of an evangelical reform movement that sought to purge the dissolute excesses of the Regency, and replace them with the gentlemanly ideal of the right-thinking, church-going family man. But in reality, these are wealthy men of the world, who had every opportunity to visit the brothels of London and the prostitutes of Bath. London was the largest and richest city in Europe at the time, famous for its 80 thousand prostitutes and many brothels. Given its small geographical footprint, sex workers were highly visible, even to country gentlewomen like Austen’s heroines, and famous courtesans displayed themselves at theatres, like celebrities today.

Like the plantation ladies who never acknowledged the resemblance between the children of their slaves and their own menfolk, the women of Austen’s novels know, and choose not to know, that their men live by a sexual standard different from their own. That makes Mary Crawford’s gay joke all the more important, since she is lifting the veil, just a little, on the social hypocrisy of the period. In this, and in her financial independence, she is a liberated woman. She therefore offers an interesting contrast to both Fanny and Maria Bertram. Maria destroys herself and threatens the social order by her reckless sexual misconduct with Mr. Wrong. The submissive Fanny Price turns out to be Sir Thomas’ “true daughter” and in the happy ending of the story, marries Edmund, the cousin she loves like a brother (the church’s prohibitions against the consanguinity of cousins are quietly ignored).

Another writer might present Mary Crawford’s contrasting fate as a legitimate alternative to the subservience and female health risks of early 19th century marriage—but that’s not what Austen, herself unmarried, does. In her telling, Mary Crawford’s fate is one of exile, although she ends up living comfortably in London with her agreeable widowed sister, Mrs. Grant. Having once known Edmund, she finds richer and more fashionable suitors inadequate. Marriage, and with it, happiness, eludes her grasp.

Thus, the Vices and Rears joke is no mere barnacle attached to the stately vessel of Austen’s craft, and the clash of values between Austen’s world and ours goes far beyond Chandler’s homophobia, or Wodehouse’s blackface, or references to “papists” in Sterne or Farquar, or Shakespeare’s disgust at the breath and sweaty nightcaps of the crowd. It’s closer to the self-loathing of Evelyn Waugh, who forced himself into the role of a mock-Edwardian paterfamilias and repeatedly betrayed his gay identity in his fiction. The victim turns true believer—and agent of oppression.

So—how is it possible to read such a writer today?

There is another conventional response to the question that distinguishes between propaganda and true literature. In this argument, true literature necessarily embeds the historical prejudices of a particular period and individual (we’re all human). But, unlike mere propaganda, it’s big enough to go beyond them. And in going beyond such particular blindness, it reveals the inadequacy of those prejudices, even within the fabric of its own fiction. The debate over the complex ambiguities of Mansfield Park becomes an indicator of precisely this quality.

That makes sense to me, kind of.

But just the same, I can’t forget the fact that desperately poor men, whose only memorial is the record of their court martial, were hanged or whipped for a fuck, and that Jane Austen thought that was perfectly OK.


ENDNOTES

[i] “Buggery and the British Navy, 1700-1861,” Journal of Social History, 10, 1976, pp. 72-98.

[ii] See Rictor Norton (Ed.), Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook. Updated 9 January 2019 <http://rictornorton.co.uk/eigh...;. Norton assembles an immense compendium of references and contemporary accounts from 1624 to 1798. The proliferation of newspapers in the 18th century meant that people were much more exposed to the existence of male-male sex, and the fact that it wasn’t only a navy or a metropolitan phenomenon. This item from the Norfolk Chronicle (1797) is typical: “William Powell, aged seventy, was on Wednesday executed at Bury, for an unnatural crime. He made no confession.”

[iii] In his gossipy account of five generations of Waughs, Alexander Waugh, Evelyn’s grandson, offers some lively tidbits from those Oxford years: Alexander Waugh, Fathers and Sons (Headline Book Publishing), London, 2004.

[iv] There is a Mr. Right and a Mr. Wrong in Northanger Abbey, the posthumously published early novel—but the dynamic is different, and Mr. Wrong is merely boastful gossip.


 

About the author

Jeremiah Bartram has a doctorate in Renaissance Literature from the University of London, a couple of degrees from University of Toronto, and an MFA from University of King’s College. He is working on a book about puppet theatre and lives in Ottawa with his puppets.