Laurel
Ann: “Wonderful Diana, you never cease to amaze me. This would make a wonderful
article for Jane Austen’s World magazine. Very well researched and thoughtful.
Jane did go to Venice, as many of the gentility did of her era, through the
written word, paintings and illustrations. Armchair traveling like Mr. Woodhouse!
I hope to see it”
Diana:
“Thank you, Laurel Ann – I love your thought, “Jane Austen did go to Venice,”
as an armchair traveler. Indeed she did. Perhaps people entered more vividly
into that kind of traveling in those days, than we do nowadays, when travel is
so much easier.”
I
only noticed this morning that Laurel Ann’s (Austenprose) above-quoted comment
on Diana Birchall’s blog post a few weeks ago…..
….entitled
“Jane Austen and Venice”, and then Diana’s reply to Laurel Ann’s comment, both
take on a whole new (and quite unintended, I am sure) meaning, when those
comments are read through the lens of my own blog post six weeks ago…
…about
Jane Austen’s wickedly sly, double entendre’d homage, in Mansfield Park, to Wycherley’s (in)famous “China”.
As my
Subject Line suggests, I would argue that Fanny Price’s “trip into China” is as
definitive an example of “armchair travel” in JA’s novels, as is Diana’s reference
(which Laurel Ann praised) to Mr. Woodhouse’s “armchair travel”.
Which
made me reread Mr. Woodhouse’s “guided tour” (courtesy of Mrs. Weston) of
foreign exotica…
“Books
of engravings, drawers of medals, cameos, corals, shells, and every other
family collection within his cabinets, had been prepared for his old friend, to
while away the morning; and the kindness had perfectly answered. Mr. Woodhouse had
been exceedingly well amused. Mrs. Weston had been shewing them all to him, and
now he would shew them all to Emma;—fortunate in having no other resemblance to
a child, than in a total want of taste for what he saw, for he was slow,
constant, and methodical. ….Jane
had not been gone a quarter of an hour, and they had only accomplished some
views of St. Mark’s Place, Venice, when Frank Churchill entered the room.”
…..and
then pause and really wonder not only about those “views of St. Mark’s Place”
but also about the nature of some of those “engravings”, and in particular
about Mr. Woodhouse being “exceedingly well amused” by them. Were these
engravings and views merely exotica….or erotica?
Support
for the latter interpretation can be found in distinct echoes (entirely
intentional, I claim, on Jane Austen’s part) of two earlier scenes in Emma and one in Mansfield Park, to boot:
ONE:
Mr. Woodhouse’s desire to immediately “shew them all to Emma” echoes Mr.
Woodhouse’s equally strong desire, 32 chapters earlier, to share with Emma (and
Harriet) all the words to Garrick’s Riddle (as Jill Heydt-Stevenson first
discovered 14 years ago, showing that it was actually about the horror of men
with syphilis having sex with virgins in order, so they thought, to cure them)---a
desire which we may be grateful he was unable, due to his faulty memory, to
satisfy, as that was one bit of “armchair travel” as to which Emma would most
certainly NOT have wished to have the use of her father’s “horse” and “carriage”!
Let Mr. Woodhouse find his “cure” by “traveling” somewhere else!
And
much better for Emma to “stay home” at Hartfield—and maybe I have stumbled upon
a pervasive hidden code for Emma’s oft-noted uniqueness among Austen heroines,
in her never having “traveled” away from home? Is this code for Emma’s sexual
innocence and inexperience? I think so!
AND
TWO:
Frank’s walking into the room at the Abbey, interrupting the “views of St. Mark’s
Place”, echoes Emma, Miss Bates & Harriet walking into the room at the
Bates residence at the very beginning of Chapter 28, finding Frank and Jane in
disarray, as they have clearly also
been interrupted while making some sort of “music” together, while Frank was
supposed to be fixing that “rivet” on Mrs. Bates’s spectacles! In both scenes,
some private activity between a man and a woman has been interrupted, and I
infer a similar embarrassment in the latter scene as the narrator tells us
about in the earlier one.
AND
THREE:
It’s no coincidence, either, that Mary Crawford, of course the Queen of Double
Entendre with her “rears and vices” witticism, also brings the reader’s attention, albeit obliquely, to Venice:
"To
say the truth," replied Miss Crawford, "I am something like the
famous Doge at the court of Lewis XIV; and may declare that I see no wonder in
this shrubbery equal to seeing myself in it.”
It
has been my interpretation for a while that “this shrubbery” is metaphorical (in
this novel pervaded by the sexualized aura of the Garden of Eden), and describes
Fanny’s very same “heart” which Henry Crawford so Freudfully wishes to make a
hole in. Therefore, Mary is saying to Fanny, in code, even though Fanny does
not get it, that Mary would like to see herself having sex with Fanny, in line with the central thesis of my
following blog post from February of this year:
Bottom
line: I think both Wycherley and Jane Austen (and certainly also Mary Crawford,
the Doge and Mary’s uncle) would both have found the unintended double entendre in Diana’s and Laurel
Ann’s exchange extremely amusing, in particular Diana’s last sentence: “Perhaps
people entered more vividly into that kind of traveling in those days, than we
do nowadays, when travel is so much easier.”
It
would be a question beyond the reach even of the protagonists of the wonderful
new show Masters of Sex to determine
whether people in Jane Austen’s era did indeed enter more vividly into “that
kind of traveling”, even though such “travel is so much easier” today, with the
abundance of “transportation” available via modern technology. I think we’ll
never know for sure, but it’s an interesting question to ponder.
What
I don’t need to ponder is the question of whether Jane Austen herself, in her
real life, did “armchair travel” to places like “China” and “Venice”, as well
as the Mansfield Parsonage “shrubbery”?
I know,
from all of the above, as well as a thousand other passages in JA’s writing,
that the answer is, as Molly Bloom would have repeated many times, simply “Yes”.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
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