In Austen L, Anielka Briggs wrote
the following manifesto of her beliefs about Jane Austen:
“We
assume that Jane Austen was a proto-feminist because.....she was a she ......
but there is actually no evidence whatsoever form the novels that she
deliberately examined and promoted this line of thought. She examined people as
a moral Anglican and parsed their faults, male or female accordingly so that we
have both highly flawed men AND women in her novels, neither being exculpated
from their behaviour by a patriarchal hierarchy. Rather they are held
accountable for their own sins to themselves and their (Anglican) God. The
concept of feminism was so much in infancy that Austen lacked both a vocabulary
and a framework in which to examine this issue. The conscious understanding of
patriarchal domination did not emerge for some years and many of the papers we
read considering Austen as a feminist suffer from being 'clever with
hindsight" and simply imposing a modern view on a historic text
illustrated with isolated anecdotal selections from the Austen canon.
We
would like to think of Jane Austen as being tolerant of all religions but in
fact this is most unlikely. The fundamental Anglican Protestant belief since
the reformation was that the Church of England was Right and the Church of Rome
was Wrong and corrupt. Jane Austen's cousin Edward and her brother Henry
both wrote sermons with anti-Semitic messages and believed, in the standard, patronising
way of the
average self-righteous eighteenth-century Anglican minister, that Jewish
people should be converted to Christianity and Catholics should renounce
the pope and become Protestants….And finally we come to homophobia. We know for
a fact that Jane Austen both understood homosexuality and thought it was a
topic worthy of derision from her joke on a carr-pet (James I's homosexual patronage
of Carr) in the juvenilia…. It would be lovely to think
that Jane Austen "grew out of this
view" and became a tolerant adult with a wide variety
of friends of differing
sexual orientations but homosexuality was illegal and the prevailing
social view was homophobic.
This is the premise of the "catamite" solution to
"Kitty a fair but frozen maid". It was something to be hidden and
laughed at covertly.” END QUOTE
Anielka, first, while I gladly acknowledge
the succinctness, wit, and clarity of your summary of your position, you are of
course not surprised to hear that I 100% disagree with your position. And I am
also glad to note that you (who, like me, sees many shadowy subtexts, hints,
and riddles in all aspects of JA’s writing) nevertheless takes a position
diametrically opposed to my own, as to what all those shadows mean, in terms of our understanding of Jane
Austen’s own personal beliefs and advocacies. Why?
Partly because, aside from our profound
differences in what we infer from what we see in her writing, I strongly
believe that it advances the cause of Austen studies overall, to show that even
two Austen scholars like you and I, who disagree profoundly about Jane Austen’s
morality, religiosity, and gender-related opinions and attitudes, can
nonetheless be in deep agreement that Jane Austen, for some implied purpose, did in fact leave all those subtexts,
hints and riddles in her writing, to be detected by the ingenuity of sharp
elves.
That attribution to JA of such a
motivation and m.o. of course flies in the face of the still conventional
wisdom about Jane Austen, which is that such subtexts are merely the product of
20-21st century anachronistic confabulations—as I
earlier today illustrated that very point, by showing that JA’s sexual
innuendoes were grounded in contemporary allusions two centuries before the
Internet enabled these amazing Jane Austen virtual book clubs.
I.e., while I see these subtexts as
so many magnetized iron filings all pointing toward the North Star of radical feminism, you (if I have understood you
correctly) see them as a double bluff, in which Jane Austen, for all her
radical writerly innovations in fictional techniques such as these subtexts,
was still, in your view, still, morally and religiously speaking, pretty much
as orthodox and conservative a social commentator as most Janeites still see
her. (If I have inadvertently mischaracterized your position in the latter half
of that last sentence, feel free to correct it. )
The paradox of our being so much
alike and parallel in our approach to decoding or interpreting Austen’s
subtexts, and yet so different in what we take away from Austen, is epitomized
in our respective opposed interpretations of Garrick’s Riddle. We both see a
strong sexual subtext in her decision to bring Garrick’s Riddle into the matrix
of meaning in Emma, and yet your
inference from that sexual content, as you framed it, above, is the diametric opposite
of mine, in terms of the social attitudes we ascribe to the inscrutable Aunt
Jane.
And I
am certain that JA meant to create precisely this sort of subtle moral ambiguity,
so as to generate opposite interpretation of her writing by different readers.
And I now also suspect that this had this authorial process in mind, metafictionally,
when she wrote the following exchange between Mary Crawford and Fanny Price, in
which Mary very slyly and intentionally channels Hamlet (and which I believe
came to my mind, subconsciously, two moments ago, when I wrote about the “North
Star”, etc.):
[Mary]
“…Those clouds look alarming."
"But
they are passed over," said Fanny. "I have been watching them. This
weather is all from the south."
"South
or north, I know a black cloud when I see it…”
The
way JA causes Mary Crawford, who is in her own way as verbally brilliant as
Hamlet, to channel that tragic hero, and seamlessly combine two of Hamlet’s
most famous verbal riddles--teasing Guildenstern with “I am but
mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a
hawk from a handsaw.” in Act 2, Scene 2, and then similarly teasing
Polonius with “Do you see yonder cloud that's
almost in shape of a camel?” in Act 3, Scene 2. It’s just
breathtaking, this particularly fine example of how JA had so thoroughly
absorbed Shakespeare deeply into her imagination.
But that’s not my main reason for
pointing to that allusion, which is to pick up on a metafictional resonance of
Mary’s subtly erudite bon mot. My point is that Jane Austen, as
a very conscious author, knew a good subtext when she created it, one which could (like Mary’s and Hamlet’s ambiguous clouds) be correctly perceived as “black”
(i.e., pregnant with multiple meanings, ready at any moment to burst upon
readers like a hard summer rainshower), whether that black cloud was believed
to be moving “south” (i.e., conservative, as you see it) or “north” (radical
feminist, as I see it).
So…
how does this relate specifically to our diametrically opposed interpretations
of the presence of Garrick’s Riddle in Emma?
It is clear to me that Jane Austen
understood the difference between, on the one hand, consensual homosexual
behavior and relationship between adults (which I assert she, for the duration
of her adult years, at least, considered a normal part of the human spectrum of
sexuality) and, on the other hand, pedophilia, rape and other forms of sexual
abuse, in which a powerful person (usually a male) forced sex upon a vulnerable
victim (usually a female), which she considered the worst sort of depraved
horror, especially when it was perpetrated in the deeply clueless belief that
no harm was being done, it was, in Edmund Bertram’s words describing Sir Thomas’s
ogling on Fanny’s blossoming female body, “but an uncle”. What’s the problem? EVERYTHING! screamed back Jane Austen through
her subtext.
It is the trademark of modern
homophobia to conflate the two—you can find a thousand examples of this primitive,
cruel and ignorant sort of false equivalency on the Internet in the desperate
ravings of fanatical right wing homophobes. But my research tells me that Jane
Austen made it very clear that this was a grotesquely cruel, immoral and ridiculous
confusion, which had fatal consequences for those in her world unfortunate
enough to get caught up in its gears.
In a nutshell, JA had the luxury of
satirizing James I’s well known homosexual acts, because James I’s life was not
endangered when he kept boy toys at his court---because he was King—as Mel
Brooks so correctly observed, it’s good to be the King, you can do what you
want. James I was exerting his power, not seeming to be too concerned about the
power differential between himself and his pets, and so he richly deserved the
satirical skewering that the youthful JA administered to him.
But now in contrast, consider the
sailor in the Royal Navy who dared to seek a moment of physical intimacy with a
shipmate on a long, lonely voyage that he had not voluntarily chosen to go on
in the first place, could find himself hung that same day if one of his
homophobic shipmates witnessed this, and gave him up to the captain. Or the midshipman hungry for advancement in a
patronage-racked Royal Navy, who perhaps had to pay a bodily price for that
advancement—hence William Price’s having to submit to the will of Admiral
Crawford, a terrible price that Mary Crawford (again, the voice of forbidden
truth in MP) satirized with her “Rears and Vices” witticism.
You really begin to see that Mary,
more even than her brother, or Tom Bertram, is the true Hamlet of MP, the one
who exposes the corruption in the “court”, Mansfield Park, ruled by its morally
bankrupt “king”, Sir Thomas Bertram. And in this case, she is there to wave a brightly
colored flag, pointing to the most foul evidences of that corruption, and
calling “Foul!”—even though nobody at MP seems to be listening, not even Fanny.
So JA,
even as a teenager, but certainly as an adult, knew the hawk from a handsaw,
morally speaking, as per these two very different cases.
So, in
that clear context, I believe that the sodomy subtext of Garrick’s Riddle
(which I DO agree with you is part of the mix of meanings swirling around inside
it, along with the usual form of intercourse---and, guess what! so did Susan
Allen Ford, in her 2007 article I quoted from in my preceding post) is there NOT
to mock all homosexuality with a broad brush, as you assert, but to expose to
moral condemnation all forms of power-based, sexual abuse, which sometimes was of the same-sex variety, but more often
was male-against-female.
And
finally, I learned earlier today from an inspired Google search (asking the
right question is, I find, 90% of the battle) that, just after Garrick’s Riddle
was re-published in the 1771 New
Foundling Hospital Wit miscellany collection (in which, as JHS pointed out,
the Hellfire Club was well represented among the contributing authors), in
1772, David Garrick himself threw Isaac Bickerstaffe under the proverbial bus,
as it were, when Garrick desperately tried to distance himself from public whispers
that Garrick himself was gay, as elucidated here:
Rictor
Norton, "The Macaroni Club: Homosexual Scandals in 1772", Homosexuality
in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook, 19 December 2004, updated 11
June 2005
Although
the first article at the above link is interesting in its own right (you’ll
never hear the word “macaroni” in “Yankee Doodle” again the same way again
after reading that!), it is the second article, entitled “Isaac Bickerstaffe
and David Garrick” which is relevant to this post of mine. Why?
Because,
presuming the accuracy of Norton’s account of that very sad bit of gay history,
which sounds an awful lot like the McCarthyite witchhunt of the early 1950’s in the US, it
makes me wonder whether Garrick’s having been the public target of such
innuendoes, in his homophobic world, somehow informed JA’s choice of Garrick’s
Riddle as the particular bit of wordplay recalled by Mr. Woodhouse. I think it did! But as to its meaning in that
context, that is open for interpretation.
And
there I will cease my own riddling for the time being.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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