For those who have taken
my previous three posts about Mrs. Norris as a closeted lesbian in Mansfield Park with some major lumps of
salt, I’ve just retrieved from my own blog archives a post by me last year,
which did not come to mind for me at first when I was writing these latest posts about Mrs. Norris, but
which now takes on dramatic new meaning in light of them.
I will just quote the
relevant discussion from my 2013 post, and then comment briefly on it at the
end:
“…revisiting Mrs. Elton’s
wordplay on “as you like it”, my eye was caught by something else Mrs. Elton says in that same passage:
“I shall wear a large
bonnet, and bring one of my little baskets hanging on my arm. Here,—probably
this basket with PINK RIBBON. Nothing can be more simple, you see. And Jane
will have such another. There is to be no form or parade—a sort of gipsy
party.”
Although it warrants a
whole blog post of its own, I will only briefly outline the color coded
connection between Mrs. Elton’s pink bonnet, on the one hand, and the following
two passages:
Sense & Sensibility Ch. 38: “I am
monstrous glad of it. Good gracious! I have had such a time of it! I never saw
Lucy in such a rage in my life. She vowed at first she would never trim me up a
new bonnet, nor do any thing else for me again, so long as she lived; but now
she is quite come to, and we are as good friends as ever. Look, she made me
this BOW to my hat, and put in the feather last night. There now, YOU are going
to laugh at me too. But why should not I wear PINK RIBBONS? I do not care if it
IS the Doctor's favourite colour. I am sure, for my part, I should never have
known he did LIKE IT better than any other colour, if he had not happened to
say so. My cousins have been so plaguing me! I declare sometimes I do not know
which way to look before them." “
AND
Mansfield Park Ch. 19: Mrs.
Norris was by no means to be compared in happiness to her sister. Not that she
was incommoded by many fears of Sir Thomas's disapprobation when the present
state of his house should be known, for her judgment had been so blinded that,
except by the instinctive caution with which she had whisked away Mr.
Rushworth's PINK SATIN CLOAK as her brother-in-law entered, she could hardly be
said to shew any sign of alarm….”
Suffice to say that the
previous speculations of some Janeites (including myself) about what Nancy
Steele means about pink being her Doctor’s
“favourite colour” , and of other
Janeites (also including myself) about Mr. Rushworth’s pink satin cloak are
implicated.
In that regard—and this is
really amazing---I only realized yesterday that Mrs. Norris’s “instinctive
caution” can be interpreted in an ENTIRELY different way than as fear of Sir
Thomas becoming aware of the Lovers Vows preparations, i.e., as her
concern that Sir Thomas might realize that Mr. Rushworth’s choice of pink was
symbolic of an important preference that would anger the very conservative
and probably quite bigoted Sir Thomas
already concerned about the bona fides of his eldest daughter’s marriage
to him, and his ability and/or desire to fulfill his conjugal duties.
All of which makes me
wonder why Sir Walter Elliot did not pun on the theme of a pink admiral… ;)”
So, back now in April2014…
I am now able to connect the dots between my earlier catch of Mrs. Norris’s
hasty concealment of Mr. Rushworth’s flaming pink cloak, and Mrs. Norris hasty
reframing of her comments to Lady Bertram about always having a bed available for a friend. In both
cases, Mrs. Norris is desperately trying to prevent the “king” of Mansfield
Park and his SI.e., Maria may well be marrying a gay man, and Mrs. Norris is
lesbian carrying on a covert lesbian lifestyle at her residence only a stone’s
throw from the Bertram family mansion nearby.
And…even more validating
of my claims----in one of my recent posts I pointed out that Mrs. Elton’s claim
that she “stands up for women” could reasonably be seen as a declaration of
lesbian pride, and now I connect that to
her fantasy of a “gipsy party” with
Jane, complete with “pink ribbon” on her basket, in part also invoking the
thinly veiled lesbian dynamic between cousins Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It, the very play that Mrs.
Elton winked at in the immediately preceding sentences of her “pink bonnet”
speech:
“That's quite unnecessary; I see
Jane every day: -- but AS YOU LIKE. IT is to be a morning scheme,
you know, Knightley; quite a simple thing...."
And, last but not least, when I view the above Mrs. Elton
lesbian-tinged comments together with Frank Churchill’s misdirections about visiting Jane which I showed were in
the same vein as Mrs. Norris’s misdirections about always having a bed for a
friend, which were censored out of the second edition of MP published at pretty
much the same time as the first edition
of Emma, in 1816, I see JA covertly but
defiantly reinforcing the lesbian subtext of Mrs. Norris’s secret life
via both Mrs. Elton’s more
deceptively coded and ambiguous lesbian comments and Frank’s forbidden liaisons with Jane, as if to say,in the same
tone as we heard in JA’s last poem, “Winchester Races” that she will NOT be
silenced as to what she cares about most passionately, and same sex love is one
of those topics that will survive in her writing, censors be damned!
And that was, I conclude, “as
Jane Austen liked it”!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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