For
those who still doubt my claim in my preceding post that Sterne intended a
sexual connotation for the word “ejaculation” when he wrote, in Tristram Shandy, “for
what the world thinks of that ejaculation—I
would not give a groat.”---let me now present you with further compelling
corroborative evidence that orgasmic ejaculation was front and center in Sterne’s
mind whenever he used the word “ejaculation”—and at the end of this post, I will relate same to Jane Austen’s
bawdy reference to Mrs. Stent’s ejaculation.
In The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists,
in the chapter “Laurence Sterne” by Melvyn New, at 67-8, Prof. New presents the
“ejaculation” quote from Tristram Shandy,
then compares it to a usage of “ejaculation: in Sterne’s equally famous Sentimental Journey as follows:
“…Yorick
finds himself in a ‘case of delicacy’. Forced to share a room at the inn with
an attractive fellow traveler, he finds himself protesting that he has not, in
his restlessness, broken their oath of silence with his ‘O my God!’ It was, he
insists, ‘no more than an EJACULATION’…Sterne’s punning use of ‘ejaculation’ in
these two passages can help us understand why reading him as a satiric rather
than novelistic writer best exhibits his genius to us. We might begin with the obvious:
Sterne intertwines the religious (‘ejaculation’ as short prayer) with the bawdy
(‘ejaculation’ as male sexual discharge)…the putative narrator of TS…tells us
early on that his writing is characterized by ‘rash jerks, and hare-brained
squirts’: ‘spurting thy ink about thy table and thy books’ (TS, III. Xxviii,
254); compare Toby’s wonderful question, a few chapters earlier: ‘are children
brought into the world with a squirt?’ (III, xv, 219). Put another way, life
begins with an ejaculation, continues
by means of human exchange, some of it thoughtful, most of it by way of ejaculations that result, in far too
many instances, with both sides ejaculating
missiles at one another, and concludes, if one dies as one should live (at
least in the eyes of the Christian world Sterne inhabited), with an ejaculation to God for…salvation…”
The explicit
references earlier in A Sentimental
Journey to Yorick squirting and jerking make it crystal clear, even to the
most skeptical reader from Missouri (the “show-me state”), that Sterne is
cleverly referring at that instant to Yorick’s double ejaculation (i.e., simultaneously
verbally and sexually, as they usually do go together that way).
This
becomes even more obvious when you look at the context of the scene in which
Yorick says “ejaculation”, which is as
famous a bawdy scene as the ones in Fielding’s Tom Jones. Here is the scene (it is in fact the final scene in the
novel)---Yorick and the French lady (and her fille de chamber) with whom he finds himself sharing intimate
sleeping quarters at an inn, have consumed a great deal of wine, and have
drunkenly negotiated a “treaty” minutely
setting forth the delicate terms governing how they will share the room
overnight. This is high-grade sexual farce, as Yorick and the lady are both
clearly intoxicated not only by all the wine, but their extremely close
proximity—whetted perhaps by the additional presence of the nubile young maid--
in their respective, side-by-side beds:
“…Now, when we were got to bed, whether
it was the novelty of the situation, or what it was, I know not, but so it was,
I could not shut my eyes; I tried this side and that, and turn'd and turn’d
again, till a full hour after midnight, when Nature and Patience both wearing
out, O my God! said I.
You have broke the treaty, Monsieur,
said the lady, who had no more sleep than myself. I begg'd a thousand pardons;
but insisted it was no more than an EJACULATION. She maintain‘d it was an entire
infraction of the treaty; I maintained it was provided for in the clause of the
third article.
The lady would by no means give up
the point, though she weaken’d her barrier by it; for, in the warmth of the
dispute, 1 could hear two or three corking-pins fall out of the curtain to the
ground.
Upon my word and honor, Madame, said
I, stretching my arm out of bed by way of asseveration, (I was going to have
added, that I would not have trespass’d against the remotest idea of decorum
for the world)
But the fille de chambre hearing there
were words between us, and fearing that hostilities would ensue in course, had
crept silently out of her closet; and it being totally dark, had stolen so
close to our beds, that she had got herself into the narrow passage which
separated them, and had advanced so far up as to be in a line betwixt her
mistress and me;
So that when I stretch‘d out my
hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre’s—
Of
course, that last dash is not a typo, it is one of the most famous dashes in
all of English literature, as Sterne left it entirely to the reader’s imagination
as to what part of the maid Yorick caught hold of in the dark. And so the novel
ends.
But
now I shall relate the above directly to Jane Austen. As is well known to all Austen
scholars, JA was well aware of Sterne’s writing----most famously, we have JA’s
epistolary reference to “an Uncle Toby annuity” as well as Maria Bertram’s reference
to Sterne’s caged starling in A
Sentimental Journey as Maria yearns for Henry.
And,
speaking of illicit sex as I was just reading Yorick’s insistence that “it was
no more than an ejaculation”, I heard the unmistakable echo of that passage in
the following equally ridiculous and distressing comment by Edmund Bertram
about Sir Thomas ogling Fanny’s body upon his return from Antigua:
"Your
uncle thinks you very pretty, dear Fanny—and that is the long and the short of
the matter. Anybody but myself would have made something more of it, and
anybody but you would resent that you had not been thought very pretty before;
but the truth is, that your uncle never did admire you till now—and now he
does. Your complexion is so improved!—and you have gained so much
countenance!—and your figure—nay, Fanny, do not turn away about it—IT IS BUT AN
UNCLE. If you cannot bear an uncle's admiration, what is to become of you? You
must really begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at. You
must try not to mind growing up into a pretty woman."
So,
to suggest that a professional writer like JA, whose command of the English
language was second to none before or since, was somehow oblivious to Sterne’s
obvious and brilliant sexual innuendoes, and that she might have echoed them
without realizing what they meant, is simply preposterous.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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