Look, I did not expect to kick off Mansfield in May by performing a full-scale investigation into whether Jane Austen was or wasn’t making an anal sex joke in Mansfield Park. I am as surprised as you by this turn of events. As with so many things in the last year and a half, I am but a leaf blown wildly about by the winds of chance and circumstance. Here I was, innocent as a lamb, reading Mansfield Park in the car, wondering only about the extent to which Mary Crawford was wronged, looking not for anal sex jokes but for evidence for and against my hypothesis that Mary Crawford was wronged, and it cannot be laid at my feet that an anal sex joke is what I encountered.
Okay, okay, I am getting ahead of myself. As you can see, it’s May! And for years I have been threatening to reread Mansfield Park in one of the months that begins with M, and at last in May of 2021, I have finally done it. For today, I read the first nine chapters of Mansfield Park, a book I have reliably been calling Mansfield Book, and I am here to report on my findings about it.
What Happened?
In these first chapters, we get a lot of set-up and, frankly, more jokes than I expected! Our heroine is Fanny Price, who’s a poor relative of Lord and Lady Bertram and has been raised in their home as a favor to her mother, Lady Bertram’s wayward sister. Three of the four Bertram children (the older son, Tom, plus the girls, Maria and Julia) have no use for Fanny, but her cousin Edmund sometimes does nice things for her. He is very patronizing. I hate him.
Due partly to Tom’s gambling debts, Lord Bertram has been called away to his properties in Antigua to try and recoup the family’s financial losses. While he’s away, strangers come to town: the charming Crawford siblings, Henry and Mary, who instantly become staples in the lives of our Bertrams. We haven’t seen much of Henry Crawford yet, but Mary Crawford is an absolute goddamn delight. That’s not what we’re meant to think of her, however. We’re meant to think that she is funny but immoral. I can already tell you that’s never going to be my opinion of her.
Is the World Wrong About Mansfield Park?
So far, yes. I am in love with this book so far. Mary Crawford is such a treasure.
Did the Crawfords Do a Wrong?
Yes, I have to admit that they did. Well, Mary did. When she finds out that Fanny’s brother is in the Navy, she’s very snotty about low-rank Navy guys. It’s rude! It’s especially rude if she understands — which she must, if she’s been paying any attention at all — that Fanny is not in a position to go against the Bertrams and their guests. I will say very mildly in her defense that Fanny didn’t not open hostilities here: Mary is making jokes about how brothers are bad correspondents, using her own brother as an example, and Fanny’s like, “Oh my brother writes me amazing letters.” But it’s still rude, and it’s snobby.
Mary is also quite snotty about Edmund’s plan to become a clergyman. For someone as socially adept as she’s supposed to be, I am not sure whence this very snotty habit she has of insulting other people’s jobs and aspirations. Maybe she’s mad at Edmund for being a total prig, for which, see the next section.
Were the Crawfords Wronged?
Yep! Henry Crawford doesn’t have much to do in these chapters, but there’s a lot of Mary Crawford, and I’m sure you have picked up on the fact that I was here for it. Before I get into the ways Mary was grievously wronged in this section of Mansfield Book, let me start by reporting that she rules. She’s consistently flashy and unembarrassed and so, so fucking funny, and Edmund doesn’t deserve her.
Okay, I will give you an example. Mary Crawford plays the harp (hot) and has been having a hard time getting her harp delivered to her new residence near Mansfield Park. So they’re talking about all the harp logistical challenges, and Mary says to Edmund, “Now, Mr. Bertram [Edmund], if you write to your brother [Tom], I entreat you to tell him that my harp is come: he heard so much of my misery about it. And you may say, if you please, that I shall prepare my most plaintive airs against his return, in compassion to his feelings, as I know his horse will lose.”
Help me? I love her???
And then, just when I thought I couldn’t love her more, she makes what you will absolutely never convince me isn’t an anal sex joke. Edmund asks her if she knows Fanny’s brother, and she says no, she doesn’t socialize with captains, too lowly!, but she has met a bunch of admirals.
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.
L O L. Now, I have done some research into this matter. Jane Austen scholar Devoney Looser believes that Mary was making reference to strictly heterosexual vices. Mary and Henry were taken in by an aunt and uncle when their own parents died, and then when their aunt died, their uncle installed his mistress in the house so Mary had to leave. Yikes! Dr. Looser’s argument is that Mary is referring to that kind of vice; i.e., the kind to which Mary may already be assumed to have been exposed by her shitty, vicious uncle.
Given what the novel reveals – the adultery of the uncle and the attempted reform and adulterous repetition in the nephew – it seems clear that Mary (and Austen, in giving her voice) was making the most pointed reference in her pun to the heterosexual vices of powerful old Naval men, not to the illegal, punishable, same-sex vices of men’s rears.
Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, a woman after my own heart, argues in her book Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions, that Jane Austen tooooooooootally meant it that way, connecting the “Rears and Vices” joke to other jokes about homosexuality in Jane Austen’s juvenilia. (She also argues that Jane Austen sides with Mary Crawford over Edmund, which I’d love to believe and will be keeping an eye out for going forward.)
D.A. Miller says that one reaction to coming upon a double entendre such as this in Austen, is to be “embarrassed and often arrested by the question, ‘Could a character in Jane Austen ever mean this?'” Miller poses a good question. My answer is that, yes, despite her lady-like manners and spinster status, Austen can create characters who mean “that.”
Brian Southam argues in a 2002 article for Essays in Criticism that it’s not a sodomy joke because Jane Austen is too polite to make a sodomy joke, and her publisher and audiences would have been upset if there had been a sodomy joke.
The point is worth contesting, because the pun has become caught up in something much larger and more damaging than a matter of purely local interpretation; it has become involved in a wider campaign to promote the idea of a bawdy or dirty-joke Jane Austen. … [Austen’s] effects … are achieved by the slightest adjustments in style and tone, and these do not include a subtext of sexual punning or double entendre. The power of the novels is achieved strictly within the terms of polite fiction, and one way of describing Jane Austen’s greatness is to say that she wrote the novels she wanted to without transgressing its literary and social decorum.
Seth Stein LeJacq points out (rather compellingly, in my opinion!) that naval sodomy trials hit their peak in the Regency era, and that Jane Austen’s two brothers sat on — and in one case presided over — naval sodomy cases. In other words, the notion of naval sodomy would have been familiar to readers of the era generally, and to the Austen family particularly.
Basically, the pro-sodomy-joke arguments and the anti-sodomy-joke arguments can both be boiled down to “Oh, come on,” and as such, I feel perfectly free to conclude that she was making an anal sex joke. Evidence: That’s fucking funny.
Anyway! After this conversation in which Mary Crawford absolutely definitely makes an anal sex joke, Edmund and Fanny sit down to recap how they felt about the conversation, and they spend a little while tsk-tsking to each other about Mary being insufficiently respectful of her uncle. The source of their unhappiness is that Mary makes a joke that her aunt and uncle did a home reno one time and it was inconvenient (plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose!), plus I guess this rears and vices joke. Like — why can’t she be snotty about her uncle? He was supposed to be sheltering her, and he totally threw her out on the street because he wanted to bone his mistress in comfort! Her uncle sucks!
The other thing is that Fanny gets mad at Mary Crawford for monopolizing her, Fanny’s, horse. It’s unclear to me how much Jane Austen endorses Fanny’s annoyance in this matter. Edmund tells Mary she can borrow Fanny’s horse in the morning before Fanny needs it, but then he starts letting Mary keep the horse out later and later, even though he knows damn well that Fanny wants to do for a ride. You do not have a Mary Crawford problem, Fanny, you have an Edmund problem. We all have an Edmund problem, because Edmund sucks. Which is disappointing because I love the name Edmund and I love most characters called Edmund (Pevensie, Dantès, Winslow). MARY WAS WRONGED. IT’S EDMUND’S FAULT.
That’s it for today! Next week at this same time, we’ll be chatting about chapters 10 to 21. I hope to have more information to share with you about the other Crawford sibling at that time!