No sex, please, we're English
Poor old Jane's been trashed again. Here comes the blockbuster version of Mansfield Park, specially adjusted for the yoof market in a glitzy makeover, with a cast of buffed, moisturised bratpackers tak- ing time off, as it seems, from underwear commercials and 'because I'm worth it' haircare promotions, to sashay across the heritage theme park in their fancy frocks. The trailer, which ambushed me while I sat in the Clapham Picture House awaiting the unquestionable joys of Topsy-Turvy, turns Sir Thomas Bertram's rpodern country seat (grand, yes, but not that grand, for good- ness' sake) into nowhere less than Burleigh, England's biggest Jacobean pile, first seen from what we must suppose to be a balloon but is more probably a heli- copter. We are promised several laborious references, in the currently modish post- colonial take on the novel, to Sir Thomas's slave-owning in Antigua and, further to authenticate the movie's historicism, one of the Bertram girls exclaims, 'But Papa, we're living in eighteen-oh-six'. And because our particular now is not eighteen- oh-six but why-too-kay, Fanny Price, fic- tion's most celebrated shrinking violet, is accorded a positively Nicola Horlick-style achiever's clout, as well as being made the object of an unconcealed lesbian tendresse on the part of Mary Crawford.
Rampant heterosexuality is the whole raison d'être of Mary Crawford, but there yer go, squire, that's showbiz. 'The steami- est Jane Austen adaptation yet', shriek the tube station mega-hoardings. The trouble with Taimable Jane' is that all of us feel we own her. From a legitimate sense of pride in the writer as England's (France after all had to wait until Flaubert to produce any- thing as sophisticated in terms of sheer artistry) it is a short step towards growing seriously territorial — colonial indeed — as regards the novels themselves. Her work, rather like Sir Thomas Bertram's slaves (whom she does not actually mention), will do whatever we want it to. As with Shake- speare, to whom, among English authors, Austen is now second in popularity, resilience is her misfortune. Which is why nowadays, where we used to be content with consuming her raw, we want her poached and steamed.
A truth universally acknowledged — and how vigorously she urges us to brush away received wisdom — proclaims her novels, written in the licentious age of Byron, 'Prinny' and Harriette Wilson's publish- and-be-damned memoirs, a sex-free zone. let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.' Like a murder in Greek tragedy, the scan- dalous carry-on between Henry Crawford and Maria Bertram takes place offstage, as do the pre-elopement shenanigans of Lydia and Wickham in Pride and Prejudice. Not the least significant aspect of Austen's role as comfort-food purveyor is her apparent scrupulousness in hiding the existence from us of even the slightest hint of a petticoat (except Miss Bates's old one, which doesn't count because Emma is simply using it as material for satire).
An alternative view is that sex in Jane Austen is practically never off the menu, that the six mature novels, not to speak of Lady Susan, The Watsons and Love and Freindship, are fairly teeming with it, and that the woman whom one of her more vinegary contemporaries labelled 'a little husband-hunting butterfly' thought of not much else. With all this in mind it is hard to read a scene such as Catherine More- land's interrogation of Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey as to his brother's designs on Isabella Thorpe without decod- ing her relentless questions as pure sexual empowerment. Henry has by now revealed himself to us as the campest of Austen's marriageable males, specialising in queeny banter about muslins and Gothic novels, who appears to have yielded any more grown-up responsibilities to his mannish sister Eleanor. So it is easy enough for Catherine, whose desire for him the author has already signposted, to subvert their tra- ditional roles, using her moral indignation to nail the flimsy creature to the wall.
An even stronger erotic charge galvanis- es Elizabeth and Darcy during his famously bungled proposal. Their mutual scorn con- ceals feelings made compellingly clear ear- lier, when Elizabeth, trying out Lady Catherine de Bourgh's piano, remarks that my fingers do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity. .. it is not that 1 do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman's of superior execution.
The double-entendre is not as intention- ally crude as many modern readers would like it to be. Subtext here is only important for the way in which Darcy so excitedly picks it up. Was there anything so steamy, if we must have that word knocking about, as his rejoinder?
You are perfectly right. You have employed your time much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you can think any- thing wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers.
No wonder Lady Catherine decides enough is enough and imperiously cuts them off.
Sex, or what Mrs Bennett earlier in the novel baldly terms 'that', peppers the nar- rative. Think of the 'great slit' in Lydia's gown, Mr Bingley's humorous observation on women's propensity to net purses, or his sister's eagerness to mend Darcy's pen. As for Emma, we may wonder what the Prince Regent, its dedicatee, made of Mr Knight- ley's thick leather gaiters or Frank Churchill's dexterity in wedging the piano leg and fixing old Mrs Bates's spectacles as a metaphor, rather than a mere pretext, for spending time alone with Jane Fairfax. Then there's always Little Henry. He, you recall, is Emma's nephew, anxiety over whose chances of inheriting Donwell Abbey conceals her inexpressible hanker- ing for Knightley. Little Henry matters to his aunt only as an alias for what she can easily have but won't admit to needing.
You want steam? Mansfield Park as writ- ten is a veritable hammam. The Sotherton episode, with Maria Bertram in danger of tearing her dress as she clambers eagerly into the paddock, and Mr Rushworth, poor cuckolded booby, mislaying his key, unites with moments such as the Portsmouth sea- side ramble, its adjectives fraught with seductive menace, and the triumphant passing of Edmund's chain through the loop of the silver cross where Crawford's will not fit, to form one of fiction's most elaborate displays of erotic symbolism.
Cinema can deal with these things as subtly as it wants, but as Mrs Elton would say, 'there is something direful in the sound' of the millennial Mansfield Park. Film critics will call me pedantic and say that feminist chic and Mary Crawford as a bi swinger are ideal cobweb brushes for Miss A. I commend them to the texts. Try Mary's smutty joke about buggery in the navy, 'Of Rears and Vices I saw enough'. Or better still, a touch of Little Henry in the night.
Jonathan Keates
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