Slipping into the Ha-Ha: Bawdy humor and body politics in Jane Austen's novels

Nineteenth-Century Literature

Volumn 55, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 309-339

  Heydt Stevenson, Jill ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 58649110455     PISSN: 08919356     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2903126     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, vol. 2 of The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3d ed., 5 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1933), p. 47
2. Notable exceptions include Alice Chandler, whose important article traces many sexual allusions and argues that Austen knew both the "far from prudish" world of the eighteenth century and the world of "post-Evangelical propriety," and that "her books underscore both the social and sexual meaning of marriage" ("'A Pair of Fine Eyes': Jane Austen's Treatment of Sex," Studies in the Novel, 7 [1975], 92, 102)
3. Another exception is Claudia L. Johnson, "What Became of Jane Austen? Mansfield Park,' Persuasions, no. 17 (1995), 59-70
4. For less extended discussions, see Edward Neill, The Politics of Jane Austen (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), pp. 75-76
5. and Grant I. Holly's Lacanian analysis of the sexual riddles in Emma, "Emmagrammatology," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 19 (1989), 39-51
6. On the subject of Austen and sexuality, see Jan S. Fergus, "Sex and Social Life in Jane Austen's Novels," in Jane Austen in a Social Context, ed. David Monaghan (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981), pp. 66-85
7. Robert M. Polhemus, "Jane Austen's Comedy," in The Jane Austen Companion, ed.J. David Grey, et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 60-71
8. Mary Ann O'Farrell, TellingCom-plexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1997)
9. and Alison G. Sulloway, Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1989)
10. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981), p. 32n
11. Morgan, Sisters in Time: Imagining Gender in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), p. 38
12. Among the many dictionaries, glossaries, essays, and primary sources I consulted when researching bawdy double-meanings circulating during Austen's time are: John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley, eds., Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present, 7 vols, in 3 (1890-1904; rpt. New York: Kraus Reprints, 1965)
13. Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 2d ed. (London: S. Hooper, 1788)
14. Thomas Hamilton [Earl of Haddington], Select Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1824; poems printed nearly every decade from 1730)
15. James T. Henke, Cutter Life and Language in the Early "Street" Literature of England: A Glossary of Terms and Topics Chiefly of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1988)
16. Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy: A Literary and Psychological Essay and a Comprehensive Glossary, rev. ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968)
17. Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 7th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1970); and the OED
18. A. J. Dezallier d'Argenville explains that this word stems from the French term "Claire-voie, or an Ah, Ah." See The Theory and Practice of Gardening, trans. John James (London: G. James, 1712). According to the OED, the derivation is from the "ha!" of surprise
19. See Bilger, Laughing Feminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edge-worth, and Jane Austen (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1998)
20. Gillooly, Smile of Discontent: Humor, Gender, and Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999)
21. and Stewart, Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions: Jane Austens Novels in Eighteenth-Century Contexts (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1993)
22. See Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700-1800 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), p. 48
23. and Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, Volume One: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 424
24. Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 210
25. Forster, "Jane, How Shall We Ever Recollect. . ., " The Nation and The Athenœum, 34 (1923-24), 512
26. "Biographical Notice of the Author" (1817), in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, p. 6
27. see also James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen (London: R. Bentley, 1870)
28. See Sales, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England (New York: Routledge, 1991), PP. 9-10
29. Butler, "Simplicity" (rev. of Jane Austen: A Life by David Nokes, and Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin), London Review of Books, 5 March 1998, p. 6
30. "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," in Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of Autocroticism, ed. Paula Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario II (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 150
31. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Rad-clijfe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 192
32. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, by Mr. Yorick; to Which Are Added "The Journal to Eliza" and "A Political Romance," ed. Ian Jack (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), p. 71
33. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, the Woll-stonecraft Debate, Criticism, ed. Carol H. Poston, 2d ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 128
34. "A Riddle," in The Poetical Works of David Garrick, 2 vols. (1785; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968), II, 507.
35. See Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1700-1825. Intercepted Letlers, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 96, 95 n. 37
36. and Duckworth, "'Spillikins, Paper Ships, Riddles, Conundrums, and Cards': Games in Jane Austen's Life and Fiction," in Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, ed. John Halperin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1975), p. 293
37. The Lock Hospital, which exclusively treated venereal disease, especially child victims who had been infected in the very way that the riddle describes, tried to educate the public about this widely held fallacy in a well-publicized campaign. The line "some willing victim bleeds" is of course tragically wrong insofar as these children were the victims of violent rapes. The riddle becomes even more charged when we realize that Garrick was also a major sponsor of the Lock Hospital. See Linda E. Merians, "The London Lock Hospital and the Lock Asylum for Women," in The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, ed. Merians (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1996), pp. 128-45
38. Mary Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1997), pp. 26, 32, 34
39. Such "cures" and preventatives were well known to the general population, and Austen would have been cognizant of them since they were the most common subject advertised in eighteenth-century periodicals. See Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), PP 599-600
40. The Politics of Sensibility. Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), p. 164
41. Walter Scott, rev. of Emma; a Novel, Quartrly Review, 14 (1815-16), 200
42. Constance Hill, Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends (London: John Lane, 1904), p. 202
43. I am here following David Nokes's chronology of the composition of Mansfield Park (see Jane Austen: A Life [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997])
44. "Austen's Laughter," in Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy, ed. Regina Barreca (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988), pp. 77, 76
45. See Gillooly, pp. 101-2
46. and Perkins, "A Subdued Gaiety: The Comedy of Mansfield Park," Nineteenth-Century Literature, 48 (1993). 1-25
47. See Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy, pp. 143-44
48. See Bradford K. Mudge, The Whore's Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684-1830 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), who explores this scandal in terms of the stories that prostitutes themselves narrate
49. and Tim Fulford, "Romanticizing the Empire: The Naval Heroes of Southey, Coleridge, Austen, and Marryat," Modern Language Quarterly, 60 (1999), 161-96, who argues that Austen's Persuasion works to counteract such corruption by presenting a navy that "redefines gentility in terms of professional activity and discipline" (p. 189)
50. See Partridge, Dictionary of Slang, pp. 265-66
51. and John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Sabor (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), often familiarly referred to as Fanny Hill
52. See "The History of Misella Debauched by Her Relation," and "Misella's Description of the Life of a Prostitute," in The Rambler, ed. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, vol. 5 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1909). PP. 135-45 (hereafter referred to as "Misella"). No one, to my knowledge, has yet made this connection between Johnson's Misella and Austen's Fanny Price
53. Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1994), p. 29
54. Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 151
55. The Lady's Magazine, 21 (1790), 398; quoted in Yeazell, p. 150
56. The Whore's Rhetorick: Calculated to the Meridian of London and Conformed to the Rules of Art, in Two Dialogues (1683; rpt. New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1961), p. 47
57. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), p. 93
58. "One Part of Womankind: Prostitution and Sexual Geography in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 7, no. 2 (1995), 21
59. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1950), cd. and trans. James Strachey, et al., vol. 8 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1960), pp. 51, 52
60. Austen, letter to Cassandra Austen, 12-13 May 1801, in Jane Austen's Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), p. 86
61. Jane Austen: Her Life (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), p. 120
62. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy: An Authoritative Text, The Author on the Novel, Criticism, ed. Howard Anderson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), p. 264
63. Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), p. 8
64. [Francis Jacox], "Female Novelists: No. I.-Miss Austen," The New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, 95 (1852), 22
65. See Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, "The Laughter of Being," trans. Terry Thomas, MLN, 102 (1987), 749
66. Auden, "Letter to Lord Byron (W.H.A.), Part I," in W. H. Auden and Louis Mac-Neice, Letters from Iceland (New York: Random House, 1937), p. 21