We all know Jane Austen for her rapier wit, but what if I told you that there is only ONE SINGLE dirty joke in her entire oeuvre? The joke is cracked by Mary Crawford, a girl of the world and very experienced in certain aspects of sexuality, concerning her admiral uncle's old Royal Navy chums.
Even prim and proper Jane Austen gives Mary Crawford the line, "Certainly, my home at my uncle's brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices, I saw enough," in Mansfield Park, leaving later generations of readers wondering whether Crawford is talking about different ranks of admirals or something else ;) It's the only blue joke in Austen's whole oeuvre, and it has aged like a fine sherry (don't British admirals love sherry?)
Each of those examples reveals something within the larger context of the work: Mary Crawford's speech foreshadows that her wealth and connections have not really made her genteel.
- Miss Crawford's "Rears and Vices", it's a canonical gay joke.
As you all know, sailors have always been a queer lot, and she's talking about the rears (keisters) and vices (sexual depravity) of old flabby-bottomed admirals who engage in certain practises with young lieutenants and midshipmen, --- but also of the ranks of Rear and Vice Admirals in the Royal Navy, given to aged sailors who were passed over for promotion as compensation. Maybe they deserved some quality time with young officers as compensation, too?
This reminds me of a certain song by Monty Python, "The Royal Naval Medley" (and also of "In the Navy" by the Village People, but I prefer Monty Python - like Austen, they're more British and wittier!):
Don't come the Rear Admiral with us, dear
We all know where you've been
You Royal Naval fairy, two, three
Left, right, left, right
Mother's kissing us tonight
Whoops, don't look now, girls
The captain's just minced in with
that dolly little seaman, two, three
O-o-o ooh, two, three
Hello, sailor!
(here "fairy" means a camp gay man, and "seaman" refers obviously to semen. Ah, Monty Python...!)
We've been discussing Mary Crawford's "rears and vices" pun in the Janeites and Austen-L groups, and I thought I'd bring my latest comment in that thread to this blog as well.
As with so many other aspects of Jane Austen's writing, I have found that,when confronted with a problem of interpretation, it is often wrong to frame questions of interpretation in terms of either one interpretation or another--the better approach is to look for doubleness, and to be prepared for both meanings to be valid. So, I will demonstrate below, that it is a false choice between the homosexual and the heterosexual interpretations of Mary's pun--it is actually BOTH that apply!
First, I continue to assert, and therefore agree with some folks in those other groups, that the pun is in one sense about male sex on Navy vessels. This is made absolutely clear by the FULL context of Mary's joke, a context which is universally ignored by those claiming Mary could not possibly have meant this meaning. I do not claim that this ignoring is intentional, but what happens during every discussion of "rears and vices" that I have ever seen is that Mary's quote is such a magnet for our attention that it draws our eyes away from, and leads us to ignore, the full context. But the fact is that Mary's statement is not some isolated joke by the novel's narrator, it is a statement made by one character in a fully dramatized scene replete with dialogue. Here is that full context:
“Miss Price has a brother at sea,” said Edmund, “whose excellence as a correspondent makes her think you too severe upon us.”
“At sea, has she? In the King’s (George IV's) Service, of course?”
Fanny would rather have had Edmund tell the story, but his determined silence obliged her to relate her brother’s situation: her voice was animated in speaking of his profession, and the foreign stations he had been on; but she could not mention the number of years that he had been absent without tears in her eyes. Miss Crawford civilly wished him an early promotion.
“Do you know anything of my cousin’s captain?” said Edmund; “Captain Marshall? You have a large acquaintance in the navy, I conclude?”
“Among admirals, large enough; but,” with an air of grandeur, “we know very little of the inferior ranks. Post–captains may be very good sort of men, but they do not belong to us. Of various admirals I could tell you a great deal: of them and their flags, and the gradation of their pay, and their bickerings and jealousies. But, in general, I can assure you that they are all passed over, and all very ill used. 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.”
Edmund again felt grave, and only replied, “It is a noble profession.”
“Yes, the profession is well enough under two circumstances: if it make the fortune, and there be discretion in spending it; but, in short, it is not a favourite profession of mine. It has never worn an amiable form to me.”
Edmund reverted to the harp, and was again very happy in the prospect of hearing her play. END OF EXCERPT
So Mary makes her pun in direct response to Edmund's question about Mary's large acquaintance in the navy, and Edmund's question in turn is directly prompted by a specific discussion about William Price's experiences at sea, in particular the sad fact that he had spent a number of lonely years at sea in foreign stations.
Now, in that context, reread Mary's answer REALLY carefully, and in particular focus on the phrase "I saw enough".
Everybody always reads that as if it refers only to the behavior of the circle of admirals. I.e., to paraphrase, Mary has seen quite enough of the naughty things these darned admirals do, thank you very much.
But there is a second, at least equally plausible meaning of that phrase "I saw enough" that is always ignored, but which actually fits better with the full context of the above excerpt. It can also mean that Mary is explaining that even though she knows very little about what happens on board at sea among post-captains and other inferior ranks, she doesn't need to know details about the rears and vices at sea, because she has already SEEN ENOUGH of rears and vices even among the small circle of land based admirals, to allow her to extrapolate and also know about what happens at sea!
The negative implication of her statement, bringing the world of the ordinary sailor at sea into the picture, is quite logical, this is not a stretch of interpretation. She is saying she does not need to have information about the rears and vices that were occurring at sea, in William's world, the world of ordinary sailors who are in effect exiled far from home in male-only environments in foreign seas. Why does she not need to have that information first hand? Because she could make an informed inference about what goes on at sea based on what she DID see among the admirals, all of whom, we may infer, were once ordinary sailors at sea in their own youth.
And perhaps some of you are now realizing that what this also means is that Mary may very well be hinting that William has participated in that activity at sea. Mary has just listened to Fanny's heartfelt account of William's loneliness, how much he misses his sister and the rest of his family, how much they miss him, etc etc. And Mary, who has seen far too much of the real world, cannot resist the urge to put a tiny pin into Fanny's naive balloon. No wonder Edmund looks grave.
And to those who will respond that we have no reason to link the ordinary sailors to the circle of admirals, the above interpretation is bolstered by Mary's drawing an explicit parallel between the admirals and the inferior ranks: "they are ALL passed over, and ALL very ill used." It's a variant on "Così Fan Tutte (So Do Everyone, the Mozart opera)", they're ALL the same. And, as in Mozart's and Da Ponte's opera, the irony is that even though the "they" is supposed to be the women, it actually turns out to really be the MEN who are all promiscuous, jealous, narcissistic, primitive, and easily manipulated! Compare "La donna è mobile (Women Are Mutable)" in Verdi's Rigoletto, sung by the Duke, a MALE who happens to be that opera's most promiscuous character! Mary Crawford is saying the same thing--the ordinary sailor at sea, the ageing admiral on land, they all do it.
And that also completes my thought and return to my initial comment. I think it is clear that Mary is talking BOTH about homosexual activity at sea, AND also about the heterosexual lechery and depravity of her uncle's circle of admirals, which almost surely involves females being treated as sexual objects in some way. And those females also seem to include Mary herself, hence her desire to get very very far away from her dear old uncle at the first opportunity. No wonder Mary is Mary.
There is no reason to limit Mary's innuendoes to just one sphere. She is in a way a kind of cynical philosopher of the sexual behavior of the male human primate, having involuntarily garnered her knowledge at a young age from experiences which have profoundly jaded and corrupted her spirit, and she is, in one immortal paragraph, summing up and crystallizing her dearly-bought wisdom--they--men---are indeed all the same.
In Mansfield Park, Mary Crawford makes a controversial joke about her uncle’s Navy friends. When describing ‘a circle of admirals’, she says she has ‘seen enough’ of their ‘Rears and Vices’ – and then jokingly denies that she has made a sexual pun. Her wordplay links the naval titles of ‘vice-admirals’ and ‘rear-admirals’ to sex (‘vices’) and to people’s bottoms (‘rears’).
There was a common association between the Royal Navy and sex between men at the time (that still persists nowaday; think Monty Python or The Village People). This may have been reinforced for Jane by her brothers Frank and Charles, who witnessed many trials for sodomy during their time as Navy officers. Whether Jane intended the pun in this way or not, it would still have been considered a very shocking thing for Mary to say and Edmund (a future vicar) turns grave at her comment.
Edmund, knowing that Mary formerly lived with her admiral uncle, asks about her knowledge of the British Royal Navy. Mary answers him with jocularity, “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.” Her attempt at wit isn’t met with laughter; we’re told that Edmund “felt grave” after she spoke.
There’s no doubt that she’s making fun of powerful naval men here. She’s already said that in her uncle’s home, she socialized only with highest-ranking of them. It’s clear by this point in the text that she’s willing to pillory these men for their faults. Just prior to this line, she describes them as invariably bickering and jealous.
It also seems obvious that Mary is indeed making a pun. She does not reference “Rear Admirals” and “Vice Admirals,” as she could have. She says “Rears and Vices,” with the italics serving to emphasize her punctuated, droll delivery and the double meaning of the words. Mary coyly invites her audience of listeners (just as Austen invites her audience of readers) to conclude precisely what she says she doesn’t want to be suspected of – that she’s uttering a pun.
Oh, I know, she’s a great writer. I don’t dispute that fact. I’m a fan. I’ve read all her novels many times. I continue to follow the literature about her—including Helena Kelly’s recent attempt to turn her into a twenty-first century, right-thinking feminist. It’s not that I don’t admire her lively characters, and the acuity of her observations, and the way her constant irony bristles with intelligence.
It’s her dirty joke.
There’s only one in the entire canon. It’s a pun, and it’s still elegant and funny, two hundred years on. It occurs in Mansfield Park, her longest and most difficult novel, the subject of which, she herself says in a letter to her sister, is “vocation,” and whose heroine is wholly passive, her only freedom the dearly-bought power to say “no.” It’s delivered at a dinner party given by Sir Thomas Bertram, owner of the estate that gives the book its title. The speaker is Mary Crawford, beautiful, accomplished, urbane—and dangerous:
Of various admirals, I could tell you a great deal; of them and their flags, and the gradation of their pay, and their bickerings and jealousies. But in general, I can assure you that they are all passed over, and all very ill used. 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.
This is a clear reference to sodomy in the Royal Navy, along with the equally clear suggestion that some of the admirals who frequented her uncle’s house are practitioners of a “vice” that constituted a capital offence at the time.
I love Jane Austen. Yet here she dismisses all that human suffering and need in a witticism that is intended to reveal the questionable moral judgment of Mary Crawford—not of the slave-owning Sir Thomas, and certainly not of the Royal Navy. And when I dig deeper, I find that she must have been fully aware of the legal system that persecuted gay people, not just in the Royal Navy but in the market town next door. Local newspapers throughout the period regularly published the trials and punishments of men caught having sex with other men. Sometimes they were hanged, sometimes they got fines and a couple of days in the stocks or six months in an “iron cage” at a workhouse. It was part of the texture of ordinary life. At least they weren't burned at the stake or locked up in lunatic asylums!
Thus, the Vices and Rears joke is no mere barnacle attached to the stately vessel of Austen’s craft, and the clash of values between Austen’s world and ours goes far beyond Chandler’s homophobia, or Wodehouse’s blackface, or references to “papists” in Sterne or Farquar, or Shakespeare’s disgust at the breath and sweaty nightcaps of the crowd. It’s closer to the self-loathing of Evelyn Waugh, who forced himself into the role of a mock-Edwardian paterfamilias and repeatedly betrayed his gay identity in his fiction. The victim turns true believer—and agent of oppression.
So—how is it possible to read such a writer today?
The question for us as readers today is, “Precisely how off-color is her pun?” Is Mary making a joke about powerful old men’s big bums and bad habits (gambling, drinking, gluttony, avarice, and adultery), or is she making a ribald joke about the Navy’s associations with sodomy?
Some argue that it’s unthinkable that Austen could ever have thought about – much less have any character joke about – sodomy. Others see Mary’s lines as unquestionably referencing sexual vices having to do with rear ends. They read them as a dirty joke about anal sex and as proof that Austen’s bawdy, wicked sense of humor – like Mary’s – roils beneath the surface of Mansfield Park. Critics have tried out all positions in between, where Mary’s lines are concerned. Most of us have our own strong opinions about how we ought, and ought not to, read this line. In forming our opinions, we must continue to investigate the larger textual and cultural contexts of Mary’s words.
As readers familiar with the hierarchy of the British Royal Navy in Austen’s era know well, vice admirals and rear admirals were the two ranks that fell just below admiral. Together, these were the three highest titles a naval officer could hold, the rest below consisting of various kinds of commodores, captains, and lieutenants. Rear admiral was usually a title belonging to an older man, often reserved to recognize a naval officer previously passed over for promotion, upon his retirement.
The crucial piece of textual information that we ought to remember in reading Mary’s line is what brings her to Mansfield Park in the first place: her admiral-uncle’s taking a mistress into his London home. His very public act – visible to family, servants, and friends, and therefore fodder for rumor-mongering among all parties beyond – means that Mary can no longer live under his roof. To stay there would be read as her tacit acceptance of his debauched choice. It would make her reputation morally besmirched.
In offering her irreverent pun, then, Mary expresses a jaunty skepticism about the Admiral’s profession, but she’s also taking a jab at his unconventional sexual (and romantic?) choices. She demonstrates a lack of filial piety toward Admiral Crawford that readers might forgive her for, given what we know about his dissolute ways. The Admiral is described by Austen’s narrator as “a man of vicious conduct,” one of the most cutting insults used in all of her novels. Vicious in this context means that he is depraved, immoral, and bad. He is vicious both for his open adultery and for his effectively washing his hands of the care of his unmarried, unprotected niece. He chooses to live in sin with his mistress over dutifully guiding Mary in polite society until she’s safely married off.
Wealthy, powerful men at this time certainly had plenty of adulterous affairs, but they were expected to hide their liaisons. The Admiral could easily have installed his mistress in a separate private residence and visited her there almost as often as he liked, without raising many eyebrows. Later in the novel, he’s described as a man who “hated marriage” and “thought it never pardonable in a young man of independent fortune” (Ch. 30). He flouts convention in relationships out of principle and inclination. Henry Crawford means to be different from his uncle, but he doesn’t manage to hold firm.
But there is one further piece of evidence we ought to consider in reading the “rears and vices” line. The word “vicious” is, of course, from the same etymological root as vice. That connection would probably not have been lost on Austen in writing the novel, using both of these words as she did at such crucial textual moments. The Admiral’s most visible and recent viciousness – that most centrally related to way the plot unfolds – is his illicit heterosexual activities.
The vices that Mary is most likely to have seen under her uncle’s roof (if we are really to believe that she’s seen them at all!) have to do with men’s and women’s sex acts. Men’s copulating with wanton women is the vice that anyone who knew her story – and knew the Admiral’s publicly preferred forms of viciousness – would assume she meant. It’s what Edmund would have believed Mary meant. It’s a dirty joke at the expense of her uncle that simultaneously reveals her own sexual knowingness, by association. Acknowledging that association in polite company would be more than enough to have Edmund feeling grave.
We’ll never know the extent to which Austen associated sodomy with the Navy men, but it seems to me very unlikely that she would have lost an opportunity in these lines to have Mary impugn the full range of vices in which the admiral and his peers indulged, while also making fun of their aging, and perhaps ungainly, rears. 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. Even if it’s not about sodomy, Mary’s unsuccessful joke is a shocking moment of how forbidden sex undergirds this novel.
