Hello and welcome to a new blog series which I’m calling “Clutching My Pearls.”
   I have thoughts. And a lot of those thoughts have to do with disagreeing with the proposition that Jane Austen was a fierce social and political critic of the times she lived in.
   Unquestionably, her world was much poorer and crueler than our own.  Austen was 6 years old when the last man was hung, drawn and quartered for treason. She was 13 when the last woman was burned at the stake (for counterfeiting money, not for witchcraft.) The year before she died, a massive famine afflicted Europe and England, and there were widespread riots for bread.
   It was also an extraordinarily eventful time in history. Austen stands at the crossroads between the rowdy Georgian age and the strait-laced Victorians, at a time of important innovations in agriculture and manufacturing. During her life, Britain was convulsed with political and social unrest, not unlike our own time. England was at war for almost the entire course of her life. The British Navy sailed to the four corners of the earth, and slave ships transported slaves to British colonies in the West Indies.
   Austen was a child of the Enlightenment, a flowering of thought whose importance to human progress cannot be understated. The long 18th century also saw the dawn of the Romantic period, the time of Byron and Beethoven and Sir Walter Scott.
   And yet, in the midst of all this upheaval, change, cruelty, racism and poverty, Austen's genteel characters talk pleasantly and drink tea and go for walks in the shrubbery. Austen doesn’t write about battles or social unrest (with one notable exception). She seldom alludes to public events, and then only in passing. She focusses on people’s private conduct, their wishes, their mistakes, their follies. In her wry examination of human nature, fans and critics have found plenty to enjoy, re-read, think about, and write about.
   So, is there anything more to her books? Is there yet another layer beyond the personal, the individual relations of her characters? Did she intend anything more?
   Many have claimed to find a great deal. In this series, I will be arguing that readers are finding radical messages in Austen because they want--in fact they need--to find them there. The modern academics who despise England’s colonial past and despise “Whiteness” can’t, in good conscience, enjoy the works of a white woman who belonged to a privileged social class and used sugar produced by slaves. The only way they can continue to enjoy Austen is to believe that she also despised and condemned her own culture, that she seethed with resentment against the patriarchy.
   I am not speaking of taking Austen and creating something new--writing a variation of her novels set in modern times, or with a same sex-couple, or what have you. That's perfectly legitimate artistic expression. I'm talking about wanting to see things in Austen that are not there, and not wanting to see the things that are there.
   If you don’t view Western civilization as entirely a force for evil and if you don’t condemn everything that has happened on this globe since Columbus got lost on his way to China, you might not even know who or what I’m referring to. Those not familiar with this culture war might think I am criticizing a very small group of people whose nihilistic views are inconsequential. This is not the case, and I’ll have more to say about that later. In public discourse today, people are being bullied into making binary choices. When someone defends the advances of Western Civilization, they are attacked for being indifferent about human suffering, colonialism, and the slave trade.  I'll be arguing for nuance.
  The ideas I'll be presenting are mine, but I don't claim that they are all original. Much has been written about Austen.

   While reading Jane Austen: the Secret Radical, I had the irresistible idea of trying my own hand at writing a spoof of the type of literary criticism that Helena Kelly employs. It was surprisingly easy -- I had my parodies, published below, written in under an hour.

   Modern literary criticism contains two basic elements: One, drawing connections between disparate things in the book which have no obvious relevance to the plot or the theme to find symbolism where none was intended. This is an especially clever technique because it is non-falsifiable. You can pronounce that some inanimate object in the book is freighted with meaning, and nobody can dig the author up out of her grave to contradict you.

    Secondly, investing classic literature with overtones of modern attitudes towards sex, gender identity, colonialism, imperialism, race and intersectionalism.
    Consider the picnic on Box Hill in Emma. We modern readers can't help thinking about the servants preparing, carrying and setting out the meal, and then waiting respectfully at a distance while the ladies and gentlemen sat and ate it, and then cleaning up after the ladies and gentlemen when they were all finished with their nice al fresco repast. But none of that is mentioned in the novel, only a brief reference to servants and carriages at the end of the passage. To Austen, servants were a fact of life.

Half of the following excerpts are from Helena Kelly's Jane Austen: the Secret Radical and half are parodies that I have written. She is quite serious, and I am just kidding. Can you tell which are which? Give your answers in the comments below!

1.  ​Then, too, an astonishing proportion of the surnames in Sense and Sensibility are metallic ones. We have the Steele sisters. We have the Ferrars family (that is, ferrous, containing iron). Willoughby’s rich cousin is called Mrs. Smith—a common name, true, and one that Jane uses in three separate novels, but nevertheless a smith is a worker of metal. Willoughby marries an heiress called Miss Grey, recalling the jeweler Gray’s; the sharing of names is something we’ll return to. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), a “gray” or “grey” is also a spot of discoloration that marks the flaw in a metal, particularly in a gun, and when we first encounter Willoughby, on the rainy hillside above Barton Cottage, he’s carrying a gun.

2. ​Shoes are more predominate in Emma than they are in any other of Jane's novels, although the word "shoe" itself appears only four times. This should not surprise us, for shoes both display and conceal, reveal and hide. We have Mr. Knightley with his thick leather gaiters, ​​Emma's trouble with her shoes when she is walking with Harriet and Mr. Elton. Miss Bates is obsessed with shoes and whether they have gotten damp or dirty; as a clergyman's daughter, she knew that sandals were connected in the Bible with uncleanliness. If something unpleasant is picked up in the outside world, it can be thoughtlessly discarded by the privileged class in Highbury -- Emma's bootlace is tossed into a ditch, Isabella tells her father, "I could change my shoes the moment I get home." For them, there will always be more bootlaces and shoes. The gypsies, of course, are all bare-footed.

3. ​One of Miss Bingley's favourite words is 'delighted'. She tells Elizabeth Bennet, "I hear you are quite delighted with Wickham." That word is chosen deliberately. De-lighted of course has a double meaning -- a light can be extinguished, can be put out. Wickham's name is a revelation; "wick" refers to the wick of a candle, which was, apart from firewood, the chief source of light in Jane's world. "Ham" would have reminded astute readers of Ham, the son of Noah. They would have known the bible passage describing how Ham saw the nakedness of his father when Noah was passed out drunk. If Wickham is the senior Mr. Darcy's illegitimate son, could this be the real reason why Wickham has been cast out of Pemberley – does he know unspeakable truths about his own father? Can Wickham shed light on the hidden sins of Pemberley?

4. Almost immediately we are reminded of slavery and the complicity of landowners like Sir Thomas; Mrs. Price offers up one of her sons to go to Sir Thomas's West Indian estates – that is, his sugar plantations where his slaves toiled -- and another to go to Woolwich. Woolwich was a military academy. Only a few years previously to the events in Mansfield Park, the British Army had invaded what is now Haiti, intending to brutally put down the slave uprising there.

​5. ​Mansfield Park includes repeated references to “pheasants,” game birds that were difficult to buy and that (like slaves, after the Mansfield ruling) couldn’t be legally recovered if they got away and so had to be carefully kept and carefully bred to maintain an adequate population. Jane barely mentions pheasants elsewhere in her writing.

6. ​Perhaps we’d do better to view the abrupt shifts, the gaps that open up in the text, as thematic. Persuasion features a lot of sudden drops and breaks. The words “fall” and “fell” appear more often in this short book than they do in Jane’s longer novels. The heroine Anne’s nephew falls from a tree and breaks his collarbone. Her headstrong rival in love, Louisa Musgrove, falls and cracks her skull on the Cobb at Lyme. Her father, Sir Walter, and eldest sister, Elizabeth, scrambling to maintain their social position, take a house on a street in Bath where planned building work had been halted because of landslides.

​7. Jane makes a point of telling us that Captain Harville has gathered “something curious and valuable from all the distant countries” he’s visited; he displays them in his rented house in Lyme. Are we meant to imagine that he has already added, or will add, some of the Lyme “curiosities”—fossils—to his collection? There is, too, a faintly reptilian flavor to two of the ships Captain Wentworth has sailed on—the Asp and the Laconia. “Asp” is a poetic term for a snake. Sparta, in Laconia, was associated with serpents. There were dozens of other, non-reptilian ship names Jane could have borrowed or invented, but she doesn’t.

8. But a close reading of Mansfield Park reveals how Austen really intended for us to understand Fanny – there is the public Fanny and the hidden, secret Fanny who takes refuge in the East Room. More than a hundred years before the illness was diagnosed, Jane has given us a portrait of someone with dissociative identity disorder, commonly (and inaccurately) called, having a split personality. The truth is seen -- but not fully understood -- by Mrs. Norris, who says of her: "she likes to go her own way to work…. she certainly has a little spirit of secrecy." And it is Mrs. Norris who says, "Fanny is not one of those who can talk and work at the same time." But Fanny is not merely daydreaming, she has retreated from reality entirely. The uncomfortable truths of Mansfield Park are too painful.

Click here for parts one, two and three of my review of Helena Kelly's Jane Austen: the Secret Radical

Click here for information about my novel, A Contrary Wind: a variation on Mansfield Park

    To begin with, I want to repeat some distinctions I made in part two:
Dr. Helena Kelly is not saying [Mansfield Park] is a romantic comedy novel that I don't happen to like, because I don't happen to like Fanny and Edmund. It just didn't hit the mark for me.
    Nor is she saying, Well, books that mentioned slaves or 12-year-old girls getting married or Jewish money lenders used to be okay, in the past, but those subjects are problematic in today's world. And for some people, a book in which the main characters live off of slavery is too problematic to be read with enjoyment today. I am not going to dispute that. If you don't want to read Huck Finn, or The Merchant of Venice, or Romeo and Juliet or Mansfield Park, I think you are missing out on some great literature, but it's your choice. But, as I said, Kelly is going farther than that.
    Kelly is saying, Austen intended for her readers to regard the main characters who get married at the end of the novel -- you know, like people always do at the end of a romantic comedy -- as bad, horrible people. Mansfield Park and Emma may look like romantic comedies on the surface but they are actually condemnations of slavery and the practise of land enclosure.​

   Kelly is positively allergic to the humour in Austen. Of Knightley and Emma's happy union, Kelly writes, "the marriage itself is made possible only by criminal acts and an elderly man's terror." In case you don't recognize what she's talking about, it's a reference to this:

Mrs. Weston's poultry-house was robbed one night of all her turkeys--evidently by the ingenuity of man. Other poultry-yards in the neighbourhood also suffered.--Pilfering was housebreaking to Mr. Woodhouse's fears.--He was very uneasy; and but for the sense of his son-in-law's protection, would have been under wretched alarm every night of his life.
​
    Austen treats the theft of the poultry with mock-drama, but of course it's deadly serious to Kelly, a comedy of terrors.

    ​Slavery of course, is not funny. According to Kelly, Mansfield Park is "inescapably political," filled with veiled allusions to slavery which her contemporary readers would have understood. Yes, slavery is mentioned briefly and in passing in the novel and yes, Sir Thomas owns slaves. But that is not what the novel is about. And if some readers think I am making light of the subject of slavery in what follows, no. My intention is to make fun of over-exuberant literary detective work.
    Did you think that when Austen began Mansfield Park with the phrase, "About thirty years ago," her readers would say to themselves, 'Okay, Miss Maria Ward met Sir Thomas Bertram thirty years ago?" No! They would think about slavery!
  Her contemporary readers, upon reading the phrase, "About thirty years ago," were supposed to be instantly reminded, and mentally review, the events of the abolition campaign, the Zong case, Cowper's poem, the Haitian slave revolt, all of which transpired during the thirty years before the publication of Mansfield Park. They weren't going to think about Mozart, or how fashions had changed, or how they used to have a full head of hair back then, or how much the pound sterling was worth, or who was on the throne, they were – obviously – going to think about slavery. As you do, you know, whenever someone mentions courtships that occurred in previous decades.

​      To resume, when Fanny has a headache and Edmund gives her a glass of Madeira wine, what are we supposed to think of? Take a guess. That's right – slavery!
    Or when Mary Crawford mentions the poet, Hawkins Browne? Well, his son once went to a dinner party with Dr. Johnson and slavery was discussed at that party! And everybody knows about Dr. Johnson. (That much is true, they did).
​​   When young Julia mentions the Roman emperor Severus, what are we supposed to think about? Hint: Severus was an African. Yes, slavery!
   No, actually, Severus is mentioned in a passage which is a comedic reference to a common topic of concern at the time -- how to educate girls and how much education girls should have. Instead of didactic passages where the novel's characters sit around and talk about female education, Austen shows, rather than tells, and is poking fun at the same time:

   "But, aunt, [Fanny] is really so very ignorant!—… I am sure I should have been ashamed of myself, if I had not known better long before I was so old as she is. ... How long ago it is, aunt, since we used to repeat the chronological order of the kings of England, with the dates of their accession, and most of the principal events of their reigns!"
   "Yes," added [Julia]; "and of the Roman emperors as low as Severus; besides a great deal of the heathen mythology, and all the metals, semi-metals, planets, and distinguished philosophers."
   "Very true indeed, my dears, [says Aunt Norris], but you are blessed with wonderful memories, and your poor cousin has probably none at all…. And remember that, if you are ever so forward and clever yourselves, you should always be modest; for, much as you know already, there is a great deal more for you to learn."
   "Yes, I know there is, till I am seventeen….."
   This is a funny, brilliant passage. Are we also supposed to be thinking about slavery while we are chuckling quietly? Ah yes, we are not supposed to be laughing. 

Update: Dec 2019: Kelly remarks: "Clearly the girls haven't learned a complete list of Roman Emperors,,. why mention the name Severus at all?  It doesn't add anything other than making the image of a black man appear in the reader's mind." Sorry, no. The real reason Maria and Julia learn about the Roman Emperors "as low as Severus," is because Severus was the last of the Roman Emperors to mount an aggressive military campaign to subdue Britain. So studying the Romans "as low as Severus" means, up to the time the Roman Empire began to withdraw from England. The girls are studying British history. The wall which we today refer to as Hadrian's Wall was also called Severus' Wall at the time. Mentioning Severus has nothing to do with reminding readers of slavery because Severus was from Africa. Further, Severus was from the area that is now Libya and his mother was Italian. The girls' speech is just part of an ironic speech which is intended to convey the girls' lack of self-awareness about what true knowledge consists of--it is more than the getting of facts.

​   And did you think Mansfield Park ends with a happy couple getting married? No!
    Timid little Fanny "has married a man who doesn't love her, who is a fool and a hypocrite." Austen has not written a hero and heroine who don't appeal to modern tastes, she deliberately wrote unlikeable main characters.
   And did you think they will live happily ever after? No! You have forgotten about the apricots!
   Here's the final, thunderously condemnatory passage in Kelly's chapter on Mansfield Park:
    Thoroughly perfect, though the Moor Park apricot tree is still in the vicarage garden, a reminder of the evil that everyone knows about but no one is willing to discuss, a tree not of knowledge, but of forgetfulness. With every spoonful of apricot jam, every apricot tart that's served up on the parsonage table, Fanny will eat the fruits of slavery.
    And the tree will keep on growing.
    Why apricots? Because Kelly claims the word "Moor" in "Moor Park" is a subtle reference to slavery that Austen's readers would instantly understand.
    "Is Jane really using this name, and this kind of apricot tree, out of all the alternatives, by accident? Is it just coincidence that it's the same word Shakespeare uses to describe the ethnicity of black Africans?"
    But of course it's not the same word, it's a homonym. The Moorpark apricot is named after a landed estate called "Moor Park." "Moor" refers not to black people but wild, windswept heaths, moors, like in Wuthering Heights. Please don't tell Kelly about the word 'niggardly,' she'll have conniptions.
      Mrs. Norris insists on telling Dr. Grant that the tree is a "Moor Park" because she is emphasizing that it is a good quality apricot. Austen chose this variety of apricot "out of all of the alternatives" because, as David M. Shapard explains in his annotated Mansfield Park, the Moor Park apricot was considered to be the best-tasting apricot.
    Of course, you can't make a good apricot tart without some sugar. Sugar was actually made by slaves, in horrible conditions. That's what they are making at Sir Thomas' plantation in Antigua. Hmm, the word "sugar" does not appear in Mansfield Park. Maybe if Austen had mentioned someone putting sugar in their tea, that would have been a more intelligible reference – to slavery! Easier to "get" than a homonym. But never mind, apricots = slaves.

   ​But what about the slaves? Well, for plot purposes, Austen had to have Sir Thomas go away for a long time, and she used the fact that he was on a dangerous sea voyage as one reason why the young people of Mansfield Park should not be amusing themselves with a play while their father was in peril of life or death. At the time of writing, because of the Napoleonic Wars, Sir Thomas couldn't go to Europe, so she had to give him a different destination. Slavery, which in fact is mentioned more explicitly by Jane Fairfax and Mrs. Elton in Emma, than by anyone in Mansfield Park, is simply not at the forefront of the story.

   One final oddity of Jane Austen: the Secret Radical, on which I'd like to comment, is that Kelly is elaborately cautious about making assumptions where the biographical details of Austen's life are concerned. She refuses to take the widely accepted stories at face value and in fact arrogantly accuses those who came before her of spreading "lies" about Austen. Do we know for a fact that it was First Impressions that her father offered to a publisher? Do we know for a fact that Harris Bigg-Wither proposed to Austen? No, we don't! It's just family "gossip." Did Edward Austen only give Chawton cottage to his mother and sisters because his wife had died and she could no longer object? "an intriguing coincidence, though one about which we can do no more than speculate."
    But, she makes head-shakingly blithe assumptions from clues that only she can perceive in Austen's text. For example, read this passage:
    [Henry Crawford] honoured the warm-hearted, blunt fondness of [Fanny's sailor brother William] which led [William] to say, with his hands stretched towards Fanny's head, 'Do you know, I begin to like that queer fashion already, though when I first heard of such things being done in England, I could not believe it; and when Mrs. Brown, and the other women at the Commissioner's at Gibraltar, appeared in the same trim, I thought they were mad; but Fanny can reconcile me to anything.'
    Do you conclude, as does Kelly, that the "the intensity of William's reaction suggests that we are dealing here with cropped hair and not just short front ringlets."?
    What? He's a young man saying when he first saw a new hairstyle, he thought it looked silly, but now that he sees it on his beloved sister's head, he is okay with it. What is 'intense' about that? Why does Kelly conclude Fanny's hair has been cut, rather than styled? Because of the word "trim'? The expression, 'appeared in the same trim,' is a nautical expression. 'Trimming the sails,' does not mean cut the sails, right? It means adjusting them. Or is it the word 'queer'? Please tell me it's not the word 'queer' that has Kelly thinking Fanny is now wearing short hair. And in the end, Kelly does not explain what is so significant about short hair.

    Or maybe Harriet Smith is Jane Fairfax's sister because "Hetty" is the name of Jane Fairfax's grandmother. "Nothing in this book remains a mystery if we read it carefully – Harriet Smith and Jane Fairfax may well be half-sisters."
    Or maybe they are not. And if they were, why would Austen bury but not reveal the secret in Emma, a book that is filled with hints and clues that are all revealed in the end. What narrative purpose would that serve?
   Jane Austen: the Secret Radical is not about Austen's innovations as a writer, her technique, her inimitable voice, her way with dialogue, or her characters. It's about a quest to find certain opinions and points of view embedded deeply within Austen's texts. Kelly has claimed to find these secret opinions, and no doubt she is as well-intentioned as was Emma Woodhouse, when she mistakenly thought she was bringing Harriet Smith and Mr. Elton together. But Kelly's inclinations have led her astray and she has found clues that aren't there at all, rather like the astronomers who thought they could see canals on the surface of Mars.
    As for me, "I do not think I am particularly quick at those sort of discoveries. I do not pretend to it. What is before me, I see."

Bonus:  in my next post, I will reproduce four paragraphs from Helena Kelly's book, along with four parodies of my own. Will you be able to tell the real Kelly analysis from the parody? Stay tuned and see for yourself!
 
My recommendations for books about Austen: 
What Matters in Jane Austen? Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved, by John Mullan
Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time, by Mary Waldron
Only a Novel: The Double Life of Jane Austen, by Joan Aiken Hodge

​Part Two: That's Not Funny!
I begin by reposting the seven points I outlined at the beginning of part one:
In Jane Austen: the Secret Radical:

1. Dr. Helena Kelly posits that Jane Austen was a secret radical. In other words, Austen held radical views, and these views were not out in the open for everyone to see, but were covert or secret in some way.
2. Because in Austen's time, writing something critical of the government or the royal family could get you in trouble with the authorities, even jailed. "[T]he Austen family lived in a country in which any criticism [my emphasis] of the status quo was seen as disloyal and dangerous." (This is overstated, and requires some qualification. We are not talking about North Korean levels of repression.)
3. Kelly explains that what you may think are light-hearted, superficial, romantic comedies are in fact very dark and complicated and multi-layered with lots of hidden (secret) messages.
4. And that she, Helena Kelly, has the insight to understand those messages.
5. It is Kelly's understanding of the context and the times in which Austen wrote her novels, that enables Kelly to analyze and explain the novels.
6. And in fact, if you think Jane Austen was a sweet, conventionally-minded spinster who wrote romantic novels, you are reading her all wrong.
7. And Kelly says, if you don't want to be disabused of your false notions, don't read her book. 

     I completely disagree with points 1, 4, and 5.  I mostly disagree with points 2 and 3. I think it's okay to read Jane Austen for the romance, (6) but I love Austen's bubbling humour, her zinging satire, her irresistible comic muse, her descriptive powers and her unforgettable dialogue and first and always, her language. And 7 is up to you, gentle reader.
     I discussed points 1, 2, 4 and 5 in part one. In part two, I will focus on 3, 4, 5 and 6.
   Having discarded the main hypothesis of Kelly's book in part one, what remains is a book of typical modern literary criticism. In case younger readers are led astray by the word 'modern,' I should mention that I encountered literary criticism like this back in the late 1970's, when I was attending university. The gist of the approach is as follows – I am paraphrasing:
     Reader, you don't really understand that book that you like because you are not educated enough, or enlightened enough, or as the kids say nowadays, "woke" enough, to understand it. Allow me to suck the joy right out of that book for you.

​    Kelly claims that she has a unique understanding of Austen denied to Austen's most fervent fans, or even Austen's relatives. And yet, she doesn't appear to comprehend that Austen's muse is a comic one. Consider the famous opening in Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth …. this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters."
    Kelly: "the joke is, of course, at heart entirely unfunny in a world where women, and some men too, could be owned."
    The reader who laughs at Austen has not yet had the terrible news.
  For Kelly, Jane Austen's romantic comedies are neither comedic nor romantic. Which raises the question, why would Austen write something that looks like a romantic comedy, albeit with a lot of tongue-in-cheek social criticism, when she really intended to write tragedy or searing social criticism? Why present someone who appears to be the romantic lead of the book, for example, Mr. Knightley in Emma, when (according to Kelly) he is really the villain, an evil, heartless man who oppresses the poor people of Highbury? As Professor John Mullan wrote: "Kelly’s eagerness to find a politically critical subtext leads her to ignore the narrative logic of the fiction." Remember how Mr. Knightley confronts Emma for being rude to Miss Bates at the Box Hill picnic. Why would Emma care, why would we care, about his disapproval if he is a villain? Why does this moment have such dramatic power? It's because Emma knows he is right--and she also realizes how much his good opinion matters to her. If it were Mr. Elton who scolded her, she would brush it off and so would we. Who cares what Mr. Elton thinks? But it is Mr. Knightley, and it does matter, and he's right. He reminds Emma that those who are better-off have a duty to be kind and forebearing to those lower on the social chain. That is, I guess, when he's not turning the local folk off the common lands.
    It's like the cruise ship in the Poseidon Adventure – Kelly and similar critics turn Austen upside down and then insist that this is what she meant to do – construct a completely unbalanced, topsy-turvy piece of writing that makes no sense whatsoever structurally, emotionally or dramatically. Hey, she meant for the propeller to be above the waterline and the decks to be submerged, get it?   

  ​Sometimes Kelly sees a joke and pronounces it unfunny, sometimes she has difficulty even recognizing jokes and sarcasm in Austen.
    For example, as John Mullan points out, Kelly thinks that when Willoughby shows up when Marianne is gravely ill, he is drunk. When in fact he is saying: “Yes, I am very drunk” with bitter sarcasm.
    She thinks Catherine Morland doesn't understand that the adorable, witty Mr. Tilney is having fun with her in the passage below, when he tells her what will happen during her visit to  Northanger Abbey:
Henry Tilney: "How fearfully will you examine the furniture of your apartment! -- And what will you discern? -- Not tables, toilettes, wardrobes, or drawers, but on one side perhaps the remains of a broken lute, on the other a ponderous chest which no efforts can open…. [The housekeeper] Dorothy, meanwhile, no less struck by your appearance, gazes on you in great agitation, and drops a few unintelligible hints. To raise your spirits, moreover, she gives you reason to suppose that the part of the abbey you inhabit is undoubtedly haunted, and informs you that you will not have a single domestic within call. With this parting cordial she curtsies off -- you listen to the sound of her receding footsteps as long as the last echo can reach you -- and when, with fainting spirits, you attempt to fasten your door, you discover, with increased alarm, that it has no lock."
Catherine Morland: "Oh! Mr. Tilney, how frightful! -- This is just like a book! -- But it cannot really happen to me. I am sure your housekeeper is not really Dorothy. -- Well, what then?"
    Kelly says that the reference to Dorothy "sails over [Catherine's] head." What do you think?
    "Catherine either hasn't read more than half of a Gothic novel, or if she has, has read it with such a breathtaking lack of attention that she might as well not have bothered." No, the exact opposite is the case. Catherine loves Gothic novels and it leads her to imagine that maybe General Tilney murdered his wife, like a villain in a novel.
    Catherine's delusion about the General is the climax of the extended parody of Gothic novels contained within Northanger Abbey. In its first draft, Northanger Abbey must have been very similar to Austen's other juvenilia – a funny take off of contemporary novels. That's why Northanger Abbey, structurally, is like a house with a patched on bow window – the first half is a satire on the literary conventions of the novel ("No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine….") Then, after Catherine realizes she's been a fool with her gothic imaginings, it becomes a more typical love story.
    And by the way, there is a novel, called The Female Quixote, which Austen admired, about a deluded heroine who thinks she's living in a land of chivalric romance. If you compare it with Northanger Abbey, you'll get a better idea of the context and intent of Austen's gothic parody. Reading an annotated edition of Northanger Abbey, like David Shapard's, would also help illuminate the text. 

    ​According to Kelly, a careful reading of Pride and Prejudice will reveal that it is a serious work because there are soldiers in it, and militia, and militia were sometimes called out in Regency times to subdue rebellions. Plus: "Jane knew that military camps were anything but 'beauteous,' knew that a town full of soldiers was not a pleasant place for women – and she knew that her readers knew that too, or could guess at it."
    So never mind Lydia's and Kitty's girlish giggles over men in uniform. Austen really wants us to think of England as a land under occupation.
    One wonders if Kelly would react the same way to all comedy that treats serious matters with levity -- what does Kelly think about The Mikado, or The Importance of Being Ernest, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, or Duck Soup, which make light of arbitrary capital punishment, child abduction, slavery, defrauding widows, and war.  I'd say that Kelly doesn't understand black humour, but she'd only accuse me of having an unconscious hidden meaning.
   In Mansfield Park, Austen paints Fanny Price, entering the ball room, with her beloved cousin Edmund's chain holding her beloved brother's topaz cross, around her neck. Supposing that we care about Fanny (another question entirely) aren't we supposed to feel her little heart flutter as she combats her shyness? Do we see the warm glow in her cheek as she takes comfort in wearing the dual talismans of the two people who mean the most to her in the world? Are you feeling the love, reader? The warmth?
    Kelly: "For the reader, the associations [of the chain and the cross] are, or should be, by this point in the novel, very different."
    The chain does not represent love and faithful friendship -- the chain represents slavery. (Obviously). 

   And the cross does not represent sweet little Fanny's artless Christian faith, and the love of her brother, it represents the Church of England and we, the readers in Austen's time, are aware that the Church of England owns sugar plantations and slaves! Get it? The cross and the chain? It's dark, it's horrible, it's hanging around Fanny's neck like an albatross of guilt and complicity. Let's dance! 
   So, does Dr. Kelly think people in Austen's time thought about slavery every time they saw a lady wearing a crucifix around her neck, or would they only think about slavery if the cross was held by a chain, rather than say, a string of pearls?

    ​Let me point out some distinctions here:
    Kelly is not saying this is a romantic comedy novel that I don't happen to like, because I don't happen to like Fanny and Edmund. It just didn't hit the mark for me.
    Nor is she saying, Well, books that featured slaves or 12-year-old girls getting married or Jewish money lenders used to be okay, in the past, but those subjects are problematic in today's world. And for some people, a book in which the main characters live off of slavery is too problematic to be read with enjoyment today. I am not going to dispute that. If you don't want to read Huck Finn, or The Merchant of Venice, or Romeo and Juliet or Mansfield Park, it's your choice. But Kelly is going even farther than that.
    Kelly is saying, Austen intended for her contemporary readers to view the main characters, the ones who get married at the end of the novel -- you know, like people always do at the end of a romantic comedy -- as bad, horrible people.
    And I think Kelly is quite wrong about that. She is unable to put aside her own modern points of reference - feminism, post modernism, post-colonialism and intersectionalism.

Therefore – no surprise here -- Kelly sees sexual perversion where Austen's contemporaries would not.
    Fanny Price's father is either a pedophile or a sadist or both, Yes, he's loud and uncouth, but how do we know he's something worse? Because, says Kelly, why else would his daughters want to have pocket knives? They must be for protection. (Because a little girl with a silver pocket knife can stop a big burly lieutenant of Marines). If pocket knives were only used for fending off lecherous relations, why did Jane Austen offer to buy her sister-in-law one? Cannot Kelly visualize a world without scotch tape and cling wrap, when parcels were tied up with string and when the chief occupation of little girls was to sew and do other hand crafts?

Both of the male leads in Sense & Sensibility are despicable: Edmund Ferrars is nervous before he proposes to Elinor, so [he] "took up a pair of scissors that lay there, and while spoiling both them and their sheath by cutting the latter to pieces as he spoke…" This is proof that Edmund is a sexual deviant, because the sheath for the scissors represents the female vagina. Colonel Brandon is the father of young Eliza, so he is both a seducer and a liar.
   I think we can question whether a majority of people, then and now, would automatically associate the fumbling efforts of a girl exploring the hidden cavities of a cabinet, as being a metaphor for female masturbation.
    Or even supposing that Austen had sex on her mind when she wrote that passage, how does a reference to female masturbation undergird the supposedly "real" message of Northanger Abbey, that sex with men is dangerous? Austen doesn’t write approvingly of Catherine's fumbling with the cabinet. She doesn't suggest that Catherine should be fumbling with a cabinet instead of fumbling with Mr. Tilney.
    In fact, Austen is showing Catherine fumbling with a cabinet, because she is parodying gothic novels. Catherine is experiencing in real life the things that Tilney teased her about. As Freud said, sometimes a cabinet is just a cabinet.

     And by golly, when Austen does write about sex in a symbolic fashion, when Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford escape through the locked gate in Sotherton into the park, when Maria quotes Laurence Sterne and says she feels like the starling in the cage that can't get out, are we supposed to think about throwing off the restraints of society, and sexual temptation? No, says Kelly – we're supposed to think about slavery! What a perverse reading of a justly famous passage.
    In part three, we'll look at the evidence adduced by Kelly to demonstrate that Mansfield Park is really an anti-slavery tract and finish off with some other peculiarities of Jane Austen: the Secret Radical.

Click here for more information about my book, A Contrary Wind:  a variation on Mansfield Park.

Click here for part one of Jane Austen: the Secret Radical, a review