I've been talking about the Austen interpretations of scholar Jillian Heydt-Stevenson and why I disagree with them. To recap, I looked at whether the name "Fanny" had the same connotations in Austen's time as it does today. I concluded that it was fine to name your daughter "Fanny" back then. There were a lot of nice Fannies around. As well, I expressed my doubt about the theory that Austen wanted readers of Mansfield Park to think of an essay by Dr. Johnson concerning a girl who had been groomed into prostitution by an older male relative. I noted that the supposed similarities between Mansfield Park and Johnson's essays were not remarkable or noteworthy at all. It isn't at all difficult to find many novels which share plot points with Mansfield Park, particularly novels with the theme of a poor dependent heroine.
​    Here, for example, is another novel featuring a sweet and faultless Fanny as its heroine. This story has some “remarkable similarities” to both Mansfield Park and Johnson’s essays about Misella the prostitute. But this novel does not have a radical anti-patriarchal theme, as we will see.
   In Fanny, or, the deserted daughter (1792), Fanny Vincent, a girl of unknown birth (it's complicated) is raised in the home of a baronet, Sir Peter Sinclair, and is looked down upon by the baronet’s daughter...

    ​In the last post, I outlined scholar Jillian Heydt-Stevenson’s arguments in favour of her contention that the message of Mansfield Park is that marriage is akin to prostitution. I’ll repeat those arguments here:

     “Where is my Fanny? Why do I not see my little Fanny?” asks Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park, and posterity snickers.
   Where I'm from, "fanny" means a derriere, as in "get your little fanny over here." But I've read that it's also a slang term for lady parts. I wanted to confirm this, then I got embarrassed when I thought about my Google search history, so I stopped. Then I found a useful book called The Lover's Tongue, which says "fanny" “emerged around 1928, and is now a familiar, albeit quaint, euphemism for the buttocks. The word fanny might have been inspired by John Cleland’s 1749 erotic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the protagonist of which, Fanny Hill, is frequently exposing her bottom.”
   Author Mark Morton adds: "Fanny has also been used to refer to the female genitals which might make a connection to Fanny Hill even more feasible.”  So there you go.
    Anyway, there are many slang names for lady parts, that’s for sure. And the ​derriere is undeniably an important part of female charms and is particularly in vogue today, it seems.
     The question is, when we think of Fanny Price, are we supposed to think about lady parts? And when we think about lady parts, are supposed to think about prostitutes? And when we think of prostitutes, are we supposed to reflect that, after all, marriage is pretty much like prostitution? And are we intended to go on and realize that Mansfield Park "rigorously links prostitution to courtship and courtship to corruption in the culture at large"? Because, look at how Fanny's brother William got promoted to lieutenant... 
​      In Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions, Subversive Laughter, Embodied History, scholar Jillian Heydt-Stevenson argues Austen intended for her readers to follow this ramshackle train of thought...

    Since I started Clutching My Pearls, I’ve read a lot of Austen scholarship, some of which I've found informative and thought-provoking, but some of it I've found to be agenda-driven and influenced by presentism.
    Granted, I'm not an academic. My eyes glaze over at mentions of Derrida and Foucault—all that stuff is just beyond me. I'd like to know more about Austen's contributions to the development of the novel, but modern scholars have moved beyond that. Or rather, they seem to take it for granted that Austen was writing at such an advanced level of subtlety and symbolism that the merest object or reference—an apricot, a shawl, a hedge, a surname—can unlock the key to a hidden level of meaning that exists underneath and often in contradiction to the narrative. I'm unconvinced: would an author of her time, even an author of genius, write novels about happy marriages that aren't really about happy marriages at all?
    I have no quarrel with individual reactions to Austen, or with what people draw out of Austen. But I do differ with those who ascribe improbable opinions to Austen, hence the following rebuttal.
   For my 100th blog post, I offer six simple questions which I think academics might profitably ask themselves when formulating their theories about who Jane Austen was, and what she believed...