The ethics of indecency: censorship, sexuality, and the voice of the academy in the narration of 'Jacob's Room.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by Susan C. Harris

The significance of this relationship between the academy and sexuality is first hinted at when Jacob reads Bonamy his diatribe against Professor Bulteel's bowdlerized edition of Wycherly. Jacob's response is presented as an idealistic excoriation of academic hypocrisy:

An outrage,Jacob said; a breach of faith; sheer prudery; token of a lewd mind and a disgusting nature. Aristophanes and Shakespeare were cited. Modern life was repudiated. Great play was made with the professional title, and Leeds as a seat of learning was laughed to scorn. And the extraordinary thing was that these young men were perfectly right - extraordinary, because, even as Jacob copied his pages, he knew that no one would ever print them; and sure enough they came back from the Fortnightly, the Contemporary, the Nineteenth Century . . . The lid shut upon truth. (70)

But what Jacob intends as a defense of intellectual freedom eventually becomes his pledge of allegiance to the censorial tactics of his academy, the "faith" that upholds Cambridge and which Bulteel, in his clumsiness, has broken.(5)

By ridiculing "Leeds as a seat of learning," Jacob hints that Bulteel's methods are the result not simply of his "lewd mind" but of his inability to understand and adopt the finer methods of censorial control. In assuming that his job as an academic is to protect the public by removing from its literature any reference to sexuality, the uncouth Bulteel has gotten it half right. Control is part of the academic mission, but Bulteel's unsophisticated methods merely exacerbate the danger by telegraphing the fact that something has been deleted. The real mission of the academy, as Jacob's citation of Aristophanes and Shakespeare demonstrates, is not to delete sexual experience and desire, but to render it cryptic by couching it in language that is a barrier to the layman. Both playwrights rely heavily on sexually explicit humor, but since Aristophanes wrote in ancient Greek and Shakespeare's slang is no longer current, the academy and its products must now mediate between this humor and its consumers. That process of mediation allows them to control the expression of the forces behind it.

By writing his piece and by bringing in Shakespeare and Aristophanes as evidence, Jacob is arguing for the preservation of sexuality in canonical literature - but only on the academy's terms. What Jacob's tirade demonstrates is how heavily invested the academy is in regulating the discourse of sexuality. By first encrypting and then decoding sexuality in the works of Aristophanes and Shakespeare, Fielding and Keats, "Mozart and Bishop Berkeley" (79), the patriarchal canon and its devotees retain control over the impulse that, if it were left in the hands of a thinking Florinda, would burst uncontrollably into the open and perhaps set something on fire.

The danger Florinda would pose if the satirical narrator did not keep her in her place becomes clearer in the paragraphs that close the first extended description of her: