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

So eventually the satiric narrator communicates its contempt to Jacob, and he sees Florinda as "horribly brainless" when she sits at dinner "staring" (80). But her stare is alarming now not because it is vacuous, but because it is directed at something she is not supposed to be seeing.(6) Calling her stare "brainless" defuses it, makes it harmless, deprives it of any power to penetrate or reveal. Having discredited her vision, the narrator then mocks Florinda's attempts at writing, comparing her to "a butterfly, gnat, or other winged insect, attached to a twig which, clogged with mud, it rolls across a page" (94). In calling her "sentiments infantile" and her "spelling abominable" the narrator makes sure that Florinda has nothing to say and no way to say it, thus neutralizing her as a witness. The reader will believe the satiric narrator, which has already demonstrated its cultivation and erudition by citing "Shakespeare and Adonais, Mozart and Bishop Berkeley," before giving any credibility to the "ignorant . . . owl" it has so completely ridiculed.

The satiric narrator, then, in performing its censorial function as flamboyantly as it does, is not silencing the narrative of Jacob's sexual education so much as straining to keep that narrative contained within the boundaries of academic discourse, where it can be properly regulated. But the ultimate fate of Jacob's "Ethics of Indecency" should remind us that as self-dramatizing as high culture's censorship of sexuality is, the effectiveness of the academy's censorial project depends on keeping some things secret. The academy's power over the expression of sexuality is "tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself" (Foucault 86). The academy does not want outsiders to understand the real nature of its ethic of indecency; the world is to be content with the ripple in the grass and not to make itself aware of the true relationship between patriarchal culture and sexual desire - or that relationship's broader implications. So society and the academy shut the lid on truth; and woe betide anyone, even an insider like Jacob, who threatens to open it again.

Both the satiric or, as it may now be more useful to call it, the academic narrator and the cultural machinery it serves are at least partially success fill in retaining control over the expression and discussion of sexuality in Jacob's Room and in Jacob's world; so much so that women like Clara, rather than expose themselves to the Florinda treatment, internalize the process and censor themselves:

"I like Jacob Flanders," wrote Clara Durrant in her diary. "He is so unworldly. He gives himself no airs and one can say what one likes to him, though he's frightening because . . ." But Mr. Letts allows little space in his shilling diaries. Clara was not the one to encroach upon Wednesday. (71)

Clara stops obediently at the prescribed limits of expression, just as things are about to get "frightening." Clara does not have to be silenced and discredited as Florinda was because she knows when to stop and what not to stare at. Clara has learned to "renounce [her]self" rather than "suffer the penalty of being suppressed" (Foucault 84). She remains "candid," clear-eyed, and pure because she voluntarily declines to testify, to look at what it is that frightens her. Nice girls know better than to encroach upon Wednesday.