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Better Left Unsaid

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................ixIntroduction: The Joy of Censorship.................................................11 The Sounds of Silence: W. M. Thackeray and Preston Sturges........................152 For Sophisticated Eyes Only: Jane Austen and George Cukor.........................453 Beyond Censorship: Charles Dickens and Frank Capra................................804 The Thrill of the Fight: Charlotte Brontë and Elia Kazan.....................115Postscript: Oscar Wilde and Mae West................................................145Notes...............................................................................151Bibliography........................................................................167Index...............................................................................175

Chapter One

Here I am smothering dear old Mrs. Grundy's objections, before she has opened her mouth. —W. M. Thackeray

It was actually the enormous risks I took with my pictures, skating right up to the edge of non-acceptance, that paid off so handsomely. —Preston Sturges

IN THE COURSE OF REJECTING the modern world's repressive hypothesis, Michel Foucault nominates the anonymous author of the Victorian pornographic confessional My Secret Life to replace Queen Victoria as the "central figure" of nineteenth-century Western sexuality. The reason for this striking substitution, Foucault explains, is that "[r]ather than seeing in this singular man a courageous fugitive from a 'Victorianism' that would have compelled him to silence, I am inclined to think that, in an epoch dominated by (highly prolix) directives enjoining discretion and modesty, he was the most direct and in a way the most naïve representative of a plurisecular injunction to talk about sex." Yet as deliciously perverse as it may be to strip a sovereign queen of her iconic status in favor of a nameless pornographer, I believe we can learn more about the ways in which the Victorian era's "directives enjoining discretion" both collided and intersected with its "injunction to talk about sex" if we focus our attention on less naïve, less directly marginalized material. To that end, the following chapter will nominate a very different nineteenth-century writer to stand in as his culture's discursive representative: William Makepeace Thackeray.

One reason that Thackeray's novels serve as a particularly good point of departure for my discussion of Victorian censorship is that so many of them point out and bemoan the kinds of social and marketplace limitations that were implicitly placed upon writers in his day. Thackeray was, of course, very much invested in the market success of his fictional works; having lost the majority of his patrimony to gambling debts that he accrued during college and having already failed in several other vocational endeavors, he entered the novel-writing profession more for financial than aesthetic reasons. But he was also able to view the hypocrisies of the English way of life with the skepticism of an outsider's perspective, having spent his early childhood in India, and he specifically chose to make those hypocrisies one of the central thematic concerns of his fiction. Thackeray was, in fact, responsible for coining one of the key terms used to describe the "tyranny of the prevailing opinion" that was so powerful within the Victorian era: Grundyism. Mrs. Grundy was originally a character in Thomas Morton's 1798 play, Speed the Plough, who never appears on stage but whose moral judgment is of extreme importance to her neighbors; "What will Mrs. Grundy think?" is their perennial refrain. But it was thanks to Thackeray's repeated use of her name in his personal and fictional writing (see, for example, this chapter's epigraph) that "Mrs. Grundy" came to signify "an unseen censoring element" on a broader level. By constructing a disembodied, hypothetical figure to symbolize his culture's priggishness and conservatism, Thackeray was able to mock and critique such impulses without attacking any of his moral censors personally. His writing managed, in other words, to be ostentatiously vocal about its inability to vocalize the forbidden truth.

Perhaps the best example of this noisy silence on Thackeray's part can be found in the middle of his best-known work, regarding his best-known character. The sixty-fourth chapter of Vanity Fair (1848) opens with the narrator's bluff announcement that he is about to censor himself: "We must pass over a part of Mrs. Rebecca Crawley's biography with that lightness and delicacy which the world demands—the moral world, that has, perhaps, no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name." What follows this promise of delicate avoidance, however, turns out to be an overt and uncompromising attack on the hypocrisy of Victorian "modesty," followed by an articulation of the strategy that Thackeray has chosen to employ in response to such hypocrisy:

[I]t has been the wish of the present writer, all through this story, deferentially to submit to the fashion at present prevailing, and only to hint at the existence of wickedness in a light, easy, and agreeable manner, so that nobody's fine feelings may be offended. I defy any one to say that our Becky, who has certainly some vices, has not been presented to the public in a perfectly genteel and inoffensive manner. In describing this syren, singing and smiling, coaxing and cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all round, has he once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster's hideous tail above water? No! Those who like may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling round corpses; but above the water line, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and decorous, and has any the most squeamish immoralist in Vanity Fair a right to cry fie? (637–38)

Thackeray's description of the politely bifurcated style of storytelling demanded of him by the Moral World in which he lives bears a striking resemblance to the cinematic style that would be encouraged by Code administrators almost a century later—a style that, as one such administrator explicitly put it, would be able to "please the sophisticated, without causing the unsophisticated to blush, which allows everybody in the audience to draw the inference he wishes." Victorian moralists and Code censors were not, in other words, enjoining the artists working under their purview to be silent; they were enjoining them to be coy.

The filmmaker I have chosen to pair with Thackeray in order to explore this coyness is Preston Sturges, another highly popular artist whose works are not generally thought to be shocking, obscene, or particularly censorable. Sturges began his artistic career writing Broadway plays and Hollywood screenplays, some of which were successful and some of which were not. But it was his 1940 foray into directing—and, more specifically, into...