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Friday 19 June 2015

Pen is a pen is a pen is a pen... or a penis?

http://www.zombiechekhov.com/2013/02/is-mr-darcys-pen-metaphorical-penis.html
From Pride and Prejudice:
"'I am afraid you do not like your pen. Let me mend it for you. I mend pens remarkably well.'
'Thank you—but I always mend my own.'"
That's between Caroline Bingley and Darcy.
Which reminds me of Mary Crawford's line in Mansfield Park:
"Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat."
http://www.bookdrum.com/books/mansfield-park/104695/bookmark/162731.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/4259632/Jane-Austen-prefers-the-lash-to-sodomy.html
http://sarahemsley.com/2014/06/27/rears-and-vices/ (the comments are worth reading too) 
A. S. Byatt warns, in Possession
"Do you ever have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects. . . I mean, all those gloves, a minute ago, we were playing a professional game of hooks and eyes--mediaeval gloves, gaints' gloves, Blanche Glover, Balzac's gloves, the sea-anemone's ovaries--and it all reduced like boiling jam to--human sexuality. Just as Leonora Stern makes the whole earth read as the female body--and language--all language. And all vegetation in pubic hair." 
But who knows, really. Why does Darcy say specifically "I always mend my own" when he can say something like "No thanks, I'm fine"? It's the 19th century (or the 18th, if you think of the time Jane Austen started writing Pride and Prejudice), not the 21st, but then earlier in the Renaissance period, poetry's full of sexual innuendoes. 
Your thoughts? 

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