Mr. Bennet & Mrs. Bennet’s tete-a-tete at the beginning of P&P is part of a larger inter-novel pattern

December 17, 2014, 6:47 pm

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 The new issue of Persuasions Online came out yesterday, and I had a chance to start browsing in it. I will be posting some reactions to what I find there during the next week or two.

To begin, I found a remarkable insight in Kevin Alan Wells’s article….

http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol35no1/wells.html

…entitled  “First Impressions: The Control of Readers’ Cognitions in the First Chapter of Pride and Prejudice”

Wells spotted something extraordinary about one of the most famous and most frequently reread first chapters in the history of English literature, something I don’t believe has ever been noticed before, and it prompted me to some fresh insights into not only P&P, but to a larger, inter-novel pattern.

Here is what Wells wrote that really caught my attention:

“Mr. Bennet ironically mocks his wife’s idea of the wealthy newcomer marrying one of the women of his family by calling forth the least likely candidate.  While Mr. Bennet intends for this to wryly communicate disagreement with his wife’s proposition, Mrs. Bennet misperceives her husband’s irony as flattery.  She is clearly excluded from the camaraderie shared by an inner circle of the reader, narrator, and Mr. Bennet.  Led by the example and wit of these latter two, the reader may feel in good company to dismiss Mrs. Bennet and her ideas as silly.

 Something else is going on with Mr. Bennet’s lady, too.  Search the chapter:  nowhere is Mrs. Bennet properly named.  Mr. Bennet is named.  Sir William and Lady Lucas are named.  Bingley is named.  Netherfield Park is named.  Even the property agent of Netherfield, a man who never appears in the story, is named.  Never, though, a “Mrs. Bennet.” “  END QUOTE

Wells attributes Mrs. Bennet’s namelessness to her husband’s and the narrator’s lack of respect for her:

“Empirical research conducted by psychologists A. J. Sanford, K. Moar, and S. C. Garrod reveals the significance of Mrs. Bennet’s namelessness.  Their study demonstrated that readers assign more prominence to characters in literature referred to by proper names than characters referred to by descriptors.  “His lady,” “she,” “his wife,” “‘my dear,’” “‘you’”—neither the narrator nor Mr. Bennet have the decency to introduce Mrs. Bennet to readers by any more proper noun.  This side-stepping of Mrs. Bennet’s name achieves two goals.  It keeps readers cognitively engaged with the narrative as they search to reinstate the proper referent of the descriptors, and it continues the devaluation of Mrs. Bennet in readers’ minds.  By the time readers reach the final paragraph of this chapter, the capsule description of Mrs. Bennet’s mentality summarizes what readers are ready to believe about her:  “Her mind was less difficult to develope.  She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper.  When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous.  The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news”  “  END QUOTE

I agree with Wells that this is one of the several ways that Mr. Bennet shows disrespect for his wife,  and I also think Wells is even more spot-on in his description of how Jane Austen “tees up” that final narrative precis about Mrs. Bennet’s foibles, via Mrs. Bennet’s namelessness throughout the entire chapter.

And that would be reason enough for this post. But Wells also indirectly caused me to recognize something else in Chapter 1 that I never noticed before—it is a tete-a-tete between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, i.e., none of their daughters is present!

So what? Well, that makes it the ‘missing link” that fits into the pattern I first identified a few years ago, which is that several of Austen’s novels, within the first five chapters, devote most or all of a chapter to a tete-a-tete between two adult “policy makers”, in which there is minimal narration. Here is my most recent summary of that pattern:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/03/my-revision-of-pollocks-law-jane.html

And here is a brief recap of the other early tete-a-tetes:

Chapter 2 of S&S, when Fanny & John Dashwood have a tete-a-tete in their carriage, and discuss, in their horrible way, the welfare of John’s sisters and stepmother.

Chapter 5 of Emma, when Mrs. Weston and Mr. Knightley have a tete-a-tete at Randalls, and discuss Emma in a very enigmatic way.

Chapter 1 of MP, when Mrs. Norris and Sir Thomas (with Lady Bertram present but not speaking much) have a tete a tete at Mansfield Park, which also reflects their reprehensible characters.

But I never did spot the tete-a-tete in Chapter 1 of P&P before, and part of the reason for that, I now realize (and just verified in YouTube) is that neither the 1980 P&P nor the 1995 film P&P, the two I have seen many times each, depicts Mr. and Mrs. Bennet having that initial conversation alone.

Faye Weldon’s 1980 BBC version has excised that entire scene, and displaces the famous opening line of narration to a tete-a-tete between Elizabeth and Charlotte. And the 1995 Davies P&P has Mr. and Mrs. Bennet having that conversation while walking home from church, following closely by their daughters, who are listening to the entire conversation, with their parents’s full awareness of being overheard.

Interestingly the 2005 P&P (which in many ways is offbase in its adaptation of the novel, without the redeeming quality of being sensitive to the shadow story) is most faithful in this instance, as it depicts Elizabeth overhearing the beginning of the tete-a-tete between Mr. &Mrs. Bennet through an open window to the outside, and when Lizzy enters the home, she finds her three sisters eavesdropping on their parents!

Which is where my seeing Chapter 1 of P&P as part of a consistent pattern through all four of the JA novels that were published during her lifetime becomes highly relevant. I.e., the existence of that pattern through four novels suggests to me that this was a true tete-a-tete between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, just like those other three scenes which clearly are not overheard by the heroine or by anyone else.

And that pattern also fits with something else remarkable about Chapter 1 of P&P, which is the same as in those other three early scenes depicting tete-a-tetes. I.e., those scenes in the other novels, like Chapter 1 of P&P, have almost no narration at all.

What this pattern means is open to speculation and interpretation. Any thoughts?

I see it in part as JA setting a theatrical tone in all four of those novels, in having the novels begin almost as if they were plays and not novels. And it’s also no coincidence that these are all tete-a-tetes in which the heroine’s romantic future is part of the agenda under secret discussion.

But it’s also as if JA, before getting very far into each of these novels which will be quickly and permanently be almost completely dominated by the subjective consciousness of the heroine, gives the reader a vivid contrast to that dominance to come, by having a scene where the heroine is not present, and there is therefore no consciousness to mediate any substantive narration.

I.e., it’s quite interesting that JA does not overt report the thoughts of either Mr. or Mrs. Bennet in Chapter 1 of P&P, nor does she enter the mind of either John or Fanny Dashwood, nor, with a couple of exceptions, of Mrs. Weston or Kningtley, or of Mrs. Norris or Sir Thomas, in these scenes.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and now that I have shown these scenes recur in all of the novels that were clearly finished from JA’s point of view, it tells us that JA would have expected at least some readers of all four to eventually spot the pattern.

And so, by all of the above, JA is simultaneously sending the metafictional message to her alert readers that each Austen novel will be as much an exercise in literary epistemology as it is a sophisticated love story, cautionary tale, and comedy of manners.

Just as Wells was correct in attributing to JA an unspoken but implied message about how the reader ought to feel about Mrs. Bennet, so too does this pattern of early tete-a-tetes send an unspoken but implied message to the reader about how a Jane Austen novel is to be fully and properly understood.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

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The Jane Austen Report: Stephen Colbert & Jane Austen as great masters of the proud tradition of the sophisticated Swiftian put-on

December 18, 2014, 4:03 pm

≫ Next: "You did behave very shamefully. You never wrote a truer line."–No, KNIGHTLEY never GHOSTwrote a phonier line!

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Many of you are aware that The Colbert Reportwill air its final show tonight. For those among you not familiar with why that is a very big deal for a lot of people, and not just here in the US, here is my edited down version of Wikipedia’s excellent introductory summary:

“The Colbert Report is an American late-night satirical television program hosted by Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central. The show focuses on a fictional anchorman character named Stephen Colbert, played by his real-life namesake. The character, described by Colbert as a "well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot", is a caricature of televised political pundits. Furthermore, the show satirizes conservative personality-driven political talk programs, particularly Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor…. the show has broadcast 1,442 episodes over its nine-year run… The show's writing is grounded in improvisation, and often lampoons current events stories. The show's structure also includes a guest interview, in which the Colbert character will attempt to deconstruct his opponent's argument… the program's set is "hyper-American," epitomizing the character's ego.,,,”

I have not been a regular watcher of The Colbert Report, but I have always enjoyed watching whenever I have tuned in over the years. A personal highlight for me was in July of this year when Colbert had as his guest my good friend Steve Wise, founder of the Nonhuman Rights Project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6oTvU2Tx80

It occurred to me today that this would be a great time to post about my long-held sense that the show’s basic premise is strongly resonant with Jane Austen’s satire—and that both are great examples of the long proud literary tradition of the sophisticated literary put-on—but how are they the same, and how are they different?

Recently, Diane Reynolds and I have had a fruitful discussion in Janeites & Austen L about the veiled allusion by Jane Austen that she and I both see in Emma to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, which of course is the most famous and celebrated hoax in literary history (here’s the link to the fourth and final of my four posts on that topic):

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/12/more-re-swifts-modest-proposal-in-jane.html

Colbert has clearly drawn fertile inspiration from Swift, as the following discussion (note the significant date of the article!) of an episode in which Colbert makes the Swift connection explicit (a link to the episode is included):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2014/04/01/stephen-colberts-modest-proposal-do-not-cancelcolbert/

And of course Sascha Baron Cohen’s numerous hoax characters (Ali G, Borat, etc) are in a very similar vein.

I find it hard to believe that very many readers of Swift’s great put-on actually believed he was serious-but I bet some Swift scholars have actually researched that question, and wouldn’t it be something if we found out that many were, in Mary Crawford’s words, “taken in” by Swift’s “manoeuvering”? Remember PT Barnum’s Audenian/Austenian cynicism about a sucker being born every minute, etc etc.

I would not be surprised to learn that some viewers who accidentally stumbled on Colbert’s show back in 2005, before he became really famous, and without realizing that they had stumbled into Comedy Central, were also “taken in” by Colbert’s faux-conservative-pundit persona. That’s because Colbert walks right up to the edge of the line of the parody---the difference between his faux persona and that of the butts of his satire is at times razor–thin. And that is a key part of the payoff of his satire, as we find ourselves saying, repeatedly, yes, they really are as absurd in real life as he mock-portrays them on the show. It’s impossible to say where absurdist parody ends, and faithful representation of absurd reality begins.

But once that early stage was passed, it’s remarkable that Colbert and his team were able to milk 9 years of shows on the premise of a put-on put-on, if you will. I.e., they have managed to produce high quality comedy even for an audience that pretty much all are fully aware that they are watching a put-on.

Ali G and Borat bring us one step closer to Jane Austen, I think, because they are completely convincing to the butts of their satire, who get caught in Cohen’s 21^st century Candid Camera-like punking, and never even know they’ve been had, because they have unwittingly hoist themselves on their own petards of prejudice and evil.

And that is what brings us to the kind of put-on we see in Jane Austen’s novels, of which I could bring forward 100 examples—but let’s go with Emma Woodhouse, because she feels closest to me to the spirit of Colbert’s and Cohen’s faux personae.

I claim that Jane Austen deliberately played a Swiftian game when she made Emma the heroine (and therefore the focal consciousness) of her eponymous novel, because I believe Emma is at the top of the list of her characters with whom the rich elitist snobs reading her novels, whom JA actually abhorred, would identify—I go further and suggest that JA’s own rich, elitist niece, Fanny Knight, was the primary real life source for the character of Emma Woodhouse—and that it was NOT meant as a compliment!

I say that Jane Austen deliberately wrote Emma from the “wrong” point of view---i.e., the true heroine of the story is actually Jane Fairfax-and what a devastating irony it is, then, to have the true heroine of the story speak only a handful of lines in the novel, and to have the reader NEVER be granted access to Jane’s thoughts and feelings, but be forced to try to figure out what is actually happening to Jane, despite the constant interference and undermining of that figuring-out process by Emma’s constant and obtrusive cluelessness..

And isn’t that what Colbert has done for 9 years and 1,442 episodes of his show? He has made a pompous, jingoistic fool the “hero” of the show! And for the same reason, I suggest, that JA made Emma her “heroine”-i.e., the better to convey, via parody and satire, everything that is wrong about the kind of talking head Colbert is hoaxing.

And that’s why it doesn’t surprise me to know that Stephen Colbert has at least some familiarity with Jane Austen’s writing, and several of his writers probably a lot more. Check out this 2008 episode of The Colbert Report:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7fwgk_stephen-colbert-jane-austen_fun

In particular, watch the 80-second segment that runs from 2:00 to 3:20 on the video clock---it’s Colbert’s very funny faux-jingoistic conceit on the inaccurate claim by the OED that Northanger Abbey was the first published usage of the word “baseball” (see my following posts where I set the record straight on that point several years ago):

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2009/11/ja-and-running-home-safely.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2009/11/catherine-morlands-home-run.html

I won’t spoil the comedy by giving you any further explanation of his shtick in this segment, but trust me, it will hold special humor for Janeites with a sense of humor!

And so, farewell to “Stephen Colbert”, and welcome the real Stephen Colbert, who will finally shed his mask, so I understand, and be himself as he replaces David Letterman. Let’s hope we won’t have to wait too long for a new talent to appear to give us the next iteration of the Great Put-On!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

"You did behave very shamefully. You never wrote a truer line."–No, KNIGHTLEY never GHOSTwrote a phonier line!

December 19, 2014, 1:06 pm

≫ Next: Mr. Knightley the Great DICTATOR (in both senses) of Highbury & Hartfield

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Apropos the recent thread about whether Knightley ghostwrote Robert Martin's proposal letter (a claim first made by Barbara Mann in 2002), and my significant extension thereof suggesting that Knightley ALSO ghostwrote the second half of Frank's letter to Mrs. Weston (shown in full in Chapter 50), I just experienced a moment of pure serendipity.

I.e., while getting ready to post about the significant usages of variants of the word "sacrifice" in MP and Emma, I serendipitously came upon DRAMATIC evidence right there in the text of Emma, that shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Knightley is the very sort of  presumptuous person who has no scruples about REwriting letters written by others, in order to conform those letters to Knightley’s own standards.

Recall first that Knightley gets really red in the face in Chapter 8 when he realizes that Emma has ghostwritten Harriet’s letter rejecting Robert Martin’s proposal, a proposal letter which Barbara Mann, Diane, and I all believe was ghostwritten by Knightley himself. That’s why Knightley turns beet red, because it’s half that he’s feeling anger at Emma for her secret meddling, but the other half is his acute  embarrassment, because he knows, but he’ll never confess, that HER secret meddling has undone HIS secret meddling! He may be red-faced, but he’s not honest enough to confess to having been caught red-handed!

Now, let’s move ahead 10 chapters---which actually covers less than a month of elapsed time in the chronology of the novel----and check out what Knightley says to Emma in Chapter 18 as they discuss Frank’s letter of excuse to Mrs. Weston for his failure to visit Highbury as promised:

“For the present, he could not be spared, to his "very great mortification and regret; but still he looked forward with the hope of coming to Randalls at no distant period."“

The Westons rationalize Frank’s flaking at the last minute, and Emma joins in their willingness to give Frank a great deal of the benefit of the doubt. However, Mr. Self-Appointed Righteous Wise Man, Knightley, is having none of that, and he launches into the following famous tirade, as if he were a prime minister addressing his wayward countrymen  in a moment of national crisis, telling them all to grow a pair and Do The Right Thing:

"There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do, if he chuses, and that is, his duty; not by manoeuvring and finessing, but by vigour and resolution. It is Frank Churchill's duty to pay this attention to his father. He knows it to be so, by his promises and messages; but if he wished to do it, it might be done. A man who felt rightly would say at once, simply and resolutely, to Mrs. Churchill—'Every sacrifice of mere pleasure you will always find me ready to make to your convenience; but I must go and see my father immediately. I know he would be hurt by my failing in such a mark of respect to him on the present occasion. I shall, therefore, set off to-morrow.'—If he would say so to her at once, in the tone of decision becoming a man, there would be no opposition made to his going."

When you take Knightley at face value as a bluntly honest man, those are good words, and he is indeed correct that Frank could have done exactly as Knightley says. However, what I never noticed before, and now I am LOL’ing at it, is how slyly and brilliantly JA has snuck in, under cover of Knightley’s great enunciation of the Gentleman’s First Commandment, if you will, how Knightley has also unconsciously  given away the game, by assuming the hypothetical role of ghostwriter for Frank.

In case you missed it in that speech, here are the very words Knightley would put in FRANK’s mouth, to be spoken to Mrs. Churchill:

'Every sacrifice of mere pleasure you will always find me ready to make to your convenience; but I must go and see my father immediately. I know he would be hurt by my failing in such a mark of respect to him on the present occasion. I shall, therefore, set off to-morrow.'

Now, does anyone think that a writer like JA, who consciously wove together a thousand different threads across vast stretches of each of her novels, as if she were doing literary needlework of the most intricate complexity, would accidentally or unconsciously toss in this sort of evidence of Knightley’s penchant for putting words in other people’s mouths (or pens)? Of course not! The memory of ghostwriting letters in Chapter 8 is still quite fresh in an alert reader’s mind, especially upon rereading.

But this passage in Chapter 18 is ten times more supportive of my more audacious claim that Knightley ghostwrote the second half of Frank’s letter shown in Chapter 50. Why? Because in both cases Knightley is responding to a letter written by Frank to Mrs. Weston in which Frank is making excuses for having failed to do his manly duty. This is a striking parallelism, and, again, impossible to see as accidental or unconscious on JA’s part. This is sheer perfection and genius in fictional story construction, pure and simple. The “Aha!” of readerly discovery is inevitably succeeded by the “Ah!” of readerly appreciation.

Back to Frank’s two letters to Mrs. Weston. While Knightley was not in a position to intervene in Chapter 18, because he was not there physically with Frank to strongarm him into writing the right thing, he was, I claim, there in Richmond to strongarm Frank into doing so in Chapter 50!

But I have left the very best for last. If it is true that Knightley ghostwrote the second half of Frank’s

Chapter 50 letter, then JA ought to also have given us additional textual winks to confirm to us that, yes,

she really did this on purpose. And, in fact, she did, with her usual wit, cleverness, and humor.

Go ahead and compare the language of the two halves of Frank’s letter in Chapter 50, and the hidden hand of Knightley is clearly revealed by the change of tone and verbiage. In the first half, Frank, writing his own thoughts without any third party “guidance”, and not feeling half as guilty as he says he feels, is having way too a good time tossing off narcissistic bon mots like “It is hard for the prosperous to be humble”—all his apologies, such as they are, are half-baked, and he undoes them every step of the way with excuses, rationalizations, and witticisms.

But now look at the striking change that occurs in the second half, and note the ghostly hand of Knightley behind the ALL CAPS words:

“I have been walking over the country, and am now, I hope, RATIONAL ENOUGH to make the rest of my letter WHAT IT OUGHT TO BE.—It is, in fact, a most mortifying retrospect for me. I behaved SHAMEFULLY. And here I can admit, that my manners to Miss W., in being unpleasant to Miss F., were HIGHLY BLAMEABLE. ….[then an enormous amount of specific detail about Frank’s “ABOMINABLE” behavior toward various people but most of all toward Jane, and with a minimum of the jocular excuse-making of the first half of the letter]…If you think me in a way to be HAPPIER THAN I DESERVE, I am quite of your opinion.—Miss W. calls me the child of good fortune. I hope she is right…”

And it gets even better. Not only does Knightley mutter the words “abominable scoundrel” BEFORE he (supposedly) reads Frank’s letter. No, when Knightley debriefs Frank’s letter with Emma in Chapter 51, and he pretends that he has never read it before, that makes the following comments by him particularly funny, in a sharply ironic way that show how much he is enjoying duping Emma in concealing his authorship:

“When he came to Miss Woodhouse, he was obliged to read the whole of it aloud…”

Yes, “he was obliged” because that was EXACTLY where Knightley started dictating the words of Frank’s letter!!!

“….Fancying you to have fathomed his secret. Natural enough!—his own mind full of intrigue, that he should suspect it in others.—Mystery; Finesse—how they pervert the understanding! My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?"

How Knightley must have laughed inside, to be giving Emma a lecture on truth and sincerity at the very moment he is concealing from Emma that he is reciting his own words—and more important, that he is concealing that he used Frank’s murdering his aunt to blackmail Frank in to writing what Knightley dictated!

“…After this, he made some progress without any pause. Frank Churchill's confession of having behaved shamefully was the first thing to call for more than a word in passing. “

Yes, again, it called for more than a word in passing because that was Knightley’s goal, to make sure Emma thought badly of Frank, whom Knightley is well aware that Emma was very attracted to.

"I perfectly agree with you, sir,"—was then his remark. "You did behave very shamefully. You never wrote a truer line."

At which point, Knightley is thinking to himself, “I never wrote a truer line.”, which is a perfect echo of  what Knightley famously says to Emma in Chapter 8 about HER short ghostwriting career:

[Knightley] “…Nonsense! a man does not imagine any such thing. But what is the meaning of this? Harriet Smith refuse Robert Martin? madness, if it is so; but I hope you are mistaken."

[Emma] "I saw her answer!—nothing could be clearer."

[Knightley] "You saw her answer!—YOU WROTE HER ANSWER TOO. Emma, this is your doing. You persuaded her to refuse him."

[Emma] "And if I did, (which, however, I am far from allowing) I should not feel that I had done wrong. Mr. Martin is a very respectable young man, but I cannot admit him to be Harriet's equal; and am rather surprized indeed that he should have ventured to address her. By your account, he does seem to have had some scruples. It is a pity that they were ever got over."

I mean, really.

I am in fresh awe of JA’s achievement in this regard, as I was always certain of the rightness of my identifying Knightley as the ghostwriter of Robert Martin’s and Frank’s letters, respectively--but now I have found the rich and varied textual evidence which proves my intuitions have been 100% correct!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Mr. Knightley the Great DICTATOR (in both senses) of Highbury & Hartfield

December 20, 2014, 12:20 pm

≫ Next: The Hare & Many Friends: Jane F. & Fanny P. as female Actaeon/Caesar…but not Hare-Yet Smith!

≪ Previous: "You did behave very shamefully. You never wrote a truer line."–No, KNIGHTLEY never GHOSTwrote a phonier line!

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Diane Reynolds responded as follows to my most recent posts re Knightley as Ghostwriter:

 

"Arnie. Great catch on Mr. Knightley hypothetically dictating wording to Frank. it does add to the atmospheric of behind the scenes dictations--and shows how bombastic Mr. Knightley can be. And it shows that Mr. Knightley is conscious of his discourse and how to use male power to intimidate: "tone of decision becoming a man ... no opposition." Emma, I'm afraid, is in for it with this one. I also can't believe Austen wrote this unconsciously--the novel is all about the awareness of male privilege." 

 Thanks! I have a couple of quick PS's:

I've known since mid 2007 that the strongest evidence that Knightley ghostwrote Frank's Chapter 50 letter to Mrs. Weston is that Knightley, in Chapter 49 (i.e., suppposedly BEFORE Knightley has seen Frank's letter) mutters under his breath THREE different things which each echo a passage from Frank's letter:
　
"Her arm was pressed again, as he added, in a more broken and subdued accent,'The feelings of THE WARMEST FRIENDSHIP--INDIGNATION-ABOMINABLE scoundrel!"
Here are the respective passages in Frank's letter-you tell me what are the odds that these three distinctive words and phrases would be anticipated by Knightley--I'd say, ZERO!:
...With the greatest respect, and THE WARMEST FRIENDSHIP, do I mention Miss Woodhouse...
...as soon as she found I was really gone from Randalls, she closed with the offer of that officious Mrs. Elton; the whole system of whose treatment of her, by the bye, has ever filled me with INDIGNATION and hatred....
...In short, my dear madam, it was a quarrel blameless on her side, ABOMINABLE on mine..
Plus....as I pointed out in 2011, even Knightley's referring to an abominable SCOUNDREL also indirectly connects back to Knightley, via Samuel Johnson:
In "Jane Austen's Englishness: Emma as national tale", Persuasions (2008), the late Brian Southam acutely picked up on the applicability of Johnson's (perhaps) most famous line to Emma thusly: "The ghost of Johnson is glimpsed once more in the scene--in technique, a travesty--in which Churchill sets out to establish his credentials as "'a true citizen of Highbury'" with a "'burst,'" as he puts it, "'of my amor patriae,'" purchasing gloves at the village shop. Emma responds half jokingly, expressing her admiration for Iris show of "'patriotism'" (200). But the joke is more than double-edged. As Boswell reminds us, Johnson dismissed "Patriotism" as "the last refuge of a scoundrel" (2.348), a sentiment much repeated and fresh in the mind of Regency England. As for amor patriae, resisting Churchill's suave plausibility, readers of Jane Austen would feel perfectly at home with Hazlitt's recently-delivered formulation, Johnsonian in tone, "the love of liberty, of independence, of peace, of "social happiness." END QUOTE
　
So....when you read Knightley debriefing Frank's letter with Emma in Chapter 51, you see him conning Emma exactly the same way Harriet conned Emma--i.e., Knightley pretends not to be particularly interested in the letter, and acts as if he is doing Emma a favor by going over it with her, even though the whole point of Knightley's ghostwriting the letter was that it had an intended audience of one--Emma!!! Just read Chapter 51 with that idea in mind, and you tell me if you don't LOL over and over again, as you marvel at how expertly Knightley leads Emma down the garden path.

And finally, as my new Subject Line suggests, I will henceforth call Knightley the Great Dictator, as he fits both senses of the word---he is a dictator in the sense of being the boss of Highbury, and in particular the boss of Hartfield, as he totally controls both Mr. Woodhouse AND Emma. But he is also a 'dictator' in the punny sense that he has been a kind of ventriloquist, dictating words to others to speak or write as if they were their own words. Knightley does it with Robert Martin, he does it with Frank, he does it with Mr. Woodhouse (with the legal papers he gets the old fool to sign without reading them). These meanings are inextricably linked, as his turning other human beings into wooden dummies like Charlie McCarthy is one of Knightley's most powerful methods of controlling the behavior of others.

I only thought of this pun yesterday because I was listening to a very interesting NPR interview with a female talking head (I didn't catch her name) in which she drew the parallel between the controversies swirling around the Sony film "The Interview" in 2014, and those which occurred when Charlie Chaplin was making "The Great Dictator" in 1938.

Because of this recent thread about Knightley, I immediately thought of the pun, and then when I got home, on a hunch, I searched the word "dictate" in Emma, and would you believe, this is where I found the single usage of it in the novel--in the penultimate sentence of Frank's Chapter 50 letter!:
"A thousand and a thousand thanks for all the kindness you have ever shown me, and ten thousand for the attentions your heart will DICTATE towards her."

Did Knightley dictate those words to Frank, as a way of saying to Mrs. Weston, in code, "I dictated this letter"? Or did Frank sneak this in at the end as a way of taking back authorship of the letter at the very end, as if to say, "The second half of this letter was dictated to me"? Either is possible, but what I know for certain is that Jane Austen put that word in to confirm to readers like myself that Knightley was indeed the Great Dictator of Highbury and Hartfield.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The Hare & Many Friends: Jane F. & Fanny P. as female Actaeon/Caesar…but not Hare-Yet Smith!

December 20, 2014, 2:38 pm

≫ Next: Tolerably decent, intolerably stupid & intolerably rude: my “defence” of Jane Austen’s (more than) “tolerably” witty wordplay in Northanger Abbey

≪ Previous: Mr. Knightley the Great DICTATOR (in both senses) of Highbury & Hartfield

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Diane wrote: “I do see Harriet as one who runs with the hounds, not with the hare--she is always looking up to those above her to curry and appreciate favor, and not one to notice those beneath her. She focuses, for example, on the kindness (dubious as we might find it) of the petty tyrant Miss Nash allowing her to peek through the blinds at Mr. Elton, but has no interest in the Abbots who are left out of the invitation.”

Diane, you are as usual spot-on, that is a brilliant observation!

I can’t resist asking---is your “Harriet as one who runs with the hounds, not with the hare” your sly way of winking at what I wrote 4 months ago about the explicit allusions in BOTH Northanger Abbeyand Emma to Gay’s famous poem “The Hare and Many Friends”?:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-startling-hidden-connectedness-of.html

As my Subject Line today evidences, it was only in responding to you that I realized—DOH!!—that the name “Harriet” is pretty darned close to the word “hare”! So add Hare-Yet Smith to the list of homophonic puns (hare, Eyre, heir, eyer, air) that Jane Austen (and Charlotte Bronte) played with, as I outlined 3 years ago:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/04/heir-oine-eyre-oine-and-many-friends.html

And that’s just the start, as my Subject Line also indicates--I am so glad you’ve brought this point up now, because this time, because of the research I did leading up to my JASNA AGM talk in October, I now am able to connect the dots to another rich Shakespearean/mythological node layer in Jane Austen’s multi-tiered cake of literary allusion in Mansfield Park &Emma, which I will get to in due course.

But first some necessary recap. As I summarized in that August 2014 post, Mrs. Elton alludes both to Gay’s poem “The Hare and Many Friends” and also to Gray’s even more famous Elegy, in order to broadly and menacingly hint at Jane Fairfax’s unmarried concealed pregnancy. I.e., Mrs. Elton is the proverbial woman scorned who carries on a vendetta against Jane, whom she blames for Frank –the “abominable puppy who gives her the acrostic which is actually the “courtship’” charade---deciding to abruptly jilt the then Miss Hawkins several months earlier on Valentine’s Day. And that is why she right from the start takes such an otherwise mysteriously strong and insistent interest in Jane’s “welfare”. She keeps hinting ominously, in code, at Jane needing to get a late-term abortion (“abolition”) when she goes to work as a “governess” (i.e., prostitute) at Mrs. Smallridge’s (i.e, in a brothel), a la Fanny Hill, all in order to avoid the social ruination that would arise if Jane’s pregnancy were exposed by Mrs. Elton to the gossips of Highbury and London. And Mrs. Elton’s blackmail almost works, but then Miss Bates and Mrs. Weston save Jane at the last minute, by pulling the strings necessary to give Jane a safe, loving placement for her baby without public detection. And so Mrs. Elton’s final appearance in the novel is the equivalent of a veiled version of  “Curses, foiled again!”. And of course, Emma knows NOTHING about any of this, so the passive reader also does not.

But, now getting back to Diane’s point--before that miraculous salvation at the end of the novel, Jane is most definitely the “hare” of Highbury, the “poor animal” who is dependent on at least some of her friends in Highbury to save her from the hounds like Mrs. Elton (and her husband) who are indeed hounding and tormenting Jane during her final trimester, when concealment has become extremely difficult.

Now Harriet, on the other hand, as you so correctly point out, has a very different strategy for setting herself up for (as Emma thinks of it in Chapter 9) “the evening of life”. Harriet is the illegitimate daughter of powerful people in Highbury who are not about to fess up to their neighbors that they are the biological parents of Harriet. Harriet is a pragmatist, like Lucy Steele, and she knows that she can’t sit back and hope for a miracle---so she decides that there is no future for her among the hares, she must set her sights on the biggest hound in Highbury---Mr. Knightley!---and if she mates with him, that will, by the law of the jungle, automatically convert her and her future children from the status of hares to hounds. And so she realizes that Emma is the perfect stepping-stone for Harriet to get close to Knightley, and that is why she shows up at Hartfield in Chapter 3, once Mrs. Weston is no longer there 24/7 to watch out for Emma. But Harriet, like Mrs. Elton, is ultimately foiled as well, as she has to settle for Robert Martin, who, as a prosperous farmer is a kind of mythological hybrid beast out of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, half hare and half hound.  ;)

And…speaking of Ovid, your post also made me realize that Jane Austen would have also been aware of a mythological source underlying Gay’s famous poem, who appears in Ovid and several other ancient sources—Actaeon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actaeon

“In the version that was offered by the Hellenisticpoet Callimachus, which has become the standard setting, Artemis was bathing in the woods when the hunter Actaeon stumbled across her, thus seeing her naked. He stopped and stared, amazed at her ravishing beauty. Once seen, Artemis got revenge on Actaeon: she forbade him speech — if he tried to speak, he would be changed into a stag— for the unlucky profanation of her virginity's mystery. Upon hearing the call of his hunting party, he cried out to them and immediately was changed into a stag. At this he fled deep into the woods, and doing so he came upon a pond and, seeing his reflection, groaned. His own hounds then turned upon him and tore him to pieces, not recognizing him. In an endeavour to save himself, he raised his eyes (and would have raised his arms, had he had them) toward Mount Olympus. The gods did not heed his actions, and he was torn to pieces. An element of the earlier myth made Actaeon the familiar hunting companion of Artemis, no stranger. In an embroidered extension of the myth, the hounds were so upset with their master's death, that Chiron made a statue so lifelike that the hounds thought it was Actaeon.”

I haven’t begun to think through a solid interpretation of how the above precis about Actaeon fits into Emma, but it’s clear to me that it is part of the mix, both re Jane Fairfax as the pursued human prey, but also in the way Harriet (supposedly) is set upon by Gypsies outside Highbury and then is rescued by Frank. That fits with my longstanding sense that Harriet has made this whole incident up, and in reality she had trysted with Frank outside Highbury but things got out of control, and so a cover story had to be made up to account for Harriet’s tumbled appearance. Sorta like the ambiguous situation between Artemis and Actaeon.

And….I had Actaeon on my mind as a source for Jane Austen in the first place, because of my recent talk about the hidden Shakespeare in Mansfield Park, in which I first quoted the following passage in Chapter 34 of MP….

“Here Fanny, who could not but listen, involuntarily SHOOK her head, and Crawford was instantly by her side again, entreating to know her meaning; and as Edmund perceived, by his drawing in a chair, and sitting down close by her, that it was to be a very thorough attack, that looks and undertones were to be well tried, he sank as quietly as possible into a corner, turned his back, and took up a newspaper, very sincerely wishing that dear little Fanny might be persuaded into explaining away that SHAKE of the head to the satisfaction of her ardent lover; and as earnestly trying TO BURY every sound of the business from himself in murmurs of his own, over the various advertisements of "A most desirable Estate in South Wales"; "To Parents and Guardians"; and a "CAPITAL SEASON’D HUNTER."”

…and then pointed out Jane Austen’s sophisticated wordplay (in all caps) all pointing to the assassination of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s eponymous tragedy, and to the myth of Actaeon:

“And note that at this moment of virtual surrender by Fanny, Jane Austen briefly allows us into Edmund’s mind, and shows us his thoughts and observations as he tries NOT to notice Fanny being seduced by Henry, but his subconscious jealousy leaks through, as the words remind us of that hole in the heart of Julius Caesar, with the first of what will be several references to a “shake” (as in Shakespeare) of Fanny’s head, and Edmund’s trying  “to bury” the sounds of Crawford’s attack, which recalls Antony’s coming to bury Caesar, and Edmund’s murmurs to himself about that ad for a “Capital season’d Hunter”.

“Capital” puns homophonically on the word Capitol;

“season’d” puns homophonically on the name Caesar (who of course was stabbed in the Capitol, as Hamlet reminds Polonius); and

“hunter” refers to the hounds who tear the mythological Actaeon to pieces, a myth which it is certain Shakespeare clearly had in mind, as per James O. Woods,  “Intimations of Actaeon in Julius Caesar”.  Shakespeare Quarterly, 24, 1, (Winter 1973): 85-88.”  END QUOTE FROM MY JASNA TALK EXCERPT

So, the fact that Jane Austen had Actaeon so clearly on her radar screen with the character of Fanny (in whose heart/hart Henry Crawford, with his hunters, wishes to make a hole) makes it that much more likely that she has Mrs. Elton invoke Gay’s “Hare and Many Friends” with Jane Fairfax as another Regency Era Actaeon as well. And..we also see Jane as a latter day Caesar and hare, both of whom found out that in crunch time, you may just find out that some of your “friends” will turn on you, and all you may be able to say is “Et tu, Mrs. Elton?”

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Tolerably decent, intolerably stupid & intolerably rude: my “defence” of Jane Austen’s (more than) “tolerably” witty wordplay in Northanger Abbey

December 21, 2014, 6:36 pm

≫ Next: Jane Austen & Edmund Bertram read the newspaper advertisements together!

≪ Previous: The Hare & Many Friends: Jane F. & Fanny P. as female Actaeon/Caesar…but not Hare-Yet Smith!

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The words “tolerably” and “tolerable” each appear over forty times in JA’s novels, but the word “intolerable” appears only six times total (and those 6 in only 3 of the novels), and the word “intolerably” appears only twice—both in the same novel, Northanger Abbey.

Upon initial reflection, this large discrepancy in frequency of usage between antonyms seems readily explainable, given that the words  “tolerable” and “tolerably” were actually clichés in JA’s era, frequently used by people of all levels of education and intelligence as a loose synonym for today’s colloquial “sort of”. In JA’s fictional worlds, it is a word often used as a tool for damning with faint praise---and I am sure some of you already realized that this latter sense most memorably occurs in the following passages about Elizabeth Bennet’s looks:

“…She is TOLERABLE, but not handsome enough to tempt me…”

"Mr. Darcy is not so well worth listening to as his friend, is he?—poor Eliza!—to be only just TOLERABLE."

“…Her face is too thin; her complexion has no brilliancy; and her features are not at all handsome. Her nose wants character—there is nothing marked in its lines. Her teeth are TOLERABLE, but not out of the common way; and as for her eyes, which have sometimes been called so fine, I could never see anything extraordinary in them. They have a sharp, shrewish look, which I do not like at all; and in her air altogether there is a self-sufficiency without fashion, which is INTOLERABLE."….”

Whereas, in contrast, “intolerable” and “intolerably” were not clichés on the tip of every tongue.

But it turns out that there is a thread inspired by these antonyms in NA, which ties together four different passages in which novels are discussed, as to which I am tolerably certain (sorry, I  couldn’t resist!) Jane Austen was having some subtle wordplay fun, which also (as with all her humor) had a deeper meaning. See what you think—to me it’s the thousand and first example of Jane Austen’s seemingly infinite capacity to use keywords as threads to unite seemingly unrelated  passages.

First, we have two conversations about reading Udolpho and other novels, which are prompted by Catherine’s obsession with Radcliffe’s novel:

Chapter 7:

"Have you ever read Udolpho, Mr. Thorpe?"

"Udolpho! Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do."

Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question, but he prevented her by saying, "Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a TOLERABLY decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t'other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation."

"I think you must like Udolpho, if you were to read it; it is so very interesting."

"Not I, faith! No, if I read any, it shall be Mrs. Radcliffe's; her novels are amusing enough; they are worth reading; some fun and nature in them."

"Udolpho was written by Mrs. Radcliffe," said Catherine, with some hesitation, from the fear of mortifying him.

"No sure; was it? Aye, I remember, so it was; I was thinking of that other STUPID book, written by that woman they make such a fuss about, she who married the French emigrant."

"I suppose you mean Camilla?"

"Yes, that's the book; such unnatural stuff! An old man playing at see-saw, I took up the first volume once and looked it over, but I soon found it would not do; indeed I guessed what sort of stuff it must be before I saw it: as soon as I heard she had married an emigrant, I was sure I should never be able to get through it."

"I have never read it."

"You had no loss, I assure you; it is the HORRIDEST nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man's playing at see-saw and learning Latin; upon my soul there is not."

AND

Chapter 14:

"Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?"

"Why not?"

"Because they are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books."

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be INTOLERABLY stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho,when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time."

JA subtly conveys the sharp contrast between John Thorpe and Henry Tilney via the sharp contrast in their novel-reading habits, with the male suitor’s reaction to Udolpho as the litmus test of taste and intelligence. And so how brilliant of JA to take Thorpe’s lament for the recent dearth of “tolerably decent” current novels, and his contempt for Burney’s “stupid novel” Camilla, to then have Henry blend those two comments into “intolerably stupid”, as if Henry had been eavesdropping on Catherine’s conversation with Thorpe, and had wittily decided to doubly hoist Thorpe on his own dull rhetorical petard. We may wonder whether Catherine, who heard both men speak their respective speeches, noticed the echo.

Anyway, JA clearly had such a good time with those two passages, that she could not help but pop a third one in, later in that same Chapter 14, which is subliminally linked to the first two via those same keywords:

… Catherine, who, in rather a solemn tone of voice, uttered these words, "I have heard that something very shocking indeed will soon come out in London."

Miss Tilney, to whom this was chiefly addressed, was startled, and hastily replied, "Indeed! And of what nature?"

"That I do not know, nor who is the author. I have only heard that it is to be more horrible than anything we have met with yet."

"Good heaven! Where could you hear of such a thing?"

"A particular friend of mine had an account of it in a letter from London yesterday. It is to be uncommonly dreadful. I shall expect murder and everything of the kind."

"You speak with astonishing composure! But I hope your friend's accounts have been exaggerated; and if such a design is known beforehand, proper measures will undoubtedly be taken by government to prevent its coming to effect."

"Government," said Henry, endeavouring not to smile, "neither desires nor dares to interfere in such matters. There must be murder; and government cares not how much."

The ladies stared. He laughed, and added, "Come, shall I make you understand each other, or leave you to puzzle out an explanation as you can? No—I will be noble. I will prove myself a man, no less by the generosity of my soul than the clearness of my head. I have no patience with such of my sex as disdain to let themselves sometimes down to the comprehension of yours. Perhaps the abilities of women are neither sound nor acute—neither vigorous nor keen. Perhaps they may want observation, discernment, judgment, fire, GENIUS, and WIT."

"Miss Morland, do not mind what he says; but have the goodness to satisfy me as to this dreadful riot."

"Riot! What riot?"

"My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own brain. The confusion there is scandalous. Miss Morland has been talking of nothing more dreadful than a new publication which is shortly to come out, in three duodecimo volumes, two hundred and seventy-six pages in each, with a frontispiece to the first, of two tombstones and a lantern—do you understand? And you, Miss Morland—my STUPID sister has mistaken all your clearest expressions. You talked of expected horrors in London—and instead of instantly conceiving, as any rational creature would have done, that such words could relate only to a circulating library, she immediately pictured to herself a mob of three thousand men assembling in St. George's Fields, the Bank attacked, the Tower threatened, the streets of London flowing with blood, a detachment of the Twelfth Light Dragoons (the hopes of the nation) called up from Northampton to quell the insurgents, and the gallant Captain Frederick Tilney, in the moment of charging at the head of his troop, knocked off his horse by a brickbat from an upper window. Forgive her STUPIDITY. The fears of the sister have added to the weakness of the woman; but she is by no means a simpleton in general."

Catherine looked grave. "And now, Henry," said Miss Tilney, "that you have made us understand each other, you may as well make Miss Morland understand yourself—unless you mean to have her think you INTOLERABLY rude to your sister, and a great brute in your opinion of women in general. Miss Morland is not used to your odd ways."

Henry was determined to call someone stupid again, and this time it’s his sister, whom he calls stupid twice—but of course he does not really think her stupid at all.

And so, once again, how fitting is Eleanor’s witty and good natured response to Henry’s sharp teasing, when SHE deliberately appropriates Henry’s word “intolerably”, and then (perhaps after a pregnant pause) she calls him “rude” rather than “stupid”---we realize just how close is the relationship between Henry and Eleanor, how they dance together verbally with such grace and elan!

But I did tell you there was a fourth passage that was part of this matrix, have you realized which one it is? I gave you a hint in my Subject Line when I referred to my “Defence” of Jane Austen’s wordplay.

It was while composing this post that I noticed for the first time that Henry’s mock-contempt for women in Chapter 14 included references to “genius”, “wit”, and “taste”. That’s when I realized—DOH!!!!---where had I read those same words “genius” and “wit” used together elsewhere in NA? Of course, these three passages using variants on the words “tolerably” and “stupid” were all foreshadowed by JA’s famous “Defence of the Novel” in Chapter 5, an extraordinary authorial intrusion sparked by—what else?—a discussion of Udolpho!

“The progress of the friendship between Catherine and Isabella was quick as its beginning had been warm …they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up, to read novels together. Yes, novels; for I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its INSIPID pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it. Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers. And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only GENIUS, WIT, and TASTE to recommend them. "I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel." Such is the common cant. "And what are you reading, Miss—?""Oh! It is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. "It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda"; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language. Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of TASTE: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favourable idea of the age that could endure it.”

How extraordinary of JA to in effect tell us in Chapter 5 what we are going to read in Chapter 7 and Chapter 14, and to pull it off so subtly that the connection has been rarely, if ever, noticed even upon a number of rereadings of Northanger Abbey—from a quick search, I only find the ever-insightful Emily Auerbach has noticed the connection.

How tolerably witty…and certainly ingenious of the sharpest elf of all, Jane Austen!

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Jane Austen & Edmund Bertram read the newspaper advertisements together!

December 21, 2014, 7:46 pm

≫ Next: Does Lady Catherine want to “LOCKE” Elizabeth Bennet up for the rest of her life?

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The Austen scholar Barbara Benedict recently revisited an Austen topic that she first wrote about in 2002, when she quoted Jane Austen’s 1811 wordplay poem which was captioned (by JEAL?) with “On reading in the newspaper, the marriage of ‘Mr. Gell of Eastbourne to Miss Gill’….

Of Eastbourne Mr. Gell
From being perfectly well
Became dreadfully ill
For the love of Miss Gill.

So he said with some sighs
“I’m the slave of your eyes,
Oh! Restore if you please
By accepting my ease.”

…and then added this brief analysis:

“…In the patch of doggerel quoted above, stimulated by a newspaper advertisement, Jane Austen collapses the printed letters “i” and “e” into a pun on the couple’s names, as well as a charade on “i. e.” In the printed edition, a further manuscript hand has marked the puns, and replaced “Of” with “At.” “

I had seen this poem before, but I never really paid much attention to it, but this time around, I took the time to really absorb the various nuances of JA’s intricate wordplay. It is quite clever, and I would imagine JA was pretty satisfied with her work when she was done.

But I mention it today because it occurs to me that in the minds of most Janeites, there is a wide disconnect between this sort of “doggerel” (as Benedict puts it) and Jane Austen’s novels. I.e., most Janeites would not think there is anything to learn about Jane Austen’s novels from studying this little poem.

That’s where I strongly disagree, because to me the same impulse that led JA to react to a name similarity in the newspaper and then to concoct a poem about it, playing on homophonic puns, also led her to write the “courtship” charade in Chapter 9 of Emma. And…taking it one step further, these sorts of puns are at the heart of the Jane Austen Code as I have decoded it over the past decade---she did not hesitate to embed the most serious and significant meanings in passages in her novels, which are clued by this very sort of pun.

Yesterday, I quoted from my JASNA AGM speech about the elaborate punning behind Edmund Bertram reading an advertisement in the newspaper (think about THAT vis a vis the above poem, apparently written less than 2 years before JA wrote MP) for a “season ‘d capital hunter”, which I showed was a three-pun extravaganza pointing in three different ways to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Her willingness to stretch homophonic puns (“season’d” from “Caesar”) is the same in the “doggerel” and in the fictional masterpiece.

In my JASNA talk, I also unveiled my discovery of one of the most audacious puns in all of JA’s writing, which is found in this passage in MP:

“Susan had read nothing, and Fanny longed to give her a share in her own first pleasures, and inspire a taste for the biography and poetry which she delighted in herself.

In this occupation she hoped, moreover,  TO BURY some of the recollections of Mansfield, which were too apt to SEIZE HER mind if her fingers only were busy; and, especially at this time, hoped it might be useful in diverting her thoughts from pursuing Edmund to London, whither, on the authority of her aunt's last letter, she knew he was gone.”  

I come…. TO BURY….CAESAR!!!! And in case you think I’m out too far on a limb with that one, I can tell you that this is the only “seize her” in all the Austen novels, and so don’t you find it a tad suspicious that it just so happens to have “to bury” right before it in the same sentence! Recall also that Julius Caesar is a play based on actual history, but a play written in poetry. So Jane Austen has touched all the Shakespearean bases in that short seemingly trivial passage.

And this is not just an erudite wordgame, to show off esoteric literary knowledge. This is actually a giant clue for interpretation of the main character, Fanny, who, I went on to explain in my talk, is in grave danger at that instant of falling completely in love with Henry ----i.e., having a hole made in her heart as he, like Babe Ruth, predicted he would—just like Julius Caesar’s heart is “riddled” with holes in the “Capitol”.

So, now you better understand why I took the time this time around to study the poem about Mr Gell and Miss Gill.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Does Lady Catherine want to “LOCKE” Elizabeth Bennet up for the rest of her life?

December 22, 2014, 12:37 am

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Lady Catherine says some pretty darned harsh things to Elizabeth during their famous showdown in Chapter 56 of P&P, which is surely in the top five of favorite Austen novel scenes among most Janeites, and the favorite of some. Here is a sampler of the harshest words she speaks:

“Your own heart, your own conscience, must tell you why I come…I was told that not only your sister was on the point of being most advantageously married, but that you, that Miss Elizabeth Bennet, would, in all likelihood, be soon afterwards united to my nephew, my own nephew, Mr. Darcy. Though I know it must be a scandalous falsehood, though I would not injure him so much as to suppose the truth of it possible, I instantly resolved on setting off for this place, that I might make my sentiments known to you…Obstinate, headstrong girl! I am ashamed of you!...The upstart pretensions of a young woman without family, connections, or fortune. Is this to be endured! But it must not, shall not be…You have no regard, then, for the honour and credit of my nephew! Unfeeling, selfish girl! Do you not consider that a connection with you must disgrace him in the eyes of everybody?...You are determined to ruin him in the opinion of all his friends, and make him the contempt of the world…I take no leave of you, Miss Bennet. I send no compliments to your mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased."

There is something in her words that remind us more of an angry mother giving a severe tongue-lashing to her own child who has done something seriously deceitful and disobedient that requires such a drastic verbal rebuke.  This evening, by chance, I stumbled upon the very passage in one of the books Lady Catherine must have read in her lifetime, which prepared her for just such a moment:

“Lying is so ready and cheap a Cover for any Miscarriage, and so much in Fashion among all 

Sorts of People, that a Child can hardly avoid observing the use is made of it on all Occasions, and so can scarce be kept without great Care from getting into it. But it is still a Quality, and the Mother of so many ill ones that spawn from it, and take shelter under it, that a Child should be brought up in the greatest Abhorrence of it imaginable. It should be always (when occasionally it comes to be mention d) spoke of before him with the utmost Detestation, as a Quality so wholly inconsistent with the Name and Character of a Gentleman, that no body of any Credit can bear the Imputation of a Lie; a Mark that is judg’d the utmost Disgrace, which debases a Man to the lowest Degree of a shameful Meanness, and ranks him with the most contemptible Part of Mankind and the abhorred Rascality; and is not to be endured in any one who would converse with People of Condition, or have any Esteem or Reputation in the World. The first Time he is found in a Lie, it should rather be wondered at as a monstrous Thing in him, than reproved as an ordinary Fault. If that keeps him not from relapsing, the next Time he must be sharply rebuked, and fall into the State of great Displeasure of his Father and Mother and all about him who take Notice of it. And if this Way work not the Cure, you must come to Blows; for after he has been thus warned, a premeditated Lie must always be looked upon as Obstinacy, and never be permitted to escape unpunished. “

Now, the thing is, the above passage was not taken from some run of the mill conduct book, long lost in the mists of history. No, it is from some of the most famous writing by a man who was arguably the Dr. Spock of the 18^th Century: John Locke’s On Education. P&P has long been known to ordinary Janeites and Austen scholars alike as having as one of its principal themes the question of proper education. Darcy and Elizabeth famously speak about this very subject in regard to himself, and some scholars have detected the shadowy presence of Locke in the background. But it’s easy to forget that Lady Catherine weighs in very decisively on the topic of female education at Rosings:

“"No governess! How was that possible? Five daughters brought up at home without a governess! I never heard of such a thing. Your mother must have been quite a slave to your education."

Elizabeth could hardly help smiling as she assured her that had not been the case.

"Then, who taught you? who attended to you? Without a governess, you must have been neglected."

"Compared with some families, I believe we were; but such of us as wished to learn never wanted the means. We were always encouraged to read, and had all the masters that were necessary. Those who chose to be idle, certainly might."

"Aye, no doubt; but that is what a governess will prevent, and if I had known your mother, I should have advised her most strenuously to engage one….”

Of course, the reader is in such close sympathy with Elizabeth throughout the novel, but especially in that scene, that Lady Catherine’s opinions are dismissed by most Janeites as wrong-headed snobbery, at least as to Lizzy and Jane, who we think of as having come out really well despite the lack of a governess.

But we now can put Lady C’s reaction in the wilderness in a proper context. She already is suspicious of the Bennet girls having been given a seriously deficient education by their parents. And so, when she believes Elizabeth is deliberately thwarting her wishes, and is compounding her sins by lying about it to Lady Catherine’s face, her mind immediately turns to Locke’s above quoted passage, and that is why Lady C suddenly starts channeling Locke’s distinctive language!

And based on that last quoted sentence from Locke, I guess we should consider Elizabeth lucky that when Lady Catherine was unsuccessful in overpowering Lizzy verbally, she did not then attack Elizabeth for her obstinacy with any ad hoc weapon she might have laid hands on in the Longbourn wilderness!

Or perhaps Lady Catherine might have improvised, and might have sought to drag Elizabeth into her barouche, in order to keep her away from Darcy by force? Might we in fact be hearing  Jane Austen having some clever punning fun in that regard some chapters earlier when Mr. Bennet speaks these fatalistic words about his own passive approach to parenting:

“Let us hope, therefore, that her being [in Brighton] may teach her her own insignificance. At any rate, she cannot grow many degrees worse, without authorising us to LOCK her up for the rest of her life."

I can hear Jane Austen laughing as she wrote the word “lock”!

And, by the way, clearly Darcy had read this section of Locke too, it is clear, as we can tell from when he says:

“But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence.”

Now, whether there is a plausible basis in the novel for determining that Darcy engages in some serious “disguise” during the novel, many of you already know my answer, but I will leave that topic for another day.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

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From Sergeant Pepper to Thriller to....Loopified? Yes! The Dirty Loops are the real deal!

December 22, 2014, 10:38 pm

≫ Next: "There are people who, the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves" --Emma channeling BOTH Fanny Dashwood and Jane Austen!

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I very rarely post here about cultural topics outside of the realm of great literature, but today is the exception that proves my rule.

A few hours ago, a dear old friend who played Edmund Bertram to my Fanny Price in college forty years ago, and turned me on to great music of all kinds, from the classical canon to the explosion of fusion jazz, has just given me another great gift--he told me I needed to listen to a group called The Dirty Loops, whom I had never heard of.

Based on his say-so, I immediately found Dirty Loops on YouTube, and I've been listening to the songs from their first album just coming out now, Loopified, over and over and over again, in particular the song "Wake me up":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0sYj4wxyk0

For those of you who were not already in on the secret of Dirty Loops, remember you heard it here --- these three young Swedish prodigies (a bass player a la Stanley Clarke, a drummer a la Billy Cobham, and a keyboard player/singer who plays like Chick Corea but sings like Stevie Wonder) deserve to be the Beatles and Michael Jackson of this decade--they are THAT good!

The question is, are they too good to go really mainstream? I sure hope not, I want to see these guys collecting a batch of Grammies in 3 months, and then I REALLY want to see them live the next time they come to the US on tour (had I known about them a month ago, I'd have driven to Seattle to see them!).

Once in a generation, a musical collaboration manages to gather together the music of their time and crystallize it into a miraculous creation which is at the same time completely accessible even to untutored ears, and yet can provide intense listening pleasure to the most exacting musical taste.

These young men are the real deal!

There's nothing else for me to say, their YouTube videos will tell you all you need to know from here on in.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter


P.S.: Actually there is a Jane Austen connection here--if you first listen to how the Dirty Loops take this musical brass perpetrated by Britney Spears and her corporate handlers....  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVhJ_A8XUgc ...and then listen to what Dirty Loops does to transform that brass into 38 karat musical gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko0kdCf0zTE ....then you will understand why I can't stop raving about their music, and you will also understand the kind of literary parody that Jane Austen pulled off in a hundred ways in her novels, taking the brass of the literature of her day, and transforming it all, via sophisticated parody only to be appreciated by the sharp elves she was really writing for, into her works of unfathomable genius.

I hear these brash, brilliant young men doing their own musical version of that alchemy.

P.P.S.:  Had Hamlet heard them play, he might have said something like this:
"I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was never acted; or, if it was, not above once; for the
play, I remember, pleased not the million; 'twascaviare to the general: but it was--as I received
it, and others, whose judgments in such matters cried in the top of mine--an excellent play, well
digested in the scenes, set down with as much  modesty as cunning. I remember, one said there
were no sallets in the lines to make the matter savoury, nor no matter in the phrase that might
indict the author of affectation; but called it an honest method, as wholesome as sweet, and by very
much more handsome than fine."

"There are people who, the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves" --Emma channeling BOTH Fanny Dashwood and Jane Austen!

December 24, 2014, 1:10 pm

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In Janeites & Austen L, Diane wrote: “…chapter 11…is the sort of chapter, I will argue, that opens the novel up to the idea of subtexts, as it seems to unnecessarily raise questions it  never answers. This is also chapter that can be read as light or dark, and I see both a charming, amused picture of happy family life as the Woodhouses unite for Christmas and the darker undercurrents of tenser family dynamics. It is in my opinion a brilliant expose of the little lies and collusions, enacted largely by the women, that maintain the surface harmony of a happy family--and arguably, that the women enable by over-catering to the men.”

Diane, you have a rare gift for fictional synopsis, which manages to combine very sharp insight with extremely reader-friendly presentation—your students are lucky to have you ushering them into the pleasures of literature.

And it’s a particular pleasure to me to observe you experiencing something like what I did ten years ago when Emma first really lit up for me like a Christmas tree (an apt metaphor for today, but I have been using that metaphor a hundred times in the past decade, because that is really what it felt like to me that first moment of epiphany).

The subtext really seems to be everywhere, and the “bread crumbs” seem to lead everywhere, but always seem to trail off suggestively into murky shadows—until you really embrace the notion of a coherent alternative shadow story—then it becomes the most pleasurable and challenging scavenger hunt imaginable.

While I believe all five of the other novels have, like Emma, a coherent shadow story, there are many more suggestive hints in the text of Emma than in the other five –it’s as if, by early 1816, Jane Austen had realized that she needed to give her readers MORE HELP to see into her (by then highly sophisticated) shadow story—the other five novels are comparable to Mozart or Beethoven symphonies---but only Emma is like Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion—one story in 12 part harmony, in counterpoint to a second story, also in 12 part harmony—but in different “keys”!

And those words “more help” are actually my segue into responding to one other point that you made in your excellent summary of this latest chapter, which sparked a new insight for me:

[Diane] “After these glimpse of the truth, Emma quickly hides from herself in the next (famous) thought:  "There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves."“

It is only because we just went through unpacking the Swiftian Modest Proposal subtext of the “charitable” visit that Emma takes Harriet on----in which we can clearly see JA covertly but insistently depicting Emma as a Fanny Dashwood in training---that I was primed today to read the above (famous) quote from off-center, and to realize that this is the exact sort of statement that Fanny Dashwood would make!

Indeed, is this not the exact same rhetorical strategy that Fanny takes in convincing husband John that the Dashwood women really would be better off with less money, and that superannuated servants have the nasty habit of outliving their life expectancy? I would go further and wager that if 100 Janeites who did not know from memory which Austen character thought this thought, and were asked which character it was and were given multiple reasonable choices to pick from, then the majority would pick Fanny Dashwood—because it fits her character so perfectly as so memorably depicted overtly in Chapter 2 of S&S.

For those who might still think I’m reaching, just consider also this key point of evidence. This thought occurs to Emma at the very beginning of Chapter 11, almost immediately after that visit to the poor sick cottager ends at the end of Chapter 10!  Just a coincidence? Of course not! This is quintessential Austen subtext---and perhaps also, upon further reflection, at least part of the reason for this famous but somewhat mysterious echolalia not much later in Emma:

[End of Chapter 20]: Manners were all that could be safely judged of, under a much longer knowledge than they had yet had of Mr. Churchill. She believed every body found his manners pleasing." EMMA COULD NOT FORGIVE HER.

[Beginning of Chapter 21]: EMMA COULD NOT FORGIVE HER….

This famous analepsis (which Trollope must have had in mind for some purpose when he titled one of his most famous novels “Can you forgive her?” ) might to some seem that Jane Austen or her printer must have just made a mistake by duplicating a line the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next, I say it is a coded message to the alert reader to be particularly attentive to connections between the very end of one chapter and the very beginning of the next chapter—and this semantic (if you will) analepsis in Chapter 10-11 is a perfect example.

And that would have been enough for me for one day, but....it also occurred to me almost simultaneously that this same quotation is ALSO a quintessential METAfictional utterance by Jane Austen herself to her readers! I.e., JA has just gotten through, in Chapter 10, depicting Emma as Fanny Dashwood. And so now, in the very same words in which Emma is rationalizing her meddling in Harriet’s love life and stuffing down any recollection of the poor cottager family, Jane Austen not only exposes Emma’s unconscious Fanny-ness, JA herself, being the thrifty writer making double use of her words, is also  speaking ventriloquistically to her readers, and is basically saying this:

that the more an author— Jane Austen herself!-- explains her text—Emma ! --- to her readers via omniscient narration, the less the readers will “do for themselves”. I.e., the more passive her readers will become in interpreting the nuances of the personality of JA’s characters.

And so JA, being the teacher-by-Zen-paradox that she was, teaches this lesson to her readers by leading them down the path of enmeshing them in Emma’s subjective rationalizations and making them (via JA’s astonishing genius for writing ambiguous narration) seem to be objective facts. But JA also gives sufficient clues--playing fair like any ethical “mystery” story writer—for an active reader to (sooner or later) realize that Jane Austen has put us all on.

And this was done by JA not for a cruel malicious satisfaction in making her readers go astray by clever authorial tricks, but for the worthy purpose of (ultimately) teaching us, upon rereadings, to be vigilant for similar scams in real life, as to which the adverse consequences of cluelessness will not merely be the harmlessness of missing out on deeper meanings of a fictional story, but suffering real harm in real life! 

ADDED 3 HOURS AFTER ORIGINAL POSTING: 

I just checked my files, and found the following wonderful discussion in a file—it’s from an excellent article by Chris Jones, U. of Wales, Bangor, in Literature & History, Vol. 9, #2, Autumn 2000, entitled “Jane Austen and Old Corruption”:

“…ManycriticsseeKnightleyasrepresentativeofthetraditionallandowningclass,asdoesEmma.Emma,however,objectstohisderogations from traditionaldignity,  such  as  walking  rather than using his carriage.  Heisclearlya‘new’,improving  landowner,whofarmscommerciallyfortheLondon  trade,  andhisvaluesoftruth,  openness,  sincerity,and independencecanbeseenas‘traditional’  oralternatively  asconnected  with theradicalidealsofthe1790s.  Hecombinesthevirtuesoftheseideologies but  the issueofpatronageshowshisone blind  spot.Hisown  privileged position  blindshimtotheincapacitiesofothersforindependentaction.He failstoseethedifficultyofmoralindependenceforthose,likeMissTaylor, JaneFairfax,andFrankChurchill, whoaremateriallydependent.‘Onelaw fortheoxandthelionisoppression’  andKnightley’sattitude  vergesonthe laissez-fairedoctrinesthathisbenevolentinterferencecontradicts.Apointed heteroglossia,  anintrusion  ofarecognisable  publicdiscourse,  alsolinksthe issuesofpatronageinthe‘match-making’  sensewiththelargequestion  of Poor  Relief.AfterEmmaand  Harrietvisitthe  poor Emmadiscusseswith Elton‘whatcouldbedoneandwhatshouldbedone’.Whenherbestefforts tobringthetwosupposedloverstogether havefailed,herthoughtsechocontemporarydebateonthetreatmentofthepoor:  ‘Therearepeople,themore youdoforthem,  thelesstheywilldoforthemselves’(73).  Independencemightbeanideal,butinacomplex,  unequal  societytheconditions  ofindependencehavetobemanaged.Highbury obviouslyhadnottakenadvantage ofKnatchbull’s1723Acttodelegatecareofthepoorcompletelytoanoverseer.Neitherworkhousenorhouseofcorrectionarealternativesto‘outdoor relief’andacommunity  involvement  thatextends  frommeetingsofprominentcitizenstoMissBates’sconcernforanostler’sfather.  Emma,whopays hervisittothepoor,  comesoffrather  betterthanElton,whodefershisvisit topursueEmma,orKnightley,who,inthetransportsofhisanticipatedmarriage,forgetsparishbusinessandfailstokeepanappointmentwithElton.In Knightley,however,Highburyhasaprogressivelandlord,whoalsoexercises abenevolent  patronage.Apatronagethatisexerted  toenableitsobjectsto exercisetheirindependentviews(hespeaksforMartin  though  hedisagrees withhischoiceofHarriet)isverydifferentfromonethatexertsitspowerto overaweanddirect.”

The parts I agree with most are “Knightley’sattitude  vergesonthe laissez-fairedoctrinesthathisbenevolentinterferencecontradicts.” & “Whenherbestefforts tobringthetwosupposedloverstogether havefailed,herthoughtsechocontemporarydebateonthetreatmentofthepoor:  ‘Therearepeople,themore youdoforthem,  thelesstheywilldoforthemselves’ “

So, bravo to Chris Jones for picking up in 2000 on that connection between Emma’s visit to the poor and her thoughts ostensibly only about Harriet and Elton.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode onTwitter

Jane Austen's Deliberate Equivocation about Emma Woodhouse's Clueless Equivocation

December 26, 2014, 8:57 pm

≫ Next: The hidden theme of animal sacrifice in Pride & Prejudice (and its off-the-wall double connection to the famous 57 varieties!)

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In Chapter 54 of Emma, we read the following narration when Emma observes with amazement how Harriet and Robert Martin suddenly get engaged:

"Serious she was, very serious in her thankfulness, and in her resolutions; and yet there was no preventing a laugh, sometimes in the very midst of them. She must laugh at such a close! Such an end of the doleful disappointment of five weeks back! Such a heart -- such a Harriet! 

 Now there would be pleasure in her returning. Every thing would be a pleasure. It would be a great pleasure to know Robert Martin.  

High in the rank of her most serious and heartfelt felicities, was the reflection that all necessity of concealment from Mr. Knightley would soon be over. The disguise, equivocation, mystery, so hateful to her to practise, might soon be over. She could now look forward to giving him that full and perfect confidence which her disposition was most ready to welcome as a duty. " END QUOTE

The most plausible reading of the above passage, I think, is that Emma has resolved to tell Knightley the truth (or, rather, what Emma understood to be the truth)  about Emma having inadvertently encouraged Harriet to aspire to marry Knightley. And, if we are talking about "full and perfect confidence", that ought also to include telling Knightley about Elton's having nearly sexually assaulted Emma in the carriage ride on Christmas Eve.

It's interesting first to note Emma's  unconscious hypocrisy, in her deciding that this was the right moment for her to feel a duty to come completely clean with Knightley about Harriet. It's hypocrisy, because right before Emma heard the news about Harriet and Robert Martin, Emma was taking NO chances on Knightley hearing that Harriet wanted him to propose to her---for fear, apparently, that Knightley might change his mind about marrying Emma!! -- especially given that as of Chapter 54, Emma believes that Mr. Woodhouse still constitutes a roadblock to Emma and Knightley getting married. So much for Emma feeling virtuous at that moment about being honest with her future husband. She's only ready to be honest when it no longer matters.

And that reminds me of something else--I can't remember exactly what-- we were very recently discussing about Emma, where exactly the same process of rationalization has occurred--she's only willing to be honest when it doesn't matter any more--i.e., the honesty won't cost her. It is truly Emma's way.

But let's put aside that hypocrisy for a moment, because it might still be an encouraging sign, that Emma plans on coming clean with Knightley. Better late than never, in other words.  

But what happens? You will search in vain, as I did, for any indication that Emma actually does ever come clean with Knightley --and it's not that the narrator drops the subject of Harriet entirely, which might suggest Emma might have told Knightley, but we simply don't hear what Emma does say to Knightley.

No, that is clearly not the case, in fact it's the opposite. In the first half of Chapter 55, we hear ALL about Harriet, about nothing BUT Harriet!---about her father the tradesman, and about her future life in the cozy bosom of the Martin family. It's Harriets all the way down, as Stephen Hawking might have put it.

But clearly Emma has (as with the poor cottager family) simply forgotten all about her very short-lived,. "sincere" resolution to do her wifely duty and be  forthcoming with Knightley about Harriet in a way that does not reflect well on Emma! Or, to be more psychologically accurate, it goes right out of her mind for the same reason Mr. Bennet predicts he will very quickly forget about feeling culpable for negligent parenting---it's something she doesn't really want to do, so she just "forgets" about it! At least Mr. Bennet knows his own foible--Emma has no self-awareness, so she is doing exactly the same rationalizing, self-congratulation, forgetting, and avoiding that she was doing in Chapter 1. So as the novel ends, Emma seems, despite the commonly held belief among Janeites that Emma has grown, she changed, she has learned to be a better person, to be continuing to equivocate, with herself and with Knightley-- with everyone. What a muddle!

And, in this and a dozen other ways, Jane Austen equivocates with her readers in Emma to the very end--leaving a dozen major points just like this one ambiguous and uncertain as the novel ends, and even having a laugh in Chapter 49 telling her readers about it:

"Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material."

If that is not authorial equivocation, I don't know what is!

But unlike her fictional creature Emma, I don't believe JA's equivocation is the result of her kidding herself about herself, either as a person or as an author. It's not a mistake, a rationalization, or a confusion on JA's part. Unlike Emma, JA is equivocating in order to better educate her readers, by forcing them, sooner or later, to stop reading passively and instead to struggle to figure out what might be going on in the shadows.

And I find it very significant that this is the one and only place in all six of her novels where Jane Austen explicitly uses the word "equivocation", even though she practices it on pretty much every page of all of her novels. Given that she clearly knew that this word had a very specific theological connotation (e.g., how Catholics persecuted during Elizabeth's reign would equivocate about their beliefs when forced to take Protestant oaths), I think that it is a giant clue that she left at that particular spot on purpose. Like those who equivocated in order to remain true to their beliefs while pretending to those who might punish you for expressing those beliefs openly, Jane Austen could only express her true views about all sorts of things that were wrong in her world via equivocation.

So she hid the truth behind one of Mrs. Elton's lace veils!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The hidden theme of animal sacrifice in Pride & Prejudice (and its off-the-wall double connection to the famous 57 varieties!)

December 27, 2014, 10:26 pm

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In Chapter 53 of Pride & Prejudice, Mrs. Bennet famously makes an offering to Mr. Bingley on her husband’s behalf:

“ "When you have killed all your own birds, Mr. Bingley," said her mother, "I beg you will come here, and shoot as many as you please on Mr. Bennet's manor. I am sure he will be vastly happy to oblige you, and will save all the best of the covies for you."

Elizabeth's misery increased, at such unnecessary, such officious attention! Were the same fair prospect to arise at present as had flattered them a year ago, every thing, she was persuaded, would be hastening to the same vexatious conclusion. At that instant, she felt that years of happiness could not make Jane or herself amends for moments of such painful confusion.”

A year and a half ago, in the following linked blog post….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/08/hunting-fishing-metaphors-in-much-ado.html

…I showed how the above passage was in no small part a veiled allusion to the repeated motif of women (but also men) as hunted animals that Shakespeare deployed to great satirical effect in Much Ado About Nothing, which of course is one of the major allusive sources for Pride & Prejudice. That is true above all in the “Meryton war” between Lizzy and Darcy, which harks back repeatedly to the “merry war” of words between Beatrice and Benedick.

Today, I realized that there is a whole additional layer of sharp, sacrilegious satirical allusion directly connected to Mrs. Bennet’s offering to Bingley, which actually casts several of the other memorable scenes during the romantic climax of P&P in a startling new dark and satirical light, as my Subject Line cryptically hints. This one is a real lulu!

When Mrs. Bennet tells Bingley that Mr. Bennet “will save all the best of the covies for you”, some with a very finely tuned ear might have detected some indirect allusion to the practice of ritual sacrifice of animals during ancient times, and, from the point of view of a reader in early 19^th century England, that would most of all raise an association to the Bible. The best animals would be chosen for sacrifice to God, for obvious reasons, just as Mrs. Bennet offers “the best of the covies”.

But, unless you are someone very knowledgeable about the particular translated English of the King James Bible, the one that JA and her contemporary readers would have been most familiar with, you might not know what words the Bible used repeatedly---FIFTY SEVEN times, to be precise (hence my joking reference to the Heinz 57 varieties!)---to describe animals considered suitable for sacrifice to God, vs. animals which were not worthy. And….that word is “blemish”, which appears in all of the 57 verses reproduced at the end of this post (so that you can pause here and go read as many of them as you like, or continue reading here, if you take my assertion on faith that I am not making all of this up!).

Of those 57 references in the Bible to “blemishes”, all but 3 of them appear in the Hebrew Bible. But the statistic that is most relevant to my argument in this post, is that ALL 57 Biblical usages of “blemish”—every last one of them--have to do with the bringing of an animal (or other offering) to God as a sacrifice, to atone for sins---no discussions of acne and skin care products in the Bible!

And by now some of the sharp elves among you probably know where I am going with this. Some of the rest of you might want to pause here and see if you can figure it out yourself, based on all the hints I’ve already given you, but those who don’t enjoy such puzzles, just keep reading, I am very close to my punch line.

Unlike those 57 “varieties” (if you will) of the word “blemish” in the King James Bible, the word “blemish” (and its “varieties”) is a very rare one in JA’s fictional lexicon, appearing only a tiny total of  three times in all of JA’s novels combined. One of them is in S&S, and refers to Marianne’s sobered view of Willoughby after her near death: “Nothing could restore him with a faith unbroken—a character UNBLEMISHED, to Marianne.”

The word “blemish” does not appear at all in NA, MP, Emma, or Persuasion, so it’s clearly not an everyday word for Jane Austen, just the opposite. But, curiously, the other two usages bothoccur in P&P, which would suggest some special significance in that novel in particular.  And, get this—both of those usages in P&P occur in the sameChapter and that is Chapter…..57! (no I am not kidding, although even I don’t claim that Jane Austen counted the 57 usages of “blemish” in the KJ Bible, just as Mr. Rushworth counted his own 42 speeches in Lovers Vows, and chose chapter 57 of P&P to put those two in it!) So, that very targeted usage of the word “blemish” by JA in one tiny corner of the text of P&P  REALLY suggests a very special significance to the word’s usage. And that turns out to be exactly the case!

One of those two usages in Chapter 57 of P&P is known to Janeites the world over, because it is embedded in one of the most memorable of the many epigrammatic speeches and narrative comments for which P&P is rightly celebrated. Mr. Bennet has called Lizzy in to tell her about Mr. Collins’s letter warning him about a man of parts being engaged to an unworthy woman, and then springs his surprise:

"Can you possibly guess, Lizzy, who is meant by this?"'This young gentleman is blessed, in a peculiar way, with every thing the heart of mortal can most desire,—splendid property, noble kindred, and extensive patronage. Yet in spite of all these temptations, let me warn my cousin Elizabeth, and yourself, of what evils you may incur by a precipitate closure with this gentleman's proposals, which, of course, you will be inclined to take immediate advantage of.'

"Have you any idea, Lizzy, who this gentleman is? But now it comes out:

"'My motive for cautioning you is as follows. We have reason to imagine that his aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, does not look on the match with a friendly eye.'

"Mr. Darcy, you see, is the man! Now, Lizzy, I think I have surprised you. Could he, or the Lucases, have pitched on any man within the circle of our acquaintance, whose name would have given the lie more effectually to what they related? Mr. Darcy, WHO NEVER LOOKS AT ANY WOMAN BUT TO SEE A BLEMISH, and who probably never looked at you in his life! It is admirable!"

Elizabeth tried to join in her father's pleasantry, but could only force one most reluctant smile. Never had his wit been directed in a manner so little agreeable to her.

"Are you not diverted?"

"Oh! yes. Pray read on."  

Now, if you haven’t done so already, go browse the 57 usages in the Bible, and think about how likely it would be that JA, a parson’s daughter who knew her Bible like the back of her hand, would use the word “blemish” in that passage in this way, without realizing its sacrilegious implications. She had seen that word appearing as it does in nine different books in the Bible, always with the same meaning.

So, when the learned Mr. Bennet---who has spent half his waking hours during his long marriage in his home library reading great books like the King James Bible---cracks wise with Elizabeth two chapters later, in Chapter 59, causing her considerable distress that she tries to hide from him, he is really having an extremely sacrilegious laugh! :

"Lizzy," said her father, "I have given him my consent. He is the kind of man, indeed, to whom I should NEVER DARE REFUSE ANYTHING, WHICH HE CONDESCENDED TO ASK. I now give it to you, if you are resolved on having him. But let me advise you to think better of it. I know your disposition, Lizzy. I know that you could be neither happy nor respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband; unless you LOOKED UP TO HIM AS A SUPERIOR. Your lively talents would place you in the greatest danger in an unequal marriage. You could scarcely escape discredit and misery. My child, let me not have the grief of seeing youunable to respect your partner in life. You know not what you are about."

Elizabeth, still more affected, was earnest and solemn in her reply; and at length, by repeated assurances that Mr. Darcy was really the object of her choice, by explaining the gradual change which her estimation of him had undergone, relating her absolute certainty that his affection was not the work of a day, but had stood the test of many months' suspense, and enumerating with energy all his good qualities, she did conquer her father's incredulity, and reconcile him to the match.

"Well, my dear," said he, when she ceased speaking, "I have no more to say. If this be the case, he deserves you. I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy." END QUOTE

How so? Because Mr. Bennet’s use of the word “blemish” in Chapter 57 had sacrilegiously reframed his consenting to Lizzy marrying Darcy as his “offering” his favorite daughter Lizzy (shades of Abraham and his beloved Isaac!) as a kind of human sacrifice to the god Darcy. And then, in Chapter 59, he’s laying it on even thicker, returning to his learned joke to milk it for its last drop of learned humor—because a god is indeed exactly the sort of being to whom a mere human should “never dare refuse anything which he condescended to ask”! And of course a god is also a being you “look up to”!

And…this subversive interpretation also fits perfectly with Kishor Kale’s brilliant identification, a number of years ago, of the sharp syntactical irony of Mr. Bennet’s final statement in that Chapter 59 passage-“I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy”---which can mean either of two opposite things—either it was Darcy’s great worthiness that induced Mr. Bennet to part with Lizzy, OR it can mean Darcy is so UNworthy that Mr. Bennet could not have found a more unworthy man to give Lizzy to if he tried! Both are equally plausible, but the latter one picks up on Mr. Bennet’s witty joke—is Darcy really so perfect a man that he is like a god, or is he rather the kind of “deity” to whom the lives of others must be sacrificed to appease them, to induce them to trickle down benefits to his worshippers?

Now, before I close, some of you who’ve been paying close attention will be asking at this point, what about the other usage of “blemish” in Chapter 57 of P&P? Here it is, in a passage showing what Lizzy is thinking right before her father calls her in to hear about Mr. Collins’s astonishing letter, and right after her showdown with Lady Catherine in the Longbourn wilderness—she’s thinking about Go—no, I mean, she’s thinking about Mr. Darcy, and Lizzy is extremely pessimistic!:

“If he had been wavering before as to what he should do, which had often seemed likely, the advice and entreaty of so near a relation [i.e., Lady Catherine] might settle every doubt, and determine him at once to be as happy as dignity UNBLEMISHED could make him. In that case he would return no more. Lady Catherine might see him in her way through town; and his engagement to Bingley of coming again to Netherfield must give way.”

Elizabeth herself is already thinking of herself as a sacrificial animal, and about all the “blemishes” she carries on her “hide”, which make her an unacceptable “offering” to the great god Darcy—and I don’t need to repeat them for any good Janeite, because you know what those blemishes are, mostly having to do with the foibles of everyone else in the Bennet family besides Lizzy and Jane.

And speaking of Lady Catherine, as the self-appointed “angel” sitting at the right hand of Darcy, advising him about his marital options from among the numerous offerings on the table before him, Lizzy must be anticipating, with dread, that Lady Catherine will repeat to Darcy her sharpest “theological” argument:

“….Heaven and earth!—of what are you thinking? Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus POLLUTED?"

Is it just a coincidence that in one of those 57 usages of “blemish” in the Bible, in 2 Peter 2:13, we read…

“And shall receive the reward of unrighteousness, as they that count it pleasure to riot in the day time. Spots they are and BLEMISHES, SPORTING themselves with their own deceivings while they feast with you.”

….and only a few verses later in that same Chapter 2 of 2 Peter, which concerns false prophets, we then read:

“For if after they have escaped the POLLUTIONS of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning.”

It would be the most improbable of coincidences for the word “sporting” to appear in 2 Peter 1:13 right next to the word “blemishes”, and only a few verses before the word “pollution”, given not only Lady Catherine’s dire lamentation about the pollution of Pemberley, but also Mr. Bennet’s most famous epigram “For what do we live, but to make SPORT for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?"—which, by the way, appears in……Chapter 57 of P&P!!!

And the verse in Ephesians bears special notice as well, because it sees Jesus as metaphorically choosing a wife, as we see when that verse is read in context (and these verses were specifically quoted in the Anglican marriage ceremony, without any apparent awareness of the primitive sacrificial overtones!):

5: 22-27Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so letthe wives be to their own husbands in every thing. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without BLEMISH.

And finally, are we not also reminded of Darcy’s and Lizzy’s memorable repartee at the Netherfield ball?:

"I am perfectly convinced by it that Mr. Darcy has no defect. He owns it himself without disguise."

"No," said Darcy, "I have made no such pretension. I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch for. It is, I believe, too little yielding—certainly too little for the convenience of the world. I cannot forget the follies and vices of others so soon as I ought, nor their offenses against myself. My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost, is lost forever."

"Thatis a failing indeed!" cried Elizabeth. "Implacable resentment isa shade in a character. But you have chosen your fault well. I really cannot laughat it. You are safe from me."

"There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil—a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome."

"And your defect is to hate everybody."

"And yours," he replied with a smile, "is willfully to misunderstand them."

And there I rest my case, my friends and fellow Janeites.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.:  Here are all 57 usages of “blemish” in the King James Bible:

2 in Exodus

12:5: Your lamb shall be without BLEMISH, a male of the first year: ye shall take it out from the sheep, or from the goats:

29:1: And this is the thing that thou shalt do unto them to hallow them, to minister unto me in the priest's office: Take one young bullock, and two rams without BLEMISH,

28 in Leviticus

1:3: If his offering be a burnt sacrifice of the herd, let him offer a male without BLEMISH: he shall offer it of his own voluntary will at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation before the Lord.

1:10: And if his offering be of the flocks, namely, of the sheep, or of the goats, for a burnt sacrifice; he shall bring it a male without BLEMISH.

3:1: And if his oblation be a sacrifice of peace offering, if he offer it of the herd; whether it be a male or female, he shall offer it without BLEMISH before the Lord.

3:6: And if his offering for a sacrifice of peace offering unto the Lord be of the flock; male or female, he shall offer it without BLEMISH.

4:3: If the priest that is anointed do sin according to the sin of the people; then let him bring for his sin, which he hath sinned, a young bullock without BLEMISH unto the Lord for a sin offering.

4: 23: Or if his sin, wherein he hath sinned, come to his knowledge; he shall bring his offering, a kid of the goats, a male without BLEMISH:

4:28: Or if his sin, which he hath sinned, come to his knowledge: then he shall bring his offering, a kid of the goats, a female without BLEMISH, for his sin which he hath sinned.

4:32: And if he bring a lamb for a sin offering, he shall bring it a female without BLEMISH.

5: 15: If a soul commit a trespass, and sin through ignorance, in the holy things of the Lord; then he shall bring for his trespass unto the Lord a ram without BLEMISH out of the flocks, with thy estimation by shekels of silver, after the shekel of the sanctuary, for a trespass offering.

5:18: And he shall bring a ram without BLEMISHout of the flock, with thy estimation, for a trespass offering, unto the priest: and the priest shall make an atonement for him concerning his ignorance wherein he erred and wist it not, and it shall be forgiven him.

6:6: And he shall bring his trespass offering unto the Lord, a ram without BLEMISH out of the flock, with thy estimation, for a trespass offering, unto the priest:

9:2: And he said unto Aaron, Take thee a young calf for a sin offering, and a ram for a burnt offering, without BLEMISH, and offer them before the Lord.

9:3: And unto the children of Israel thou shalt speak, saying, Take ye a kid of the goats for a sin offering; and a calf and a lamb, both of the first year, without BLEMISH, for a burnt offering;

14:10: And on the eighth day he shall take two he lambs without BLEMISH, and one ewe lamb of the first year without BLEMISH, and three tenth deals of fine flour for a meat offering, mingled with oil, and one log of oil.

21: 17-23:

Speak unto Aaron, saying, Whosoever he be of thy seed in their generations that hath any BLEMISH, let him not approach to offer the bread of his God.

For whatsoever man he be that hath a BLEMISH, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous,

Or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a BLEMISHin his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken;

No man that hath a BLEMISH of the seed of Aaron the priest shall come nigh to offer the offerings of the Lord made by fire: he hath a BLEMISH; he shall not come nigh to offer the bread of his God.

Only he shall not go in unto the vail, nor come nigh unto the altar, because he hath a BLEMISH; that he profane not my sanctuaries: for I the Lord do sanctify them.

22:19-21, 25:

Ye shall offer at your own will a male without BLEMISH, of the beeves, of the sheep, or of the goats.

But whatsoever hath a BLEMISH, that shall ye not offer: for it shall not be acceptable for you.

And whosoever offereth a sacrifice of peace offerings unto the Lord to accomplish his vow, or a freewill offering in beeves or sheep, it shall be perfect to be accepted; there shall be no BLEMISHtherein.

Neither from a stranger's hand shall ye offer the bread of your God of any of these; because their corruption is in them, and BLEMISHES be in them: they shall not be accepted for you.

23:12: And ye shall offer that day when ye wave the sheaf an he lamb without BLEMISH of the first year for a burnt offering unto the Lord.

23:18: And ye shall offer with the bread seven lambs without BLEMISH of the first year, and one young bullock, and two rams: they shall be for a burnt offering unto the Lord, with their meat offering, and their drink offerings, even an offering made by fire, of sweet savour unto the Lord.

24: 19: And if a man cause a BLEMISHin his neighbour; as he hath done, so shall it be done to him;

24:20 Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a BLEMISH in a man, so shall it be done to him again.

12 in Numbers:

6:14: And he shall offer his offering unto the Lord, one he lamb of the first year without BLEMISH for a burnt offering, and one ewe lamb of the first year without BLEMISH for a sin offering, and one ram without BLEMISH for peace offerings,

19:2: This is the ordinance of the law which the Lord hath commanded, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no BLEMISH, and upon which never came yoke:

28: 19: But ye shall offer a sacrifice made by fire for a burnt offering unto the Lord; two young bullocks, and one ram, and seven lambs of the first year: they shall be unto you without BLEMISH:

28:31: Ye shall offer them beside the continual burnt offering, and his meat offering, (they shall be unto you without BLEMISH) and their drink offerings.

29:2: And ye shall offer a burnt offering for a sweet savour unto the Lord; one young bullock, one ram, and seven lambs of the first year without BLEMISH:

29:8: But ye shall offer a burnt offering unto the Lord for a sweet savour; one young bullock, one ram, and seven lambs of the first year; they shall be unto you without BLEMISH:

29:13: And ye shall offer a burnt offering, a sacrifice made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord; thirteen young bullocks, two rams, and fourteen lambs of the first year; they shall be without BLEMISH:

29:20: And on the third day eleven bullocks, two rams, fourteen lambs of the first year without BLEMISH;

29: 23: And on the fourth day ten bullocks, two rams, and fourteen lambs of the first year without BLEMISH:

29: 29: And on the sixth day eight bullocks, two rams, and fourteen lambs of the first year without BLEMISH:

29:32: And on the seventh day seven bullocks, two rams, and fourteen lambs of the first year without BLEMISH:

29: 36 But ye shall offer a burnt offering, a sacrifice made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord: one bullock, one ram, seven lambs of the first year without BLEMISH:

2 in Deuteronomy

15:21: And if there be any BLEMISHtherein, as if it be lame, or blind, or have any ill BLEMISH, thou shalt not sacrifice it unto the Lord thy God.

17:1: Thou shalt not sacrifice unto the Lord thy God any bullock, or sheep, wherein is BLEMISH, or any evilfavouredness: for that is an abomination unto the Lord thy God.

1 in 2 Samuel:

14:25: But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no BLEMISH in him.

8 in Ezekiel

43:22: And on the second day thou shalt offer a kid of the goats without BLEMISH for a sin offering; and they shall cleanse the altar, as they did cleanse it with the bullock.

43: 23: When thou hast made an end of cleansing it, thou shalt offer a young bullock without BLEMISH, and a ram out of the flock without BLEMISH.

43:25:  Seven days shalt thou prepare every day a goat for a sin offering: they shall also prepare a young bullock, and a ram out of the flock, without BLEMISH.

45: 18: Thus saith the Lord God; In the first month, in the first day of the month, thou shalt take a young bullock without BLEMISH, and cleanse the sanctuary:

45: 23: And seven days of the feast he shall prepare a burnt offering to the Lord, seven bullocks and seven rams without BLEMISHdaily the seven days; and a kid of the goats daily for a sin offering.

46:4: And the burnt offering that the prince shall offer unto the Lord in the sabbath day shall be six lambs without BLEMISH, and a ram without BLEMISH.

46:6: And in the day of the new moon it shall be a young bullock without BLEMISH, and six lambs, and a ram: they shall be without BLEMISH.

46: 13:  Thou shalt daily prepare a burnt offering unto the Lord of a lamb of the first year without BLEMISH: thou shalt prepare it every morning.

1 in Daniel:

1:4:  Children in whom was no BLEMISH, but well favoured, and skilful in all wisdom, and cunning in knowledge, and understanding science, and such as had ability in them to stand in the king's palace, and whom they might teach the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans.

1 in Ephesians:

5:27:  That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without BLEMISH.

2 in Peter:

1 Peter 1:19: But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without BLEMISH and without spot:

2 Peter 2:13: And shall receive the reward of unrighteousness, as they that count it pleasure to riot in the day time. Spots they are and BLEMISHES, SPORTING themselves with their own deceivings while they feast with you…

2 Peter 2 in full:

The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished: But chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government. Presumptuous are they, selfwilled, they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities. Whereas angels, which are greater in power and might, bring not railing accusation against them before the Lord. But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption; And shall receive the reward of unrighteousness, as they that count it pleasure to riot in the day time. Spots they are and blemishes, SPORTING themselves with their own deceivings while they feast with you; Having eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin; beguiling unstable souls: an heart they have exercised with covetous practices; cursed children: Which have forsaken the right way, and are gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness; But was rebuked for his iniquity: the dumb ass speaking with man's voice forbad the madness of the prophet. These are wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever. For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escaped from them who live in error. While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage. For if after they have escaped the POLLUTIONS of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning. For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them. But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.

Another little literary quiz with a twist

December 28, 2014, 5:07 pm

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So.....I am thinking of a novel by a famous English novelist which contains ALL of the following TEN elements:

It has a married couple Mr. and Mrs. Norris.

Mrs. Norris has contempt for those who are enslaved (whether literally or metaphorically).

Colonial slavery is mentioned at certain key points, but is not central to the story.

There is a reference (which may or may not be explicit) to strange business in America.

A man who plays on an organ, and children dance to his music.

Lord Mansfield’s 1772 Somersett decision is strongly hinted at but never explicitly referred to.

Lord Mansfield’s real life is also strongly hinted at.

There is specific reference to the burning of books in anger.

The novelist alludes to Inchbald's Lovers Vows (but not necessarily in the same novel as the rest of these ten elements)

There is an important character named Tom who is of an artistic nature.


So, what novel and novelist am I talking about?


(think before you answer)


Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The answer to my little literary quiz with a twist

December 29, 2014, 2:41 pm

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The answer to my (yes, trick) question is that there are two good answers, either:
Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (MP)

OR 

a combination of Dickens's 2 novels written consecutively in the early 1840's, sandwiched around his US  trip when he witnessed slavery firsthand: Martin Chuzzlewit (MC) and Barnaby Rudge (BR)—with one additional item from Edwin Drood (ED).

I royally screwed up my presentation of the ten points, however, as you can see. My error occurred as I added items from BR and ED to my list that initially only had items from MC, and then I had a senior moment (okay, I'm 62) and just forgot to mention that rather important point in all but one of the points re: BR.

So, having bollixed up the quiz, I will endeavor at least to get the explanation correct in all respects!

My point in noting this striking parallelism is that this confirms, to my satisfaction, my suspicion since several years ago that Dickens had MP strongly on his mind in the early 1840s while writing MC and BR, and in particular Dickens must have deduced Jane Austen’s reason for naming her novel MANSFIELD Park, and he chose to demonstrate that awareness covertly in these two novels of his, and his alluding to Lovers Vows two decades later in ED also suggests to me a long-continuing interest in Mansfield Park.

And, one final point—I believe Dickens also picked up on Jane Austen’s sexual innuendo in Point FIVE, below, pertaining to her subtle double entendre on “hand-organ”,  and then Dickens chose to amplify that sexual double entendre by making Tom Pinchs’ “organ” a running joke throughout the entire length of MC!

With that prelude, here goes:

ONE:  It has a married couple Mr. and Mrs. Norris.

In MP, this is obvious, as Mrs. Norris is a major character, and her husband Mr. Norris is well known for his one action in MP, which is when he dies.
In MC, each member of the Norris family is named in one scene, and Mr. Norris reappears later.

TWO: Mrs. Norris has contempt for those who are enslaved (whether literally or metaphorically).

In MP, Mrs. Norris has contempt and other bad feelings for Fanny Price, who is the poor cousin who acts as a de facto house slave for much of the action.

In MC, Mrs. Norris, along with everyone in her family, make horribly racial slurs about enslaved blacks in their collective scene.

THREE: Colonial slavery is mentioned at certain key points, but is not central to the story.

In MP, of course, Sir Thomas owns a slave plantation in Antigua.

In MC, there is discussion of slavery, as noted above.

FOUR: There is a reference (which may or may not be explicit) to strange business in America.

In MP, that’s the cryptic statement that Tom Bertram makes to Dr. Grant.

In MC, there is, as noted above, discussion of slavery in the United States.

FIVE: A man who plays on an organ, and children dance to his music.

In MP, you have this scene where William Price reminisces about dancing with sister Fanny to music from a hand-organ:

"I should like to go to a ball with you and see you DANCE. Have you never any balls at Northampton? I should like to see you DANCE, and I'd DANCE with you if you would, for nobody would know who I was here, and I should like to be your partner once more. We used to jump about together many a time, did not we? when the HAND-ORGAN was in the street? I am a pretty good DANCER in my way, but I dare say you are a better." And turning to his uncle, who was now close to them, "Is not Fanny a very good DANCER, sir?"

Fanny, in dismay at such an unprecedented question, did not know which way to look, or how to be prepared for the answer. Some very grave reproof, or at least the coldest expression of indifference, must be coming to distress her brother, and sink her to the ground. But, on the contrary, it was no worse than, "I am sorry to say that I am unable to answer your question. I have never seen Fanny DANCE since she was a little girl; but I trust we shall both think she acquits herself like a gentlewoman when we do see her, which, perhaps, we may have an opportunity of doing ere long."

"I have had the pleasure of seeing your sister DANCE, Mr. Price," said Henry Crawford, leaning forward, "and will engage to answer every inquiry which you can make on the subject, to your entire satisfaction. But I believe" (seeing Fanny looked distressed) "it must be at some other time. There is oneperson in company who does not like to have Miss Price spoken of."

True enough, he had once seen Fanny DANCE; and it was equally true that he would now have answered for her gliding about with quiet, light elegance, and in admirable time; but, in fact, he could not for the life of him recall what her DANCING had been, and rather took it for granted that she had been present than remembered anything about her.

In MC, you have this scene which includes reminiscence of Tom and sister Ruth dancing:

So, with a smile upon thy face, thou passest gently to another measure—to a quicker and more joyful one—and little feet are used to DANCE about thee at the sound, and bright young eyes to glance up into thine. And there is one slight creature, Tom—her child; not Ruth's—whom thine eyes follow in the romp and DANCE; who, wondering sometimes to see thee look so thoughtful, runs to climb up on thy knee, and put her cheek to thine; who loves thee, Tom, above the rest, if that can be; and falling sick once, chose thee for her nurse, and never knew impatience, Tom, when thou wert by her side.

Thou glidest, now, into a graver air; an air devoted to old friends and bygone times; and in thy lingering touch upon the keys, and the rich swelling of the mellow harmony, they rise before thee. The spirit of that old man dead, who delighted to anticipate thy wants, and never ceased to honour thee, is there, among the rest; repeating, with a face composed and calm, the words he said to thee upon his bed, and blessing thee!

And coming from a garden, Tom, bestrewn with flowers by children's hands, THY SISTER, LITTLE RUTH, AS LIGHT OF FOOT and heart AS IN OLD DAYS, sits down beside thee.

SIX: Lord Mansfield’s 1772 Somersett decision is strongly hinted at but never explicitly referred to.

In MP, it has been argued many times since Margaret Kirkham first claimed that the novel’s title and eponymous estate was named for Lord Mansfield, and the slavery subtext of MP suggests that famous and very influential legal decision.

In MC, we read the following broad hints in two different passages at the famous language of the Somersett decision:

“He likewise stuck his hands deep into his pockets, and walked the deck with his nostrils dilated, AS ALREADY INHALING THE AIR OF FREEDOM WHICH carries death to all tyrants, and CAN NEVER (UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WORTH MENTIONING) BE BREATHED BY SLAVES. An English gentleman who was strongly suspected of HAVING RUN AWAY FROM A BANK, with SOMETHING IN HIS POSSESSION belonging to its strong box besides the key, grew eloquent upon THE SUBJECT OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN, and hummed the Marseillaise Hymn constantly.”

“Mr Pecksniff's house is more than a thousand leagues away; and again this happy chronicle has Liberty and Moral Sensibility for its high companions. Again it BREATHES THE BLESSED AIR OF INDEPENDENCE; again it contemplates with pious awe that moral sense which renders unto Ceasar nothing that is his; again INHALES THAT SACRED ATMOSPHERE which was the life of him—oh noble patriot, with many followers!—who dreamed of FREEDOM IN A SLAVE’S EMBRACE, and waking sold her offspring and his own in public markets.

SEVEN: Lord Mansfield’s real life is also strongly hinted at.

In MP, it has been argued many times since the late 90’s (and is shown in the recent movie Belle) that Fanny Price is a representation of Elizabeth Dido Belle Lindsay, the biracial grandniece of Lord Mansfield.

In BR, which of course is focused on the Gordon Riots in 1780, Lord Mansfield’s key role in that event is mentioned prominently.

EIGHT: There is specific reference to the burning of books in anger.

In MP, Sir Thomas Bertram burns all copies of Lover’s Vows in anger after his return from Antigua to find his children and their friends staging a home theatrical of Inchbald’s adaptation of Kotzebue’s original play.

In BR, a key point is made about the burning of Lord Mansfield’s priceless library of books by the rioters.

NINE: The novelist alludes to Inchbald's Lovers Vows (but not necessarily in the same novel as the rest of these)

In MP, as noted above, the Lover’s Vows home theatrical is a central episode.

In ED, there is a strong veiled allusion to Lover’s Vows, as noted by Robert Langton in his bio about Dickens’s youth:

“In this story again there is evidence of the results of the early readings at Chatham. The Princess Puffer (who dealt in opium) asks both Edwin Drood and Mr. Datchery for a specific sum of money, three-and- sixpence, and in each case succeeds in getting it. Mr. Datchery, however, remarks, "Wasn't it a little cool to name your sum? Isn't it customary to leave the amount open? Mightn't it have the appearance, to the young gentleman—only the appearance— that he was rather dictated to?"

In Mrs. Inchbald's Lovers' Vows, Act III, Scene 1, Baron Wildenheim is asked by a supposed beggar to give him a dollar, and the Baron replies, " This is the first time I was ever dictated to by a beggar what to give him."“

TEN: There is an important character named Tom who is of an artistic nature.

In MP, of course this is Tom Bertram, the eldest son of Sir Thomas.

In MC, of course this is Tom Pinch, who of course is also the organist.

And there you have the ten points which show Dickens really was a closet Janeite, at least when it came to Mansfield Park.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Charles Dickens and his chronically bored intellectual adversary

December 29, 2014, 10:50 pm

≫ Next: If you could see Mrs. Elton’s face through her lace veils and through Jane Austen's eyes, instead of Emma's…..what would you see?

≪ Previous: The answer to my little literary quiz with a twist

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Ever since the advent of Google Books some eight years ago, I’ve been proclaiming the utter obsolescence of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), given that anyone anywhere in the world can go to Google Books any time, and, using its date range function, quickly determine the earliest published usage of many words in the English language.  As I will show you, below, apparently the news about Google Books has not yet reached the OED, which is a poignant irony, suggesting that the OED has not yet gotten the proverbial memo.

Two weeks ago, I read a passing mention in a blog post asserting that the OED credits the first published usage of the noun “boredom” (but not the related adjective “bored” which came much earlier) to Charles Dickens in his novel Hard Times. Sure enough, I Googled and found that the OED Tweeted the following on 9/5/11: “The word 'boredom', in the sense of 'the state of being bored', was first used by Charles Dickens in Bleak House (1853).”

Given my skeptical attitude toward the OED, I checked Google Books on this one, and in very short order, I deduced, by my usual literary sleuthing methods, that Dickens not only was NOT the coiner of the word “boredom”, but that Dickens had actually tried, eleven “hard” times in that novel, to tell the reader—in code---who the coiner was. You see, Dickens used the word “boredom” as a parody of that earlier published author’s original usage! Read on to find out the identity of that very famous first user, who has been unjustly ignored by the OED for nearly two centuries!

To begin, although Dickens used the word “boredom” twice in Hard Times, he used the word “bored” nine times in the novel as well! And the most curious part of these eleven usages is that they are ALL used by a single character in the novel—the dandy and politician, James Harthouse. Here they all are, you will quickly get the drift of his defining character trait:

‘You must be very much BORED here?’ was the inference [Harthouse] drew from the communication.

…Now, this gentleman had a younger brother [Harthouse] of still better appearance than himself, who had tried life as a Cornet of Dragoons, and found it a BORE; and had afterwards tried it in the train of an English minister abroad, and found it a BORE; and had then strolled to Jerusalem, and got BORED there; and had then gone yachting about the world, and got BORED everywhere. 

…‘I have not so much as the slightest predilection left.  I assure you I attach not the least importance to any opinions.  The result of the varieties of BOREDOM I have undergone, is a conviction (unless conviction is too industrious a word for the lazy sentiment I entertain on the subject), that any set of ideas will do just as much good as any other set, and just as much harm as any other set.  There’s an English family with a charming Italian motto.  What will be, will be.  It’s the only truth going!’

… ‘Tom is misanthropical to-day, as all BORED people are now and then,’ said Mr. Harthouse.  ‘Don’t believe him, Mrs. Bounderby.  He knows much better.  I shall disclose some of his opinions of you, privately expressed to me, unless he relents a little.’

… Thenext morning was too bright a morning for sleep, and James Harthouse rose early, and sat in the pleasant bay window of his dressing-room, smoking the rare tobacco that had had so wholesome an influence on his young friend.  Reposing in the sunlight, with the fragrance of his eastern pipe about him, and the dreamy smoke vanishing into the air, so rich and soft with summer odours, he reckoned up his advantages as an idle winner might count his gains.  He was not at all BORED for the time, and could give his mind to it.

… Mr. James Harthouse passed a whole night and a day in a state of so much hurry, that the World, with its best glass in his eye, would scarcely have recognized him during that insane interval, as the brother Jem of the honourable and jocular member.  He was positively agitated.  He several times spoke with an emphasis, similar to the vulgar manner.  He went in and went out in an unaccountable way, like a man without an object.  He rode like a highwayman.  In a word, he was so horribly BORED by existing circumstances, that he forgot to go in for BOREDOM in the manner prescribed by the authorities.

…Dear Jack,—All up at Coketown.  BORED out of the place, and going in for camels.

From the above, it is clear why Dickens caught the eye of the OED in the first place—after all, he had made James Harthouse’s boredom a leitmotif, the signature comment of this not very sympathetic character, who was described as follows by Agustin Coletes Blanco in a 1985 scholarly article that also picked up on the “boredom” drumbeat:

“Harthouse combines the ’indolence of his manner’ and his ‘accessions of BOREDOM’ with a cultivated languor and a ‘lightness and smoothness of speech’. Like Bounderby and Mrs Sparsit in their respective ways, he uses the system for his own ends -till he is adequately disposed of by Sissy. A sarcastic account of his background is displayed by the author in book II, chapter 2. He belongs to the kind of people who ‘yaw-yawned’ in their speech, ‘in imitation of fine gentlemen’. Before “'going in' for statistics”, he had tried life ‘as a Cornet of Dragoons, and found it a BORE; and had then strolled to Jerusalem, and got BORED there; and had gone yatching about the world, and got BORED everywhere’. In short, he is both the aristocratic counterpart of the Utilitarians and a social parasite. Once again, his speech will be in accord with his personality….”

But here’s the funny part---because of what I had found in Google Books when I first checked for the earliest usage of “boredom”, I already knew in my gut who the fictional James Harthouse was a parody of! You see, the novel which first used “boredom” was entitled The Young Duke, it was published in 1829 (24 years before Hard Times), and here is the relevant passage:

“The House had just broken up, and the political members had just entered, and in clusters, some standing and some yawning, some stretching their arms and some stretching their legs, presented symptoms of an escape from BOREDOM.”

Did you also notice that this usage occurred in a passage about politicians? And isn’t Dickens’s James Harthouse also a politician in the House of Commons? Hmm….

And now I will put you out of your misery, and finally reveal to you the name of the author of The Young Duke—it was a young politician who dabbled all his life in writing fiction as well as making a rather greater name for himself as a politician, achieving the pinnacle in 1868 (two years before Dickens died) of the Prime Ministership---Benjamin D’Israeli!!!!

And so I was not in the slightest surprised this evening when a quick further Google Books search revealed the following scholarly observation, which, as far as I can tell, was not based on the keyword “boredom”, but on character-driven analysis:

The Alien in their Midst: images of Jews in English literature by Esther L. Panitz, 1981

P. 112: “James Harthouse of Hard Times was a caricature of that dandy who helped shape England's destiny, Benjamin Disraeli….”

So, why would Dickens parody D’Israeli? That’s a topic for a full article in itself, but to give you a taste of an answer, read the following 2012 blog post by Peter G. Hilston, who definitely had no idea about the “boredom” connection:

http://petergshilstonsblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/dickens-and-disraeli-on-discontent.html

“Dickens and Disraeli on discontent”

For those who don’t want to read his whole post, here are the relevant highlights:

“I recently read “Hard Times” (1854), Charles Dickens’s only attempt at a novel about the industrial north of England, set in a cotton-manufacturing city he calls “Coketown”. Opinions of the novel have differed widely: in George Orwell’s long essay on Dickens we are told that the great Victorian historian Lord Macaulay refused to review the book because of what he saw as its “sullen socialism”, whereas Lenin was revolted by Dickens’s “bourgeois sentimentality”. In my opinion, Lenin was much closer to the mark than Macaulay. I found it a deeply irritating book, with a ramshackle plot, ridiculous characters, and a complete absence of any ideas for remedying the faults and abuses Dickens portrayed. As a corrective I reread a contemporary novel covering similar ground: “Sybil” (1845) by Benjamin Disraeli. I would like here to compare and contrast the two books.

...Let us turn to Benjamin Disraeli: the only British Prime Minister to have been also the author of several novels. In the 1840s, when he was already a Tory Member of Parliament (at this point representing Shrewsbury, in Shropshire) he produced a trilogy: “Coningsby”, “Sybil” and “Tancred”; the third being the least satisfactory. His motives for writing were mixed. In the first place, he needed the money: for most of his career he was plagued by debts, which at this time amounted to about £20,000 - at least half a million in today’s terms. Secondly, there were political ideas he wished to put forward, and which he does at length in the trilogy. He was associated with a group of youthful aristocrats known as “Young England”. Their theories sound very silly nowadays, but at the time they were considered important enough for Karl Marx to jeer at them in the “Communist Manifesto”. Particularly they were hostile to their Conservative party leader, Sir Robert Peel (Prime Minister 1841-46), whom they accused of betraying old Tory principles. Disraeli, who was neither an aristocrat nor young (he was born in 1804, eight years before Dickens) produced such ringing phrases as “A Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy”, and, in “Coningsby”, “A sound Conservative government - Tory men and Whig measures”. In 1846 Disraeli was to play a leading role in splitting the party and bringing down Peel’s government: an action which left the Conservatives without a Parliamentary majority for the next thirty years.
Most of Disraeli’s novels centre upon an upper-class young man making his way in politics and high society; “Sybil” being the only one where he ventured to set scenes in the industrial north.

…Disraeli’s characters, though not as memorably depicted as Dickens’s, are much more believable as people…Rather surprisingly, there is more overt Christianity in Disraeli’s novel than in Dickens’s: Disraeli portrays Walter Gerard and his daughter as dedicated Catholics, and among his minor characters there is a strong-minded vicar who is prepared to stand up to the upper-class bullies.
As an experienced politician, Disraeli knew how things actually worked, whereas Dickens never bothered to find out, but simply took refuge in satire. Dickens is contemptuous of Parliament and dismisses M.P.s as “national dustmen”; though many today would see the time as a golden age of political giants: Palmerston and the young Gladstone, as well as Peel and Disraeli himself. Dickens is thus incapable of matching the lethal scene where Disraeli portrays Peel (called simply “the gentleman in Downing Street”) instructing his factotum, who is given the thoroughly Dickensian name of Hoaxem, to give two completely contradictory messages to two different visiting delegations, and particularly to be “ “Frank and explicit”: that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and to confuse the minds of others.” This is far more damaging than Dickens’s crude abuse!” END QUOTE FROM HILSTON BLOG POST

In conclusion, it is a final irony of the above that Dickens and Disraeli, by virtue of an irony of surname spelling, have entries one after the other in The Oxford Companion to Charles Dickens.

If you read Disraeli’s entry on p.181 thereof, you will learn that Disraeli, when asked in 1857 whether he had ever read anything by Dickens, replied in the negative, “except extracts in the newspaper.”

I am not sure I believe D’Israeli on that one, but if it’s true, then that’s a good thing, I suppose, because I don’t think “boredom” would have described his response had he seen himself in the character of the “bored” James Harthouse in Hard Times!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.: I am Tweeting the link for this post to the OED, let’s see if they change their entry and acknowledge me for pointing out their error.

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If you could see Mrs. Elton’s face through her lace veils and through Jane Austen's eyes, instead of Emma's…..what would you see?

December 30, 2014, 12:24 am

≫ Next: The OED is wrong AGAIN --Jane Austen didn't coin "sponge-cake" either!

≪ Previous: Charles Dickens and his chronically bored intellectual adversary

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 The group read of Emma in Janeites & Austen L appears to have stirred up stuff that’s been brewing in my subconscious for a while, and the latest such bubbling up has to do with my realizing that Jane Austen emphasized Mrs. Elton’s lace veils for a reason—a quick check of all the passages in the novel which pertain to her appearance confirmed to me that (unlike the case with every other young female character in the novel) we never actually get any objective report of what her face looks like! We don’t have the slightest idea.

Think about that bold assertion as you consider each of the following:

In Chapter 22, we have a great deal of apparent description of Mr. Elton’s new bride, even before she shows up---but it’s all vague gossip and hearsay, such as “The charming Augusta Hawkins, in addition to all the usual advantages of perfect beauty and merit, was in possession of an independent fortune, of so many thousands as would always be called ten”.

Then she arrives and we read: “Mrs. Elton was first seen at church: but though devotion might be interrupted, curiosity could not be satisfied by a bride in a pew, and it must be left for the visits in form which were then to be paid, to settle whether she were very pretty indeed, or only rather pretty, or not pretty at all. “

Now, why is it exactly that “it must be left for the visits” “to settle” how pretty she was? On first reading, that would be mysterious, but not on rereading—we realize from what Mrs. Elton says at the very end of the novel, about the wedding of Emma and Knightley (“Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business!”) that she is almost certainly wearing a lace veil then, hence her face cannot be clearly seen.

Then Emma pays the necessary visit, and we read this: “The visit was of course short; and there was so much embarrassment and occupation of mind to shorten it, that Emma would not allow herself entirely to form an opinion of the lady, and on no account to give one, beyond the nothing-meaning terms of being "elegantly dressed, and very pleasing." She did not really like her. She would not be in a hurry to find fault, but she suspected that there was no elegance;—ease, but not elegance.— She was almost sure that for a young woman, a stranger, a bride, there was too much ease. Her person was rather good; her face not unpretty; but neither feature, nor air, nor voice, nor manner, were elegant. Emma thought at least it would turn out so.”

What is that Emma “was almost sure”, and why did Emma think “at least it WOULD TURN OUT SO”??  It sounds to me like JA is making sure we have a fair chance to realize that Emma has visited Mrs. Elton but has not in fact gotten a good look at her face, as Emma leaves still guessing, and that could include whether “her face” was “not unpretty”.

Then we come to three later passages, which make me even more suspicious about whether anyone ever sees Mrs. Elton’s face unobscured by a lace veil or other large covering to hide her face. Consider:

Ch. 34: “Mrs. Elton, as elegant as lace and pearls could make her, [John] looked at in silence …” ---of course the “lace” refers to the lace VEIL she wears.

Ch. 38: “…Stop, stop, let us stand a little back, Mrs. Elton is going; dear Mrs. Elton, how elegant she looks!—Beautiful lace!—Now we all follow in her train. Quite the queen of the evening!—“

And that time it was Miss Bates brings attention to Mrs. Elton’s lace veil. Seems like a lace veil is for Mrs. Elton like an AMEX card today—she doesn’t leave home without it!

And, to be sure we don’t miss it, how about this, as Mrs. Elton plans the summer outing to Donwell Abbey, an event that a woman simply cannot wear a lace veil to:

Ch. 41: "That's quite unnecessary; I see Jane every day:—but as you like. It is to be a morning scheme, you know, Knightley; quite a simple thing. I shall wear a large bonnet, and bring one of my little baskets hanging on my arm. Here,—probably this basket with pink ribbon. Nothing can be more simple, you see. And Jane will have such another. There is to be no form or parade—a sort of gipsy party.

A large bonnet would have the same fuction as a lace veil, the better to hide a face—just as—not coincidentally, I assert---Jane Fairfax wears pelisses and shawls and other clothing in that same very warm weather, the better to hide a large belly, my dear…..

Which leads to the real question-what exactly would Mrs. Elton be hiding about her face? Of course, one real possibility would be that she had smallpox scarring, like the Austen family member who did, who was in many ways Jane Austen’ s model for Mrs. Elton—Mary Lloyd Austen.

But I think there’s another possibility which came to my mind when I suddenly found myself humming the words from “If You Could See Her” from Cabaret:

http://cinemafanatic.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/cabaret_if_you_could_see_her.jpg

Emcee (appearing with a Gorilla)

I know what you're thinking:
You wondered why I chose her
Out of all the ladies in the world.
That's just a first impression,
What good's a first impression?
If you knew her like I do
It would change you're point of view.

If you could see her through my eyes
You wouldn't wonder at all.
If you could see her through my eyes
I guarantee you would fall (like I did).
When we're in public togtheer
I hear society moan.
But if they could see her through my eyes
Maybe they'd leave us alone.

Spoken: (There you are my liebling. Your favourite!)
How can I speak of her virtues,
I don't know where to begin?
She's clever, she's smart, she reads musics
She doesn't smoke or drink gin (like I do).
Yet when we're walking together
They sneer if I'm holding her hand.
But if they could see her through my eyes
Maybe they'd all understand.
(Emcee and Gorilla dance)
Why can't they leave us alone.

Seriously, think about it…In Sanditon, we have the young biracial heiress Miss Lambe—Miss Hawkins was from a rich Bristol family, meaning they probably made their fortune in some way from the slave trade. Might Miss Hawkins be the “Harriet” of the family—an illegitimate daughter of a rich man sired on an African slave?

That would make Mrs. Elton’s comment about being “a friend of the abolition” particularly ironic, if she herself were biracial! And it would then make sense that she would be hiding her facial appearance, so as not to have her racial background be too obvious.

Of course, those with eyes and brains would know, but Mrs. Elton would not be the first character in the novel to have the truth known about her by others, BUT NOT BY EMMA. That is the running joke of the novel—Emma really is globally clueless! One of the joys of rereading the novel is to occasionally spot another one of Emma’s blind spots!

And finally, it would make sense if Mr. Elton—he who is described at one point as “spruce, BLACK, and smiling”—married a biracial bride in casually racist Regency Era England. Maybe part of what made Mr. Elton so unacceptable a marital candidate for a woman of means (as opposed to the illegitimate Harriet) was the dark color of his skin?

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The OED is wrong AGAIN --Jane Austen didn't coin "sponge-cake" either!

December 30, 2014, 2:51 pm

≫ Next: P.S. re Mrs. Elton always wearing a lace veil or bonnet

≪ Previous: If you could see Mrs. Elton’s face through her lace veils and through Jane Austen's eyes, instead of Emma's…..what would you see?

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Just to see, I went back to the OED's Twitter feed, and went backwards in time from the present to find their latest Tweet in which they made a claim of word usage priority for a famous person.

It didn't take me long, here's the Tweet the OED sent out 2 weeks ago, on the occasion of JA's birthday:

"#*OnThisDay* in 1775, Jane Austen was born. Did you know that she currently provides the OED with the earliest reference to sponge cake? "

I remembered having looked into that some years ago, and a quick check of my files revealed that I noted the following in May 2012 as I was looking at Jane Austen's Letter 52 dated June 17, 1808:

"JA wishes CEA “had not a disagreeable evening with Miss Austen (age 40) and her niece (must be still a girl). You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me.” That sounds to me like she is saying they are spongers, whose affections have been bought by a powerful person!  So how fittingly ironic that a term JA coined to describe a person became a universal term for a kind of cake!...In the 1807 /Mirth and Metre, A collection of Songs Sonnets Ballads and Bagatelles /written by Charles Dibdin (and we knew his name as one that JA knew well!), on P. 125, in the midst, alas, of an anti semitic doggerel, I read:

“A pastry cook said, the Jew was a CAKE to give himself a bad character; but he found the world full of CAKES. He called a beau a SWEET CAKE; a lover, a HEART CAKE; a prude, a LEMON CAKE; and a wit, a SHORT CAKE; a doctor, a WORM CAKE, his patient, a BATH CAKE; a lawyer, a SPONGE CAKE, his client a PAN-CAKE; a courtier, a PUFF CAKE; a citizen, a PLUM-CAKE….”
So the timing is just amazing, obviously JA got the idea from that book."

[me again in the present] Yes, it surely is no coincidence that Dibdin's book is published in 1807, and then JA, less than a year later, writes a letter using the word sponge-cake in an anthropomorphic sense, EXACTLY as Dibdin coined a cake-term for a dozen different kinds of persons/cakes. Her satirical eye had been caught by his satirical lexicon of people as cakes, and she must have shared a laugh with Cassandra over it when they read  it --- hence it made a convenient code for describing CEA's visit to their relatives who apparently were ripe for satirizing.

Here's the URL for the Dibdin book in Google Books so you can see the 1807 publication date plain as day at the beginning:

https://books.google.com/books?id=3yNYAAAAcAAJ&pg=PP7&dq=%22Mirth+and+Metre%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xSajVKaoGdDooATj6oGYBw&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Mirth%20and%20Metre%22&f=false

The doggerel about people-cakes is on ppg. 124-5.

And, again, this tells us that the OED is, as of two weeks ago, STILL not looking at Google Books in order to make their listings correct!

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode onTwitter

P.S. re Mrs. Elton always wearing a lace veil or bonnet

December 30, 2014, 7:02 pm

≫ Next: Babies, Incest, Riddles, & the Bad Air of South End: Emma Chapter 12 as black comedy version of an SVU Episode

≪ Previous: The OED is wrong AGAIN --Jane Austen didn't coin "sponge-cake" either!

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 Yesterday, I posted my initial thoughts about Mrs. Elton and her striking predilection for wearing lace veils:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/12/if-you-could-see-mrs-eltons-face.html

Diane Reynolds responded in a variety of interesting ways, first with this: 

"I am trying to envision Mrs. Elton going around veiled all the time. The idea makes me laugh and could be a part of a comic filming of Emma, but I just can't see it as JA's intent."

Diane, excuse me if I don't entirely believe you, I think you're on the fence about this one.. I.e., it makes you laugh, I suggest, because the possibility intrigues you.

And actually, I only just realized that Diana has slid something very clever into her post this morning that supports my theory further:

"I'm also thinking that Mrs. Elton's "very few pearls, very few lace veils," is not necessarily a comment on anything resembling a typical @1800 wedding, but her own aspirational materialistic nature!  (And why is that in the plural?  Pearls yes, but if the bride didn't wear a lace veil, who else would?). "

To answer Diana's parenthetical question, MRS. ELTON WOULD! Just as she tries to steal the show from Emma at the Crown Inn ball (Queen of the Evening, lace, etc.) Jane Austen keeps subliminally injecting this idea that Mrs. Elton's face has not been seen by anyone .And in that Crown Inn scene, I also just noticed that JA again reminds us that people are STILL curious to get a look at Mrs. Elton, even though she has been in Highbury for a while already. It means that every Sunday people see her in church wearing a lace veil. 

Diane also wrote: "But it could perhaps point to a Moorish or Muslim subtext, especially with Miss Bates talking about Aladdin's lamp. Maybe Augusta is part Arab? Maybe that has something to do with her gipsy party to pick strawberries ... of course, I am being facetious ... "

Oh, no, you're not, you just are ambivalent, but you can't resist bringing
forward this wonderful additional element---of course Miss Bates just happens to mention Aladdin's Lamp (under cover of praising Mr. Weston for his genie-like transformation of the Crown Inn into an Arabian Nights décor) RIGHT AFTER she praises Mrs. Elton for her lace, Queen of the Evening (which is an echo of the Queen of the NIGHT, from The Magic Flute, who wears black). And yes, the gipsy party is absolutely part of JA's subliminal clueing. Arab, Gipsy, African, they are all dark skinned groups, and ALL associated with Mrs. Elton in particular.

And...it's interesting to think of the contrast in this regard between Mrs. Elton, on the one hand, and Emma Harriet and Jane on the other, who are all
light skinned. Frank in particular takes special pleasure in noting how pale Jane's neck is, almost as if to say "NOT like Mrs. Elton!"

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Babies, Incest, Riddles, & the Bad Air of South End: Emma Chapter 12 as black comedy version of an SVU Episode

January 3, 2015, 10:57 am

≫ Next: ""...And, by-the-bye, everybody ought to have two pair of spectacles; they should indeed. Jane said so..."

≪ Previous: P.S. re Mrs. Elton always wearing a lace veil or bonnet

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Diane Reynolds wrote the following summary of Emma Chapter 12 in our ongoing group read in Janeites & Austen L: 

“The chapter opens with Emma deciding to make it up to Mr. Knightley and doing so by greeting him as he visits with her niece (and his niece), baby Emma, in her arms, a bit if artifice that Emma uses to disarm him. Again, atmospherics come into play--the text never says that the current baby Emma reminds Mr. Knightley of the baby Emma he remembers from when he was 16--the baby Emma who is now the grown up Emma holding a baby Emma--but clearly the implication--or background note--is all over the passage. And Emma works very hard to be a peacemaker, to smooth over differences for the family Christmas. The baby gambit works. Mr. K is led to "talk on of them in the usual way" and to take the baby in his own arms with "all the unceremoniousness of perfect amity." Mr. K does then lecture the older Emma in an overbearing way, accusing her of being under the power of "fancy" and "whim" in her dealings with adults, but not so with children--and if she would act with men and women as she did with children they might "always think alike."“

As usual, Diane, your attention gravitates to the most significant aspects of each chapter which lead off the page into shadowy realms. In this case, you rightly pick up on what I see as the latent pedophilia in which Chapter 12 is drenched, as I will now explain.

First, it’s Knightley’s disturbingly fond free associations from holding a baby girl in his arms to remembering holding the infant version of his now 21 year old sister in law in his then 16 year old arms.

The universal response should be “EEEWWWW!”  The creepiness factor is off the charts. It was a memorable moment at the 2011 JASNA AGM in Ft. Worth when Andrew Davies drew a collective gasp from 800 attendees at his plenary address by daring to suggest that Knightley’s interest in Emma is very disturbing.

Diane also wrote: “He is holding baby Emma when he agrees with the adult Emma. "Yes ... I was sixteen years old when you were born."  How can the baby Emma he is holding not be jogging this memory--and awareness--of their age difference? How can he not be thinking of adult Emma in her babyhood? Emma tries to reduce the difference Mr, K perceives by noting that she is now 21, implying they are both now adults, which they are. But Mr. K won't give it up: "I have still the advantage of you by 16 years experience" and then he says patronizingly, pointing directly to his male privilege, "and by not being a pretty young woman and a spoiled child." If Emma looks to establish some equality with him as an adult--and she IS an adult--he insists on characterizing her  as a child. Mr. K then turns to address baby Emma directly, asking her to tell her aunt to set  "a better example than renewing old grievances."

Indeed, Jane Austen is showing us, without saying it out loud, that the age difference is what really turns Knightley on --- he’s like one of the pedophiles on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit who loses interest in his victim unless he can keep seeing her as very young. We see Knightley in this scene charmed by Emma from angry thwarted petulance to smiling joviality—we see a side of him we’d rather not.

This whole creepy theme will be revisited, in spades, when Emma and Mrs. Weston chortle over baby Anna Weston near the end of the novel.

But enough about Knightley---I say the chapter is drenched in pedophilia, because the far greater portion of Chapter 12 is then given over to Mr. Woodhouse’s disturbingly strong feelings about having some alone time with daughter Isabella.  We see that Knightley and Mr. Woodhouse have an awful (all puns intended) lot in common when it comes to their attentions to much young females--- in their own families, no less.

Otherwise, I will also note that last year I posted several times about my seeing Mr. Perry as Mr. Woodhouse’s imaginary friend…..

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/02/take-magic-carpet-ride-on-peri-banou.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-shakespeare-play-hiding-in-plain.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/02/perryperis-on-horseback-in-dreams.html

….as to which the narrator (audaciously) slides in a giant hint to that effect at the very end of this chapter, in which Mr. Perry is mentioned a dozen times:

“Mr. Woodhouse was rather agitated by such harsh reflections on his friend Perry, to whom he had, in fact, though unconsciously, been attributing many of his own feelings and expressions…”

I love that “though unconsciously”, because it perfectly plays on the double meaning of that word—on the surface, it appears to mean “unintentionally”, but, against the grain, it means that Mr. Woodhouse is completely unaware that Mr. Perry is his IMAGINARY friend, not a living, breathing person.

And in the middle of those three posts, I point out how Mr. Woodhouse is a representation of the depraved incestuous King in Shakespeare’s very disturbing “romance”  Pericles: Prince of Tyre”, the King who gets off on killing potential suitors for his daughter by posing them a riddle, the answer to which is father-daughter incest. And Chapter 12 is perhaps the epicenter of that incestuous subtext, given that both Knightley AND Mr. Woodhouse take center stage in that regard, one after the other.

And…I’ve also written about this Chapter 12 from another shadow perspective, i.e., that the “mud” at “South End”, and the “bad air”, and Isabella’s assurances to her father that Brunswick Square has clean air, are all part of Jane Austen’s inter-novel theme of the pervasive presence of  feces (both animal and human) on the ground in Jane Austen’s world, especially in the parts of towns where the likes of Miss Bates and Mrs. Smith live:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/09/unless-you-keep-on-footpath-mr.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/06/remarkable-veiled-meaning-of-latin.html

And… to conclude,  if you use your imagination a little bit, you realize that these two themes, of incest and obsession with “south ends”, are directly connected, such that these two “codes” overlap in a most disturbing way.

And all of it goes entirely over Emma’s head—this is bravura hiding in plain sight on Jane Austen’s part.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

""...And, by-the-bye, everybody ought to have two pair of spectacles; they should indeed. Jane said so..."

January 5, 2015, 1:49 pm

≫ Next: Was Phylly Walter (Fanny Price) ambivalent about "acting" on her attraction to Eliza de Feuillide (Mary Crawford)?

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In the Janeites group read of Emma in progress, my central claim that Jane Fairfax is pregnant continues to be questioned skeptically:

Nancy Mayer wrote:  "...The situation, the clothes, the circumstances make it impossible for Jane Fairfax to hide a pregnancy. To get down to basics-- her maid would know that she hadn't had to wash any rags for months."

Then Christy Somer replied: "Yes, the Bates' did have one maid-of-all-works. And it seems reasonable to assume that for the majority of genteel families with only one or two maids, they would have been the first to suspect such a condition for the lack of wash -or, even if JF washed her own rags, the maid would miss seeing the drying of them."

I never suggested that Jane Fairfax's pregnancy was a secret from her aunt or from their maid Patty.

Just listen very carefully to Miss Bates telling you about it:

"...And, by-the-bye, everybody ought to have two pair of spectacles; they should indeed. Jane said so. I meant to take them over to John Saunders the first thing I did, but something or other hindered me all the morning; first one thing, then another, there is no saying what: you know. At one time Patty came to say she thought the kitchen chimney wanted sweeping. 'Oh,'said I, 'Patty, do not come with your bad news to me. Here is the rivet of your mistress's spectacles out.' Then the baked apples came home..."

Two sets of spectacles, indeed! The very definition of the double-story structure I have claimed JA wrote for all six of her novels, and Miss Bates is there to tell every reader about it, who doesn't zone her out, as Emma does..

And Apropos Patty's saying the  "chimney wanted sweeping", just remember  the official answer to Garrick's Riddle that Mr. Woodhouse tries to fully recollect - "chimney sweep" - of course the Freudian implications of sweeping chimneys, especially In regard to a pregnant woman, do not require any explanation.

And by the way, as I've also been speaking about in my Jane Fairfax talks since the beginning, and finally posted about in 2010 in my blog...

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/12/answer-to-my-best-quiz-ever.html?m=1

....the Bates's maid Patty also figures in the second salacious solution to the charade long attributed to Henry Austen which has as its official answer "Pat-riot" - that second solution which I figured out is "Han-cock" -- and of course Patty and Hannah are the names of servants in Emma.

So...Jane having Miss Bates and Patty (as well, of course, as Mrs. Weston) in on her secret and helping her keep it secret (most of all from Emma, which isn't very difficult!) is an integral part of the shadow story I have long ago sleuthed out.

And finally, apropos those rags you both mentioned, here is what Miss Bates has to say about Jane's protective clothing  (tippet on the exterior, quantities of matting on the interior)   while under the acute stress of attending the Crown Inn ball, and being tormented by Mrs Elton- who knows exactly what is going on and is trying to blackmail Jane with exposure: 

"Jane, Jane, my dear Jane, where areyou? Here is your tippet. Mrs. Westonbegs you to put on your tippet. She   says she is afraid there will be           draughts in the passage, though everything has been done—one door nailed up—quantities of matting, my dear Jane, indeed you must."

I mean, there it all is, right under everyone's noses, even a contingency plan if Jane's water should break unexpectedly. 

Cheers, 

Arnie