...... SHARP ELVES SOCIETY ...... Jane Austen's Shadow Stories

How many of you have ever wondered, when reading the following passage in Chapter 34 of Emma, who is the “some one else” to whom Mrs. Weston is attending, when Emma wishes to add her two cents to the group conversation about handwriting styles by expressing to Mrs. Weston a compliment about Frank’s handwriting?:

My guess would be, “None of you reading this.” And yet, one of the surest signs I know of a wormhole that leads deep into the shadow story of a Jane Austen novel is such a reference to an unnamed character. I.e., I’ve learned, from a decade of fruitful experience, that this sort of reference is, under the guise of a throwaway, meaningless bit of narrative filler, actually and invariably a clue to a significant detail in the shadow story.

I was prompted to take a closer look at the above particular passage in Emma after reading a short essay posted today elsewhere online, in which the topic was the subtle meaning of the many “pauses” which are explicitly mentioned in JA’s novels. I had not previously considered the meaning of the word “pause” in my ever-growing lexicon for the Jane Austen Code, and so, even though I was not particularly taken by the orthodox interpretations of Austenian pauses in that other blog post, I was nonetheless grateful for the prompt to take a look at JA’s usages of the word “pause” through the spectacles of my own theory of Jane Austen’s shadow stories, so as to add it to its proper place in the Jane Austen Code.

In particular, the common expression of a “pregnant pause” popped into my head, and given the centrality I have long claimed for concealed pregnancies in Jane Austen’s shadow stories—most of all Jane Fairfax’s----I decided to go searching in Emma for any usage of the word “pause” there which might pertain in some interesting way to Jane Fairfax’s increasingly challenging efforts to conceal her increasingly enlarging abdomen, especially from Emma. And as I will now show you, I struck gold in the above passage.

And I begin by first asking you to read the full context in which such usage occurs. See if YOU can guess who that unnamed “some one” is to whom Mrs. Weston briefly attends—I’ll bet you can, once you focus on the question---and I’ll give you my answer immediately afterwards, see if it’s the same as yours:

“By this time, the walk in the rain had reached Mrs. Elton, and her remonstrances now opened upon Jane.

"My dear Jane, what is this I hear?—Going to the post-office in the rain!—This must not be, I assure you.—You sad girl, how could you do such a thing?—It is a sign I was not there to take care of you."

Jane very patiently assured her that she had not caught any cold.

"Oh! do not tell me. You really are a very sad girl, and do not know how to take care of yourself.—To the post-office indeed! Mrs. Weston, did you ever hear the like? You and I must positively exert our authority."

"My advice," said Mrs. Weston kindly and persuasively, "I certainly do feel tempted to give. Miss Fairfax, you must not run such risks.—Liable as you have been to severe colds, indeed you ought to be particularly careful, especially at this time of year. The spring I always think requires more than common care. Better wait an hour or two, or even half a day for your letters, than run the risk of bringing on your cough again. Now do not you feel that you had? Yes, I am sure you are much too reasonable. You look as if you would not do such a thing again."

"Oh! she shall not do such a thing again," eagerly rejoined Mrs. Elton. "We will not allow her to do such a thing again:"—and nodding significantly—"there must be some arrangement made, there must indeed. I shall speak to Mr. E. The man who fetches our letters every morning (one of our men, I forget his name) shall inquire for yours too and bring them to you. That will obviate all difficulties you know; and from us I really think, my dear Jane, you can have no scruple to accept such an accommodation."

"You are extremely kind," said Jane; "but I cannot give up my early walk. I am advised to be out of doors as much as I can, I must walk somewhere, and the post-office is an object; and upon my word, I have scarcely ever had a bad morning before."

"My dear Jane, say no more about it. The thing is determined, that is (laughing affectedly) as far as I can presume to determine any thing without the concurrence of my lord and master. You know, Mrs. Weston, you and I must be cautious how we express ourselves. But I do flatter myself, my dear Jane, that my influence is not entirely worn out. If I meet with no insuperable difficulties therefore, consider that point as settled."

"Excuse me," said Jane earnestly, "I cannot by any means consent to such an arrangement, so needlessly troublesome to your servant. If the errand were not a pleasure to me, it could be done, as it always is when I am not here, by my grandmama's."

"Oh! my dear; but so much as Patty has to do!—And it is a kindness to employ our men."

Jane looked as if she did not mean to be conquered; but instead of answering, she began speaking again to Mr. John Knightley.

"The post-office is a wonderful establishment!" said she.—"The regularity and despatch of it! If one thinks of all that it has to do, and all that it does so well, it is really astonishing!"

"It is certainly very well regulated."

"So seldom that any negligence or blunder appears! So seldom that a letter, among the thousands that are constantly passing about the kingdom, is even carried wrong—and not one in a million, I suppose, actually lost! And when one considers the variety of hands, and of bad hands too, that are to be deciphered, it increases the wonder."

"The clerks grow expert from habit.—They must begin with some quickness of sight and hand, and exercise improves them. If you want any farther explanation," continued he, smiling, "they are paid for it. That is the key to a great deal of capacity. The public pays and must be served well."

The varieties of handwriting were farther talked of, and the usual observations made.

"I have heard it asserted," said John Knightley, "that the same sort of handwriting often prevails in a family; and where the same master teaches, it is natural enough. But for that reason, I should imagine the likeness must be chiefly confined to the females, for boys have very little teaching after an early age, and scramble into any hand they can get. Isabella and Emma, I think, do write very much alike. I have not always known their writing apart."

"Yes," said his brother hesitatingly, "there is a likeness. I know what you mean—but Emma's hand is the strongest."

"Isabella and Emma both write beautifully," said Mr. Woodhouse; "and always did. And so does poor Mrs. Weston"—with half a sigh and half a smile at her.

"I never saw any gentleman's handwriting"—Emma began, looking also at Mrs. Weston; but stopped, on perceiving that Mrs. Weston was attending to some one else—and the pause gave her time to reflect, "Now, how am I going to introduce him?—Am I unequal to speaking his name at once before all these people? Is it necessary for me to use any roundabout phrase?—Your Yorkshire friend—your correspondent in Yorkshire;—that would be the way, I suppose, if I were very bad.—No, I can pronounce his name without the smallest distress. I certainly get better and better.—Now for it."

Mrs. Weston was disengaged and Emma began again—"Mr. Frank Churchill writes one of the best gentleman's hands I ever saw."

"I do not admire it," said Mr. Knightley. "It is too small—wants strength. It is like a woman's writing."

This was not submitted to by either lady. They vindicated him against the base aspersion. "No, it by no means wanted strength—it was not a large hand, but very clear and certainly strong. Had not Mrs. Weston any letter about her to produce?" No, she had heard from him very lately, but having answered the letter, had put it away.

"If we were in the other room," said Emma, "if I had my writing-desk, I am sure I could produce a specimen. I have a note of his.—Do not you remember, Mrs. Weston, employing him to write for you one day?"

"He chose to say he was employed"—

"Well, well, I have that note; and can shew it after dinner to convince Mr. Knightley."

"Oh! when a gallant young man, like Mr. Frank Churchill," said Mr. Knightley dryly, "writes to a fair lady like Miss Woodhouse, he will, of course, put forth his best."

Dinner was on table.—Mrs. Elton, before she could be spoken to, was ready; and before Mr. Woodhouse had reached her with his request to be allowed to hand her into the dining-parlour, was saying—

"Must I go first? I really am ashamed of always leading the way."

Jane's solicitude about fetching her own letters had not escaped Emma. She had heard and seen it all; and felt some curiosity to know whether the wet walk of this morning had produced any. She suspected that it had; that it would not have been so resolutely encountered but in full expectation of hearing from some one very dear, and that it had not been in vain. She thought there was an air of greater happiness than usual—a glow both of complexion and spirits. …”

I think it must be obvious that “some one else” must be Mrs. Elton – who else would it be? But what does it matter, you reasonably ask? And my answer is that, as I have posted on numerous occasions over the past several years, Mrs. Elton already knows that Jane is pregnant, and is trying, under the guise of her zealous interest in every detail of Jane’s life, to blackmail and coerce Jane into either aborting or giving up her baby. Why? Because I also discerned long ago, and have several times posted, that Frank Churchill was the “abominable puppy” who jilted Mrs. Elton on Valentine’s Day by giving her the “acrostic” which is actually one and the same as the charade which Mr. Elton gives to Emma!

And, finally, I can also explain why Mrs. Weston was attending to Mrs. Elton at that very instant when Emma, as usual in her clueless utter lack of awareness of what is really going on right under her nose, wanted to compliment Frank’s handwriting, because she knew it would give Mrs. Weston pleasure.

Mrs. Weston has been observing Mrs. Elton hounding Jane about picking up Jane’s mail for her, repeatedly overriding Jane’s polite demurrals, and decides to jump in and engage directly with Mrs. Elton, so as to deflect Mrs. Elton away from Jane—and Mrs. Weston succeeds, as the conversation has by then turned away from Jane, which allows Mrs. Weston to disengage from Mrs. Elton and turn her attention back to Emma to hear the compliment to Frank.

And the clincher is that “pause” which, in Emma’s clueless mind, gives Emma time to properly phrase her compliment to Frank, but which, to the eyes of the knowing reader, gives Jane a chance to escape from Mrs. Elton’s relentless hounding, which is all about Jane’s concealed pregnancy—hence a very “pregnant pause” indeed!

I conclude by pointing you back to the end of the passage in which Emma cheerfully pats herself on her back for her supposed perspicacity: “Jane's solicitude about fetching her own letters had not escaped Emma. She had heard and seen it all…” Actually, Emma in this scene in particular fits the words of John Lennon: “Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see”. Emma has correctly and sharply observed Jane and noted that “there was an air of greater happiness than usual—a glow both of complexion and spirits.” But what a rich and powerful irony that Emma mistakenly attributes that happy glow to Jane’s having received a letter from Mr. Dixon, when the shadowy reality is that Jane is actually seeing the father of her baby—Mr. John Knightley—for the first time since her arrival in Highbury months earlier, and is getting to talk to him, albeit in code, about her pregnancy---which is why the glow that Emma perceives is tempered by the tears that well up in Jane’s eyes when John tells her, in code, that he is not going to step up and leave his airhead trophy wife, Isabella, for the woman he really loves, Jane.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

In response to my last post, Jane Fox wrote: “But doesn't a "pregnant pause" mean that the listeners wonder what the speaker will say? In this case, no one is paying attention to Emma. So my question is, why doesn't it bother her that no one is paying attention?”

First, thank you once again, Jane, for reading my posts with care, and for responding substantively—it’s always fun to engage with you in this way.

Second, I didn’t mean that it was a literal “pregnant pause” --I meant it punningly. I.e., the pause occurred, because Mrs. Weston was busy trying to rescue the very PREGNANT Jane from Mrs. Elton’s line of fire, and therefore was not paying Emma the kind of doting attention that Emma was used to.

Third, in answer to your final question, I don’t believe that Emma was being ignored by the group---when she did eventually speak, Mr. Knightley immediately responded to her. As for Mrs. Weston ignoring her in that moment, I think Emma is not bothered by that, because Emma is so preoccupied by her own thoughts and feelings. I.e., JA is showing (rather than telling) us that Emma is so much inside her own head, that Emma doesn’t even register the identity of the ‘some one’ to whom Mrs. Weston is attending, let alone the words being spoken!

This scene is a particularly good example of one of the foundations of JA’s genius, especially in Emma--how JA writes polyphonically (to use an apt musical metaphor, given JA’s Mary-Bennet-like musical ability and knowledge). Even as the “principal melody” (the heroine’s conscious view of what is happening) engages the passive reader’s exclusive attention, the discerning reader who listens for the “thorough-bass” and subordinate melodic lines will always find these sorts of questions lurking on the edge.

What we have in the excerpt I quoted is, first, Mrs. Elton hounding Jane about getting her letters at the post office (with the coded pregnancy subtext I suggested), then Mrs. Weston chimes in to echo Mrs. Elton but in a kinder, non-intrusive way. Then Jane seizes that moment to turn the subject away from her letters, to the post office in general (exactly as Mr. Knightley turns the “path” of conversation to the footpath to Langham, when the words get dangerously heated between John and Mr. Woodhouse), and John follows Mrs. Weston in further deflecting Mrs. E from Jane, by immediately chiming in to support her, and ending with:

“…Isabella and Emma, I think, do write very much alike. I have not always known their writing apart."

Then George K and Mr. Woodhouse toss in their comments about male vs. female handwriting, and THAT’s when Emma is prompted to make a comment about Frank’s handwriting.

Now the most interesting question, which only occurred to me while responding to you, is, why does Emma think of Frank’s handwriting just then? Is it just random? The answer becomes clear, I suggest, when we look at the giant clue that JA provides to us, as she always does in such instances.

What is of concern to Emma as she is reflecting on exactly how she wants to say her piece? She pauses and worries, for just a moment, whether she is “unequal to speaking [Frank’s] name at once before all these people”.

Of course! It was only a few chapters earlier, that Frank was abruptly summoned back to Enscombe, thereby putting a hold on the Crown Inn ball. And then we read a long paragraph in which Emma’s complex emotional reactions (while reading Frank’s latest LETTER to Mrs. Weston) are set forth, followed by this:

“Gratifying, however, and stimulative as was the letter in the material part, its sentiments, she yet found, when it was folded up and returned to Mrs. Weston, that it had not added any lasting warmth, that she could still do without the writer, and that he must learn to do without her. Her intentions were unchanged.”

There is that secondary melody in the Post Office scene—Emma has listened to Jane and John speaking about letters of friendship and letters of business, and has observed the tear in Jane’s eye, and being the narcissist that she is, Emma immediately recollects, and revisits, her own experience (which itself was perhaps also tearful) while she was reading Frank’s letter. Once again, JA does not tell us this, she shows it.

But of course, Emma is not going to reveal to the group in Chapter 34 her internal struggle to deny her real sadness about Frank’s abrupt departure (which attempts boil down, basically, to a game of “I love him. I love him not. I love him. I love him NOT.”) . She is never ever going to reveal to the group that listening to their conversation has made her feel a sharp pang of missing Frank. And THAT’s why Emma wonders if she’s unequal to mentioning Frank’s name—she fears her voice may crack if she says his name, “Frank”, and her feelings will be totally exposed to everyone. She wants to pretend to them all that she has no feelings whatsoever for Frank, even though the opposite is true.

And all that from looking behind a seemingly trivial pause. Isn’t that a wonderful example of the hidden depths of JA’s writing? Everywhere we look, there are these sentences which open doors to treasure rooms of hidden meaning.

But I have one last question about another one of Emma’s private thoughts during that pause:

“…Is it necessary for me to use any roundabout phrase?—Your Yorkshire friend—your correspondent in Yorkshire;—that would be the way, I suppose, if I were very bad.”

I am puzzled. Why would calling Frank “your correspondent in Yorkshire” mean Emma was being “very bad”? Presuming “your” means Mrs. Weston, that would be a little stilted, sure, but why “very bad”? Emma has earlier been “very bad” in her joking with Frank about Mr. Dixon, but I just don’t see that in either “Your Yorkshire friend” OR “your correspondent in Yorkshire”—but I won’t be surprised if someone responds and shows that the answer is right under MY nose, but, like Emma, I can’t see it!

Cbeers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The punch line of my last post about the group discussion in Chapter 34 of Emma about the Post Office was my observation about Emma’s attempts to repress and deny her continuing feelings for Frank: “But of course, Emma is not going to reveal to the group…her internal struggle to deny her real sadness about Frank’s abrupt departure (which attempts boil down, basically, to a game of “I love him. I love him not. I love him. I love him NOT.”) . She is never ever going to reveal to the group that listening to their conversation has made her feel a sharp pang of missing Frank. And THAT’s why Emma wonders if she’s unequal to mentioning Frank’s name—she fears her voice may crack if she says his name, “Frank”, and her feelings will be totally exposed to everyone. She wants to pretend to them all that she has no feelings whatsoever for Frank, even though the opposite is true.” END QUOTE

As my Subject Line suggests, my topic today is an extraordinarily parallel situation that unfolds in Pride & Prejudice—i.e., in which the heroine, Elizabeth (like Emma) falls head over heels in romantic thrall to a disreputable sexy suitor, Wickham (like Frank), as to whom she also goes through a complicated process of denial and rewriting of personal history, before she is ready to accept the proposal of the official hero, Darcy (like Knightley).

Today, in Part One, I want to take you on a tour to sightsee the actual textual “peaks” in the first half of P&P which demonstrate that, at least for a while, Wickham was The One in Lizzy’s eyes (and in other parts of her anatomy). In Part Two, I’ll complete the tour through the remainder of P&P, and tie all loose ends together, and give my answer to the little quiz I pose at the end of this Part One.

To begin, in Chapter 15, Elizabeth clearly has a case of lust at first sight when the handsome stranger Wickham shows up in Meryton astride his stallion, and that is only inflamed by their first official meetup chez the Phillipses:

“But the attention of every lady was soon caught by a young man, whom they had never seen before, of most gentlemanlike appearance, walking with another officer on the other side of the way… All were struck with the stranger's air, all wondered who he could be…the young man wanted only regimentals to make him completely charming. His appearance was greatly in his favour; HE HAD ALL THE BEST PART OF BEAUTY, A FINE COUNTENANCE, A GOOD FIGURE, AND VERY PLEASING ADDRESS…Mr. Wickham, after a few moments, touched his hat—a salutation which Mr. Darcy just deigned to return. What could be the meaning of it? It was impossible to imagine; it was IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO LONG TO KNOW.

…Elizabeth allowed that he had given a very rational account of it, and they continued talking together, with mutual satisfaction till supper put an end to cards, and gave the rest of the ladies their share of Mr. Wickham's attentions. There could be no conversation in the noise of Mrs. Phillips's supper party, but his manners recommended him to everybody. Whatever he said, was said well; and whatever he did, done gracefully. Elizabeth went away WITH HER HEAD FULL OF HIM. SHE COULD THINK OF NOTHING BUT OF MR. WICKHAM, and of what he had told her, ALL THE WAY HOME…”

Lizzy’s fire only burns hotter in Chapter 16, as her superlatives about his sexiness pile up:

“…The gentlemen did approach, and when Mr. Wickham walked into the room, Elizabeth felt that SHE HAD NEITHER BEEN SEEING HIM BEFORE, NOR THINKING OF HIM SINCE, WITH THE SMALLEST DEGREE OF UNREASONABLE ADMIRATION. …Mr. Wickham was as FAR BEYONG THEM ALL IN PERSON, COUNTENANCE, AIR, AND WALK, asthey were superior to the broad-faced, stuffy uncle Phillips, breathing port wine, who followed them into the room.

Mr. Wickham was the happy man towards whom almost every female eye was turned, and Elizabeth was the happy woman by whom he finally seated himself; and the agreeable manner in which he immediately fell into conversation, though it was only on its being a wet night, made her feel that THE COMMONEST, DULLEST, MOST THREADBARE TOPIC MIGHT BE RENDERED INTERESTING BY THE SKILL OF THE SPEAKER.

…. Elizabeth honoured him for such feelings, and THOUGHT HIM HANDSOMER THAN EVER as he expressed them.

In Chapter 17, the attraction escalates to a dose of sexual innuendo on the theme of “dancing” and “balls” and delayed satisfaction:

“Elizabeth related to Jane the next day what had passed between Mr. Wickham and herself. Jane listened with astonishment and concern; she knew not how to believe that Mr. Darcy could be so unworthy of Mr. Bingley's regard; and yet, it was not in her nature to question the veracity of A YOUNG MAN OF SUCH AMIABLE APPEARANCE AS WICKHAM.

… though [Kitty and Lydia] EACH, LIKE ELIZABETH, meant to DANCE HALF THE EVENING WITH MR. WICKHAM, he was by no means THE ONLY PARTNER WHO COULD SATISFY them, and A BALL WAS, at any rate, A BALL.

…Elizabeth felt herself completely taken in. She had fully proposed being engaged by Mr. Wickham for those very dances; and to have Mr. Collins instead! her liveliness had never been worse timed. There was no help for it, however. MR. WICKHAM’S HAPPINESS AND HER OWN were perforce DELAYED A LITTLE LONGER..

…Even Elizabeth might have found some trial of her patience in weather which totally suspended THE IMPROVEMENT OF HER ACQUAINTANCE WITH MR. WICKHAM….

In Chapter 18, Elizabeth’s passion for Wickham suffers a major temporary setback, and so she redirects that romantic intensity into an escalation of her anger at Darcy for shooting down her romantic fantasies. In particular, note the uptick in sexual innuendo of Lizzy’s echoing both her earlier sense of having her head full of Wickham, and of her earlier anticipation of satisfaction at a ball, when Lizzy says to Darcy, “"No—I cannot talk of books in a ball-room; my HEAD is always FULL of something else." Wickham is indeed “SOMETHING ELSE” in Lizzy’s head at that instant, and that’s why Lizzy asks Darcy about his unforgiving resentment!:

“Till Elizabeth entered the drawing-room at Netherfield, and LOOKED IN VAIN FOR MR. WICKHAM among the cluster of red coats there assembled, a doubt of his being present had never occurred to her. THE CERTAINTY OF MEETING HIM had not been checked by any of those recollections that might not unreasonably have alarmed her. SHE HAD DRESSED WITH MORE THAN USUAL CARE, and prepared in THE HIGHEST SPIRITS FOR THE CONQUEST OF ALL THAT REMAINED UNSUBDUED OF HIS HEART, trusting that it was not more than might be won in the course of the evening. But in an instant arose the dreadful suspicion of his being purposely omitted for Mr. Darcy's pleasure in the Bingleys' invitation to the officers…This part of his intelligence, though unheard by Lydia, was caught by Elizabeth, and, as it assured her that Darcy was not less answerable for Wickham's absence than if her first surmise had been just, every feeling of displeasure against the former was SO SHARPENED BY IMMEDIATE DISAPPOINTMENT, that she could hardly reply with tolerable civility to the polite inquiries which he directly afterwards approached to make. Attendance, forbearance, patience with Darcy, was injury to Wickham.

… She danced next with an officer, and had the refreshment of talking of Wickham, and of hearing that he was universally liked. …When the dancing recommenced, however, and Darcy approached to claim her hand, Charlotte could not help cautioning her in a whisper, not to be a simpleton, and allow HER FANCY FOR WICKHAM to make her appear unpleasant in the eyes of a man ten times his consequence.

…"What think you of books?" said he, smiling.

"Books—oh! no. I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same feelings."

"I am sorry you think so; but if that be the case, there can at least be no want of subject. We may compare our different opinions."

"No—I cannot talk of books in a ball-room; my HEAD is always FULL of something else."

"The presentalways occupies you in such scenes—does it?" said he, with a look of doubt.

"Yes, always," she replied, without knowing what she said, for her thoughts had wandered far from the subject, as soon afterwards appeared by her suddenly exclaiming, "I remember hearing you once say, Mr. Darcy, that you hardly ever forgave, that your resentment once created was unappeasable. You are very cautious, I suppose, as to its being created."

When Lizzy next speaks to Wickham in Chapter 21, he says all the right things to her to explain his no-show at the Netherfield Ball, and it works so well that he gets to meet the parents (can wedding bells be far behind?) and that “even from Wickham” speaks volumes:

“She highly approved his forbearance, and they had leisure for a full discussion of it, and for all the commendation which they civilly bestowed on each other, as Wickham and another officer walked back with them to Longbourn, and during the walk HE PARTICULARLY ATTENDED TO HER. His accompanying them was a double advantage; SHE FELT ALL THE COMPLIMENT it offered to herself, and it was most acceptable as an occasion of INTRODUCING HIM TO HER FATHER AND MOTHER.

...Elizabeth FELT AN ANXIETY on the subject which DREW OFF HER ATTENTION EVEN FROM WICKHAM; and no sooner had he and his companion taken leave, than a glance from Jane invited her to follow her up stairs.”

And then, in Chapter 26, Aunt Gardiner, who has been observing Lizzy’s making gaga eyes at Wickham, tosses some icy cold water on Lizzy’s hots for Wickham--- but Lizzy, like an immature teenager, insincerely yesses her aunt to death. And, along the way, we hear about the Lydiaesque lengths Lizzy has been going to, to sneak more facetime alone with Wickham:

"Well, then, you need not be under any alarm. I will take care of myself, and of Mr. Wickham too. He shall not be in love with me, if I can prevent it."

"Elizabeth, you are not serious now."

"I beg your pardon, I will try again. At present I am not in love with Mr. Wickham; no, I certainly am not. But he is, BEYOND ALL COMPARISON, THE MOST AGREEABLE MAN I EVER SAW—and if he becomes really attached to me—I believe it will be better that he should not. I see the imprudence of it. Oh! that abominable Mr. Darcy! My father's opinion of me does me the greatest honour, and I should be miserable to forfeit it. My father, however, is partial to Mr. Wickham. In short, my dear aunt, I should be very sorry to be the means of making any of you unhappy; but since we see every day that where there is affection, young people are seldom withheld by immediate want of fortune from entering into engagements with each other, how can I promise to be wiser than so many of my fellow-creatures IF I AM TEMPTED, or how am I even to know that it would be wisdom to resist? All that I can promise you, therefore, is not to be in a hurry. I will not be in a hurry to believe myself his first object. When I am in company with him, I will not be wishing. In short, I will do my best."

"Perhaps it will be as well if you discourage his coming here so very often. At least, YOU SHOULD NOT remind YOUR MOTHER OF INVITING HIM."

"As I did the other day," said Elizabeth WITH A CONSCIOUS SMILE: "very true, it will be wise in me to refrain from that. But do not imagine that he is always here so often. It is on your account that he has been so frequently invited this week. You know my mother's ideas as to the necessity of constant company for her friends. But really, and upon my honour, I will try to do what I think to be the wisest; and now I hope you are satisfied."

Her aunt assured her that she was, and Elizabeth having thanked her for the kindness of her hints, they parted; a wonderful instance of advice being given on such a point, without being resented. “

But, as all good Janeites know but perhaps shockingly to the first time reader, it turns out that this marks the abrupt end of the brief but super-intense sexual thralldom of Elizabeth to Wickham. When you think about it (despite the narrator saying not a word to make you do so), it almost seems like Mrs. Gardiner was psychic, doesn’t it? Could her cold shower speech to Lizzy have been based on some inside information that Aunt Gardiner already knew about Wickham being about to jilt Lizzy, at the very moment when Lizzy, from all we had read in the previous ten chapters, was ready to “go all the way” with him?

And, in that same vein, isn’t it very curious, again, when you think about it on your own initiative, that, after 25 chapters filled with dramatically enacted scenes that could be (and have been) readily adapted to theatrical performance, JA chooses NOT to enact the very scenes (which would have been of the greatest interest to the reader) in which Wickham remains in Meryton but redirects all his romancing from Lizzy to the suddenly rich Miss King. It reminds me of the way JA ends most of her novels, where she abruptly turns off the camera at the very moment when passions are supposed to be running highest.

But then, P&P is a novel that was written not only to be read, but to be REREAD, and reread countless times—and isn’t that the case with countless Janeites, including most of you reading this post today? So, part of the genius of Jane Austen was to handle the matter of Elizabeth’s passion for Wickham so that it would be reread very differently than it was originally read without knowing what would happen.

I.e., on rereading, the reader has already been permanently reprogrammed to experience the security of knowing that Lizzy will actually wind up with Darcy after all. In that frame of mind, it is not surprising that the intense heat generated between Elizabeth and Wickham tends to be skimmed by, if not actively ignored, by Austen scholars and ordinary Janeites alike. Unless I am forgetting something, we really don’t get a strong sense from any of the film adaptations of Lizzy being REALLY into Wickham, nor do I recall this topic ever being discussed as a separate topic in any of the online Austen forums I’ve participated in the past 15 years.

In fact, my friend and fellow Janeite, Elaine Bander, is the only Austen scholar I can find who has addressed, more than in passing, the intense romantic vibe that flares between Lizzy and Wickham during the second quarter of P&P. Elaine, in her 2012 Persuasions article, “Neither Sex, Money, nor Power: Why Elizabeth Finally Says “ Yes !”, recognized that Elizabeth’s attraction to Wickham was just not a small pothole on the highway to true love with Darcy.

And that almost universal ignoring actually makes perfect sense, when we look at it within the chronology of Austenmania. Thanks in part to P&P itself, and in part to the Firth/Ehle/Davies 1995 P&P2, the central and by far the most significant “commandment” in the religion of Janeism, is the successful uniting of Elizabeth and Darcy in true love, with each of them having overcome all sorts of struggles to reach each other in the ultimate romantic embrace in the middle. For all except the most knowledgeable Janeites, P&P is the be-all and end-all of Jane Austen, and Darcy’s wet-blouse scene is Christmas and Easter all rolled up in one. That means Lizzy’s love for Wickham must be seen as something akin to Jesus tempted by Satan in the desert. Not something we want to be reminded of too much.

In that light, to remind ourselves that Lizzy has tipped her cap bigtime for Wickham for several chapters in the novel, feels almost sacrilegious —it strikes a dissonant chord that disturbs the final harmony of that Darcy-Lizzy embrace.

And that brings me to the end of Part One of Two posts on this topic of Elizabeth’s passion for Wickham. In Part Two, which I’ll post in the next day or two, I’ll show you how her passion dies surprisingly hard, and in complex, even mysterious ways.

I conclude today with the suggestion that there is much more than meets the eye in the way that Wickham ceases to court Lizzy—can you guess what it is? Is it possible that we’ve been given a giant hint in the last chapters of the novel, which sheds like on the rest of the story behind Wickham’s abrupt desertion of Lizzy?

Think about it, as you reread the following paragraph just before the end of Chapter 26, below. The answer is right there, if you only put on the proper pair of “skeptical spectacles” that enable you to see past the usual interpretation, and grasp the full meaning of the hint hiding in plain sight!:

“Mrs. Gardiner about this time reminded Elizabeth of her promise concerning that gentleman [Wickham], and required information; and Elizabeth had such to send as might rather give contentment to her aunt than to herself. His apparent partiality had subsided, his attentions were over, he was the admirer of some one else. Elizabeth was watchful enough to see it all, but she could see it and write of it without material pain. Her heart had been but slightly touched, and her vanity was satisfied with believing that she would have been his only choice, had fortune permitted it. The sudden acquisition of ten thousand pounds was the most remarkable charm of the young lady to whom he was now rendering himself agreeable; but Elizabeth, less clear-sighted perhaps in this case than in Charlotte's, did not quarrel with him for his wish of independence. Nothing, on the contrary, could be more natural; and while able to suppose that it cost him a few struggles to relinquish her, she was ready to allow it a wise and desirable measure for both, and could very sincerely wish him happy.”

Cheers, ARNIE

@JanerAustenCode on Twitter

Earlier today, I noticed for the first time a pun I am now convinced, for the reasons set forth below, Jane Austen intended, a pun which extends between works she wrote a quarter century apart.

First, in Volume the Second, JA dedicated to her first maternal cousin Jane Cooper (the one whose bravery and resourcefulness saved the lives of JA, CEA, and Jane Cooper herself, when they fell seriously ill while away at boarding school in Reading when JA was only 7) "A Collection of Letters". It was written by JA, it is estimated by Austen scholars, in 1791, when JA was not quite 16. It consists of five letters of more or less increasing length (but collectively no longer than a short short story), which appear to be a miscellaneous hodgepodge, with no overlap of characters, and little discernible parallelism of writing style and content.

The one which stood out the most for me when I reread them today for the first time in years is the second letter addressed to by “a young lady crossed in love” named Sophia to her friend Belle. After a brief account of getting jilted at the altar by a rake named Willoughby (no surprise there!), the bulk of the letter is about a woman in her thirties who calls herself "Miss Jane", in particular the revelation to Sophia of Miss Jane’s being a widow, and how that played out in her life.

Given that Jane Cooper (to whom this collection of letters was dedicated in a playful paragraph in which nearly every word began, fittingly, with the letter 'C", as in “Cooper”: To Miss Cooper –––Cousin,Conscious of the CharmingCharacter which in every Country, & every Clime in Christendom is Cried, Concerning you, with Caution& Care I Commend to your CharitableCriticism this CleverCollection of CuriousComments, which have been CarefullyCulled, Collected& Classed by yourComicalCousin-- The Author) was herself somewhat older than Jane Austen, my sense is that the adoration of Miss Jane which the letter writer Sophia cannot even put into words, out of acute embarrassment, makes me wonder whether the reason for that embarrassment is the strong romantic feeling that Sophia has secretly harbored for her older particular friend. In that sense, Sophia’s being “crossed in love’ could refer both to her having been jilted by a man, and also to her having then been romantically disappointed by a woman.

I was looking for just that sort of hidden meaning in JA’s youthful “Collection of Letters”, because I had already recognized the title "A Collection of Letters” as a pun by JA on a very different kind of "Collection of Letters", the kind which we read about in Chapter 41 of Emma, during the pleasure excursion at Donwell Abbey:

"Miss Woodhouse," said Frank Churchill, after examining a table behind him, which he could reach as he sat, "have your nephews taken away their alphabets—their BOX OF LETTERS? It used to stand here. Where is it? This is a sort of dull-looking evening, that ought to be treated rather as winter than summer. We had great amusement with THOSE LETTERS one morning. I want to puzzle you again."

Emma was pleased with the thought; and producing the box, the table was quickly scattered over with alphabets, which no one seemed so much disposed to employ as their two selves. They were rapidly forming words for each other, or for any body else who would be puzzled. The quietness of the game made it particularly eligible for Mr. Woodhouse, who had often been distressed by the more animated sort, which Mr. Weston had occasionally introduced, and who now sat happily occupied in lamenting, with tender melancholy, over the departure of the "poor little boys," or in fondly pointing out, as he took up any stray letter near him, how beautifully Emma had written it.

…Jane's alertness in moving, proved her as ready as her aunt had preconceived. She was immediately up, and wanting to quit the table; but so many were also moving, that she could not get away; and Mr. Knightley thought he saw another COLLECTION OF LETTERS anxiously pushed towards her, and resolutely swept away by her unexamined. She was afterwards looking for her shawl—Frank Churchill was looking also—it was growing dusk, and the room was in confusion; and how they parted, Mr. Knightley could not tell….”

So we see this latter kind of “Collection of Letters’ to refer to a box of letters of the alphabet, as in a modern game of Scrabble, rather than a collection of epistolary missives, which not coincidentally just happen to consist of words which, in their elemental form, are themselves each a “collection of letters”.

Wheels within wheels, exactly the sort of wordplay we know JA (indeed her whole family) loved.

And, to add to my sense of JA’s juvenilial “Collection of Letters” as being intended to function as a kind of literary puzzle—a series of seemingly unrelated letters which somehow have a concealed unifying theme which can be sleuthed out by the reader---I note the following relevant passage earlier in Emma, in Chapter 9, where yet another sort of word puzzle is identified as a kind of literary “collection”:

“…and the only literary pursuit which engaged Harriet at present, the only mental provision she was making for the evening of life, was the COLLECTING and transcribing all the RIDDLES of every sort that she could meet with, into a thin quarto of hot-pressed paper, made up by her friend, and ornamented with ciphers and trophies.

In this age of literature, such COLLECTIONS on a very grand scale are not uncommon. Miss Nash, head-teacher at Mrs. Goddard's, had written out at least three hundred; and Harriet, who had taken the first hint of it from her, hoped, with Miss Woodhouse's help, to get a great many more. Emma assisted with her invention, memory and taste; and as Harriet wrote a very pretty hand, it was likely to be an arrangement of the first order, in form as well as quantity….”

In fact, much is made in Chapter 9 of Harriet’s “collection”, and of course, we also can discern that the charades and Riddle written out in that same Chapter 9 are themselves individually “collections” of words (and therefore letters) which each have a coded meaning to be found out—and that is especially true of the “courtship” charade, which, as Colleen Sheehan first pointed out in 2006, is a double anagram acrostic on the word or name “lamb”—the whole idea of an acrostic is to focus on the first LETTER of every line in it—and so an anagram acrostic is itself a “collection of letters’ very much like the one played with at Donwell Abbey.

And I saved for last the most interesting aspect of this matrix of letter collections spanning nearly the entire duration of JA’s writing career---the “heroine” of Letter the Second in the 1791 Collection of Letters is “Miss Jane”---and the shadow heroine of Emma, and arguably the shadow heroine of that “courtship” charade in Chapter 9 of Emma, is also a “Miss Jane”. I.e., the explicit references in JA’s 1791 production to Willougby, Edward, Augusta, Dashwoods, Crawfords, Williams, and Annesley (all names which of course appear in JA’s novels) are supplemented by at least one covert reference—to Miss Jane….Fairfax!

What remains, I believe, and I will revisit another time to see if I can further crack the young JA’s code, is to uncover the other concealed meanings in that seemingly insubstantial collection of letters.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

In Janeites, Nancy Mayer wrote: "The dictionary I read said that while [the word “pregnant”] was used for pregnancy by 1800 in medical books, it wasn't widely used at that time and was rather socially taboo until the 20th century. Edmund Wilson is credited with creating the phrase “pregnant pause”. Usually the silence after some one makes a gaffe."

Nancy, I am afraid that Edmund Wilson arrived at that party about a century too late to be the originator of that phrase!

In Honesty: A Drama by Henry Spicer published in 1842, we read:

PEMBROKE.

Tis plain,

I am no judge of feature —(Approaches closer.)

Still as death!

What beating hearts anticipate the birth

Of fate, that PREGNANT PAUSE may furnish! — Ah!

[A sudden and loud murmur heard within — then enter two Advocates.

That’s the earliest explicit usage of the idiom which is now in such common usage, but I am so glad you wrote the above, prompting me to check for the earliest usage, because as a result, Google Books just led me to something so mind-boggling so surreal, that I am still shaking my head in amazement.

It’s something which bears (ha ha) directly on the expression “pregnant pause” as it relates to the post office discussion in Chapter 34 of Emma where we find the usage of “pause” which I punningly characterized as “pregnant”, without my intending to claim that JA meant to use the common expression there. But now, after what I am about to tell you, I really am not so sure Jane Austen wasn’t herself the catalyst to the creation of that phrase by Henry Spicer 26 years later. Anyway, that is only a sidebar to the significant discovery I have now just serendipitously made.

Mary Anne Clarke, the notorious courtesan turned mistress of the Duke of York and the center of a massive public firestorm in 1809 over the corrupt sale of military promotions, has previously been recognized (at least as early as August 2012 by a blogger calling herself “The Honest Courtesan”, aka Maggie McNeil, at http://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/author/maggiemcneill/) as a model for JA’s scintillating, scandalous Mary Crawford.

That catch by McNeill (and you really oughta read her post in full, its filled with interesting details about Clarke’s life) fits with uncanny closeness with my earlier claim, arrived at by me in 2009….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2009/08/rears-and-vices-redux.html

…solely from the context in the story line of Mansfield Park, that Mary’s “rears and vices” bon mot is really blowing the whistle on Admiral Crawford and Henry extracting a sexual quid pro quo from William Price, as the price for his naval promotion).

Well, what I found today while searching in Google Books for the earliest usage of the term “pregnant pause” in print, shows that Jane Austen continued to be fascinated by the 1809 scandal with Mary Anne Clarke and her lover the Duke of York, even while JA was writing Emma.But instead of Jane Austen being focused on the naval promotion side of the scandal, she was focused on the public furor over the evidence for whether the Duke knew what his mistress was doing.

With that brief intro, then, read the following excerpt from the 1812 publication (i.e., the year before Jane Austen supposedly began writing Emma) of a very long speech to the House of Commons by the Councillor of the Exchequer which was delivered on March 8, 1809, on the subject of “The Conduct of the Duke of York” [i.e., right when the corruption scandal was exploding into the British tabloid press].

The question being discussed at great length by the Councillor was whether the Duke of York did, or did not, personally write a certain note which was at the heart of the scandal—i.e., if it were determined that he actually wrote it, then it would be highly probative that he was involved in his mistress’s racket, and not merely an innocent dupe:

https://books.google.com/books?pg=PT73&dq=pregnant+pause&id=_7sTAAAAYAAJ#v=onepage&q=pregnant%20pause&f=true

"As to the proof of the HAND-WRITING, it does not rest, certainly, on Mrs. C.'s evidence alone. Those most conversant in h.r.h.’s character of HAND-WRITING all think it very like his hand: one only (General Brownrigg) says he does not believe it to be his. But still I think WE HAVE STRONG AND PREGNANT EVIDENCE TO INDUCE US TO PAUSE, before we do conclude that it is his HAND-WRITING. The house is too well aware that there is such a thing as forgery, as successful forgery; but, in order that the forgery should succeed, it is necessary that the person whose object is deception and fraud, should be able closely to imitate the HAND-WRITING, by which the fraud is to be effected, and the parties to be imposed upon; unless the forgery is well executed, it can impose on no one. Is the house not aware that Mrs. C. has had the infamous audacity to boast at its bar of the dexterity with which she can imitate the HAND-WRITING of others? how she has admitted that she could imitate the Duke's. Does it recollect to what a dangerous extent this abandoned woman is gifted with the faculty of adopting her HAND-WRITING to the style and manner in which others write? Does it advert to the very important circumstance that she had the letters of the D. of Y. constantly before her; and that if it was her intention to write a short note which should have every appearance of his HAND-WRITING, how easy it was for a person of her ability to execute her design? That among the notes of h.r.h. which she has given in at the table, there appears one or two in which the very words in this note about Tonyn are introduced; that she had only to look at the words, which would answer her purpose—that she had only to select and copy those particular notes which would furnish her with a pattern to imitate? Can the house contemplate all these facilities which Mrs. Clarke possessed in so eminent a degree, and not entertain even more than a doubt, as to the fact of this being the note of the D. of Y.? It does stand undoubtedly in evidence as a piece of paper, on which there is handwriting to a small extent similar to the HAND-WRITING of the D. of Y. The contradictions in the evidence, as to the fact, OUGHT TO MAKE ONE PAUSE. I am ready to admit, that upon the testimony of the witnesses, who have been called from the Bank and POST-OFFICE, to state their opinion of the authenticity of this note, the balance of the evidence is in favour of its being the HAND-WRITING of the D. of Y.; but is it not possible that the witnesses may have been deceived by the closeness of the imitation? There is a doubt in the minds of all the persons who were acquainted with the HAND-WRITING of h.r.h. Gen. Brownrigg does not think it is his HAND-WRITING; and the result, I think, fairly is, that the question is so far involved in doubt and obscurity, as fully to justify this house in hesitating, before it comes to any conclusion upon its authenticity; as however, I cannot disguise from myself, that it does appear that the impression of the house upon the direct evidence seems to be in favour of the authenticity of the note, it is necessary to examine the collateral evidence which we have upon the subject of it.”

So….is there a doubt in anyone’s mind, after reading the above transcript, that JA was very deliberately alluding to it in the discussion of handwriting in Chapter 34 of Emma? I hope not! To me it’s obvious that she was having wickedly good fun hiding the scandal in (deniable but) plain sight.

First I ask you--is it just a coincidence that the above quoted passage includes the following excerpts?:

“But still I think WE HAVE STRONG AND PREGNANT EVIDENCE TO INDUCE US TO PAUSE, before we do conclude that it is his HAND-WRITING.” &

“The contradictions in the evidence, as to the fact, OUGHT TO MAKE ONE PAUSE.”

Recall that in Chapter 34, right after the group discussion of handwriting, we read:

"I never saw ANY GENTLEMAN’S HANDWRITING"—Emma began, looking also at Mrs. Weston; but stopped, on perceiving that Mrs. Weston was attending to some one else—and THE PAUSE gave her time to reflect, "Now, how am I going to introduce him?....”

And…now I also know why Emma interrupts Mrs. Weston when Mrs. Weston starts to say that Frank “chose to say he was employed" in regard to writing the note to Emma. I concluded last night that Mrs. Weston was about to imply, discreetly, that Frank wrote the note WITHOUT Mrs. Weston’s authorization to do so on her behalf! But now we can see that the question of male vs. female handwriting on notes which may or may not have been forged, was at the center of the issue of the Duke’s guilt or innocence.

Above all, I claim that is why there is all that discussion in Chapter 34 about the difference between male and female handwriting---it’s all JA’s hugely wicked satire on the 1809 Duke of York-Clarke scandal!

And there’s more that corroborates my inference in that regard. That 1809 scandal, you will recall, was front page news in England only a few years before JA was beginning to write Emma, and was also only a few years before the time that the Prince Regent’s abominable treatment of Princess Caroline also became front-page news.

In that regard, we all know that JA, in her 1812 letter to Martha Lloyd, famously stated, without pulling any punches (with Martha, JA could be direct), that JA hated the Prince for how abominably he had treated his wife for so long—and of course it is by now well known that the “Prince of Whales” was the primary butt of the second charade in Chapter 9 of Emma.

Clearly, when we put the two together, it’s clear—JA had cast her allusive net widely, to catch all sorts of notorious Royal scandals….

So, for all of the above reasons, it makes perfect sense that Jane Austen would hide this allusion to the Clarke scandal in plain sight in Chapter 34 of Emma, and would also (as a bonus) pick up on that phraseology about “pregnant” evidence which gives “pause”, and to, in effect, imply the idea of a “pregnant pause” which covertly points to the great scandal of Emma waiting to explode, i.e., Jane Fairfax’s concealed pregnancy.

So I am very grateful to Nancy for inadvertently creating a pregnant pause in this thread of discussion, which allowed me to deliver an answer pregnant with multiple implications for a deeper understanding of Jane Austen’s satires of the Royal Family.

And I conclude by bringing forward another Royal Family factoid which I dug up from my files as I was writing this post—we’ve seen the Prince Regent and his younger brother the Duke of York get skewered in Emma—let’s not forget the mentally deranged, Mr.Woodhouse-like King George the Third. Here is Mary Anne Clarke, speaking to us from beyond the grave in an anecdote provided by John Wardroper in his 2002 book Wicked Earnest about the deeply disturbed Duke of Cumberland:

P. 46: “Mary Anne Clarke says in her memoir that sometimes the king’s greatest amusement ‘was to listen to all the tender and delicate stories that those two dukes (Ernest and the Duke of York) could collect or had the filthiness and obscenity enough to invent for him.”

Yet further evidence that Mr. Woodhouse recalls Garrick’s filthy riddle for a very specific reason—to be part of this satire on scandalous doings in high (or High-bury) places.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

In Janeites, Jane Fox wrote: “You mentioned Peyton Place. Lovely notion. We could also say [Jane Austen] could have written something similar to Tom Jones about her society. “

Jane, you just had what I call a Trojan Horse Moment, because on some subconscious level I believe you realized that Jane Austen DID write something similar to Tom Jones—it’s called the shadow story of Pride & Prejudice!!!!

And you’ve actually given me the prompt to provide another piece of the interpretation I started a few days ago with Part One of the evidence for Elizabeth having REALLY been into Wickham in a very intense, sexual way, and vice versa, in Pride & Prejudice.

I.e., what I see going on between Elizabeth and Wickham in those few chapters when their romance briefly bursts into bright flame, before it is abruptly extinguished, is very much like the sparks that fly between Sophie Western and Tom Jones.

And, in the shadow story of P&P, as Linda Berdoll recognized a decade ago, Wickham is actually the half brother of Darcy, i.e., they share the same father ---just think Jacob (Darcy) and Esau (Wickham).

But here’s the ironic twist in JA’s allusion to Fielding’s masterpiece. In the shadow story of P&P, Wickham is the hero, Tom Jones, while Darcy is the sleazy hypocritical villain, Blifil ---except that while in Tom Jones, the story ends as comedy, because Tom gets the heroine, whereas in the shadow story of P&P, there’s a strong tragic flavor, because it’s the Blifil who gets the Sophie, by successful manipulation of his brother’s good natured but carnal weakness.

Definitely not a happy ending, but a cautionary tale about the even more dangerous sort of suitor, the kind who pretend to reform, but really are all about Winning the Girl (and thereby the Game).

Jane Fox also wrote: “It would be fun to read a novel based on Emma with all of Arnie's imaginative twists. How about it, Arnie? But if you write it, put is firmly in the society of its time.”

Whereas I know that I am actually just using my imagination to decode the shadow story that Jane Austen herself wrote. And that shadow story was very much a story set in the society of her time as it actually existed---in all its horribly anti-female bias that was denied by the powers that be.

Don’t believe The Myth of Jane Austen, which still widely prevails among Janeites---it’s was a mirage then, and it’s a mirage today.

And you’re right, Jane Austen’s shadow stories ARE fabulous stories, that have never (yet) been told properly, because I’ve only ever hinted at various pieces of the six of them. But I WILL tell them as a coherent whole soon, and I hope you will enjoy them, however you choose to see them.

I can only reiterate what I’ve said a hundred times before –I could never, on my own, have invented such a perfectly interlocked plot of the shadow story of Emma, where Jane Austen keeps twelve dishes (main characters) spinning at the top of twelve poles….

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_spinning#mediaviewer/File:Opening_Ceremony_Plate_Spinning.jpg

…and yet never drops a single one --- and this is while, in a parallel fictional universe, she keeps those same twelve dishes spinning in a DIFFERENT pattern than in the overt story.

They both work perfectly—but everything is topsy-turvy between them. What a magnificent even miraculous artistic achievement on her part.

In short, I am not a fictional genius, as she was—I am just a master decoder of the handiwork of fictional geniuses, and that is good enough for me—it requires every ounce of creative imagination I can summon up!

And remember what DW Harding wrote 75 years ago:

"…her books are, as she meant them to be, read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked; she is a literary classic of the society which attitudes like hers, held widely enough, would undermine."

DW Harding would, I believe, have been thrilled to learn that there were alternative versions of each of her novels which could be read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she LIKED.

Cheers,ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.: Jennifer Preston Wilson was the first, in 2004, to notice that the story of Jacob and Esau was played out in P&P. However, her analysis was based on her reading of what i call the overt story of P&P. As I indicate, above, the Biblical tale is a much closer fit to the shadow story of P&P, in which Darcy, like Jacob, tricks his brother twice and gets away with it both times, and walks off with the birthright that makes him Israel.

Similarly, there have been Austen scholars who’ve noticed that Tom Jones lurks behind P&P, but they, like Jennifer Preston Wilson, could only interpret that allusion through the wrong lens of the overt story of P&P, when the shadow story is so much closer to Fielding’s masterful plot.

In response to my preliminary suggestion yesterday that Jane Austen deliberately but covertly alluded to the Genesis story of the sibling rivalry of Jacob vs. Esau in her depiction of Darcy vs. Wickham in the shadow story of P&P, Jane Fox wrote the following earlier today in Janeites:

“In the Bible story, Jacob and Esau have the same mother and the same father, so I think you need a different pair for your analogy. Were you perhaps thinking of [Isaac] and Ishmael?”

Jane, thank you for your tact, but I was not thinking of them. While Ishmael and Isaac do, like Wickham and Darcy in the shadow story of P&P, share a father but not a mother, there is no other “smoke” in their Biblical tale that parallels what happens in either Tom Jones or Pride & Prejudice. I.e., there’s no competition for a birthright between the brothers—Ishmael is never in the running to succeed Abraham in his covenant with God, and there’s really nothing at all in Genesis about Ishmael as an adult---- except…one curious little detail I had never noticed before, which relates ironically to your question—in Genesis Chapter 28, when Esau goes off to make his own fortune after selling his birthright to the opportunistic, manipulative Jacob, Esau then does what actually makes perfect sense--- he chooses to go to his uncle Ishmael, and there he takes as an additional wife one of Uncle Ishmael’s daughters—i.e., one of his own first cousins!—that’s as Austenesque as you can get—just ask Fanny and Edmund! ;)

But, all joking aside, as for my claim that Jacob & Esau was alluded to by JA in P&P, and your raising as an objection their being full rather than half brothers, I am glad to have the opportunity to rebut that objection. I’ve long considered it an unduly rigid requirement, in order for a literary allusion to be recognized as intentional by the author, to insist that there be parallelism on all or even most major points, between the characters and situations alluded to, on the one hand, and the characters and situations alluding to them, on the other. What I’ve found is that this just isn’t the way great authors operate, and it’s easy to see why. The purpose of a worthy, interesting allusion is not to pay an empty homage, nor is it to show off erudition, but it’s for a higher artistic purpose, i.e., to reflect illumination into shadowy aspects of the later story. So, to insist on exact repetition of all major elements of the prior story would be to shackle the later author to a slavish, dead imitation.

I learned early on to take each allusion on a case by case basis, and to use my judgment as to the gestalt of the allusion—it’s a smell test, based on imagination and common sense. After first gathering all relevant textual and extratextual evidence, and synthesizing it all using imagination does it seem significantly more likely than not that it was intentional. In the case of the Jacob and Esau allusion in the relationship of Darcy and Wickham, the latter being half brothers doesn’t matter. What matters, as is made crystal clear by both Darcy and Wickham in their respective accounts to Elizabeth, is that they were RAISED JUST LIKE BROTHERS:

Wickham: "Yes—the late Mr. Darcy bequeathed me the next presentation of the best living in his gift. HE WAS MY GODFATHER, and excessively attached to me. I cannot do justice to his kindness. He meant to provide for me amply, and thought he had done it; but when the living fell, it was given elsewhere."

Darcy: “"…on George Wickham, who was [Mr. Darcy Sr.’s] godson, his kindness was therefore liberally bestowed. My father supported him at school, and afterwards at Cambridge—most important assistance, as his own father, always poor from the extravagance of his wife, would have been unable to give him a gentleman's education. My father was not only fond of this young man's society, whose manners were always engaging; he had also the highest opinion of him, and hoping the church would be his profession, intended to provide for him in it.”

Wickham: “"We were born in the same parish, within the same park; the greatest part of our youth was passed together; inmates of the same house, sharing the same amusements, objects of the same parental care.”

And Wickham a moment later explains the motive for Darcy’s animus toward him, which comes straight out of the sequential tales of bitter sibling rivalry that are THE MAIN THEME of the Book of Genesis, from Cain and Abel to Jacob and Esau to Joseph and his brothers:

"A thorough, determined dislike of me—a dislike which I cannot but attribute in some measure to jealousy. Had the late Mr. Darcy liked me less, his son might have borne with me better; but his father's uncommon attachment to me irritated him, I believe, very early in life. He had not a temper to bear the sort of competition in which we stood—the sort of preference which was often given me."

Lest you think it was only deep in the past, recall that Wickham’s portrait STILL hangs on the walls at Pemberley when Lizzy visits there. And by the way, in passing, I just noticed for the first time another very subtle and very ironic textual parallel between Wickham and Darcy in that last-quoted speech by Wickham, which also surely is intentional on JA’s part:

Wickham: “Had the late Mr. Darcy LIKED ME LESS, his son might have borne with me better.”

Lizzy: “"You might have talked to me more when you came to dinner."

Darcy: "A man who had FELT LESS, might."

In short, Darcy and Wickham may as well have been full brothers, for all relevant purposes. And now, I will briefly summarize why I believe the layered allusion by JA in P&P to a combination of Tom Jones and the Genesis 25 tale of Jacob and Esau meets the smell test, in spades. In a nutshell, the Jacob & Esau story is a source for both Tom Jones and Pride & Prejudice, in that all three stories involve foregrounding of (at least) the following THREE elements:

ONE: Major sibling rivalry between brothers

TWO: One of the brothers feels himself cheated out of his proper inheritance of the family birthright by the other

THREE: The cheated brother has a red coat, and is generally associated with the color red, while the cheating brother is associated with the color white.

Literature and history are filled with examples which have both ONE and TWO-- indeed they are built in to the history of the human race, going back to our primate ancestors. So it would be foolish of me to assert an allusion based solely on the presence of such two elements in two different stories being compared. However, it’s the third one, on a seemingly throwaway detail pertaining to red coats, and a contrast between the colors red and white, which collectively are the textual bread crumbs which Jane Austen strewed in her reader’s path, which led me from strong suspicion of allusion to virtual certainty.

First, the source passages in Genesis 25 re Jacob & Esau:

25:25 And the first came out RED, all over LIKE AN HAIRY GARMENT; and they called his name Esau.

25:30 And Esau said to Jacob, Feed me, I pray thee, with THAT SAME RED POTTAGE; for I am faint: therefore was HIS NAME CALLED EDOM.

So Esau/Edom ‘s (nick)name, if you will, is “Red”; whereas the color “white” is associated with Jacob, and that coloristic wordplay centers on the trick that Jacob plays on his (double) father in law Laban (which, by the way, means “white” in Hebrew!) when Jacob uses his own devious ingenuity to foil Laban’s attempt to cheat Jacob out of what he has earned thrice over:

Genesis 30:35-43 : ^“And [Laban] removed that day the he goats that were ringstraked and spotted, and all the she goats that were speckled and spotted, and every one that had SOME WHITE IN IT, and all the brown among the sheep, and gave them into the hand of his sons. And he set three days' journey betwixt himself and Jacob: and Jacob fed the rest of Laban's flocks. And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and chesnut tree; and PILLED WHITE STRAKES IN THEM, and MADE THE WHITE APPEAR which was in the rods…. And it came to pass, whensoever the stronger cattle did conceive, that Jacob laid the rods before the eyes of the cattle in the gutters, that they might conceive among the rods. But when the cattle were feeble, he put them not in: so the feebler were Laban's, and the stronger Jacob's. And the man increased exceedingly, and had much cattle, and maidservants, and menservants, and camels, and asses.”

And now carefully observe how that theme of red and white plays out in two telltale passages in Tom Jones:

Book 7, Chapter 14: “As soon as the serjeant was departed, Jones rose from his bed, and dressed himself entirely, putting on even HIS COAT, which, as ITS COLOUR WAS WHITE, showed very visibly the STREAMS OF BLOOD which had flowed down it; and now, having grasped his new-purchased sword in his hand, he was going to issue forth, when the thought of what he was about to undertake laid suddenly hold of him, and he began to reflect that in a few minutes he might possibly deprive a human being of life, or might lose his own.

…The clock had now struck twelve, and every one in the house were in their beds, except the centinel who stood to guard Northerton, when Jones softly opening his door, issued forth in pursuit of his enemy, of whose place of confinement he had received a perfect description from the drawer. It is not easy to conceive a much more tremendous figure than he now exhibited. He had on, as we have said, A LIGHT-COLOURED COAT, COVERED WITH STREAMS OF BLOOD. His face, which missed that very blood, as well as twenty ounces more drawn from him by the surgeon, was pallid. Round his head was a quantity of bandage, not unlike a turban. In the right hand he carried a sword, and in the left a candle. So that the bloody Banquo was not worthy to be compared to him. In fact, I believe a more dreadful apparition was never raised in a church-yard, nor in the imagination of any good people met in a winter evening over a Christmas fire in Somersetshire.”

Book 8, Chapter 13: "The day preceding my father's journey (before which time I scarce ever left him), I went to take my leave of some of my most intimate acquaintance, particularly of Mr Watson, who dissuaded me from burying myself, as he called it, out of a simple compliance with the fond desires of a foolish old fellow. Such sollicitations, however, had no effect, and I once more saw my own home. My father now greatly sollicited me to think of marriage; but my inclinations were utterly averse to any such thoughts. I had tasted of love already, and perhaps you know the extravagant excesses of that most tender and most violent passion."—Here the old gentleman paused, and looked earnestly at JONES; WHOSE COUNTENANCE, WITHIN A MINUTE’S SPACE, DISPLAYED THE EXTREMITIES OF BOTH RED AND WHITE. Upon which the old man, without making any observations, renewed his narrative. “

So much for Henry Austen’s lie in his Biographical Notice, when he wrote, with a straight face:

“She did not rank any work of Fielding quite so high [as Richardson's Grandison]. Without the slightest affectation she recoiled from every thing gross. Neither nature, wit, nor humour, could make her amends for so very low a scale of morals.”

Yeah, right……and where on the scale of morals does telling a lie about your dead sister, which plays a pivotal role in causing the world of those who love her novels to harbor such a deep false conception about her literary allusions? Talk about a jealous and greedy sibling deliberately concealing the true character of a sibling infinitely his superior!

But back to business—with those textual excerpts in front of you for ready comparison, now, please carefully observe how JA repeatedly word-plays with Darcy and Wickham as red and white, and also drops in some references to Esau-esque soup and porridge for good measure!:

Ch. 6: And [Lizzy] gravely glancing at Mr. Darcy, "There is a fine old saying, which everybody here is of course familiar with: 'Keep your breath to cool your PORRIDGE'; and I shall keep mine to swell my song."

Ch. 7: [Mrs. Bennet re the militia in Meryton] “…I remember the time when I liked A RED COAT myself very well—and, indeed, so I do still at my heart…”

Ch. 11: "If you mean Darcy," cried her brother [Bingley], "he may go to bed, if he chooses, before it begins—but as for the ball, it is quite a settled thing; and as soon as Nicholls has made WHIITE SOUP ENOUGH, I shall send round my cards."

Ch. 13: It was next to impossible that their cousin [Mr. Collins] should come in A SCARLET COAT, and it was now some weeks since they had received pleasure from the society of A MAN IN ANY OTHER COLOUR.

Ch. 15: Mr. Darcy corroborated it with a bow, and was beginning to determine not to fix his eyes on Elizabeth, when they were suddenly arrested by the sight of the stranger, and Elizabeth happening to see the countenance of both as they looked at each other, was all astonishment at the effect of the meeting. BOTH CHANGED COLOUR, ONE LOOKED WHITE, THE OTHER RED. Mr. Wickham, after a few moments, touched his hat—a salutation which Mr. Darcy just deigned to return. What could be the meaning of it? It was impossible to imagine; it was impossible not to long to know.

Ch. 18: Till Elizabeth entered the drawing-room at Netherfield, and looked in vain for Mr. Wickham among the cluster of RED COATS there assembled, a doubt of his being present had never occurred to her.

Ch. 34: Mr. Darcy, who was leaning against the mantelpiece with his eyes fixed on her face, seemed to catch her words with no less resentment than surprise. His complexion became PALE WITH ANGER, and the disturbance of his mind was visible in every feature.

Ch. 41: [Lydia] saw all the glories of the camp—its tents stretched forth in beauteous uniformity of lines, crowded with the young and the gay, and DAZZLING WITH SCARLET; and, to complete the view, she saw herself seated beneath a tent, tenderly flirting with at least six officers at once.

Ch. 51: However, I did not hear above one word in ten, for I was thinking, you may suppose, of my dear Wickham. I longed to know whether he would be married IN HIS BLUE COAT."

Now, if all of the above is still (as we Jews sing at Passover) not enough….to at least garner a strong “maybe it’s true” from you, I’ve saved some icing to apply to the top of this rich allusive layer cake, to put you over the top:

First, we know for 100% certain that JA was specifically focused on the symbolism of Tom Jones’s red coat, because JA made it explicit in her very famous Letters 1 and 2, which she wrote when she was (no coincidence) exactly the same age as Elizabeth Bennet—“not one and twenty”:

1/9-1/10/1796: “…we received a visit from Mr. Tom Lefroy and his cousin George. The latter is really very well-behaved now; and as for the other, HE HAS BUT ONE FAULT, which time will, I trust, entirely remove -- it is that HIS MORNING COAT IS A GREAT DEAL TOO LIGHT. HE IS A GREAT ADMIRER OF TOM JONES, AND THEREFORE WEARS THE SAME COLOURED CLOTHES, I imagine, WHICH HE DID WHEN HE WAS WOUNDED.”

1/16/1796: “Our party to Ashe to-morrow night will consist of Edward Cooper, James (FOR A BALL IS NOTHING without him), Buller, who is now staying with us, and I. I look forward with great impatience to it, as I rather expect to receive an offer from my friend in the course of the evening. I SHALL REFUSE HIM, HOWEVER, UNLESS HE PROMISES TO GIVE AWAY HIS WHITE COAT.

…Friday. -- At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy, and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow as I write at the melancholy idea. “

Here is the passage in Tom Jones which JA was covertly alluding to—and you can be sure that the priggish Tom Lefroy was no more of an admirer of Tom Jones than Darcy was an admirer of Wickham!:

Book 4, Chapter 8: “Having scoured the whole coast of the enemy, as well as any of Homer's heroes ever did, or as Don Quixote or any knight-errant in the world could have done, he returned to Molly, whom he found in a condition which must give both me and my reader pain, was it to be described here. Tom raved like a madman, beat his breast, tore his hair, stamped on the ground, and vowed the utmost vengeance on all who had been concerned. He then PULLED OFF HIS COAT, AND BUTTONED IT ROUND HER, put his hat upon her head, wiped the BLOOD from her face as well as he could with his handkerchief, and called out to the servant to ride as fast as possible for a side-saddle, or a pillion, that he might carry her safe home.

Master Blifil objected to the sending away the servant, as they had only one with them; but as Square seconded the order of Jones, he was obliged to comply.

The servant returned in a very short time with the pillion, and Molly, having collected her rags as well as she could, was placed behind him. In which manner she was carried home, Square, Blifil, and Jones attending.

Here Jones HAVING RECEIVED HIS COAT, given her a sly kiss, and whispered her, that he would return in the evening, quitted his Molly, and rode on after his companions.

As Darcy correctly pegged Elizabeth, Jane Austen “[found] great enjoyment in occasionally professing opinions which in fact [were] not [her] own"!!!

Now, beyond the above textual evidence, I submit to you the following scholarly support:

As I briefly mentioned in my previous post, Jennifer Preston Wilson’s 2004 Persuasions article proceeds from an orthodox Janeite perspective, with no awareness of the shadow story of P&P I claim exists, and nonetheless identifies a clear allusion to Jacob & Esau in P&P.

In a 2011 Persuasions article by Joyce Kerr Tarpley, she makes a mainstream argument that JA had Jacob & Esau in the back of her mind as she wrote S&S, her first novel, published right before JA lopt and cropt P&P for publication.

In several prior posts over the past few years, I have written about Jane Austen’s allusions to Jacob’s son Joseph (with his famous bloody red coat) and his harrowing experiences with fraternal jealousy which are, of course, recounted right after the Jacob-Esau tale in Genesis.

And if you STILL think this is all just my imagination, then here’s one last little chart for good measure. Without reciting the substantial evidence that supports it, because it would double the length of this post, I claim that there are several clearly defined layers of allusion involving rivalry between brothers bouncing down the years:

ONE: Jacob & Esau Genesis Ch. 25, The Yahwist 800 BCE The Root Source

TWO: Tom Jones & Blifil Tom Jones, Henry Fielding 1749 Alludes to Two

THREE: Charles & Joseph School for Scandal, Sheridan 1777 Alludes to One&Two

FOUR: Wickham & Darcy Pride & Prejudice, JaneAusten 1813 Alludes to #1, 2 &3

FIVE: Cleaver & Mark Darcy Bridget Jones’ Diary, 1996 Alludes to #2 & 4

Helen Fielding

I may write more about the above five-layer cake of literary allusion another time, but for today I wanted to conclude by giving a snapshot of the kind of layered allusive games that JA and other great, playful, and knowledgeable authors have played through the centuries.

Cheers,

ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

In 2013, I noted the many clever ways Jane Austen, in Pride & Prejudice, alluded to Shakespeare’s hyperbolic motif on the number “twenty” in As You Like It:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-twenty-clever-and-clever-twenty.html

Today, catalyzed by Diane Reynolds, with her usual sharp eye for veiled allusions, pointing out in Janeites & AustenL that Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had Pride & Prejudice on her radar screen, I was able to extend my earlier discovery, by recognizing that Jane Austen, in P&P, was also picking up on Shakespeare’s hyperbolic use of “twenty” in The Merchant of Venice. And, what’s even cooler, I recognized this because Harriet Beecher Stowe “told” me so in Chapter 16 of Uncle Tom’s Cabin! Here’s what I mean by that.

First, in her post last night, Diane wrote the following: “Austen in P&P whitewashes and softens the reality of English aristocratic landowners like Mr. Darcy. In UTC—AND YOU COULD ALMOST THINK STOWE HAS READ P&P--Mr. St. Clare, a "good" slave owner caught up in a system he despises, likens all aristocrats to each other, particularly naming English aristocrats (and others) as similar to slave owners. He says, "“Now an aristocrat, you know, the world over, has no human sympathies, beyond a certain line in society. … What would be hardship and distress and injustice in his own class, is a cool matter of course in another. … Among his equals, never was a man more just and generous …” This correlates with our understanding of Darcy as we have it from Lizzie's experience and Wickham's not altogether untruthful portrait: if you are in Darcy's circle, he is kindness itself but is very chilly otherwise….”

I knew immediately from the above that Diane was onto something great, and so I decided to delve into the text of UTC and see what other Austenian echoes I might detect, particularly in the character of Mr. St. Clare. It didn’t take me long to discover that not only does Stowe’s plantocrat Augustine St. Clare indeed have more than a whiff of Mr. Darcy in him, he has a blazing fire’s worth of MR. BENNET in him as well—complete with his own hypochondriac wife!

The only proof any Janeite will need of this assertion is to simply read Chapter 16 of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its (short) entirety, the text of which is conveniently available here:

http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/uncletom/utfihbsa16t.html

If you don’t see a dozen or more obvious winks, in that chapter, at the memorable dialogs between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet (with a liberal additional dollop or three of Mr. and Mrs. Palmer from S&S), then you’re just not paying attention—it’s THAT obvious! Here’s a brief sampler of the most obvious Austen allusions in the one-sided banter between the droll, cynical, teasing Mr. St. Clare and his not-very-clever histrionic wife Marie:

"O, certainly, she will discover that, and a world of wholesome truths besides, no doubt," said St. Clare.

"Talk about our keeping slaves, as if we did it for our convenience," said Marie. "I'm sure, if we consulted that, we might let them all go at once."

Evangeline fixed her large, serious eyes on her mother's face, with an earnest and perplexed expression, and said, simply, "What do you keep them for, mamma?"

"I don't know, I'm sure, except for a plague; they are the plague of my life. I believe that more of my ill health is caused by them than by any one thing; and ours, I know, are the very worst that ever anybody was plagued with."

"O, come, Marie, you've got the blues, this morning," said St. Clare. "You know 't isn't so. There's Mammy, the best creature living,—what could you do without her?"

"Mammy is the best I ever knew," said Marie; "and yet Mammy, now, is selfish—dreadfully selfish; it's the fault of the whole race."

"Selfishness is a dreadful fault," said St. Clare, gravely.

….

“…sulkiness about this. She won't marry anybody else; and I do believe, now, though she knows how necessary she is to me, and how feeble my health is, she would go back to her husband tomorrow, if she only could. I do, indeed," said Marie; "they are just so selfish, now, the best of them."

"It's distressing to reflect upon," said St. Clare, dryly.

Miss Ophelia looked keenly at him, and saw the flush of mortification and repressed vexation, and THE SARCASTIC CURL OF THE LIP, as he spoke.

"Now, Mammy has always been a pet with me," said Marie. "I wish some of your northern servants could look at her closets of dresses,—silks and muslins, and one real linen cambric, she has hanging there. I've worked sometimes whole afternoons, trimming her caps, and getting her ready to go to a party. As to abuse, she don't know what it is. She never was whipped more than once or twice in her whole life. She has her strong coffee or her tea every day, with white sugar in it. It's abominable, to be sure; but St. Clare will have high life below-stairs, and they every one of them live just as they please. The fact is, our servants are over-indulged. I suppose it is partly our fault that they are selfish, and act like spoiled children; but I've talked to St. Clare till I am tired."

"And I, too," said St. Clare, taking up the morning paper.

……

[Marie] ”…If you encourage servants in giving way to every little disagreeable feeling, and complaining of every little ailment, you'll have your hands full. I never complain myself—nobody knows what I endure. I feel it a duty to bear it quietly, and I do."

Miss Ophelia's round eyes expressed an undisguised amazement at this peroration, which struck St. Clare as so supremely ludicrous, that he burst into a loud laugh.

"St. Clare always laughs when I make the least allusion to my ill health," said Marie, with the voice of a suffering martyr. "I only hope the day won't come when he'll remember it!" and Marie put her handkerchief to her eyes.

Of course, there was rather a foolish silence. Finally, St. Clare got up, looked at his watch, and said he had an engagement down street. Eva tripped away after him, and Miss Ophelia and Marie remained at the table alone.

"Now, that's just like St. Clare!" said the latter, withdrawing her handkerchief with somewhat of a spirited flourish when the criminal to be affected by it was no longer in sight. "He never realizes, never can, never will, what I suffer, and have, for years. If I was one of the complaining sort, or ever made any fuss about my ailments, there would be some reason for it. Men do get tired, naturally, of a complaining wife. But I've kept things to myself, and borne, and borne, till St. Clare has got in the way of thinking I can bear anything."

…

[Marie] "You see, I brought my own property and servants into the connection, when I married St. Clare, and I am legally entitled to manage them my own way. St. Clare had his fortune and his servants, and I'm well enough content he should manage them his way; but St. Clare will be interfering. He has wild, extravagant notions about things, particularly about the treatment of servants. He really does act as if he set his servants before me, and before himself, too; for he lets them make him all sorts of trouble, and never lifts a finger. Now, about some things, St. Clare is really frightful—he frightens me—good-natured as he looks, in general.…..You don't know, and you can't, the daily, hourly trials that beset a housekeeper from them, everywhere and every way. But it's no use to complain to St. Clare. He talks the strangest stuff. He says we have made them what they are, and ought to bear with them. He says their faults are all owing to us, and that it would be cruel to make the fault and punish it too. He says we shouldn't do any better, in their place; just as if one could reason from them to us, you know."

…

"The old tune," said St. Clare, sauntering in. "What an awful account these wicked creatures will have to settle, at last, especially for being lazy! You see, cousin," said he, as he stretched himself at full length on a lounge opposite to Marie, "it's wholly inexcusable in them, in the light of the example that Marie and I set them,—this laziness."

"Come, now, St. Clare, you are too bad!" said Marie.

"Am I, now? Why, I thought I was talking good, quite remarkably for me. I try to enforce your remarks, Marie, always."

"You know you meant no such thing, St. Clare," said Marie.

"O, I must have been mistaken, then. Thank you, my dear, for setting me right."

"You do really try to be provoking," said Marie.

…..

"St. Clare, I wish you wouldn't whistle," said Marie; "it makes my head worse."

"I won't," said St. Clare. "Is there anything else you wouldn't wish me to do?"

"I wish you would have some kind of sympathy for my trials; you never have any feeling for me."

"My dear accusing angel!" said St. Clare.

"It's provoking to be talked to in that way."

"Then, how will you be talked to? I'll talk to order,—any way you'll mention,—only to give satisfaction."

END QUOTES FROM CHAPTER 16 OF UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

And those excerpts would be noteworthy enough, if that were all the Jane Austen there was to harvest from Chapter 16 of UTC. But….here’s the proof of this literary pudding, in the following giant hint which Stowe hides in the plainest sight possible there:

"It's strange, cousin," said Miss Ophelia, "one might almost think you were a professor, to hear you talk."

"A professor?" said St. Clare.

"Yes; a professor of religion."

"Not at all; not a professor, as your town-folks have it; and, what is worse, I'm afraid, not a practiser, either."

"What makes you talk so, then?"

"Nothing is easier than talking," said St. Clare. "I believe Shakespeare makes somebody say, 'I could sooner show TWENTY what were good to be done, than be one of the TWENTY to follow my own showing.' Nothing like division of labor. My forte lies in talking, and yours, cousin, lies in doing."

As I will now show you, this is actually Harriet Beecher Stowe herself slyly playing the literature professor, as her fictional creature Mr. St. Clare speaks words which demonstrate an awareness that Jane Austen caused her Mr. Bennet to channel Portia from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Let’s walk through Stowe’s learned, veiled double allusion to Shakespeare AND Jane Austen.

To begin, St. Clare misquotes Shakespeare, but in so doing, he demonstrates that he has recognized Shakespeare’s hyperbolic play on the number “twenty”, which occurs several times in Merchant, first and foremost in 1.2, when Portia complains to Nerissa about her dreary dealings with the suitors who keep coming out of the woodwork to try to choose wisely among the caskets and pass the test set by her late father’s will:

PORTIA By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is AWEARY OF THIS GREAT WORLD .

NERISSA You would be, sweet madam, if your miseries were in the same abundance as your good fortunes are: and yet, for aught I see, they are as sick THAT SURFEIT WITH TOO MUCH AS THEY THAT STARVE WITH NOTHING. It is no mean happiness therefore, to be seated in the mean: superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer.

PORTIA Good sentences and well pronounced.

NERISSAThey would be better, if well followed.

PORTIA If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches and poor men's cottages princes' palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I CAN EASIER TEACH TWENTY WHAT WERE GOOD TO BE DONE, THAN BE ONE OF THE TWENTY TO FOLLOW MINE OWN TEACHING .…

…

NERISSA How say you by the French lord, Monsieur Le Bon?

PORTIA …..if I should marry him, I SHOULD MARRY TWENTY HUSBANDS. If he would despise me I would forgive him, for if he love me to madness, I shall never requite him.

And there are several more hyperbolic “twenty” usages in Merchant: to 20 searchers, 20 merchants, 20 miles, 20 times, etc. But the one that Stowe chose to (mis)quote was the above one pertaining to Portia and her suitors, which just happens to be the one Jane Austen tagged so memorably in P&P when Mr. Bennet mocks Mrs. Bennet’s yearning for a deluge of suitors for her five unmarried daughters! I.e., we have Mr. Bennet using “twenty” repeatedly, as I noted in my earlier post about P&P and As You Like It:

Chapter 1 of P&P:

"You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these last TWENTY years at least."

"Ah, you do not know what I suffer."

"But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of four thousand a year come into the neighbourhood."

"It will be no use to us, if TWENTY such should come, since you will not visit them."

"Depend upon it, my dear, that when there are TWENTY, I will visit them all."

So, in short, Stowe recognized that Elizabeth Bennet and her father were both channeling Merchant, and Stowe also recognized that “twenty” was the magic word that opened that door of subtle allusion.

And there’s more of Stowe’s subtle erudition in her sharp irony, via her several references to African American slaves (and English workers) STARVING, which recall Nerissa’s metaphor on starving in 1.2, and also recall the following sarcastic reply by Elizabeth (which, it turns out, is not only a wink at Twelfth Night and Sonnet 75, as I’ve previously noted):

"I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love," said Darcy.

"Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will STARVE it entirely away."

And Stowe’s showing me another side of Portia hidden in Elizabeth Bennet also made me realize that Portia’s being “aweary of the great world” was on Elizabeth’s mind when she sighed to her aunt: “The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it”

But let’s take a closer look at Stowe’s St. Clare and his rhetorical spin on that “twenty” motif. He is saying, in effect, that it’s easier to find twenty people to learn the right thing to do, than to find a single person who’ll actually DO the right thing! And there you have Mr. St. Clare’s character in a nutshell. He cynically acknowledges his own inner Mr. Bennet—he knows that endlessly reiterated raillery on a stupid wife is a lazy moral path for a man of intellect and moral insight---but St. Clare continues to own slaves, and to glide aimlessly through life (his fingers gliding over piano keys as do Elizabeth’s during her telling repartee about performing ot strangers at Rosings), never doing what his conscience tells him is right.

His cynicism about the wide gulf between knowing and doing, with regard to morality, is also deeply resonant with Elizabeth’s Zen aphorism to Jane near the end of P&P:

“We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing.”

In summary, then, what is crystal clear from all of the above is that Jane Austen was a Shakespeare savant—which is not news to anyone who’s been reading my posts the past decade—and, what IS news, which is that Harriet Beecher Stowe was well aware of Austen’s insights into Shakespeare, and brilliantly but covertly extended those insights to her own fiction. Which fits with my long held notion that Jane Austen, in her literary immortality, has repeatedly changed the world by inspiring countless later, great writers to channel Jane’s genius in their own writing.

So, thanks again, Diane—your intuition was spot-on!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.: In addition to the Wentworthian “sarcastic curl of the lip” I capitalized, above, in my quotation from Chapter 16 of UTC, there is also another Wentworth wink in Chapter 3 of UTC:

"Yes, but who knows?—he may die—and then he may be sold to nobody knows who. What pleasure is it that he is handsome, and smart, and bright? I tell you, Eliza, that a sword will PIERCE THROUGH YOUR SOUL for every good and pleasant thing your child is or has; it will make him worth too much for you to keep."

Diane Reynolds responded to my previous post as follows: “Arnie, you really took off on Stowe. I'm impressed! I am particularly interested that Stowe obviously is alluding to The Merchant of Venice--as with Austen, there's a tendency to write Stowe off as a littler scribbler, when her novel is full of bitter irony and allusion and anger. It's not simply sentimental pablum.”

Thanks, Diane! And of course I agree with every word you wrote, above.

Diane also wrote: “I don't know enough about Stowe to know what she read--but like Austen she seems to have read everything, which would make it possible she'd read ... Austen. I can see parallels between Mr and Mrs Bennet and Mr and Mrs. St Clare, but Mrs. St Clare in particular is so much darker a character than Mrs. Bennett that I hadn't initially made a connection. Mrs. Bennet is driven by fear. Mrs. St Clare is simply mean--the kind of person who knows the tables won't turn and who takes full advantage of her power in cruel ways. Unlike Mrs. B, she has nothing to worry about. Mr Clare and Mr Bennet are more alike--basically decent people who are yet too careless and lazy to make proper provision for the people dependent on them.”

Excellent summary—but my firm position on the presence of a genuine allusion is that there needs to be just enough parallelism to make it clear that an allusion was intended, but not so much as to bind the later author to a slavish imitation of the original source. And in this case, where Stowe was (obviously) writing a book that was intended by her to be extremely overt in its political polemicism, much much much more so than P&P, I think it’s perfectly fine that her Mrs. St. Clare is so much less sympathetic character than Mrs. Bennet, while the situation is more complicated with their husbands.

Speaking of whom, I think you’ve spoken too quickly about Mr. St. Clare—after my research today, I am firmly in the camp that believes his character was meant by Stowe to be like a Rorschach Test for the reader –extremely ambiguous—very sympathetic in many ways, and yet, when you think about it—not so much, by a long shot. In a way, he’s even worse than the real bad guys, because he has real sensitivity and awareness, and so the moral burden is much higher on him--he SHOULD have freed his slaves a LOT sooner—he doesn’t have the excuse of being a primitive, violent thug. He knows better than to be a key cog in the vast Satanic machinery of slavery in the South.

Diane also wrote: “Being more cautious than you, I would love more of a smoking gun, like a letter, to say that Stowe did indeed read P&P. But this is fascinating.”

Diane, you’re going to think I made this next part up, because it is almost (from my perspective) too good to be true—except it is true, and I have hinted at it already in my Subject Line, which perhaps raised your curiosity as to what I was referring to.

It was when I started doing some digging into Stowe’s composition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the strong interest in Jane Austen’s life and writing that I was certain I would eventually uncover more evidence of, that I found the following:

UTC was published in 1852, and sold 10,000 copies right away, an unprecedented accomplishment. But did you know that in 1853, in the midst of that astonishing success, she published something she called A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin—a companion to the novel---and you REALLY should browse in it:

http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/uncletom/key/kyhp.html

It may seem on the surface to be what it purports to be—a kind of bolstering of the novel with real world evidence—but when you begin to realize that Stowe was heavily influenced by Jane Austen-who wrote hoaxing April Fool’s Day letters to Crosby and to James Stanier Clarke—then it dawns on you that this “Key” is like the charades in Emma, or the kinds of sophisticated literary hoaxes that Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding wrote!

So, go with me on this—Stowe’s Key has chapters, among others, about Mrs. St. Clare AND Mr. St. Clare. Interesting, right, vis a vis those two characters being Mrs. And Mr. Bennet with Southern accents.

And guess what—in another chapter, which Stowe mysteriously entitled “The Spirit of St. Clare”, who of course, as I’ve claimed, is the “Mr. Bennet” of UTC, we read the following amazingly Austenesque introduction:

“Ch. XIV: The Spirit of St. Clare

The eneral tone of the press and of the community in the slave States, so far as it has been made known at the North, has been loudly condemnatory of the representations of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Still, it would be unjust to the character of the South to refuse to acknowledge that she has many sons with candour enough to perceive, and courage enough to avow, the evils of her "peculiar institutions." The manly independence exhibited by these men, in communities where popular sentiment rules despotically, either by law or in spite of law, should be duly honoured. The sympathy of such minds as these is a high encouragement to philanthropic effort. The author inserts a few testimonials from Southern men, not without some PRIDE in being thus kindly judged by those who might have been naturally expected to read her book with PREJUDICE against it.”

Do you see that giant wink at Jane Austen hidden in plain sight in that last sentence?

…PRIDE… & ....PREJUDICE!!!!

That is surely Stowe’s way of tipping her hat to Pride & Prejudice in code, in a chapter named for the character in UTC who is at the heart of the veiled allusion by Stowe to P&P!

That is NOT a coincidence!

But that’s only a hoaxing warmup….right after we read that, we read the following letter, which I really do believe was a complete hoax on Stowe’s part—and your first clue is the name of the person who is supposed to have written it. His name just happens to be the identical name to that of the man whose “letter” written 76 years earlier goes by the name of “the Declaration of Independence”—a “letter” which was at the foundation of the institution of slavery in the United States. And that was a man who, exactly like Mr. St. Clare, (in)famously owned slaves but also raised children sired by him upon his slave wife Sally Hemings-of course I am talking about THOMAS JEFFERSON!:

“The Jefferson Inquirer, published at Jefferson City, Missouri, October 23, 1852, contains the following communication: UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.

I have lately read this celebrated book, which, perhaps, has gone through more editions, and been sold in greater numbers, than any work from the American press, in the same length of time. It is a work of high literary finish, and its several characters are drawn with great power and truthfulness, although, like the characters in most novels and works of fiction, in some instances too highly coloured. There is no attack on slave-holders as such, but, on the contrary, many of them are represented as highly noble, generous, humane, and benevolent. Nor is there any attack upon them as a class. It sets forth many of the evils of slavery, as an institution established by law, but without charging these evils on those who hold the slaves, and seems fully to appreciate the difficulties in finding a remedy. Its effect upon the slave-holder is to make him a kinder and better master; to which none can object. This is said without any intention to endorse everything contained in the book, or, indeed, in any novel, or work of fiction. But, if I mistake not, there are few, excepting those who are greatly PREJUDICED, that will rise from a perusal of the book without being a truer and better Christian, and a more humane and benevolent man. As a slave-holder, I do not feel the least aggrieved. How Mrs. Stowe, the authoress, has obtained her extremely accurate knowledge of the negroes, their character, dialect, habits, &c., is beyond my comprehension, as she never resided—as appears from the preface—in a slave State, or among slaves or negroes. But they are certainly admirably delineated. The book is highly interesting and amusing, and will afford a rich treat to its reader. THOJMAS JEFFERSON. “

I will be posting a followup tomorrow with my sense of the ramifications of this extraordinary circumstance—which is rendered all the more extraordinary by the presence in Mansfield Park of a patriarch owning a slave plantation named Thomas, whose estate has a “white house” in which resides the woman who is like a de facto wife to him, and who (perhaps) was the mother of one or more of his biological children.

It would be an enormous understatement to state that Harriet Beecher Stowe was quite the discerning Janeite.

Is that a good enough smoking gun for you? ;)

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

As I told my friend Diane Reynolds a few hours ago, it has become increasingly clear to me during the past 2 days that she opened an entire new and very large Pandora’s Box of hidden allusion involving Jane Austen and Harriet Beecher Stowe, when she wrote the following the other night:

“Austen in P&P whitewashes and softens the reality of English aristocratic landowners like Mr. Darcy. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin--AND YOU COULD ALMOST THINK STOWE HAS READ P&P--Mr. St. Clare, a "good" slave owner caught up in a system he despises, likens all aristocrats to each other, particularly naming English aristocrats (and others) as similar to slave owners….”

This will be the third post I’ve written in response to Diane’s suggestion that Stowe might have been a closet Janeite, as I continue to take inventory of the astonishing interconnected treasures which lay hidden in Pride & Prejudice and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which are (in a positive sense) a literary Pandora’s Box. It’s positive, because now more than ever, the hoary Myth of Jane Austen to which I’ve been taking a hammer for a decade—the heretofore “universally acknowledged” notion that Jane Austen was a tame, pious, modest, straightforward, strait-laced, prudish, conservative lady---is, thanks to Stowe, in even greater danger of collapsing from the sheer weight of its numerous inconsistencies on all major fronts.

[For those following along, my fourth post about Stowe will be forthcoming tomorrow, and it will expand my investigation of the “Thomas Jefferson” subtext in Uncle Tom’s Cabin]

STOWE & AUSTEN AS CRITICS OF SEXIST LAWS AS LEGALIZED SLAVERY

I begin this post by quoting Harriet Beecher Stowe circa 1869, i.e., nearly 2 decades after she (in the famous wartime words of Abraham Lincoln) “wrote the book that started this great war.”:

“[T]he position of a married woman ... is, in many respects, precisely similar to that of the negro slave. She can make no contract and hold no property; whatever she inherits or earns becomes at that moment the property of her husband.... Though he acquired a fortune through her, or though she earned a fortune through her talents, he is the sole master of it, and she cannot draw a penny....[I]n the English common law a married woman is nothing at all. She passes out of legal existence.”

This is EXACTLY the same view on legalized-slavery-disguised-as-marriage that I’ve long attributed to Jane Austen, the covert radical feminist, covertly championed in her novels as her fundamental principle. But, being the ironic satirist that she was, Jane Austen presented her feminist manifesto parodically, via Henry Tilney’s famous rant which drives poor Catherine to tears. His rant has been mistakenly taken literally by 99% of Janeites over the past 2 centuries, when it was actually meant by JA to be read topsy-turvy:

"If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"

I.e., Jane Austen’s actual answer is, YES!! English laws DID connive at these domestic horrors which were grotesquely unfair to women, and YES!! Those laws, and the actions taken to enforce them, WERE routinely perpetrated on women without being criticized, let alone repealed.

But we may then ask the question---did Stowe interpret Henry Tilney’s rant the way I do? Given that she and Jane Austen were both of the opinion that women got the short end of the stick, can we infer from Stowe’s having alluded to Mr. & Mrs. Bennet in the characters of Mr. & Mrs. St. Clare, that Stowe was aware of JA’s covert feminist agenda? I think you know my answer, but let me show you the amazingly powerful evidence that my answer (again) is YES!!!!

LADY CATHERINE, MRS. BENNET & ANOTHER PREGNANT STOWE QUOTATION

First, it is a wonderful Austenian irony that, in one sense, we cannot imagine two women more UNLIKE than Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mrs. Bennet—and yet, what these two ladies had very strongly in common was a relentless, nearly fanatical drive to marry off their daughters to the right man selected, of course, by their mama. And…they also had something else in common----Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mrs. Bennet were strange protofeminist bedfellows---they both decried (in Lady C’s words) “entailing estates from the female line”---i.e., they were both critics of the customary deployment of the English law of inheritance and real property in ways which reduced women to powerless legal ciphers – which legal non-existence is, not so strangely, exactly the situation that Stowe depicted in UTC, and documented in her Key, as the plight of the African-American slaves!

So, again, we have a resonance in P&P to marriage as legal slavery, the theme Stowe took up as her principal hobby horse after the end of the Civil War. Women like Lady C and Mrs. B were so desperate to marry their daughters off, even though they knew that they were losing all their rights in marriage, because marriage was to many only the frying pan, and trying to survive as a single woman without financial resources was the fire.

So, was this another strand in P&P that caught Stowe’s eye? I think so, and here’s why! Now you’re finally ready to hear the nitty-gritty.

You may recall that in my immediately preceding post, I posted a quotation from Stowe’s Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which I identified Stowe’s sly disjointed allusion to the title “Pride & Prejudice” in the very chapter which discussed the character of Mr. St. Clare, whom I claim is Stowe’s version of Mr. Bennet:

“THE AUTHOR inserts a few testimonials from Southern men, not without some PRIDE in being thus kindly judged by those who might have been naturally expected to read HER BOOK with PREJUDICE against it.”

In the aftermath of my said post, I wondered what percentage of those who read it were skeptical of my inference that Stowe meant for her readers to connect that “pride” to that “prejudice”, and to thereby realize that “The author” and “her book” could refer as much to Jane Austen as it did to Harriet Beecher Stowe herself.

Well, for all of you diehard skeptics who didn’t buy what I was selling then, how (as Matt Damon said in Good Will Hunting) about THESE apples, from the chapter in Stowe’s Key entitled “A COMPARISON OF THE ROMAN LAW OF SLAVERY WITH THE AMERICAN.”:

“There are other respects, in which American legislation has reached a refinement in tyranny of which the despots of those early days never conceived. The following is THE LANGUAGE OF GIBBON:— “Hope, the best comfort of our imperfect condition, was not denied to the Roman slave; and if he had any opportunity of rendering himself either useful or agreeable, he might very naturally expect that the diligence and fidelity of a few years would be rewarded with the inestimable gift of freedom. * * * Without destroying the distinction of ranks, a distant prospect of freedom and honours was presented even to those whom PRIDE AND PREJUDICE almost disdained to number among the human species. The youths of promising genius were instructed in the arts and sciences, and their price was ascertained by the degree of their skill and talents. Almost every profession, either liberal or mechanical, might be found in the household of an opulent senator.” END QUOTE FROM STOWE QUOTING GIBBON

So….what are the odds that, purely by coincidence, in a very short space within her Key, Harriet Beecher Stowe would write TWO such passages: one with the words “pride” and “prejudice” within the same sentence and in Jane Austen’s word order, albeit separated; and the other a quotation from a very famous book that Jane Austen could very well have read, a quotation in which Austen’s exact title, “pride and prejudice” is stated?

Those odds are vanishingly close to zero! And…to take you all the way to zero, I wonder if any sharp elf reading Gibbon’s sentence containing the phrase “pride and prejudice” noticed ANOTHER distinctive Austenian echo, this one pointing to a passage IN the text of Pride & Prejudice?

STOWE RECOGNIZED THAT AUSTEN HAD ALLUDED TO GIBBON!

That phrase is “the distinction of ranks”, and here is the passage in Chapter 29 of P&P that Stowe had picked up on (I claim) in BOTH the Gibbon source, AND in the Austen veiled allusion to Gibbon:

“Scarcely anything was talked of the whole day or next morning but their visit to Rosings. Mr. Collins was carefully instructing them in what they were to expect, that the sight of such rooms, so many servants, and so splendid a dinner, might not wholly overpower them.

When the ladies were separating for the toilette, he said to Elizabeth— "Do not make yourself uneasy, my dear cousin, about your apparel. Lady Catherine is far from requiring that ELEGANCE OF DRESS in us which becomes herself and her daughter. I would advise you merely to put on whatever of your clothes is superior to the rest—there is no occasion for anything more. Lady Catherine will not think the worse of you FOR BEING SIMPLY DRESSED. SHE LIKES TO HAVE THE DISTINCTION OF RANK PRESERVED."

While they were dressing, he came two or three times to their different doors, to recommend their being quick, as Lady Catherine very much objected to be kept waiting for her dinner. Such formidable accounts of her ladyship, and her manner of living, quite frightened Maria Lucas who had been little used to company, and she looked forward to her introduction at Rosings with as much apprehension as her father had done to his presentation at St. James's…” END QUOTE FROM P&P

Still skeptical that Jane Austen had that sentence from Gibbon’s Volume I in mind when she entitled her novel, and put the above words about “the distinction of rank” in Mr. Collins’s mouth? Well then, check out the FULL context of the quotation from Gibbon, which Stowe failed to provide:

Gibbon 1776, Volume 1 of his History of the Rise & Fall of the Roman Empire:

“It was a maxim of ancient jurisprudence, that a slave had not any country of his own; he acquired with his liberty an admission into the political society of which his patron was a member. The consequences of this maxim would have prostituted the privileges of the Roman city to a mean and promiscuous multitude. Some seasonable exceptions were therefore provided; and the honourable distinction was confined to such slaves only as, for just causes and with the approbation of the magistrate, should receive a solemn and legal manumission. Even these chosen freedmen obtained no more than the private rights of citizens, and were rigorously excluded from civil or military honours. Whatever might be the merit or fortune of their sons, they likewise were esteemed unworthy of a seat in the senate; nor were the traces of a servile origin allowed to be completely obliterated till the third or fourth generation. WITHOUT DESTROYING THE DISTINCTION OF RANKS, a distant prospect of freedom and honours was presented, even to those whom PRIDE AND PREJUDICE almost disdained to number among the human species.

Ikt was once proposed TO DISCRIMINATE THE SLAVES BY A PECULIAR HABIT; but it was justly apprehended that there might be some danger in acquainting them with their own numbers!”

Aside from Gibbon’s epigrammatic cadences, which Jane Austen surely and subtly parodied with her own epigrammatism in phrasing like “It is a truth universally acknowledged”, the key point here is that in Gibbon’s very next sentence after the one referring to the preservation of “the distinction of ranks” in ancient Rome, we read that one of the Roman methods of preserving that distinction was by having SLAVES DRESS differently from free persons.

You get it now, right? What puts a hilarious spin on Mr. Collins’s usual pompous, smarmy condescension to Elizabeth, is that when he tells her not to worry about being dressed simply—what he’s saying, unwittingly, is that by dressing like a country girl, Elizabeth will be preserving the distinction of rank between herself, as a low-status quasi-“slave” visiting the court of a Roman empress, Lady Catherine!

And THAT, all Janeites must universally acknowledge, is precisely the kind of witty, withering satire that Jane Austen scattered in a thousand places in her writings!

So, in summary, then:

ONE: Jane Austen, in P&P, specifically alluded TWICE to that specific sentence in Gibbon’s great History, in order to subliminally hint that gentlewomen in England without resources were treated like slaves, even by other (wealthy) women; and

TWO: Stowe, in her Key to UTC, quoted that particular passage from Gibbon precisely so as to show that she had spotted, understood, AND SUPPORTED Jane Austen’s veiled feminist channeling of Gibbon on slavery in P&P.

And all of this was Stowe’s way of reiterating her later-life mantra about the metaphorical slavery of women in American society—and what better way to do it than to demonstrate, for those with eyes to see, that she was following in the sure footsteps of her literary and feminist mentor in absentia, Jane Austen. I.e., the main reason Stowe alluded to P&P in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was precisely to hint at this metaphorical resonance she detected in JA’s fiction, between the actual enslavement of Africans in the West Indies and the metaphorical enslavement of women in Great Britain—the latter being a slavery which was not even acknowledged except by a tiny fringe of radical progressives who were treated as lepers by the conservative sexist mainstream.

But now, finally, as the 202 year old secrets of Jane Austen, and the 163 year old secrets of Harriet Beecher Stowe, are finally coming to light, isn’t it long overdue that the United States finally takes another major step toward ending that metaphorical slavery Stowe and Austen were so appalled by, by electing a female President in 2016?

And then maybe, just maybe, all people of good conscience will finally begin to work together to accomplish the universal moral imperative of making all people of color, and all women, and all people whatever their sexual preferences—in short, all the victims of past and persisting slavery--truly equal citizens, entitled to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I hope you’ll say, Amen.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

In Janeites & Austen L, Diane Reynolds wrote me a wonderful response to my latest post about Stowe's allusions to Pride & Prejudice, and this is my point by point reply to her.

First Diane wrote: “I love that Stowe brings us around again to Austen, through Gibbon. What a fabulous quote from Stowe and I agree that it is a strong contender--to me a convincing contender, other uses of "pride and prejudice" in 18th century lit. notwithstanding--as a source quote for Pride and Prejudice's title”

Diane, my sense is that one or both of Gibbon (Decline and Fall) and Paine (Common Sense), both published in 1776, were sources for Burney (Cecilia), and then for Jane Austen, who had “collected” all of them, and then alluded to all of them in P&P, each for a different important thematic purpose. With Jane Austen, the right answer, I’ve found, is not either/or, but BOTH.

Here, by the way, is Paine’s 1776 usage:

“The PREJUDICE of Englishmen, in favour of their own government, by King, Lords and Commons, arises as much or more from national PRIDE than reason. Individuals are undoubtedly safer in England than in some other countries: but the will of the king is as much the law of the land in Britain as in France, with this difference, that instead of proceeding directly from his mouth, it is handed to the people under the formidable shape of an act of parliament. For the fate of Charles the First hath only made kings more subtle — not more just.

Wherefore, laying aside all national PRIDE AND PREJUDICE in favour of modes and forms, the plain truth is that IT IS WHOLLY OWING TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE PEOPLE, AND NOT TO THE CONSTITUTION OF THE GOVERNMENT that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey.

An inquiry into the CONSTITUTIONAL ERRORS in the English form of government, is at this time highly necessary; for as we are never in a proper condition of doing justice to others, while we continue under the influence of some leading partiality, so neither are we capable of doing it to ourselves while we remain fettered by any obstinate PREJUDICE. And as a man who is attached to a prostitute is unfitted to choose or judge of a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.”

Don’t you hear the famous first sentence of P&P, with its topic being the choice of a wife by a “single man of good fortune”, in Paine’s sexualization of his political argument in that last sentence? Read it again, it’s very crude and jarring, isn’t it? Paine is not pulling ANY punches, no wonder it got the American colonists fired up---Paine was risking a hangman’s noose for sure with that kind of provocative in-your-face flaming rhetoric.

So….if Darcy is the “single man” we think of first and foremost in P&P, then what is JA hinting at if she is pointing to Paine’s usage as well as Gibbon’s and Burney’s? I say she’s suggesting that Darcy’s ability to choose a good wife has been tainted by his having been attached to a prostitute. Hmm…….is this what Colonel Fitzwilliam is hinting at when he reports to Lizzy that Darcy has boasted of having saving Bingley from a very unfortunate attachment? That’s not the only hint I’ve found in P&P that suggests an offstage life of Jane’s which Lizzy is utterly unaware of. I’ve accumulated a great deal of evidence in that vein, and I spoke about it in my presentation to the JASNA Los Angeles chapter in 2011. This adds another piece of that puzzle.

But back to Gibbon….I started thinking about Jane Austen first reading Gibbon in her father’s home library in 1790, as background reading for her teenage parodic History of England. And then, two decades later, I can see the 37 year old Jane Austen revisiting Gibbon, and this time enjoying his epigrammatism, which was a reflection of real witty (rather than solemn) history. And I believe JA had by then heard about Gibbon having been a Hampshireman (and friend of Revd. Austen?), and was now looking at Gibbon very different—she was focused on the parallels between the Roman Empire and the British Empire, and (as your intuition alerted you) it’s no coincidence that the Gibbon “pride and prejudice” occurs in the discussion of Roman slavery.

Think about Darcy and the Bingley sisters—when they arrive in Meryton, they could easily be bored Roman courtiers, passing time in a provincial backwater in Gaul. And then here comes an exotic barbarian temptress—Elizabeth Bennet—dark, sensual, simply dressed—and that’s why they treat her as if she were an uneducated slave girl from the provinces—or Sally Heming to Darcy’s Tom Jefferson!

Diane also wrote: “Clearly, when we think of Catherine de Bourgh we think of a woman who, in regards to Lizzie, through "PRIDE AND PREJUDICE almost disdained to number among the human species." It is not too much of leap to see this as JA's shout out against the people who separated her from Tom Lefroy. I can understand this as a cry of the heart from Austen, who felt perhaps not to number of among human species in Tom's relatives stampede to get him away from her. And I am sure that was not the only time she felt dehumanized by her lack of fortune.”

Interesting speculations, Diane, but, I think somewhat differently. I think JA, by the time she was finalizing P&P, was no longer thinking about her own victimization—that was ancient history for her, she had moved on long ago to finding her love from women, not men---so I believe JA was thinking MUCH bigger, as she had finally gotten S&S published, and she foresaw a writing career for herself which would enable her to sustain herself financially. So, she saw herself as the voice for ALL women living in virtual servitude in England—whether they were married or single—she was going to use her personal success to make things better for women everywhere.

Diane also wrote: “And yes, I agree that Austen reinforces the allusion to that same Gibbon passage… These are great catches. They speak compellingly to a deep, bitter undertone beneath the bright, sparkling surface.”

Thanks! And yes, that is exactly what I think, too, about the bitter undertone. The shadow story of P&P that I see is very very dark—there’s a reason why Mary tries to warn Elizabeth, repeatedly—“The men shan’t come between us”---but Elizabeth is not listening, and walks voluntarily into the lion’s den.

Diane also wrote: “I also very very much like the idea of Lady Catherine and Mrs. B as alike in their blindered, single-minded determination to marry off their daughters--both are women blighted by a marriage market that isn't too far removed from a market for human flesh--it WAS that. My students can't get over how mercenary Austen's marriage market it (i think we are just used to it.) It is completely consistent with Austen's sleight of hand as well to slide that kind of parallel between two matriarchs in.”

Yes! And dontcha see, that’s exactly what Stowe describes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and her Key therefor—the slave market, the literal buying and selling of human beings as if they were farm animals—and especially the female slaves of childbearing age---because so many of the slave owners used the slave women they owned as “breeding women” (that was actually Thomas Jefferson’s terminology!). Jefferson not only sired children himself on Sally Hemings, he also treated the fecundity of his female slaves as a financial asset. And we know Jane Austen knew Jefferson’s terminology, that’s why in her letters, she referred to pregnant women she knew as “breeding again”, and her own (psychological) “daughter”, Anna, as a “poor Animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty”.

And so kudos once more to Stowe, who, like Auden, recognized in JA’s writing Austen’s utter lack of innocence about “the economic basis of society”.

Diane also wrote: “It would be interesting to put their speeches side by side and see how much Mrs. B's excoriation of Charlotte for marrying Mr. C--stealing him away from her own daughters, who had a rightful claim to him!-- mirrors Catherine de Bourgh's outrage at LIzzie stealing HER rightful son-in-law out from under her nose.”

I can only say one word in response to that---brilliant!!!!!!!!!

Cheers,ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

In my previous two posts, I began to explore Harriet Beecher Stowe’s surprising and intriguing coded textual hints, which convey Stowe’s savvy recognition of Jane Austen’s veiled allusion to Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I speculated that Stowe, in her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, quoted from one specific passage in Gibbon which contained the phrase “pride and prejudice”, in order to alert her sharp readers that Jane Austen had, in her most popular novel, deliberately pointed to Gibbon’s discussion of slavery in the Roman Empire, as part of Austen’s own theme of women in England as being subjected to pernicious forms of unofficial or metaphorical slavery.

I’ve given some further thought to the significance of Jane Austen’s allusion to Gibbon’s History in P&P, and Stowe’s recognition of same, and now I see that both Stowe and Austen had another major purpose, which was to address the eternal question in any quest for truth--- what constitutes knowledge and impartiality in writing the history of any events, whether they be events on a global scale, such as the decline and fall of the Roman Empire or the institution of slavery in America, both over a period of centuries; or on a tiny human scale, re the seemingly less weighty questions about character and marriageability in Regency Era England which are enacted so tellingly in P&P and JA’s other novels.

History is history, and it turns out that in P&P JA provides exactly the sort of imaginative history that the sophisticated and wise Eleanor Tilney enjoyed reading:

"Historians, you think," said Miss Tilney, "are not happy in their flights of fancy. They display imagination without raising interest. I am fond of history—and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under one's own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such. If a speech be well drawn up, I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made—and probably with much greater, if the production of Mr. Hume or Mr. Robertson, than if the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola, or Alfred the Great."

Jane Austen was actually up to her ears in history from a young age. In her parodic absurdist 1791 History of England, the 15 year old Jane Austen playfully referred to herself as “a PARTIAL, PREJUDICED, & IGNORANT Historian.” In Northanger Abbey, as I noted just above, Jane Austen includes the famous discussion of the pros and cons of history among Henry Tilney, Eleanor Tilney and Catherine Morland. But, to the best of my knowledge, Pride & Prejudice has NOT been considered in the same light, even though Jane Austen hid an allusion to her youthful History in plain sight in P&P, when Elizabeth Bennet, in the process of a radical reversal of opinion about Darcy and Wickham, thinks to herself:

“She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think without feeling she had been blind, PARTIAL, PREJUDICED, absurd. "How despicably I have acted!" she cried; "I, who have prided myself on my discernment! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable mistrust! How humiliating is this discovery! Yet, how just a humiliation! Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind! But vanity, not love, has been my folly. Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and IGNORANCE, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself."

It turns out, upon examination, that the theme of partiality and prejudice in history has been hidden in several places in P&P, as the following passages demonstrate:

Ch. 16: “Allowing for the common demands of the game, Mr. Wickham was therefore at leisure to talk to Elizabeth, and she was very willing to hear him, though what she chiefly wished to hear she could not hope to be told—the HISTORY of his acquaintance with Mr. Darcy…."I have no right to give my opinion," said Wickham, "as to his being agreeable or otherwise. I am not qualified to form one. I have known him too long and too well to be a fair judge. It is impossible for me to be IMPARTIAL. But I believe your opinion of him would in general astonish—and perhaps you would not express it quite so strongly anywhere else. Here you are in your own family."

Ch. 17: "I can much more easily believe Mr. Bingley's being imposed on, than that Mr. Wickham should invent such a HISTORY of himself as he gave me last night; names, facts, everything mentioned without ceremony. If it be not so, let Mr. Darcy contradict it. Besides, there was TRUTH in his looks."

Ch. 18: "No," replied Jane, "I have not forgotten him; but I have nothing satisfactory to tell you. Mr. Bingley does not know the whole of his HISTORY, and is quite IGNORANT of the circumstances which have principally offended Mr. Darcy…”

…"Both," replied Elizabeth archly; "for I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb."

"This is NO VERY STRIKING RESEMBLANCE of your own character, I am sure," said he. "How near it may be to mine, I cannot pretend to say. You think it a faithful portrait undoubtedly."

Ch. 21: “…My brother admires her greatly already; he will have frequent opportunity now of seeing her on the most intimate footing; her relations all wish the connection as much as his own; and a sister's PARTIALITY is not misleading me, I think, when I call Charles most capable of engaging any woman's heart. With all these circumstances to favour an attachment, and nothing to prevent it, am I wrong, my dearest Jane, in indulging the hope of an event which will secure the happiness of so many?"

Ch. 36: But when this subject was succeeded by his account of Mr. Wickham—when she read with somewhat clearer attention a relation of events which, if true, must overthrow every cherished opinion of his worth, and which bore so alarming an affinity to his own HISTORY of himself—her feelings were yet more acutely painful and more difficult of definition. Astonishment, apprehension, and even horror, oppressed her. She wished to discredit it entirely, repeatedly exclaiming, "This must be FALSE! This cannot be! This must be the grossest FALSEHOOD!"—and when she had gone through the whole letter, though scarcely knowing anything of the last page or two, put it hastily away, protesting that she would not regard it, that she would never look in it again…..She put down the letter, weighed every circumstance with what she meant to be IMPARTIALITY--deliberated on the probability of each statement—but with little success. On both sides it was only assertion….She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think without feeling she had been blind, PARTIAL, PREJUDICED, absurd….

And now, when we turn to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, we find that Stowe is concerned with exactly the same question that so engrossed Jane Austen. How to demonstrate that she has not been a “blind, partial, prejudiced, and absurd historian”, when all the Southern states had risen up as one to denounce her novel as (in Lizzy’s words) “the grossest falsehood”. So, it’s no accident that Stowe should obliquely refer to P&P (with its central concern about the truthfulness of personal history) via Gibbon in her Key, because Stowe makes her stated purpose in writing the Key quite clear and right upfront in Chapter 1 thereof:

“At different times, doubt has been expressed whether the scenes and characters pourtrayed in “Uncle Tom's Cabin” convey a fair representation of slavery as it at present exists. This work, more, perhaps, than any other work of fiction that ever was written, has been a collection and arrangement of real incidents, of actions really performed, of words and expressions really uttered, grouped together with reference to a general result, in the same manner that the mosaic artist groups his fragments of various stones into one general picture. His is a mosaic of gems—this is a mosaic of facts.

Artistically considered, it might not be best to point out in which quarry and from which region each fragment of the mosaic picture had its origin; and it is equally unartistic to disentangle the glittering web of fiction, and show out of what real warp and woof it is woven, and with what real colouring dyed. But the book had a purpose entirely transcending the artistic one, and accordingly encounters at the hands of the public demands not usually made on fictitious works. It is treated as a reality—sifted, tried, and tested, as a reality; and therefore as a reality it may be proper that it should be defended.

The writer acknowledges that the book is a very inadequate representation of slavery; and it is so, necessarily, for this reason—that slavery, in some of its workings, is too dreadful for the purposes of art. A work which should represent it strictly as it is would be a work which could not be read; and all works which ever mean to give pleasure must draw a veil somewhere, or they cannot succeed.”

And…I have saved the best for last---it turns out that both Stowe and Austen had Gibbon on their respective radar screens, in part because they both knew that Gibbon’s own monumental History had itself been subjected to a fierce attack by critics who claimed that Gibbon himself had been a PARTIAL historian about certain topics.

Check out the following passage in a letter written by George Travis, Archdeacon of Chester, to Gibbon, which mainly excoriated Gibbon for supposedly betraying a deist/pagan anti Christian prejudice in his History. I’ve put in ALL CAPS the excerpts which make it clear that Jane Austen was very much interested in Gibbon’s coming under such fierce attack—you tell me what the odds are that in one page of one letter in a book published in England several times when Jane Austen was a girl and teenager, we should find the phrases “impartial historian”, “truths universally acknowledged” and “pride and prejudice” in such very close proximity?

I’ll you the odds—a zillion to one! It’s obvious that Jane Austen meant to point to this specific letter when she wrote P&P:

“Let me in the next place, Sir, but still more briefly, remark on these extracts, that they convey NO VERY FAVORABLE IDEA of YOUR IMPARTIALITY AS A HISTORIAN. You have in them brought forward Mr. Emlynon the subject of this verse, because he is your fellow-advocate. And you have consigned even the name of Mr. Martin, his respectable antagonist, to deep silence— no friendly Note to tell where his work lies—because his opinions were directly adverse to yours, and because he has overthrown many of Emlyn's misrepresentations. But, Sir, is this the part of an IMPARTIAL HISTORIAN? To state authorities, and to urge arguments, on one side of a question alone, is but barely tolerable in a hired advocate. A HISTORIAN who acts in this manner is----- but his description will be best give in your own words. “Whatever subject he has chosen, whatever persons he introduces, be owes to himself, to the present age, and to posterity, a just and perfect delineation of all that may be praised, of all that may be excused, and of all that must be censured. If he fails in the discharge of his important office, he PARTIALLY violates the sacred obligations of truth."

But, Sir, this is not all. Let me in the third, and last place remark, that the extracts in question supply the most palpable proof of yourPARTIALITY AND PREJUDICE, in respect to the great question of the authenticity of this verse of St. John. They shew you to be capable even of forgingauthorities in a matter which bears no more than a collateral, or rather an implied relation to it. You have wilfully (for your reference is too exact to allow you shelter under any supposed inadvertence) misrepresented both Petavius and Gennadius, in the last of those extracts.

[Latin quotation, then] May it not be suspected, Sir, from this quotation, that, by fondly studying Dr. Bensonyou have imbibed no small portion of his spirit? You have, in your HISTORY, confidently placed this assertion, as to the expressions of Gennadius among CERTAIN TRUTHS WHICH YOU AFFIRM TO BE NOW UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED. Let me beseech you to compare the real expressions of Gennadius with your own account of them, and then to inform the world, whether you mean to repeat the assertion. Is it not practicable for you to utter truth, even whilst you have its sacred name in your mouth? Surely, Sir, "this seemeth to argue a bad cause, or a bad conscience, or both." Is there any physical, or moral impossibility for those who deny the authenticity of this verse to quote fairly, to argue candidly, and to speak truly? Is there any reason in nature for such hard hearts? Those reasons, such as they are, can only be found (but they may be there plentifully found) in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. If a false tenet, or opinion is to be defended at all events, to what auxiliaries must it look for assistance? Not to truth;-—for she is all fair and artless, uniform and consistent, simple and sincere.

….In fine---The defence of this text of the three (heavenly) Witnesses, which you affirm to have been profanely introduced into the scriptures by rash and sacrilegious hands, hath been thus attempted with, at least, upright intentions, and a serious persuasion of its originality, the result of much patient, and, as I believe, IMPARTIAL investigation. This defence, fixing its foundation upon the impeachments alledged against the text in a part of your HISTORY, hath, almost necessarily, produced a counter-charge against yourself. This general defence on the one hand, and this particular accusation on the other, are now both laid before the tribunal of an IMPARTIAL and discerning Public…..” END QUOTE

And so ends my history of the covert allusion by Jane Austen to Edward Gibbon’s great History, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s covert allusion to Austen alluding to Gibbon!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

I’ve been learning more about the life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, a woman who changed the world during her own lifetime (she published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, at age 42, at a time when women almost never had an impact beyond a very small local circle). That made me think of Jane Austen, who died thirty five years earlier, in 1817, just before she reached the age of 42, when she was arguably on the cusp of achieving real fame and fortune as an author, and also of making a wider impact on her society at large.

Given that I’ve now established that Stowe embedded a significant allusion to JA’s Pride & Prejudice in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that made me wonder how much Stowe, who, like Austen, was a dedicated scholar, knew about JA’s life, and how well she grasped from reading Jane Austen’s fiction her predecessor’s aspirations to change the fate of women in her world. At the very least, it appears to me that Stowe took inspiration from Austen’s novels, and dared to hope that she could tap into some of JA’s magic, and be the catalyst to righting a grave wrong by the force of her words and imagination.

On the theme of Stowe and Austen on parallel tracks, I just came across a very interesting op/ed piece from 4 years ago…

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/opinion/14Reynolds.html?_r=0

…by Prof. David S. Reynolds, entitled “Rescuing the Real Uncle Tom” in which Reynolds explained convincingly how Stowe’s “Uncle Tom” has gotten the bad rap it still has today:

“…..Today, of course, the book has a decidedly different reputation, thanks to the popular image of its titular character, Uncle Tom — whose name has become a byword for a spineless sellout, a black man who betrays his race. And we tend to think of the novel itself as an old-fashioned, rather lachrymose affair that features the deaths of an obsequious enslaved black man and his blond, angelic child-friend, Little Eva. But this view is egregiously inaccurate: the original Uncle Tom was physically strong and morally courageous, an inspiration for blacks and other oppressed people worldwide. In other words, Uncle Tom was anything but an “Uncle Tom.” … Together Tom and Eva form an interracial bond that offers lessons about tolerance and decency.

Unfortunately, these themes were lost in many of the stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that inevitably sprung from its immense popularity. Indeed, Stowe’s novel yielded the most popular and one of the longest-running plays in American history. The first dramatization of the novel appeared in 1852, the year it was published, and countless others followed. By the 1890s, there were hundreds of acting troupes — so-called Tommers—that fanned out across North America, putting on Uncle Tom’s Cabinin every town, hamlet and city. Some troupes even toured internationally, performing as far away as Australia and India. The play, seen by more people than read the book, remained popular up to the 1950s and still appears occasionally, including a staging last fall at the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York.

But as the story moved from the book to the stage, Stowe’s revolutionary themes were drowned in sentimentality and spectacle. Eva’s death was frequently a syrupy scene in which the actress was hauled heavenward by rope or piano wire against a backdrop of angels and billowing clouds. Uncle Tom, meanwhile, was often presented as a stooped, obedient old fool, the model image of a submissive black man preferred by post-Reconstruction, pre-civil rights America….” END QUOTE

Those who follow my Austen ruminations will immediately realize why my attention was riveted by Reynolds’s account of how “[T]he play, seen by more people than read the book, remained popular up to the 1950s …But as the story moved from the book to the stage, Stowe’s revolutionary themes were drowned in sentimentality and spectacle…”

Hmmm….. sounds an awful lot like the trajectory of modern Austenmania to me. Just look at the universe of fanfic and film spinoffs that has sprung from Darcy in a wet blouse in 1995. And read Austen fans Tweeting sappy lines from the film adaptations, words that Jane Austen never wrote (and never would have written) , etc etc.

And I am glad to be enlightened that just as many non-Janeites (mostly men) scorn an Austen that is a Victorian and 20^th century myth as “chick lit”, and never give the real Jane Austen a fair reading---so too, Reynolds has explained how the exact same sort of distortion has apparently occurred with Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

And it’s easy to see how this racist Bowdlerization happened with UTC---the vast white American audience, still very racist well over a century after the end of the Civil War that Stowe “started”, wanted a safe, non-threatening Uncle Tom, and that’s what they were given by the entertainment industry.

And the same with Jane Austen. As I’ve claimed a thousand times, no sooner was JA cold in her crypt at Winchester Cathedral than her family began to whitewash her true subversive radical feminism and Christianity---and, sadly, the Myth of Jane Austen they created has ruled the day since then—although I will give it my best shot to thoroughly debunk it.

So…if Stowe and Austen are sharing a cup of tea in heaven as I write this, and discussing their shared love of Shakespeare, I bet they’re both smiling, but with sadness, as Stowe reminds Austen that Stowe-mania preceded Austenmania by nearly a century and a half, and they commiserate over how hard it is to keep the truth alive after you’ve written it!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

As those who follow me know, I’ve been claiming for over a year now that Thomas Barrow is the Iago of Downton Abbey, Iago of course being the Machiavellian villain of Shakespeare’s Othello. Today, another, related allusion just popped out at me, after simmering in my subconscious for who knows how long.

So….I’m thinking of another famous work of literature which, like Downton Abbey, has all of the following elements:

A “king” with three daughters and no son

A good man named “Tom” who is an outsider and yet very loyal to the patriarch

A young tormented man who constantly causes chaos in the kingdom

An idealistic daughter who falls in love with “Tom”

A selfish daughter who is indifferent to her sister’s suffering

A loyal subject of the “king” who gets “pilloried”

An ancient kingdom in jeopardy of getting split up.

Which is it? I am sure everyone reading this with even a passing acquaintance with literature already guessed the answer after the first two clues---of course, it’s Shakespeare’s King Lear! Yes, Downton Abbey fans, the very clever Julian Fellowes has managed to sneak yet another clever literary allusion into his so-called faux-artistic “soap opera”, and to elude detection by nearly all of its multitude of fans for nearly 5 years.

Here’s my quick summary of these parallel characters, I hope some of you will jump in and help me sharpen this summary still further, and spot other parallels—I bet there must be several sly allusions to King Lear scattered through the first five seasons, and at least one of them will (I predict) have been uttered by Violet Crawley!:

Robert Crawley as King Lear---he is arrogant, finds it difficult to adjust to his loss of control over a domain his forefathers ruled without opposition for generations.

Tom Branson as Edgar (aka Poor Tom), who is an outsider at court, and who is cast out of favor but who remains intensely loyal to the king.

Thomas Barrow as Edmund, the bitter talented young man who wants revenge on all those who have treated him as less than human because of his status, and who operates by turning others into his puppets to do his mischief for him.

Sybil Crawley as Cordelia, the idealistic daughter who courageously flouts her father’s authority, and then tragically dies—but recall Nahum Tate’s 18th Century Bowdlerization of Shakespeare’s play, in which Cordelia actually survives and marries “Tom”.

Mary Crawley as Regan, the selfish daughter who is indifferent and even contemptuous of one of her sisters.

Bates as Gloucester, the faithful courtier to the king, who is blunt spoken and fearless, and who is publicly punished for crimes he did not commit, but remains loyal.

And finally we have a “kingdom” that is danger of being split up into pieces, as the “king” listens to “Tom’s” plans for subdividing the ancestral realm.

My parting question is, “Who is the Fool of Downton Abbey?”—(that’s not a trick question, I really can’t think of who it is).

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

I ended my previous post, about the comprehensive allusion to Shakespeare’s King Lear hidden in plain sight by Julian Fellowes for five seasons in Downton Abbey, with the following:

“My parting question is, “Who is the Fool of Downton Abbey?”—(that’s not a trick question, I really can’t think of who it is).”

Well, I soon found the answer….on Twitter! I searched in Twitter for any Tweets that included the words “Tom” and “fool” and was brought to this 1/12/14 Tweet by Matthew Brian Beck aka @Beck:

“Tom is a fool. Fool, fool, fool. According to Tom.”

That was all the prompting I needed! I now see very clearly that Tom Branson plays the “Fool” in Downton Abbey in several senses of the word:

He is just like Lear’s Fool, in that he speaks truth to power—he has never been afraid to tell Robert what he thinks, from the time he was a chauffeur, to when he married Sybil, to when he became a second “son” to Robert after Sybil’s death. And Robert loves him like a son.

But Tom Branson is also a fool in the sense that Edgar (Poor Tom) is fooling Lear by dressing in disguise and speaking crazily, to disguise his own true identity.

And…I also now see that Robert is like Lear in his own foolish arrogance, and at times Rober, like Lear, shows awareness of this.

And….last but not least, I now see that Violet is most the Fool of Downton Abbey, because Fellowes consistently gives to her the best lines, the zingers that have just that ironic, witty aphoristic quality that we know and love in the speeches given by Lear’s Fool.

So, now for the remainder of this post, I invite you to peruse the following quotations from Downton Abbey, which all involve the word “fool”, especially those pertaining to “Poor Tom” Branson:

Season 1, Episode 7:

Robert: If it had been left to that bloody FOOL Branson You should see what he reads. It's all Marx and Ruskin and John Stuart Mill. I ask you.
Mary: Papa prefers the servants to read the Bible and letters from home (!)

Mrs. Hughes: There are sandwiches for Mr Crawley in the dining room, Lady Mary.
Mary: Thank you, Mrs Hughes.

Season 2, Episode 8:

Sibyl: Thank you, Granny. Yes, we do have a plan. Tom's got a job on a paper. I'll stay until after the wedding; I don't want to steal [Mary & Lavinia’s] thunder. But after that, I'll go to Dublin.
Cora: To live with him? Unmarried?
Sibyl: I'll live with his mother while the bans are read. And then we'll be married... And I'll get a job as a nurse.
Violet: What does your mother make of this?
Branson: If you must know, she thinks we're very FOOLISH.

Violet: So at least we have something in common.
Robert: I won't allow it! I will not allow my daughter to throw away her life!
Sibyl: You can posture it all you like, Papa, it won't make any difference!
Robert: Oh, yes, it will.
Sybil: How? I don't want any money and you can hardly lock me up until I die! I'll say goodnight. But I can promise you one thing, tomorrow morning nothing will have changed. Tom.
….

Robert: How much will you take to leave us in peace?
Tom: What?
Robert: You must have doubts. You said your own mother thinks you FOOLISH.
Tom: Yes, she does.
Robert: Then yield to those doubts and take enough to make a new life back in Ireland. I'll be generous if we can bring this nonsense to an end.
Tom: I see. You know, your trouble, milord, you're like all of your kind. You think you have the monopoly of honour.

Season 3, Episode 6:

Robert: Has Matthew told you about his latest plans for Downton? I know he wants to change things.
Cora: Doesn't he just? You mustn't let him upset you.
Robert: He more or less told me I've let the estate fall to pieces.
Cora: I'm sure he didn't mean that.
Robert: Didn't he? A FOOL and his money are soon parted. I have been parted from my money, so I suppose I am a FOOL.

Season 4, Episode 3:

Mary: How are you enjoying the party?

Tom: I look like a FOOL. I talk like a FOOL. I am a FOOL.
Mary: Alfred said you were dancing.
Tom: With an old bat who could be my granny and thinks I grew up in a cave. My clothes deceive no one.
Mary: Don't be so hard on yourself.
Tom: I'm a fish out of water and I've never felt it more than today.

Season 5, Episode 5

Tom: Look, I am very grateful to you and this family. But my vision of this country is different from yours.
Robert: But not from Miss Bunting's?

Tom: I believe in reform and the moral direction of the Left, and when I'm with her, I don't feel like a freak or a FOOL, devoid of common sense.

What we may wonder is whether, in Season Six, Tom Branson will disappear from the action as the Fool does in King Lear, or if he will (like Edgar) come out of disguise and take over stewardship of Downton Abbey (perhaps married to Edith or Mary????) if Robert happens to die or abdicate his authority?

Food for thought!!!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Now that I’ve been finding more and more veiled literary and historical allusions in Downton Abbey, I’m paying attention to every unusual character name, waiting for another one to pop up—and one just did, in Season 5’s Episode 8 that aired last Sunday in the U.S.. My Subject Line gives it away---here is the dialog from Episode 8, in which Susan, Rose’s anti-Semitic mother, attempts to insult her future in-laws during a dinner for Atticus and his parents at Downton Abbey:

Cora: Do come in. How lovely to see you.

Rose: Daddy, Mummy. This is Atticus.
Susan: How do you do? What a peculiar name.
Robert: What made you choose Yorkshire? Was it a historic reason? Not really.
Lady Sinderby: I used to go there as a girl and of course it's beautiful.
Susan: Do you have any English blood?

Lord Sinderby: We only date from the 1850s, but Lady Sinderby's family arrived in the reign of King Richard III.
Susan: Really? I think of you as nomads, drifting around the world.
Violet: Talking of drifting round, is it true you're starting your honeymoon at the Melfords' in CONINGSBY?

Atticus: Lady Melford is Mother's cousin.
Violet: Is she? I never knew that.

And then after the dinner we watch the tense tete-a-tete between Rose’s parents, as he gives her what-for:
Shrimpie: Did you enjoy this evening?

Susan: Not really, no. In fact, I hated it. Having to play act in front of those people is so degrading.
Shrimpie: It's not for much longer.
Susan: Did you know that Anne Melford was Jewish?

Shrimpie: I neither knew nor didn't know. What difference does it make?

Susan: No need to parade your pseudo-tolerance here. We are quite alone.
Shrimpie: I don't feel as you do about it.

Susan: Or about anything else.
Shrimpie: Either way I want no more of your tricks. Is that clear?

The name “Coningsby” rings few bells in 2015, but it would definitely have meant something to Shrimpie, Violet, Robert, Carson, Molesley, Tom, and Miss Bunting, among other characters in the show. It was the title of one of the most well known of the many novels written by Benjamin Disraeli, who of course is famous even today for having been the Prime Minister of Great Britain twice between 1868 and 1880.

And what tells us that this was not just a coincidence, because Coningsby sounds like such a good name for an English estate, is that Disraeli created in Coningsby a character, SIDONIA (sounds a LOT like SINDERBY), who was in part inspired by the real life Baron de Rothschild, but who was also a mouthpiece for many of the 38-year old Disraeli’s own ideas, in 1842, about Jewish emancipation, superiority, and the pivotal role of Jews in the ancient and modern worlds.

So, when Violet politely changes the subject from Susan’s crude anti-Semitic nastiness, and asks Atticus whether he plans to honeymoon at Coningsby, this is Julian Fellowes invoking the rich subtext of Disraeli, both as great Tory politician of a vanished Victorian Era and as staunch defender of the right of Jews to sit at the great dinner tables—and to marry the daughters of—the great Christian families of England!

And my joking Subject Line about Sidonia being “the most Rothschildian man in the world” is based on what every reader of Disraeli’s novel would discern in a second, which is that Sidonia is almost a superman among men—he has so many talents and insights, and his presence is so utterly desirable at any social function he deigns to grace therewith, that he may as well be the guy in the Dos Equis Beer commercials!

But the mention of horses and impossibly attractive men is not accidental on my part, as the following comments virtually leapt off the screen during my followup reading of a 1979 scholarly article by Robert O’Kell about, inter alia, Sidonia in Disraeli’s Coningsby:

“…some critics would argue that the extravagant characterization of Sidonia is satirical. But it seems as much mistaken to judge the absurdity of his accomplishments by the test of verisimilitude as to restrict oneself to a literal definition of autobiography. It is clear that the two-fold essence of Sidonia's character, in both respects contrasting sharply with that of Coningsby [the young Gentile protagonist whom Sidonia helps at the end of the novel, VERY much like what Colonel Brandon does for Edward Ferrars at the end of Sense & Sensibility- so very like that I believe Disraeli was nodding to Jane Austen in that motif], is that [Sidonia] is an outsider and that he is powerful. Consequently, he should be interpreted as an equally idealized counterassertion. Perhaps the conclusive proof of this ambivalence is the allegorical steeplechase in Book IV, Ch. 14, where Coningsby, mounted on the best of his grandfather's stud, aptly called "Sir Robert," comes in second behind Sidonia on his gorgeous Arab "of pure race," again symbolically named "The Daughter of the Star" (Bk. III, Ch. 1 & Bk. IV, Ch. 14). …”

So…the horse race that we watched only two weeks earlier in Episode 6, in which Atticus competes while his parents watch, is, we now see, a very sly wink by Fellowes at the steeplechase race in Coningsby , and is every bit as allegorical as to the characters in DT as it was in Disraeli’s novel! And you gotta LOL at a horse named “Sir ROBERT’ being the stud whom Coningsby rides, which comes in second to Sidonia’s “pure race” Arab!—especially when we note that Lord Sinderby, like Disraeli’s Sidonia, is even more concerned about preserving the purity of the Jewish genes than Rose’s mother!

I conclude with the invitation to consider the broader implications of Fellowes’s bravura veiled allusion to Disrael and his fictional creature Sidonia---does it suggest that in Season Six of DT, in some way as yet unforeseeable, the Sinderbys will save Downton Abbey, the way Sidonia boasts to Coningsby about his coming to the financial rescue of the British government’s creditworthiness?

One thing is absolutely for sure--you don’t have to be Jewish to like—no, LOVE--- Fellowes’s seamless blend of erudition and entertainment.

Shabbat shalom,

Arnie

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Yesterday I posted about my discovery of the veiled allusion to Benjamin Disraeli’s 1842 novel Coningsby in the Jewish subplot in Season Five of Downton Abbey --- Rose’s romance with, and marriage to, Atticus Aldridge, heir to the Sinderby (aka Rothschild/Sidonia) fortune. Little did I imagine that with a little more digging, I’d be able to connect the dots between that allusion by the clever Fellowes, and some real life Highclere Castle history, as the following Amazon.com book blurb reveals:

“Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey tells the story behind Highclere Castle, the real-life inspiration and setting for…Downton Abbey, and the life of one of its most famous inhabitants, Lady Almina, the 5th Countess of Carnarvon. Drawing on a rich store of materials from the archives of Highclere Castle, including diaries, letters, and photographs, the current Lady Carnarvon has written a transporting story of this fabled home on the brink of war. Much like her Masterpiece Classic counterpart, Lady Cora Crawley, Lady Almina was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Alfred de ROTHSCHILD, who married his daughter off at a young age, her dowry serving as the crucial link in the effort to preserve the Earl of Carnarvon's ancestral home. Throwing open the doors of Highclere Castle to tend to the wounded of World War I, Lady Almina distinguished herself as a brave and remarkable woman…..”

In that same vein, http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/02/22/the-aristocratsadds this:

“…Widely believed to be the illegitimate daughter of industrialist Alfred de Rothschild and his French mistress, Marie Wombwell, Almina married George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, in 1895, when she was just nineteen. In Lady Carnarvon’s telling, it was a felicitous match romantically and financially. Dubbed “the Pocket Venus,” diminutive Almina was a renowned beauty, reportedly besotted with her new husband, a budding Egyptologist. More important, perhaps, Almina brought to her marriage the cash desperately needed to run Highclere. Lady Carnarvon’s book focuses on the tumultuous years of World War I, when Almina converted her palatial estate into a convalescent hospital for wounded officers, and ends rather abruptly in 1924, shortly after the Earl’s untimely death. Downton Abbey fans will note the striking parallels between Almina’s life and that of her fictional counterpart, Lady Cora Crawley. This is hardly an accident: Lady Carnarvon and her husband, the eighth Earl of Carnarvon, affectionately known as Geordie, have been friends with Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes for more than a decade. Though Lady Carnarvon calls Fellowes a “genius,” she’s too involved with the show to call herself a fan. “It’s too much of a bloody muddle,” she says.”

So is Julian Fellowes “telling” us that Cora is an illegitimate heiress of her family’s fortune?

And….just to tie the knot even tighter to Disraeli’s Coningsby, check out this factoid, courtesy of http://www.manfredlehmann.com/sieg231.html :

“Disraeli was an intimate friend—both financially, socially and politically—of the Rothschilds. In fact, he once considered marrying a Rothschild daughter and only shrank back because it would undermine his career. He was hounded enough as a Jew, and could not "afford" to identify himself openly with the Jewish religion. He was attracted to Baron Lionel de Rothschild, in part because like himself, a Rothschild was an "outsider" in English society.”

You guessed it—Lionel de Rothschild was the FATHER of Alfred de Rothschild, and therefore was the grandfather of Almina. And…a final irony: Alfred was born in 1842, the very same year that Disraeli wrote Coningsby!

And I’ll conclude with a tangential tile of the complicated mosaic underlying Fellowes’s incorporation of this Disraeli-Rothschild subtext into Downton Abbey:

“One of the first girls I went out with was a Jewish girl,” Fellowes said. “It was sort of my first experience of not being desirable. She belonged to one of the great Jewish families. I won’t name them. They certainly didn’t want a Catholic in the family.”

So, I hope your enjoyment of DT is enhanced by having this glimpse of the huge iceberg of “juicy” (if you’ll forgive my pun) allusion hidden beneath its Season Five Jewish subtext!

Cheers,

ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Diana Birchall wrote the following brilliant observation today in Janeites & Austen-L:

“Enjoyed your student's interesting mashup of P & P and Uncle Tom's Cabin,Diane - I'm sure such a thing has never been attempted before, and it wasimaginatively done. However, I read the last line, Elizabeth saying "It isa truth universally acknowledged that a single man of fortune must be in
want of a wife," as,"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man of fortune mustbe in want of a SLAVE."Perhaps that's the truth that we get from a P & P/UTC mashup?”

Yes, Diana, that was indeed precisely the hidden truth that Stowe saw in Pride & Prejudice! Diane was spot-on in spotting the connection, and that’s all I needed to take her catch and run with it and flesh out her brilliant intuition.

In regard to fleshing out (if you’ll forgive another pun), I’ve been working on a followup post re UTC and and P&P, in which I go one step further beyond my claim that St. Clare is Mr. Bennet, and his wife is Mrs. Bennet.

Here’s the kicker---- UTC’s slave girl Topsy is…… Elizabeth Bennet, the Creole!!!

I’ve felt for some time that Elizabeth Bennet was a Creole, but never realized till this past week that Stowe picked up on this in UTC. First, let’s recap the passages in P&P that suggest Lizzy’s being biracial. When we read this passage about Darcy moving past his initial negative first impression of Elizabeth at the Meryton assembly…

“But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she HARDLY HAD A GOOD FEATURE IN HER FACE, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of HER DARK EYES.”

….this is code for Darcy learning to look past her Creole features (which would be unattractive to a racially prejudiced white man), and it reminds us of a passage in another Austen novel where exactly the same code is used to describe white observers learning to like the looks of a dark skinned person of the opposite sex:

“Her brother was not handsome: no, when they first saw him he was absolutely plain, black and plain; but still he was the gentleman, with a pleasing address. The second meeting proved him not so very plain: he was plain, to be sure, but then he had so much countenance, and his teeth were so good, and he was so well made, that one soon forgot he was plain; and after a third interview, after dining in company with him at the Parsonage, he was no longer allowed to be called so by anybody. He was, in fact, the most agreeable young man the sisters had ever known, and they were equally delighted with him. Miss Bertram's engagement made him in equity the property of Julia, of which Julia was fully aware; and before he had been at Mansfield a week, she was quite ready to be fallen in love with.”

Of course this is Henry Crawford, whom I have long considered to be biracial. But…I only noticed this time around the sharp irony of the line “made him in equity the property of Julia”---- a human being as “property” indeed—Jane Fairfax’s sale of human flesh!

And that same ironic joke is played upon in the other direction in P&P in a much more famous iteration of it: “he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.” That is the idea behind Lady Catherine’s accusing Lizzy of bewitching Darcy, taking possession of his soul and body by “black” magic!

And….that’s just the beginning—all of the teasing of Darcy by Caroline Bingley can readily be read as racist innuendo, all circling around Lizzy’s “dark eyes” as code for “dark SKIN”.

"I am afraid, Mr. Darcy," observed Miss Bingley in a half whisper, "that this adventure has rather affected your admiration of her fine eyes."

"Not at all," he replied; "they were BRIGHTENED by the exercise."

In other words, Darcy’s saying that Elizabeth’s skin color looks WHITER, as in the racist expression “That’s white of you.”

And Carolyn misses no opportunity to emphasize Lizzy’s dark skin coloration:

”How very ill Miss Eliza Bennet looks this morning, Mr. Darcy," she cried; "I never in my life saw anyone so much altered as she is since the winter. She is grown SO BROWN and coarse! Louisa and I were agreeing that we should not have known her again."

However little Mr. Darcy might have liked such an address, he contented himself with coolly replying that he perceived no other alteration than her being rather tanned, no miraculous consequence of travelling in the summer.

"For my own part," she rejoined, "I must confess that I never could see any beauty in her. 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."

This is the language of the slave auction!

And finally, all the references to the “mud” on Lizzy’s shoes and petticoat, which I demonstrated last year were code for feces (human and animal), fit perfectly with the white racist conflation of black skin color with the color of waste. Crude, disgusting, abhorrent racism---and exactly what many white people of that era believed!

And this is definitely what Stowe picked up on in P&P, and (as I will be posting in the near future) gave us Topsy to show her awareness----and, last but not least, that also goes for the other transformation of Elizabeth Bennet in a very famous later 19^th century novel, a character created nearly 3 decades after Topsy, by a close friend of Harriet Beecher Stowe--- Louisa May Alcott’s topsy-turvy Jo March in Little Women!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

“Romeo and Juliet with Joseph Fiennes”, Episode 5 of the PBS series, Shakespeare Uncovered, recently aired, and those who missed it can still watch it and the other 5 episodes online:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/shakespeare-uncovered/uncategorized/romeo-juliet-joseph-fiennes-full-episode/ It’s excellent, as you’d expect. It provides both (i) a thorough basic factual and critical grounding in Romeo & Juliet for anyone unfamiliar with it, AND (ii) supplementary intellectual treats for the cognoscenti, with rare perspectives on Shakespeare’s early and beloved tragedy.And what Shakespeare lover wouldn’t enjoy taking scholarly “potions” from “apothecaries” like actors Joseph Fiennes and Orlando Bloom, scholars Marjorie Garber and Jonathan Bate, and other knowledgeable folks, as your guides, with generous on location visuals from the Globe and a Verona balcony or two, to boot!

One of those exotic segments (starting 12+ minutes into Episode 5) was a clip from a recent staging of RomeUS and Juliet-that’s NOT a typo----that is the actual title of the poem by the otherwise unknown versifier Arthur Brooke written in 1562, two years before Shakespeare was born-it’s the poem which was Shakespeare’s primary source. Sorry to burst the bubble of those who (like me till 10 years ago) didn’t know that Stoppard’s version of Shakespeare’s composition of Romeo & Juliet in Shakespeare in Love was flamboyantly contrary to historical fact. I.e., there never wasa plotline being invented from scratch by the Bard, with a working title of Romeo & Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter!But, of course I, like everyone else, still love the film, because it so wittily, brilliantly, and passionately captures and recreates the spirit of Shakespeare.

But back to Brooke. As the PBS show accurately reported, it’s been common scholarly knowledge for centuries that Brooke’s poem was Shakespeare’s primary source---not only because of the virtual repetition of the title, but even down (as Episode 5 cleverly enacted) to Shakespeare stealing specific lines of poetry from Brooke, and tweaking them into altered, but still recognizably similar, lines in his play. And, with some exceptions, including the change of moral tone noted in Episode 5, the vast majority of plot and character details in Brooke’s poem are closely tracked in Shakespeare’s play. But, of course, the PBS show, and a thousand other scholars, have also pointed out, that we only know of Brooke and his poem today (he is believed to have died in a shipwreck—a sly joke in Stoppard’s ending!---not long after composing the poem), because Brooke mined, from Italian sources, the literary dross that Shakespeare’s literary alchemy turned into pure gold.

Well, as I will now demonstrate to you, Brooke’s been getting a raw deal for 400 years on one important point that’s never been noticed before. All of the above is merely prologue to the existence of a secret codeword borrowed by Shakespeare from Brooke’s poem which is beyond anything than has been dreamt of in the philosophy of scholarly interpretation of Romeo & Juliet (and also, for that matter, Romeus & Juliet and Paradise Lost).Sounds crazy—sounds VERY crazy---but it’s true, and I will prove it, in this very post! It’s a borrowing I discovered 7 months ago while reading Romeo & Juliet for another reason entirely, and then I went back into Brooke’s poem and found the source there. And then I realized, from something I had learned during my earlier research on Paradise Lost, that John Milton may have beaten me to the sleuthing punch by 350 years, as he coded his discovery into his epic poem!

I’m breaking the story today, a bit sooner than I had planned, because I could not resist the serendipity of the airing today of Episode 5, with its excerpt about Brooke’s poem, which I hope has resulted in a lot of Shakespeare lovers having Romeo & Juliet temporarily on their (your) minds. And so it’s my goal to blow that part of your mind! Please bear with me till I get to my punch line, which is a single code word that appears in all three passages. I promise it will be worth your attention!

Without further ado, then, here first is a brief description of the three passages, which will be immediately followed by the three passages themselves-only 121 lines in total:

ONE: Lines 2338-2377, of Brooke’s poem, describing Juliet’s taking the sleeping potion provided by Friar Laurence that simulates death.

TWO: Lines 2443-2486, in Act 4, Scene 1, of Shakespeare’s play, describing Juliet’s fears about taking the sleeping potion, and Friar Laurence’s pep talk, reassuring her that all will end well.

THREE: Lines 494-531, in Book 9 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, revised 1674 version (the identical passage appears in Book 8 of Milton's original 1667 version), describing Satan, having assumed serpentine form, circling in on the sleeping Eve in the Garden of Eden, getting ready to whisper tempting words to her to induce her to take a forbidden bite.

As you can gather, these are three passages, in three works by three different authors, the first of which is known to have been a primary source for the second one, which ALL describe exactly the same situation: a young girl about to take a pretty dangerous “fall” via ingestion of a substance into her mouth, on the prompting and advice of an authoritative and seductive male voice she cannot resist. I.e., these are passages which are otherwise already strongly resonant with each other thematically, without regard to any additional coded connection.

I will reveal the actual code word to you immediately after my quotation of these three passages, but, for those who enjoy solving a puzzle yourself, rather than being told the answer, I’m giving you the passages first, with certain words in ALL CAPS as clues, and I’ve also put the specific lines which contain the actual code word in boldfaced italics, all so as to enable those so inclined to try to discover the code word yourself. But those who hate puzzles, feel free to immediately skip right to the end for the answer, and then go from there.

BROOKE’S POEM: (see 2363-70 for the code word, which appears twice in a row)

The NURSE departed once, the CHAMBER door shut close,
Assuréd that no living wight her doing might disclose,
She pouréd forth into the VIAL of the FRIAR                2340
Water, out of a silver ewer that on the board stood by her.
The SLEEPY mixture made, fair Juliet doth it hide
Under her bolster soft, and so unto her bed she hied:
Where divers novel thoughts arise within her head,
And she is so environed about with deadly dread,
That what before she had resolved undoubtedly
That same she calleth into doubt; and Iying doubtfully,
Whilst honest love did strive with dread of deadly pain,
With hands wrung and weeping eyes thus gan she to complain:
"What, is there any one, beneath the heavens high,       2350
So much unfortunate as I? so much past hope as I?
What, am I not myself, of all that yet were born,
The deepest drenchéd in despair, and most in Fortune's scorn?
For lo, the world for me hath nothing else to find,
Beside mishap and wretchedness and anguish of the mind;
Since that the cruel cause of my unhappiness
Hath put me to this sudden plunge and brought to such distress,
As, to the end I may my name and conscience save,
I must devour the mixéd drink that by me here I have,
Whose working and whose force as yet I do not know."2360
And of this piteous plaint began another doubt to grow:
"What do I know," quoth she, "if that this powder shall
Sooner or later than it should, or else, not work at all?
And then my CRAFT descried as open as the day,
The people's tale and laughingstock shall I remain for aye.
"ANd what know I," quoth she, "if SERPENTS odious,
ANd other beasts &worms that are of nature VENOMOUS,
That wonted are to LURK in DARK caves underground,
And commonly as I've heard in deadmen's tombs are found
Shall harm me, yea or nay, where I shall lie as dead? --
Or how shall I that alway have in so fresh air been bred,
Endure the lothsome stink of such an heapéd store
Of carcases not yet consumed, and bones that long before
Intombéd were, where I my sleeping-place shall have,
Where all my ancestors do rest, my kindred's common grave?
Shall not the friar and my Romeus, when they come,
Find me, if I awake before, stifled in the tomb?"

TWO: SHAKESPEARE’S PLAY (see lines 2469-2473 for the code word)

JULIET
O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,
From off the battlements of yonder tower;
Or walk in thievish ways; or bid me lurk
Where SERPENTS are; chain me with roaring bears;
Or shut me nightly in a charnel-house,
O'er-cover'd quite with dead men's rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls;
Or bid me go into a new-made grave
And hide me with a dead man in his shroud;
Things that, to hear them told, have made me tremble;
And I will do it without fear or doubt,
To live an unstain'd wife to my sweet love.

FRIAR LAURENCE
Hold, then; go home, be merry, give consent
To marry Paris: Wednesday is to-morrow:
To-morrow night look that thou lie alone;
Let not thy NURSE lie with thee in thy CHAMBER:
Take thou this VIAL, being then in bed,
And this distilled liquor drink thou off;
When presently through all thy veins shall run
A cold and DROWSY humour, for no pulse
Shall keep his native progress, but surcease:
No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou livest;
The ROSES in thy lips and cheeks shall fade
To paly ashes, thy EYES' windows fall,
Like death, when he shuts up the day of life;
Each part, deprived of supple government,
Shall, stiff and stark and cold, appear like death:
And in this borrow'd likeness of shrunk death
Thou shalt continue two and forty hours,
And then awake as from a pleasant sleep.
Now, when the bridegroom in the morning comes
To rouse thee from thy bed, there art thou dead:
Then, as the manner of our country is,
In thy best robes uncover'd on the bier
Thou shalt be borne to that same ancient vault
Where all the kindred of the Capulets lie.
In the mean time, against thou shalt awake,
Shall Romeo by my letters know our drift,
And hither shall he come: and he and I
Will watch thy waking, and that very night
Shall Romeo bear thee hence to Mantua.
And this shall free thee from this present shame;
If no inconstant TOY, nor womanish fear,
Abate thy valour in the acting it.

THREE: Paradise Lost (see lines 510-514 for the code word)

So spake the ENEMIE of Mankind, enclos'd
In SERPENT, Inmate bad, and toward Eve
Address'd his way, not with indented wave,
Prone on the ground, as since, but on his reare,
Circular base of rising foulds, that tour’d
Fould above fould a surging Maze, his Head
Crested aloft, and CARBUNCLE HIS EYES;   500
With burnisht Neck of verdant Gold, erect
Amidst his circling Spires, that on the grass
Floted redundant: pleasing was his shape,
And lovely, never since of SERPENT kind
Lovelier, not those that in Illyriachang’d
Hermioneand Cadmus, or the God
In Epidaurus; nor to which transformd
Ammonian Jove, or Capitolinewas seen,
Hee with Olympias, this with her who bore
Scipio the highth of Rome.With tract oblique
At first, as one who sought access, but feard
To interrupt, side-long he works his way.
As when a Ship by Skilful Stearsman wrought
Nigh Rivers mouth or Foreland, where the Wind

Veres oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her saile;
So varied hee, and of his tortuous Traine
Curld many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve,
To lure her Eye; shee busied heard the sound
Of rusling Leaves, but minded not, as us'd
To such disport before her through the Field,   520
From every Beast, more duteous at her call,
Then at Circeancall the Herd disguis’d.
Hee boulder now, uncall'd before her stood;
But as in gaze admiring: Oft he bowd
His turret Crest, and sleek enamel'd Neck,
Fawning, and lick'd the ground whereon she trod.
His gentle dumb expression turnd at length
The EYE of Eveto mark his play; he glad
Of her attention gaind, with Serpent Tongue
Organic or impulse of vocal Air,                   530
His fraudulent temptation thus began.

And the secret code word that Brooke hid twice in plain sight in his 1562 poem, which Shakespeare then hid in plain sight in his 1592 play, and then Milton hid in plain sight in his 1667/1674 poem is…..

……

…..

SATAN!!!!

I.e. (out of chronological order, for most appropriate explanation):

SHAKESPEARE, PASSAGE TWO: There is an acrostic of the name "SATAN" right in the middle of that speech by Friar Laurence as he successfully cajoles Juliet to drink the Elizabethan Kool-Aid. In the stranger than fiction category, this SATAN acrostic was actually discovered and noted a century ago! But it was in a tiny footnote, by William Stone Booth, a Baconian obsessive (and member of the famous Booth family, of theatrical fame and assassinatory infamy) , in a book filled with Byzantinely geometric supposed variations on the name (Francis) “Bacon”, whom Booth of course believed was Shakespeare in disguise. So, Booth passed right by Friar Laurence’s acrostic SATAN it in order to get to what Booth thought was ‘the good stuff’, and I only found his footnote because I had already independently rediscovered Shakespeare’s SATAN myself—and here it is:

S hall, stiff and stark and cold, appear like death:
A nd in this borrow'd likeness of shrunk death
T hou shalt continue two and forty hours,
A nd then awake as from a pleasant sleep.
N ow, when the bridegroom in the morning comes

MILTON, PASSAGE THREE: The SATAN acrostic in the passage from Paradise Lost was discovered in 1977 by Prof. Paul Klemp, then a young graduate student, whom I have been in touch with since last year, and who has endured 38 years of skepticism from smug Miltonian scholarly colleagues, who have danced on the heads of pins angsting over whether it was intentional on Milton’s part or not, and also as to what it might have meant, in a poem in which Satan is the protagonist. I mean, really……:

S   cipio the highth of Rome. With tract oblique
A   t first, as one who sought access, but feard
T   o interrupt, side-long he works his way.
A   s when a Ship by Skilful Stearsman wrought
N   igh Rivers mouth or Foreland, where the Wind

BROOKE, PASSAGE ONE: But the best proof of all that both Shakespeare and Milton wrote their respective SATAN acrostics intentionally, is that there two SATAN acrostics which are like snakes "touching tails"-- the tails being the letters “AN”--- in that passage from Brooke’s poem, which could never in a million million million years occur by coincidence in a scene so strongly parallel thematically to Shakespeare’s and Milton’s:

S ooner or later than it should, or else, not work at all?

A   nd then my CRAFT descried as open as the day,
T    he people's tale and laughing-stock shall I remain for aye."
"AN d what know I," quoth she, "if SERPENTS odious,

AN   d other beasts and worms that are of nature VENOMOUS,
T    hat wonted are to LURK in DARK caves underground,
A    nd commonly, as I have heard, in dead men's tombs are found,
S     hall harm me, yea or nay, where I shall lie as dead?

CONCLUSION:

I’ve already gone on long enough for this informal venue, so for now I’ll leave it to you to begin to think about what this all means. As you might guess, I’ve given that question a great deal of thought and study over the past 8 months, and I will be publishing, in due course, a full analysis of the numerous significant implications I see in this three layer cake of secret literary allusion. I hope it will in turn provoke a rich response from the scholarly community, to point out many implications I am sure I will miss. For now, I will merely mention that my analysis will include but not be limited to discussion of the following highlights;

FRANCISCAN FRIARS:

Brooke, Shakespeare and Milton all seem to me to be participating in a long literary tradition among English (Protestant) authors (like Spenser and Marlowe, to name two others) who have famously and OVERTLY presented Franciscan friars like Friar Laurence as devils --and Brooke has long been recognized to have presented a paradoxical view of Friar Laurence, with a conflict in that regard between his preface and his poem. And even Shakespeare’s Friar Laurence has long been a controversial and enigmatic figure for Shakespeare scholars who’ve looked at him. His SATAN acrostic should liven up that debate, don’t you think?

SERPENTS:

All of these passages have to do with serpents, and I realized early on that Romeo & Juliet is a major (and heretofore never recognized) allusive source for Paradise Lost, with Milton using Romeo and Juliet as models for his own Adam and Eve, and Friar Laurence (who speaks the acrostic SATAN) as model for his Satan. I also see Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra as sources for Milton’s paradisian couple.

TWO-AND-FORTY:

Friar Laurence refers to the potion lasting for "two-and-forty hours"---it turns out that this a wormhole that leads straight back to the enormously significant usage of that word in the King James Bible’s version of the Book of Revelation, with its dragon, serpent, beast, etc etc. –and I don’t have to tell anyone in the age of the Internet that the number 42 has been the subject of enormous heated discussion among groups of passionate scholars not only of the Bible but also of Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, the late Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with its computer Deep Thought which cryptically explains the meaning of the universe as “42”, Dr. Who, and a half dozen other cult classics.

SHAKESPEAREAN ACROSTICS:

It’s been 8 years since I first became aware of numerous acrostics and anagram-acrostics in Shakespeare’s plays, far beyond the number that had previously been detected by scholars. However, none of them, not even the TITANIA acrostic in a speech by Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, has the enormous resonance and significance of Friar Laurence’s SATAN, embedded in that layer cake between Brooke’s and Milton’s. And it will no longer be possible for conservative Shakespeare scholars to keep a straight face as they opine that Shakespeare would not have lowered his literary artistry so as to include word puzzles in his plays. Obviously, he did, the only question is, what did they mean?

SHAKESPEARE & THE JESUITS

And finally, this may also bear on the recent discovery of that extremely rare First Folio in Northern France that had originally been held for centuries in a now defunct Jesuit library--does this mean Shakespeare was a secret Jesuit mocking rival Franciscans, and not a Protestant mocking all Catholics?

So, I hope you’ll agree that I’ve delivered on my promise and I’ve given you enough to realize that this is the real deal, an amazing secret code that has waited nearly 400 years for discovery and recognition for what it really is—a true literary Pandora’s Box.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

My last few posts about Downton Abbey…

http://tinyurl.com/q4t2mdm & http://tinyurl.com/n2aujnb

...covered the Season 5 Jewish subtext of Downton Abbey surrounding the marriage of heiress Rose Crawley to Atticus Aldridge, heir to Jewish power broker Lord Sinderby. In those posts, I made a strong case, based on varied evidence, for Julian Fellowes having, in Atticus’s family, cleverly and covertly alluded to TWO generations of one English branch of the great Jewish Rothschild dynasty as follows:

First, by pointing to Benjamin Disraeli’s 1842 novel Coningsby, with its Downtonesque, allegorical steeple-chase horse race and its veiled but compelling portrait of the Jewish contemporary Disraeli admired most, Baron Lionel de Rothschild, in the character of the almost superhuman Sidonia (a loose anagram of Sinderby);

Second, by also pointing to the real life Rothschildian ancestry of Lord Carnavon, the current owner of Highclere Castle, which of course is the real-life setting for Downton Abbey, such ancestry being aptly summarized by The Paris Review as follows:

“Widely believed to be the illegitimate daughter of industrialist Alfred de Rothschild and his French mistress, Marie Wombwell, Almina married George Herbert, the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, in 1895, when she was just nineteen. In Lady Carnarvon’s telling, it was a felicitous match romantically and financially. Dubbed “the Pocket Venus,” diminutive Almina was a renowned beauty, reportedly besotted with her new husband, a budding Egyptologist. More important, perhaps, Almina brought to her marriage the cash desperately needed to run Highclere. Lady Carnarvon’s book focuses on the tumultuous years of World War I, when Almina converted her palatial estate into a convalescent hospital for wounded officers, and ends rather abruptly in 1924, shortly after the Earl’s untimely death. Downton Abbey fans will note the striking parallels between Almina’s life and that of her fictional counterpart, Lady Cora Crawley. This is hardly an accident: Lady Carnarvon and her husband, the eighth Earl of Carnarvon, affectionately known as Geordie, have been friends with Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes for more than a decade. Though Lady Carnarvon calls Fellowes a “genius,” she’s too involved with the show to call herself a fan. “It’s too much of a bloody muddle,” she says.” END QUOTE

I then noted how neatly Fellowes tied his allusive bow, in that Disraeli’s Baron Lionel de Rothschild was the FATHER of Alfred de Rothschild, and therefore was the grandfather of Almina. And…a final irony: Alfred was born in 1842, the very same year that Disraeli wrote Coningsby!”

And finally I concluded by speculating: “So is Julian Fellowes “telling” us that Cora is an illegitimate heiress of her family’s fortune?” Well, now that I’ve seen the final episode of Season 5, I’d be quite surprised if we were to learn in Season 6 that Cora is herself an illegitimate Jewish heiress like Almina was. As my Subject Line suggests, I think we just saw, in this last episode, the payoff of the veiled allusion to Almina Lady Carnavon, when we learned that Lord Sinderby (who, as I’ve argued, represents two successive generations of Rothschild men) fathered an illegitimate son. Obviously, this closely tracks the above-quoted, widely held belief that the early 20^thcentury Lady Carnavon, Almina, was the illegitimate daughter of Alfred de Rothschild. And note also that the real life Alfred de Rothschild died at age 78 in 1918, and therefore was an older contemporary of the fictional Lord Sinderby.

Which brings me back to the magnificently Shakespearean Thomas Barrow. How so? Because it occurred to me as I was writing this post that Thomas is, in a deliciously ironic way, a metafictional alter ego to his creator, Julian Fellowes. Just as Iago, Edmund, and Richard III, are all metafictional alter egos to their common creator, Shakespeare, so too does Thomas reflect one side of Fellowes’s artistry. By this I mean that in both instances, Shakespeare and Fellowes, we have an author who resembles his most Machiavellian characters in taking great delight, and in being very skilled, in manipulating the perceptions of other people. But of course there is one huge difference. A great author deceives his audience for worthy artistic and didactic purposes, but his villains deceive other characters for darker reasons!

And you surely have guessed why I brought up Barrow at this moment. Barrow is the one who contrives, by trickery, to bring Lord Sinderby’s mistress and illegitimate namesake to Downton Abbey, on false pretenses. But is he emulating Iago, Edmund, or Richard III in this action, or (as my Subject Line suggests) is his model in this instance Hamlet? After all, what is enacted when Lord Sinderby’s mistress and illegitimate son show up at Downton Abbey, is strikingly similar to the Mousetrap that Hamlet stages at another castle, Elsinore, in order to “catch the conscience of the King”—i.e., to trigger an involuntary nonverbal reaction which will confirm Claudius’s guilt (for murdering his brother the late King Hamlet) to Hamlet and Horatio.

But whereas the Mousetrap in Hamlet has the unfortunate (and ultimately tragic) effect of provoking Claudius into scheming to do away with Hamlet, in Downton Abbey, we see that Barrow’s Mousetrap has an immediate positive impact. We see Lord Sinderby a deeply chastened, humiliated man, having learned the hard way that (in his own words) people in glass houses ought not to throw stones, and so he will henceforth cease his stubborn, obstructionist hostility to his son’s interfaith marriage. In short, a happy-ending Hamlet, and the decisive and daring Barrow the improbable hero!

And there is one final twist to this bravura ironic comic turn by Fellowes . When Lord Sinderby’s mistress shows up with little Daniel in tow, those who know the Rothschild backstory recognize that the real-life counterpart of little Daniel is Almina, who actually wound up as the mistress of Highclere Castle (a la Cora as mistress of Downton Abbey), and therefore the boy Daniel is, in a metafictional sense, being brought “home” to the actual real life residence where Almina reigned as Lady Carnavon!

And it bears repeating that all of this has flowed from my recognizing, last week, the name “Coningsby”, as the title of Disraeli’s novel, in the following apparently throwaway dialog in the previous episode:

Susan: Do you have any English blood?

Atticus: Lady Melford is Mother's cousin.
Violet: Is she? I never knew that.

Which all is an object lesson that with many authors, from Shakespeare to Fellowes, it’s always a good idea to pay closer attention to things you never knew, because you may find out a great deal by being curious and suspicious.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

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