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

This is a followup to my previous post about the startling parallels I outlined between the playful witty banter (about the attributes and accomplishments of an ideal woman) engaged in by Iago and Desdemona in Othello, on the one hand, and by Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride & Prejudice, on the other. In that post, I showed how those parallels were, collectively, a giant hint by Jane Austen pointing to deeper, pervasive parallels between the characters of Iago and the Darcy of the shadow story of P&P that I have sleuthed out: both of them brooding, brilliant, enigmatic, stage-managing masters of deception.

Darcy is an enigma, in no small part because we only have two or three brief opportunities to hear his private thoughts during the entire novel; and few Janeites have ever freed themselves from the tyranny of the naïve Elizabeth’s confused perceptions, in order to see Darcy as he is. It is no surprise that two very different Darcys can be detected in the novel.

Whereas Iago is an enigma for a completely different reason. His is the focal consciousness of the ironically mis-titled Ohello; and yet, Iago’s sometimes cryptic asides, regularly shared with the audience, leave us far from certain in the end as to what really makes Iago tick. I.e., perhaps we can no more safely believe the accuracy of his statements to us, when we see the suffering that Othello, Desdemona, Cassio, and Roderigo all undergo, caused by their believing what “the honest Iago” says to them!

Today, in that same vein, I’d now like to point out three additional parallels between these two enigmatic protagonists----the last of which is, I hope you’ll agree, a true smoking gun deliberately left behind by Jane Austen in order to give her alert readers a better chance of spotting the Iago hidden in Darcy.

FIRST, Darcy, like Iago, repeatedly makes a big deal about being scrupulously “honest”, and both of them also liberally use the words “abhor” and “despise” with suspicious hyperbole. Combining the two words, Darcy poetically and memorably epitomizes this predilection, when he avers that “disguise of every sort is [his] abhorrence” .

This is essentially the pose that Iago repeatedly and insincerely adopts with every other major character in Othello. And when Eliza teases Darcy with “now despise me if you dare” and Darcy wittily replies, “Indeed! I do not dare.”, JA means us to hear another echo: that of Iago saying to Roderigo, “If ever I did dream of such a matter, abhor me.” and “Despise me, if I do not”.

SECOND, Darcy, like Iago, works hard at, and succeeds in, destroying the reputation of a charming but irresponsible younger man (Wickham, Cassio) who lacks control over his impulses, and therefore is very vulnerable to manipulative temptation placed in his path by a satanic opponent.

When Iago decides to turn Cassio into a villain in Othello’s eyes, he plies Cassio with booze and exploits his drinking problem. When Darcy decides, after Eliza rejects his first proposal, to turn Wickham into a villain in Elizabeth’s eyes, I suggest to you that Darcy takes no chances, and has his own trusted double agent, Mrs. Yonge, lead him directly to Wickham and Lydia in London, so Darcy can then play the hero who rescues the Bennet family from ruin, earning Eliza’s undying gratitude and shame.

THIRD, last, and most telling of all, please now note the uncanny (and, I suggest, not coincidental) resonance between the following speeches spoken by Darcy and Iago:

[Darcy] “I HAVE BEEN a SELFISH being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son (for many years an only child), I was spoilt by my parents, who, though good themselves (my father, particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be SELFISH and overbearing; to care for none beyond my own family circle; to think meanly of all the rest of THE WORLD; to wish at least to think ;meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. SUCH I WAS, FROM EIGHT TO EIGHT AND TWENTY; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased."

[Iago]O villainous! I HAVE LOOKED UPON THE WORLD FOR FOUR TIMES SEVEN YEARS; and since I could distinguishbetwixt a benefit and an injury, I never found man that knew how to love HIMSELF.

Darcy’s speech to Elizabeth is four times as long as Iago’s to Roderigo, and unless studied closely, they can superficially appear unrelated. However, upon closer examination, these speeches are seen to be eerily similar in two specific, interconnected aspects:

A: Each speech purports to be a philosophizing retrospection on life experience in “the world” with respect to self-love, albeit from opposite ends of the telescope. Iago speaks of the problem of man’s (meaning Roderigo’s) not loving himself enough, whereas Darcy reverses that logic, confessing to his own lifelong excess of self-love, until cured by a dose of Eliza’s miraculous truth serum.

But behind the apparently opposition of meaning, both such speeches cynically and ironically deal in the same currency of subtle flattery of the self-love of the listener. Iago works his black magic on the gullible Roderigo, giving his ego some major stroking about his chances of winning the hand of Desdemona, so that Roderigo will continue to unwittingly perform the valuable services that Iago still requires of him.

Darcy plays a very different card, which however is perfectly suited to his gull. What is Eliza’s greatest vulnerability? It is revealed early in the novel in the following exchange between Lizzy and Bingley, which Darcy joins in:

"That is exactly what I should have supposed of you," said Elizabeth.

"You begin to comprehend me, do you?" cried he, turning towards her.

"Oh! yes—I understand you perfectly."

"I wish I might take this for a compliment; but to be so easily seen through I am afraid is pitiful."

"That is as it happens. It does not follow that a deep, intricate character is more or less estimable than such a one as yours."

"Lizzy," cried her mother, "remember where you are, and do not run on in the wild manner that you are suffered to do at home."

"I did not know before," continued Bingley immediately, "that you were a studier of character. It must be an amusing study."

"Yes, but intricate characters are the most amusing. They have at least that advantage."

"The country," said Darcy, "can in general supply but a few subjects for such a study. In a country neighbourhood you move in a very confined and unvarying society."

"But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever."

Darcy’s dry comment about the deficiency of Eliza’s education as a “studier of character” is actually spot on—Eliza is a 21-year old country girl, whose ego has distorted her own native quickness into a grandiose belief that she perfectly understands even deep, intricate characters. Darcy, on the other hand, has actually been around the block many times in both the country and the town, and therefore we may guess that he files away, for future use, his detection of Eliza’s unfounded narcissism about her own psychological acuity.

Then, 40 chapters later, after Darcy has softened Elizabeth up with Pemberley, Mrs. Reynolds, and finally Darcy-to-the-rescue, he’s ready to complete his campaign of Iagoesque deception, by giving Eliza an Oscar-calilber “confession” that will play perfectly to her idea of herself as master ‘studier of character”.

B: Both Iago’s and Darcy’s speech include the corroborative citation of the lofty perspective of age whence such retrospection and generalization is being made. And on this point, Austen tracks Shakespeare in deploying the identical irony. I.e., such a speech should properly be spoken only by a person of no younger than 50 years of age, after accumulating a vast amount of life experience. But as it turns out, the self-important, grandiose Darcy and Iago are both still quite young men, even by the standards of their eras---and what’s remarkable is that they both just happen to be exactly the same age: 28!:

In closing, then, I ask you---what are the odds that this degree of parallelism between Darcy and Iago, as I’ve outlined in both of these recent posts, might have occurred by accident? I suggest to you that this would occur only once in eight-and-twenty (or, if you like, four times seven)…..centuries!

Sincerely, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

I had barely hit the “Send” button on my previous post about Darcy and Iago as both being 28 year old deceivers, when I realized that there was a whole nother aspect of Darcy’s Iago-esque scheming in P&P that I had failed to recall, one which would be right up Iago’s alley. Of course, I refer to Darcy’s interference in the Bingley-Jane courtship, interference which was not rectified for months, until Darcy decided to undo his interference, by giving Bingley his blessing to renew his attentions to Jane. It took me five minutes more to identify the keyword which JA used to tag Darcy’s interference back to its literary allusive source—‘triumph’, which, as you’ll see, is uttered twice in Act 4, Scene 1 of Othello!

In that scene, we watch in horrified fascination as Iago carries to fruition his nefarious plot to destroy Desdemona’s reputation in Othello’s eyes, by staging a performance for an audience of one (Othello), starring Iago, with the key supporting role of the unwitting Cassio. As Iago helpfully explains to the audience, he smears Desdemona’s chastity by speaking with Cassio about Bianca, while telling Othello he’s speaking with Cassio about Desdemona. This is almost exactly the same trick Borachio and Don John use to accomplish the same goal vis a vis Hero in Much Ado.

With that brief intro, here’s the scene. Keep an eye out for the ALL CAPS verbiage which JA picks up on in P&P, as I will show immediately thereafter:

IAGO Work on, My medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught; AND MANY WORTHY AND CHASTE DAMES EVEN THUS, ALL GUILTLESS, MEET REPROACH. What, ho! my lord!
My lord, I say! Othello!

Enter CASSIO How now, Cassio!

CASSIO What's the matter?

IAGO My lord is fall'n into an epilepsy: This is his second fit; he had one yesterday.

CASSIO Rub him about the temples.

IAGO No, forbear; The lethargy must have his quiet course: If not, he foams at mouth and by and by
Breaks out to savage madness. Look he stirs: Do you withdraw yourself a little while, He will recover straight: when he is gone, I would on great occasion speak with you.

Exit CASSIO

How is it, general? have you not hurt your head?

OTHELLO Dost thou mock me?

IAGO I mock you! no, by heaven. Would you would bear your fortune like a man!

OTHELLO A horned man's a monster and a beast.

IAGO There's many a beast then in a populous city, And many a civil monster.

OTHELLO Did he confess it?

IAGO Good sir, be a man; Think every bearded fellow that's but yoked May draw with you: there's millions now alive That nightly lie in those unproper beds Which they dare swear peculiar: your case is better. O, 'tis the spite of hell, the fiend's arch-mock, To lip a wanton in a secure couch,And to suppose her chaste! No, let me know;And knowing what I am, I know what she shall be.

OTHELLO O, thou art wise; 'tis certain.

IAGO Stand you awhile apart; Confine yourself but in a patient list. Whilst you were here o'erwhelmed with your grief-- A passion most unsuiting such a man-- Cassio came hither: I shifted him away, And laid good 'scuse upon your ecstasy, Bade him anon return and here speak with me; The which he promised. Do but encave yourself, And mark the fleers, the gibes, and notable scorns, That dwell in every region of his face; For I will make him tell the tale anew, Where, how, how oft, how long ago, and when He hath, and is again to cope your wife: I say, but mark his gesture. Marry, patience; Or I shall say you are all in all in spleen, And nothing of a man.

OTHELLO Dost thou hear, Iago? I will be found most cunning in my patience; But--dost thou hear?--most bloody.

IAGO That's not amiss; But yet keep time in all. Will you withdraw?

OTHELLO retires

Now will I question Cassio of Bianca,A housewife that by selling her desiresBuys herself bread and clothes: it is a creatureThat dotes on Cassio; as 'tis the strumpet's plague To beguile many and be beguiled by one: He, when he hears of her, cannot refrain From the excess of laughter. Here he comes:

Re-enter CASSIO

As he shall smile, Othello shall go mad;And his unbookish jealousy must construePoor Cassio's smiles, gestures and light behavior, Quite in the wrong. How do you now, lieutenant?

CASSIO The worser that you give me the additionWhose want even kills me.

IAGO Ply Desdemona well, and you are sure on't.

Speaking lower Now, if this suit lay in Bianco's power, How quickly should you speed!

CASSIO Alas, poor caitiff!

OTHELLO Look, how he laughs already!

IAGO I never knew woman love man so.

CASSIO Alas, poor rogue! I think, i' faith, she loves me.

OTHELLO Now he denies it faintly, and laughs it out.

IAGO Do you hear, Cassio?

OTHELLO Now he importunes him To tell it o'er: go to; well said, well said.

IAGO She gives it out that you shall marry hey:Do you intend it?

CASSIO Ha, ha, ha!

OTHELLO DO YOU TRIUMPH, ROMAN? DO YOU TRIUMPH?

CASSIO I marry her! what? a customer! Prithee, bear somecharity to my wit: do not think it so unwholesome. Ha, ha, ha!

OTHELLO So, so, so, so: they laugh that win.

IAGO 'Faith, the cry goes that you shall marry her.

CASSIO Prithee, say true.

IAGO I am a very villain else.

OTHELLO Have you scored me? Well.

CASSIO This is the monkey's own giving out: she ispersuaded I will marry her, out of her own love and
flattery, not out of my promise.

OTHELLO Iago beckons me; now he begins the story.

CASSIO She was here even now; she haunts me in every place.I was the other day talking on the sea-bank withcertain Venetians; and thither comes the bauble,and, by this hand, she falls me thus about my neck--

OTHELLO Crying 'O dear Cassio!' as it were: his gesture imports it.

CASSIO So hangs, and lolls, and weeps upon me; so hales,and pulls me: ha, ha, ha!

OTHELLO Now he tells how she plucked him to my chamber. O,I see that nose of yours, but not that dog I shall throw it to.

CASSIO Well, I must leave her company.

IAGO Before me! look, where she comes.

CASSIO ‘Tis such another fitchew! marry a perfumed one.

Enter BIANCA

What do you mean by this haunting of me?

BIANCA Let the devil and his dam haunt you! What did youmean by that same handkerchief you gave me even now? I was a fine fool to take it. I must take out the work?--A likely piece of work, that you should find it in your chamber, and not know who left it there! This is some minx's token, and I must take out the work? There; give it your hobby-horse: wheresoever you had it, I'll take out no work on't.

CASSIO How now, my sweet Bianca! how now! how now!

OTHELLO By heaven, that should be my handkerchief!

BIANCA An you'll come to supper to-night, you may; an youwill not, come when you are next prepared for. Exit

IAGO After her, after her.

CASSIO 'Faith, I must; she'll rail in the street else.

IAGO Will you sup there?

CASSIO 'Faith, I intend so.

IAGO Well, I may chance to see you; for I would very fain speak with you.

CASSIO Prithee, come; will you?

IAGO Go to; say no more.

Exit CASSIO

And now here’s the passage in Pride & Prejudice which I say JA tags to Othello via “triumph”, when Colonel Fitzwilliam makes Elizabeth ill (although not epileptic!) with his casual report of Darcy’s unwarranted interference:

“…some ladies of my acquaintance, Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley. I think I have heard you say that you know them."

"I know them a little. Their brother is a pleasant gentlemanlike man—he is a great friend of Darcy's."

"Oh! yes," said Elizabeth drily; "Mr. Darcy is uncommonly kind to Mr. Bingley, and takes a prodigious deal of care of him."

"Care of him! Yes, I really believe Darcy does take care of him in those points where he most wants care. From something that he told me in our journey hither, I have reason to think Bingley very much indebted to him. But I ought to beg his pardon, for I have no right to suppose that Bingley was the person meant. It was all conjecture."

"What is it you mean?"

"It is a circumstance which Darcy could not wish to be generally known, because if it were to get round to the lady's family, it would be an unpleasant thing."

"You may depend upon my not mentioning it."

"And remember that I have not much reason for supposing it to be Bingley. What he told me was merely this: that he congratulated himself on having lately saved a friend from the inconveniences of a most imprudent marriage, but without mentioning names or any other particulars, and I only suspected it to be Bingley from believing him the kind of young man to get into a scrape of that sort, and from knowing them to have been together the whole of last summer."

"Did Mr. Darcy give you reasons for this interference?"

"I understood that there were some very strong objections against the lady."

"AND WHAT ARTS DID HE USE TO SEPARATE THEM?"

"He did not talk to me of his own arts," said Fitzwilliam, smiling. "He only told me what I have now told you."

Elizabeth made no answer, and walked on, her heart swelling with indignation. After watching her a little, Fitzwilliam asked her why she was so thoughtful.

"I am thinking of what you have been telling me," said she. "Your cousin's conduct does not suit my feelings. Why was he to be the judge?"

"You are rather disposed to call his interference officious?"

"I do not see what right Mr. Darcy had to decide on the propriety of his friend's inclination, or why, upon his own judgement alone, he was to determine and direct in what manner his friend was to be happy. But," she continued, recollecting herself, "as we know none of the particulars, it is not fair to condemn him. It is not to be supposed that there was much affection in the case."

"That is not an unnatural surmise," said Fitzwilliam, "but it is a lessening of the honour of my cousin's triumph very sadly."

This was spoken jestingly; but it appeared to her so just a picture of Mr. Darcy, that she would not trust herself with an answer…That he had been concerned in the measures taken to separate Bingley and Jane she had never doubted; but she had always attributed to Miss Bingley the principal design and arrangement of them. If his own vanity, however, did not mislead him, he was the cause, his pride and caprice were the cause, of all that Jane had suffered, and still continued to suffer. He had ruined for a while every hope of happiness for the most affectionate, generous heart in the world; and no one could say how lasting an evil he might have inflicted….”

In posts over the past few years, I’ve opined that Darcy does not merely mean to suggest to Bingley that the Bennets lack sufficient status and money for Jane to be a good match—I read Colonel Fitzwilliam’s pointed reference to “very strong objections against the lady” as much stronger than that- I believe Darcy was referring to Jane’s having engaged in sexual relations with another man (or men)—i.e., that Jane was (as Don John tells Claudio in Much Ado, and Iago hints to Othello) a common stale, or even a whore.

And so JA uses Colonel Fitzwilliam’s snide comment about Darcy’s “triumph” in separating Bingley from Jane as a tag for that above-quoted scene in which Iago uses Cassio as an unwitting talking puppet in order to raise that very same innuendo about Desdemona vis a vis Cassio. The only difference is that the triumph is situated at a different corner of the romantic triangle. I.e., in Othello, the “triumph” is what Iago’s performance leads Othello to mistakenly imagine Cassio is feeling about supposedly cuckolding Othello with Desdemona, and then supposedly laughingly discarding her as if she were trash. Whereas, in P&P, the “triumph” is the very real feeling that Darcy boasts of to Fitzwilliam, after Darcy has emulated Iago and successfully blackened Jane’s character to Bingley. Either way, the echo is unmistakable. Plus, reading how Elizabeth’s heart swells with indignation upon hearing the Colonel’s report reminds us of Othello’s reaction to Iago’s tale of the handkerchief: Yield up, O love, thy crown and HEARTED throne To tyrannous hate! SWELL, bosom, with thy fraught,For 'tis of aspics' tongues!

I conclude by connecting the dots from the above to a post of mine last year, in which I suggested that the “triumph” mentioned by the Colonel was meant to ping an echo of “The Triumph of the Whale” , Charles Lamb’s savagely satirical poem about the Prince Regent, which Colleen Sheehan in 2007 established as a primary source for the “Prince of Whales” answer to the “courtship” charade in Chapter 9 of Emma.

I still believe that’s a valid interpretation, but now I see that my earlier catch fits remarkably well with the idea of Darcy as Iago creating the illusion of Cassio’s cuckolding “triumph” in Othello’s mind. How so? Because we know from JA’s candid statement in her 1812 letter to trusted friend Martha Lloyd that she hated the Prince for treating his wife Princess Caroline so abominably—and the most salient recent portion of that mistreatment was the Prince’s hypocritical public smearing of his wife as an adulterous wife—hypocitical because it was his own rejection of his wife over a period of many years, combined with his notorious history of whoring, gambling, gluttony, and perhaps a few other deadly sins on the list, that, as JA noted, he had driven his wife into scandalous actions: “….but if I must give up the Princess, I am resolved at least always to think that she would have been respectable, if the Prince had behaved only tolerably by her at first."

In “if the Prince had behaved only tolerably by her at first”, I now hear the source of the verbal dart Eliza hurls at Darcy (“had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner”). And since I claim that Darcy’s final repentance….

"…The recollection of what I then said, of my conduct, my manners, my expressions during the whole of it, is now, and has been many months, inexpressibly painful to me. Your reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: 'had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner.' Those were your words. You know not, you can scarcely conceive, how they have tortured me;—though it was some time, I confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice."

…is Iago-esque in its insincerity, it’s another master stroke of JA to place such faux-repentance right before his insincere “eight-and-twenty” speech.

Oh—I almost forgot to explain why Darcy reverses his interference and allows Bingley and Jane to marry—it’s because Darcy has bigger fish to fry than his animus toward Jane; which is to trick Elizabeth into marrying him—not because he loves her, but because, as I’ve also written before, Elizabeth, when she turns 21, and as the unwitting legitimate daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Darcy unjustly banished at birth, will be the true heiress of Pemberley, and therefore Darcy had to marry her to preserve his own ownership----what a prince!

So there you have it, Iago, Mr. Darcy, and the Prince Regent---an unholy triad of “triumphant” deceivers!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

A few weeks ago, I wrote:

“…I am not the first to note that Viola and Iago speak the identical words "I am not what I am". For example, Stephen Booth noted this parallel in 1995, when he wrote the following in drawing a number of surprising parallels between Othello and Twelfth Night: "To begin with the truly minimal, central deceivers in both Twelfth Night and Othello echo and play on “I am that I am” the phrase in Exodus 3:14 by which Jehovah so unsatisfactorily defines himself for Moses. During their second interview, Olivia asks the disguised ‘Viola’ “his” opinion of her and thereby opens the way into an ontological cul-de-sac ["I am not what I am"]…Iago uses the same words in celebrating the difference between what he is and what he appears to be…"

However, where I vigorously disagree with Booth is that I do not consider the usage of that identical God-like pronouncement by both Iago and Viola to be of minimal significance. Rather, I believe this exact quotation is Shakespeare's way of alerting the reader who treats his entire canon as a kind of "Bible" with dense, thematically significant intertextuality amongst its parts, that Iago and Viola are profoundly similar not merely in their readiness to assume metaphorical disguise to achieve their goals, but in their readiness to assume ACTUAL disguise (Viola presenting herself to the world as Cesario, Iago briefly presenting himself to the world as the CLOWN)!

But it was only as I was finishing this post, that I noticed Shakespeare's final wink at the parallel between Viola in disguise as Cesario and Iago disguised as CLOWN. It occurs when Viola says to Olivia ---"now I am your FOOL". For Shakespeare, fools and CLOWNs were virtually synonymous. And this is especially the case in Twelfth Night, because in the speech attributions and stage directions Feste is always referred to as "CLOWN", whereas he himself, and the other characters in the play, always refer to him as Olivia's fool!” END QUOTE FROM MY EARLIER POST

A wild and crazy idea occurred to me yesterday relative to the above: “What if Iago was not merely like Viola in adopting a physical disguise as another person (the Clown), but was even more like Viola, in being a woman who adopts, over an extended period of time, a physical disguise as a man?” I quickly realized that this would provide a much more satisfying explanation than I gave in my earlier post for why Shakespeare caused Iago to echo Viola in uttering that identical parody of God’s words in Exodus. I.e., Viola spends nearly the entirety of Twelfth Night disguised as “Cesario”---what if Iago is a woman (whose real name we never hear) doing exactly the same thing in Othello?

One argument in favor of this reading is that it is not entirely new. Some quick research showed me that there have been productions of Othello over the years in which Iago has indeed been played as a woman disguised as a man, although I cannot discern that this decision was based on a belief that it was fulfilling Shakespeare’s original intention. And I also found a half dozen Tweets in which the same idea has been floated. But…I don’t see that anyone has ever connected the dots between those productions and speculations, on the one hand, and the crucial fact that Iago echoes Viola in that famous line, on the other. Let’s take a closer look, shall we, and see how those dots connect up?

In Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene 1, Olivia is making Viola (“Cesario”) very uncomfortable by coming on to “him” romantically, as a result of which Viola in effect shares a private joke with the audience, that she obviously does not wish to share with Olivia. We in the audience, who witnessed the transformation of Viola into “Cesario” at the beginning of the play, therefore understand “I am not what I am” as Viola’s coded and poignant message that she is not a man, but a woman – and what’s more, a woman in love with a man – Duke Orsino—to whom for whatever reason she does not yet wish to reveal her female identity, when we read:

VIOLA Then westward-ho! Grace and good disposition Attend your ladyship!
You'll nothing, madam, to my lord by me?

OLIVIA Stay: I prithee, tell me what thou thinkest of me.

VIOLA That you do think you are not what you are.

OLIVIA If I think so, I think the same of you.

VIOLA Then think you right: I AM NOT WHAT I AM.

OLIVIA I would you were as I would have you be!

VIOLA Would it be better, madam, than I am? I wish it might, for now I am your fool.

OLIVIA O, what a deal of scorn looks beautiful In the contempt and anger of his lip!
A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon Than love that would seem hid: love's night is noon.
Cesario, by the roses of the spring, By maidhood, honour, truth and every thing,
I love thee so, that, maugre all thy pride, Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide.
Do not extort thy reasons from this clause, For that I woo, thou therefore hast no cause,
But rather reason thus with reason fetter, Love sought is good, but given unsought better.

VIOLA By innocence I swear, and by my youth I have one heart, one bosom and one truth,
And that no woman has; nor never none Shall mistress be of it, save I alone.
And so adieu, good madam: never more Will I my master's tears to you deplore.

OLIVIA Yet come again; for thou perhaps mayst move That heart, which now abhors, to like his love.

Now let’s take a look at Iago, who speaks that exact same line but in a very different circumstance. As the play begins, we catch him in mid-conversation defending himself to Roderigo, who is irked because he believes Iago, who has supposedly been acting as Roderigo’s hired “Yenta” for courtship of the rich heiress Desdemona, should have done something to prevent Othello from eloping with Roderigo’s “intended”.

IAGO O, sir, content you;
I follow him to serve my turn upon him: We cannot all be masters, nor all masters
Cannot be truly follow'd. You shall mark Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave,
That, doting on his own obsequious bondage, Wears out his time, much like his master's ass,
For nought but provender, and when he's old, cashier'd: Whip me such honest knaves. Others there are
Who, trimm'd in forms and visages of duty, Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves,
And, throwing but shows of service on their lords, Do well thrive by them and when they have lined their coats Do themselves homage: these fellows have some soul; And such a one do I profess myself. For, sir,
It is as sure as you are Roderigo, Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago:
In following him, I follow but myself; Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so, for my peculiar end: For when my outward action doth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart In compliment extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at: I AM NOT WHAT I AM……

Iago’s defense is to explain to Roderigo how much he really hates Othello, all appearances to the contrary. He even makes a point of saying that he serves Othello “not…for love”. He uses the Biblical phraseology to explain that he disguises himself as Othello’s honest servant, while secretly using Othello for his own “peculiar end”—but Iago never explains what that “peculiar end” is, and end that would presumably coincide with preventing Othello from marrying Desdemona. How come?

The true motive (or lack thereof) for Iago’s malicious destruction of the happiness of those closest to him has been a mystery that has fascinated and stymied centuries of Shakespeare scholars and ordinary Bardolaters alike. One strand of speculative interpretation has explored whether Iago is a gay man who loves Othello, and therefore (ironically) is motivated by jealousy and a desire for revenge on both the secret beloved who has spurned him, and also on the woman who has stolen his secret beloved’s heart right from under him. That latter motivation sparks even more irony, when we hear Roderigo’s self-pity, because Iago, as longtime unrequited lover of Othello at close proximity, has reason to feel much greater pain upon Othello’s sudden elopement, than Roderigo, whose courtship of Desdemona has existed entirely in his own imagination, as carefully and cynically cultivated by Iago.

I’ve always found great merit in that interpretation of Iago as a gay man, but what if Iago’s “peculiar end” is even more convincingly understood as being the same exact end that Viola seeks? I.e., what if Iago is a woman who impersonates a man because it is the only way she can stay close, in the role of trusted right hand “man”, to Othello, the man sheloves? In that reading, Othello would not be Olivia, but Duke Orsino.

The ripple effects of this massive change in understanding the play’s protagonist are enormous, but to take just one, think of the layers of fresh meaning this interpretation brings to the two scenes in the middle of Othello during which Iago eventually maneuvers Othello toward a strange “marriage ceremony” .

In Act 2, Scene 3, right after Iago firmly plants the first seeds of jealousy in Othello’s brain, note Iago’s words of love subtly slipped into the mix:

OTHELLO …if thou dost love me,Show me thy thought.

IAGO My lord, you know I love you.

OTHELLO I think thou dost;And, for I know thou'rt full of love and honesty,
And weigh'st thy words before thou givest them breath,Therefore these stops of thine fright me the more:
For such things in a false disloyal knave Are tricks of custom, but in a man that's just
They are close delations, working from the heart That passion cannot rule.

IAGO For Michael Cassio, I dare be sworn I think that he is honest.

OTHELLO I think so too.

IAGO MEN SHOULD BE WHAT THEY SEEM; OR THOSE THAT BE NOT, WOULD THEY MIGHT SEEM NONE!

OTHELLO CERTAIN, MEN SHOULD BE WHAT THEY SEEM.

IAGO Why, then, I think Cassio's an honest man.

OTHELLO Nay, yet there's more in this: I prithee, speak to me as to thy thinkings,
As thou dost ruminate, and give thy worst of thoughts The worst of words.

…

OTHELLO By heaven, I'll know thy thoughts.

IAGO You cannot, if my heart were in your hand;Nor shall not, whilst 'tis in my custody.

OTHELLO Ha!

IAGO O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on; that cuckold lives in bliss Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger;
But, O, what damned minutes tells he o'er Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!

OTHELLO O misery!

IAGO Poor and content is rich and rich enough, But riches fineless is as poor as winter
To him that ever fears he shall be poor. Good heaven, the souls of all my tribe defend From jealousy!

OTHELLO …. No, Iago; I'll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove;
And on the proof, there is no more but this,-- Away at once with love or jealousy!

IAGO I am glad of it; for now I shall have reason To show the love and duty that I bear you
With franker spirit: therefore, as I am bound, Receive it from me. I speak not yet of proof.
….

IAGO Why, go to then;She that, so young, could give out such a seeming,
To seal her father's eyes up close as oak- He thought 'twas witchcraft--but I am much to blame;
I humbly do beseech you of your pardon For too much loving you.

OTHELLO I am bound to thee for ever.

IAGO I see this hath a little dash'd your spirits.

OTHELLO Not a jot, not a jot.

IAGO I' faith, I fear it has.I hope you will consider what is spoke
Comes from my love. But I do see you're moved: I am to pray you not to strain my speech
To grosser issues nor to larger reach Than to suspicion.

…..[Going] My lord, I take my leave.

OTHELLO Why did I marry? This honest creature doubtless
Sees and knows more, much more, than he unfolds.

And then, we reach the culmination of this strange romantic arc in an ad hoc ceremony improvised by Iago and Othello in Act 3, Scene 3:

OTHELLO Never, Iago: Like to the Pontic sea,Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on To the Propontic and the Hellespont,
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge Swallow them up. Now, by yond marble heaven,

Kneels

In the due reverence of a sacred vow I here engage my words.

IAGO Do not rise yet.

Kneels Witness, you ever-burning lights above, You elements that clip us round about,
Witness that here Iago doth give up The execution of his wit, hands, heart, To wrong'd Othello's service! Let him command, And to obey shall be in me remorse, What bloody business ever.

They rise

OTHELLO I greet thy love, Not with vain thanks, but with acceptance bounteous,And will upon the instant put thee to't: Within these three days let me hear thee say That Cassio's not alive.

IAGO My friend is dead; 'tis done at your request:But let her live.

OTHELLO Damn her, lewd minx! O, damn her! Come, go with me apart; I will withdraw,
To furnish me with some swift means of death For the fair devil. Now art thou my lieutenant.

IAGO I am your own for ever.Exeunt

Not exactly a traditional exchange of “I do’s”, but it’s the best Iago can get, right?

And realize that this arc of Iago’s heterosexual love for Othello began when Shakespeare gave us that first, unambiguous signal that Iago is a woman, prompting us to recall Viola speaking specifically about her disguise as a man. It makes perfect sense that this echo be sounded at the moment when we’re first introduced to Iago in Act 1, Scene 1, of Othello, even before we have any idea at all about Iago’s character.

By the end of Act 1, Scene 1, we know that disguise is Iago’s middle name, so to speak, so such a physical disguise would fit perfectly with such a character. And then, when we get to Act 3, Scenes 1 and 4, we’re already primed to think about Iago as a master of disguise, and so we in the audience would have a good chance of hearing the Clown’s Iagoishness, and then guessing that Iago was also the Clown in disguise, making it a disguise of a disguise! We know by then that Iago’s art of disguise has no limits, in his behavior, his speech, and/or his garb---it is all part and parcel of the essence of the satanic shapeshifter he so clearly was.

And all of the above would be enough to make this line of inquiry worthwhile, but here’s where Iago as a woman gets more interesting still. Through my brief study this morning, I quickly found that there’s another significant echo in Othello of that above quoted exchange between Viola and Olivia – in fact, it occurs a mere three lines earlier than Viola’s “I am not what I am” --- it’s the line in which Olivia flirts with “Cesario” in a very particular way:

OLIVIA Stay: I prithee, TELL ME WHAT THOU THINKEST OF ME.

VIOLA That you do think you are not what you are.

OLIVIA If I think so, I think the same of you.

VIOLA Then think you right: I AM NOT WHAT I AM.

OLIVIA I would you were as I would have you be!

VIOLA Would it be better, madam, than I am? I wish it might, for now I am your fool.

I realized as soon as I read that exchange with Othello specifically in mind, that I had just seen something exactly like that in Othello, because I had just discussed the following exchange in Act 2, Scene 1, in one of my posts over the weekend just ended!:

DESDEMONA WHAT WOULDST THOU WRITE OF ME, IF THOU SHOULDST PRAISE ME?

IAGO O gentle lady, do not put me to't; For I am nothing, if not critical.

DESDEMONA Come on assay. There's one gone to the harbour?

IAGO Ay, madam.

DESDEMONA I am not merry; but I do beguile The thing I am, by seeming otherwise.
Come, HOW WOULDST THOU PRAISE ME?

Is it just a coincidence that Iago and Desdemona both strongly echo in the above quoted passage the distinctive lines spoken by Viola and Olivia in their short exchange? Of course not!! Shakespeare was NOT that unconscious an artist! No, I claim he very much meant for those who read his plays as a unified canon like the Bible, or even those who had only seen Twelfth Night on stage, and then were attending a performance of Othello two years later, to notice this striking double parallelism, and then, to ask themselves: what might this mean? And seeing Iago as a woman becomes even more interesting when we see Desdemona’s echoing Olivia in the above scenes, in terms of what it suggests to us about both Iago and Desdemona.

Olivia has no conscious awareness that “Cesario” is actually female, but it is also plausible to speculate that Olivia’s strong attraction to Viola is based at least in part on an unconscious lesbian attraction she feels for Viola (and perhaps vice versa as well?). This all lays the groundwork for Olivia’s abrupt transfer of her affections to the very masculine Sebastian (who, by the way, used the assumed name “Roderigo” while on the voyage to Illyria), who somehow manages to resemble Viola very strongly, at the end of the play.

So, what is Shakespeare suggesting to us about Desdemona, by drawing this surprising parallel between the recently married innocent bride of Othello, on the one hand, and the worldly, provocative, desirable unmarried heiress Olivia, on the other? Desdemona explains her teasing questions posed to Iago as an innocent way for her to reduce her anxiety for Othello’s safe return from the wars. After all, Desdemona knows Iago to be Othello’s right hand “man”, and so who would be a safer man to mildly flirt with?

How can she even guess that such flirting will both exacerbate Iago’s jealousy of Othello, but also reveal to his sharp eye her vulnerability to defamation. Iago will take that innocent flirting by Desdemona, and weave it into a narrative of wanton adultery. And perhaps, even in the innocent young woman, might there also be, some subconscious sexual attraction felt by Desdemona to Iago, similar to that felt by Olivia toward “Cesario”? or even similar to the way Duke Orsino sees “Cesario”? Many questions, no clear answers—but I hope you’ll agree that the meme of Iago as a woman opens up some fruitful avenues for fresh interpretation of the entirety of Othello.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

In Janeites and Austen-L this morning, my good friend Diane Reynolds responded to my recent posts about Darcy as Iago, and also Iago as a woman, as follows:

Diane: "Arnie, I want to say your idea of Othello being a woman disguised as a man is fascinating"

And Diane, I want to say thanks for that, so I will: THANKS! ;)

Diane: "I have not been able to read through your entire post on Darcy and Othello (an condensed summary would be helpful)....

You are always so tactful in dispensing such wise counsel, and I never regret taking it. ;)

Essentially in the shadow story of P&P, Darcy is, and always remains, the same nasty prick he so patently is at the Meryton assembly. So, at least in the beginning, he is not Iago-like, mainly because he doesn't have to be, right? In the game of cards which has been his world, he has always held all the cards. Actually, at the end of the novel, he gives a remarkably candid description of himself from birth until he encounters Elizabeth.

But, even before Elizabeth rejects him, he does doone Iago-esque thing--he privately smears Jane's reputation to Bingley, in order to trick Bingley into abandoning Jane without warning or explanation. So that makes Jane the Desdemona of P&P.

Which raises the very interesting (and unanswerable) question as to whether Iago initiates his Machiavellian maneuvering as a result of a similar shock, i.e., being bypassed by Cassio for the promotion he desires (which may also involve his losing out on close contact with Othello, which, if Iago is a woman secretly in love with Othello, will be a massive loss for Iago). My guess is that Iago has been a maneuverer for a long time, because he, unlike Darcy, was, as far as we can tell, not born to wealth or power.

Anyway, back to Darcy. It is only after Elizabeth shocks Darcy with her rejection of his first proposal, that Darcy is thwarted for the first time in his 28 years. And, being the toxic narcissist that he is, Darcy does NOT repent and reform, he merely PRETENDS to do so, because he is the proverbial man who cannot take no for an answer.

And so, that is very moment when he shifts into high Iago gear, and....

....writes the letter to Elizabeth smearing Wickham (who is the "Cassio" of the novel),

....secretly obtains Mr. Gardiner's cooperation (because he knows Gardiner, probably from business connections formed, unknown to Elizabeth, via Mrs. Gardiner's Lambton origins and then networking in London, where the Gardiners live fulltime and Darcy lives part time) in "randomly" bringing Elizabeth to Pemberley so that first she will (literally) be brought to a climax being overpowered by its grandeur, and then Darcy

....instructs Mrs. Reynolds (on threat of severe penalty if she refused to play along--she is sorta the "Emilia" of P&P) to paint a totally false rosy picture of Darcy's character,

....tempts Wickham into eloping with Lydia, all carefully monitored by Darcy via Mrs. Yonge, so that Darcy can then step in and "earn" Elizabeth's eternal gratitude for rescuing the Bennet family reputation,

....gives Bingley permission to marry Jane, to earn still more gratitude, then

...STILL plays hard to get, even when he shows up again at Longbourn, by remaining silent.

In short, then, Darcy uses his Machiavellian guile, and his considerable wealth and influence over others, to produce a profound, drastic reversal in Elizabeth's attitude toward him, so that she will be reduced to rubble, basically. She is so totally taken in, that she actually believes that a marriage to Darcy will be a marriage of true minds, although it will be the furthest thing from that, since his primary motivation, aside from finding her physically attractive (she being the first woman who has ever been more attractive to him than his male friends), and from the revenge motivations you so beautifully spelled out, Diane, is that she will, upon attaining age 21, become the heir of Pemberley--and if she is his wife by that time, HE will become the clear owner of Pemberley --because, you see, Darcy is actually NOT Mr. Darcy's legitimate son in the first place after all!

That's how I see Darcy as Iago, in a nutshell.

Diane also wrote [Diane, I changed Othello to Iago where appropriate, as per your followup correction]:

"if the shadow Darcy is an Iago figure, I might understand it as follows: (this is not "motiveless malignancy" however) Darcy, after initially insulting Elizabeth, begins to fall for her, especially after she stays at Netherfield. But she is clearly not so "into" him. Then the charming Wickham comes on the scene and it is no secret in the community how Elizabeth feels about him. Miss Bingley warns Elizabeth about Wickham at the ball, showing the gossip has spread to her circle. Darcy must be miffed that his rival is winning the woman he, Darcy, has fallen in love with. It could needle him the way Othello's success apparently needles Iago: Darcy gets respect based on his status, but Wickham can make friends and influence people--including Lizzie--based on his personal appeal. Annoying. ..."

So far, so good, that is all consistent with my summary, above.

Diane continued: "...Let's assume Darcy is irked (this is the dark, shadow Darcy, who has long harbored a diseased hatred for the Wickham who can charm everybody as Daarcy can't.) ...."

Yes, exactly! That's also Blifil vis a vis Tom Jones, which, because I have long seen Darcy and Wickham as Blifil and Tom, now suggests to me that Fielding also modeled Blifil in part on Iago. And guess what, I am not alone---I just found the following interesting 1877 comparison of Blifil with Iago, which was written by Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf:

"The one great difficulty in Tom Jones is the assumption that the excellent Allworthy should have been deceived for years by the hvpocrite Blifil, and blind to the substantial kindliness of his ward. Here we may fancy that Fielding has been forced to be unnatural by his plot. Yet he suggests a satisfactory solution with admirable skill. Allworthy is prejudiced in favor of Blifil by the apparently unjust prejudice of Blifil’s mother in favor of the jovial Tom. A generous man may easily become blind to the faults of a supposed victim of maternal injustice; and even here Fielding fairly escapes from the blame due to ordinary novelists who invent impossible misunderstandings in order to bring about intricate perplexities. Blifil is perhaps the one case...in which Fielding seems to lose his unvarying coolness of judgment; and the explanation is obvious. The one fault to which he is, so to speak, unjust, is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, indeed, cannot well be painted too black, but it should not be made impossible. When Fielding has to deal with such a character he for once loses his self-command, and, like inferior writers, begins to be angry with his creatures. Instead of analyzing and explaining, he simply reviles and leaves us in presence of amoral anomaly. Blifil is not more wicked than Iago, but we seem to understand the psychical chemistry by which an Iago is compounded; whereas Blifil can only be regarded as a devil (if the word be not too dignified) who does not really belong to this world at all."

Sorry for the interruption of your summary, Diane, to which I now return:

"The annoyance will hit the stratosphere when Darcy is turned down by Elizabeth in part based on what Wickham has told her! Now he really wants revenge. So ... knowing Wickham's weak spot for pretty girls, Darcy manipulates Wickham into running off with Lydia, then saves the day, looks like hero and has concocted the perfect revenge. It is the perfect revenge. His rival can't accuse him of doing wrong by him, and he has married him off to a dimwit. But the best part of it is, he has married him off to the sister of the woman Wickham loves! And Darcy marries the woman Wickham loves. Elizabeth, Darcy and Wickham will be thrown together enough (though not too much--Darcy won't want to chance an affair) for Darcy to be able to taunt Wickham with having Elizabeth. It has a diabolical genius, worthy of an Othello."

Absolutely brilliant, Diane, BRAVO! And that also complements the other material motivations that I see as driving the shadow Darcy. But I really love your analysis, that is indeed poetic injustice!

The shadow Darcy is a very very interesting character, isn't he? ;)

Which gets to my core point--the deepest didactic reason JA wrote her double stories---if the Darcy of the overt story is the quintessence of the female fantasy of reforming a bad man into a good one by the power of a woman's love, and the Darcy of the shadow story is the quintessence of the cautionary tale of the dangers of that same female fantasy --- which is that it is wished for ten times more often than it is actually achieved---then Jane Austen will have taught a very valuable experiential lesson to her female readers---when you meet a guy who looks like a "project" worth working on, take EXTRA time--and check all your ideas out with your most cynical friends---before you take a leap. Like making a nuclear arms deal with the Russians or the iranians--trust or distrust as you choose, but in all events verify!

[Diane then responded to my above post, and I wrote the following in response to her]

Diane: "Except that Jane doesn't get killed, at least not within the confines of the novel--the difference between comedy and tragedy! "

Exactly! In effect, in the shadow story of P&P, "Iago" (i.e., Darcy) prioritizes his goals, and quickly realizes, after Elizabeth confronts him with his having separated Bingley from Jane, that he needs to reverse his destruction of Jane's relationship with Bingley, in order to achieve his more pressing goal, which is to get Elizabeth to reverse herself, and agree to marry him! The shadow Darcy, like Iago (and like Elton, as Knightley describes him) will act rationally in pursuit of his courtship goals, and so he forfeits the lesser "triumph" he boasted of to Colonel Fitzwilliam, for the sake of a greater triumph--over Elizabeth's resistance to him. But note that Darcy does not do so immediately--in his letter to Elizabeth, he attempts to hold onto it:

"Perhaps this concealment, this disguise was beneath me; it is done, however, and it was done for the best. On this subject I have nothing more to say, no other apology to offer. If I have wounded your sister's feelings, it was unknowingly done and though the motives which governed me may to you very naturally appear insufficient, I have not yet learnt to condemn them. "

He only learns to condemn them once he has a chance to plot his strategy for the campaign to destroy Elizabeth's resistance to him, and he realizes that it will be most expedient, and will maximize his chances to win that campaign, if he surrenders that earlier "triumph" at just the right moment. So, he does not ever really learn to condemn them, he just (as with everything else in the second half of the novel) pretends to do so.

Further responding to your very interesting comment, Diane----you also make me realize that if Shakespeare had wished to not end Othello tragically, he might have had Desdemona reach Cassio just in the nick of time to foil Iago's handkerchief scheme. Delaying their speaking to each other was why, I claim, Iago twice dons the disguise of the Clown in Act 3, so as to delay first Cassio, and then Desdemona, as they try to contact each other. But Shakespeare could have easily thrown in some other plausible twist of the plot such that Iago's on-the-fly improvisations nonetheless fall just short of success.

And (carrying this hypothetical forward a bit more) ...if Shakespeare had allowed Desdemona to get her handkerchief back from Cassio before he could give it to Bianca, then Iago, being endlessly flexible in his tactics, would have accepted what he could not change, and instead would have been forced to come up with some fresh scheme to achieve his goal of remaining close to Othello. He might, e.g., have chosen some other way of getting Roderigo out of the way (because Roderigo was a constant threat of exposing all of Iago's scheming), and then might have come up with a Plan B in which Othello and Desdemona would not have to die. That would sorta be like the endings of the problem plays, like All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, which both lurch toward tragedy before abruptly turning "comic" at the very end, but in a very UNromantic way --just think about Helena marrying the jerk Bertram, and Angelo marrying the woman he jilted-------sorta like...Mansfield Park!

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

In followup to my recent discussion with Diane Reynolds re Darcy as Iago, I just realized who is the other assistant to Mr. Darcy in his campaign to subtly coerce Elizabeth into marrying him. It’s the person without whose assistance Darcy could never have discreetly and effectively stage-managed the Wickham-Lydia elopement and shotgun-marriage---- Colonel Forster!

As I stated in my previous post in our recent thread, I already had deduced that Mrs. Yonge must be in cahoots with Darcy, so as to let Darcy know exactly where to find Wickham and Lydia; but I was still unclear as to how Darcy managed to maintain some measure of remote control over what went on between Wickham and Lydia prior to their arrival in London.

That's when it dawned on me – of course! It's Colonel Forster who proposes the excursion to Brighton, it's Colonel Forster's wife who is Lydia's bosom friend, and it's Colonel Forster’s surrogate oversight upon which Mr. Bennet relies in order to keep an eye on Lydia. I also suspect that there are a few more duties fulfilled by the Colonel that will become visible as I think about this some more—such as, e.g., the possibility that the Colonel, at Darcy’s suggestion, followed Iago’s lead and got Wickham drunk a good deal in Brighton, and maybe even took him out to gaming establishments as well.

This list I just described already collectively pegs the Colonel as just the man Darcy would have depended upon to look the other way at just the right moment, so as to gull Wickham into believing he and Lydia were slipping away to Mrs. Yonge in London scot-free (so to speak) and unfollowed.

But that’s only the half of this amazing tour de force by JA. I believe she also gave us nonstop subliminal hints the entire length of the novel, as to the importance of Colonel Forster in the shadow story of P&P, including , for starters, in this passage:

"What does Mr. Darcy mean," said she to Charlotte, "by listening to my conversation with Colonel Forster?"

"That is a question which Mr. Darcy only can answer."

This is JA’s early wink at the beginning of a connection between Darcy and the Colonel . In the overt story, it suggests nothing other than that Darcy eavesdrops solely to satisfy his own surprising (to him) spike of interest in Elizabeth’s intelligent “beautiful dark eyes”, and that is a reasonable assumption. However, once armed with the hindsight of my interpretation of the shadow story, most of all as to Darcy as Iago and Colonel Forster as one of his minions, I imagine that Darcy recalls that bit of eavesdropping when he reaches out to Colonel Forster after Elizabeth rejects his first proposal, in order to enlist his assistance. I also imagine that Darcy’s offer was sweetened by the offer of an appropriate emolument, to be paid to the Colonel upon the successful completion of Darcy’s scheme to make himself a hero to Elizabeth. And so, what a rich irony to read Charlotte’s coy explanation of the reason for Darcy’s eavesdropping being “a question which Mr. Darcy only can answer”—indeed that is an appropriate way to describe the motivation and tactics of a Regency Era Iago! And it is especially so, because I have believed since 2004 what Kim Damstra first showed in 1999, i.e., that Charlotte is a benevolent Iago who works behind the scenes to bring about the marriage of Elizabeth to Darcy, for the higher purpose of Charlotte once again getting to live in close proximity to the one she loves—Elizabeth!

But back to Colonel Forster. That passage is, as I said, only for starters. It turns out that there is an even more audacious train of continuing wordplay in P&P, which reinforces, at nearly a dozen key points in the storyline, the role that Colonel Forster plays that helps Darcy to force her (meaning Elizabeth) to marry him! I’m not the first to notice this wordplay, I found an April 2009 Honors Thesis entitled “Jane Austin and the significance of names” by Amanda Katherine Reinbold,, which stated the following:

“When read out loud, the name [Forster] can sound like “forced her.” The language in the novel that surrounds the descriptions Lydia gives of Mrs. Forster in particular support the connection of this surname with the idea of force. For example, one paragraph in which Lydia describes to her sisters a party that the Forsters have thrown also contains the phrase “forced to” twice: “…Pen was FORCED to come by HERself” and “…we were FORCED to borrow one of HER gowns”. Though this scene itself is not the most explicit representation of the Forsters’ purpose in the novel, the language the narrator uses surrounding them invites this reading. As the couple, they force into existence the situation that loses Lydia her reputation, though Lydia is anything but an innocent bystander.”

END QUOTE FROM REINBOLD

My addition of ALL CAPS illustrates that Reinbold only fell short, in failing to note that it wasn’t just “forced” that was echoed in both of those quoted passages, it was “forced…her” (homophone of “Forster”)---and she also failed to note the obvious sexual innuendo in those two particularly lewd statements uttered by the shameless Lydia.

But those two passages are only the tip of an iceberg of subliminal allusion, as we see in the following additional passages that all hint at the sound of the name “Forster”:

Immediately before we read Colonel Forster’s name for the first time in that eavesdropping scene, we read: “Though [Darcy] had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in [Elizabeth’s] form, he was FORCED to acknowledge HER figure to be light and pleasing…”

Then, when Mrs. Bennet attempts damage control after Elizabeth rejects Mr. Collins’s proposal, he replies: “If therefore she actually persists in rejecting my suit, perhaps it were better not to FORCE HER into accepting me, because if liable to such defects of temper, she could not contribute much to my felicity."

Then, when Mrs. Bennet grumbles about Charlotte swooping Mr. Collins up in the aftermath of Elizabeth’s rejection, she adds three “hers” after “forced”, as if to lengthen out the last syllable of the name, for humourous effect, to sound like “Forstererer”: "Indeed, Mr. Bennet," said she, "it is very hard to think that Charlotte Lucas should ever be mistress of this house, that I should be FORCED to make way for HER, and live to see HER take HER place in it!"

But then, as if to ratchet up the subliminal suggestion to a fever pitch, when Mr. Bennet rationalizes sending Lydia off with the Colonel and his wife to Brighton, we read not one, not three, but FIVE “hers” following “forced”, sounding like Forstererererer!!!!!: With this answer Elizabeth was FORCED to be content; but HER own opinion continued the same, and she left him disappointed and sorry. It was not in HER nature, however, to increase HER vexations by dwelling on them. She was confident of having performed HER duty, and to fret over unavoidable evils, or augment them by anxiety, was no part of HER disposition.

But we’re still not done. When Elizabeth is being subjected to the intense pressure (or “force”) of the Pemberley experience, plus seeing Bingley again, we read: But she had no reason to fear Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner's curiosity; it was not their wish to FORCE HER communication.

And then, while still at Pembeley, after Caroline Bingley gets the final humiliation of hearing Darcy reassert his admiration for Elizabeth’s looks, we read: He then went away, and Miss Bingley was left to all the satisfaction of having FORCED him to say what gave no one any pain but HERself.

But perhaps the eleverest wordplay in this vein is Elizabeth’s reaction to Jane as soon as they are alone after learning the news about Wickham and Lydia: “…That they should marry, small as is their chance of happiness, and wretched as is his character, we are FORCED TO Rejoice. Oh, Lydia!" ---“forcetor”, spread across three words, is a perfect homonym for “Forster”, and I imagine Jane Austen took special pride in that bit of wordplay!

And of course it is fitting that Lydia should prompt the next one, given that Elizabeth’s curiosity has been provoked to find out why Darcy was at Wickham’s wedding:

"Thank you," said Lydia, "for if you did, I should certainly tell you all, and then Wickham would be angry."

On such encouragement to ask, Elizabeth was FORCED to put it out of HER power, by running away.

But to live in ignorance on such a point was impossible; or at least it was impossible not to try for information. Mr. Darcy had been at HER sister's wedding.

And then Lydia is again a part of the next such passage in P&P:

The day of his and Lydia's departure soon came, and Mrs. Bennet was FORCED to submit to a separation, which, as her husband by no means entered into HER scheme of their all going to Newcastle, was likely to continue at least a twelvemonth.

And it is altogether fitting that the final such passage is the one which occurs at the very instant when Darcy has indeed “forced her” (meaning Elizabeth) to accept his second proposal: Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now FORCED HERself to speak…

Elizabeth only thinks that she forced herself—but those who know the shadow story of P&P know that Darcy “forced her” (with that key assist from Colonel Forster!)

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Laurie, let me start by thanking you verymuch for your considered, respectful, and probing disagreements with my (admittedly radical and unprecedented) claim that Iago is disguised as the Clown in 3.1 and 3.4 of Othello. It’s exactly the kind of reply I hope to receive, whether in agreement or disagreement, because I must sharpen my argument to keep it viable.

Laurie wrote: “I recall that something very like this was posted in response to Larry Weiss. I admit at the time that I was in transit from Australia to New Orleans for SAA, so I skimmed it, but my memory served me well in thinking that you had not yet addressed 3.1, Arnie”

Laurie, as you discerned, in my early reply to Larry, I wrote “3.4” when I meant to write “3.1”, and I only became aware of the typo when reading, and responding to, your previous reply to me---hence my (silent) correction of that typo in that reply. I apologize for any confusion, and I’m glad you went on to reply to my claim as I originally intended it.

That confusion has an inadvertent silver lining, as it suggests to me another line of rebuttal to your critique of my argument re Iago’s wearing a disguise as a Clown that Iago could readily remove and re-don in a very short time period. I.e., while it appears that the situation in 3.4 is different from that in 3.1 in terms of time lapse, upon examination it is not materially different at all, as I’ll now explain:

On the one hand, in 3.4 there’s clearly plenty of time between the Clown’s exit and Iago’s entrance, to allow Iago to discreetly remove and stow away his disguise as Clown. I imagine that disguise to have consisted of a face-concealing beard---like the one Iago specifically directs Roderigo to wear while in Cyprus----together with some appropriate loose-fitting Clown garb, which Iago could’ve worn right on top of his usual clothing. Such a disguise would have been very easily and quickly removed, and would also have provided an additional benefit—it would’ve concealed Iago’s actual trim soldier’s body shape, making his build appear huskier. And the rest of Iago’s disguise, such as change of voice and gait, would obviously have been instantaneously shed.

In 3.1, on the other hand, it might seem at first glance that there’s not enough time for Iago to pull off the same quick-change, when we read this sequence:

CASSIO Prithee, keep up thy quillets. There's a poor piece of gold for thee: if the gentlewoman that attends the general's wife be stirring, tell her there's one Cassio entreats her a little favour of speech:
wilt thou do this?

CLOWN She is stirring, sir: if she will stir hither, I shall seem to notify unto her.

CASSIO Do, good my friend.

Exit CLOWN

Enter IAGO

In happy time, Iago.

IAGO You have not been a-bed, then?

CASSIO

Why, no; the day had broke
Before we parted. I have made bold, Iago,
To send in to your wife: my suit to her
Is, that she will to virtuous Desdemona
Procure me some access.

It’s easy to take the path of least resistance, and read “Exit Clown Enter Iago”, as if only a few seconds elapse between these two stage events. However, I suggest that would be an assumption based on no actual evidence. Going further, if we study the above passage, I say it’s more plausible and realistic if there’s a gap of about 30 seconds between that exit and entry. Why?

On the upper side, a gap of more than 30 seconds without spoken dialog or significant action would begin to feel like dead air on the radio—but for 30 seconds, I think it would be dramatically quite effective if, after the Clown enters the castle, we watch Cassio nervously pacing back and forth a half dozen times. Cassio would not expect Emilia to appear instantaneously, because it would take time minutes for the Clown to get to her, to speak to her, and then for her to make her way down to the castle entrance. But Cassio would be very agitated, and every second would feel like a minute to him. That would make good theater, don’t you think? The absence of dialog for 30 seconds would work perfectly.

And then, when Iago suddenly shows up after only 30 seconds, instead of a few minutes, Cassio would be pleasantly surprised, which neatly explains why he says “In happy time, Iago”. This would translate today into “Even quicker than I expected, and just the guy I needed to talk to as well.”

And, in the same vein, there’s nothing in Iago’s “You have not been a-bed, then?” that suggests that Iago, who presumably emerged from Othello’s castle the same way the Clown entered, has encountered the Clown, or that suggests that Iago has any idea that Cassio was going to be there when he walked outside. Yet if Iago and the Clown had bumped into each other, you’d think that the Clown would’ve immediately passed Cassio’s message on to Iago, to in turn pass on to Iago’s own wife, Emilia, right?

And, getting to my main point, if 30 seconds have elapsed between the Clown’s exit and Iago’s entrance, that gives Iago plenty of time to shed his Clown disguise and stow it away safely in a dark hall corner near the castle entrance, where he can quickly get at it again (which he will need to do so after he leaves Othello’s room at the castle at the end of 3.3). And so Iago can then bolster his disguise as the Clown by speaking to Cassio as if he did not bump into the (imaginary) Clown in the hall inside.

Laurie also wrote: “You begin the revised comment with “What if…,” which always concerns me when it is offered for an explanation of what is supposed to be true for the play (in this case, that the Clown’s true identity isIago). The moment we have to supplement the explicit content of the play with a “what if” explanation to cover what isn’t there, we are moving away from the play, I suggest. “

As I think I’ve already made clear in the first part of this reply, above, when I wrote “What if”, I wasn’t suggesting a departure from what is written in the text of the play, so much as I’m suggesting a departure from reading the stage directions too passively, and assuming Shakespeare always wrote them to be as complete and clear as possible.

I’d also like to answer by presenting my specific claim in larger context.

First, apropos my claim that it’s a normal part of Shakespearean stagecraft for performers to have to answer questions like “how much time to leave between exits and entrances”, correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t believe it was common for Shakespeare to micromanage so closely, as to specify time lapses between the exit of one character followed without intervening event by the exit of another character. My recollection is that Shakespeare did not do this, not because it is unimportant, but because he expected the performer to examine the context of the scene, and to determine what sort of time lapse would make sense. Just as the greatest musical composers left a great deal to the interpretive imagination of the performer in their musical notations.

Second, think about all the careful analysis that any actor must engage in, in order to determine how to deliver lines – again, correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe there are many speeches in the Shakespeare canon in which he micromanages by, e.g., telling actors which lines are meant to be delivered ironically, and which are to be delivered straight. Why is that silence any different from the silence I see regarding time lapses and other similar issues pertaining to entrances and exits?

While it’s beyond the scope of this thread of posts, my research over the past decade has repeatedly suggested to me that, in some very significant aspects, Shakespeare deliberately wrote his stage directions with “significant silences”. By this I mean, he didn’t explicitly say there was an implicit gap in those directions to be filled in, but he was (like Iago at the end of Othello) going “to never speak word” about that, one way or the other. That leaves it up to the reader of the play to discern what is implicit.

This is the very same methodology that Iago often used, where, like the devil he was, he was happy to avoid outright lying if he could achieve his deceptions by letting his victims make their own false assumptions about what he was telling them. And it’s also the same methodology as is employed by many other Shakespearean characters, like Viola, who, while still in disguise as a man, speaks truthfully but cryptically to Olivia and Duke Orsino about her gender.

In other words, I see myself as extending an old and rich strand of Shakespearean criticism that has seen Shakespeare engaging in metafictional games with his readers. By this I mean, Shakespeare conceived the relationship between himself as playwright, and his readers, as involving the same Machiavellian manipulations of point of view as are employed by a number of his most memorable characters. And there is no character more that way than Iago, so therefore it is particularly fitting that Shakespeare should engage in such subtle misleading in the way Iago is presented to the audience.

In short, then, I attribute to Shakespeare a didactic motive in leaving silences and gaps in his play texts which invite the sort of inquiry I’ve made in this case, and which provide a great payoff in discovering major, surprising aspects of his greatest characters.

Laurie also wrote: “Yet let us go further. The explanation goes on to say that upon the direction to “exit,” the actor playing the Clown/Iago would not leave the stage, but would still be seen “at the extreme side of the stage, behind some sort of wall …” – I’d be curious to find out where else in the early modern dramatic canon a stage direction to “exit” was expected to be a direction to notleave the stage. This would seem to be a significant departure from the practice of entrances and exits as they have been understood. Even where there have been debates about where an entrance or exit is to be made (Fitzpatrick vs Gurr and Ichikawa, for example), I’ve never heard it said that an exit was actually not an exit at all. I’m also unsure that “some sort of wall” might be built to erect on the Globe stage, or the Blackfriars’ stage, or at court, for the sole purpose of allowing this switch to be made on-stage: does the play offer other situations in which this set element would be used?”

I would guess that there have been such stagings and usage of props, and I ask anyone else reading this with knowledge of stage history (that I lack) to chime in if you know of any.

But let’s assume for purposes of argument that you are correct, Laurie, that my suggestion regarding an exit not being a full exit vis a vis the audience would be unprecedented in the staging of Othello. That doesn’t make it incorrect, it may just mean that no one who has previously staged Othello has read the stage directions of the Clown’s exit followed by Iago’s entrance from the metafictional perspective I put forward, above. I.e., perhaps my interpretation has always been implicit in the text, but has been hiding patiently in plain sight for four centuries, waiting to be recognized.

But, as I think about it further, my interpretation does not depend upon an exit of the Clown being a partial exit – I can also readily imagine, instead, that Iago (disguised as the Clown) makes his exit, then discards the disguise entirely offstage, and then enters within 30 seconds, appearing as himself. I believe that the actor playing Iago/Clown could easily do things gesturally that would clue the audience into that disguise. For example (and I imagine an experienced actor could think of several ways of pulling this off), Iago, while disguised as the Clown, might have walked with a limp (a fitting idea, given Othello’s later imagining he sees Iago’s hooves!) in order to further distance the Clown’s appearance from Iago’s. But then, as the Clown exits, and Cassio is not looking at him, he might instantly stop limping and give a significant look at the audience as he walks off.

But….I still prefer the idea of the exit that is not entirely an exit, because I still believe it would be more dramatic. Speaking of which….

Laurie also wrote: “I’m sorry, Arnie, but I don’t think that the pause required for the shedding of a disguise (since nothing else happens on stage while this is supposed to take place) lends itself to an electrifying dramatic moment, but that’s a difference of opinion.”

Yes we do disagree, But I guess neither of us will really know unless and until my version is enacted before a real audience, and we observe their reaction! ;)

Laurie also wrote: “Of more interpretive importance, I think, is the suggestion that a costume or at least mask and prop change constitutes the “same sort of duping” Iago inflicts on others. I simply don’t see this as anything like the sort of duping to which he subjects other characters in the play, where his arsenal is routinely verbal.”

But you forget---Iago deploys Roderigo in physical disguise as his secret agent! Doesn’t that totally rebut your point, since it shows that Iago’s “toolkit” of deception does include physical disguise? And then, it’s a distinction without a difference between Roderigo in disguise at Iago’s direction, and Iago in disguise at his own direction.

And even if it weren’t for that, I’d still aver that knowing Iago to be a master of deception in verbal ways does make it more likely that he’d also achieve deception in nonverbal ways as well.

Laurie also wrote: “The final concern I have relates to the added comment in response to my query: “it’s a giant hint to a creative director” = first, this suggests Shakespeare foresaw the advent of the director as a focus for creative oversight of a production….”

And I reply: that’s another distinction without a difference! In every staging of a Shakespeare play, going back to his own, someone, whether Shakespeare himself, or a director, or an actor, has to decide how to make performance questions like this one. So whether you want to think of it as a hint to a director, or to an actor, or to whomever else you like, it’s a hint. Sometimes silences can be deafening.

Laurie concluded with: “As I say, then, I’m yet to be convinced.”

If you will favor me with another substantive reply, addressing my further arguments, above, I will be honored. Perhaps I will nudge you a step or two closer to convincing. ;)

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

5 ½ years ago, I wrote the following passing comment about resonance I noticed between Romeo & Juliet and Pride & Prejudice:

“It is interesting to think about Juliet's parents pressuring her to marry Paris, the way Mrs. Bennet pressures Lizzy to marry Mr. Collins; and Darcy and Lizzy, like Romeo & Juliet, meeting at a big dance, but [then the contrast of] how JA depicts Lizzy and Darcy being mutually attracted, but fighting it from the start, [whereas Romeo & Juliet immediately fall for each other].”

At that time, I searched, and was very surprised to find only one Austen scholar who had ever recognized any sort of veiled allusion to R&J in P&P—Park Honan, who in his 1989 Austen bio, wrote:

“Darcy's visible disgust with a Meryton society lacking in grace, culture and variety has deeply allied him with her at first. 'Nay, gentle Romeo, we must have you dance,' Mercutio had said in Romeo and Juliet. Mr. Bingley's first words to Darcy echo the Shakespearean scene: "Come, Darcy," said he, "I must have you dance. I hate to see you standing about by yourself in this stupid manner. You had much better dance."…Darcy, like Romeo, is a self-obsessed spectator, and Bingley is like Mercutio the reveler…”

Then, in 2014, while posting about the allusion to Romeo & Juliet that I detected in Persuasion, I noted, in passing, yet another Darcy-Romeo parallel:

“I have often posted about JA’s sexual puns on the word “pen”, and I am also far from the first to point to the phallic resonance of Wentworth’s “pen” which drops, and the debate about who holds the “pen”, etc., in Persuasion, and also, e.g., in Darcy’s preference to “mend” his “own pen”, despite Caroline’s offer to do it for him. Well, R&J also has an amazing sexual pun on “pen” in a similar masturbatory sense when we first hear [from Montague], in Act 1, Scene 1, about [his son] Romeo pining away for Rosaline before he meets Juliet:

Many a morning hath he there been seen,
With tears augmenting the fresh morning dew.
Adding to clouds more clouds with his deep sighs;
But all so soon as the all-cheering sun
Should in the furthest east begin to draw
The shady curtains from Aurora's bed,
Away from the light steals home my heavy son,

AND PRIVATE IN HIS CHAMBER PENS HIMSELF
Shuts up his windows, locks far daylight out
And makes himself an artificial night:
Black and portentous must this humour prove,
Unless good counsel may the cause remove.

As I look back today at the above with the benefit of 5 ½ years of hindsight, I now add another strong parallel I see between Shakespeare’s tragic lovers and Austen’s romantic lovers: that the relationships between the two couples both ignite and progress in defiance of the strong opposition of powerful family members (Juliet’s parents and Lady Catherine, respectively).

And I also notice an irony in the history of English literature, which is that, in 2016, Elizabeth and Darcy, and Romeo and Juliet, are regularly mentioned in the same breath, as both being at the top of the general reading public’s list of the most romantic fictional couples. And yet, other than Honan’s brief catch, and my own short contributions, above, despite diligent searching the past 2 days, I can’t find, in the past two centuries of Austen criticism, any other detections of JA, in 1812-3, writing P&P with Shakespeare’s great early romantic tragedy in mind as one of her many literary allusive sources.

I mention all this because the other day I fortuitously happened upon yet another striking and specific textual parallel between R&J and P&P --- one which is so obvious, that it has me slapping my head “Duh!” for not noticing it sooner, given that I’ve studied both texts very carefully over the years. It is a very specific parallel between Juliet’s Nurse and Mrs. Bennet----two characters who, when you think about it, could not be more similar, right? --- a textual parallel which, I claim, cannot possibly have arisen by chance. Let’s see what you think.

Please first read the following passage, in which the Nurse engages in sharp, but playful, repartee with the Capulet household servant Peter, immediately after Mercutio has just mocked the Nurse’s appearance while engaging in very pointed sexual repartee:

NURSE An a' [i.e., Mercutio] speak any thing against me, I'll take him down, an a' were lustier than he is, and twenty such Jacks; and if I cannot, I'll find those that shall. Scurvy knave! I am none of his flirt-gills; I am none of his skains-mates. And thou must stand by too, and suffer every knave to use me at his pleasure?

PETER I saw no man use you a pleasure; if I had, my weapon should quickly have been out, I warrant you: I dare draw as soon as another man, if I see occasion in a good quarrel, and the law on my side.

NURSE Now, afore God, I AM SO VEXED, THAT EVERY PART ABOUT ME QUIVERS. Scurvy knave! …

Surely every Janeite reading the ALL CAPS portion of the Nurse’s last line in that excerpt immediately made the connection to Mrs. Bennet’s agitated statements to Elizabeth and Jane about Lydia’s elopement with Wickham, right after the former has just arrived back at Longbourn from Pemberley with the Gardiners:

“…And, above all, keep Mr. Bennet from fighting. Tell him what a dreadful state I am in, that I am frighted out of my wits—and have such TREMBLINGS, such FLUTTERINGS, all over me—such SPASMS in my side and pains in my head, and such BEATINGS at heart, that I can get no rest by night nor by day….”

Notice not only the striking parallelism of language between the Nurse’s and Mrs. Bennet’s speeches, but also the striking parallelism of context on not one, but seven different points---i.e., both of these speeches are spoken by (1) an older woman (2) who is a “mother” to the heroine, an older woman who (3) unrestrainedly and graphically (4) complains about her nervous psychosomatic symptoms, and then, as part of the conversation, (5) the topic of an older man close to that older woman (6) fighting a duel with (7) a smooth-talking young buck, is raised.

And I’d be remiss not to add that “vexed” is not only the verb which Juliet’s Nurse uses to describe her emotions which accompany her “quiverings”, it just happens to be Mrs. Bennet’s favorite verb to describe her own feelings during all those memorable moments when her “nerves” pay her a visit, as we see in the following four passages (the last one being Jane Austen’s narrator describing Mrs. Bennet’s feelings):

"Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in VEXING me. You have no compassion for my poor NERVES."

“…First of all, he asked Miss Lucas. I was so VEXED to see him stand up with her! “

"I beg you would not put it into Lizzy's head to be VEXED by his ill-treatment, for he is such a disagreeable man, that it would be quite a misfortune to be liked by him….”

She was now in an IRRITATION as violent from delight, as she had ever been FIDGETY from alarm and VEXATION.

Now, of course, I acknowledge that there is also an enormous contrast here---even a reversal--between these two passages, Shakespeare’s and Austen’s. The R&J passage involves the Nurse’s comic raillery at an early stage of the story, when there’s no imminent threat of the tragedy to come when (another parallel to R&J in P&P) two impetuous young lovers scheme to get out of town and live together elsewhere in defiance of community mores. Conversely, in P&P, Mrs. Bennet is seriously upset at the elopement, which portends social tragedy for the Bennet family, as to which Mr. Collins (inadvertently parodying Juliet’s suicide) observes “The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison of this.”

Based on all of those parallels, I believe there can be no reasonable doubt that Jane Austen meant to pointedly remind her readers of Juliet’s inimitable Nurse when she wrote that memorable dialog for the equally inimitable Mrs. Bennet. In that regard, other Austen scholars, including myself, have previously noticed and described the subliminal allusive presence of Juliet’s Nurse in the psyches of both Mrs. Norris and Miss Bates—both of them sharing the Nurse’s garrulous verbosity and intrusiveness—but for some odd reason, nobody before me the other day has noticed that Mrs. Bennet is actually the most direct descendant of Juliet’s Nurse.

And I also wonder whether Jane Austen also meant for us to notice the following Miss-Bingley-like sexual innuendoes by Mercutio to the lovesick Romeo….

I conjure thee by Rosaline's BRIGHT EYES,
By her high forehead and her scarlet lip,
By her fine foot, straight leg and QUIVERING THIGH (Shakespeare’s wink at the Nurse’s quiverings)
And the demesnes that there adjacent lie,
That in thy likeness thou appear to us!

…when we repeatedly hear in P&P about Darcy’s fascination with Elizabeth’s fine, brightened eyes.

I conclude by pointing out that the allusion to Romeo & Juliet which is so powerfully tagged in Mrs. Bennet’s nervous vexations, takes on much, much greater significance still, when viewed through the lens of the dark shadow story of P&P I’ve been sketching out during the past decade. Most of all, there’s a troubling parallel between Romeo and the dark Darcy of the shadow story of P&P, which, as I initially noted, is winked at in their sharing both an initial reluctance to dance at big balls, as well as a penchant for solitary “mending” of their respective “pens”.

In “Wherefore Art Thou Tereu? Juliet and the Legacy of Rape” in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Spring 2005), pp. 127-156, Robert N. Watson and Stephen Dickey persuasively spell out the numerous literary allusions which Shakespeare slyly wove into the character of Romeo, which all converge on the very disturbing and anti-romantic image of Romeo as a predatory rapist instead of lovestruck young man.

I see Elizabeth’s married life with Darcy as a parody of Juliet’s tragic death, because it will be no walk in the park for her to be married to the dark Darcy of the shadow story, who does not actually repent and reform after she rejects his first proposal, but merely pretends to do so, because he is a man who cannot take no for an answer, and who does not hesitate to use his considerable resources to stage an extended experience for Elizabeth during the latter half of P&P, which destroys her (healthy) resistance to him.

But if you find that a door you don’t wish to walk through with me today, then I hope at least that you will still enjoy the comic pleasure of thinking about Mrs. Bennet and Juliet’s Nurse, as Austen’s and Shakespeare’s “sisters” in vexed quiverings!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Ellen Moody wrote: “Reviewed by a polite reviewer in the Washington Post, by the time you get to the end you realize this is an awful concoction, calculated trash like pop substitutions which jar with imitations of Austen's language that make the prose style stilted:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/eligible-a-modern-retelling-of-pride-and-prejudice/2016/04/13/04147e3e-0183-11e6-9d36-33d198ea26c5_story.html “

Ellen, I also would call Ron Charles’s review of Eligible(which actually consists of both a video clip and a text review, both of them excellent) polite, but I want to explain how. I see Charles as adopting an amusedly tolerant stance, via his zany Andy-Rooney-like stylings combined with astute literary insight. In this way, he politely and wittily gets across, in a gentlemanly way, that Sittenfeld doesn’t really succeed in channeling Austen. What Charles also demonstrates, is that he channels Austen very well, as he seems to capture the inspired juveniliac wackiness which never left Austen’s fiction, but she just tucked neatly just under the surface.

But, in fairness to Sittenfeld, she deserves considerable benefit of the doubt, because she has bravely and voluntarily put herself in the middle of the crosshairs of a few million wary rifles aimed at her novel by Janeites (like myself). We’re naturally skeptical of any other writer with the stones to adapt the most popular Austen novel—indeed, in 2016, arguably the most popular novel ever written. So I quickly read a few of the short opening chapters in Eligible, and I found Sittenfeld’s writing style to be reasonably light, bright and sparkling in its own right---nowhere near Austen’s, of course, in any of those categories, but it did not strike me as a jarring imitation, nor did it have the look of calculated trash.

More substantively, what became clear (and was not at all surprising) was that Sittenfeld (who is not a Janeite herself--more on that below) was not ambitious enough to attempt to capture the complex irony that oozes off every page of Austen’s fiction, especially P&P. Sittenfeld’s handling of point of view seems, at first blush, fairly conventional, and in particular it does not seem to derive anything from the deliberate blurring of the subjective reality of the heroine and the objective reality of the narrator, the free indirect discourse of which Austen was an ultimate master.

In short, then, upon very first impression, Eligible seems to be a good effort at a modern romcom novel which just happens to closely hew to the plot structure and characters of P&P.

Nor, apparently, did she seem to expose any subtextual insights into P&P, other than…..

[SPOILERS AS TO ONE CHARACTER, ALREADY DISCUSSED IN REVIEWS I’VE READ]

….turning Wickham into a transgendered person. My guess is that this twist might have been inspired by Lydia’s vivid description of the transvestitism (which of course is not the same as transgender) of the militiaman Chamberlayne:

“…We dressed up Chamberlayne in woman's clothes on purpose to pass for a lady, only think what fun! Not a soul knew of it, but Colonel and Mrs. Forster, and Kitty and me, except my aunt, for we were forced to borrow one of her gowns; and you cannot imagine how well he looked! When Denny, and Wickham, and Pratt, and two or three more of the men came in, they did not know him in the least. Lord! how I laughed! and so did Mrs. Forster. I thought I should have died. And thatmade the men suspect something, and then they soon found out what was the matter."

I fear we’ll never know whether “they soon found out what was the matter” was JA’s way of referring to anything more than cross-dressing, but maybe Sittenfeld saw something in the text of P&P that I haven’t so far?

I base these (admittedly) snap judgments, not only on my browsing in Sittenfeld’s novel and Charles’s review, but also upon the following as well:

I read a sampling of online reviews, including this withering, savage pan, courtesy of Ursula LeGuin (who seems to be spot-on in her condemnation, but who adopts a curmudgeonly, censorious tone which sounds unnervingly--and surely unintentionally--similar to the tone of Lady Catherine de Bourgh!):

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/21/eligible-curtist-sittenfeld-review-modern-retelling-pride-and-prejudice-novel?CMP=twt_gu

Here’s the heart of LeGuin’s complaint with Eligible: “The five Bennet sisters and their parents speak to one another only in this style: peevish and self-assertive, relentlessly striving for wit through mere insult. Any differentiation of character is hard to perceive through the artificiality and monotony of the dialogue. Lydia and Kitty can be shown as more disagreeable than Liz and Jane only by the slightly greater coarseness of their language. If I were tempted to feel any sympathy for any of them – for Mary, perhaps, the plain, bookish, feminist one – I would be forestalled by the author…”

That will be one point I will focus on, if I do wind up reading Eligible– I would have no problem with Sittenfeld having the Bennet girls speak saltily like many women in 2013, if she otherwise succeeds in differentiating their characters.

Then I read Sittenfeld’s recent article in support of her novel’s release here:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/20/jane-austen-feminist-pride-prejudice-curtis-sittenfeld?CMP=twt_gu “Was Jane Austen a feminist? The answer is in her stories”

Here’s one comment Sittenfeld made that stood out for me: “That Austen herself never married (despite a proposal she accepted before turning it down a day later) is treated as such a noteworthy fact that it seems to be the exception that proves the rule.”

I think it was a missed opportunity for Sittenfeld not to have dug into Austen’s bio more deeply, and to have realized that Jane Austen, at least after her early twenties if not all along, really did not want to be married to a man. Sittenfeld also clearly had no idea that Austen alluded to Wollstonecraft’s writings in all her novels, and that (as I see it) Austen was more radical in her feminism than Wollstonecraft!

Then I listened to the interview of Sittenfeld by NPR’s Diane Rehm that aired this morning:

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2016-04-21/curtis-sittenfeld-eligible

The interview will seem thin in Austenian substance to Janeites, but was still fun to listen to. As you will gather from it, Sittenfeld speaks of Janeites as a group she herself does not belong to, nor did she give any sign of having read intensively on Jane Austen’s biography.

And there I will close for now, but will probably followup at some point in the future.

[Added 5:09 pm PST]

This is a good, thorough interview with Sittenfeld that covers a lot of bases:

https://www.guernicamag.com/daily/curtis-sittenfeld-pride-and-prejudice-then-now/?platform=hootsuite

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

In my post earlier this week… http://tinyurl.com/jkqvv8m…I made the case that Jane Austen, whose genius gave us her unforgettable comic depiction of the nerves, tremblings, and vexations of Mrs. Bennet, also used that same comic figure, Mrs. Bennet, for a much more serious purpose. I.e., Austen wished to subtly point to the Nurse in Romeo & Juliet uttering the following line to the Capulet servant Peter about Mercutio’s sexually provocative remarks about her:

“Now, afore God, I AM SO VEXED, THAT EVERY PART ABOUT ME QUIVERS. Scurvy knave! …”

I ended that post with the following summation:

“I see Elizabeth’s married life with Darcy as a parody of Juliet’s tragic death, because it will be no walk in the park for her to be married to the dark Darcy of the shadow story, who does not actually repent and reform after she rejects his first proposal, but merely pretends to do so, because he is a man who cannot take no for an answer, and who does not hesitate to use his considerable resources to stage an extended experience for Elizabeth during the latter half of P&P, which destroys her (healthy) resistance to him.”

However, it was only today that I took a second look at the rest of that speech by Juliet’s Nurse, and, as you’ll see below, that led me right to a scholar’sparadise: Jane Austen’s three-tiered allusion in Pride & Prejudice, to (chronologically in literary history) Romeo & Juliet (1599), Paradise Lost (1667), andTom Jones (1749)! It takes my breath away, much as Elizabeth’s breath is taken away by her first views of Pemberley –except mine is not a “fool’s paradise”, it’s for real----I hope you’ll agree!

PART ONE: Pride & Prejudice (1813) Allusion to Romeo & Juliet (1599):

To begin, here’s the rest of the Nurse’s speech, when she abruptly shifts from addressing Peter, to issuing a stern warning to the amorous Romeo:

“…but first let me tell ye, if ye should lead her into A FOOL’S PARADISE, as they say, it were a very GROSS kind of behavior, as they say: for the gentlewoman is young; and, therefore, if you should DEAL DOUBLE with her, truly it were an ill thing to be offered to any gentlewoman, and very weak dealing.”

However, Elizabeth’s ear is not tuned to the frequency of her mother’s warning, and so, when Elizabeth first sees Pemberley, she indeed enters a “fool’s paradise”. I.e. its Edenic majesty mesmerizes Elizabeth, with such powerful effect that she later jokes to sister Jane (but the joke is actually on Elizabeth) about dating her own falling in love with Darcy from her “first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”

And, once we think about Pemberley as a “fool’s paradise” for Elizabeth, we find that the idea of a single female’s reactions to being wooed as being “foolish”, is a motif that pops up at key points during P&P.

First, we read this exchange between Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Collins, in which Elizabeth is called “foolish” by both of them, for rejecting his proposal:

"But, depend upon it, Mr. Collins," she added, "that Lizzy shall be brought to reason. I will speak to her about it directly. She is a very headstrong, FOOLISH girl, and does not know her own interest but I will make her know it."

"Pardon me for interrupting you, madam," cried Mr. Collins; "but if she is really headstrong and FOOLISH, I know not whether she would altogether be a very desirable wife to a man in my situation, who naturally looks for happiness in the marriage state….”

Then, we read these contradictory comments regarding the foolishness of Miss King’s flip flop in responses to Wickham’s sudden courtship:

[first, to Mrs. Gardiner, when Miss King appears receptive toWickham’s advances]

"Well," cried Elizabeth, "have it as you choose. He shall be mercenary, and she shall be FOOLISH."

[then, after Miss King rejects Wickham’s proposal]

"And Mary King is safe!" added Elizabeth; "safe from a connection imprudent as to fortune."

[Lydia] "She is a great FOOL for going away, if she liked him."

And then, after Elizabeth rejects Darcy’s first proposal, we read this description of her struggle to make sense of what she reads in Darcy’s letter. The word “fool” does not appear, but the Nurse’s references to “gross” and “double dealing” are distinctly echoed. Elizabeth does not wish to be fooled, but doesn’t at that moment know who is trying to fool her, Darcy or Wickham:

“What Wickham had said of the living was fresh in her memory, and as she recalled his very words, it was impossible not to feel that there was GROSS DUPLICITY on one side or the other; and, for a few moments, she flattered herself that her wishes did not err….”

And finally, here are Elizabeth’s private thoughts as she steals glances at Darcy at Longbourn, after she has already fully and irreversibly entered the “fool’s paradise” while at Pemberley:

"If he does not come to me, then," said she, "I shall give him up for ever."

The gentlemen came; and she thought he looked as if he would have answered her hopes; but, alas! the ladies had crowded round the table, where Miss Bennet was making tea, and Elizabeth pouring out the coffee, in so close a confederacy that there was not a single vacancy near her which would admit of a chair. And on the gentlemen's approaching, one of the girls moved closer to her than ever, and said, in a whisper: "The men shan't come and part us, I am determined. We want none of them; do we?"

Darcy had walked away to another part of the room. She followed him with her eyes, envied everyone to whom he spoke, had scarcely patience enough to help anybody to coffee; and then was enraged against herself for being so silly!

"A man who has once been refused! How could I ever be FOOLISH enough to expect a renewal of his love? Is there one among the sex, who would not protest against such a weakness as a second proposal to the same woman? There is no indignity so abhorrent to their feelings!"

Despite the feminist warnings of the unnamed whisperer (whom I identified 6 years ago as Elizabeth’s sister Mary!), Elizabeth by this point is so far lost wandering in her fool’s paradise, that she now defines being “foolish” as holding out hope for a second proposal from Darcy she now desperately yearns for.

So there you have a brief tour of Jane Austen’s veiled allusion to the fool’s paradise of Elizabeth’s conversion to loving Darcy, which, I suggest, is the very same fool’s paradise that the Nurse warned Romeo against. Now, let’s dig another layer deeper.

TWO: Pride & Prejudice Allusion to Paradise Lost (1667)/Romeo & Juliet (1599)

I’ve written on various occasions since 2014 about the allusion to Romeo & Juliet, such as here…. http://tinyurl.com/mlap3do http://tinyurl.com/k4gxf2t ….that Milton wove into the deepest fabric of Paradise Lost, most strikingly of all in the “SATAN” acrostic in Book 8, which I claim points to the “SATAN” acrostic in Friar Laurence’s speech to Juliet.

Today, I see that the Nurse’s warning reference to a “fool’s paradise” was also alluded to by Milton in plain sight in Book 3 of Paradise Lost, in the description of Satan’s journey leading up to his arrival in Eden. The following-quoted passage not only contains “The Paradise of Fools”, it’s also peppered with scathing insulting descriptions of Catholicism, particularly Franciscan friars ---like “SATAN” Friar Laurence in R&J—whom Satan encounters in his Danteesque journey:

So, on this windy sea of land, the Fiend
Walked up and down alone, bent on his prey;
Alone, for other creature in this place,
Living or lifeless, to be found was none;
None yet, but store hereafter from the earth
Up hither like aereal vapours flew
Of all things transitory and vain, when sin
With vanity had filled the works of men:
Both all things vain, and all who in vain things
Built their fond hopes of glory or lasting fame,
Or happiness in this or the other life;
All who have their reward on earth, the fruits
Of PAINFUL SUPERSTITION AND BLIND ZEAL,
Nought seeking but the praise of men, here find
Fit retribution, empty as their deeds;
All the unaccomplished works of Nature's hand,
Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mixed,
Dissolved on earth, fleet hither, and in vain,
Till final dissolution, wander here;
Not in the neighbouring moon as some have dreamed;
Those argent fields more likely habitants,
Translated Saints, or middle Spirits hold
Betwixt the angelical and human kind.
Hither of ill-joined sons and daughters born
First from the ancient world those giants came
With many a vain exploit, though then renowned:
The builders next of Babel on the plain
Of Sennaar, and still with vain design,
New Babels, had they wherewithal, would build:
Others came single; he, who, to be deemed
A God, leaped fondly into Aetna flames,
Empedocles; and he, who, to enjoy
Plato's Elysium, leaped into the sea,
Cleombrotus; and many more too long,
Embryos, and idiots, eremites, and FRIARS
White, black, and gray, WITH ALL THEIR TRUMPERY, [as in Donald Trumpery!]
Here pilgrims roam, that strayed so far to seek
In Golgotha him dead, who lives in Heaven;
And THEY, WHO to be sure of Paradise,
Dying, put on the weeds of Dominick,
Or IN FRANCISCAN THINK TO PASS DISGUISED;
They pass the planets seven, and pass the fixed,
And that crystalling sphere whose balance weighs
The trepidation talked, and that first moved;
And now Saint Peter at Heaven's wicket seems
To wait them with his keys, and now at foot
Of Heaven's ascent they lift their feet, when lo
A violent cross wind from either coast
Blows them transverse, ten thousand leagues awry
Into the devious air: THEN MIGHT YE SEE
COWLS, HOODS, AND HABITS, with their wearers, tost
And fluttered into rags; then RELIQUES, BEADS,
INDULGENCES, DISPENSES, PARDONS, BULLS,
The sport of winds: ALL THESE, upwhirled aloft,
FLY O’ER THE BACKSIDE OF THE WORLD far off
Into a Limbo large and broad, since called
THE PARADISE OF FOOLS, to few unknown
Long after; now unpeopled, and untrod.
All this dark globe the Fiend found as he passed,
And long he wandered, till at last a gleam
Of dawning light turned thither-ward in haste
His travelled steps: far distant he descries
Ascending by degrees magnificent
Up to the wall of Heaven a structure high….

In short, then, I believe that the above was yet another clue left by Milton in Paradise Lost, telling us that he recognized that Friar Laurence was the SATAN whose meddling actually brings about fatal consequences for Juliet far worse even that the Nurse feared when she warned Romeo!

And, I believe Jane Austen, brilliant literary scholar that she had to have been, spotted and understood Milton’s profound engagement with Shakespeare, and then showed it, by weaving both Paradise Lost and Romeo & Juliet into the subtext of Pride & Prejudice, most of all via her portrayal of Elizabeth as Juliet/Eve, and Darcy as Romeo/Friar Laurence/Satan.And the Nurse’s speech is one key linchpin which unites these three of the greatest works in English literature. But guess what, there’s a fourth, too!

Pride & Prejudice Allusion to Romeo & Juliet (1599) /Paradise Lost (1667)/Tom Jones (1749):

In this section, I’ll explain how I see Jane Austen layering Tom Jones on top of R&J and Paradise Lost in the subtext of P&P.

First, there are several overt references to Paradise Lost by Henry Fielding’s intrusive narrator in Tom Jones, most notably:

“And now having taken a resolution to leave the country, [Tom Jones] began to debate with himself whither he should go. The world, as Milton phrases it, lay all before him; and Jones, no more than Adam, had any man to whom he might resort for comfort or assistance.”

And, to add a deeper layer, here is an excellent, orthodox unpacking of the veiled allusion to Tom Jones in Pride & Prejudice, courtesy of Jo Alyson Parker in her article “Pride & Prejudice: Jane Austen’s Double Inheritance Plot” (1988):

“Austen’s Pride & Prejudice serves as Austen’s revision of Tom Jones from a woman’s perspective, with Elizabeth filling the Tom Jones role and Pemberley serving as Austen’s version of Paradise Hall. Just as the fact of his bastardy, coupled with the machinations of Blifil, deprives Tom Jones of any claim to Paradise Hall, so does the Longbourn entail cut Elizabeth off from what may seem to be her ‘rightful’ inheritance. And Elizabeth’s state of dispossession, like Tom’s, causes her to embark on what will become a quest for self knowledge and position. Elizabeth is not, like Tom Jones, an actual foundling, but the romantic aura of that condition nevertheless clings to her.

…The family setup at Pemberley bears a curious affinity to the setup at Paradise Hall, so much so that we might regard such allusions as deliberate. In his first appearance early in the novel, Darcy, with his coldness and reserve, might almost be mistaken for Blifil. He is responsible for banishing Wickham from the family estate, just as Blifil is responsible for getting Tom banished. Although legitimate, Wickham is, like Tom Jones, a foster son; Darcy’s father treated him like one of his own children…Wickham also resembles Fielding’s hero in appearance…We come to find out that Wickham shares another quality with Fielding’s hero-an ungoverned sexuality …In eloping with Lydia, he displays a disregard for sexual restraint worthy of the unreformed Tom Jones.

Unlike Tom Jones, however, Wickham does not reform…As Elizabeth discovers, he is prodigal, mercenary, revengeful and mendacious. Murray Krieger points out that Austen turns the TJ model on its head: “Wickham is not permitted to make it: it is as if, in Tom Jones, Blifil turned out to be the good guy. For it is Darcy, the wealthiest and most highly placed character in the novel, who is its hero and who gets the girl … Wickham does not, like Tom Jones, make the discovery which makes him the worthy hero; rather, the discovery is made about him to make him the worthless villain.’

In regards to the respective fates of her two leading men, Austen certainly rewrites the plot of Tom Jones, even to the extent that the worthless Wickham ends up, like Blifil, permanently banished from ‘paradise.’

….the rewriting is also a decentering, Austen’s real focus being not on the heroes but on the heroine. In effect, Elizabeth replaces Wickham as the Tom Jones figure….” END QUOTE FROM PARKER

I call the above excellent analysis “orthodox” because Parker lacked the outside-the-box perspective on P&P that I have, which is that it is a double story. While her explanation is very plausible for the overt story of P&P, my understanding provides a powerful explanation for what puzzled Parker—i.e., why “Darcy, with his coldness and reserve, might almost be mistaken for Blifil” ---my answer is that, in the shadow story of P&P, Darcy really is Blifil, and Wickham really is Tom Jones!

In any event, what Parker does not get into, but I will now, is to first point out that Tom Jones also points to (what a surprise!) Romeo and Juliet:

Per Fredson Bower in his 1975 edition of Tom Jones:

“Sophia’s situation at this point in the novel recalls that of Shakespeare’s heroine in R&J. As Juliet loves Romeo but is intended by her family for Paris, so Sophia loves Jones while her family arranges her marriage to Blifil. With the present scene between Honour and Sophia, compare, in particular, R&J 3.2: when the Nurse brings news that Romeo has been banished for killing Tybalt, Juliet at first condemns her faithless lover, then reproves her companion for echoing her sentiments.”

CONCLUSION

While it all may take a while to absorb, if you reread the above a few times over a few days, the dazzling superstructure of layered Shakespeare/Milton/Fielding allusions upon which Pride & Prejudice rests will, I hope, come more and more into focus for you.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.: My Subject Line ends with Paradise Regained, because of my earlier claim that Elizabeth Bennet is actually the true heiress of Pemberley, who (like Tom Jones) was banished.

Last summer, I wrote about the word “unaccountable” as JA’s code for “lesbian” in her novels, most saliently in Elizabeth Bennet’s deeply upset reaction to Charlotte Lucas’s marrying Mr. Collins:

“As another unexpected bonus in terms of my own interpretation of Charlotte as lesbian, as I was reading one of those scholarly takes on Anna Howe as lesbian, I read, in passing, the assertion (which I then verified to my satisfaction) that the word “unaccountable” was 18^th century punning code for “lesbian” . I immediately recalled Elizabeth’s grumbling world-weary comments to sister Jane about Charlotte’s marriage to Mr. Collins:

“There are few PEOPLE WHOM I REALLY LOVE, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense. I have met with two instances lately, one I will not mention; the other is Charlotte's marriage. It is UNACCOUNTABLE! In every view it is UNACCOUNTABLE!...were I persuaded that Charlotte had any regard for him, I should only think worse of her understanding than I now do of her heart. My dear Jane, Mr. Collins is a conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man; you know he is, as well as I do; and you must feel, as well as I do, that the woman who married him cannot have a proper way of thinking. You shall not defend her, though it is Charlotte Lucas. You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger security for happiness."

It’s now obvious to me that this speech, which I already interpreted as Eliza venting her unconscious jealousy of Charlotte---who not only married an absurd husband, but also moved far away from Eliza--- also reflects that JA, from her extensive readings of 18^th century novels, understood that code of “unaccountable” as “lesbian” very well indeed, and that’s why she has Eliza exclaim that word not once but twiceabout Charlotte! And I think JA also picked up on the following passage in Vol 1, Letter 25, when Clarissa, writing to Anna, quotes from her mother’s (i.e., Mrs. Harlowe’s) letter:

“I charge you, let not this letter be found. Burn it. There is too much of the mother in it, to A DAUGHTER SO UNACCOUNTABLY OBSTINATE.”

The sexual pun works perfectly here, as it is Clarissa’s “unaccountable” and “obstinate” lesbian love for Anna which, in part, motivates Clarissa to reject both the loathsome Solmes AND the attractive Lovelace.”

END QUOTE FROM MY 2015 POST

What I didn’t mention in that post last summer was the specific, key literary source I believe lay behind both JA and Richardson: “The Unaccountable Wife”,one of several inset tales in Jane Barker’s 1723 novel A Patch-work Screen for the Ladies. In it, Barker tells, in “screened” code, a brief but moving tale of unmentionable romantic love between a wife and her maidservant, a relationship which survives despite enormous obstacles thrown in their path. The wife’s husband and the rest of the straight world repeatedly try to separate them, but the “unaccountable” wife – unaccountably in the mind of the straight world --- shows constant love and devotion to her “only friend”---another woman, and a woman from a lower social class to boot!

Earlier today, when I reread my above 2015 post, I couldn’t recall whether I had searched for “unaccountable” in JA’s peripheral fiction, as well as in her published novels. It turned out that I hadn’t, and when I did that search this morning, what a treasure I found! As you’ll see below, I retrieved not one but two jewels from the Austenian deep; and, fittingly, one was from a very early stage in JA’s writing career, and one was from the very very end, as she (literally) lay dying, in almost the last words of fiction she composed.

“UNACCOUNTABLE SUSPICION” IN LOVE & FREINDSHIP:

In the madcap juvenilia Love & Freindship (written—and misspelled--by JA when not yet 15!), JA at one point creates a particular matrix of relationship, which she would revisit in a much more sophisticated and complex manner in Northanger Abbey. In the passage I quote below, we find the 55-year old epistolary protagonist Laura, recalling and summarizing, for the purpose of educating her young female correspondent Marianne in the ways of the world, one episode from among Laura’s several wild and crazy youthful adventures. As you read it, just think of Laura and her close friend Sophia as a composite model for Catherine Morland; Janetta as a source for Eleanor Tilney, Mr. MacDonald as General Tilney, and MacDonald Hall as a proto-Northanger Abbey:

“I related…every other misfortune which had befallen me since we parted. …of our [meaning, Laura and Sophia] visit to Macdonald-Hall—of the singular service we there performed towards Janetta [Laura and Sophia, like Friar Laurence and the Nurse in Romeo & Juliet, have just aided and abetted Janetta’s elopement with a suitor she loves, rather than marry her father’s choice] —of her Father’s ingratitude for it ... of his inhuman Behaviour, UNACCOUNTABLE SUSPICIONS, and barbarous treatment of us, in obliging us to leave the House ... of our lamentations on the loss of Edward and Augustus and finally of the melancholy Death of my beloved Companion.”

I believe that, even at 15 (and in this regard, please recall the 16-year old JA’s X-Rated Sharade on James I’s “pet” Robert Carr), JA meant to hint, in code, that Mr. MacDonald suspects Laura and Sophia not just of thwarting his matrimonial schemes for his daughter, or even of attempting to rob him (as Laura comically describes), but of something far more “unaccountable” to a homophobic man of that society than either elopement or theft—i.e., of Laura and Sophia being women in love with each other, instead of with men!

And, by the way, it’s that same “unaccountable suspicion” of lesbianism, that I believe Val McDermid was spot-on about, in her recent novel adaptation of Northanger Abbey, as I also wrote last year: “McDermid suggested that General Tilney abruptly boots Catherine out of the Abbey because he wishes to put the kibosh on a budding lesbian romance between Eleanor and Catherine. While this plot twist has elicited snorts of scorn from many Janeites who’ve read McDermid’s retelling, I have long believed that Jane Austen very intentionally created a very strong erotic subtext in the relationship between Eleanor and Catherine. So I say that McDermid was spot-on in inferring the banishment of Catherine from the Abbey as a probable consequence of Colonel Tilney’s discovery of same.”

So, now that we’ve seen JA writing about “unaccountable” lesbian relationships at 15 in Love & Freindship and then again at age 37 in Pride & Prejudice, it should come as no surprise that this code also pops up one more time, at the end of JA’s life four years later, as she started writing the seventh novel that she did not live to complete.

“UNACCOUNTABLE” DIANA PARKER IN SANDITON

The other passage I was led to by my word search this morning was the following torrent of words spoken by Diana Parker to young heroine Charlotte Heywood when they first meet, in the next to last chapter of the Sanditon fragment:

“…Miss Heywood, I astonish you. You hardly know what to make of me. I see by your looks that you are not used to such quick measures."

The words "UNACCOUNTABLE officiousness!—Activity run mad!" had just passed through Charlotte's mind, but a civil answer was easy.

"I dare say I do look surprised," said [Charlotte], "because these are very great exertions, and I know what invalids both you and your sister are.

"Invalids indeed. I trust there are not three people in England who have so sad a right to that appellation! But my dear Miss Heywood, we are sent into this world to be as extensively useful as possible, and where some degree of strength of mind is given, it is not a feeble body which will excuse us or incline us to excuse ourselves. The world is pretty much divided between the weak of mind and the strong; between those who can act and those who cannot; and it is the bounden duty of the capable to let no opportunity of being useful escape them. My sister's complaints and mine are happily not often of a nature to threaten existence immediately. And as long as we can exert ourselves to be of use to others, I am convinced that the body is the better for the refreshment the mind receives in doing its duty. While I have been travelling with this object in view, I have been perfectly well."

The entrance of the children ended this little panegyric on her own disposition…”

END QUOTE FROM SANDITON MANUSCRIPT

So, following the logic of my posts about the “unaccountable” Charlotte Lucas and Anna Howe, I asked myself, was Charlotte’s thinking of Diana as “unaccountable” a sly suggestion by Jane Austen, writing in March 1817 (or more than a quarter century after she wrote Love and Friendship) that Diana Parker---whom we as readers barely get to meet before Austen’s fragment breaks off less than a quarter of the way through the novel---was a closet lesbian?

As soon as I read the above passage (not for the first time, but for the first time with a possible lesbian subtext in mind), I immediately realized that it was, and how….because I suddenly connected the dots between Diana Parker’s “panegyric” on the great power, but also the great responsibility, of the strong of mind vis a vis the weak of mind, on the one hand, and the following passage that I practically know by heart from my prior analysis of it:

“Beleive me, I was interested in all you wrote, though with all the Egotism of an Invalid I write only of myself.-Your Charity to the poor Woman I trust fails no more in effect, than I am sure it does in exertion. What an interest it must be to you all! & how gladly sh. I contribute more than my good wishes, were it possible!-But how you are worried! Wherever Distress falls, you are expected to supply Comfort. Lady P. writing to you even from Paris for advice!-It is the Influence of Strength over Weakness indeed.-GALIGAI DE CONCINI FOR EVER & EVER.-Adeiu.- “

That excerpt is from Letter 159, written by Jane Austen on May 22, 1817 (less than 3 months before her death) to her dear friend (and, as I’ve long claimed, a woman JA loved much more than a friend), Ann Sharpe. A decade earlier, Jane met Ann, while the latter was the governess at Edward Austen Knight’s Kentish estate Godmersham, and Ann was the donee of one of the dozen precious first editions of Emma only a year before. So she was very special to Jane. I wrote several posts two years ago here…http://tinyurl.com/ksww92r http://tinyurl.com/nc9hocl http://tinyurl.com/nofrqle http://tinyurl.com/lpv95sv …. on the theme of Jane Austen dying a proud lesbian, in which I explained how that reference to “Galigai de Concini for ever & ever” was most of all a coded allusion, which Ann understood, to the woman who was burnt at the stake almost exactly four centuries earlier, purportedly for financial abuse of her fiduciary relationship to her Medici patroness, but with the unspoken subtext of their female friendship having been too close for public comfort – and if that sounds like the reason why Laura and Sophia were banished from MacDonald Hall in Love & Freindship, it’s not a coincidence! And while we’re looking at allusions, it’s also no coincidence that Jane and Ann were in the same class mismatch as we saw in Jane Barker’s “The Unaccountable Wife.”

CONCLUSION

So, what is the takeaway of all this? There is much more than I can cover in this post today, but I want to hit three points:

First, it tells me that Jane Austen really was a few steps further down the brave path toward bringing her non-heterosexual subtext closer to the surface of her fiction, and I believe Diana Parker was going to be the key character carrying the load of that subtext, along with the other character who is subversive of male power in the Sanditon fragment, Lady Denham – who I believe is going to be played by the lesbian cinema icon, Charlotte Rampling, in the film adaptation of Sanditon in production.

Second, it is a particularly good (and therefore egregious) example of how superficial and/or misguided has been the general scholarly analysis of the relationship between Jane Austen’s life and Jane Austen’s fiction – here we have an unmistakable and obvious parallel between a passage in her final fiction—some of the last words she every wrote down as an author---and one of her last letters—and yet, as far as I can discern after diligent online search, no other Austen scholar has ever noticed it.

Third and last, and perhaps most significant to Janeites who love her novels but are not that interested in her biography, it sheds very intriguing light on how Jane Austen would have finished Sanditonhad she lived long enough. I suggest that we can infer from the above that Diana Parker would have continued to play a role somewhat analogous to that played by Miss Bates in Emma—i.e., right there in the thick of the action of the story, but….because misunderstood and harshly judged by Charlotte, the young naïve heroine, we would have had, as with Miss Bates, to piece out the deep intrigue that really brought Diana Parker to Sanditon, under cover or disguise of her parade of philanthropy.

Since JA’s death, there have been several continuations of Sanditon, including most intriguingly the one by Jane Austen’s writing niece (and psychological daughter), Anna Austen Lefroy. I will during the coming weeks bring myself up to speed on how each of those continuations saw the character of Diana Parker. And I am particularly curious to see how the Sanditon film will present Diana Parker’s character. That is the interpretation that potentially will be seen by a million eyeballs worldwide during the bicentennial of 1817, the year when JA started, then stopped, writing Sanditon, then wrote that love letter to Anne Sharpe, and then left this world with so many questions unanswered.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Off and on, I’ve spent a fair amount of time the past two years looking at Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet from a variety of perspectives, particularly the way that Shakespeare looked back at it in his later plays, and the way that two great authors who came after him --- John Milton in Paradise Lost and Jane Austen in several of her novels—also looked back at Romeo & Juliet. I posted most recently about this in the remarkable echoes of Juliet’s Nurse in the character of Mrs. Bennet in Pride & Prejudice:

Juliet’s Nurse & Mrs Bennet: Shakespeare’s & Austen’s matronly “sisters” in vexed quiverings

http://tinyurl.com/jkqvv8m

Pemberley as Eliza Bennet’s Shakespeare/Milton/Fielding Fools Paradise (Hall) Lost & Regained

http://tinyurl.com/j8gwzck

Today, I wish to revisit Jane Austen’s veiled allusion to Romeo & Juliet, and this time zero in on a wrinkle I have only generally addressed in those prior posts—the surprising way in which Elizabeth Bennet subtly reminds us of Shakespeare’s Juliet! And, as my Subject Line suggests, there is also a post-Austen connection involved as well!

SHAKESPEARE’S JULIET & AUSTEN’S ELIZABETH BENNET:

First, here are general parallels I drew between Elizabeth Bennet and Juliet in those two recent posts:

AND

“…here’s the rest of the Nurse’s speech, when she…issu[es] a stern warning to the amorous Romeo:

“…but first let me tell ye, if ye should lead her into a fool’s paradise, as they say, it were a very gross kind of behavior, as they say: for the gentlewoman is young; and, therefore, if you should deal double with her, truly it were an ill thing to be offered to any gentlewoman, and very weak dealing.”

In other words, watching out for Juliet, the fiercely maternal Nurse warns Romeo to love Juliet faithfully, and not to break her 12-year old heart. I now suggest that when Mrs. Bennet (to Elizabeth’s great distress and bewilderment) repeatedly makes hostile jabs at Darcy in the Netherfield salon, she’s actually giving him a similar maternal warning not to try to exploit his high status and lead any Bennet girl into a fool’s paradise. She does this because, as I’ve previously suggested, Mrs. Bennet and Darcy (but not Elizabeth) know that Darcy is the unnamed suitor who wrote a sonnet while six years earlier wooing the then 16-year old Jane Bennet in London. However, Elizabeth’s ear is not tuned to the frequency of her mother’s warning, and so, when Elizabeth first sees Pemberley, she indeed enters a ‘fool’s paradise’. I.e. its Edenic majesty mesmerizes Elizabeth, with such powerful effect that she later jokes to sister Jane (but the joke is actually on Elizabeth) about dating her own falling in love with Darcy from her ‘first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.’ “ END QUOTES FROM MY PRIOR POSTS

Having noted those general parallels, I remained on the lookout for specific textual parallels---which are always the best evidence of a genuine Jane Austen veiled allusion—and this morning I found one---and as happens so often in my research, it dropt into my hands while I was looking at something else entirely!

In this instance, I was following up on my post yesterday about the lesbian subtext of Jane Austen’s final novel fragment, Sanditon , as particularly tagged by the adjective “unaccountable”, by looking also at the variant verbal form “account for” in JA’s novels. I had first identified “unaccountable” as code for lesbian in JA’s writing a few years ago, when I quoted Elizabeth Bennet’s appalled reaction to news she has just received: “the other is Charlotte's marriage. It is unaccountable! In every view it is unaccountable!”

And so, as I did that further word searching in P&P, I was led to the beginning of the famous showdown in the Longbourn wilderness between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Elizabeth Bennet:

“As soon as they entered the copse, Lady Catherine began in the following manner:—‘You can be at no loss, Miss Bennet, to understand the reason of my journey hither. Your own heart, your own conscience, must tell you why I come.’

Elizabeth looked with unaffected astonishment. ‘Indeed, you are mistaken, Madam. I have not been at all able TO ACCOUNT FOR the honour of seeing you here.’

But as I read “I have not been able to account for the honour of seeing you here”, Elizabeth’s dry, pitch-perfect sarcastic reply to Lady Catherine, masked by insincere deference, my eye was caught instead by the word “honour”. Why? Because I suddenly realized that this was the very passage I’d been trying to tease out of my memory for weeks, the speech which I was reminded of when I recently read Juliet’s response, with identical dry, pitch-perfect sarcasm, masked by insincere deference, to her mother’s imperious interrogation, but couldn’t bring to mind:

LADY CAPULET Marry, that 'marry' is the very theme I came to talk of. Tell me, daughter Juliet,
How stands your disposition to be married?

JULIET It is an honour that I dream not of.

LADY CAPULET Speak briefly, can you like of Paris' love?

JULIET I'll look to like, if looking liking move: But no more deep will I endart mine eye
Than your consent gives strength to make it fly.

In short, I recognized that Juliet’s “It is an honour that I dream not of” must be the “mother” of Elizabeth’s “I have not been at all able to account for the honour of seeing you here”!

Searching for that Austenian allusion had been driving me crazy, because the closest I had gotten, were were the following three dishonourable responses by Willoughby to Marianne’s desperate attempts to meet with him in London: "I did myself the HONOUR of calling in Berkeley Street last Tuesday, and very much regretted that I was not fortunate enough to find yourselves and Mrs. Jennings at home. My card was not lost, I hope...I have just had the HONOUR of receiving your letter, for which I beg to return my sincere acknowledgments…It is with great regret that I obey your commands in returning the letters with which I have been HONOURED from you, and the lock of hair, which you so obligingly bestowed on me.” Certainly there was real Shakespearean resonance there, especially when we take into account that it is not only Willoughby awkwardly referring to the “honour” of his relationship with Marianne, but his new wife, who has pressured him to reply thusly to Marianne in person, and then clearly has dictated his letter to Marianne –she is rubbing sarcastic salt in Marianne’s open wound.

But…I knew that wasn’t the passage I was almost remembering, and so my frustration came to blessed end today, when I connected Elizabeth’s thrilling defiance of Lady Catherine to Juliet’s thrilling defiance of her parents’s pressure regarding whom she will marry. And this also of course fits perfectly with what I mentioned in my previous post: “It is interesting to think about Juliet's parents pressuring her to marry Paris, the way Mrs. Bennet pressures Lizzy to marry Mr. Collins…”

I therefore recommend you also compare the passages in Romeo & Juliet in which Juliet’s parents pressure her to marry Paris, on the one hand, and the passage in Pride & Prejudice, when Mr. Bennet refuses to comply with Mr. Bennet’s demand that he pressure Elizabeth to marry Mr. Bennet, on the other. That comparison shows how masterfully Jane Austen turned tragedy to comedy in those scenes of parental pressure to marry, and in particular how JA (surprisingly) subtly echoed Shakespeare’s most famous young romantic heroine, Juliet, in her own most famous young romantic heroine, Elizabeth Bennet.

SHAKESPEARE’S JULIET & THE BROWNINGS (ELIZABETH BARRETT & ROBERT)

I now want to bring yet another pair of famous lovers into this allusive mix – Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning! The courtship correspondence between them in 1845 included the following playful, erudite Shakespearean to-and-fro over four consecutive letters, which, as you’ll immediately note, bears directly on Juliet’s sarcasm to Lady Capulet:

“You will never more, I hope, talk of the ‘honor of my acquaintance’—but I will joyfully wait for the delight of your friendship, and the Spring, and my Chapel-sight after all! “ --RB

“As to the vain parlance of the world, I did not talk of the ‘honor of your acquaintance” without a true sense of honor, indeed,- but I shall willingly exchange it all; (-& now, if you please, at this moment, for fear of worldly mutabilities…) for the ‘delight of your friendship’.” –EBB

“See now, how of that ‘Friendship’ you offer me (and here Juliet’s words rise to my lips)- I feel sure once and for ever” --- RB

“So do not take me for a born heroine of Richardson, or think that I sin always to this length! Else,--you might indeed repeat your quotation from Juliet….which I guessed at once--& of course—‘I have no joy of this contract today! It is too unadvis’d, too rash & sudden.’ “ -EBB

I found the above exchange, while searching for any other literary engagements with Juliet’s comment to her mother besides the one in P&P, and I then found the following two analyses of these Barrett-Browning Shakespeare allusions:

“Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: Translating the Language of Intimacy” by Gail Marshall

Victorian Poetry Volume 44, Number 4, Winter 2006:

“One of EBB and Browning's most intimate exchanges involves an absolutely silent quotation from Shakespeare, which neither needs to quote on the page because they are sufficiently sure of the reference being clear to the other without further prompting. Browning writes of a word of Juliet's which rises to his lips, and EBB assures him in her next letter that she "guessed at once" what his meaning was…Under the guise of an exchange about their friendship, the two poets seem to be referring to Juliet's "It is an honour that I dream not of".…words which are applied in the play to the young lovers' marriage. Shakespeare is not simply the language in which EBB and Browning speak to each other, the way in which they acknowledge their shared status and knowledge as poets; he is of the very essence of their relationship…”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: 'This is Living Artby Josie Billington (2012):

“In the letters, very early in the correspondence, the lovers allude (shyly at first) to Romeo & Juliet ‘See now’, Browning writes, ‘how of that ‘Friendship’ you offer me (and here Juliet’s word rises to my lips)—I feel sure once and for ever’ …The quotation is ‘guessed at once’ by Elizabeth Barrett and closes her letter of reply:

I have no joy of this contract today!

It is too unadvis’d, too rash & sudden.” “

After reading these analyses, I had the strong intuition that Elizabeth Barrett’s Shakespearean winking in her final letter in the above exchange, in which she wrote “you might indeed repeat your quotation from Juliet…. which I guessed at once…”, was not about Juliet’s “It is an honour that I dream not of”, but instead was pointing to yet another speech by Juliet. The sophisticated game of dueling quotations played by the erudite lovers seemed to me to have still another layer, which has apparently not been seen by Browning scholars. I was sure that Elizabeth Barrett Browning had in her second letter already moved on from Juliet’s sarcastic allusion to her “honour”, and wanted to show her lover that she had guessed his later allusion as well.

So, to start, take a second look at the teaser Robert wrote, to which Elizabeth was responding:

“See now, how of that ‘Friendship’ you offer me (and here Juliet’s words rise to my lips)- I feel sure once and for ever”

I suggest that Juliet’s sarcastic one-liner spoken to her mother about marrying a man she has no interest in marrying are surely not words which would rise to Robert’s lips at that romantic stage of their repartee. Not only would that be a weak retreading of old ground in their rapidly moving, witty game of quotations, that would also be far less fitting to a romantic moment than a speech Juliet makes directly to Romeo.

And, upon further reflection, I also realized that the speech of Juliet’s which rises to Robert’s lips would also have to fit all three of the following criteria as well:

It would have to include a specific reference to “friendship”, because that is the single word which Robert puts in quotes, as a clue, right before he writes “here”; and

It would have to relate thematically to the notion of a love which will make Romeo (i.e., Robert) “feel sure once and for ever” of Juliet’s (i.e., Elizabeth’s) love; and

It would have to relate thematically to Elizabeth’s final quote from Juliet: ‘I have no joy of this contract today! It is too unadvis’d, too rash & sudden.’ That line is from the speech Juliet makes to Romeo in 3.5, as she tastes the not-so-sweet sorrow of parting from Romeo as he must hastily decamp from Verona for what seems to both to be an eternity of banishment in Mantua. Here is the full speech that Elizabeth has only quoted two lines from:

Well, do not swear: although I joy in thee,

I have no joy of this contract to-night:
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;

Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say 'It lightens.' Sweet, good night!
This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath,
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.
Good night, good night! as sweet repose and rest
Come to thy heart as that within my breast!

So, is there another speech by Juliet elsewhere in the play, which meets all of these tests? Yes!! And I found it in two minutes, simply by searching the word “friend” in the play text! Here it is, in 2.2 --- exactly where, with 20:20 hindsight, one might expect to find it, at the end of the famous balcony scene, when Julia bids Romeo farewell right after he has finally descended down from her balcony, but before he leaves her garden:

Art thou gone so? love, lord, ay, husband, FRIEND!
I must hear from thee every day in the hour,
For in a minute there are many days:
O, by this count I shall be much in years
Ere I again behold my Romeo!

In other words, I believe Elizabeth also solved Robert’s clues, as I just did, and that’s why she chose to respond with the quote from Juliet’s 3.5 speech, because these two speeches by Juliet are really bookends to each other, coming at the ends of the first two parting scenes in the play (the third parting, of course, being the tragic sequence when first Romeo, and then Juliet, commits suicide, a tragic and final parting).

CONCLUSION: JULIET & THE TWO ELIZABETHS

In a way, the above real-life courtship between Elizabeth and Robert bears on the imaginary courtship between Elizabeth and Darcy, in that both of them involved a playful, learned reliance on knowledge of Shakespearean tragic romance.

Is it possible that either Robert or Elizabeth had any idea that their Shakespearean romance was in a way following in the footsteps of Elizabeth and Darcy? My answer is “No”, based on what Elizabeth wrote

ten years later, in a letter to John Ruskin:

“She [Miss Mitford] never taught me anything but a very limited admiration of Miss Austen, whose people struck me as wanting souls, even more than is necessary for men and women of the world. The novels are perfect as far as they go— that's certain. Only they don't go far, I think. It may be my fault.” Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 1855, To Mr. Ruskin, Nov. 5; Letters, ed. Kenyon, vol. n, p. 217.

In any event, I feel honored to have to have the chance to sleuth out all these connections---and that’s an honor I dreamt not of while I slept last night. ;)

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

As part of my latest revisiting of Romeo & Juliet, I was reading the following speech by Capulet to daughter Juliet, in which Capulet (like Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park or Mrs. Bennet in Pride & Prejudice) is astonished by her refusal to docilely accede to the rich, older husband he has chosen for her. Beyond those (unsurprising) Austenian echoes, I was jolted by the unexpected echo of another, very well known story – can you guess what it is? (my Subject Line, plus the words in ALL CAPS in Capulet’s speech, give you a giant hint, if you think about it):

CAPULET

Soft! take me with you, take me with you, wife.
How! will she none? doth she not give us thanks?
Is she not PROUD? doth she not count her blest,
Unworthy as she is, that we have wrought
So worthy a gentleman to be her bridegroom?

JULIET

Not PROUD, you have; but thankful, that you have:
PROUD can I never be of what I hate;
But thankful even for hate, that is meant love.

CAPULET

How now, how now, chop-logic! What is this?
'PROUD,' and 'I thank you,' and 'I thank you not;'
And yet 'not PROUD,' mistress minion, you,
THANK me no THANKINGS, nor, PROUD me no PROUDS,
But fettle your fine joints 'gainst Thursday next,
To go with Paris to Saint Peter's Church,
Or I will drag thee on a hurdle thither.
Out, you green-sickness carrion! out, you baggage!
You tallow-face!

Did you guess?

To immediately end the suspense, my mind was blown when I read “Thank me no thankings, nor, proud me no prouds” --- what I was reminded of were the ironically negating lyrics of the final stanza of the song “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” from Fiddler on the Roof, in which big sister Tzeitl scares Hodel and Chava out of their romantic yearning for a perfect husband:

[Hodel & Chava]

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match.
Find me a find, catch me a catch.
Matchmaker, matchmaker, look through your book
And make me a perfect match.
Matchmaker, matchmaker, I'll bring the veil.
You bring the groom, slender and pale.
Bring me a ring, for I'm longing to be
The envy of all I see.
For Papa, make him a scholar.
For Mama, make him rich as a king.
For me, well, I wouldn't holler
If her were as handsome as anything.
Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match.
Find me a find, catch me a catch.
Night after night, in the dark, I'm alone.
So, find me a match of my own.

[Tzeitl]
Hodel, oh Hodel, have I made a match for you.
He's handsome! He's young! All right, he's 62.
But he's a nice man, a good catch. True? True!
I promise you'll be happy. And even if you're not,
There's more to life than that. Don't ask me what!

Chava! I've found him! Will you be a lucky bride!
He's handsome. He's tall! That is, from side to side.
But he's a nice man, a good catch, Right? Right!
You've heard he has a temper. He'll beat you every night.
But only when he's sober- so you're all right!
Did you think you'd get a prince?
Well I do the best I can.
With no dowry, no money, no family background,
Be glad you got a man!
[All three of them]

Matchmaker, matchmaker, you know that I'm
Still very young. Please, take your time.
Up to this minute, I've misunderstood
That I could get stuck for good.
Dear Yenta, see that he's gentle.
Remember, you were also a bride.
It's not that I'm sentimental.
It's just that I'm terrified!

Matchmaker, matchmaker, PLAN ME NO PLANS.
I'm in no rush. maybe I've learned
Playing with matches a girl can get burned.
So bring me no ring, GROOM ME NO GROOM,
FIND ME NO FIND, CATCH ME NO CATCH.
Unless he's a matchless match!

Think it’s just a coincidence? In a 2003 thread in the Shaksper listserv…. http://tinyurl.com/zaz2ewv

…Capulet’s two consecutive “neologizing imperative retorts” [for other examples, see Dale Randall’s “X Me No X's…” American Speech, 64/3 (Aut. 1989), 233-43] were noted, but, since Fiddler on the Roof is never associated with Shakespeare, no one heard what I believe is, from the right perspective, an obvious allusion.

So now, please allow me to introduce you to the evidence I’ve quickly assembled. First and foremost, there’s striking, multifaceted parallelism between these two scenes in Romeo and Fiddler. Both scenes are about daughters coerced by parents to marrying rich older men those daughters don’t want to marry- plus Tseitl, like Juliet, has already secretly declared her love to a younger suitor. In Romeo & Juliet, Capulet spews abuse at Juliet, an insane overreaction to her diplomatic, deferential, and desperate attempt to avoid his draconian fiat. In Fiddler, the girls in that final stanza seek to do exactly the same as Juliet—by not challenging parental authority directly, but instead cajoling diplomatically, asking “only” that no match be brought “unless he’s a matchless match”!

And there’s also a subtly ironic pun in the word “matchless”, that I never noticed till today ---on the surface, it’s a comparative; i.e., the ideal husband is unmatched by all the other suitors. But there’s also a subversive “chop-logic” hidden meaning –he can be a “match” only so long as he’s “matchless”, meaning he must not be a match….imposed on her against her own free choice! And by the way, we hear that same comic chop-logic in the rabbi’s prayer that God keep the Czar (who, like Capulet, is prone to cruel, irrational, and deadly edicts)……far away from the Jews he victimizes!

And, it turns out that throughout Romeo & Juliet, the word “match” is repeatedly used, by four different speakers, as Shakespeare walks this versatile word through the paces of its many meanings, including that very same pun in that last stanza of “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” I decoded in the previous paragraph!:

ROMEO [re Rosaline]

One fairer than my love! the all-seeing sun
Ne'er saw her MATCH since first the world begun.

[and it’s that same pun on “match”, as both arrange marriage and comparison, in “matchless match”!]

Then, after Romeo & Juliet first meet, we read the Chorus intone in the next Prologue:

Now old desire doth in his death-bed lie,
And young affection gapes to be his heir;
That fair for which love groan'd for and would die,
With tender Juliet MATCH'D, is now not fair. [again, that same pun on marriage and comparison!]
Now Romeo is beloved and loves again,
Alike betwitched by the charm of looks,
But to his foe supposed he must complain,
And she steal love's sweet bait from fearful hooks:

Then, Romeo and Mercutio trade witty jests:

ROMEO O single-soled jest, solely singular for the singleness.

MERCUTIO Come between us, good Benvolio; my wits faint.

ROMEO Switch and spurs, switch and spurs; or I'll cry a MATCH.

This is yet another meaning of match, as game, a pun which is then unwittingly and darkly echoed by Juliet hears that Romeo having killed Tybalt:

…Come, civil night,
Thou sober-suited matron, all in black,
And learn me how to lose a winning MATCH,
Play'd for a pair of stainless maidenhoods:
Hood my unmann'd blood, bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold,
Think true love acted simple modesty.

And finally the Nurse does an abrupt 180, and advises Juliet that Paris is a better match for her than Romeo, which unites the meanings of arranged marriage and comparison via “it excels your first”:

Then, since the case so stands as now it doth,
I think it best you married with the county.
O, he's a lovely gentleman!
Romeo's a dishclout to him: an eagle, madam,
Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye
As Paris hath. Beshrew my very heart,
I think you are happy in this second MATCH,
For it excels your first: or if it did not,
Your first is dead; or 'twere as good he were,
As living here and you no use of him.

That is an extraordinary matrix of punning poignant wordplay that makes it crystal clear that the lyricist of “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” was very specifically pointing to Capulet’s rant --- which adds a dark depth to a song that already was darkened by the agitated minor key interlude of Tseitl’s cautionary tale.

I wondered how this translation of Romeo & Juliet to Fiddler came about, and Google quickly led me to the following discussion in the late Mark Van Doren’s 1939 classic, Shakespeare, as he pointed out ”…the relentless rush of time as the Thursday of Juliet’s enforced marriage to Paris is tolled by Capulet the perpetual motion MATCHMAKER---

Day, night, hour, tide, time, work, play

Alone, in company, still my care hath been

To have her MATCHED; (3.5)

…Romeo & Juliet will have [the older generation] with them to the end, and will be sadly misunderstood by them. The Capulets hold still another view of love. Their interest is in ‘good’ marriages, in sensible choices. They are MATCHMAKERS, and believe they know best how their daughter should be put to bed…..She is ‘a wretched puling fool, a whining mammet,’ a silly girl who does not know what is good for her….” Whereupon Van Doren then quoted Capulet’s “proud me no prouds” speech.

There you have yet another set of remarkable echoing, which to me is strong evidence that the lyricist of “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” read Van Doren’s authoritative tome, while grafting Romeo & Juliet onto Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye stories. And it was then that I recognized a clue to answering that question, right in front of my eyes (and next to my ears), in parallel scenes from two films made a decade apart:

First, the “To Life” number in Fiddler, which begins with Tevye and Lazar Wolf toasting each other after the former consents to the latter’s marrying Tseitl (which will be undone in the next scene), then morphs into a complex dance number involving many dancers from among the Jews and Cossacks of Anatevka:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9J4RsUwMh4

And second, there’s the opening scene in West Side Story, in which the Anglo Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks dance their way through the first of several, increasingly tense confrontations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxoC5Oyf_ss

When you examine it, the parallel is much more than the obvious fact that Jerome Robbins wrote the choreography for both -- it's that Robbins and his collaborators clearly chose to consciously revisit, in Fiddler,the Us vs. Them theme from West Side Story; but instead of Sharks and Jets, it's Russian Jews and Gentiles! And the subtle, pervasive leitmotif of that echo is the Jets’s finger snaps, which are revisited in the finger snaps by the Chasidic dancers in the Bottle Dance scene in Fiddler:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sH3mjOsZY0

The following account in Robbins’s Wikipedia page bears out my claim of that revisiting:

“In 1947, Jerome Robbins approached Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents about collaborating on a contemporary musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. He proposed that the plot focus on the conflict between an Irish Catholic family and a Jewish family living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the Easter–Passover season. The girl has survived the Holocaust and emigrated from Israel; the conflict was to be centered around anti-Semitism of the Catholic "Jets" towards the Jewish "Emeralds" (a name that made its way into the script as a reference).”

When Robbins’s initial conception morphed away from his original Jewish theme into West Side Story, he never forgot it, and then played a key role in eventually transplanting it to Czarist Anatevska!

And that would have been enough…but then, I turned to the rest of Fiddler, to see if I could spot any other Romeo & Juliet echoes in it. As I browsed Juliet’s speeches searching for other Fiddler antecedents, my eye was caught by two conversations between Juliet and her mother, which I believe find their way into the subtext of Fiddler.

First, as Lady Capulet seeks to persuade Juliet to accept Paris as a husband, she turns to a metaphor of Juliet and Paris as fish:“The fish lives in the sea, and 'tis much pride For fair without the fair within to hide.” In other words, fish, especially attractive fish, should be paired off together, as in Noah’s ark.

That seems to me to be a direct source for Tevye’s attempt to persuade Chava not to continue her growing intimacy with the righteous Gentile Fyedka, but this time Tevye turns Lady Capulet’s fishy metaphor on its head, using it in a negative sense: “In other words, a bird may love a fish, but where would they build a home together?”

And second, we have what Juliet says to her mother later in the story, when she must conceal that she plans to run away to Mantua to be with the banished Romeo: “God knows when we shall meet again.”

That reminded me of the exchange in Fiddler:

Hodel: Papa! God alone knows when we shall see each other again.

Tevye: Then we will leave it in his hands.

And I checked in Sholem Aleichem’s original story, and saw that Hodel does indeed say the same thing to Tevye there as well.

That exchange leads right into Hodel’s poignant solo in Fiddler that Juliet could have sung had she actually been able to pick up and openly move to Mantua, far from Verona, and live with Romeo there.

How can I hope to make you understand
Why I do, what I do.
Why I must travel to a distant land,
Far from the home I love.

Once I was happily content to be
As I was, where I was,
Close to the people who are close to me,
Here in the home I love.

Who could see that a man could come
Who would change the shape of my dreams.
Helpless now I stand with him,
Watching older dreams grow dim.

Oh, what a melancholy choice this is,
Wanting home, wanting him,
Closing my heart to every hope but his,
Leaving the home I love.

There where my heart has settled long ago
I must go, I must go.
Who could imagine I'd be wand'ring so
Far from the home I love.

Yet there with my love, I'm home.

These three echoes of Romeo and Juliet in the love stories of Tseitl, Hodel, and Chava in Fiddler raise a deeper question: whether this Romeo & Juliet subtext in Fiddler was entirely the work of its American creators, or was any of it already present in Sholem Aleichem’s original stories?

My sense is that the great Yiddish storyteller did know Shakespeare (as well as Austen --- especially Pride & Prejudice, as I’ve previously claimed many times), and decided to use Romeo and Juliet as a model, but in an outside the box way—in effect, Sholem Aleichem split Romeo and Juliet into three couples, in order to separately highlight three different sides of their complex story:

In the triad of Tseitl, Motel, and Lazar Wolf, we see Juliet, Romeo, and Paris; except that S.A. “corrects” Capulet’s tragic error of going berserk on Juliet, by allowing Tevye to change his mind. Then, in Hodel and Perchik, S.A. foregrounds Juliet wishing to marry the “outlaw” who is banished for a serious “crime”, and being willing to following him anywhere. And finally, in Chava and, S.A. brings out the Juliet who wished to marry the forbidden lover, who is part of the ancient enemy of the bride’s clan.

Before I close, I want to bring out two fainter echoes of Romeo & Juliet in Fiddler, which would not stand alone, but which nicely complement all of the above:

First, the joyous exuberance of “the tailor Motel Tamzoyl”, after Tevye (again, so opposite to Capulet) reverses himself and consents to Tseitl’s marrying him, in “Wonder of Wonders”, seems to point to Romeo’s following two exuberant love paeans to Juliet on the theme of “wonder”:

She speaks:
O, speak again, bright angel! for thou art
As glorious to this night, being o'er my head
As is a winged messenger of heaven
Unto the white-upturned WONDERING EYES
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him
When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds
And sails upon the bosom of the air.

'Tis torture, and not mercy: heaven is here,
Where Juliet lives; and every cat and dog
And little mouse, every unworthy thing,
Live here in heaven and may look on her;
But Romeo may not: more validity,
More honourable state, more courtship lives
In carrion-flies than Romeo: they my seize
On the white WONDER of dear Juliet's hand
And steal immortal blessing from her lips,
Who even in pure and vestal modesty,
Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin

Part of what makes me think this “wonder” allusion is intentional, is that Motel calls himself a Daniel, and I have long seen more than a little of the Biblical Daniel in Romeo the dreamer. So, I believe, did Sholem Aleichem, by means of his clever parody on Daniel, the faux-prophetic dream of Tevye which he uses in order to bring his wife around to the notion of Motl as a good match for Tseitl.

And finally, I invite you to read the following exchange through the lens of all of the above:

TYBALT Mercutio, thou consort'st with Romeo,--

MERCUTIO Consort! what, dost thou make us minstrels? An thou make minstrels of us, look to hear nothing but discords: here's my FIDDLESTICK; here's that shall make you dance. 'Zounds, consort!

The image of a fiddler on the roof as a symbol of the Jew in Eastern Europe was clearly derived by the creators of Fiddler from Sholem Aleichem’s story “On the Fiddler” in his collection Jewish Children. I suggest that those imaginative minds also looked at Romeo & Juliet, and found in Mercutio a Shakespearean analog for S.A. fiddler– the fearless artistic soul who teeters precariously on a knife’s edge of divided loyalty between the Montagues and Capulets, seeking to seduce the warring factions into “dancing”—i.e., making peace---with each other. All it earns him is an early death, as he literally gets caught between the crossed swords of Tybalt and Romeo --- tragically similar to the Jews whose ancient balancing act in Eastern Europe is brought to a similarly abrupt end, first by the Czar with his pogroms, and then later by Hitler’s Holocaust.

And so, in that fiddler on the roof, we see the genius of Jerome Robbins et al – the symbol of dance and music as a force for peace between ancient enemies---most of all in those scenes from West Side Story and Fiddler I gave YouTube links for, with their astonishing synthesis of music, dance---especially in that brief moment of hopeful possibility, when Tevye and his Cossack counterpart first start to dance together arm clasping arm.

To life (and also to Shakespeare, to Sholem Aleichem, and to Robbins and his Fiddler partners)!!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

I’ve been following the recent discussion in Janeites about the theme of leading apes into hell as the proverbial punishment for women who don’t marry and bear children.

First, let me add in passing that in my previous research, I came across the related scholarly suggestion of a variant on that theme—I.e., that it was also a punishment for single women who kill their illegitimate offspring—the common denominator being that the woman must be punished for refusing to play her appointed societal role as “breeding animal”.

Second (and surprisingly), no one has noted the most famous literary examples other than Dante’s (and by the way, I never could find exactly where in Dante’s poetry that “leading apes to hell” metaphor is expressed--does anybody know?) of this meme of “leading apes into hell”----Shakespeare!!! ---Jane, is that what you were thinking of?

Specifically, Shakespeare used this theme not once but twice, in passages which he clearly treated as related, because the speakers are so very similar—the “curst”, sharp-tongued single woman Kate in 2.1 of The Taming of the Shrew, as she unleashes her fury at sister Bianca whom Kate sees as being their father’s favorite….

BIANCA

Is it for him you do envy me so?
Nay then you jest, and now I well perceive
You have but jested with me all this while:
I prithee, sister Kate, untie my hands.

KATHARINA If that be jest, then all the rest was so.

Strikes her

Enter BAPTISTA

BAPTISTA

Why, how now, dame! whence grows this insolence?
Bianca, stand aside. Poor girl! she weeps.
Go ply thy needle; meddle not with her.
For shame, thou helding of a devilish spirit,
Why dost thou wrong her that did ne'er wrong thee?
When did she cross thee with a bitter word?

KATHARINA Her silence flouts me, and I'll be revenged.

Flies after BIANCA

BAPTISTA What, in my sight? Bianca, get thee in.

Exit BIANCA

KATHARINA

What, will you not suffer me? Nay, now I see
She is your treasure, she must have a husband;
I MUST DANCE BARE-FOOT ON HER WEDDING DAY
And for your love to her LEAD APES IN HELL.
Talk not to me: I will go sit and weep
Till I can find occasion of revenge.

Exit

BAPTISTA Was ever gentleman thus grieved as I?

…and the “curst” sharp tongued single woman Beatrice (not coincidentally, the name of Dante’s beloved) in Much Ado About Nothing, as he resists her uncle’s jibes about her pushing suitors away with her sharp wit:

BEATRICE Just, if he send me no husband; for the which blessing I am at him upon my knees every morning and evening. Lord, I could not endure a husband with a beard on his face: I had rather lie in the woollen.

LEONATO You may light on a husband that hath no beard.

BEATRICE What should I do with him? dress him in my apparel and make him my waiting gentlewoman? He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man: and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him: therefore, I WILL EVEN TAKE SIXPENCE IN EARNEST OF THE BEAR-WARD , AND LEAD HIS APES INTO HELL .

LEONATO Well, then, go you into hell?

BEATRICE No, but to the gate; and there will the devil meet me, like an old cuckold, with horns on his head, and say 'Get you to heaven, Beatrice, get you to heaven; here's no place for you maids:' so DELIVER ME UP MY APES , and away to Saint Peter for the heavens; he shows me where the bachelors sit, and there live we as merry as the day is long.

I now want to turn this discussion around to Jane Austen, by picking up on the first part of Beatrice’s sentence: “I will even take sixpence in earnest of the bear-ward”.

Beatrice’s witty conceit is that she’ll accept the sum of sixpence as an earnest money deposit or down payment from the bearward (one meaning being the bear keeper who worked in the horrible bear-baiting trade—and who apparently sometimes kept nonhuman primates as a sideline) in order to make delivery of the apes into hell. And then, presumably after getting paid C.O.D. by the devil, she’ll turn around and head straight up to heaven to make merry with the bachelors (which suggests that the apes led to hell were the married men!).

What I was immediately reminded of was the following passage in JA’ Letter #2 dated Jan. 14-15, 1796, in which the 20 year old JA, sounding remarkably like Beatrice and also Elizabeth Bennet, playfully discusses her own marital prospects:

“Tell Mary that I make over Mr. Heartley & all his Estate to her for her sole use and Benefit in the future, & not only him, but all my other Admirers into the bargain wherever she can find them, even the kiss which C. Powlett wanted to give me, as I mean to confine myself in future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, FOR WHOM I DONOT CARE SIXPENCE. Assure [Miss C. Powlett] also as a last & indubitable proof of Warren’s indifference to me, that he actually drew that Gentleman’s picture for me, & delivered it to me without a Sigh.”

It is 100% clear to me that JA had Shakespeare’s Beatrice specifically in mind as she concocted that conceit, because it’s not merely the echoing of Beatrice’s reference to “sixpence”, which, alone, could very well be coincidence. It’s that this echo occurs in the same, very specific context of a woman treating men as commodities to be bought, sold, and delivered in business transactions—that’s no coincidence!

And of course the subversive point of this conceit in Letter #2 is that this is exactly the way women were actually treated in both Shakespeare’s and Jane Austen’s eras: i.e., the marriage market was a vast slave market in which women were bought and sold as if they were farm or performing animals, with no say whatsoever over who their “owner” would be. That passage thus has an absurdist twelfth night sensibility —turning the real world topsy turvy, to make the point of the truly absurd injustice of that real world.

And that led me to search for any other usages of “sixpence” in JA’s fiction—and wouldn’t ya know, 5 of the 6 pertain to a woman leading a single life in a man’s world!:

First, in The Watsons fragment, we listen in as the single Emma Watson, single and no longer in youthful bloom, receiving Mr. Collins-esque sexist condolences from her brother, for her having been left in spinsterhood by her financially inept aunt, forcing Emma to return to her penurious family of origin. Note her brother’s two references to Emma being left “without a sixpence”, the second of which reduces her to tears!:

“Emma was the first of the females in the parlour on entering it again; she found her brother there alone.‐‘So Emma’, said he, ‘you are quite the Stranger at home. It must seem odd enough to you to be here. A pretty peice of work your Aunt Turner has made of it! By Heaven! a woman should never be trusted with money. I always thought said she ought to have settled something on you, as soon as her Husband died. when she took you away.’

‘But that would have been trusting me with money’, replied Emma smiling, ‘& I am a woman too.’

‘It might have been placed secured to you after future use, in Trust, without your having any power over it now. What a blow it must have been upon you! To find yourself, instead of being probable Heiress of 8 or 9000£, sent back a weight upon your family, WITHOUT A SIXPENCE. I hope the old woman will smart for it.’

‘I beg you, Do not to speak disrespectfully of my Aunt, Brother. Her ‒ She was very good to me; & If she has made an imprudent choice, she will suffer more from it herself, than I can possibly do.’

‘I do not mean to distress you, but you know every body must think her an old fool. I am just come from my Father’s room, he seems very indifferent. It will be a sad breakup when he dies. Pity, you can none of you get married! You must come to Croydon as well as the rest, & see what you can do there. I beleive if Margt. Margaret had had a thousand or fifteen hundred pounds, there was a young man who wd. would have thought of her.’

Emma was glad when they were joined by the others; it was better to look at her Sister in law’s finery, than listen to her brother . Robert, who had equally mortified, irritated & greived her. Mrs. Robert exactly as smart as she had been at her own party, came in with apologies for her dress.

‘I would not make you wait, said she, so I put on the first thing I met with. I am afraid I am a sad figure. My dear Mr. W. (to her husband) you have not put any fresh powder in your hair.’

‘No, I do not intend it. I think there is powder enough in my hair for my wife & Sisters.’

‘Indeed you ought to make some alteration in your dress before dinner when you are out visitting, if though you do not at home.’

‘Nonsense. ‘

‘It is very odd you should not like to do what other gentlemen too do.’

‘Mr.. Marshall & I thought Turner had been reckoned an extra ordinary sensible, clever man. How the Devil came he to leave make such a will?’

‘My Uncle’s sense is not at all impeached in my opinion, by his attachment to my Aunt. She had been an excellent wife to him. The most Liberal & enlightened minds are always the most confiding. The event has been unfortunate, for me, but my Uncle’s memory is if possible endeared to me by such a proof of tender respect for my Aunt.’

‘That’s odd sort of Talking! ‒ He might have provided decently for his widow, without leaving it all every thing that he had to dispose of, or any part of it at her mercy.’

‘My Aunt may have erred’ said Emma warmly, ‘she has erred ‐ but my Uncle’s conduct was faultless. I was her own Neice, & he left to her self the power & the pleasure of providing for me.’

‘But unluckily she has left the pleasure of providing for you, to your Father, & without the power. That’s the long & the short of the business. After keeping you at a distance from your family for 14 years such a length of time as must do away all natural affection among us & breeding you up (I suppose) in a superior stile, you are returned upon their hands WITHOUT A SIXPENCE.’

‘You know’, replied Emma struggling with her tears, ‘my Uncle’s melancholy state of health. He was a greater Invalid than my father. He cd. could not leave home.’

‘I do not mean to make you cry.’ said Robt….

And then in Chapter 2 of S&S, with its famous allusion to King Lear (which I’ve also shown was also an allusion to a similar passage in As You Like It), we have a very similar heartlessly hypocritical discussion between Fanny and John Dashwood about the financial needs of his (single) stepmother and stepsisters:

"It is certainly an unpleasant thing," replied Mr. Dashwood, "to have those kind of yearly drains on one's income. One's fortune, as your mother justly says, is NOT one's own. To be tied down to the regular payment of such a sum, on every rent day, is by no means desirable: it takes away one's independence."

"Undoubtedly; and after all you have no thanks for it. They think themselves secure, you do no more than what is expected, and it raises no gratitude at all. If I were you, whatever I did should be done at my own discretion entirely. I would not bind myself to allow them any thing yearly. It may be very inconvenient some years to spare a hundred, or even fifty pounds from our own expenses."

"I believe you are right, my love; it will be better that there should be no annuity in the case; whatever I may give them occasionally will be of far greater assistance than a yearly allowance, because they would only enlarge their style of living if they felt sure of a larger income, and WOULD NOT BE SIXPENCE THE RICHER FOR IT at the end of the year. It will certainly be much the best way. A present of fifty pounds, now and then, will prevent their ever being distressed for money, and will, I think, be amply discharging my promise to my father."

"To be sure it will. Indeed, to say the truth, I am convinced within myself that your father had no idea of your giving them any money at all.

And finally, in Emma (which in a number of ways harks back to The Watsons), there are two references, one about Mrs. Goddard, the other about Miss Bates, representing two versions of the older spinster:

Mrs. Goddard's school was in high repute—and very deservedly; for Highbury was reckoned a particularly healthy spot: she had an ample house and garden, gave the children plenty of wholesome food, let them run about a great deal in the summer, and in winter dressed their chilblains with her own hands. It was no wonder that a train of twenty young couple now walked after her to church. She was a plain, motherly kind of woman, who had worked hard in her youth, and now thought herself entitled to the occasional holiday of a tea-visit; and having formerly owed much to Mr. Woodhouse's kindness, felt his particular claim on her to leave her neat parlour, hung round with fancy-work, whenever she could, and WIN OR LOSE A FEW SIXPENCES by his fireside.

"Never mind, Harriet, I shall not be a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public! A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls, but a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as any body else. And the distinction is not quite so much against the candour and common sense of the world as appears at first; for a very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind, and sour the temper. Those who can barely live, and who live perforce in a very small, and generally very inferior, society, may well be illiberal and cross. This does not apply, however, to Miss Bates; she is only too good natured and too silly to suit me; but, in general, she is very much to the taste of every body, though single and though poor. Poverty certainly has not contracted her mind: I really believe, if she had only a shilling in the world, SHE WOULD BE VERY LIKELY TO GIVE AWAY SIXPENCE OF IT; and nobody is afraid of her: that is a great charm."

It’s clear from all of the above examples that JA never forgot Beatrice’s witty lines as she wrote her novels. The only one of the six usages that is not about single women is in P&P, and it is used in reference to the next person up from the bottom of the food chain—the poor son of a steward without an inheritance, who becomes a fortune hunter:

"If [Mr. Bennet] were ever able to learn what Wickham's debts have been," said Elizabeth, "and how much is settled on his side on our sister, we shall exactly know what Mr. Gardiner has done for them, because Wickham HAS NOT SIXPENCE OF HIS OWN. The kindness of my uncle and aunt can never be requited….”

So, in closing, the above suggests that the 20 year old JA’s veiled channeling of Shakespeare’s Beatrice in Letter #2 showed both that she knew Shakespeare really well from a young age, and also that her feminist outrage at the second class status of women in her world, especially the parts about not having control over money and being treated as a commodity, was always present and outfront in her writing!

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Over the past 15 years, now and again I've sampled several different audio versions of JA's novels; but I must confess that I heard one today that out-Austens all of them in the strangest way.

I find I have an unforgivable weakness for this computer generated reading of three key scenes in Pride & Prejudice. It's all SOOOOO wrong that it comes all the way around to being right, in a comically absurd way that I bet it would have made Jane Austen laugh, too!

Darcy’s first proposal:

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glRXlRRT3B4

Lady Catherine & Elizabeth:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KANO8_-ITTU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jjOCSTNYkw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukY03VkqprM

Elizabeth describing when she came to love Darcy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQX4TxwclL0

Tell me if you can listen to these while keeping your countenance!

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

In the Shaksper listserv, Larry Weiss responded to my post as follows: "I suppose Arnie Perlstein is suggesting that the lyricist of Fiddler on the Roof might at one time or another seen or read Romeo and Juliet. Strange as that might be, it is not entirely implausible."

Larry, thanks for your reply, but let me briefly reiterate what I suggested. In a nutshell, I made a case in chronological literary order:

First, Sholem Aleichem, a century ago, appears to me to have had Capulet & Juliet in mind as he originally wrote the Tevye stories bearing on the marrying of his three eldest daughters;

Second, a half century ago, the creators of Fiddler seem to me to have had both Romeo & Juliet (as well as its "offspring"West Side Story) and the Tevye stories in mind as they conceived Fiddler, in particular the Us versus Them theme particularly reflected in the major group dance numbers; and then

Third, as part of that adaptation process described above, the lyricist of Fiddler zeroed in still further on the Capulet family, in the lyrics of both "Matchmaker, Matchmaker" (Juliet & her father) and "Far From the Home I Love" (Juliet & her mother).

I think it’s extremely plausible, not only because of the textual evidence, but also if you look at the big picture. The most global themes of Fiddler are about modernity’s impact on (a) intergroup hostility on a societal scale; and (b) courtship and marriage on the scale of the individual family. As to both (a) and (b), those are the identical global themes of Romeo & Juliet.

My previous posts about the allusive presence of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice in both Sholem Aleichem’s stories about Tevye and his daughters, and in Fiddler as well, fit like a glove with what I am saying in these current posts. And that makes perfect sense, as Romeo & Juliet and Pride & Prejudice have both been at or near the top of the list of stories in Western literature involving courtship and marriage—so of course a modern adaptor would pick up on all of them.

Larry also wrote "It is also conceivable that he was somehow familiar with York’s line in Richard II, II.iii.85: “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle.” I marvel that Arnie left it out."

But my central point in the first section of my post was to show that the lyricist not only echoed Capulet's two consecutive "neologizing imperative retorts", he also extremely closely tracked the context of that specific speech by Capulet, as I explained thusly:

"Both scenes are about daughters coerced by parents to marrying rich older men those daughters don’t want to marry- plus Tseitl, like Juliet, has already secretly declared her love to a younger suitor. In Romeo & Juliet, Capulet spews abuse at Juliet, an insane overreaction to her diplomatic, deferential, and desperate attempt to avoid his draconian fiat. In Fiddler, the girls in that final stanza seek to do exactly the same as Juliet—by not challenging parental authority directly, but instead cajoling diplomatically, asking “only” that no match be brought “unless he’s a matchless match”! And there’s also a subtly ironic pun in the word “matchless”, that I never noticed till today ---on the surface, it’s a comparative; i.e., the ideal husband is unmatched by all the other suitors. But there’s also a subversive “chop-logic” hidden meaning –he can be a “match” only so long as he’s “matchless”, meaning he must not be a match….imposed on her against her own free choice! And by the way, we hear that same comic chop-logic in the rabbi’s prayer that God keep the Czar (who, like Capulet, is prone to cruel, irrational, and deadly edicts)……far away from the Jews he victimizes! [etc etc]"

The context of York's line otherwise has nothing to do with matchmaking, although, interestingly, it is similar in tone to Capulet's speech, in that it is a bitter outburst by an older male against a younger close relative. So, I believe this particular poetic structural element was clearly associated in Shakespeare’s mind with that sort of situation.

By the way, as the article I cited explained, there are "neologizing imperative retorts" in several 16th and 17th plays other than those by Shakespeare. One in particular seems to me to be directly based on that specific speech of Capulet in R&J. It’s in John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s A Whore, and here’s the relevant scene (Annabella is “Juliet”, Putana is “Nurse”, and Grimaldi and Soranzo are “Paris”). Note that Ford gives Putana the “leave me no leaving”, and this scene is clearly the analog of the one in Romeo & Juliet in which Nurse abruptly changes her tune, and starts pushing Juliet to accept Paris after all:

PUTANA. How like you this, child? here's threatening, challenging, quarrelling, and fighting, on every side, and all is for your sake; you had need look to yourself, charge, you'll be stolen away sleeping else shortly.

ANNABELLA. But, tutoress, such a life gives no content To me, my thoughts are fix’d on other ends.

Would you would leave me!

PUTANA. Leave you! no marvel else; LEAVE ME NO LEAVING, charge; this is love outright.

Indeed, I blame you not; you have choice fit for the best lady in Italy.

ANNABELLA. Pray do not talk so much.

PUTANA. Take the worst with the best, there’s Grimaldi the soldier, a very well-timber’d fellow. They say he's a Roman, nephew to the Duke Montferrato; they say he did good service in the wars against the Milanese; but, ’faith, charge, I do not like him, an't be for nothing but for being a soldier: not one amongst twenty of your skirmishing captains but have some privy maim or other, that mars their standing upright. I like him the worse, he crinkles so much in the hams: though he might serve if there were no more men, yet he's not the man I would choose.

Ann. Fie, how thou prat’st!

PUTANA. As I am a very woman, I like Signior Soranzo well; he is wise, and what is more, rich; and what is more than that, kind; and what is more than all this, a nobleman: such a one, were I the fair Annabella myself, I would wish and pray for. Then he is bountiful; besides, he is handsome, and by my troth, I think. wholesome, and that's news in a gallant of three-and-twenty: liberal, that I know; loving, that you know; and a man sure, else he could never have purchased such a good name with Hippolita, the lusty widow, in her husband’s lifetime. An ’twere but for that report, sweetheart, would he were thine! Commend a man for his qualities, but take a husband as he is a plain, sufficient, naked man; such a one is for your bed, and such a one is Signior Soranzo, my life for’t.

But…I am not suggesting that Fiddler is based in any way on Tis Pity She’s a Whore!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The following all have to do with a particular English play written long before Jane Austen lived, by a male English author who is most famous for this particular play (and no, it’s not Shakespeare!). Solely by reading the rest of this post, and without cheating (i.e., using Google or any database):

Who is the author? &

What is the title of the play?

Even if you can’t guess either or both the first two answers (and until last week, I wouldn’t have known the answers myself), I nonetheless believe that a Janeite familiar with JA’s writing could give a pretty good answer to my third question, which is, “What does the play—whatever it’s title, and whoever its author---have to do with Jane Austen’s fiction?”

There are also two bonus questions for the erudite and intrepid respondent:

What do all three of those answers have to do with Shakespeare? &

What two clever clues are hidden in plain sight in the below-quoted speech spoken by the Older Spiritual Advisor, which point to Shakespeare?

As you’ll see, what I give you below are two scholarly reactions from Jane Austen’s era to the play and its author, plus three speeches (one of them quoted in the second scholarly reaction) from the play—but with the character names and main theme of the play all concealed, because they might give the answers away to those well versed in English literature.

I promise to give all these answers, and some explanation, at around 8 pm PST tomorrow (Friday), if they have not already been answered correctly before then.

Charles Lamb 1808 commentary:

"[Author] was of the first order of poets. He sought for sublimity, not by parcels, in metaphors or visible images, but directly where she has her full residence in the heart of man; in the actions and sufferings of the greatest minds. There is a grandeur of the soul above mountains, seas, and the elements. Even in the poor perverted reason of [Male Lover] and [Female Lover], in the play which stands at the head of the modern collection of the works of this author, we discern traces of that fiery particle, which, in the irregular starting from out the road of beaten action, discovers something of a right line even in obliquity, and shews hints of an improveable greatness in the lowest descents and degradations of our nature."

1812 The Critical Review re Weber’s 1811Edition of[Author’s] Dramatic Works:

“…[The principal theme of the play] has always been a favourite subject with tragic writers of strong powers. Mr. Lamb has given two or three beautiful scenes from this play: we shall not clash with his specimens in presenting our readers with the following brief passage:

[Older spiritual advisor speaking to the Female Lover]:

Ay, you are wretched, miserably wretched,
Almost condemned alive. There is a place,—
List, daughter!—in a black and hollow vault,
Where day is never seen; there shines no sun,
But flaming horror of consuming fires,
A lightless sulphur, choked with smoky fogs
Of an infected darkness: in this place
Dwell many thousand thousand sundry sorts
Of never-dying deaths: there damned souls
Roar without pity; there are gluttons fed
With toads and adders; there is burning oil
Poured down the drunkard's throat; the usurer
Is forced to sup whole draughts of molten gold:
There is the murderer for ever stabbed,
Yet can he never die; there lies the wanton
On racks of burning steel, whiles in his soul
He feels the torment o£ his raging lust.

[Name of play] is so well known to all whose curiosity has ever tempted them to look into the collection published by Dodsley, (in other words, to all lovers of the antient Drama,) that it is unnecessary to make any particular observations on it in this place. ‘The vivid glow of passion, with which the [theme of the play] of [the two lovers]is delineated,’ (see Introd. p. xi.) has been justly remarked by Mr. Weber as well as other critics, and is equally deserving of poetical admiration and moral censure; but the natural and consistent discrimination of character, so rarely to be found among the old dramatists, except in Shakspere, does not appear to have been so well understood, at least by the present editor [Weber]; who, to one of the best imagined and most judicious scenes in the whole play… subjoins only this cold and spiritless remark:

‘The wicked assurance of [Female Lover] is very properly introduced, though perhaps not with such a design, to erase the pity we had felt for her at first, when her perfections were painted in such strong colours.’

Most certainly, [Author] had no other ‘design’ than that (in which he has fully succeeded) of painting a mind naturally good and noble, but rendered corrupt by the long indulgence of a criminal passion, out-braving the vehemence of angry reproof and cruel treatment by an affected and overstrained assurance, but subdued in an instant and touched with the acutest sense of guilt by the change from furious vehemence to gentleness and mildness. The revolting coarseness of the dialogue is another consideration, and the fault rather of the age than of the author. It may, however, be observed that the effect of contrast is heightened by it.”

[Two almost consecutive speeches by Male Lover, the first right before telling his love to Female Lover, the second right after doing so]

Lost! I am lost! my fates have doomed my death:

The more I strive, I love; the more I love,

The less I hope: I see my ruin certain.

What judgment or endeavours could apply

To my incurable and restless wounds,

I thoroughly have examined, but in vain.

O, that it were not in religion sin

To make our love a god, and worship it!

I have even wearied Heaven with prayers, dried up

The spring of my continual tears, even starved

My veins with daily fasts: what wit or art

Could counsel, I have practised; but, alas,

I find all these but dreams, and old men's tales,

To fright unsteady youth; I'm still the same:

Or I must speak, or burst. 'Tis not, I know,

My lust, but 'tis my fate that leads me on.

Keep fear and low faint-hearted shame with slaves!

I'll tell her that I love her, though my heart

Were rated at the price of that attempt.

— O me! she comes.

True [Female Lover]! 'tis no time to jest.
I have too long suppressed the hidden flames
That almost have consumed me: I have spent
Many a silent night in sighs and groans;
Ran over all my thoughts, despised my fate,
Reasoned against the reasons of my love,

Done all that smoothed-cheeked virtue could advise;
But found all bootless: 'tis my destiny
That you must either love, or I must die.

Good luck, my fellow Janeites!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The other day, I posted a literary quiz about an unnamed author and play, and now I’ll provide my answers, followed by my presentation of salient probative textual evidence:

Who is the author? JOHN FORD

What is the title of the play? ‘TIS PITY SHE’S A WHORE (1633)

What does the play have to do with Jane Austen’s fiction? AUSTEN ALLUDED TO ‘TIS PITY IN P&P!

[In a followup post, I’ll answer my two bonus questions: “What do all three of those answers have to do with Shakespeare? & What two clever clues are hidden in plain sight in the speech spoken by the Older Spiritual Advisor, which point to Shakespeare?”]

For those Janeites unfamiliar with Ford’s most notorious drama, here is a brief edited synopsis of the first portion, courtesy of Wikipedia: “Giovanni, recently returned from university study in Bologna, has developed an incestuous passion for his sister Annabella, despite their blood relationship…Annabella, meanwhile, is being approached by a number of suitors, [but] she is not interested in any of them…and when Giovanni finally tells her how he feels (obviously having failed in his attempts to repent), she requites his love immediately. Annabella's tutoress Putana encourages the relationship. The siblings consummate their relationship. “ After that, well….suffice to say that all does NOT end well! ;)

So where does Austen fit in? First and foremost, there’s striking parallelism between the following speeches by Giovanni in Tis Pity, on the one hand, and by Darcy during his first proposal to Eliza, on the other. In both situations, we have a young man in the throes of an enormous internal struggle as to whether to declare his love to a young woman whom he feels strong attraction to, even though she is in important respects a forbidden romantic option. In each case, the young man, overpowered by feelings, bursts out his declaration of love anyway:

First here’s Giovanni just before he declares his incestuous love to sister Annabella:

Lost! I am lost! my fates have doomed my death:

The more I strive, I love; the more I love,

The less I hope: I see my ruin certain.

What judgment or endeavours could apply

To my incurable and restless wounds,

I thoroughly have examined, but IN VAIN.

O, that it were not in religion sin

To make our love a god, and worship it!

I have even wearied Heaven with prayers, dried up

The spring of my continual tears, even STARVED

My veins with daily fasts: what wit or art

Could counsel, I have practised; but, alas,

I find all these but dreams, and old men's tales,

To fright unsteady youth; I'm still the same:

Or I MUST SPEAK, OR BURST. 'Tis not, I know,

My lust, but 'tis my fate that leads me on.

Keep fear and low faint-hearted shame with slaves!

I'll tell her that I love her, though my heart

Were rated at the price of that attempt.

— O me! she comes.

And then, a few moments later, here is Giovanni actually expressing his love to her:

True, Annabella! 'tis no time to jest.
I have TOO LONG SUPPRESSED the hidden flames
That almost have consumed me: I have spent
Many a silent night in sighs and groans;
Ran over all my thoughts, despised my fate,
REASONED AGAINST THE REASONS of my love,

Done all that smoothed-cheeked virtue could advise;
But found all bootless: 'tis my destiny
That you must either love, or I must die.

….

You My sister Annabella; I know this,
And could afford you instance why to love
So much the more for this; to which intent
WISE NATURE first in your creation meant
To make you mine; else't had been sin and foul
To share one beauty to a double soul.

And now, here, of course, are Darcy’s famous passionate words spoken to Eliza--both his own opening line, and also the narration describing the rest of his speech, all of which parallel the verbiage and substance of Giovanni’s speeches:

"IN VAIN have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be REPRESSED. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you."

Elizabeth's astonishment was beyond EXPRESSION. She stared, coloured, doubted, and was silent. This he considered sufficient encouragement; and the avowal of all that he felt, and had long felt for her, immediately followed. He spoke well; but there were feelings besides those of the heart to be detailed; and he was not more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride. His sense of her inferiority—of its being a degradation—of the family obstacles which had always opposed to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit.

… “But perhaps…these offenses might have been overlooked, had not your pride been hurt by my honest confession of the scruples that had long prevented my forming any serious design. These bitter accusations might have been suppressed, had I, with greater policy, concealed my struggles, and flattered you into the belief of my being impelled by unqualified, unalloyed inclination; by REASON, by reflection, by everything. But disguise of every sort is my abhorrence. Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were NATURAL and just. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections?—to congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?"

I also see, in Eliza’s reflections after she rejects Darcy’s proposal, including her “pity” for Darcy, yet another Austenian wink at Giovanni’s proposal to Annabella:

…. The tumult of her mind, was now painfully great. She knew not how to support herself, and from actual weakness sat down and cried for half-an-hour. Her astonishment, as she reflected on what had passed, was increased by EVERY REVIEW OF IT. That she should receive an offer of marriage from Mr. Darcy! That he should have been in love with her for so many months! So much in love as to wish to marry her in spite of all the objections which had made him prevent his friend's marrying her sister, and which must appear at least with equal force in his own case—was almost incredible! It was gratifying to have inspired unconsciously so strong an affection .But his pride, his abominable pride—his shameless avowal of what he had done with respect to Jane—his unpardonable assurance in acknowledging, though he could not justify it, and the unfeeling manner in which he had mentioned Mr. Wickham, his cruelty towards whom he had not attempted to deny, soon overcame THE PITY which the consideration of his attachment had for a moment excited…

Besides this central and salient parallel, there are also some less salient allusions to Tis Pity in P&P (e.g., Darcy’s sharing with Giovanni a love of books), but I’ll leave them for a followup post. I want instead to get right to demonstrating that Austen not only read Ford’s scandalous play, which was first published 180 years before she wrote P&P, and was almost never staged or edited since then until Weber’s 1811 edition of Ford’s plays, due to its central theme being brother-sister incest. It turns out, I suggest, that JA left numerous hints in the text of P&P to show that she had also read the very high-profile recent review thereof (hence also Eliza’s “every REVIEW of it” in the above “pity” paragraph in P&P), written by William Gifford.

That name should ring a loud bell for Janeites, because Gifford was Murray’s principal editor, a literary savant who wrote admiringly about P&P to Murry, and not long afterward edited Emma! His review of Weber’s 1811 Ford edition ran in The Critical Review in 1812, which is exactly when JA was busily at work on the final lopping and cropping of P&P, and I’m certain that JA read it with great approval.

Gifford’s review, entitled “Weber’s Edition of Ford’s Dramatic Works”, contained the following discussion of Ford, which, I suggest, Jane Austen deliberately echoed in a half dozen different passages in P&P. Why? So as to reinforce, for the literati who read The Critical Review, her subliminal but significant allusion in P&P to Ford’s most infamous play, Tis Pity She’s A Whore.

As you’ll see, Gifford (echoing Charles Lamb’s 1808 praise for Ford—and you know that Charles Lamb was very prominent on JA’s radar screen) made an eloquent plea for appreciation of Ford’s maligned masterwork. Gifford asking readers to look past Ford’s scandalous theme and “coarse” sexual frankness to reach a deeper appreciation of his overarching literary greatness and beauty—and I believe that is exactly the way Jane Austen read Ford as well, even though, for obvious reasons, she was not about to be explicit in her praise for Tis Pity.

Immediately following the Gifford passage, I’ll present the various passages in P&P which echo it (with parallel verbiage in both in ALL CAPS to make the parallels more visible):

“…Incest has always been a favourite subject with tragic writers of strong powers. Mr. Lamb has given two or three beautiful scenes from this play…Tis Pity is so well known to all whose curiosity has ever TEMPTED them to look into the collection published by Dodsley, (in other words, to all lovers of the antient Drama,) that it is unnecessary to make any particular observations on it in this place. The vivid glow of passion, with which the incestuous INTERCOURSE of Giovanni and Annabella is delineated …has been justly remarked by Mr. Weber as well as other critics and is EQUALLY DESERVING OF poetical ADMIRATION and moral CENSURE: but the NATURAL and consistent DISCRIMINATION of character, so rarely to be found among the old dramatists, except in Shakspere, does not appear to have been so well understood, at least by the present editor...[Weber]: ‘The wicked assurance of Annabella is very properly introduced, though perhaps not with such a design, to erase the pity we had felt for her at first, when her perfections were painted in such strong colours.’ Ford hadno other ‘design’ than that (in which he has fully succeeded) of painting A MIND NATURALLY GOOD AND NOBLE, but rendered CORRUPT by the long INDULGENCE of a criminal passion, out-braving the vehemence of angry REPROOF and cruel treatment by an AFFECTED and overstrained assurance, but subdued in an instant and touched with the acutest sense of guilt by the change from furious vehemence to GENTLENESS and mildness. The revolting COARSENESS of the dialogue is another consideration, and the fault rather of the age than of the author. It may, however, be observed that THE EFFECT OF CONTRAST IS HEIGHTENED BY IT.”

Now here are the echoing passages in P&P involving Lizzy & Darcy, with Darcy’s description of his own mixed character particularly echoing Gifford’s description of Giovanni’s mixed character:

"Your PICTURE may be very exact, Louisa," said Bingley; "but this was all lost upon me. I thought Miss Elizabeth Bennet looked remarkably well when she came into the room this morning. Her DIRTY petticoat quite escaped my notice."

"You observed it, Mr. Darcy, I am sure," said Miss Bingley; "and I am inclined to think that you would not wish to see YOUR SISTER make such an exhibition."

…"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."

"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.

[just as Gifford’s admiration of Tis Pity is heightened by the contrast of the coarse dialog with it’s the play’s serious theme]

…..

"Miss Eliza Bennet," said Miss Bingley, "despises cards. She is a great reader, and has no pleasure in anything else."

"I DESERVE neither such PRAISE nor such CENSURE," cried Elizabeth; "I am not a great reader, and I have pleasure in many things."

….“…But amidst your concern for the defects of your nearest relations, and your displeasure at this representation of them, let it give you consolation to consider that, to have conducted yourselves so as to avoid any share of the like CENSURE, is PRAISE no less generally bestowed on you and your elder sister, than it is honourable to the sense and disposition of both.

[just as Tis Pity deserves both poetical admiration and moral censure]

“…I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!"

"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."

Darcy only smiled…

She paused, and saw with no slight indignation that he was listening with an air which proved him wholly unmoved by any feeling of remorse. He even looked at her with a smile of AFFECTED incredulity.

“You could not have made the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have TEMPTED me to accept it."

Oh! why did she come? Or, why did he thus come a day before he was expected? Had they been only ten minutes sooner, they should have been beyond the reach of his DISCRIMINATION; for it was plain that he was that moment arrived—that moment alighted from his horse or his carriage. She blushed again and again over the perverseness of the meeting. And his behaviour, so strikingly altered—what could it mean? That he should even speak to her was amazing!—but to speak with such civility, to inquire after her family! Never in her life had she seen his manners so little dignified, never had he spoken with such GENTLENESS as on this unexpected meeting. What a contrast did it offer to his last address in Rosings Park, when he put his letter into her hand! She knew not what to think, or how to account for it.

When she saw him thus seeking the acquaintance and courting the good opinion of people with whom any INTERCOURSE a few months ago would have been a DISGRACE—when she saw him thus civil, not only to herself, but to the very relations whom he had openly disdained, and recollected their last lively scene in Hunsford Parsonage—the difference, the change was so great, and struck so forcibly on her mind, that she could hardly restrain her astonishment from being visible.

“…As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son (for many years an only child), I was SPOILT by my parents, who, though good themselves (my father, particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing…”

Had you not been really amiable, you would have HATED me for it; but in spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself, your feelings were ALWAYS NOBLE and just; and in your heart, you thoroughly despised the persons who so assiduously courted you.

Now……the big question that surely has occurred to many of you by now is, “Why, oh why, would Jane Austen consciously allude to the incest theme of Tis Pity in such a complex fashion in P&P, and in particular why would she repeatedly and very specifically depict Darcy as an echo of Giovanni?

My very short answer is --- because Austen intended thereby to add to her portrait of Darcy as having incestuous inclinations! That’s a suggestion I’ve previously made a few times, in calling Darcy “Jane Austen’s Byronic hero/villain”. Beyond that tempting hint, I’ll leave a full explanation for a future time.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post… http://tinyurl.com/hcom2zu …entitled

“Sanditon‘s “unaccountable” Diana Parker as dying Jane Austen’s veiled lesbian self-portrait”.

In that post, I pointed out the striking (and never previously noticed) parallel between two paragraphs written by Jane Austen in the Spring of 1817, both of which harked back to a famous aphorism about strong and weak minds, attributed to Galigai de Concini (Maria de Medeci’s close female advisor—and more) as she was about to be burnt at the stake in 1617. This same aphorism had previously been requoted in Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son and by Maria Edgeworth in both Leonora and Belinda.

The first passage by JA is in Letter 159, written by her on May 22, 1817 (2 months before her death) to her dear friend (and a woman JA loved much more than as a friend), Ann Sharpe:

“Beleive me, I was interested in all you wrote, though with all the Egotism of an Invalid I write only of myself.-Your Charity to the poor Woman I trust fails no more in effect, than I am sure it does in exertion. What an interest it must be to you all! & how gladly sh. I contribute more than my good wishes, were it possible!-But how you are worried! Wherever Distress falls, you are expected to supply Comfort. Lady P. writing to you even from Paris for advice!-IT IS THE INFLUENCE OF STRENGTH OVER WEAKNESS INDEED.-Galigai de Concini for ever & ever.-Adeiu.- “

The second passage is in the Sanditon fragment JA stopped writing in April, 1817, in which Diana Parker (the character I claim was a veiled self-portrait by JA) refers to her own and her sister’s strong minds:

“…Miss Heywood, I astonish you. You hardly know what to make of me. I see by your looks that you are not used to such quick measures."

The words "Unaccountable officiousness!—Activity run mad!" had just passed through Charlotte's mind, but a civil answer was easy.

"I dare say I do look surprised," said [Charlotte], "because these are very great exertions, and I know what invalids both you and your sister are.

"Invalids indeed. I trust there are not three people in England who have so sad a right to that appellation! But my dear Miss Heywood, we are sent into this world to be as extensively useful as possible, and where some degree of strength of mind is given, it is not a feeble body which will excuse us or incline us to excuse ourselves. THE WORLD IS PRETTY MUCH DIVIDED BETWEEN THE WEAK OF MIND AND THE STRONG; between those who can act and those who cannot; and it is the bounden duty of the capable to let no opportunity of being useful escape them. My sister's complaints and mine are happily not often of a nature to threaten existence immediately. And as long as we can exert ourselves to be of use to others, I am convinced that the body is the better for the refreshment the mind receives in doing its duty. While I have been travelling with this object in view, I have been perfectly well."

The entrance of the children ended this little panegyric on her own disposition…”

What I didn’t notice two weeks ago, was that this was only half of the echoing between Sanditonand her contemporaneous final letters, on the specific topic of personal strength and weakness. I became aware of the other half today, when I read the following speech by Diana Parker’s younger brother, Mr. Parker, while talking to heroine Charlotte about his sisters (Diana and the elder Miss Parker) prior to the arrival of those two ladies in Sanditon:

“And you must know, [Sidney] will have it there is a good deal of imagination in my two sisters' complaints. But it really is not so, or very little. They have wretched health, as you have heard us say frequently, and are subject to a variety of very serious disorders. Indeed, I do not believe they know what a day's health is. And at the same time, they are such excellent useful women and have so much energy of character that where any good is to be done, they force themselves on exertions which, to those who do not thoroughly know them, have an extraordinary appearance. But there is really no affectation about them, you know. THEY HAVE ONLY WEAKER CONSTITUTIONS AND STRONGER MINDS THAN ARE OFTEN MET WITH, either separate or together…”

I only then realized that Diana’s speech was actually a close echo of her brother’s comments, in referring to her and her sister’s strong minds in the context of referring to their bodily weakness:

“it is not a feeble body which will excuse us or incline us to excuse ourselves…. as long as we can exert ourselves to be of use to others, I am convinced that the body is the better for the refreshment the mind receives in doing its duty. While I have been travelling with this object in view, I have been perfectly well.”

It makes perfect sense that Mr. Parker would mouth his sister’s words, because he has surely heard her speak the same shpiel many times before.

But that’s not all. I went back to Le Faye’s edition of JA’s letters, and found another passage in yet another of JA’s final letters, on the same theme! It’s in the letter written by JA less than a month before the one she wrote to Anne Sharpe, and it’s to brother Charles, dated April 27, 1817, containing this passage:

“I live upstairs however for the present & am coddled. I am the only one of the Legatees who has been so silly, but A WEAK BODY MUST EXCUSE WEAK NERVES. My Mother has born the forgetfulness of herextremely well—her expectations for herself were never beyond the extreme of moderation, & she thinks with you that my Uncle always looked forward to surviving her…”

So we see even more clearly how much Jane Austen the novelist was pouring into her new fictional creation, Diana Parker, the essence of the tragedy of Jane Austen the human being in her last year of life: the tragedy of a genius-strong mind finding itself trapped inside a prematurely dying body. And of course, being Jane Austen, she did this in a highly ironic fashion—i.e., just as Miss Bates was the healthy JA’s ironic self portrait, in 1815, as a healthy tedious foolish busybody, so too was the “unaccountable” Diana Parker the dying JA’s ironic self portrait in 1817, as a hypochondriac tedious hypocritical busybody.

I see in what JA wrote to her younger brother Charles the need JA felt to minimize her serious illness, in order to spare her family. And who knows whether there were those in the family (such as entitled niece Fanny or spiteful sister in law Mary Lloyd?) who may’ve actually seen Jane as a hypochondriac, with her mysterious illness that came and went—until, of course, it came and stayed.

And all of the above also fits with her final written words, dictated to her sister in the last few days of her life—the poem “When Winchester Races”---which, as I’ve written a number of times, is Jane Austen’s ironic, defiant thumbing of her nose at Death and at those who thought her fiction would die with her. Even as her weak body was about to finally surrender, her still strong mind screamed its final defiance:

“When once we are buried, you think we are gone. But behold me immortal!”

If only she had been given the time to give us Diana Parker in all her glory, everything I now see in Sanditon tells me JA would’ve given us priceless additional hints at the passionate, protean genius concealed behind that mask of irony.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

In the Janeites group, Jane Fox wrote: "I'm guessing JA read Oliver Goldsmith. I'm also guessing that he meant this, and that this was read, wryly or even as irony. Comments?”

When lovely woman stoops to folly,

And finds too late that men betray,

What charm can sooth her melancholy,

What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover,

To hide her shame from every eye,

To give repentance to her lover,

And wring his bosom—is to die.

PART ONE: GOLDSMITH’S “WHEN LOVELY WOMAN STOOPS TO FOLLY” IN EMMA

Jane, it's not a guess, the following narrative comment is right there in the text of Emma, quoting Goldsmith’s famous poem explicitly in relation to Mrs. Churchill's suspiciously sudden death: "Goldsmith tells us, that when lovely woman stoops to folly, she has nothing to do but to die; and when she stoops to be disagreeable, it is equally to be recommended as a clearer of ill-fame."

[I’m just curious--what was it that made yoususpect that JA read Goldsmith, if it wasn’t that passage?]

To answer to your question, certainly Goldsmith must have been highly ironic in suggesting that the only option for a woman who’d been betrayed sexually ---i.e., who’d been impregnated outside wedlock--- was to kill herself. What kind of moral monster would Goldsmith have been, had he been serious?

What I think is an even more interesting question is, what did JA mean by this allusion to Goldsmith’s poem? On the surface, her meaning seems straightforward. She ironically adds "disagreeableness" to the list of female follies, the ill-fame of which can only be cleared by death. It’s a biting irony about the cruelly unfair oppression of women in JA’s world, and JA relished such irony in safely venting her righteous feminist anger about this unfairness -- even when the woman who dies is so thoroughly “disagreeable” as Mrs. Churchill! Recall how in 1812, JA was ready to forgive Princess Caroline for her numerous sexual follies, because, JA believed, she had been driven to them by the cruel mistreatment she endured from her husband the Prince Regent.

However, beyond that overt meaning, I now suggest that, within the backstory of Emma, Jane Austen was hinting that the first Mrs. Weston (nee Miss Churchill), Mrs. Churchill’s sister in law, had actually“stooped” to “folly” with a young male betrayer. After all, "ill fame" was a term applied to a woman guilty of sexual indiscretion And “stoop” is a euphemistic English verb which sounds a lot like—and I suspect is etymologically related to—the very graphic and vulgar Yiddish verb, shtup, meaning to f---k.

I wondered whether “stoop” had once had a similarly vulgar meaning in English, and sure enough, it did! Here is a usage in Thomas Middleton’s 1657 play Women Beware Women:

WARD:

If I but live

To keep a house, I’ll make thee a great man,

If meat and drink can do’t. I CAN STOOP GALLANTLY

And pitch out when I list; I’m dog at a hole.
I mar’l my guardianer does not seek a wife for me;

I protest I’ll have a bout with the maids else,

Or contract myself at midnight to the larder-woman

In presence of a fool or a sack-posset.

In their 1988 edition, Bryan Loughrey & Neil Taylor gloss the above speech as follows: “the literal sense of this passage is obscure. Probably ‘stoop’, ‘pitch out’ and ‘hole’ were part of the technical vocabulary of Cat and Trap, and the Ward is bragging of his prowess. HOWEVER, EACH OF THESE TERMS ALSO HAS A BAWDY MEANING: ‘STOOP’ = F—K; ‘pitch out’ = ejaculate; and ‘hole’ = c—t … ’have a bout’ = fornicate.”

So, it seems clear to me now that JA recognized Goldsmith’s sexual double entendre with “stoop”. But that’s not all—please read this portion of Wikipedia’s synopsis of Middleton’s play, and you tell me which character in Emma you’re strongly reminded of in the character of Bianca:

“Women Beware Women tells the story of Bianca, a woman who escapes from her rich home to elope with the poor Leantio. Fearful and insecure, Leantio requires that his mother lock Bianca up while he is away. While locked up, the Duke of Florence spots Bianca in a window and attempts to woo her with the help of Livia, a widow. When Leantio returns he discovers that Bianca has been corrupted and no longer loves him because he lacks wealth and fortune….as affairs and relationships are exposed, one of the bloodiest Jacobean tragedies is created.”

Doesn’t Miss Churchill fit Bianca to a tee? I.e., like Middleton’s Bianca, Miss Churchill also leaves her rich home to elope with the poor Captain Weston, and then Miss Churchill also no longer is satisfied with Captain Weston, because he lacks wealth and fortune! And finally, she Miss C fills the bill of a woman who “stoops’ to sexual folly in another crucial Goldsmithian aspect—she dies not too long thereafter, fulfilling Goldsmith’s ironic proscription!

So, if JA means us to figure out that Miss Churchill did stoop to such a sexual folly, who was the (then) young man who knocked her up? Given that Frank Weston had to be the product of an illicit liaison in order for folly to have been stooped to, the biological father must be someone other than her husband, Captain Weston. And now I amaze even myself with the seemingly preposterous suggestion that this line of backstory sleuthing dovetails perfectly with another recent post of mine about Emma… http://tinyurl.com/jcvso9z … in which I speculated that the biological father of Frank (a latter day Oedipus) was none other than Mr. Woodhouse!

In that recent post, I suggested that Miss Taylor was Frank’s biological mother, but now I wish to switch to Miss Churchill instead, because of these veiled allusions to Goldsmith and Middleton. And if Frank really is Miss Churchill’s biological son, then it still makes sense that Captain Weston would, after a suitable delay of a couple of years, “sell” Frank back to his maternal aunt and uncle—especially as it appears that Mr. Churchill may have been sterile, given that he and Mrs. Churchill were childless.

PART TWO: GOLDSMITH’S THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELDIN EMMA

But that poem is only the beginning of the Goldsmith I see hidden in plain sight in Emma. We also have the equally explicit reference to Goldsmith’s famous novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, which occurs in this exchange between Emma and Harriet:

"Mr. Martin, I suppose, is not a man of information beyond the line of his own business? He does not read?"

"Oh yes!—that is, no—I do not know—but I believe he has read a good deal—but not what you would think any thing of. He reads the Agricultural Reports, and some other books that lay in one of the window seats—but he reads all them to himself. But sometimes of an evening, before we went to cards, he would read something aloud out of the Elegant Extracts, very entertaining. And I KNOW HE HAS READ THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD. He never read the Romance of the Forest, nor The Children of the Abbey. He had never heard of such books before I mentioned them, but he is determined to get them now as soon as ever he can."

So, why would Harriet recommend Vicar to Robert Martin? Perhaps we may find the answer in the following excerpt from “The Gentleman Farmer in Emma: Agrarian Writing and Jane Austen's Cultural Idealism” by Robert James Merrett (U. of Toronto Quarterly 77/2, Spr. ’08) . Please in particular see the part of Merrett’s argument that I put in ALL CAPS, and you tell me which character in Emma you are thereby particularly reminded of:

“Two reasons explain why Austen makes Robert Martin's fictional point of reference in Emma Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. Firstly, she will have known this romance was the most popular of 18th-century novels. Secondly, she will have appreciated that in his depiction of Squire Thornhill, the vicar's landlord, and of Burchell, the disguised Sir William Thornhill, uncle to the squire, Goldsmith adopts a stance that balances Richardson's optimism with Fielding's pessimism about land tenure. THE SQUIRE IS full of 'high life' and 'fashionable cant'. No farmer, but A THOUGHTLESS HUNTSMAN WHO HIRES PROSTITUTES, HE SEDUCES TENANTS’ DAUGHTERS BY AFFECTING BENEVOLENCE while holding aloof from rural life BY PRETENDING TO BE SUBJECT TO HIS ‘ATTORNEY AND STEWARD’. When Dr Primrose rents one of Thornhill's farms – twenty acres of excellent land consisting of 'little enclosures' neatly defined by 'elms and hedge rows'– things seem idyllic. Local farmers, retaining a 'primeval simplicity of manners,' till their land untouched by urban 'superfluity' . Affectation somewhat impedes the Primroses' adaptation to farm life...Blind to Burchell's authenticity, they subject themselves to the squire's power. When the vicar cannot pay his rent, the steward seizes his cattle, selling them for less than half their value. But Burchell comes to their aid; he works on the Primroses' farm, helping to save 'an after-growth of hay' and to turn 'the swath to the wind'…He saves the vicar from debtors' prison and exposes his nephew.” END QUOTE

Of course I’m referring to Mr. Knightley, who: (1) is the squire of Emma ; (2) appears to benevolently govern his neighbors, (3) prefers the company and is guided by the counsel of his steward William Larkins; and (4) is the landlord to Robert Martin, the tenant farmer whom Harriet has urged to read Vicar. Hmmm……that makes 4 out of 5 very direct and specific links between the roguish Squire Thornhill and the upright Mr. Knightley. Does it make you wonder, as it makes me wonder, about the fifth data point---that part about “hiring prostitutes”! Mr. Knightley, a seemingly virile heterosexual man who has never been married --- what do you think about the possibility that he was like Squire Thornhill in seeking out ladies of the evening (or as Miss Bates drily put it re Mrs. Elton, “queen of the evening”)?

PART THREE: GOLDSMITH’S SHE STOOPS TO CONQUERIN EMMA

The above two explicit allusions to Goldsmith in the same Austen novel (and Emma has more explicit allusions scattered throughout its entire length---as opposed to the bunching of explicit allusions at the beginning of Northanger Abbey--- than any other Austen novel, surely because she was frustrated that her implicit allusions were not being recognized by her readers) are still not all the Goldsmith to be mined from Emma. There’s also a third Goldsmith work, the play She Stoops to Conquer, which lurks behind those other two. Please check out this Wikipedia synopsis (and, again, please focus on the ALL CAPS):

“Wealthy countryman Mr. Hardcastle arranges for his daughter Kate to meet Charles Marlow, the son of a rich Londoner, hoping the pair will marry. Unfortunately, Marlow is nervous around upper-class women, yet the complete opposite around working-class women. On his first acquaintance with Kate, the latter realises she will have to pretend to be 'common', or Marlow will not woo her. Thus Kate 'stoops to conquer', by posing as a maid, hoping to put Marlow at his ease so he falls for her. Marlow sets out for the Hardcastle's manor with a friend, George Hastings, an admirer of Miss Constance Neville, another young lady who lives with the Hardcastles. During the journey the two men become lost and stop at an alehouse, The Three Jolly Pigeons, for directions. Tony Lumpkin, Kate's step-brother and cousin of Constance, comes across the two strangers at the alehouse and, realising their identity, plays a practical joke by telling them that they are a long way from their destination and will have to stay overnight at an inn. The "inn" he directs them to is in fact the home of the Hardcastles. When they arrive, the Hardcastles, who have been expecting them, go out of their way to make them welcome. However, Marlow and Hastings, believing themselves in an inn, behave extremely disdainfully towards their hosts. Hardcastle bears their unwitting insults with forbearance, because of his friendship with Marlow's father. Kate learns of her suitor's shyness from Constance and a servant tells her about Tony's trick. SHE DECIDES TO MASQUERADE AS A SERVING-MAID (CHANGING HER ACCENT AND GARB) TO GET TO KNOW HIM. Marlow falls in love with her and plans to elope with her but, because she appears of a lower class, acts in a somewhat bawdy manner around her. All misunderstandings are resolved by the end, thanks to an appearance by Sir Charles Marlow. The main sub-plot concerns the secret romance between Constance and Hastings. Constance needs her jewels, an inheritance, guarded by Tony's mother, Mrs. Hardcastle, who wants Constance to marry her son, to keep the jewels in the family. Tony despises the thought of marrying Constance — he prefers a barmaid at the alehouse — and so agrees to steal the jewels from his mother's safekeeping for Constance, so she can elope to France with Hastings. The play concludes with Kate's plan succeeding: she and Marlow become engaged. Tony discovers his mother has lied about his being "of age" and thus entitled to his inheritance. HE REFUSES TO MARRY CONSTANCE, WHO IS THEN ELIGIBLE TO RECEIVE HER JEWELS and become engaged to Hastings, which she does.”

As I’ve opined numerous times, I see the Harriet Smith of the shadow story of Emma as an ambitious, clever, manipulator who (much like Lucy Steele in S&S, or Shamela in Fielding’s parody of Pamela) attempts to level the playing field using her guile, in particular her ability to wrap Emma around her little finger by sucking up to the rich but cluelessly naive heiress. In that sense, I see Kate Hardcastle, who adopts a very similar strategy to nab herself a rich husband, as a source for Harriet, who, however, is foiled in her ambition to wed Knightley and is made to settle instead for Robert Martin.

Plus, I see in Constance a source for Jane Fairfax, in particular in regard to the jewels which Jane winds up receiving after Mrs. Churchill’s conveniently sudden death, as Frank whispers to Emma (and JA whispers to the reader):

“You will be glad to hear (inclining his head, and whispering seriously) that my uncle means to give her all my aunt's jewels. They are to be new set. I am resolved to have some in an ornament for the head. Will not it be beautiful in her dark hair?"

And Jane as Constance Neville also fits with the fact that the words “stoop” and “conquer”, which both appear in Emma (stoop actually occurs 7 times in Emma, and only once in all five other Austen novels combined!) actually are most closely associated in Emma with Jane Fairfax:

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

“…only objection to gathering strawberries the STOOPING—glaring sun—TIRED TO DEATH—COULD BEAR IT NO LONGER—must go and sit in the shade…."

In Frank’s letter to Mrs. Weston:

“…I dared not address [Jane] openly; my difficulties in the then state of Enscombe must be too well known to require definition; and I was fortunate enough to prevail, before we parted at Weymouth, and to induce the most upright female mind in the creation TO STOOP in charity TO A SECRET ENGAGEMENT.—Had she refused, I should have gone mad….”

PART FOUR: JANE AUSTEN’S REAL LIFE IN EMMA VIA GOLDSMITH

I’ve claimed for over 11 years now that Jane’s concealed pregnancy is the driving force of the shadow story of Emma, and that John Knightley is the baby daddy, not Frank, whom Jane throws herself at in Weymouth in order to snag a husband soon enough to legitimize her unborn child. Therefore it fits perfectly for Jane to be associated with Goldsmith’s fiction and poetry about women who are forced to deal with “ill-fame” as best they can—and Jane finds a way, with a LOT of secret help from her friends, not to die, but to survive (and also for her baby to survive, even if the child is to be raised by Mrs. Weston instead of Jane).

And…coming around full circle back to Goldsmith’s poem which led off this post, let me now suggest Jane Fairfax as a second referent for Jane Austen’s allusion to a young woman who stooped to folly, and (in Jane’s case) might have died as a result, but did not. You may recall the account I’ve often told, that 9 years ago, I told Anielka Briggs my theory of the secretly pregnant Jane Fairfax giving her baby to Mrs. Weston to raise as Anna Weston, whereupon Anielka brilliantly upped the ante, by showing that “Anna Weston” was a coded transformation of “Ann Awe-ston” = “Anna Austen”, who of course was Jane Austen’s niece. What JA meant by this double code is up for grabs as to whether it was JA’s fantasy about a beloved niece, or a real life account of a beloved illegitimate child.

But what I note now, for the first time, is that the toddler Frank Weston was given over by his birth father Captain Weston to Frank’s maternal aunt Mrs. Churchill at almost the same age that Anna Austen was given over by her birth father James Austen (for the three years it took James to remarry) to the primary care of Anna’s paternal aunts Jane & Cassandra Austen.

This suggests to me that Jane Austen spun herself off into three different female characters in Emma who, all stooped to folly:

Miss Churchill, mother of illegitimate Frank;

Jane Fairfax, mother of illegitimate Anna; and

Miss Bates, mother of illegitimate Harriet.

In creating such a beautiful and complex backstory of illegitimacy in Emma, Jane Austen the author did not stoop to folly, she rose to conquer (artistically speaking).

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

In Janeites, Ellen Moody wrote this about Jane Austen's novella, Lady Susan:
“My suggestion was it’s a radical inverted protest novel. Austen is getting away with protesting her own and other women’s situations through presenting a heroine all will detest. There were ways for women to express themselves “contra mundi”: I saw her as turning to a sub-genre or kind of book that allowed this. Epistolary narrative, and French amoral anti-heroines. She can express herself through such a heroine as a mask. This was an era when spinsters were harshly criticized and mocked in conduct books, sent up cruelly in novels. She was despised for not having sex, but as a woman with little money and no power she’d be worse ostracized and punished for admitting knowing about sex, much less trying to live a pleasurable life of sex on her own without a man controlling her. This is the type of woman we find in these novels, only they are often widows or domineer over husbands and lovers, or simply living independently (if they had wealth somehow).”

I agree with a lot of what you say, above, Ellen, but couch my position differently, and go further in some ways.

First, I see a very striking resemblance between Lady Susan and another Austen character who has not been mentioned yet in this discussion, but who should be --- Lucy Steele in S&S --- whose married name, as I first pointed out a decade ago, is LUCY FERRARS aka "Lucifer! Lady Susan, like Lucy, is a woman without scruples who gets her way by using her own superior psychological acumen to exert influence over others - and she particularly rises to the challenge when someone dares to stand in her path and attempt to thwart her. She feels free to in effect “invade” a wealthy family, and wreak havoc in it, the way a skilled borderline personality can do (and some of you may be aware of Christine Shih’s claims that borderline personality was a key theme in Austen’s writing).

And I see Lucy doing exactly the same once she "invades" the Ferrars family -- in particular, in the way that I see Lucy as holding Edward on a string, and neutralizing sad clueless Elinor by making her her "confidante" , while she does her real work behind the scenes on Robert, setting up the mousetrap on the Ferrars family. And then, when the time is just right, her secret is "accidentally" revealed by her sister, and the trap is sprung on Mrs. Ferrars, who unwittingly does Lucy's bidding by disinheriting Edward, and making Robert her vested heir—whereupon Mrs. Ferrars has no way to squirm out of that trap.

I think that part of what makes many readers lack sympathy for the victims of Lady Susan's guile is that she is a woman, who manages to turn what is ordinarily a kind of death sentence for women in that era --becoming a widow without money--into opportunity for herself --- sorta like a self-serving Robin Hood.

Second, I think we find a continuation of JA’s grudging admiration for an amoral rake like Lady Susan and her ability to subvert male authority at will, in JA’s famous and very candid comment to Martha Lloyd in her 1812:

"I suppose all the World is sitting in Judgement upon the Princess of Wales's Letter. Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, & because I hate her Husband -- but I can hardly forgive her for calling herself ``attached & affectionate' to a Man whom she must detest -- & the intimacy said to subsist between her & Lady Oxford is bad -- I do not know what to do about it; but if I must give up the Princess, I am resolved at least always to think that she would have been respectable, if the Prince had behaved only tolerably by her at first. --"

In effect, Lady Susan is Princess Caroline on steroids --- and JA might have said about Lady Susan something like “if I must give up Lady Susan, I am resolved at least always to think that she would have been respectable, if the patriarchal social system had not been totally rigged against women, and she could have attained personal fulfilment in an ethical way".

And finally, in case anyone thinks Jane Austen as she got older was no longer in tune with having a villainess as heroine of an Austen story, just remember what JA wrote in her next to last surviving letter to her old dear friend Anne Sharp, only months before JA's death (I quoted this same passage in my post yesterday about Diana Parker in Sanditon, who bears some resemblance to Lady Susan in her exertion of influence on several people at once, like one of those circus jugglers who can keep ten dishes twirling at the same time at the top of ten sticks):

"Lady P. writing to you even from Paris for advice!-It is the Influence of Strength over Weakness indeed.-Galigai de Concini for ever & ever.-Adeiu.- “

"the influence of Strength over Weakness indeed"! That could very well be Lady Susan’s motto as well, right? I am thinking now about what she writes to his bosom buddy Alicia Johnson about Reginald de Courcy that partakes of the same attitude:

“He is lively & seems clever, & when I have inspired him with greater respect for me than his sister's kind offices have implanted, he may be an agreable Flirt. There is exquisite pleasure in subduing an insolent spirit, in making a person predetermined to dislike, acknowledge one's superiority. I have disconcerted him already by my calm reserve; & it shall be my endeavour to humble the Pride of these self-important De Courcies still lower, to convince M^rs . Vernon that her sisterly cautions have been bestowed in vain, & to persuade Reginald that she has scandalously belied me. This project will serve at least to amuse me, &prevent my feeling so acutely this dreadful separation from You & all whom I love. Adeiu.

Yours Ever S. Vernon.”

And Jane Austen herself, from the time she first picked up a quill pen as a teenaged author, to the day she died when she was too sick to even hold a pen, and despite her being a woman with little money, managed to use the enormous strength of her mind to achieve true immortality, and give inspiration to countless women, over ten generations and counting, who've read her novels, and derived strength and inspiration to be strong despite gender-based obstacles still placed in their path.

To read my post after seeing Whit Stillman's spectacular film adaptation of Lady Susan entitled Love and Friendship in January, here it is: http://tinyurl.com/pb5nbfb

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

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Lady Susan, Jane Austen, & Diana Parker for ever & ever: the strong, immortal female mind