My latest defense of my theory of Jane Austen’s shadow stories

May 11, 2016, 5:41 pm

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In the Janeites listserv, Nancy Mayer (whom I think of as my personal “Friendly Skeptic” because she is never convinced by my arguments, and yet she is unfailingly polite in her skepticism) restated yet again her old objections to my theory of Jane Austen’s shadow stories, giving me the opportunity to restate my answers according to my most current understanding, which has evolved over the past decade:

Nancy: "I do get tired of all the changing partners and imaginary lovers and sexual predators that people are driven to create. Please, as I have suggested before, do write those novels-- just don't defame Jane
with having created them."

Nancy, we've been down this road before --- every time you make a comment like that, I explain to you that I see one underlying and highly laudatory goal for Jane Austen having written novels which include
shadow stories in which many of the main characters other than the heroine are "flipped" from "good guys" to "bad guys", or from fools to geniuses:

First and foremost, I see JA's shadow stories as sophisticated cautionary tales, which exactly counterbalance the sophisticated romance of the overt stories. In a nutshell, and using P&P as one example among six:

If Darcy really is a good guy who reforms and repents his former arrogant selfish ways, then you have the story that has warmed many millions of hearts over 2 centuries. But if Darcy really is a bad guy who only pretends to reform and repent, because he's just one of those narcissistic men who cannot take no for
an answer, then you have the sophisticated cautionary tale of the shadow story. Neither is intended by JA to be understood as having an exclusive claim to be "reality"--both are possibliities, both of them fit the narrative on the page.

I believe her goal was to educate women (not in a conduct book lecture fashion, but by using the powerful experience of reading fiction as a tool to enable her female readers to read their own lives better, and be
prepared for the next man who walks in her door to be EITHER a good guy OR a bad guy.

And for the cautionary tale to have power and be effective, it had to present all the horrible things that really did happen in her world, most of which involved men oppressing women, and much of it having to do with women's bodies (serial pregnancy, sexual predation, freedom and ease of travel, etc). That was reality --men routinely did abuse the power that religion, custom, and law gave them.

So why is it defaming Jane Austen to say that she was a whistleblower, shining a light on the domestic Gothic of everyday English family life?

Nancy then responded to my above answer with this followup: "How can it be a cautionary tale if no one ever knew it? Jane Austen was too smart and too talented to be so obscure. She could have written that story more boldly."

Good question, and also one I've answered before, but I will be happy to answer it again, with three reasons which interacted with each other in complicated ways:

ONE: You overestimate her freedom to write the shadow story more boldly. She had reason to feel extremely vulnerable on a personal level, if she openly wrote what she actually thought. Remember, she had no savings, and was utterly dependent on family for room and shelter, not to say travel and leisure activities. She was not a martyr, and wasn't willing to go down in flames in order to make a point.

TWO: As an author, her primary goal with her shadow stories, I believe, was to reach women, and she feared (rightly I believe) that she would never even get published if she were too clear that she was advocating for radical readjustment of gender relations in British society.

THREE: And here's the complicated ironic aesthetic/didactic reason--it was necessary to structure the novels so that the socially acceptable overt story would be accessible by reading with the grain, where the
subversive shadow story would be accessible only by reading against the grain. The most effective way to give a reader an "Aha!" moment about being overly passive in accepting society's narratives about one's own life, would be to first seduce female readers into the very satisfying sophisticated, nuanced romance of the stories, and then, when they reread in order to enjoy the pleasure of the romance again,  their
subconscious minds would have had the chance to begin to notice subliminal hints pointing to the shadow story.

What was impossible for her to do, however, was to accurately judge, ahead of time, how close to come to crossing the line of deniability ("Do not be suspecting me of a pun") in each successive novel, without crossing it. Each publication was therefore a kind of experiment, that's why she collected reader responses as she did for MP and Emma. She was trying to gauge what was or was not being detected by her readers.

Now that I have had so much time to decode all of her fiction, beginning with the earliest Juvenilia and running right up to the deathbed poem, I can see a clear progression over time:

The Juvenilia is wildly transgressive, but was never intended to be published; same with Lady Susan.

As she went from one published novel to the next, she kept finding that nobody was "getting" the shadow stories, and so each time she upped the ante. That's why Emma, which was the fourth novel to be published in her lifetime, has its famous "Gotcha!" with the revelation of the secret 9/10 through the novel, that compels a rereading to understand what has really happened. The meta-message of that "Gotcha!", to a reader who was paying attention, is that JA was capable of pulling the wool over
readers's eyes, so maybe readers ought to be more suspicious about ALL her fiction, to see if there were other such secrets.  Plus I see her getting closer and closer to making the same-sex love themes of her
shadow stories more and more visible.

So, for all these interacting reasons, Austen proceeded cautiously. I truly believe that had she even lived to the age of 50, and had written 3-4 more novels, and had become as famous as, say, Maria Edgeworth or
Fanny Burney, and felt independent and secure enough, she would have gone public in some way with what she had been up to.

But we all know what happened instead--she died rather abruptly at 41 1/2, and then her family went into overdrive to create the Myth of Jane Austen. Whatever chance there was that readers would begin to see the shadow stories was squashed--because the key to seeing the shadow stories is the willingness to believe they MIGHT be there.  If you've been told that she did not transgress as a writer (just read Henry's Bio Notice, and JEAL's Memoir protesting way too much about what she DIDN'T do in her writing!), you will have to be a very very stubborn reader to think otherwise.

As Jane Austen the amateur epistemologist recognized, people pretty much see only what they expect to see --- the naive observer just assumes the objectivity of the world he or she sees, whereas the wiser observer recognizes his or her own hard wired subjectivity, and struggles to come up with ways of partially freeing themselves from the tyranny of one's own pride and prejudice.

This is why all six novels are so strictly written from a single point of view, that of the heroine, with less than 1% of every novel giving VERY brief windows into the minds of certain other characters --in
effect, we as readers are imprisoned in the minds of JA's young heroines, who all believe they know what is going on around them, but, in the shadow story, are utterly clueless.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

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Jane Austen’s “obscured” figure-ground novels

May 12, 2016, 1:20 pm

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In the Janeites group, a skeptic named Louise responded to one of my recent posts, and I respond as follows: 

Louise wrote: "I don't see what the point was of her writing 'shadow stories' so obscure that nobody found out about them until 200 years later."

Louise I'm satisfied with my explanation, which, briefly again is that they weren't discovered till now primarily because of the active and successful obfuscation of the Austen family from 1817 onward. People see what they expect to see, and explain away the rest as “imaginary” or “mistake”. That’s exactly what has happened in this instance.

As anyone who’s closely followed my posts the past decade would know, I've collected a hugenumber of readerly reactions to JA’s novels, dating back to JA's lifetime, when readers (other than me) have (to my mind correctly) spotted pieces of the proverbial elephant (i.e., JA’s shadow stories). However, in pretty much every instance until the present day, having been told by everyone else that there was no “elephant” there, they explained away what they saw as either the product of their own overactive imagination, or as JA having been careless about inadvertently creating the appearance of an alternative version of a given character; or similar rationalizations.

So, in short, I say you’re begging the most important question when you refer to JA’s shadow stories as “obscure” – I believe “obscured” is a better descriptor, because what should have been visible on rereading of the novels has been obscured by a deeply erroneous orthodoxy in interpreting JA’s novels. Just because “it is a truth universally acknowledged” that JA’s novels do not have shadow stories, that doesn’t mean it’s true, only that most people believe it to be true.

Louise also wrote: "As for warning readers against the dangers of predatory men - she does that quite openly in her books, there are many charming men who turn out to be bad lots."

As I’ve also explained many times, yes indeed those seducers were identified in JA's overt stories. But it was the powerful Machiavellian hypocrites, who pretended to be reliable and honest, who could be even more dangerous - like the shadow Darcy or shadow Knightley I've written about so often. It wasn’t an “either/or” situation with male predators in JA’s era, alas, it was a “both” scenario. In short, Wickham being bad did not mean Darcy had to be good, he could also be bad, but in a different way.

Louise also wrote: "The main problem with there being 'shadow stories' though is that Jane Austen's characters have always seemed like real people to me, it's what is so clever about her writing.  If they are really just cardboard cutouts who can be viewed one way or another, that ruins the whole thing.  I don't believe she intended that at all.  I think her characters were real to her, just as they are to her readers."

Louise, to reply to arguments like yours, I've often used the example of the familiar figure-ground image, like this one… http://www.afn.org/~gestalt/haggirl.gif  

  …to make my point about the ambiguity and anamorphism of Jane Austen’s shadow stories. If you’re willing to spend 15 minutes on a little experiment, perhaps you’ll be surprised at what happens, and I’d love to hear what happens if you (or anyone else reading this) takes a shot at it.

So now, look at that linked image. What do you see? (scroll down after you give it a go for a few minutes)

[scroll down]

[scroll down]

[scroll down]

Speaking for myself, when I first looked at it this morning (I had last looked at it a few years ago), what I saw initially was only the image of a fashionable young woman with a lot of dark hair wearing a large round hat of some kind.  She is looking back and to the viewer’s left, but you can’t see her eyes at all. I am guessing that this is what most people see, but perhaps that’s not so. What did you see?

Now, had I not already known that there was a second possible female face visible in that same image, I seriously doubt I’d ever have seen the second one – not because it is not there, but because I wouldn’t even have looked for it!

It’s only because I knew in advance that this is a figure-ground image, that I kept looking, and kept struggling to free myself from the tyranny of that initial “overt” image. It was only then that, after a few minutes, something flipped in my brain, and I suddenly “saw” the old woman; she is also looking to the left, but the young woman’s delicate jawline has now miraculously morphed into a very large Roman nose in the old woman. The old woman’s left eye seems to just be peeping out from under her hair, and she’s wearing a kind of scarf wrapped closely on her head.  Do you see her?

Now, how does this work this way? The human brain is mysterious, but it’s clear that we are each capable of organizing ambiguous images from the visual world into different “gestalts”. That’s the whole point of the Rorschach test, which is to create an image that is so ambiguous that it can readily be seen as 100 different objects.

But with a different sort of image, one deliberately designed to be ambiguous between two “gestalts”, like the one I linked to, we are capable of flipping back and forth between them in our minds. Go ahead and try it, and you’ll see that you can see the young woman, then see the old woman, then go back again, ad infinitum. The more repetitions, the easier it becomes.

And that brings me to my main point, which rebuts your above comment. Is the image of the young woman any less real or complex, now that we know that there is also the face of an old woman there as well? Has it become more of a “cardboard figure”, to use your terminology? Of course not! They both seem real and complex, just different.

The various visual elements are ambiguous, and have been carefully chosen so as to create two distinct visual pathways for interpretation by the brain. Even though I didn’t see the old woman until I worked hard at it, now I see both with equal ease. My brain has obviously learned to see the old woman too, in part by remembering to notice her large nose, her headscarf, her tiny eye.

And all I am saying to you is that Jane Austen, using words on pages, achieved that exact same result with the characters and storylines of the six novels--- for example, Harriet Smith may be the naïve impulsive doofus that Emma sees her as throughout most of the novel, or she may be the hard nosed, pragmatic, ambitious young woman who suddenly shows her face to Emma late in the novel, and shocks Emma with the news that Harriet has her sights set on Knightley. Which one is real?  Both of them! It does not diminish the complexity of Harriet the trusting doofus, if there is also a Harriet the manipulative fortune hunter. Actually, they constitute a fascinating contrast with each other. But, they can’t be combined – Harriet cannot be a schemer in one scene, and a doofus in the next one, because human personality (at least in people who do not suffer from psychosis) is very stable.

And finally, this also explains why I so readily see elements of JA’s shadow stories, whereas I had to really struggle to see them 14 years ago, when I saw my first one (Willoughby was stalking Marianne when she falls and twists her ankle). As I’ve often recounted, it took me 2 ½ years to reach the epiphany that all of JA’s novels have coherent shadow stories. Up till then, I kept gathering more and more shadow story elements, but I kept trying to squeeze these literary square blocks into the circular holes of the novels as customarily read. It was only when I realized Jane Fairfax’s concealed pregnancy, and Frank’s having murdered his aunt, in early 2005, that the scales fell from my eyes. 

And since then, by means of frequent continuous practice, a few thousand times over the past 14 years, I’ve trained my brain to recognize the particular sort of anamorphism that JA created in her fiction, utilizing ambiguous wordplay and situations rather than the lines and shadings of the figure-ground image of the old/young women. It’s truly a breathtaking beautiful artistry that she must have developed, like Mozart writing his late masterpieces. And that is already reason enough to want to become acquainted with her shadow stories. They are like discovering another six Austen novels!

And this is one important reason why my theory sounds so crazy to you – the shadow story does not pop out in your mind as a whole, the way the old woman does in the visual image. Obviously, a Jane Austen novel has complexity on a scale thousands of times larger than a simple visual image. So it is a leap of faith to take the intellectual/cognitive journey required in order to really see the shadow stories as “real”—and also to learn to move back and forth between it and the overt story, as I have now also learned to do.

You may well ask at this point—this sounds like a gigantic amount of work—why should I bother, beyond appreciating JA’s artistry? And my answer is, another hidden benefit of such an exercise is that this sort of skill is widely generalizable to all sort of creative thinking. I have often pointed out that my longtime crossword puzzle addiction is one of the key factors that predisposed me to see Jane Austen’s shadow stories. They both depend on developing brain flexibility and pattern recognition skill. And guess what? I have found (and my wife, who is a clinical psychologist who has been a skilled therapist for a quarter century, agrees) that this skill can be transferred into real life, allowing a person to read their own and other people’s characters with greater nuance, allowing for the possibility of moving beyond “first impressions” to more nuanced interpretations of the personalities of ourselves and those around us. That was JA’s didactic purpose, I believe, but alas, her ambitions were thwarted by her premature death and the snow job her family then perpetrated on the reading public at large. But now the light bulb can be switched on again.

[For those who want to read two earlier explanations of mine emphasizing different aspects of Jane Austen's double stories, here are links to two other posts at this same blog:

http://tinyurl.com/onftqz7   http://tinyurl.com/jyfet25

Thank you for your interest!]

Cheers, ARNIE 

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

"We all love to instruct": the didactic purpose of Jane Austen's double stories

May 13, 2016, 10:35 am

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My friendly skeptic Nancy Mayer was at it again yesterday in Janeites, giving me yet another prompt to explain myself in a different way: 

"Jane Austen didn't have to go to the lengths of a Da Vinci code  rigmarole  to publish her cautionary tales. She could have published them openly and called them cautionary tales for  young women on the verge of marriage. She was a genius . She would have found a way if she'd  wished."

Nancy, I'll explain this one more time,  since you keep ignoring my repeated explanations of this very point. I've often mentioned the strange Zen paradox that JA put in the mouth of Elizabeth Bennet ("We all love to instruct though we can teach only what is not worth knowing") in this regard, and will do so again now.

I claim that Jane Austen wished to instruct her female readers about the perils not only of the Wickhams of her world but also of the bad Darcys (as opposed to the good Darcys), too. 

And JA realized that just straightforwardly instructing her female readers that rich, powerful handsome men who couldn't take no for an answer could be even more seductive than smooth tongued penniless charmers like Wickham, would be "teaching what is not worth knowing", because a cocky country girl like Elizabeth, who considered herself a great amateur psychologist (studies of character) would just laugh that warning off, and say something like "oh, I wouldn't be that naive, I'm not a fortune hunter, i will marry for love, not money".

But how much more effective a lesson can be indirectly taught in two steps. First JA seduces the female reader to fall in love with Darcy at the end of P&P right along with Elizabeth, and get totally swept up in the fantasy of reforming a narcissistic jerk just by telling him off really well one time! That fantasy is SO powerful, that it has made P&P the most popular love novel of our time, and the 1996 P&P the most popular love film for sophisticated viewers.

But Then later upon rereading (just as Elizabeth changes her mind after repeated rereading of  Darcy's letter, not coincidentally), when the reader eventually becomes aware of the shadow story, the reader can feel that frisson of scary self awareness - "uh-oh, OMG,  it seems that I bought into that unrealistic fantasy just as much as Elizabeth did-I'm actually more vulnerable to the seduction of money and power than I realized. I better be extra alert to that risk the next time a man like Darcy appears in my life.".

That is experiential learning rather than passive ingestion of a "lesson" and is therefore much more powerful than the straightforward lecture you say JA could have written, warning about the dangers of such a man. 

Because JA understood what Shakespeare and Milton "taught" her. Satan (or Iago) operates that way, by whispering in our ears, subtly appealing  to our vanity, and hinting that we would be safe to voluntarily walk down a garden path to our own destruction. Influence is most powerful when the victim buys into the seducer's suggestion, and takes it on as her own idea. 

And finally, speaking of readers seeing parts of the elephant but not realizing there were two stories in one novel, guess who recognized, way back in 1816, that the joke was really on Elizabeth in P&P?:

".....The story of the piece [P&P] consists chiefly in the fates of the second sister, to whom a man of high birth, large fortune, but haughty and reserved manners, becomes attached, in spite of the discredit thrown upon the object of his affection by the vulgarity and ill-conduct of her relations. The lady, on the contrary, hurt at the contempt of her connections, which the lover does not even attempt to suppress, and prejudiced against him on other accounts, refuses the hand which he ungraciously offers, and does not perceive that she has done a foolish thing until she accidentally visits a very handsome seat and grounds belonging to her admirer. They chance to meet exactly as her prudence had begun to subdue her prejudice; and after some essential services rendered to her family, the lover becomes encouraged to renew his addresses, and the novel ends happily..... "

Scott brilliantly nudged open the door, but didn't realize that there was a double story structure.

And finally it's no coincidence that Elizabeth utters that Zen parable to Jane in the same conversation in which Elizabeth jokes about dating her own falling in love with Darcy from the moment she first saw Pemberley. But as I've said many times, in the shadow story the joke was on Elizabeth.

So, at least now I hope you will know and keep in mind what I'm actually saying, and if you want to still disagree, then so be it.

Cheers,
Arnie
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter 

Why Sir Walter Scott’s brilliant, subversive 1816 reading of P&P has not prevailed among Janeites

May 13, 2016, 11:42 am

≫ Next: “With these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted!”: Remembrance of Pemberley Past

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In my previous post, I quoted the following passage from Sir Walter Scott’s 1816 review of Jane Austen’s writing, which included this about P&P:

".....The story of the piece [P&P] consists chiefly in the fates of the second sister, to whom a man of high birth, large fortune, but haughty and reserved manners, becomes attached, in spite of the discredit thrown upon the object of his affection by the vulgarity and ill-conduct of her relations. The lady, on the contrary, hurt at the contempt of her connections, which the lover does not even attempt to suppress, and prejudiced against him on other accounts, refuses the hand which he ungraciously offers, and does not perceive that she has done a foolish thing until she accidentally visits a very handsome seat and grounds belonging to her admirer. They chance to meet exactly as her prudence had begun to subdue her prejudice; and after some essential services rendered to her family, the lover becomes encouraged to renew his addresses, and the novel ends happily..... "

I became curious to see if any later Austen scholars had ever engaged with Scott’s subversive reading, which (again) suggests that Elizabeth’s sudden emergence of loving feelings toward Darcy arose because she had been overawed and seduced by the wealth and grandeur of Pemberley.

And I found a remarkable reaction to Scott, in “Jane Austen ob. July 18, 1817” an article by renowned early 20^th century Austen scholar, Reginald Farrer, in The Quarterly Review.I had not previously read Farrer’s July, 1917 commemoration of Austen on the centennial of her death, but now I see that it contains a quintessential example of how the Myth of Jane Austen has blinded even the most insightful Austen scholars to evidence of her shadow stories, even when it has been placed right in front of their noses by the one contemporary of Jane Austen who would have been the best example possible of a sophisticated contemporary reader of her novels--- Sir Walter Scott, in the above quoted passage. Scott, after all, was the author whom JA famously jokingly wished would stop writing such successful novels, because he was making it so hard for other authors like her to get their books published, sold, and read.

For starters, the following passage in Farrar’s article is of interest, because Farrer so blithely states, as facts, assertions about JA’s writing which I believe most Janeites today, including myself, would consider  either wrong or wrong-headed—see if you can spot Farrers’s errors of fact and opinion about P&P:

“But now comes the greatest miracle of English Literature. Straight on the heels of Lady Susan and Sense and Sensibility this country parson’s daughter of barely twenty-one breaks covert with a book of such effortless mastery, such easy and sustained brilliance, as would seem quite beyond reach of any but the most mature genius. Yet, though Pride and Prejudice has probably given more perfect pleasure than any other novel (Elizabeth, to Jane Austen first, and now to all time, ‘is as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print,’ literature’s most radiant heroine, besides being the most personally redolent of her creator), its very youthful note of joyousness is also the negation of that deeper quality which makes the later work so inexhaustible. Without ingratitude to the inimitable sparkle of this glorious book, even Northanger Abbey, in its different scale, must be recognised as of a more sumptuous vintage. Pride and Prejudice is, in fact, alone among the Immortal Five, a story pure and simple, though unfolded in and by character, indeed, with a dexterity which the author never aimed at repeating. For, as Jane Austen’s power and personality unfold, character becomes more and more the very fabric of her works, and the later books are entirely absorbed and dominated by their leading figures; whereas Darcy and Elizabeth are actors among others in their comedy, instead of being the very essence of it, like Anne or Emma. And to the reader, the difference is that, whereas he can never come to an end of the subtle delights that lurk in every sentence of the later books, there does come a point at which he has Pride and Prejudice completely assimilated.

Perhaps Jane Austen never quite recovered this first fine careless rapture; still, the book has other signs of youth. It has a vice-word, ‘tolerably,’ and its dialogue retains traces of Fanny Burney. Compare the heavy latinised paragraphs of the crucial quarrel between Darcy and Elizabeth (the sentence which proved so indelible a whip-lash to Darcy’s pride is hardly capable of delivery in dialogue at all, still less by a young girl in a tottering passion) with the crisp and crashing exchanges in the parallel scene between Elton and Emma. The later book provides another comparison. Throughout, when once its secret is grasped, the reader is left in no doubt that subconsciously Emma was in love with Knightley all the time.”  END QUOTE FROM FARRER

I leave it you to count all the questionable assertions that Farrer makes in the above passage, in particular his claim that the dialog of the first proposal scene between Darcy and Elizabeth is “hardly capable of delivery in dialogue at all” –anyone who has seen Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth deliver those very same lines would beg to disagree, right?

But now we come to the point, as Mr. Bennet would say. Here is where Farrer blithely slams Sir Walter Scott’s 1816 comments about P&P, which I quoted above:

“In Pride and Prejudice the author has rather fumbled with an analogous psychological situation, and is so far from making clear the real feeling which underlies Elizabeth’s deliberately fostered dislike of Darcy, that she has uncharacteristically left herself open to such a monstrous misreading as Sir Walter Scott’s, who believed that Elizabeth was subdued to Darcy by the sight of Pemberley. In point of fact, we are expressly told that her inevitable feeling, ‘this might have been mine,’ is instantly extinguished by the belief that she could not bear it to be hers, at the price of having Darcy too; while her subsequent remark to Jane is emphatically a joke, and is immediately so treated by Jane herself (‘another entreaty that she would be serious,’ etc.), wiser than some later readers of the scene. Sir Walter’s example should be a warning of how easy it is to trip even amid the looser mesh of Jane Austen’s early work. Rapid reading of her is faulty reading….”

Now do you see a quintessential example of why Jane Austen’s shadow stories have not been spotted and properly understood for 200 years. The legitimate question of whether Sir Walter Scott has makes an incisive subversive interpretation of the climax of P&P is begged in the most cavalier, superficial manner by Farrer, and yet Farrer has the intellectual chutzpah to accuse Scott of reading P&P too fast to have understood it properly! Physician, heal thyself, I say!

Note in particular how Farrer accuses JA of making a rather large mistake, i.e., in leaving Elizabeth’s feelings about Darcy ambiguous. Farrer thereby implicitly and inadvertently concedes that there is an ambiguity in the novel on this crucial point—but again, with colossal chutzpah, he accuses JA herself of having “rather fumbled” the execution of this central aspect of her novel. And on top of that, he inadvertently also reveals that he has so misunderstood the manner in which P&P was composed by JA—did you note that he believed that JA wrote P&P at 21? That shows that Farrer did not bother to read JA’s 1812 letter in which she reported to Cassandra about her progress, at age 37, in lopping and cropping P&P for publication. Again, Mr. Farrer, physician heal thyself!

And finally note how Farrer accuses Scott of the “monstrous misreading” of that “mistake”, when Scott takes JA’s ambiguity as intentional on JA’s part. And then Farrer gives as “proof” that Scott has misread JA  two pieces of evidence which are anything but probative, because they can very plausibly be read as (1) Elizabeth’s self-deluding rationalizations about her immunity from the seduction of wealth and power; and (2) yet another ignoring of unpleasantness by Jane Bennet, the quintessential Pollyanna, who ought to be the last character in the world to cite as an authority on whether Elizabeth was joking!

But, who was ever going to challenge Farrer, in 1917…..or in 2016, for that matter, with these sorts of objections, other than a stubborn obsessive contrarian like myself? Nobody! Only I have had both the necessary firmness of belief that Scott was correct, plus, in the past 15 years (out of the 203 years since P&P was published), the power of the Internet and computers at my disposal, with all that those resources provide. And I’ve also been fortunate to have had the enormous amount of time to completely research the entire range of Austen scholarship—in particular, the ability to gather hundreds of nuggets like Scott’s, and to put them all in their proper place in a well organized argument, alongside my own discoveries.

And that’s yet another reason why Jane Austen’s shadow stories have not been discovered until now.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

“With these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted!”: Remembrance of Pemberley Past

May 13, 2016, 4:59 pm

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While delving into modern scholarly reactions to Sir Walter Scott’s decidedly unromantic take on how Eliza comes to fall in love with Darcy in Pride & Prejudice, I was led to an article, “Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Hegel's Truth in Art: Concept, Reference, and History” by Claudia Brodsky Lacour in ELH 59/3 (Aut.1992), 597-623, which briefly discussed Scott’s cynical take on P&P.

As I was reading the discussion in Lacour’s article about Elizabeth’s strong emotional reaction upon first being led around the interior of Pemberley, in prelude to reading Lacour’s take on Scott’s take, my eyes were arrested by one of Lacour’s acute observations:  about the “strangeness” of Elizabeth’s reaction:

“Much has been made, and should be made, of this visit to Darcy's estate, for it is only in seeing it that Elizabeth begins to imagine herself in possible connection to Darcy- a connection, however, which remains mediated by the tasteful beauty and order of the estate itself. The narrator writes:

‘At that moment she felt, that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something,’ continuing, 'And of this place,' thought she, 'I might have been mistress! With these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted! Instead of viewing them as a STRANGER, I might have rejoiced in them as my own’.

Regardless of one's view of Elizabeth at this moment, the drift of her thoughts stands out markedly from the fiction. For it is a STRANGE thing indeed to regret being a "STRANGER" to "rooms," to wish to be more "familiarly acquainted" with them, to be able to "rejoice in them as one's own" rather than rejoice in the expressed passion of, or wish to become more familiar with, their owner. Such thoughts appear EVEN STRANGER when one considers that Elizabeth is not experiencing a naive displacement of feelings; she is freely viewing objects that please her in a way that Darcy's grave and apparently indifferent demeanor never pleased her, objects that, unlike Darcy's pride, condescending proposal, and disturbing letter, need not even be read, let alone responsively or dialogically transformed. Elizabeth's imaginings about Pemberley leave Darcy quite out of the picture, until she sees Darcy at Pemberley in a picture. Walking in the family portrait gallery she is "arrested" by her recognition of Darcy in a painting, "'with such a smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen, when he looked at her". The reader may remember that Darcy is frequently described by the narrator as consciously averting Elizabeth's eyes lest she discern the light of admiration for her in his own. Here in the portrait the very liveliness of mind absent from Darcy's person is represented, and, the narrator observes:

‘There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth's mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original, than she had ever felt in the height of their acquaintance. .. and as she stood before the canvas, on which he was represented, and fixed his eyes upon herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever raised before; she remembered its warmth, and softened its impropriety of expression.’……” END QUOTE FROM LACOUR

A wild idea popped into my head for the first time when I read Lacour’s thoughts about the strangeness of Elizabeth’s reaction to Pemberley and its rooms. Her perceptive flagging of that strangeness made me realize that, in the shadow story of P&P, there was a very different reason why Elizabeth initially reacts so strongly to the rooms at Pemberley---even, as Lacour also acutely observes, before Elizabeth’s eyes are arrested by Darcy’s portrait.  My Subject Line broadly hints at the reason for Elizabeth’s reaction that I see—can you guess what it is?

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Here’s my answer. While Lacour’s reasoning works very well for the overt story, the reason that occurred to me fits perfectly with one crucial element of the shadow story of P&P that I’ve been writing about since 2012.

The rooms of Pemberley, like any other great estate of ancient origin, would’ve had their own unique and enduring sights, sounds, and smells. I suggest to you that Eliza responds so strongly to walking through those rooms, even before she sees Darcy’s portrait, because those sensory experiences reawaken in Elizabeth’s mind (very much like the time-transporting aroma of Proust’s madeleines in Remembrance of Things Past) a subliminal matrix of distant sense memory; a memory of the time Elizabeth was very young………and lived at Pemberley, because she was herself born a Darcy!

And so, I suggest, the strangeness of her feeling so drawn to the rooms is a kind of déjà vu for her—she had toddled through those same rooms two decades earlier, had stared up at the portraits on the walls, had smelled the aromas from the kitchen, and also from the surrounding vegetation, and it all comes back to her gradually as Mrs. Reynolds shows her and the Gardiners around.

But because Eliza has no conscious memory of having been born and initially raised at Pemberley, she cannot account to herself for her strange feelings of “familiarity, and so, like a love potion, these inchoate positive feelings attach themselves to the next person she sees—and that turns out to be Darcy, in his portrait hanging on the wall! That’s why she sees him differently for the first time at that moment -- it’s because now she is seeing him through the rose-colored glasses of remembrance of the way she was as a very young happy child!

And JA, with her love of punning wordplay, also hints at this ancestral memory when we read this narration of Eliza’s thoughts:

'And of this place I might have been mistress! With these rooms I might now have been FAMILIARLY acquainted! Instead of viewing them as a STRANGER, I might have rejoiced in them as my own’.

Indeed, had Elizabeth not been sent away and adopted by the Bennets, she would indeed have been mistress of Pemberley! And with the rooms of Pemberley she was indeed one “familiarly” (as in having been born into the Darcy family!) acquainted! And when she was little, she did indeed rejoice in these rooms as her own, because they were her own—and guess what, Mrs. Reynolds showed her those particular rooms precisely because Mrs. Reynolds remembers Eliza as a child, and knows what parts of the home she spent her time in!

Now, I cannot (yet) explain with exactness why Elizabeth was sent away at a very young age, but I am very confident that the reasons were very much like those that drive the plotlines of the tales of the families of Genesis which JA knew so well: sibling rivalry, stepparents with sharply conflicting goals for their respective offspring, inheritance, etc.

So, that is the key shadow story element I was reminded of as I read that section of Lacour’s article. That idea of Eliza as a Darcy first came to me in 2012 as I listened to my friend Elaine Bander’s excellent breakout session at that year’s JASNA AGM on the parallels between P&P and Fanny Burney’s Cecilia. Revelation of a secret family relationship was a staple of 18^th century fiction, even the high quality variety by the likes of Burney, but also of the Gothic fiction we know JA loved, especially Radcliffe’s. But leave it to that sly elf, Jane Austen, to hide such a scenario in plain sight, but never reveal it explicitly.  

For example, Eliza being a Darcy provides a compelling reason----other than the usual explanation, which is that JA stooped to (what I would've seen as crass) authorial expediency----for the massive multiple coincidence of P&P that I’ve been harping on every chance I get for over a decade now. We have these three young men previously connected to each other with one degree of separation --- Mssrs. Darcy, Wickham, and Collins---- all showing up within a very short time of each other in a country town where none of them had previously been, and each promptly starts courting the same young woman, Elizabeth----who also is connected to a woman, Mrs. Gardiner, who came of age in the shadow of Pemberley when Darcy and Wickham were still children.

This is either hackwork, or it’s a telltale hint left by a clever, teasing genius. I prefer the latter explanation, how about you? If Elizabeth is an heiress of Pemberley in some fashion, who is due to inherit when she reaches adult age, then she would be a particularly sweet flower to which bees like those three young men would be attracted from a very long distance.

And Elizabeth’s age was another clue to her being an heiress, as we learn in Chapter 32:  

“…Pray, what is your age?"

"With three younger sisters grown up," replied Elizabeth, smiling, "your ladyship can hardly expect me to own it."

Lady Catherine seemed quite astonished at not receiving a direct answer; and Elizabeth suspected herself to be the first creature who had ever dared to trifle with so much dignified impertinence.

"You cannot be more than twenty, I am sure, therefore you need not conceal your age."

"I am not one-and-twenty."

The reason we hear this is not to give us yet another example of Lady C’s intrusive nosiness, it’s to alert us that when Elizabeth turns 21, and she inherits her Darcy fortune, Darcy’s reign at Pemberley will turn upside down. Unless, that is, Darcy marries Elizabeth before she turns 21, in which event “sanity” will be restored, and Pemberley will revert right back to Darcy, as her husband, as soon as she does. And, did I mention that this all is necessary because Darcy, despite all appearances, is actually illegitimate!

And there’s still another sly hint hidden in the novel text. Recall that eleven chapters earlier, we read this:

“…Mr. Darcy drew his chair a little towards her, and said, ‘You cannot have a right to such very strong local attachment. You cannot have been always at Longbourn.’…”)

Indeed Elizabeth has not been always at Longbourn, because she was originally at Pemberley! Or, to put it another way, Elizabeth’s “first impressions” of Pemberley were not formed the day the Gardiners brought her there, but two decades earlier. It is only after those infantile “first impressions” are rekindled, that their glow settles on Darcy like a shimmering aura, and Elizabeth exclusively attributes this to his improved behavior toward her.She’s literally impressed—but I think I also detect a hint at the naval meaning of the verb, in this novel written by the sister of two future admirals. I think Elizabeth is also impressed like the poor men who were impressed off the street against their will into the Royal Navy!

And it’s only after Eliza sees Darcy with new eyes that we read:

“Such a change in a man of so much pride exciting not only astonishment but gratitude—for to love, ardent love, it must be attributed; and as such its IMPRESSION on her was of a sort to be encouraged, as by no means unpleasing, though it could not be exactly defined.”

And all that I’ve been writing this past year about incest themes in Austen’s fiction obviously comes to the fore as well in regard to Elizabeth as a Darcy—if she is a Darcy, and so is Darcy, then they are at least part-siblings – which fits with my longstanding claim that one of the real-life models for Darcy is none other than Lord Byron, who of course sired a child on his half sister!

And I will end by noting the irony the above reading provides to this happy comment by Elizabeth to Darcy after they have declared their love for each other:

“…You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure."

How ironic, given that if Elizabeth could actually remember her past at Pemberley, she might feel very different about Darcy in the present.  

And so I owe Nancy Mayer special thanks, because if she had not been so persistent today in repeatedly rebutting my claims about Darcy as a shadow story villain, I would not have revisited Sir Walter Scott’s shrewd 1816 comments about Elizabeth and Pemberley, and I’d therefore never have revisited Lacour’s article focused on that particular section of P&P, etc etc.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, & Eliza Bennet’s FIRST “first impressions”

May 15, 2016, 12:35 pm

≫ Next: The little “great” alteration that Lydia notices in the Longbourn sitting room

≪ Previous: “With these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted!”: Remembrance of Pemberley Past

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Nancy Mayer wrote:

"Charlotte Smith's life was made miserable due to the wretched man she married. She was quite young, he was a charming scoundrel who lied to everyone. Like Mary Robinson, Charlotte had to sit in Debtors' prison with her children -- I think one was born there-- while her husband spends what little of their funds existed cavorting with his mistress. I can see her or Mary Robinson writing novels that depict men as betrayers and monsters under their fancy coats. The way I understand it, her husband's father rewrote his will to provide for Charlotte and the children but relatives contested it, the lawyers kept the case in court for a decade and took most of the money. Charlotte had reason to distrust everyone. She subscribed to the saying "First kill the lawyers." I think she died just as the case settled or just before it did. Did anyone ever look into what happened to her children?"

Nancy, from that otherwise excellent summary, you left out one crucial fact, vis a vis JA: that Charlotte Smith’s writing was a hugely significant allusive source for JA regarding men behaving badly! Not just to mirror the likes of Wickham, but the shadow Darcy as well. Several years ago, I posted about a powerful example of the latter, drawn from one of Smith’s “ripped from the headlines” dramatizations of real life domestic Gothic horror-----and it reflects very badly indeed on the shadow Darcy. In short, I say that JA’s shadow stories are directly inspired by Smith’s overt stories!

ELIZA BENNET’S FIRST “FIRST IMPRESSIONS”:

As for Ann Radcliffe, she happens to be the other author I was going to write about today on my own accord, in followup on my claim yesterday that Eliza has such a strong reaction to seeing Pemberley with the Gardiners, because she’s NOT seeing Pemberley for the first time. Instead, she’s having a "deja vu" moment, but in the literal sense. She has literally "already seen" Pemberley before, when she was a small child born there! And so, her tour through the rooms of Pemberley on two legs is repeatedly subliminally reminding her of when she once crawled through them on four legs!

And here's how Radcliffe comes into that mix. Yesterday, I was trying to recall and retrieve other literary characters who unwittingly return to their birthplace, and have a feeling of "deja vu" based on actual early memories. Besides the most famous one, Oedipus (did you catch my sendup of the Sphinx’s riddle, in referring to Elizabeth at Pemberley on two legs and four legs?), I recalled that something strikingly similar happens to Emily St. Aubert, the heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho. Here’s how Nelson S. Smith explained it, in “Sense, Sensibility and Ann Radcliffe” in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 Vol. 13, No. 4, Nineteenth Century (Autumn, 1973), pp. 577-590:

“Throughout Dorothee's story of the Marchioness, prolonged over nearly forty pages, Mrs. Radcliffe hints that Emily might be her daughter. Later, Emily visits a dying nun, Agnes, who resides at the monastery of St. Claire. The first story which Emily hears suggests that Agnes may be the Marchioness. But Agnes turns out to be the original owner of Udolpho, mistakenly thought by Emily among others, to have been murdered by Montoni. Agnes then confirms that Emily must be the illegitimate daughter of St. Aubert and the Marchioness. When things finally get straightened out, the Marchioness turns out to be St. Aubert's sister (which explains the picture and the papers) whom he kept secret from Emily "whose sensibility he feared to awaken". …”

So I thought, hmmmm… that sounds a lotlike Eliza when the Gardiners bring her to Pemberley. And so it’s no surprise that such passage in P&P is strikingly picturesque, given how central the picturesque was to Radcliffe’s fiction, including Udolpho.

But there’s more, and I’ll let the late Brian Southam (in Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts, 1964) set up the next part of my claim:   “First Impressions may also have begun as a literary satire…The object of the burlesque is hinted at in the title, for the phrase ‘first impressions’ comes directly from the terminology of sentimental literature…She would have known a…recent usage in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), where the heroine is told that by resisting first impressions she will ‘acquire that steady dignity of mind, that can alone counterbalance the passions.’ Here, as commonly in popular fiction, ‘first impressions’ exhibit the strength and truth of the heart’s immediate and intuitive response, usually love at first sight…There is a striking reversal of this concept in P&P; first impressions are effective with Elizabeth Bennet, yet in circumstances altogether unsentimental. The moment she catches sight of Darcy’s family home, she feels ‘that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!’; it is this sense of property which warms her heart towards Darcy, as she later admits to Jane, jokingly, but speaking more truly than she knows, confessing to a worldliness, a common humanity which no sentimental heroine could possess …Her violent first impressions of Darcy derive from prejudice and false reasoning…she has to learn how little the first impressions of her sharp intelligence are to be trusted…”

Southam was spot-on in all respects (and Tony Tanner approved Southam’s arguments a decade later), but he was not armed with the perspective I now have, of the “déjà vu” aspect of Elizabeth’s visit to Pemberley. Therefore, Southam couldn’t possibly realize yet another, punning meaning of JA’s original novel title “First Impressions”, which I flashed on this morning, and which my Subject Line hints at. I.e., when viewed through the lens of Eliza returning to her childhood home Pemberley, “first impressions” suggests that she is remembering her first “first impressions” in her entire life, when she was a small child at Pemberley!

But, within the ambit of that alternative reading, note that Elizabeth does not heed Radcliffe’s warning! She doesn’t do so, because she doesn’t realize that she’s falling under the powerful spell of “first impressions” formed nearly two decades earlier. These first “first impressions” exert a powerful influence on the adult mind, as Freud so aptly explained a century ago. And so, not recognizing them for what they are, Elizabeth does not resist them, she does not counterbalance the passion they arouse in her heart, and she instead mistakenly attributes them to Darcy himself, and her (otherwise justified) resistance to Darcy crumples and disintegrates.

And finally, in that same vein, I found one other remarkable punning textual wink at this same shadow meaning in the very famous exchange between Eliza and Lady Catherine during their epic showdown in the Longbourn wilderness. This is the perfect place for JA to hide such a wink in plain sight, since it is prompted by Lady Catherine’s panic that Eliza will shortly be returning to Pemberley again, but this time as its mistress!

And so when Lady C thunders her grandest line of impassioned oratory, “Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?", Elizabeth has had quite enough: "You can now have nothing further to say," she resentfully answered. "You have insulted me in every possible method.”

And that’s the perfect moment for JA to then wink at us via Elizabeth’s next line:

“I must beg to return to the house."

Do you get it? Of course, on the surface, we all understand that Eliza means to say that she must go back inside the house there and then at Longbourn, from the wilderness where she and Lady C have been walking. It’s Elizabeth’s deliberately defiant and impolite way of terminating their  head-butting “tete-a-tete”  on her own terms, and we cheer her for it. But, in the shadow story, Elizabeth is also unwittingly speaking on a metaphorical level. She’s saying “I must beg to return to Pemberley, my rightful home of origin, by marrying Darcy!”

And, in the shadow story of P&P, that is, alas, nothing to cheer for.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The little “great” alteration that Lydia notices in the Longbourn sitting room

May 17, 2016, 6:28 pm

≫ Next: Mr. Darcy’s “request” that the (in)dependent Mr. Bennet cannot refuse

≪ Previous: Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, & Eliza Bennet’s FIRST “first impressions”

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While I do the overwhelming majority of my literary sleuthing online and on my computer, I still sometimes have occasion to delve into actual tangible books I hold in my hands (I have three whole shelves of books by and about Jane Austen), and yesterday I spent an enjoyable stretch browsing and rereading essays in Donald Gray’s Norton Critical Edition of P&P, for the first time in several years. My first reaction was to salute Gray and the Norton Critical Editions people for including extended excerpts from 4 or 5 essays about P&P which make, at least in part, what I consider to be excellent subversive readings of important aspects of P&P. I’ll write about each of them in the coming week, and today I’ll begin by talking about something remarkable I was prompted to discover after reading something in Nina Auerbach’s 1978 essay “Waiting Together: Pride and Prejudice”.

Auerbach’s major point that resonated most strongly with me is summed up by her here: 

“The acknowledged center of power in the novel is the shadowy Darcy…Elizabeth is overcome by a kind of social vitalism…like the shadowy ‘Duke of dark corners’ in Measure for Measure, he moves behind the scenes and secretly arranges the marriages of the three Bennet girls.” 

Those pithy comments anticipate my full-fledged vision of the Machiavellian Darcy of the shadow story of P&P, and I heartily recommend the rest of her essay to you all. However, today I want to focus on a small snippet of it, in which Auerbach discusses the strange insubstantiality of Longbourn as a place, due to JA’s dearth of physical description thereof in Chapter 51 of P&P:

“When the unregenerate Lydia return[ed] to make everyone miserable as the family’s first bride, and look[ed] ‘eagerly round the room, took notice of some little alteration in it, and observed, with a laugh, that it was a great while since she had been there”, it matters to nobody what the little alteration might be.” END QUOTE FROM AUERBACH ARTICLE

My eyes widened at the tantalizingly vague word “alteration”, which I had identified years ago as one of the many euphemistic words (others include ‘borne’, ‘expectation’, ‘interesting condition’, and ‘swelled’) by which JA subliminally hinted at concealed pregnancies in all her novels. All my experience of JA’s cryptic clueing was telling me that this was a clue to something like that; not, as Auerbach seemed to think, a trivial moving of a sofa from one part of the room to the other that no reader had any reason to care about. I quickly retrieved the full relevant excerpt to try to glean some more clues: 

“Lydia was Lydia still; untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless. She turned from sister to sister, demanding their congratulations; and when at length they all sat down, looked eagerly round the room, took notice of some little alteration in it, and observed, with a laugh, that it was a great while since she had been there.”

That full excerpt showed me that Auerbach had not thought far enough outside the box to grasp that the “little alteration” was not in the furnishings of the room, but in someone— “in it”—i.e. a little alteration in one of Lydia’s sisters! The key to solving this little mystery is to pay close attention to the physical details that Jane Austen actually provides, rather than looking in vain for the physical details she does not. In this case, we are told that Lydia turned from sister to sister (a lot of turning, since she has 4 sisters!), and then JA takes care to repeat the placement of the 4 other sisters within the space of the room, now seated around Lydia. I’m reminded (not coincidentally, I suggest) of Elizabeth’s playful allusion to Gilpin earlier in the novel, in the Netherfield shrubbery, except this time it’s Lydia who is laughing at others, not Eliza: “No, no; stay where you are. You are charmingly grouped, and appear to uncommon advantage. The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a fourth. Good-bye."

And here’s the key—I see in Lydia’s laughing observation a giant hint as to what sort of alteration she notices — it is indeed that Lydia is having some uncharitable fun at the expense of one of her sisters, whose physical appearance has altered during Lydia’s months away — altered, that is, by having given birth to a child in the interim!

That hint is that Lydia laughs first and then says that she has been gone “a great while”. Lydia is slyly making the point that one of her sisters had been “great” — with child, that is — when Lydia left around May 10, and was now, over three months later, in late August, no longer “great” with child. But which sister?

At first, not thinking carefully, I thought it was Jane Bennet, since I’ve been saying since 2010 that Jane is secretly pregnant when the action of the novel begins (e.g., it is her morning sickness, not getting caught in the rain, which is the actual “illness” that forces her to spend most of her visit to Netherfield in bed). But I quickly realized, today, that it can’t be Jane to whom Lydia is referring, since the chronology is all wrong. I recalled that I had figured out a while ago that Jane Bennet goes to London to stay with the Gardiners so she can have her illegitimate child under the cloak of the anonymity of the great metropolis, far away from the probing eyes of sister Elizabeth and also the gossip hothouse known as Meryton. But Jane is already back at Longbourn before Lydia leaves for Brighton, so it can’t be Jane who has altered during Lydia’s absence. 

That brought me up short. I hadn’t previously considered the possibility that yet another Bennet sister might be pregnant, but which one? It certainly wasn’t Eliza, and I already knew from prior close readings that there was nothing in the small number of lines spoken by Mary, or in the small amount of narration about her, that in any way hinted in that direction. By process of elimination, that left only Kitty! I decided to investigate that possibility, in deference to Sherlock Holmes’s famous credo:  “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

So I began to think about Kitty Bennet as an (improbable, but possible) unmarried pregnant girl in the shadow story of P&P, and the first thing I recalled, promisingly, was my finding, several years ago, that Kitty has depths unsuspected by Elizabeth, through whose eyes we experience Kitty. I knew that Kitty’s sarcastic coughing at the beginning of the novel, when Mr. and Mrs. Bennet engage in their famous repartee about his contacting Mr. Bingley, showed that Kitty had a sharp mind and wit. 

But were there any textual clues elsewhere in the novel hinting at a much more significant hidden life of Kitty’s—of her being in a family way? 

I quickly collected a number of passages that seem relevant, and will go through them with you, below, in order, except that I will first present the one I found that really knocked my socks off. It’s the following passage in Chapter 42, by the light of which a heretofore “dark corner” of Kitty’s life was shockingly illuminated:

“By the middle of June, Kitty was SO MUCH RECOVERED as to be able to enter Meryton WITHOUT TEARS”

I don’t deny that the context of the above in the overt story is clear— that Kitty took over a month to get over herself regarding not being allowed to go with Lydia to Brighton. Not a big deal. But if we read that quoted sentence against the grain, what pops out at us (so to speak) from the ALL CAPS verbiage is extraordinary, when combined with Lydia’s laughing comment 9 chapters (and over 2 months) later. Everyone knows that the period of time for mothers to recover from childbirth can vary, depending on how easy the delivery is. 

And that’s where JA’s punning mastery comes in — while we overtly read “without tears” to mean that Kitty no long cries tears (rhymes with ‘tiers’), there is also a pun in the word “tears”, which, when pronounced to rhyme with “fares”,  refers to rips, rents, or slits in fabric, paper, or. ….. human flesh! You see now where I’m going with this — one of the events which can occur during delivery which can significantly extend her recovery time is that the mother can suffer unusual injuries (‘tears”), especially in the case of a large newborn being borne by a petite mother.

So, was the above sentence JA’s way of alerting us to look at Kitty as a pregnant mother, who gives birth shortly after Lydia leaves for Brighton? I think so, and now, let’s walk through the other relevant passages I collected from the text of P&P, and I’ll show you the delicate textual palimpsest that JA weaves in this regard.

BEFORE LYDIA LEAVES FOR BRIGHTON

Ch. 39:   …both KITTY and Lydia looking out of a dining-room up stairs. These two girls had been above an hour in the place, happily employed in visiting an opposite milliner, watching the sentinel on guard, and DRESSING A salad and CUCUMBER.

The sexual innuendo of that “cucumber”, involving both Kitty and Lydia, is strongobvious.

“…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 that made the men suspect something, and then they soon found out what was the matter."

With such kinds of histories of their parties and good jokes, did Lydia, ASSISTED BY KITTY’S HINTS and additions, endeavour to amuse her companions all the way to Longbourn. 

And even more so is the sexual innuendo clear in the above passage—and note that Kitty is associated with sexual activity and hints as well as Lydia.

“…As we went along, Kitty and I drew up the blinds, and pretended there was nobody in the coach; and I should have gone so all the way, IF KITTY HAD NOT BEEN SICK…”

And note that Lydia’s R-rated suggestion of sex play needing to be concealed, is prevented because Kitty is “sick”. This would be within a short time before Kitty would give birth.

Ch. 41: "And my aunt Phillips is sure [sea-bathing] would DO ME A GREAT DEAL OF GOOD," added Kitty.

And so, here again is slipped in a subtly veiled implication that Kitty is not well.

"I cannot see why Mrs. Forster should not ask me as well as Lydia," said she, "Though I am not her particular friend. I have just as much right to be asked as she has, and more too, for I am two years older.”

And we may wonder about Kitty’s not being able to go for a very different reason, i.e. that she is about to give birth!

AFTER LYDIA LEAVES FOR BRIGHTON

The following passages cover the time period that Lydia is away, and look at what we read right before the above-quoted “smoking gun” about Kitty’s recovery from her tears:

Ch. 42: [Lydia’s] letters were always LONG EXPECTED, and always very short…from her correspondence with her sister, there was still less to be learnt—for her letters to Kitty, though rather longer, were much too full of lines under the words to be made public.

In addition to the pun on “long expected”, we may now wonder whether Lydia’s letters to Kitty had to be written in a kind of code to conceal the portions thereof relating to Kitty’s imminent childbirth ordeal.

After the first fortnight or three weeks of her absence, HEALTH, good humour, and cheerfulness began to reappear at Longbourn. Everything wore a happier aspect. The families who had been in town for the winter came back again, and summer finery and summer engagements arose. 

And once again, subtly, the restoration not merely of good humor and cheerfulness, but of health, is slipped into the narrative.

Now we move ahead a bit in time, to when Lydia elopes.

Ch. 46: To Kitty, however, it does not seem SO WHOLLY UNEXPECTED.

Again, that same pun on expectation and childbirth.

Poor Kitty has anger FOR HAVING CONCEALED their ATTACHMENT; but as it was a matter of confidence, one cannot wonder. 

Ch. 47: “…Mary and Kitty, thank Heaven, are QUITE WELL.”

And yet again, it seems Kitty’s health is always under consideration.  

In the dining-room they were soon joined by Mary and Kitty, who had been too busily engaged in their separate apartments to make their appearance before. One came from her books, and THE OTHER [Kitty] WITH HER TOILETTE. The faces of both, however, were tolerably calm; and no change was visible in either, except that the loss of her favourite sister, or the anger which she had herself incurred in this business, had given MORE OF FRETFULNESS THAN USUAL TO THE ACCENTS OF KITTY. “

And yet again, we are subtly directed to think about Kitty’s body, and her complaints. 

“…Kitty then owned, with a very natural triumph on knowing more than the rest of us, that in Lydia's last letter she had prepared her for such a step. She had known, it seems, of their being in love with each other, many weeks."

"Mary and Kitty have been very kind, and would have shared in every fatigue, I am sure; but I did not think it right for either of them. Kitty is SLIGHT AND DELICATE…”

And here we get another clue — Kitty is given a pass by Jane that is not given to Mary, so as to avoid causing Kitty fatigue, because Kitty is slight and delicate, which connects back to her “tears”.

Ch. 48: "This is a parade," he cried, "which does one good; it gives such an elegance to misfortune! Another day I will do the same; I will sit in my library, in my nightcap and powdering gown, and give as much trouble as I can; or, perhaps, I may defer it till Kitty runs away."

"I am not going to run away, papa," said Kitty fretfully. "If I should ever go to Brighton, I would behave better than Lydia."

"You go to Brighton. I would not trust you so near it as Eastbourne for fifty pounds! No, Kitty, I have at last learnt to be cautious, and you will feel the effects of it. No officer is ever to enter into my house again, nor even to pass through the village. Balls will be absolutely prohibited, unless you stand up with one of your sisters. And you are never to stir out of doors till you can prove that you have spent ten minutes of every day in a rational manner."

Kitty, who took all these threats in a serious light, began to cry.

"Well, well," said he, "do not make yourself unhappy. If you are a good girl for the next ten years, I will take you to a review at the end of them.”

The above passage, which appears to be pure comedy, also carries a dark possible implication - could it be that Mr. Bennet’s unwillingness to allow Kitty to go away is a clue to the identity of the father of Kitty’s illegitimate child?—I.e., Mr. Bennet himself? It would certainly fit with the patriarchal incest theme that comes to the fore in the shadow story of Emma, with Mr. Woodhouse as a latter day Antiochus from Shakespeare’s Pericles.

And that last disturbing suggestion is totally consistent all of the following passages in the final chapters of the novel, which have that same common theme— that Kitty is not going to leave Longbourn anytime soon—and it won’t be for a good reason.

Ch. 55: It was an evening of no common delight to them all; the satisfaction of Miss Bennet's mind gave a glow of such sweet animation to her face, as made her look handsomer than ever. Kitty simpered and smiled, and hoped her turn was coming soon. …Mary petitioned for the use of the library at Netherfield; and Kitty begged very hard for a few balls there every winter.

Ch. 59: "It may do very well for the others," replied Mr. Bingley; "but I am sure it will be too much for Kitty. Won't it, Kitty?" Kitty owned that she had rather stay at home. 

So, in honor of Kitty Bennet, it seems fitting if I end with a cough— because, regarding her coughing at the beginning of P&P, was I correct last year that Kitty was just being sarcastic about her parents’ tired old vaudeville routine? Or, behind that comedy, was there a darker timbre to her coughing, perhaps referring to Kitty’s extreme skepticism that her father will EVER let her get away from Longbourn?

That being said, I hope that the following, final reference to Kitty in the novel suggests that Elizabeth and Jane have taken matters into their own hands, in rescuing Kitty from the need for further coughing. 

Ch. 61: Kitty, to her very material advantage, spent the chief of her time with her two elder sisters. In society so superior to what she had generally known, her improvement was great. She was not of so ungovernable a temper as Lydia; and, removed from the influence of Lydia's example, she became, by proper attention and management, less irritable, less ignorant, and less insipid. From the further disadvantage of Lydia's society she was of course carefully kept, and though Mrs. Wickham frequently invited her to come and stay with her, with the promise of balls and young men, her father would never consent to her going.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Mr. Darcy’s “request” that the (in)dependent Mr. Bennet cannot refuse

May 19, 2016, 12:51 pm

≫ Next: Marianne’s galloping dream, Queen Mab, Eve of St. Agnes (& Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, & Keats!)

≪ Previous: The little “great” alteration that Lydia notices in the Longbourn sitting room

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I’ve engaged in an offlist exchange of emails with a sharp elf Janeite the past 2 days about my most recent claim, that Kitty Bennet is subliminally depicted as going through childbirth during the time Lydia is in Brighton and London. I’ve again urged her to join these two groups and contribute her excellent insights, and the latest one she wrote me is the following remarkable speculation about Mr. Bennet's possible source of income other than from Longbourn's operations:

"Somewhere in the novel a rather long paragraph was dedicated to the non-existence of economy in the household and that they would indeed have been in trouble if Mr. Bennet didn't 'love his independence' so much.."

I immediately recognized this as brilliant, because "independence" is exactly the sort of ambiguous abstract noun which JA clearly relished punning on in a variety of sophisticated ways. I will now take a preliminary stab at fleshing out her insight here, and hopefully she will show up soon and add more to this thread, and hopefully to many others to come.

First of all here’s the passage she was recalling:

“[Mr B] was seriously concerned that a cause of so little advantage to anyone should be forwarded at the sole expense of his brother-in-law, and he was determined, if possible, to find out the extent of his assistance, and to discharge the obligation as soon as he could. When first Mr. Bennet had married, economy was held to be perfectly useless, for, of course, they were to have a son. The son was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow and younger children would by that means be provided for. Five daughters successively entered the world, but yet the son was to come; and Mrs. Bennet, for many years after Lydia's birth, had been certain that he would. This event had at last been despaired of, but it was then too late to be saving. Mrs. Bennet had no turn for economy, and her husband's love of independence had alone prevented their exceeding their income.”

I hadn’t previously focused on that last curious reference to Mr. Bennet’s “love of independence”, and so first I had to decode its somewhat obscure surface meaning, before addressing the shadowy pun that my correspondent had spotted. After a few minutes, it became clear to me that the idea was that Mr. Bennet hated the idea of owing anything to anyone (like Mr. Gardiner), and that was the only reason why he periodically dragged himself out of his beloved library and forced himself to pay enough attention to keeping Mrs. Bennet’s expensive taste in financial check, so they didn’t incur debt.

So far, so good, JA always got a kick out of forcing readers to stay alert and be ready to parse her deliberate gaps and elisions. But now for the pun — it’s also clear to me that she repeatedly deployed, in both narration and dialog, the now archaic meaning of “independence” as a kind of annuity or source of regular income. To give just three out of a number of examples:

[Emma] : [Mr. Weston] had received a good education, but, on succeeding early in life to a small independence, had become indisposed for any of the more homely pursuits in which his brothers were engaged, and had satisfied an active, cheerful mind and social temper by entering into the militia of his county, then embodied.

"Six years hence! Dear Miss Woodhouse, he would be thirty years old!” "Well, and that is as early as most men can afford to marry, who are not born to an independence. …”

[P&P]: “…You have deprived the best years of his life of that independence which was no less his due than his desert…” 

In short, an independence was akin to a “living”, but it was a legal entitlement to a regular stream of vested payments having nothing to do with clerical services.

So….was JA suggesting, in her usual sly elliptical way, and as my correspondent noted, that Mr. Bennet was receiving a stream of income from a benefactor? I believe JA was doing exactly that, and I again applaud my correspondent for this catch. The use of this word “independence” in relation to Mr. Weston is particularly probative, because 12 years ago I first noted how the following legalistic language from the law of property was a giant clue that he had sold young Frank to the Churchill: 

“Some scruples and some reluctance the widower-father may be supposed to have felt; but as they were overcome BY OTHER CONSIDERATIONS, the child was given up to the care and the wealth of the Churchills, and he had only his own comfort to seek, and his own situation to improve as he could.”

And now I will reveal who my correspondent had in mind as Mr. Bennet’s secret benefactor — none other than the bountiful Mr. Darcy — but trust me, most of you don’t want to know why he’d be paying money to Mr. Bennet all along, so I will leave that for another post!

Anyway, I love the idea of Mr. Darcy (and perhaps, before him, Mr. Darcy Sr?) as having provided crucial backup for the Bennet family finances, because it just happens to dovetail very nicely with a few things I had spotted in P&P a very long time ago, prompted initially by something Kishor Kale mentioned in the Janeites group, about the following comment that Mr. Bennet makes to Lizzy about Darcy when she reaffirms to him that she really does love Darcy:

“…If this be the case, he deserves you. I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy."

Kishor sees this ambiguous figure-ground statement as JA’s inadvertent, unintended suggestion that Mr. Bennet is warning Lizzy that Darcy is the most UNworthy man she could possible have chosen, whereas I believe JA’s ambiguity was completely deliberate….and brilliant! And I’ve believed for a very long while that Mr. Bennet and Mr. Darcy have somehow known each other for a very long time completely outside Lizzy’s awareness. But i never connected that dots to Mr. Bennet’s “love of independence”!

You can see a further hint at this when you read the full context of the above-quoted sentence:

"Lizzy," said her father, "I have given him my consent. He is the kind of man, indeed, to whom I should never dare refuse anything, which he condescended to ask. I now give it to you, if you are resolved on having him. But let me advise you to think better of it. I know your disposition, Lizzy. I know that you could be neither happy nor respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband; unless you looked up to him as a superior. Your lively talents would place you in the greatest danger in an unequal marriage. You could scarcely escape discredit and misery. My child, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life. You know not what you are about."

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

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

You really have to wonder about Mr. Bennet’s never daring to refuse Darcy anything that he “condescended to ask”— it drips with euphemistic irony, and is the kind of “polite” statement that could most aptly have been made about Don Corleone, the Godfather! This very famous scene in The Godfather Part I comes specifically to mind:

MICHAEL: We’re all proud of you…   JOHNNY: Thank, Mike. MICHAEL: Sit down, Johnny— I want to talk to you…The Don is proud of you.  JOHNNY: Well I owe it all to him.  MICHAEL: Well, he knows how grateful you are. He wants to ask a favor of you.  JOHNNY: Mike, what can I do? MICHAEL: [Asks for the specific favor, then]  FREDO: Hey, Mike, are you sure about that? Moe loves the business, he never said nothin’ to me about sellin’    MICHAEL: Yeah, well, I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse

And so the idea that Mr. Bennet has been on Darcy’s payroll all along, as a result of Darcy’s having preyed on the financial vulnerability of the Bennet family, and therefore Darcy’s “request” for Mr. Bennet’s consent truly is a proverbial offer he cannot refuse, is very appealing to me.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

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Marianne’s galloping dream, Queen Mab, Eve of St. Agnes (& Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, & Keats!)

May 24, 2016, 7:16 am

≫ Next: Joe F.O.X. & Mr. D.A.R.C.Y. make offers that Kathleen & Elizabeth cannot refuse

≪ Previous: Mr. Darcy’s “request” that the (in)dependent Mr. Bennet cannot refuse

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A great satisfaction of the past 2 years of my 14-year AustenQuest has been the accelerating interconnection of different discoveries which I previously had no idea were connected. It’s like the last stage of solving a diabolical crossword puzzle, when the entire pattern becomes clear, and I can’t write fast enough to fill the rest in, after the initial square by square struggle. This post is a great example of this rewarding late-stage process.

Way back on 11/23/10, I posted about one of Jane Austen’s multiple veiled allusions to the religious/folk idea behind the Eve of St. Agnes, in relevant part, as follows:

“Per Wikipedia, “Saint Agnes is the patron saint of young girls; folk custom called for them to practice rituals on Saint Agnes' Eve (20–21 January) with a view to discovering their future husbands.” These rituals include getting into bed naked and dreaming about their future husbands….Marianne Dashwood in London gets her really good night’s sleep on the Eve of St. Agnes, even though Elinor drinks the wine that Mrs. Jennings brought for Marianne—because, you see, Mrs. Jennings wants Marianne to dream about a future husband to REPLACE Willoughby! And that’s why she sounds a LOT like John Thorpe the wooer when she invokes another proverb: “One shoulder of mutton drives down another”, although, when you think about that proverb as a metaphor for “Marianne will find another man to marry”, it’s a pretty darned vulgar turn of phrase-but that’s ol’ Mrs. Jennings for ya!…” END QUOTE

In that post 5 1/2 years ago, I pointed out that Jane Austen had, with Marianne D. (as well as Catherine M. and Fanny P.) repeatedly alluded to both John Gay’s The Wife of Bath and Samuel Foote’s later The Maid of Bath, both of which turn on that same Eve of St. Agnes theme. And I thought that was the full extent of that allusion. 

It was only yesterday that I recognized another clue alluding to the Eve of St. Agnes theme, hidden in plain sight in S&S — and, as you’ll see, below, it’s like the tape on the doors left after the Watergate break-in; i.e., it leads everywhere in a multilayered literary layer cake—-a benign literary “conspiracy” over centuries, involving not only Austen, Gay, and Foote, but also Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton & Keats! 

Before I cut to the chase, let me first give you one more key clue to keep in mind, also courtesy of Wikipedia, about the details of the Eve of St. Agnes ritual:  “[The young virgin] would go to bed without any supper, undress herself so that she was completely naked and lie on her bed with her hands under the pillow and looking up to the heavens and not to look behind. Then the proposed husband would appear in her dream, kiss her, and feast with her.”

So…in my 2010 post, I quoted the passage in Chapter 30 of S&S when Mrs. Jennings, on the Eve of St. Agnes (according to JA’s implicit calendar for S&S), brings the broken-hearted Marianne a bottle of wine to help her sleep; and then (as inferred by the reader aware of the Eve) hopefully to dream about a lover to replace Willoughby in her heart.  

Now, here are the relevant portions of the passage in Chapter 12 of S&S, which I finally “got” the full significance of the other day (pay special attention to the words in ALL CAPS):  

“As Elinor and Marianne were walking together the next morning the latter communicated a piece of news to her sister, which in spite of all that she knew before of Marianne's imprudence and want of thought, surprised her by its extravagant testimony of both. Marianne told her, with the greatest delight, that Willoughby had given her a HORSE, one that he had bred himself on his estate in Somersetshire, and which was exactly calculated to CARRY A WOMAN. Without considering that it was not in her mother's plan to keep any horse, that if she were to alter her resolution in favour of this gift, she must buy another for the servant, and keep a servant to ride it, and after all, build a stable to receive them, she had accepted the present without hesitation, and told her sister of it in raptures.

"He intends to send his groom into Somersetshire immediately for it," she added, "and when it arrives we will ride every day. You shall share its use with me. Imagine to yourself, my dear Elinor, the delight of a GALLOP on some of these downs."

Most unwilling was she to AWAKEN FROM SUCH A DREAM OF FELICITY to comprehend all the unhappy truths which attended the affair; and for some time she refused to submit to them…I have not known him long indeed, but I am much better acquainted with him, than I am with any other creature in the world, except yourself and mama. It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;—it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others. I should hold myself guilty of greater impropriety in accepting a horse from my brother, than from Willoughby. Of John I know very little, though we have lived together for years; but of Willoughby my judgment has long been formed."

…when Willoughby called at the cottage, the same day, Elinor heard her express her disappointment to him in a low voice, on being obliged to forego the acceptance of his present. The reasons for this alteration were at the same time related, and they were such as to make further entreaty on his side impossible. His concern however was very apparent; and after expressing it with earnestness, he added, in the same low voice,—"But, Marianne, the horse is still yours, though YOU CANNOT USE IT NOW. I shall keep it only till you can claim it. When you leave Barton to form your own establishment in a more lasting home, QUEEN MAB SHALL RECEIVE YOU."

This was all overheard by Miss Dashwood; and in the whole of the sentence, in his manner of pronouncing it, and in his addressing her sister by her Christian name alone, she instantly saw an intimacy so decided, a meaning so direct, as marked a perfect agreement between them. From that moment she doubted not of their being engaged to each other; and the belief of it created no other surprise than that she, or any of their friends, should be left by tempers so frank, to discover it by accident.”

A hundred Austen scholars, academic and amateur alike, have noted that Willoughby’s naming the gift horse (ala the Trojan Horse as well) “Queen Mab” was an allusion to Mercurio’s famous speech to Romeo just before he meets Juliet. Here’s the relevant exchange, in which Mercurio spins his Queen Mab fantasy in response to Romeo’s report of having just dreamt a significant dream:

ROMEO I dream'd a dream to-night.

MERCUTIO And so did I.

ROMEO  Well, what was yours?

MERCUTIO That dreamers often lie.

ROMEO In bed asleep, while they do dream things true.

MERCUTIO

O, then, I see QUEEN MAB HATH BEEN WITH YOU.

She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate-stone

On the fore-finger of an alderman,

Drawn with a team of little atomies

Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;

………….

Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut

Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,

Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.

And in this state she gallops night by night

Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;

O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight,

O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees,

O'er ladies ' lips, who straight on kisses dream,

Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,

Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:

………..

This is the hag, WHEN MAIDS LIE ON THEIR BACKS,

That PRESSES THEM AND LEARNS THEM FIRST TO BEAR,

Making them women of good carriage…

It’s a sign of the threadbare thinness of so much existing Austen scholarship that the Queen Mab R&J allusion in S&S has been noted so often, yet in almost all of them, the allusion receives minimal or no explanation of its meaning - as if Jane Austen were a literary poseur who showed off that she had read Shakespeare by an obvious quotation. But there have been a few welcome exceptions.

To start, Anielka Briggs has at various times in the past several years referred to Willoughby’s Queen Mab as referencing several possible subtexts, including Shelley's 1808 poem of that title. 

A number of years ago, John Dussinger, in his 1990 article “Madness and Lust in the Age of Sensibility”, speculated as follows about Willoughby’s mare as JA’s allusion to Fuseli’s famous 1782 painting “The Nightmare”:

“Other than folklore and traditional religious accounts of dreams, rational explanations in the classical period show little interest in what Fuseli so vividly reveals about the mind—its demonic cravings and humiliations that appear uninvited in the darkness…Medical literature stressed simply the bad effects of sleeping on one’s back; according to Dr. John Bond, in one of the first English works on the nightmare, the condition ‘general seizes people sleeping on their backs…” …In this context, Robert Anthony Bromley ridiculed “The Nightmare” as offering instruction to young people about how to lie in their beds: “Don’t lie on your back, my dear, and no harm will come to you.”…Although both sexes are subject to dreams and nightmares, folk legends tended to emphasize the woman’s susceptibility, as in Mercutio’s speech in R&J…Willoughby, in JA’s S&S, alludes to this legend after the Dashwoods decline his gift….As if associating Queen Mab and the gift horse with Fuseli’s traumatic scene, Elinor quite properly believes that Willoughby’s sexual innuendoes must indicate a secret engagement to her sister. Erasmus Darwin, Fuseli’s friend, included an engraving of The Nightmare  in The Loves of the Plants …and interpreted its significance in doggerel verse…. “ END QUOTE

Then, in her 2006 book Unbecoming Conjunctions, Jill Heydt-Stevenson presented this excellent, detailed analysis:

“Willoughby's desire to give Marianne a horse named Queen Mab provides a prime example of the risks she faces and the careful ways Austen uses Shakespeare to establish Willoughby's motives and complicate the seeming idyll of their short courtship ... The Queen Mab allusion from Romeo and Juliet is well known… In this scene Mercutio chides Romeo for thinking he is in love… and concludes that Queen Mab has visited his sleeping friend. Queen Mab, a mischievous spirit that provides a dream of fulfillment of one's less noble longings… gallops over “ladies's lips, who straight on kisses dream”… So for Mercutio, rather like Willoughby, love has less to do with an intimate connection, a position both Romeo and Maryanne share, that with the immediate fulfillment of "vain fantasy". Stephen Derry cites this allusion to indicate that "Marianne's hopes of future happiness with Willoughby will have all the substances of dreams, and then they will come to nothing". Recalling Mercutio's admission that "dreamers often lie" Derry insists that "dream lovers like Willoughby… can lie."

I agree with Derry that the reference accentuates Willoughby’s deceit but go further in noting the clear parallels established respectively between Willoughby and Mercutio and Romeo and Marianne. Further the allusion implicates Willoughby's baser motives insofar as it insinuates that this midwife to the fairies, this ‘hag’, will teach a class in sex education to Marianne since she is the one who "when maids lie on their backs"... John Dussinger’s idea that Elinor might have "associated Queen Mab and the gift horse with… the traumatic scene [in Fuseli’s The Nightmare]” is tantalizing, but he does not develop the disturbing implications of such an association, only concluding that it leads Elinor "quite properly to believe that Willoughby’s sexual innuendos must indicate a secret engagement to her sister". If such a link could be forged, it would (contrary to Dussinger’s argument) diminish the possibility of an engagement and amplify the potential for seduction and ruin; further, it incriminates Marianne, who as possessor of the animal, plays Queen Mab, delighting in the fantasy of "a gallop on some of these Downs". Marianne metonymically becomes the seductress who incites Willoughby to dream of love as "she gallops night by night through lovers brains". In giving her Queen Mab, Willoughby links Marianne with the seduced Eliza Williams, whom he describes as reproachable for her excess and lack; a woman of "violent passions and weak understanding".

Again, a look at the slang is revealing. The name “Mab" was standard English for a “slattern, a loose moral’d woman” … Unlike Eliza, Marianne declines the "horse", though Willoughby promises her that “Queen Mab will receive you.”

Is this the Queen Mab who, angry that the ladies “breathes with sweetmeats tainted are”, “blisters” their lips? Here one bawdy novelist alludes to a bawdy playwright. As this discloses, Shakespeare's Queen Mab passage is quite vulgar, since sweetmeat referred to the male member and to “a mere girl who is a kept Mistress”. Perhaps since Austen conjoins Marianne with Eliza and the mother who becomes a prostitute she suggests that the Queen Mab who “receives” Marianne would potentially also blister her lips – that is, see that she contracts venereal disease.… Austen’s allusion to the scene from Romeo and Juliet still allows her to foreshadow the novels conclusion, reinforce the ubiquity of such seductions, express how vulnerable Marianne is to fantasies of erotic fulfillment, and establish the danger to Marianne's physical and emotional body. Finally the fact that Shakespeare’s Queen Mab is a miniature… reinforces how in the novel Austen has "draw a team of little atomies" that allow her to enact several roles at once. First she is a kind of Queen Mab herself, fiction’s “midwife”, bringing dreams to life for her characters and playing with cultural fantasies of true love. Her performance as Queen Mab thus undercuts her position as potential didact. Moreover, the high literary allusion which in itself embeds a rich trove of indelicate images) and the low slang surrounding the word Mab intimate that if Austin plays pedagogue here, her lesson plan devolves from the desire to alert her readers to the hazards and dangerous of male seducers rather than to correct feeling. I do not think that Austen concentrates on correcting rather than liberating this anarchic energy.… I want to stress that Austen promulgates an open and liberal (and, so ironic) “conduct book” of female sexuality.” END QUOTE

I do not suggest that any of the above speculations or analyses are wrong, today I bring forward a deeper allusion which readily includes these other earlier interpretations within its wide ambit. Specifically, none of Anielka, Dussinger, nor Heydt-Stevenson was aware of the key that unlocks the primary meaning of Queen Mab in S&S, which is the Eve of St Agnes when single girls literally follow Mercurio’s prescription, and lie on their backs in order to (metaphorically) feast with their future husband. Willoughby’s gift mare is a living breathing symbol of that dream, and so its name is a perfect fit.

And therefore we can now see Mrs Jennings's attempt to nurse Marianne's broken heart via the Eve of St. Agnes Method as the ironic bookend to the earlier Eve of St Agnes-infused romance with Willoughby which turned into romantic nightmare for Marianne.

In a nutshell (or, to channel Mercutio, an atomie), that is the main reason why JA had Willoughby name the gift mare Queen Mab. But that only fulfills half of the discoveries promised by my Subject Line. Aside from the above Austen subtexts, there’s much more allusive ore to be mined, in regard to the Eve of St. Agnes/Queen Mab meme.

It is now obvious to me that it wasn't just Austen (and Gay and Foote) who had embedded the religious/folk significance of the Eve of St.Agnes in their storytelling. For starters, when Mercutio speaks about the maids on their backs, this is, in no small part, Shakespeare's way of confirming that Mercutio has that exact same subtext in mind as he counsels Romeo. I.e., that allusion to the folk/religious tradition is reinforced by the final example Mercutio gives of Queen Mab’s varied subversions. In effect, Mercutio is telling Romeo that he is about to meet a young virgin who has been dreaming about him!

I will leave for another day the unpacking of the significance of the Eve of St. Agnes subtext of Romeo & Juliet, and quickly move on chronologically to the next famous author who has alluded to the Eve of St. Agnes —only a few years after Shakespeare—Ben Jonson. Please now read the following excerpt I found online, in which some modern scholar (I cannot find a name) quoted from Ben Jonson’s 1603 Satyr—-please note the final speech by the Satyr, which explicitly connects the Eve of St. Agnes to Queen Mab vis a vis bringing dreams to virgins seeking a husband or lover:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/tfm/tfm124.htm

“The next poet, in point of time, who employs the Fairies, is worthy, long-slandered, and maligned Ben Jonson. His beautiful entertainment of the Satyr was presented in 1603, to Anne, queen of James I. and prince Henry, at Althorpe, the seat of Lord Spenser, on their way from Edinburgh to London. As the queen and prince entered the park, a Satyr came forth from a "little spinet" or copse, and having gazed the "Queen and the Prince in the face" with admiration, again retired into the thicket; then "there came tripping up the lawn a bevy of Fairies attending on Mab, their queen, who, falling into an artificial ring, began to dance a round while their mistress spake as followeth:"

MAB. 

Hail and welcome, worthiest queen!

Joy had never perfect been,

To the nymphs that haunt this green,

Had they not this evening seen.

Now they print it on the ground

With their feet, in figures round;

Marks that will be ever found

To remember this glad stound.

……

SATYR. 

She can start our Franklin's daughters

In her sleep with shouts and laughters;

And ON SWEET ST. ANNA’S NIGHT

Feed them with a promised sight

Some of HUSBAND, some of LOVERS,

WHICH AN EMPTY DREAM DISCOVERS.

END QUOTE

That scholar also noted: “Whalley was certainly right in proposing to road Agnes. This ceremony is, we believe, still practised in the north of England on St. Agnes' night. See Brand, i. 34.”

But there’s still more. To find out if any other Shakespeare scholars had ever noticed Shakespeare’s allusion to the Eve of St. Agnes, when I Googled "Eve of Saint Agnes" and "Romeo and Juliet", I was shocked to find that the only hits that came up, and there were many, were all pointing to the poem written in 1821 by John Keats entitled (fittingly) “The Eve of Saint Agnes”!

It would take me a great deal of virtual ink to unpack the manifold significances of the Eve of Saint Agnes ritual, and Romeo & Juliet, in Keats’s poem, but I wish to end this long post shortly, so I must move on to the final link in the chain, which is John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In another nutshell: 

It has often been noted by literary scholars that Keats’s poem draws heavily on the dreaming motif in Paradise Lost.  And I have shown last year that Paradise Lost draws heavily on Romeo & Juliet, that extensive borrowing epitomized in the SATAN acrostics in both.

But no one has ever noted that all of the above cited literary works — by Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, Gay, Foote, Austen, and Keats—- are all united by a common grounding in the Eve of St. Agnes religious/folk tradition of virgins sleeping naked on their backs in order to dream about their future husband.

So, when I referred to the literary layer cake of the Eve of Saint Agnes, you can now taste all its rich flavors!

[Added later on May 24]

As I Tweeted a few hours ago about my above post, I came across an interesting blog post here .... https://deborahwallaceauthor.wordpress.com/2016/03/12/the-eve-of-st-agnes/

....which stated the following:

"The second [custom] is Scottish in origin. It states that for a young woman to see her future husband she must leave the house at midnight the night before St Agnes’s feast day, go into a field and scatter grain while reciting the following incantation: ‘Agnes sweet, and Agnes fair, hither, hither, now repair; Bonny Agnes, let me see the lad who is to marry me.’ Her future husband would then appear to her."

Although Marianne and Margaret don't go out in the Devon countryside at midnight, doesn't it sound like JA is winking at the above-described variant on Eve of St. Agnes customs, when Marianne is rescued by Willoughby in the rain during her walk?

It first perfectly with what I realized a few years ago, which is that while Willoughby is indeed stalking Marianne, she already has noticed this, and that is precisely why she puts herself in the position to be rescued by "her future husband"!

Only one small problem from the Eve of St. Agnes angle---I don't believe Marianne is still a virgin when this occurs......

Cheers, 

ARNIE 

@JaneAustenCode onTwitter

Joe F.O.X. & Mr. D.A.R.C.Y. make offers that Kathleen & Elizabeth cannot refuse

May 27, 2016, 11:34 am

≫ Next: A quiz about Wickham’s bit lips, Mrs. Gardiner’s fantasy phaeton, & coarse Eliza’s brown skin

≪ Previous: Marianne’s galloping dream, Queen Mab, Eve of St. Agnes (& Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, & Keats!)

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I ended my post last week about Mr. Bennet’s “independence” with my take on his comments about Mr. Darcy as a kind of Regency Era Don Corleone: 

“ "Well, my dear," said he, when she ceased speaking, "I have no more to say. If this be the case, he deserves you. I could not hiave parted with you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy.” You really have to wonder about Mr. Bennet’s never daring to refuse Darcy anything that he “condescended to ask”— it drips with euphemistic irony, and is the kind of “polite” statement that could most aptly have been made about Don Corleone, the Godfather!

This very famous scene in The Godfather Part I comes specifically to mind:

MICHAEL: We’re all proud of you…   JOHNNY: Thank, Mike.

MICHAEL: Sit down, Johnny— I want to talk to you…The Don is proud of you.  JOHNNY: Well I owe it all to him. 

MICHAEL: Well, he knows how grateful you are. He wants to ask a favor of you.  JOHNNY: Mike, what can I do?

MICHAEL: [Asks for the specific favor, then]  FREDO: Hey, Mike, are you sure about that? Moe loves the business, he never said nothin’ to me about sellin’.    

MICHAEL: Yeah, well, I’LL MAKE HIM AN OFFER HE CAN’T REFUSE.

And so the idea that Mr. Bennet has been on Darcy’s payroll all along, as a result of Darcy’s having preyed on the financial vulnerability of the Bennet family, and therefore Darcy’s “request” for Mr. Bennet’s consent truly is a proverbial offer he cannot refuse, is very appealing to me.”  

END QUOTE FROM MY PRIOR POST

Today, I return to this curiously striking similarity between the Darcy and Corleone “families”, in order to acknowledge that I’m actually not the first Austen scholar to see Darcy’s Godfatherliness — I was beaten to the punch two decades ago by the subtle brilliance of the late, great Nora Ephron in her sneakily erudite romcom You’ve Got Mail. This is a tale of authorial genius that you can’t refuse to read!

I’ve previously blogged on several occasions… http://tinyurl.com/ofmur5r  http://tinyurl.com/nlvvjm3

…about the veiled allusion in You’ve Got Mail to Shakespeare’s great “romcom” Much Ado About Nothing that is best viewed through the lens of Ephron’s not-so-veiled allusion to Pride & Prejudice.  And, because of that undisguised evocation of P&P in You’ve Got Mail, I’d guess that a pretty large number of Janeites have seen You’ve Got Mail, and therefore are familiar with the three scenes in which The Godfather is explicitly mentioned, even if they’ve never paid those mentions any particular attention. Now I will show you how significant those “passing” references actually are.

In the first such scene, Kathleen suddenly realizes that the nice guy who brought kids to her bookstore is actually her business nemesis, Joe Fox, heartless bookstore magnate. Thereupon, she immediately confronts him: 

KATHLEEN    Fox?  Your last name is Fox?

Joe spins around, looks at her.

JOE     F-O-X.

KATHLEEN God, I didn't realize.  I didn't know who you--

JOE   -- were with. (quoting) "I didn't know who you were with."

KATHLEEN  Excuse me?

JOE   It's from The Godfather.  When the movie producer realizes that Tom Hagen is the emissary of Vito Corleone --

Kathleen is staring at him.

JOE -- just before the horse's head ends up in his bed--never mind --

KATHLEEN  You were spying on me, weren't you? You probably rented those children.

JOE     Why would I spy on you?

KATHLEEN   I am your competition.  Which you know perfectly well or you would not have put up that sign saying "Just around the Corner."

JOE    The entrance to our store is around the corner.  There is no other way to say it. It's not the name of our store, it’s where it is.  You don't own "around the corner."

Kathleen’s justifiable suspicion that Joe has been spying on her iconic “village” bookstore in order to crush it, and her witty, sarcastic “suspicion” that he rented two children to make him appear kind and humane, is uncannily in synch with my longstanding suspicion that in the shadow story of Pride & Prejudice, Mr.Darcy similarly stage-manages a completely inauthentic, faked performance of himself as the generous, benevolent patron of Pemberley, who “accidentally” shows up just as Elizabeth (not coincidentally) is brought there by her uncle and aunt.

In the midst of being bowled over by the Pemberley Experience, Elizabeth slides right by her perceptive observation of the ambiguity of Darcy’s power:  “As a brother, a landlord, a master, she considered how many people's happiness were in his guardianship!—how much of pleasure or pain was it in his power to bestow!—how much of good or evil must be done by him!”  

Elizabeth doesn’t pay any attention to the “evil” side of that ambiguity, nor does she realize that the “adoring servant” Mrs. Reynolds is just as much of a role as the two “fake children” that Kathleen mockingly suspects Joe has rented for the occasion. But rest assured that Nora Ephron understood this very well indeed!

We know this in part because Ephron has Joe Fox in effect boast about his own omnipotence by invoking The Godfather. Like Donald Trump, Joe is so arrogant and certain of his power that he indirectly boasts about it by implicitly comparing himself to Tom Hagen, the outwardly friendly face of the murderous Corleone family. And we find explicit authority on that category of boast in this speech by Mr. Darcy, which fits very well indeed with Joe Fox’s real pride of his rapacious business career:

"My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them—by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents."

"Your humility, Mr. Bingley," said Elizabeth, "must disarm reproof."

"Nothing is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast."

"And which of the two do you call my little recent piece of modesty?"

"The indirect boast; for you are really proud of your defects in writing, because you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of thought and carelessness of execution, which, if not estimable, you think at least highly interesting….”

So far, then, we can already see Ephron weaving P&P and The Godfather together via the character of Joe Fox. But this is only the beginning.

In the second such scene, Joe and Kathleen, who’ve been trading instant messages on AOL without knowing each other’s identities, discuss (in IMs) Kathleen’s business woes dealing with….Joe!:

JOE   I'm a brilliant businessman.  It's what I do best.  What's your business?

KATHLEEN  No specifics, remember?

JOE   Minus specifics, it's hard to help. Except to say, go to the mattresses.

KATHLEEN What?

JOE  It's from The Godfather.  It means you have to go to war.

KATHLEEN (to herself)The Godfather?

KATHLEEN  What is it with men and The Godfather?

JOE  The Godfather is the I Ching.  The Godfather is the sum of all wisdom.  The Godfather is the answer to any question. What should I pack for my summer vacation?  "Leave the gun, take the cannoli."  What day of the week is it? "Maunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday.” And the answer to your question is "Go to the mattresses.”….You're at war.  "It's not personal, it’s business.  It's not personal it’s business."  Recite that to yourself every time you feel you're losing your nerve. I know you worry about being brave, this is your chance.  Fight.  Fight to the death.

Once again, Joe reveals his true (and ugly) self via his Godfather-mania, yet Kathleen is not quite able to consciously connect the dots (“What is it with men and The Godfather?”) between Joe’s invocation of same, and her online “friend”’s. This is also Ephron counterbalancing Joe’s worship of The Godfather with Kathleen’s worship of Pride & Prejudice. But, by the end of You’ve Got Mail, it’s also Ephron’s sharp irony: since Kathleen does not grasp the dark shadow story of P&P, in which Darcy does not actually reform, but merely pretends to reform, she is doomed to repeat Elizabeth’s error—believing that, in real life, a narcissistic man of power can receive an “instant message” that instantly transforms his character completely!

And that brings me to the third such scene, which occurs much later in the film, after Joe knows who Kathleen is, but she does not. This carries the implicit message that Joe still believes that it’s perfectly okay to retain complete control of his relationship with a woman he wishes to manipulate into loving him, by concealing that he is the same man as her dear online friend, and by showering her with apparent love and kindness.

And a prime example of this is when Joe talks with Kathleen about his own online persona:

JOE   Come on, I'm not going to write him.  Is that what you think?                                                

KATHLEEN   NY152.

JOE    One five two.  One hundred fifty two. Very interesting.  He's 152 years old. He has 152 hairs remaining on his head. He's had 152 moles removed and now he has 152 pockmarks.

JOE    His combined college board scores.

KATHLEEN His IQ.

JOE    The number of women he's slept with.

KATHLEEN   The number of times he's seen The Godfather.

JOE     That's the first good thing I've heard about him.

Note how subtly brilliant is Ephron’s dialogue there. Once more Kathleen inadvertently and subconsciously connects Joe and NY152 by bringing up male Godfather obsession, and Joe clearly enjoys validating it –safely, because he still conceals that he and NY152 are the same man. And only while writing this post today did I get a brief chill wondering whether Joe got a special charge out of telling the truth when he wrote “The number of women he’s slept with.”

Perhaps he is indeed the kind of man who keeps that kind of score. It’s not unrealistic, given that Ephron has subtly set the stage for this dark side of Joe’s character by letting us see his father and grandfather, both of them board-certified represensible serial lechers and cocksmen.

And once again we see Joe enjoying the narcissistic thrill of daring to hide it in plain sight (as an apparent joke) to Kathleen, because he feels so confident she would never suspect him of such a horrid thing.

It was only on my third or fourth viewing of You’ve Got Mail that I began to realize that the happy ending of You’ve Got Mail was every bit as tainted by strong doubt as that of P&P – in effect, Ephron has showed me, in several different but related ways, that she understood that P&P was a double story, with a romantic fantasy of an overt story masking a cautionary tale of a shadow story. And Ephron did this the way great storytellers do: not by heavy handed imitation, but by the subtlest kind of emulation of her literary models.

Most brilliant of all, Ephron confronts her audience with the same puzzle that JA presented her readers with — to show the heroine falling in love with a man who does not hesitate to manipulate her, to spy on her, to plan an elaborate ruse in order to get a second romantic chance with her, all the while controlling the entire situation, knowing everything about her, while allowing her to know nothing about his disguise until after her resistance to him has been reduced to nothing—and still, despite all these undisguised actions, Ephron manages to make the audience fall in love with Joe F.O.X. by the end, right along with poor motherless storeless Kathleen.

And, speaking of Kathleen’s mother, and thinking about that very poignant scene when Kathleen, standing and sadly looking at her now empty store, vividly recalls herself as a young girl dancing with her young mother, it makes me wonder whether Ephron had in mind the scene at Longbourn only a very short time before Darcy proposes a second time. Elizabeth is sitting and fretting about Darcy’s ignoring her, and then a young woman (as I’ve written before, I believe it is actually sister Mary Bennet) whispers this in Elizabeth’s ear: "The men shan't come and part us, I am determined. We want none of them; do we?"

Unfortunately for Elizabeth, she doesn’t hear this feminist whisper. And unfortunately for Kathleen, whose female world at her store inherited from her mother has been shattered by Joe’s having gone to the mattresses against her, she doesn’t hear this “instant message” from her long-dead mother, and allows herself to be abducted into Joe’s world – as we hear the romantic strains of “Somewhere over the rainbow”, if we pay really close attention, we might just hear Nora Ephron whispering to us “Don’t believe it, Kathleen has just put herself entirely into the hands of the Wizard of Oz, but this time it’s Kathleen whose still asleep at the switch, romantically speaking.”

And, finally, Ephron brought The Godfather into the mix, I think, most of all because she recognized that Michael Corleone, in his dreadful cold, narcissistic, compulsion to control his wife, was a perfect match for the Mr. Darcy of the shadow story, who will, I fear, treat Elizabeth at Pemberley much the same way that Michael treated his wife, making her a prisoner of his bloated ego and refusal to take no for an answer—because, after all, their idea of marriage was as an offer that no woman could refuse.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

A quiz about Wickham’s bit lips, Mrs. Gardiner’s fantasy phaeton, & coarse Eliza’s brown skin

May 31, 2016, 8:24 pm

≫ Next: The hidden “Prince of Whales” answer to Jane Austen's Emma charade, 1816 to 2006 to 2016

≪ Previous: Joe F.O.X. & Mr. D.A.R.C.Y. make offers that Kathleen & Elizabeth cannot refuse

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A few days ago, my friend Diane Reynolds shared a post at her blog Jane Austen & Other Writers   by her colleague Professor EmeritusTom Flynn…  

http://janeaustenandotherwriters.blogspot.com/2016/05/may-memories-first-encounters-with_29.html

…about his own personal Jane Austen journey. My eye was caught by something he wrote about Elizabeth Bennet’s and Mr. Wickham’s final encounter in Pride & Prejudice, after Wickham has just married Lydia:

“Elizabeth’s economical and layered response both condemns him and also permits him to save face, should he choose to do so. She reports that the housekeeper said “That [Wickham] had gone into the army, and she was afraid had—not turned out well.  At such a distance as that, you know, things are strangely misrepresented.”

Austen reports that Elizabeth intends this information to silence Wickham, and he does bite his lip. Yet Wickham emerges from this first encounter relatively unscathed.  He has not been so wounded that he considers retreating; rather, he adopts the dangerous strategy of returning to one of his earlier misrepresentations.”  END QUOTE FROM FLYNN POST

What caught my eye was that Wickham “bites his lip”. Jane Austen is typically sparing in such nonverbal details, and so I checked the context of that usage in P&P, to get a hang on this unusual detail (only one other Austen character bites her lip: Lucy Steele in Sense & Sensibility --in anger at her sister). Was this a clue to a covert allusion by to some prior literary work in which lips are bitten?:

“…And so, my dear sister, I find, from our uncle and aunt, that you have actually seen Pemberley."

She replied in the affirmative.

"I almost envy you the pleasure, and yet I believe it would be too much for me, or else I could take it in my way to Newcastle. And you saw the old housekeeper, I suppose? Poor Reynolds, she was always very fond of me. But of course she did not mention my name to you."

"Yes, she did."  "And what did she say?"

"That you were gone into the army, and she was afraid had—not turned out well. At such a distance as that, you know, things are strangely misrepresented."

"Certainly," he replied, BITING HIS LIPS…. "

What emotion was Wickham leaking? Was it anger, like Lucy (who, you’ll recall, becomes Lucy Ferrars àLucifer, after she marries), or anxiety, or a combination of the two? I was also reminded of the angry thumb-biting of Montague at Capulet in the first scene of Romeo & Juliet:

SAMPSON  Nay, as they dare. I will bite my thumb at them; which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it.

ABRAHAM Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?  SAMPSON I do bite my thumb, sir.

ABRAHAM Do you bite your thumb at us, sir? SAMPSON [Aside to GREGORY] Is the law of our side, if I say ay?

GREGORY No. SAMPSON No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.

That encouraged me to check to see if any Shakespeare play in which a character bit his/her lips---as opposed (ha ha) to their thumbs--and I found four of them. After looking them over, and sleuthing things out, I’ve now concluded that one of them is indeed a Shakespeare play which JA intentionally tagged, when she wrote the seemingly trivial detail that Wickham bit his lips. 

For those of you who enjoy my literary quizzes, I give the following NINE hints (this is a very solvable quiz, ladies and gentlemen!); but, in all events, as usual, I’ll reveal my answer and give my analysis, within the next two days:

ONE: There is a character in the Shakespeare play who, like Wickham, bites his lips in anger.

TWO: There is a character in the play who twice calls another character “not sound”, just as Eliza says the following to BFF Charlotte Lucas: 

[Charlotte] “…it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life."

"You make me laugh, Charlotte; but it is NOT SOUND. You know it is NOT SOUND, and that you would never act in this way yourself."

THREE: There is in an exchange in the play which is specifically echoed by Miss Bingley’s withering criticism of Eliza’s suntanned appearance:

"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."

So far, these hinted echoes may sound trivial, but the remaining hints make clear that this is not a casual allusion, it goes to the heart of Pride & Prejudice, specifically how we are to think about Elizabeth, Darcy, Wickham, and another major character in P&P to be named later—see Hint EIGHT, below.

FOUR: There is a character who, like Mrs. Bennet, is on a determined quest for a male to preserve the family “inheritance”.

FIVE: There is a charismatic, manipulative character in the play who takes a precipitous—dare I say, Satanic?---fall from grace, because of some shady financial and other dealings, very much like that described in the following passage about Wickham in P&P:

“All Meryton seemed striving to blacken the man who, but three months before, had been almost an ANGEL OF LIGHT. He was declared to be in debt to every tradesman in the place, and his intrigues, all honoured with the title of seduction, had been extended into every tradesman's family. Everybody declared that he was the wickedest young man in the world; and everybody began to find out that they had always distrusted the appearance of his goodness. Elizabeth, though she did not credit above half of what was said, believed enough to make her former assurance of her sister's ruin more certain…”

SIX: That same character described in Hint FIVE, above, is explicitly named in one of Jane Austen’s juvenilia, in a passage that is significantly echoed by this letter from Mrs. Gardiner to niece Elizabeth Bennet: "Pray forgive me if I have been very presuming, or at least do not punish me so far as to exclude me from P[emberley]. I shall never be quite happy till I have been all round the park. A low PHAETON, with a nice little pair of ponies, would be the very thing.”

SEVEN: There is a very powerful, noble male character in the play who casts his eye on one particular young lady, who is described as having a vivacious, charismatic personality—and by the end of the play, they have indeed married, and that young lady gets to be “mistress” of a real life “Pemberley” -albeit, not for very long.

EIGHT: There is an enigmatic character in the play who has exactly the same name as a key character in P&P, and who (according to my reading of the shadow story of P&P) plays a similarly crucial behind the scenes role in both the play and in P&P.

NINE: (For those diligent souls who go so far as to do a Shakespeare word search) The play is NOT Coriolanus, Taming of the Shrew, & Richard III --- it’s the fourth one!   ;)

Happy sleuthing, y’all- --- as I said, I’ll be back….in two days with my best explanation as to what it all means!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The hidden “Prince of Whales” answer to Jane Austen's Emma charade, 1816 to 2006 to 2016

June 4, 2016, 3:56 pm

≫ Next: The Shakespearean source for Wickham’s bit lips, Mrs. Gardiner’s phaeton & coarse Eliza’s brown skin

≪ Previous: A quiz about Wickham’s bit lips, Mrs. Gardiner’s fantasy phaeton, & coarse Eliza’s brown skin

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A lot of Janeites worldwide have heard by now that 2016 is the bicentennial of publication of Emma.Conversely, only a relative handful of Janeites know about a significant discovery about Emma made a decade ago by my friend and fellow Austen scholar, Colleen Sheehan -- i.e., after Emma had been out in the world for 190 long years---i.e., Austen’s dangerous, daring, derogatory satire of the Prince Regent as the “Prince of Whales”, the secret answer to the charade in Emma.

Colleen, a distinguished senior political science prof at Villanova, has been modest about her discovery since she published it in 2006, and if you Google “Prince of Whales” & “Emma”, you’ll see that a number of the hits are to my blog posts in which I’ve repeatedly spread the word over the past decade.

Another of my friends, Linda Walker, in her 2013 Persuasionsarticle (speculating about S&S’s Colonel Brandon having been forcibly circumcised in India) is the only scholar other than myself to have embraced the large implications of Sheehan’s discovery:

“...[Austen] would have not only have known what circumcision was but wouldn’t have quailed at writing about it, employing the allusiveness with which she always protected herself.  In Emma, after all, Austen took on the Price Regent either despite or because of having more or less been ordered to dedicate it to him, composing a charade that could be solved, as Sheehan has so cleverly shown, not only as “Courtship” but also “Prince of Whales,” taken from a satirical poem on the fat, unfaithful spendthrift by Charles Lamb.  Anybody who missed the source of the insult might have been tipped off by the anagrams Austen devised with the first letters of two sets of four lines that twice, rearranged, spell “Lamb.”

 Jane Austen was fearless:  willing to address issues of sexuality, politics, the military, and family secrets….”

Besides Sheehan, Walker and myself, only Douglas Murray, Janine Barchas, Megan A. Woodworth, A. Marie Sprayberry, Laurie Kaplan, and Michelle Levy have taken note of Sheehan’s discovery during the past 10 years; and of them, only Murray, in 2007, gave it more than passing attention.

As to the vast body of other scholarly articles, book chapters, and dissertations that have been written about Emma during the past decade ---and I’d guess there’ve been a few hundred if not more—to say nothing of the thousand-plus articles written about Emma in the pop culture press, where the vast majority of Janeites (and Jane-curious folks) get their Austen info---it is, sadly, as if Sheehan’s discovery had never been made. This is the case, even though her articles detailing her findings have been right there at the JASNA website, the obvious place where any Austen researcher or scholar ought to begin, freely and readily searchable and readable.

So it is, ten years after, still an almost universal belief among Janeites that Jane Austen was humbled and/or discomfited by the royal request that Emma be dedicated to the Prince Regent, rather than (as Colleen, Linda, and I all believe) this dedication was actually the icing on the cake of Austen’s subversive “Prince of Whales” satire. I.e., what more delicious way to top off the satire than to actually have the butt of that satire demand a dedication to himself?!

But, even today in 2016, it would still shock the average Janeite, who has been fed a continuous diet of what I call the Myth of Jane Austen, to even imagine the possibility that Jane Austen would have taken on the most powerful man in Great Britain in this manner worthy of a Jonathan Swift with his modest proposal (which Diane Reynolds and I have previously argued is a source for Mr. Woodhouse’s porcine obsession in Emma).

And that’s not all. Even the trailblazing Sheehan in her pair of 2006 articles did not go so far as to suggest that this extrinsic political satire might significantly alter the way the plot of Emma should be read, because that, too, would be too far outside the box of conventional Austen scholarship. Whereas I believe the political satire and the alternative reading of the novel itself go hand in hand.

So, I have a proposal to all of you reading this post, if you’ve gotten this far. If you haven’t do so already, please read Sheehan’s two articles here (there’s a link to the second one at the end of the first one):

 http://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol27no1/sheehan.htm

Sheehan’s writing is jargon-free, and witty as well as informative, and an investment of thirty minutes of your time should suffice to give you a firm handle on her prima facie case for Jane Austen having intentionally alluded to the Prince Regent as the “Prince of Whales”.

Keep in mind also, as Colleen noted, the brothers Hunt, editors of the Examiner, were jailed for two years in 1812, for being too blunt in an editorial castigating the Prince for exactly the same miscreancy that Lamb and Cruikshank mocked. So JA was taking a real chance, gambling that neither the Prince nor anyone loyal to him would be clever enough to decode that highly derogatory secret answer.

After you’ve read that, please let me know if you believe Sheehan was correct that this was an intentional, daringly satirical poke at the Prince by Jane Austen. Or, instead, do you believe that this is somehow a coincidence? or that Jane Austen unconsciously recalled reading Lamb’s poem or seeing Cruikshank’s caricature, and unwittingly wrote her charade so that it would fit with such a scandalous alternative answer?

I’m very curious to know whether the lack of awareness of discoveries like Sheehan’s is just a problem of getting the word out, or is instead a much more troubling problem, of getting across a radical new idea about Jane Austen that doesn’t fit within the comfortable confines of the Myth of Jane Austen.

After I give people a chance to respond, I will write a followup post in which I will present brand-new evidence, just discovered by me, hidden in plain sight in the text of Emma itself, which provides dramatic new validation for Sheehan’s remarkable 2006 discovery.

Cheer, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The Shakespearean source for Wickham’s bit lips, Mrs. Gardiner’s phaeton & coarse Eliza’s brown skin

June 6, 2016, 4:26 pm

≫ Next: A deeper dive into the delicate “Prince of Whales” subtext of Emma

≪ Previous: The hidden “Prince of Whales” answer to Jane Austen's Emma charade, 1816 to 2006 to 2016

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In my post last week, I provided several hints all pointing to a particular Shakespeare play which I believe Jane Austen intentionally tagged in a variety of passages in Pride & Prejudice, including the seemingly trivial detail that Wickham “bit his lips” when Eliza challenged his version of the conflict between him and Darcy.  Now I am ready to reveal the answer to this latest literary quiz of mine:

The play---which to my knowledge has, with one offhand exception, never been connected by any literary scholar to Pride & Prejudice ---is Henry VIII, the very play which---not coincidentally, is explicitly alluded to in a complex, significant manner in Mansfield Park, the novel JA wrote next after P&P, most of all of the following passage in MP:

“To good reading, however, [Fanny] had been long used: her uncle read well, her cousins all, Edmund very well, but in Mr. Crawford's reading there was a variety of excellence beyond what she had ever met with. THE KING, THE QUEEN, BUCKINGHAM, WOLSEY, CROMWELL, all were given in turn; for with the happiest knack, the happiest power of jumping and guessing, he could always alight at will on the best scene, or the best speeches of each; and whether it were dignity, or pride, or tenderness, or remorse, or whatever were to be expressed, he could do it with equal beauty. It was truly dramatic. …

…."That play must be a favourite with you," said [Edmund]; "you read as if you knew it well."

"It will be a favourite, I believe, from this hour," replied Crawford; "but I do not think I have had a volume of Shakespeare in my hand before since I was fifteen. I ONCE SAW HENRY THE EIGHTH ACTED, or I have heard of it from somebody who did, I am not certain which. But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately."

Although Henry VIII is currently one of Shakespeare’s least popular plays, it was very popular during Jane Austen’s lifetime. Therefore, JA had reason to expect her more literate contemporary readers of P&P in 1813 to discern her implicit allusion to Henry VIII in P&P. However, when that didn’t happen, because, I believe, the allusion was subliminal, that’s why she then made sure, as she wrote MP later in 1813, to make her interest in Henry VIII explicit in MP.

But what does her allusion to Henry VIII in P&P mean? How does it add to our understanding of P&P?

I’ve been saying for years that the shadow story of P&P involves a Mr. Darcy who does not reform and repent after his unsuccessful first proposal to Elizabeth Bennet. Instead, the shadow Darcy is a powerful, narcissist, who cannot take no for an answer when he is thwarted, especially by a woman; and so he uses his considerable resources to subtly coerce Elizabeth into feeling first gratitude, and then love, toward him—most of all, by wowing her with his “palace”, Pemberley, and the prospect of her becoming “mistress” (or might we say, Queen?) of his “realm”?

It’s therefore very interesting, I suggest, to think about Mr. Darcy as a Regency Era Henry VIII, and Elizabeth as an Anna Bullen. Many parallels spring to mind as soon as you consider this unlikely parallel, and I’ll lead off with the words of an Austen scholar, Janet Todd, who almost scooped me (in her entry in the 2013 The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen) on this discovery:

“When one woman [Elizabeth] manages, in her own words, to cheat this man [Darcy] of ‘premeditated contempt’, he falls in love and then blames her for his predicament; he has been ‘bewitched’—for all the world as if he were Henry VIII contemplating Anne Boleyn. Now he grows obsessive, even more silent, and conflicted…” 

Todd did not make the leap to this being an intentional allusion on Jane Austen’s part---that’s what I was able to do, assisted (as is so often the case in my literary sleuthing, based on the textual clues that Jane Austen left, like so many bread crumbs, in the text of P&P, which led me to Henry VIII.

First, to amplify Todd’s sharp intuition, note that strong romantic sparks do indeed fly between Darcy and Elizabeth as they meet at a dance, just as they fly between Henry and Anna at a masque arranged by Wolsey.

And just as Elizabeth initially confides to worldly-wise older friend Charlotte Lucas that she has no interest whatsoever in marrying Darcy, regardless of his wealth and desirability to other women, so too does Anna initially confide to the old female court attendant pretty much the same sort of disdain about Henry’s interest in her. In both cases, the older, wiser friend, schooled by life in human nature, expresses strong skepticism, and is proved to be correct by the end of each story.

And, in general, there is a strong theme in both P&P and in Henry VIII –in the latter, explicit, in P&P implicit, of the notion of “trials”, and the difficulty of ascertaining the truth in a society riddled with rumors, lies, and innuendoes.

And there’s also a larger perspective here vis a vis the classification of plays within the Shakespeare canon. Although Henry VIII, for obvious reasons is generally included among the history plays, scholars have pointed out that it also partakes of some of the same elements as are found in his late romances, in particular the royal romances, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline. But it is way outside the box to think about P&P, the quintessential romantic comic novel, which has its strongest Shakespearean antecedents in the Bard’s romantic comedies --- Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It --- as also drawing upon Shakespeare’s final history play as if it were a romantic comedy

There’s much more to say about this allusion generally, but I’ll leave that for future posts—for now, I will run through the clues I presented, and indicate how they fit with the above summary:

CLUE ONE: There is a character in the Shakespeare play who, like Wickham, bites his lips in anger.

As I stated earlier, there are 4 references to lips bitten in anger in Shakespeare, but the one I believe JA particularly had in mind was the following speech in Henry VIII, while writing Wickham’s lip-biting. It is spoken by the wily Norfolk to Henry VIII, who poisonously describes Wolsey’s attitude toward the king who is already suspicious of Wolsey’s intentions:

NORFOLK……My lord, we have Stood here observing him: some strange commotion Is in his brain: HE BITES HIS LIP, and starts; Stops on a sudden, looks upon the ground, Then lays his finger on his temple, straight Springs out into fast gait; then stops again, Strikes his breast hard, and anon he casts His eye against the moon: in most strange postures We have seen him set himself.

That made me wonder whether Shakespeare intended his audience to see Wolsey as a fall guy, and I found the following blog discussion of the historical Wolsey in that regard:

BanditQueen 12/02/13:“Cardinal Wolsey is one of Henry’s servants that I feel gets at least in media films a poor press; and is portrayed as someone who does not come over as one of history’s good guys. Certainly he had enough enemies at court to bring him down on charges that amounted to embezzlement and treason, but they had the power to persuade the King that Wolsey in his career had mishandled funds and monies that allegedly should have gone to the treasury were being used for his two pet foundations: the schools and colleges at Cambridge and Oxford Universities. The pamphlets that they put about probably made even more obscure claims about him in order to bring him down…I feel sorry for Wolsey as he had been close to the King, worked hard in his cause, done almost everything with his master’s approval and his desire always seemed to serve the King. His enemies cashed in if you like on his failure to get Henry the verdict he desired at Blackfriars in 1529; and with Henry turning against Wolsey bit by bit because of that failure; they were able to use what evidence they could find or plant to get Henry to move against his former first minster. I am of the personal opinion that WOLSEY WAS SOMETHING OF A FALL GUY to allow a new regime to take the place of him as Henry’s advisors.”

And speaking of taking falls, here’s Wolsey’s very famous speech, the one that many suspect is read aloud, to great effect, by Henry Crawford in the Mansfield Park salon:

So farewell to the little good you bear me. Farewell! a long farewell, to all my greatness!
This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hopes; to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him; The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And, when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured, Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride
At length broke under me and now has left me, Weary and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream, that must for ever hide me. Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye:
I feel my heart new open'd. O, how wretched Is that poor man that hangs on princes' favours!
There is, betwixt that smile we would aspire to, That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin,
More pangs and fears than wars or women have: And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,
Never to hope again.

And, speaking of Lucifer, Wickham is indeed a poor man who spends his life hanging on Darcy’s favors, a man as to whose Luciferian fall into notorious disgrace we read (which also answers my Clue FIVE):

“All Meryton seemed striving to blacken the man who, but three months before, had been almost an ANGEL OF LIGHT. He was declared to be in debt to every tradesman in THE PLACE, and his intrigues, all honoured with the title of seduction, had been extended into every tradesman's family. Everybody declared that he was the wickedest young man in the world; and everybody began to find out that they had always distrusted the appearance of his goodness. Elizabeth, though she did not credit above half of what was said, believed enough to make her former assurance of her sister's ruin more certain; and even Jane, who believed still less of it, became almost hopeless, more especially as the time was now come when, if they had gone to Scotland, which she had never before entirely despaired of, they must in all probability have gained some news of them.”

I also think of Wickham when we read about Wolsey as “a man of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking himself with princes” --- and it would certainly add an interesting twist to the next portion of Elizabeth’s jousting with Wickham, as Diane Reynolds’s colleague Tom Flynn described, regarding Wickham as a prospective country clergyman (a parody of Wolsey as a cardinal):

“[Wickham] asks if she had visited the village when she toured Pemberley.  She states that she had not; he reflects, “I mention it, because it is the living which I ought to have had. A most delightful place!—Excellent Parsonage House! It would have suited me in every respect. “

Elizabeth’s response here is perhaps my favorite line in the novel, revealing her wit, her knowledge of her opponent and her condemnation of his behavior.

“How should you have liked making sermons?” 

Had he any self-knowledge or integrity, Wickham could not make an honest affirmative answer to this question. Austen, through Elizabeth, has put him in checkmate. Wickham’s attempt to ruin Georgiana Darcy, his success in poisoning Elizabeth’s opinion of Darcy, his willingness to ruin Lydia, his greed in marrying Lydia solely for the money that Darcy offers him, all demonstrate that all his sermons would be grounded in hypocrisy. 

Wickham’s response is a wonderful comic stroke of character illustration, exemplifying his thorough lack of self -knowledge.

He declares that he would have liked making sermons “Exceedingly well.  I should have considered it part of my duty, and the exertion would soon have been nothing.  One ought not to repine; ---but, to be sure, it would have been such a thing for me! The quiet, the retirement of such a life would have answered all my ideas of happiness!” END QUOTE FROM FLYNN POST

So I see number of Wickham’s characteristics originating in the wily manipulative Wolsey. But that’s only the beginning. A bit later in the play, we hear Queen Katharine’s sympathetic eulogy for Wolsey who died a broken, yet strangely humble, almost saintly death—and I hear in the saintly Queen Katharine’s remarkably forgiving remarks about Wolsey the saintly Jane Bennet’s remarkably charitable  remarks about Wickham late in P&P:

KATHARINE

So may he rest; his faults lie gently on him! Yet thus far, Griffith, give me leave to speak him,
And yet with charity. He was a man Of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking
Himself with princes; one that, by suggestion, Tied all the kingdom: simony was fair-play;
His own opinion was his law: i' the presence He would say untruths; and be ever double
Both in his words and meaning: he was never, But where he meant to ruin, pitiful:
His promises were, as he then was, mighty; But his performance, as he is now, nothing:
Of his own body he was ill, and gave The clergy in example.

CLUE TWO: There is a character in the play who twice calls another character “not sound”, just as Eliza says the following to BFF Charlotte Lucas: 

[Charlotte] “…it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life."

"You make me laugh, Charlotte; but it is NOT SOUND. You know it is NOT SOUND, and that you would never act in this way yourself."

In 5.3 of Henry VIII, the wily royal counsellor Gardiner (more about him re Clue EIGHT, below), attempts to take down Cranmer, an attempt which will be firmly rebuked by the King later in the scene:

GARDINER  My lord, my lord, you are a sectary, That's the plain truth: your painted gloss discovers,
To men that understand you, words and weakness.

CROMWELL  My Lord of Winchester, you are a little, By your good favour, too sharp; men so noble,
However faulty, yet should find respect For what they have been: 'tis a cruelty To load a falling man.

GARDINER  Good master secretary, I cry your honour mercy; you may, worst Of all this table, say so.

CROMWELL  Why, my lord?

GARDINER  Do not I know you for a favourer Of this new sect? ye are NOT SOUND.

CROMWELL  NOT SOUND?

GARDINER    NOT SOUND, I say.

CROMWELL  Would you were half so honest! Men's prayers then would seek you, not their fears.

GARDINER  I shall remember this bold language.

CROMWELL    Do. Remember your bold life too.

It is no coincidence that the sole usages of the phrase “not sound” in the respective canons of Austen and Shakespeare appears in these two passages. And it’s also no coincidence, as I will explain re clue EIGHT, below, that the counsellor trying to sandbag Cranmer has the identical name as Elizabeth Bennet’s aunt and uncle Gardiner!

CLUE THREE: There is in an exchange in the play which is specifically echoed by Miss Bingley’s withering criticism of Eliza’s suntanned appearance:

"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."

I believe JA had in mind the following sharp exchange between Wolsey and Surrey, right before Wolsey takes his Luciferian fall:

CARDINAL WOLSEYTill I find more than will or words to do it, I mean your malice, know, officious lords, I dare and must deny it. Now I feel OF WHAT COARSE METAL YE ARE MOULDED, envy: How eagerly ye follow my disgraces, As if it fed ye! and how sleek and wanton Ye appear in every thing may bring my ruin! Follow your envious courses, men of malice; You have Christian warrant for 'em, and, no doubt, In time will find their fit rewards. That seal, You ask with such a violence, the king, Mine and your master, with his own hand gave me; Bade me enjoy it, with the place and honours, During my life; and, to confirm his goodness, Tied it by letters-patents: now, who'll take it?

SURREY  The king, that gave it.

CARDINAL WOLSEYIt must be himself, then.

SURREY  Thou art a proud traitor, priest.

CARDINAL WOLSEYProud lord, thou liest: Within these forty hours Surrey durst better Have burnt that tongue than said so.

SURREY  Thy ambition, Thou scarlet sin, robb'd this bewailing land Of noble Buckingham, my father-in-law: The heads of all thy brother cardinals, With thee and all thy best parts bound together, Weigh'd not a hair of his. Plague of your policy! You sent me deputy for Ireland; Far from his succor, from the king, from all That might have mercy on the fault thou gavest him; Whilst your great goodness, out of holy pity, Absolved him with an axe.

CARDINAL WOLSEYThis, and all else This talking lord can lay upon my credit, I answer is most false. The duke by law Found his deserts: how innocent I was From any private malice in his end, His noble jury and foul cause can witness. If I loved many words, lord, I should tell you You have as little honesty as honour, That in the way of loyalty and truth Toward the king, my ever royal master, Dare mate A SOUNDER MAN than Surrey can be, And all that love his follies.

SURREYBy my soul, Your long coat, priest, protects you; thou shouldst feel My sword i' the life-blood of thee else. My lords, Can ye endure to hear this arrogance? And from this fellow? if we live thus tamely, To be thus jaded by a piece of scarlet, Farewell nobility; let his grace go forward, And dare us with his cap like larks.

CARDINAL WOLSEYAll goodness Is poison to thy stomach.

SURREY  Yes, that goodness Of gleaning all the land's wealth into one, Into your own hands, cardinal, by extortion; The goodness of your intercepted packets You writ to the pope against the king: your goodness, Since you provoke me, shall be most notorious. My Lord of Norfolk, as you are truly noble, As you respect the common good, the state Of our despised nobility, our issues, Who, if he live, will scarce be gentlemen, Produce the grand sum of his sins, the articles Collected from his life. I'll startle you Worse than the scaring bell, WHEN THE BROWN WENCH LAY KISSING IN YOUR ARMS, lord cardinal.

CARDINAL WOLSEY  How much, methinks, I could despise this man, But that I am bound in charity against it!

NORFOLKThose articles, my lord, are in the king's hand: But, thus much, they are foul ones.

CARDINAL WOLSEYSo much fairer And spotless shall mine innocence arise, When the king knows my truth.

And Surrey’s reference to the “brown wench” sheds light on a deeper, darker slander inherent in Caroline Bingley’s demeaning comment about Elizabeth’s skin color. Check out this entry in Gordon Williams’s A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature:

“Brown as indicator of wantonness (cf nut-brown maids) is marked in Heywood, Golden Age (1609- 11)… Marlowe’s Ovid (1580s) II.iv.40 claims that ‘nut-brown girls in doing have no fellow’; so Shakespeare alludes to Cardinal Wolsey’s amorousness…The colour indicates pubic hair in ‘BROWN MADAM, or MISS BROWN. The monosyllable.’ (Grose 1788). A phrase now used in sodomy denotes sexual confrontment in Unconscionable Gallant(c.1690; Pepys Ballads, V 236) where the gallant tells a mercenary lady that he is unwilling ‘To give more than a Crown for a bit of the Brown.’…”

CLUE FOUR: There is a character who, like Mrs. Bennet, is on a determined quest for a male to preserve the family “inheritance”.

That of course is Henry VIII himself, who runs through wives like Kleenex in search of a male heir.

CLUE FIVE: [As answered, above, Wickham = Wolsey]

CLUE SIX: That same character described in Hint FIVE, above, is explicitly named in one of Jane Austen’s juvenilia, in a passage that is significantly echoed by this letter from Mrs. Gardiner to niece Elizabeth Bennet: "Pray forgive me if I have been very presuming, or at least do not punish me so far as to exclude me from P[emberley]. I shall never be quite happy till I have been all round the park. A low PHAETON, with a nice little pair of ponies, would be the very thing.”

In a 2015 post of mine written without any idea of Henry VIII being alluded to in P&P, I wrote:

“…JA slipped yet another subtle Shakespearean allusion into Love&Freindship for good measure, when Laura abruptly turns philosophical after witnessing the phaeton accident which carries off her lover:    

"What an ample subject for reflection on the uncertain Enjoyments of this World, would not THAT PHAETON and THE LIFE OF CARDINAL WOLSEY afford a thinking Mind!" said I to Sophia”…Jane Austen wrote those words for Laura for the benefit of the “thinking mind” of her erudite readers, who might recognize that her burlesque of a hero’s fatal phaeton fall was a witty reference not only to the real life Prince of W(h)ales, as I discussed in the preceding section, but also to Cardinal Wolsey who gives the… famous tragic speech in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII about his own “fall” from political grace….”

CLUE SEVEN: There is a very powerful, noble male character in the play who casts his eye on one particular young lady, who is described as having a vivacious, charismatic personality—and by the end of the play, they have indeed married, and that young lady gets to be “mistress” of a real life “Pemberley” -albeit, not for very long.

As I’ve already written, above, that is Henry VIII smitten by Anna Bullen. And in that regard, here’s what the 15 year old Jane Austen wrote about Anna Bullen in her History of England:

“this amiable Woman was entirely innocent of the Crimes with which she was accused, and of which her BEAUTY, her ELEGANCE, and her SPRIGHTLINESS were sufficient proofs, not to mention her solemn protestations of Innocence, the weakness of the Charges against her, and the King’s Character.”

The 37 year old Jane Austen wrote something very resonant about Elizabeth Bennet in a letter to her sister right after P&P was finally published:        “…she really does seem to admire Elizabeth. I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.”

CLUE EIGHT: There is an enigmatic character in the play who has exactly the same name as a key character in P&P, and who (according to my reading of the shadow story of P&P) plays a similarly crucial behind the scenes role in both the play and in P&P.

As I already stated above, that would be GARDINER, the shifty advisor to Wolsey and Henry VIII, who winds up getting sternly rebuked by the King when Gardiner tries to do a hatchet job on Cranmer.

I’ve long believed that Mr. Gardiner is actually a secret agent acting on behalf of Mr. Darcy during the latter half of P&P, in particular, with the crucial task of bringing Elizabeth to Pemberley “accidentally” so that she can be overwhelmed by Pemberley, Mrs. Reynolds, and Mr. Darcy’s insincere “reformation”

(all puns intended vis a vis Henry VIII). And that gives enormous ironic meaning to the final line of the novel:

“With the Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.”

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

A deeper dive into the delicate “Prince of Whales” subtext of Emma

June 6, 2016, 10:28 pm

≫ Next: My interview with Diane Reynolds about her new book, The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

≪ Previous: The Shakespearean source for Wickham’s bit lips, Mrs. Gardiner’s phaeton & coarse Eliza’s brown skin

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In followup to my post a few days ago about the hidden “Prince of Whales” answer to the Emma charade (and thank you Diane and Elaine for your substantive, positive replies), I have a question for you all (but especially for Anielka, in light of your recent posts about the royal family allusions in Emma):

What do all of the following passages in Emma have to do with one particular, and very important element of the covert satire of the Prince Regent in Emma?

HINT: In some of these following passages, it is specific verbiage that connects to that element, in others it is the lines under the words, as Lydia Bennet would have put it.

As usual, I’ll post my answer in two days, to give, to anyone who wishes, a chance to respond:

Ch. 1: Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

Ch. 7:

"Yes, indeed, a very good letter," replied Emma rather slowly—"so good a letter, Harriet, that every thing considered, I think one of his sisters must have helped him. I can hardly imagine the young man whom I saw talking with you the other day could express himself so well, if left quite to his own powers, and yet it is not the style of a woman; no, certainly, it is too strong and concise; not diffuse enough for a woman. No doubt he is a sensible man, and I suppose may have a natural talent for—thinks strongly and clearly—and when he takes a pen in hand, his thoughts naturally find proper words. It is so with some men. Yes, I understand the sort of mind. Vigorous, decided, with sentiments to a certain point, not coarse. A better written letter, Harriet (returning it,) than I had expected."

"Well," said the still waiting Harriet;—"well—and—and what shall I do?"

"What shall you do! In what respect? Do you mean with regard to this letter?"

"Yes."

"But what are you in doubt of? You must answer it of course—and speedily."

"Yes. But what shall I say? Dear Miss Woodhouse, do advise me."

"Oh no, no! the letter had much better be all your own. You will express yourself very properly, I am sure. There is no danger of your not being intelligible, which is the first thing. Your meaning must be unequivocal; no doubts or demurs: and such expressions of gratitude and concern for the pain you are inflicting as propriety requires, will present themselves unbidden to your mind, I am persuaded. You need not be prompted to write with the appearance of sorrow for his disappointment."

Ch. 8:

"Pray, Mr. Knightley," said Emma, who had been smiling to herself through a great part of this speech, "how do you know that Mr. Martin did not speak yesterday?"

"Certainly," replied he, surprized, "I do not absolutely know it; but it may be inferred. Was not she the whole day with you?"

"Come," said she, "I will tell you something, in return for what you have told me. He did speak yesterday—that is, he wrote, and was refused."

This was obliged to be repeated before it could be believed; and Mr. Knightley actually looked red with surprize and displeasure, as he stood up, in tall indignation, and said,

"Then she is a greater simpleton than I ever believed her. What is the foolish girl about?"

"Oh! to be sure," cried Emma, "it is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage. A man always imagines a woman to be ready for any body who asks her."

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

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

"You saw her answer!—you wrote her answer too. Emma, this is your doing. You persuaded her to refuse him."

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

"Not Harriet's equal!" exclaimed Mr. Knightley loudly and warmly...

Chs. 20-21:

The like reserve prevailed on other topics. She and Mr. Frank Churchill had been at Weymouth at the same time. It was known that they were a little acquainted; but not a syllable of real information could Emma procure as to what he truly was. "Was he handsome?"—"She believed he was reckoned a very fine young man.""Was he agreeable?"—"He was generally thought so.""Did he appear a sensible young man; a young man of information?"—"At a watering-place, or in a common London acquaintance, it was difficult to decide on such points. Manners were all that could be safely judged of, under a much longer knowledge than they had yet had of Mr. Churchill. She believed every body found his manners pleasing." Emma could not forgive her.

Emma could not forgive her; --but as neither provocation nor resentment were discerned by Mr. Knightley, who had been of the party, and had seen only proper attention and pleasing behaviour on each side, he was expressing the next morning, being at Hartfield again on business with Mr. Woodhouse, his approbation of the whole; not so openly as he might have done had her father been out of the room, but speaking plain enough to be very intelligible to Emma. He had been used to think her unjust to Jane, and had now great pleasure in marking an improvement.

Ch. 39:  

In the few minutes' conversation which she had yet had with him, while Harriet had been partially insensible, he had spoken of her terror, her naivete, her fervour as she seized and clung to his arm, with a sensibility amused and delighted; and just at last, after Harriet's own account had been given, he had expressed his indignation at the abominable folly of Miss Bickerton in the warmest terms.

Ch. 48:

"Wrong! No one, I believe, can blame her more than she is disposed to blame herself. 'The consequence,' said she, 'has been a state of perpetual suffering to me; and so it ought. But after all the punishment that misconduct can bring, it is still not less misconduct. Pain is no expiation. I never can be blameless….”

Ch. 49:

"Time, my dearest Emma, time will heal the wound.—Your own excellent sense—your exertions for your father's sake—I know you will not allow yourself—." Her arm was pressed again, as he added, in a more broken and subdued accent, "The feelings of the warmest friendship—indignation—abominable  scoundrel!"—And in a louder, steadier tone, he concluded with, "He will soon be gone. They will soon be in Yorkshire. I am sorry for her. She deserves a better fate."

Ch. 50:

“…I must still add to this long letter. You have not heard all that you ought to hear. I could not give any connected detail yesterday; but the suddenness, and, in one light, the unseasonableness with which the affair burst out, needs explanation; for though the event of the 26th ult., as you will conclude, immediately opened to me the happiest prospects, I should not have presumed on such early measures, but from the very particular circumstances, which left me not an hour to lose. I should myself have shrunk from any thing so hasty, and she would have felt every scruple of mine with multiplied strength and refinement.—But I had no choice. The hasty engagement she had entered into with that woman—Here, my dear madam, I was obliged to leave off abruptly, to recollect and compose myself.—I have been walking over the country, and am now, I hope, rational enough to make the rest of my letter what it ought to be…..”

Ch. 55: 

…Frank Churchill caught the name. "Perry!" said he to Emma, and trying, as he spoke, to catch Miss Fairfax's eye. "My friend Mr. Perry! What are they saying about Mr. Perry?—Has he been here this morning?—And how does he travel now?—Has he set up his carriage?"

Emma soon recollected, and understood him; and while she joined in the laugh, it was evident from Jane's countenance that she too was really hearing him, though trying to seem deaf.

"Such an extraordinary dream of mine!" he cried. "I can never think of it without laughing.—She hears us, she hears us, Miss Woodhouse. I see it in her cheek, her smile, her vain attempt to frown. Look at her. Do not you see that, at this instant, the very passage of her own letter, which sent me the report, is passing under her eye—that the whole blunder is spread before her—that she can attend to nothing else, though pretending to listen to the others?"

Jane was forced to smile completely, for a moment; and the smile partly remained as she turned towards him, and said in a conscious, low, yet steady voice, "How you can bear such recollections, is astonishing to me!—They will sometimes obtrude—but how you can court them!"

He had a great deal to say in return, and very entertainingly…

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

My interview with Diane Reynolds about her new book, The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

June 7, 2016, 11:00 am

≫ Next: Four more questions about connections to the Prince of W-h-ales subtext in Jane Austen’s Emma

≪ Previous: A deeper dive into the delicate “Prince of Whales” subtext of Emma

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I am so pleased today to have the opportunity to talk with my good friend Diane Reynolds about her new book, The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Women, Sexuality, and Nazi Germany:

http://wipfandstock.com/the-doubled-life-of-dietrich-bonhoeffer.html

Those who read my blog regularly have often seen Diane’s name, invariably in the context of some aspect of Jane Austen’s writing and/or biography as to which Diane and I are in agreement. Indeed, Diane and I have become friends over the past 7 years in no small part via our continuing shared fascination and love for Jane Austen’s writing, and our belief that the real Jane Austen, two centuries after her death, has still not really been seen by her large worldwide readership and fanbase.

Diane and I have spurred each other on, in the quest for a clearer understanding of the real lives and characters of Austen and other women in her era, via Austen’s fiction and her letters---and along the way, we’ve been helping each other debunk aspects of the Myth of Jane Austen that has been obscuring that truth for two centuries.

I’m so glad that Diane has now taken a similar approach to demystifying the life of this extraordinary man, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, with particular emphasis on the women in his life, about whom I knew nothing before hearing about, and that I’ve finally gotten to read Diane’s engrossing book. And let me also add, Diane has the extraordinary gift of expressing deep and complex ideas without even a hint of jargon or ego, which is extremely rare in scholarly writing.

One of the things that piqued my curiosity about Diane’s book is that connection between the obscurity surrounding Austen (who tragically died at 41 in 1817), and the mystery surrounding the relationship of  Bonhoeffer (who tragically died at 39 in 1945) with the women in his life. However, in Bonhoeffer’s case, the situation is flipped, because he’s the famous person, and it’s the women close to him who’ve been ignored, whereas with Austen she’s the famous person who nonetheless (and ironically) has not been accurately portrayed in much of the scholarly and popular writing about her.

With that brief introduction, then, here’s a transcript of our chat the other day:

A: Diane, did studying Austen lead you to studying Bonhoeffer, or vice versa, or no connection?

D: Austen and Bonhoeffer have been two separate tracks, but mystery links both figures. In Austen, I was tantalized at something I sensed dancing behind her texts, just out of view. Likewise, I found myself entangled in Bonhoeffer because women seemed inexplicably erased from his life story. I wanted in both cases to know what was going on. I found both compelling figures in their own rights: both are artists. I loved Austen's six novels and I loved Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison, but it was the mystery that pulled me in. Then with Bonhoeffer, I found myself wanting to get in the skin of his times, to try to understand what he and the women might be thinking.

A: In the case of Austen, you and I know that there were key figures in Austen family history who decisively shaped that exclusionary version of her life --was that the case in Bonhoeffer's biography as well? For example, did his sister or any other woman in his life ever write their version of things?

D: Bonhoeffer’s biographer and best friend, Eberhard Bethge, cannily devised Bonhoeffer’s life story in a huge biography that floods the reader with details but says almost nothing about the women--it really distorts and it is a labyrinth--deliberately. Bonhoeffer’s sister, his twin, with whom he was very close, Sabine, left a memoir, and she cooperated with the first bio of Bonhoeffer, before Bethge's. She steered the story, but left clues. It was Bethge who deliberately obscured things. Sabine, like many in the Austen family, was concerned with image, but was an honest person too.

A: And then all subsequent biographers ignored her memoir? Were you able to read it?

D: People don't look much at her memoir. I read it multiple times. People will lean into Sabine for childhood stories. They lose how close the two were all their lives.

A: Can you give an example or two of the kind of insight she provided, that has been missing from other male-oriented bios?

D: She emphasizes that Bonhoeffer was no saint. I think of James Edward Austen Leigh’s (JEAL) saintly portrait of his Aunt Jane Austen, but Sabine wouldn't go there: she paints a positive picture, but notes that he wasn't perfect and brings up that German males were basically chauvinist pigs. She says it more politely than that. She says Bonhoeffer “was no pillar saint."

Bethge, like the Austens, basically didn't want people to know things, such as that Bonhoeffer was same sex oriented and that he, Bethge, schemed for years to marry Bonhoeffer's niece, Renate.

A: As you know, I’ve written a lot about the many ways that JEAL sneakily but systematically distorted the picture of his aunt: both metaphorically, but also literally, in that he commissioned a revision of JA’s sister’s authentic sketch of JA when JA was 35, and turned a no-nonsense glaring countrywoman into a placid cow-like smiler.

And JEAL wasn’t the first, Bethge also sounds a lot like Jane’s brother Henry Austen in his Bio Notice of Jane Austen, published the year after her death, which kicked off what I call the Myth of Jane Austen that is still going strong two centuries later.

So, getting back to Bonhoeffer, from what you gathered from Sabine’s Memoir, what do you speculate Sabine would think of your book, if she were able to read it today- would she say, "Thank God someone has really gotten the complexity of my brother’s life?”

D: I think she would have mixed feelings. She wanted to protect the family franchise, but she would have, I think, not been altogether unhappy. Yes, Bethge could be likened to Henry Austen. One good thing about the Bonhoeffers--they didn't destroy letters wholesale. We can get a more complete story. Some key letters got "lost" but that is different from whole packets consigned to the flames. I am still hopeful that more Austen letters will show up.

A: Me too as to those Austen letters! I sometimes wonder some still exist, but are being deliberately concealed by family who don't want something "dark" (such as, e.g., her support for radical feminist causes or her complicated personal sexual preference) about Jane Austen to be made public.

…I meant to ask about Dietrich's attitude but I am glad you responded re the sister's...

D:  I wonder sometimes how both Austen and Bonhoeffer would have felt about their true stories being told. I don't know that either would have liked it. I don't think Bonhoeffer would have. What do you think about Austen?

A: Contrary to the near universal belief that Austen shunned public attention, I believe she was desperate for her true life to be known, most of all in regard to her complicated sexuality, and also her desire to be an inspiration to women to become conscious of their oppressed status. I see her last poem (“But behold me immortal!”) as a literal last gasp shaking her fist at all the forces squelching her voice.

D: I am more inclined to think Austen wanted to be put her story out there--and yes, the final poem supports that. I think DB would have been more reticent--but I don't know. He died in another time and place.

A: Do his theological writings in any way shed light on his personal self?

D: For him the personal was always the theological and vice versa, so yes, they do. I wonder how he would have been, say, post Stonewall. In his time and place, he wasn't going to say he was same-sex oriented.

A: Makes sense - gay liberation was not even a possibility then, so he opted instead for the struggle against Hitler.

D: He definitely comes from a more privileged location than Austen too--he was a male, had money, autonomy, voice--his twin sister, Sabine, is more of a cognate to Austen, and more likely to appreciate her full story being told.

A: Which leads to my next question -- can you glean any sense of how his theology was influenced by her?

D: As a woman married to a Jew in Nazi Germany, she was more silenced the way Austen may have been--she just couldn't speak her mind.

A: Did she marry a Jew before Hitler's rise?

D: Yes, she married a Jew in 1926--even then the family was worried, but supported her.

A: Did she support his decision to become a man of the cloth?

D: Sabine was Bonhoeffer’s first theological partner and his theology, his absolute desire to oppose Hitler and Hitler's church-based anti-Semitism was driven by great worry about her and her husband and their two daughters. It was personal. And yes, she supported him in becoming a pastor.

A: So interesting -- as I read your 2014 blog post about Austen and Bonhoeffer, I was reminded of Edward Ferrars's and Edmund Bertram's decisions to become clergymen.

D: Yes. And Austen supported her brothers too.

D: I am sure Bonhoeffer never wavered in his opposition to any kind of anti-Semitism because of her, and also because of his brother in law, who was also Jewish, though Hitler absolved him of that "stain" in 1940. It was personal.

A: So...are you suggesting that if his sister had not married a Jew, Bonhoeffer might not have followed his anti-Hitler path as he did?

D: The entire family was completely opposed to National Socialism, but yes, I think Bonhoeffer was human and Jewish persecution might not have been as urgent, as pressing to him, without her. What I am saying is yes, the opposition is driven not only by abstract theology, but by a need to protect his sister and her husband. They are in grave danger and can't speak for themselves. Jews just couldn't.

A: I’m reminded of Jane Austen’s shadow stories there – I think that she saw herself as giving a voice to what English women were afraid to even think, let alone speak out loud. The best example is the high incidence of death in childbirth that combined with serial pregnancy to generate a very high death rate for young married English gentlewomen. While JA could not express her outrage publicly, her surviving letters are filled with sarcastic comments about wives caught in this insidious trap literally for decades, and I believe Northanger Abbey’s shadow story is at its heart concerned with this plague on English wives, whom, I believe, JA wished to inspire to start talking about this domestic Gothic horror.

D: I think they both had to say what they meant in veiled ways.

A: Did you find evidence of him and his sister talking about Nazism through a Christian lens?

D: Well, I am not sure what you mean. They both abhorred the attempt to hijack the Christian Church and turn it Aryan. They wished more Christians would stand up to Hitler but unfortunately that didn't happen.

A: I was just wondering if she and he conversed at any point in theological language -- was that an intellectual realm that she entered too? Or did she influence his theological stance in other modalities?

D: Really we don't have a record of that, except a few oblique hints. It's largely a blank, although they surely discussed theology. She does mention that they talked over his pacifism in 1939--and in Nazi Germany, there was no CO option--if you declared as a pacifist, they basically shot you. He was able to talk this over with her and she understood and supported him--most of his theological partners in Germany couldn't comprehend being a pacifist. It was just not something they could wrap their brains around and she could, completely. And his close friend Ruth, understood, but advised him to lay low, as she knew what kind of trouble he could get into. She was right.  The women he was closest to did understand the pacifist stance in a way German men in that era couldn't.

A: Same as in the time of Aeschylus and in the time of Trump.

D: Yes. Warfare is still tied up with masculinity.

A: Apropos the ignoring of women close to a “great man”, I have a quick aside I think you will enjoy. Laurie Anderson the performance artist/poet, put out something sharply ironic in that regard about 20 years ago. When you first told me the premise for your book about telling the untold female story, I was immediately reminded of one particular part of Anderson’s great music/spoken word album "Stories from the Nerve Bible" Here is the text of it:

"the only sadder cemetery I saw was last summer in Switzerland. And I was dragged there by a Hermann Hesse fanatic, who had never recovered from reading Steppenwolf, and one hot August morning when the sky was quiet, we made a pilgrimage to the cemetery; we brought a lot of flowers and we finally found his grave. It was marked with a huge fir tree and a mammoth stone that said "Hesse" in huge Helvetica bold letters. It looked more like a marquee than a tombstone. And around the corner was this tiny stone for his wife, Nina, and on it was one word: "Auslander" foreigner. And this made me so sad and so mad that I was sorry I'd brought the flowers. Anyway, I decided to leave the flowers, along with a mean note, and it read: Even though you're not my favorite writer, by long shots, I leave these flowers on your resting spot."

Sadly, it sounds like women being relegated to the shadows is a common denominator in the realm of the arts and theology just as much as in other fields. It also makes me wonder whether Jane’s oldest brother James, the “golden child” of the family, had the idea that books would be written about him, but then little sister Jane did not get the memo, and became the famous one in the family instead.

D: Yes interesting. Nobody in the Austen expected Jane to be their claim to fame and nobody in the Bonhoeffer family expected it to be Dietrich. They thought he had thrown his life away by studying theology. One thing too I think is a backdrop common to both Bonhoeffer and Austen is the high level of censorship--we KNOW that about Nazi Germany, but also England is in the Napoleonic Wars--the last great war until the 20th century, and the leadership is seriously worried and writers can't say what they want, certainly nothing republican or even semi radical. There never was a First Amendment in England. I think we forget how severely Austen was curtailed. It’s very interesting, because her Regency English culture is much closer to Nazi German culture than either one are to American culture. We find it so surprising, for instance, that both cultures thought Republics were dangerous: to us, being a Republic is ingrained.

A: Yes, and especially if the writer was a woman who wanted to blow the whistle on everything about life in England that was bad for women.

D: Yeah--and as Ellen [Moody] has been saying about Charlotte Smith--they buried her novels because she said too much that was too uncomfortable to hear and the Austens weren't going to let Austen do that. The kind of hierarchy that both Regency England and Nazi Germany upheld kept women constrained, as it did gays or anyone likely to step out of line.

A: Nosiree Jane.

D:  And so both these figures are severely censored--I think much of the interest lies in that and pulling that out as a reality for Austen.

A: As we've been posting, Austen made sure to weave Smith's overt stories into her own shadow stories.

D: Yes. I find that very interesting--just the fact that she alluded to Smith at all speaks volumes.

A: My next question is re Bonhoeffer's irony -how did he go about being ironical? You and I both know how Jane Austen did it, but I am curious to hear how he did it in his writings

D: Well that's a complicated question--he uses terms ironically, like a "world come of age." He talks about a mis-fuhrer or misleader of the people--he can be sardonic about Hitler as the emperor with no clothes ... I don't know how much you want to go here, as his theology gets complicated.

A: Whatever you found most interesting--what made you smile the way we smile at Austen's irony?

D: Well he is not ironic in the same way. Think of the reams of words it would take to even explain the irony in the speech by Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey about every Englishman being a spy. When everyone was arguing that you had to join the Nazis to combat them, Dietrich said that if the train is heading for a crash and you had climbed on it and are running in the opposite direction of the crash through the cars, you are still going to crash. I think he realized the Nazis were pea brains and bullies. But it gets to a point when its not funny that these morons are in charge

A: No, just as I can no longer laugh at Trump. It reminds me of Elizabeth Bennet’s great putdown of Darcy: “My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost, is lost forever."

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

D: I am sure it was hard for Austen too to deal with the tin-plated bullies like her Aunt Leigh-Perrot.

A: For sure---and part of the way she coped was to skewer those bullies in the shadow stories of her novels. And speaking of Trump, that prompts another segue --- What can we in America today learn from Bonhoeffer's writings that can better equip us to combat this current dangerous flirtation with fascism that seems to have infatuated way too many Americans?

D: Absolutely don't fall for it. Stay in community. Resist it. Recognize that Trump is a fraud. When solutions to problems --this is what Bonhoeffer would say and you can agree or not--go out of what the Old Testament and New Testament would say are legitimate responses to problems--not where people in the Bible went crazy and did things wrong--but when the core Torah/Jesus beliefs are being turned on their heads, head for the hills, say no—instead, base your life in a sane reading of those texts. What happened when people tried to build the tower of Babel--is that like building a wall to keep out Mexicans? He would keep bringing it back to that--maybe that is old fashioned to our ears, but maybe it's good advice.

He would say, treat people decently—that means don’t kill people, don’t deport people, you don't nuke people, you don't do this sort of thing to them. It's pretty basic.

A: Funny that we are not hearing any prominent American theologians speaking out about Trump, especially today of all days, when Trump has perhaps gone too far even for him.

D: We need to hear more.

A: Many of them are compromised -- they are so hung up on abortion, that they won't openly criticize a Trump who promises to give them SC justices to do their bidding.

D: History repeats itself. And in Germany--Jews thought they could keep quiet and ride it out and Christians got diverted by promises to restore some mythic pre-Weimar moral golden age.

A: I was just thinking about Austen vis a vis what you said above--- I realized, in her era, there was no real “Resistance” she could be part of --- And that’s one big difference --- in her time, it wasn't horrific Nazis who were perpetrating horrific evil that was obvious to everyone sane. It was everybody - even the Edmund Bertrams, country clergymen who believed they were on a higher moral plane than big city folks, were part of the oppression.

D: Yes. People believed in it, thought it was how society had to be. And Hitler wanted to restore that. He loved patriarchy.

A: Is there any other topic I did not bring up, that you'd like us to talk about before we conclude?

D: I would like to emphasize how relevant both figures are to the world of today--we are facing the same issues. Basically, Austen and Bonhoeffer are fighting similar ideological battles. We don’t like to compare Regency England to Hitler’s Germany, but the ideological similarities—extreme belief in patriarchy, hierarchy, militarism, violent punishment, colonialism, the inferiority of certain “races,” fear of the other –are uncomfortably similar.

A: Amen. Thank again, Diane, for answering my questions, and congratulations on a book of great interest to Janeites and all other thinking people as well!  

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Four more questions about connections to the Prince of W-h-ales subtext in Jane Austen’s Emma

June 8, 2016, 12:43 pm

≫ Next: Mrs. Bennet’s triumph over Darcy: a radical explanation

≪ Previous: My interview with Diane Reynolds about her new book, The Doubled Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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Tomorrow, I’ll be back to reveal the common connection to Jane Austen’s satire of the Prince Regent (aka the Prince of W-h-ales) which I claim unites all those seemingly unconnected passages I quoted from Emma the other day. In the interim, I give you some questions about four of those quoted passages, the answers to which may make that connection more visible (and some of you may recall my past posts about these quoted passages):

Ch. 43:

"Oh! for myself, I protest I must be excused," said Mrs. Elton; "I really cannot attempt—I am not at all fond of the sort of thing. I had an acrostic once sent to me upon my own name, which I was not at all pleased with. I knew who it came from. An abominable puppy!—You know who I mean (nodding to her husband). 

Who is the “abominable puppy” Mrs. Elton refers to, why doesn’t she name him, how does her husband know who she means, and why does Mrs. Elton’s reference to “an abominable puppy” echo the Trinculo’s descriptions of the “monster” Caliban in The Tempest, 2.2?:

CALIBAN     I'll kiss thy foot; I'll swear myself thy subject.

STEPHANO  Come on then; down, and swear.

TRINCULO   I shall laugh myself to death at this puppy-headed monster. A most scurvy monster! I could find in my heart to beat him,--

STEPHANO  Come, kiss.

TRINCULO   But that the poor monster's in drink: an abominable monster!

Ch. 49:

"Time, my dearest Emma, time will heal the wound.—Your own excellent sense—your exertions for your father's sake—I know you will not allow yourself—." Her arm was pressed again, as he added, in a more broken and subdued accent, "The feelings of the warmest friendship—indignation—abominable  scoundrel!"—And in a louder, steadier tone, he concluded with, "He will soon be gone. They will soon be in Yorkshire. I am sorry for her. She deserves a better fate."

As to Knightley’s second sentence, who is Knightley talking about, why doesn’t he name him, and why does Knightley speak it in “a more subdued accent” that his direct statements to Emma?

Ch. 39:  

In the few minutes' conversation which [Emma] had yet had with [Frank], while Harriet had been partially insensible, he had spoken of her terror, her naivete, her fervour as she seized and clung to his arm, with a sensibility amused and delighted; and just at last, after Harriet's own account had been given, he had expressed his indignation at the abominable folly of Miss Bickerton in the warmest terms.

What is the meaning of the echoing between the verbiage of the above passage and that of the above two previously quoted passages (in Chapters 43 & 49)?

Ch. 20 “…Manners were all that could be safely judged of, under a much longer knowledge than they had yet had of Mr. Churchill. [Jane] believed every body found his manners pleasing."

            Emma could not forgive her.

Ch. 21 Emma could not forgive her; --but as neither provocation nor resentment were discerned by Mr. Knightley, who had been of the party, and had seen only proper attention and pleasing behaviour on each side…

What does Jane Austen mean by having the anadiplosis of “Emma could not forgive her” (that bridges Chapters 20 & 21) strongly echo the following famous passage in her 02/16/13 letter [Letter 82] to Martha Lloyd about “the Princess of Wales”?:

 “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..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.”

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Mrs. Bennet’s triumph over Darcy: a radical explanation

June 8, 2016, 6:01 pm

≫ Next: “Abominable” ghostwritten letters are key to decoding the Prince of W-h-ales subtext in Austen’s Emma

≪ Previous: Four more questions about connections to the Prince of W-h-ales subtext in Jane Austen’s Emma

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The steady flow of Pride & Prejudicefanfics continues to flood the world of Jane Austen, unabated since it first welled up in the aftermath of the great 1996 A&E/BBC P&P film starring Ehle & Firth. However, every so often, one comes out (such as McCullough’s The Independence of Mary Bennet and P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley) that provides a welcome alternative to hyper-romance and monsters. I may’ve just stumbled upon another such rare spinoff from P&P – Mrs. Bennet’s Sentiments by Dori Salerno:

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=%22Mrs.+Bennet's+Sentiments%22

Here’s the blurb that, together with the sample chapter at Amazon.com, gives me hope that Saleron’s novel is a worthy presentation of the story of P&P from the point of view of a non-foolish Mrs. Bennet:     “Jane Austen’s mother tells all! Jane Austen's Mrs. Bennet, mother of five difficult teenage daughters, is silent no more. Those who grew up enjoying Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" will delight in "Mrs. Bennet's Sentiments". Tired of having her ungrateful girls roll their eyes at her, and watching her husband return to his man cave, Mrs. Bennet finally tells all. "Mrs. Bennet surprises them all.""She defies the conventions of the day -- proving the old adage 'Mother knows best'".”

This theme caught my eye, because Mrs. Bennet is one of the many secondary characters in P&P who I have long believed are very different in the shadow story of P&P than in the overt story. In the latter, Mrs. Bennet is viewed from Elizabeth’s decidedly jaundiced point of view of her mother, which infuses the narrator’s initial, withering narrative assessment of her:

“…the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.”

There’s also prior scholarly support for an alternative view of Mrs. Bennet. In Judith Wylie’s excellent "Dancing in chains: feminist satire in Pride and Prejudice."Persuasions 22 (2000), which I heartily recommend you all to read in full, we read:

“…in the tradition of the satiric trickster, Austen turns her comedic message inside out, by interpolating within the seemingly conservative tenor of her novels a satiric feminist subtext quite at odds with the surface conventionality, a strategy that Susan Fraiman calls "counternarrative." This dialogic style allows women writers to "argue in the same track as men" through their depiction of the "ideal" female but also to present "dissident tracks" that undercut this patriarchal icon of feminine behavior. These "dissident tracks" are often traversed by a minor female character whose words and behavior are criticized while the heroine, conforming to the romantic narrative direction of the text, is held up as the untarnished role model. In Pride and Prejudice, the "dissident track" is cut by a truth-telling female monster, Mrs. Bennet, who is employed to question masculine prerogatives. On the surface, Mrs. Bennet seems to be the perfect subject for ridicule because she appears to be truly silly and mindless. The author's veiled feminist message is revealed only when the reader looks past the humor aimed at women and then asks why a character such as Mrs. Bennet acts as she does….”

I take Wylie’s excellent reading of Mrs. Bennet against the grain as a starting point, but I believe Mrs. Bennet can plausibly be seen as having many hidden depths and much mystery. For example, she may well be very intelligent, even sly. Very much as with my reading of Miss Bates in the shadow story of Emma, one can see Mrs. Bennet’s dithering motormouth persona as an act designed to keep her off the radar, so she can operate discreetly in the shadows.

And, in a different vein, as I blogged a few years ago here…. http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/09/mary-musgroves-complaintand-mrs-bennets.html   ….  Mrs. Bennet’s perpetual “nerves” may be seen as a Regency Era precursor of the classic “Dear I’ve got a headache” excuse given by the stereotypical modern wife who wishes to avoid her conjugal “duties”.

And…I’ve also found textual evidence that suggests that Mrs. Bennet is not merely foolish, but might actually be psychotic, having an imaginary friend named Mrs. Long: http://tinyurl.com/pbhcxay

But most relevant of all to my understanding of the tumultuous courtship of Elizabeth by Darcy, is my longstanding firm belief that the shadow Mrs. Bennet actually knows some very important, even explosive facts about Mr. Darcy, which she feels she cannot share with daughter Elizabeth. This puts Mrs. Bennet in the same category of secondary female character in P&P as Charlotte Lucas, Mrs. Gardiner, and Mary Bennet, in that I see them all, in the shadow story, operating behind the scenes, in order to influence the outcome of that courtship.

And that brings me to the topic I had originally planned to write about this week, even before I came upon Mrs. Bennet’s Sentiments. Last month, I mentioned a particularly interesting essay in the Norton Critical Edition of P&P, one part of which I wanted to discuss and react to. That article is “Getting the Whole Truth in Pride and Prejudice“ by Tara Ghoshal Wallace from Jane Austen and Narrative Authority (1995) 45-58, which can actually be accessed online here: http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/doifinder/view/10.1057/9780230372948

While I urge you all to read Wallace’s entire article, here’s the beginning, to which I will respond, particularly because it relates directly and specifically to my above discussion of Mrs. Bennet as intelligent and sly:

“Of all Jane Austen's novels, Pride and Prejudiceends most serenely. The marriage that will perfectly balance Elizabeth Bennet's 'ease and liveliness' with Fitzwilliam Darcy's 'judgement, information, and knowledge of the world,' the stability of Pemberley and the capitulation of even Miss Bingley and Lady Catherine all point to a closure which eliminates ambiguities and achieves coherence. Impediments (the Bennet family's vulgarities, for example) become irrelevant, and mysteries (such as Mr Bingley's inconsiderate behaviour) are cleared up.

Looking back at the narrative, however, I locate three puzzling moments not adequately explained or contained by the text's impulse towards clarity and closure. And in attempting to 'solve' the mysteries of these moments, I discover not only their resistance to my efforts to fix meaning but also a general epistemological uncertainty. Pride and Prejudice thematizes a narrative problem: it exposes the inadequacies alike of careful reticence, of ambiguity, and of absolute assurance, demonstrating how each of these strategies serves to block access to the 'whole truth' in narrative.” END QUOTE, WALLACE

So far, so good, and now here’s the part that relates to Mrs. Bennet as an intelligent woman:

“The first of the baffling but provocative moments describes a reaction to one of Mrs Bennet's many mindless assertions. To Elizabeth's generalization, 'people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever,' Mrs Bennet adds, 'Yes indeed ... I assure you there is quite as much of that going on in the country as in town.' Then follows narrative commentary on the effect of her statement: 'Every body was surprised; and Darcy, after looking at her for a moment, turned silently- away. Mrs. Bennet, who fancied she had gained a complete victory over him, continued her triumph.' There is no explanation as to why this innocuous inanity should give rise to so much surprise, silence and triumph. “

If you read the rest of Wallace’s essay at the above link, as best I understand her conclusions, she tries to have it both ways, purporting to both honor the happy ending, but at the same time suggest some larger purpose to the cruxes and uncertainties she discusses. For me this is quintessential orthodox Austen scholarship: a competent close-reader of the text detects irregularities and ambiguities, asks good questions, but then is unable to provide a satisfying explanation. And the reason she cannot explain her  discovery, is because her belief system about what an Austen novel can be is fatally limited.

So, how do I give a better explanation for why Mrs. Bennet’s “innocuous inanity should give rise to so much surprise, silence and triumph”?

Very simple. I’ve previously pointed out, dating back to 2010, that Mrs. Bennet’s triumph makes perfect sense, if she and Darcy have been speaking to each other in code during that entire scene in the Netherfield salon, a code that Eliza (and therefore also the reader) is not privy to.

Let me therefore provide you some interspersed, decoding commentary to translate each Mrs. Bennet’s statements, to show the deeper reason why she comes to Netherfield—which is to confront Darcy with a reminder of a very unpleasant fact about Jane’s “illness” which he would rather forget, now that he has turned his amorous attention to Elizabeth. That unpleasant fact, which I first spoke about publicly in 2011 to the SoCal JASNA chapter, is that Darcy (to put it bluntly) knocked Jane Bennet up during her last visit with the Gardiners a few months earlier in London!

Regardless of whether you’ve read my prior posts that have touched on this point, and what you think about them, I invite you all to let me walk you through this scene anyway, and show you how it fits into that particular subtextual theme in the shadow story of P&P—see what you think:

“…Mrs. Bennet, accompanied by her two youngest girls, reached Netherfield soon after the family breakfast….. [Bingley] "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."

[TRANSLATION: “Lizzy, don’t you dare say anything that will scare Bingley away from marrying Jane, because she needs to be married soon or we Bennets will have a BIG problem!”]

“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."

"Yes, indeed,"cried Mrs. Bennet, offended by his manner of mentioning a country neighbourhood. "I assure you there is quite as much of THAT going on in the country as in town."

[TRANSLATION: “Lizzy, don’t say anything that will cause Bingley to observe how Jane’s body is beginning to “alter”. And Darcy, don’t think I don’t know you knocked Jane up when she was in town!” That’s the “triumph” Elizabeth observes, without having a clue as to its meaning. And that’s why Darcy looks at Mrs. Bennet for a moment, and then turns silently away].

Everybody was surprised, and Darcy, after looking at her for a moment, turned silently away. Mrs. Bennet, who fancied she had gained a complete victory over him, continued her triumph.

"I cannot see that London has any great advantage over the country, for my part, except the shops and public places. The country is a vast deal pleasanter, is it not, Mr. Bingley?"

[TRANSLATION: Mrs. Bennet picks up on the “country” sexual innuendo that Hamlet made famous why talking to Ophelia about “country matters”, and she is saying, in code, Jane is a vast deal pleasanter than any alternative for Bingley.]

"When I am in the country," he replied, "I never wish to leave it; and when I am in town it is pretty much the same. They have each their advantages, and I can be equally happy in either."

"Aye—that is because you have the right disposition. But that gentleman," looking at Darcy, "seemed to think the country was nothing at all."

[TRANSLATION: Just because Darcy doesn’t want to marry Jane after knocking her up, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t, Mr. Bingley”]

"Indeed, Mamma, you are mistaken," said Elizabeth, blushing for her mother. "You quite mistook Mr. Darcy. He only meant that there was not such a variety of people to be met with in the country as in the town, which you must acknowledge to be true."

"Certainly, my dear, nobody said there were; but as to not meeting with many people in this neighbourhood, I believe there are few neighbourhoods larger. I know we dine with four-and-twenty families."

[TRANSLATION: “And by the way, Mr. Darcy, Jane is approaching 24 weeks of pregnancy, and is therefore getting larger!” Bingley and his sister both get the “joke”, and that’s why he can hardly keep his countenance, and she smiles expressively at Darcy, not the reason Elizabeth infers. As you can see, Elizabeth is much more like Emma than has previously been understood.]

Nothing but concern for Elizabeth could enable Bingley to keep his countenance. His sister was less delicate, and directed her eyes towards Mr. Darcy with a very expressive smile. Elizabeth, for the sake of saying something that might turn her mother's thoughts, now asked her if Charlotte Lucas had been at Longbourn since her coming away.

"Yes, she called yesterday with her father. What an agreeable man Sir William is, Mr. Bingley, is not he? So much the man of fashion! So genteel and easy! He has always something to say to everybody. That is my idea of good breeding; and those persons who fancy themselves very important, and never open their mouths, quite mistake the matter."

[TRANSLATION: “Mr. Darcy, you’ve turned my eldest daughter into a “breeding animal”, don’t you dare do anything to deter Bingley from marrying Jane!”]

"Did Charlotte dine with you?"

"No, she would go home. I fancy she was wanted about the mince-pies. For my part, Mr. Bingley, I always keep servants that can do their own work; my daughters are brought up very differently. But everybody is to judge for themselves, and the Lucases are a very good sort of girls, I assure you. It is a pity they are not handsome! Not that I think Charlotte so very plain—but then she is our particular friend."

[TRANSLATION: “Lizzy, how can you be so clueless about Charlotte? She’s a lesbian in love with you and you still don’t realize it!”]

[Bingley] "She seems a very pleasant young woman."

"Oh! dear, yes; but you must own she is very plain. Lady Lucas herself has often said so, and envied me Jane's beauty. I do not like to boast of my own child, but to be sure, Jane—one does not often see anybody better looking. It is what everybody says. I do not trust my own partiality. When she was only fifteen, there was a man at my brother Gardiner's in town so much in love with her that my sister-in-law was sure he would make her an offer before we came away. But, however, he did not. Perhaps he thought her too young. However, he wrote some verses on her, and very pretty they were."

[TRANSLATION: “Charlotte is a lesbian, but Jane is beautiful and straight, PLUS, Mr. Darcy, in case you would also like to forget, it was YOU who was first introduced to her by my brother Gardiner—your business associate---six years ago in London, and you wrote her some pretty poetry then before you jilted her without warning.”]

"And so ended his affection," said Elizabeth impatiently. "There has been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. 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.

[TRANSLATION: That’s why Darcy defends the unnamed poet—it’s because it was him! And that’s why he “only smiled” in the next paragraph]

"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; and the general pause which ensued made Elizabeth tremble lest her mother should be exposing herself again. She longed to speak, but could think of nothing to say; and after a short silence Mrs. Bennet began repeating her thanks to Mr. Bingley for his kindness to Jane, with an apology for troubling him also with Lizzy.  END QUOTE

And that is my explanation for the anomaly that Tara Ghoshal Wallace first pointed out 22 years ago. 

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

“Abominable” ghostwritten letters are key to decoding the Prince of W-h-ales subtext in Austen’s Emma

June 10, 2016, 6:14 pm

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During the past several days, I’ve claimed, in two successive posts… http://tinyurl.com/guofpvmhttp://tinyurl.com/hneurvl   …that there’s a common connection underlying Jane Austen’s satire of the Prince Regent (aka the Prince of W-h-ales) which unites a dozen seemingly unconnected passages in Emma.

Today I return to outline that connection, which hinges on the repeated motif of strategically ghostwritten letters, combined with a cluster of 3 words (“abominable”, “indignation” and “warmest”), which appears 3 times in the text of Emma (as in the Magic Flute-like motif of the # 3: the 3 come-at-able ladies, the 3 teachers, Mr. Woodhouse’s 3 turns and 3x-baked apples, and 3 dull things at Box Hill) and leads (fittingly) to the following 3 significant inferences:

ONE: All Janeites know that Knightley correctly guesses that Emma ghostwrites Harriet Smith’s letter rejecting Robert Martin’s written proposal letter. However, only a few (including my friend Barbara Mann in 2002, and myself in 2005) have recognized that Knightley is primed to make this correct guess, because “it takes one to know one”, i.e., it is Knightley himself (not, as Emma guesses, the Martin sisters) who, despite his claim of never engaging in deceit, ghostwrites Robert Martin’s proposal letter. That’s why he gets so angry, he’s been beaten at his own game by the unwitting Emma!

TWO: Knightley turns out to be a serial ghostwriter, given that he also ghostwrites the latter part of Frank Churchill’s long letter to Mrs. Weston (which comprises almost all of Chapter 50), forcing Frank to pretend that he and Jane were engaged all along, when Jane and Frank actually only had a sexual affair, initiated by Jane, who was seeking a husband after she found herself pregnant by the married John Knightley.

THREE: By echoing of key words and phrases, Jane Austen also meant her political tabloid-savvy readers to recognize her veiled allusion to Princess Caroline’s highly publicized January 1813 letter to her husband the Prince Regent, in which the Princess urges him to stop preventing her from having a real relationship with their daughter Princess Charlotte. It must have been obvious to those knowledgeable political observers that the Princess’s letter, which was far too well-written to have actually been authored by the foreign-born, legally unsavvy Princess, was ghostwritten. We know today that the ghostwriter was Henry (later Lord) Brougham, a Whig reformer and skilled advocate on her behalf.

That’s the gist of my argument, but now I will give you the highlights of the textual evidence in Emma

which I say supports my claims:

Ch. 43:  "Oh! for myself, I protest I must be excused," said Mrs. Elton; "I really cannot attempt—I am not at all fond of the sort of thing. I had an acrostic once sent to me upon my own name, which I was not at all pleased with. I knew who it came from. An ABOMINABLE PUPPY!—You know who I mean (nodding to her husband). 

I realized a decade ago that the “abominable puppy” Mrs. Elton refers to but doesn’t name--yet her husband Mr. Elton know exactly who she means---is Frank Churchill, who, several months earlier, while out on the singles social circuit with his “wing man”, that very same Mr. Elton, had jilted the then Miss Hawkins when he made his sudden trip to London for a “haircut”, because Frank believes he has good prospects for marrying Emma!

By that derisive term “abominable puppy”, Mrs. Elton, the proverbial woman scorned, invokes Trinculo’s description of the monstrous Caliban in The Tempest, and throws in a racist innuendo that Frank is of mixed race, to boot:

CALIBAN     I'll kiss thy foot; I'll swear myself thy subject.  

STEPHANO  Come on then; down, and swear. 

TRINCULO   I shall laugh myself to death at this PUPPY-headed monster. A most scurvy monster! I could find in my heart to beat him,-- 

STEPHANO  Come, kiss.

TRINCULO   But that the poor m in drink: an ABOMINABLE monster!

Ch. 49:  "Time, my dearest Emma, time will heal the wound.—Your own excellent sense—your exertions for your father's sake—I know you will not allow yourself—." Her arm was pressed again, as he added, in a more broken and subdued accent, "The feelings of the WARMEST friendship—INDIGNATION—ABOMINABLE  scoundrel!"—And in a louder, steadier tone, he concluded with, "He will soon be gone. They will soon be in Yorkshire. I am sorry for her. She deserves a better fate."

As to Knightley’s second sentence, it is (as with Mrs. Elton’s “abominable puppy”) Frank Churchill whom Knightley is muttering about; and he speaks it in “a more subdued accent”, because, as I also pointed out a decade ago, those are three words/phrases which all also appear in significant passages in Frank’s letter to Mrs. Weston in Chapter 50.

This tells us, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that at a minimum Knightley has already read Frank’s letter in Chapter 49 (even though we hear in Chapter 51, when Emma and Knightley discuss Frank’s letter, that Knightley is supposedly reading the letter for the first time!); and at a maximum, Knightley has (as I stated above) dictated the latter part of Frank’s letter, much the same way that all Janeites know that the new Mrs. Willoughby dictates Willoughby’s jilting letter to Marianne in S&S.

Ch. 39:    In the few minutes' conversation which [Emma] had yet had with [Frank], while Harriet had been partially insensible, he had spoken of her terror, her naivete, her fervour as she seized and clung to his arm, with a sensibility amused and delighted; and just at last, after Harriet's own account had been given, he had expressed his INDIGNATION at the ABOMINABLE folly of Miss Bickerton in the WARMEST terms.

What I didn’t realize till last week, despite my longstanding awareness of those three words/phrases being echoed by Knightley before he is supposed to have read them in Frank’s letter, is that these same three words actually also appear in Frank’s above, negative appraisal of Miss Bickerton’s leaving Harriet in the lurch. What does this treble echoing in these three seemingly unconnected passages mean? I suggest that they all point to a common denominator, the “abominable” Frank.

Ch. 20 “…Manners were all that could be safely judged of, under a much longer knowledge than they had yet had of Mr. Churchill. [Jane] believed every body found his manners pleasing."

            Emma could not forgive her.

Ch. 21 Emma could not forgive her; --but as neither provocation nor resentment were discerned by Mr. Knightley, who had been of the party, and had seen only proper attention and pleasing behaviour on each side…

What Jane Austen means by having the anadiplosis of “Emma could not forgive her” (that bridges Chapters 20 & 21) strongly echo the following famous passage in her 02/16/13 letter [Letter 82] to Martha Lloyd about “the Princess of Wales”, is, I believe, an in-joke for Martha Lloyd’s private benefit, in light of the veiled allusion to the Princess’s letter which prompted JA’s following comment in Letter 82:

“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..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.”

And I conclude with the following highlights from the Princess’s famous (ghostwritten) letter to her husband the Prince Regent, with the words/phrases echoed in Emma (in the passages in my first post, linked above) in ALL CAPS:

"Sir, It is with great reluctance that I presume to OBTRUDE myself upon your Royal Highness, and to solicit your attention to matters which may, at first, appear rather of a personal than a public nature.

…I should continue, in silence and retirement, to lead the life which has been prescribed to me, and console myself for the loss of that society and those domestic COMFORTS to which I have so long been a stranger, by the reflection that it has been deemed proper I should be AFFLICTED without any fault of my own—and that your Royal Highness knows. But, Sir, there are considerations of a higher nature than any regard to my own happiness, which render this address a duty both to myself and my daughter. May I venture to say —a duty also to my husband, and the people committed to his care? There is a point beyond which a guiltless woman cannot with safety carry her forbearance.

…It is impossible, sir, that any one can have attempted to persuade your Royal Highness, that her character will not be injured by the perpetual violence offered to her strongest affections—the studied care taken to estrange her from my society, and even to interrupt all communication between us. That her love for me, with whom, by his Majesty's wise and gracious arrangements, she passed the years of her infancy and childhood, never can be extinguished, I well know, and the knowledge of it forms THE GREATEST BLESSING OF MY EXISTENCE. But let me implore your Royal Highness to reflect how inevitably all attempts to abate this attachment, by forcibly separating us, if they succeed, must injure my child's principles —if they fail, must destroy her happiness.

The plan of excluding my daughter from all intercourse with the world, appears to my humble judgment peculiarly unfortunate. She who is destined to be the sovereign of this great country, enjoys none of those advantages of society which are deemed necessary for imparting a knowledge of mankind to persons who have infinitely less occasion to learn that important lesson; and it may so happen, by a chance which I trust is very remote, that she should be called upon to exercise the powers of the Crown, with an experience of the world more confined than that of the most private individual. To the extraordinary talents with which she is blessed, and which accompany a DISPOSITION as singularly amiable, frank, and decided, I willingly trust much; but beyond a certain point the greatest natural endowments cannot struggle against the disadvantages of circumstances and situation.

… To the same unfortunate counsels I ascribe a circumstance in every way so DISTRESSING both to my parental and religious feelings, that my daughter has never yet enjoyed the benefit of confirmation, although above a year older than the age at which all the other branches of the royal family have partaken of that solemnity.”  END QUOTE FROM PRINCESS CAROLINE’S JANUARY 1813 LETTER

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

A delightful Jane Austen quiz

June 20, 2016, 11:40 pm

≫ Next: A long, agreeable, meaty Austenesque carriage ride in early May

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Okay, a delightful Jane Austen quiz to usher in the summer solstice (here in the Northern Hemisphere):

Clue #1: There is a 2-sentence passage in Henry Austen’s (pretty short) 1818 Biographical Notice of Jane Austen… http://www.austen.com/persuade/preface.htm  …which is the common thread that unites ALL EIGHT of the following seemingly unconnected passages written by Jane Austen over a period of 21 years. Can you locate the passage in the Biographical Notice, and then explain the concealed connection to each of the eight passages?

Clue #2: There is another, ninth passage in JA’s writings which has long been universally acknowledged to be part of that same concealed connection:

1793: “Henry VIII: in The History of England:

“…a slight sketch of the principal Events which marked his reign. Among these may be ranked Cardinal Wolsey's telling the father Abbott of Leicester Abbey that "he was come to lay his bones among them,"

…Nothing can be said in his vindication, but that his abolishing Religious Houses & leaving them to the ruinous depredations of time has been of infinite use to the landscape of England in general, which probably was a principal motive for his doing it…”

1811: S&S Chapter 18:

"I am convinced," said Edward, "that you really feel all the delight in a fine prospect which you profess to feel. But, in return, your sister must allow me to feel no more than I profess…I do not like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if they are tall, straight, and flourishing. I do not like ruined, tattered cottages….”

1813  P&P

Chapter 11: “…My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost, is lost forever."

Chapter 29:  Elizabeth found herself quite equal to the scene, and could observe the three ladies before her composedly…"…It is wonderful how many families I have been the means of supplying in that way. I am always glad to get a young person well placed out. Four nieces of Mrs. Jenkinson are most delightfully situated through my means…”

Chapter 35:  "Two offenses of a very different nature, and by no means of equal magnitude, you last night laid to my charge. The first mentioned was, that, regardless of the sentiments of either, I had detached Mr. Bingley from your sister, and the other, that I had, in defiance of various claims, in defiance of honour and humanity, ruined the immediate prosperity and blasted the prospects of Mr. Wickham…”

Chapter 42: “…The walk here being here less sheltered than on the other side, allowed them to see him before they met. Elizabeth, however astonished, was at least more prepared for an interview than before, and resolved to appear and to speak with calmness, if he really intended to meet them. For a few moments, indeed, she felt that he would probably strike into some other path. The idea lasted while a turning in the walk concealed him from their view; the turning past, he was immediately before them. With a glance, she saw that he had lost none of his recent civility; and, to imitate his politeness, she began, as they met, to admire the beauty of the place; but she had not got beyond the words "delightful," and "charming," when some unlucky recollections obtruded, and she fancied that praise of Pemberley from her might be mischievously construed….” 

1814: Letter 97 to Cassandra Austen “I have seen nobody in London yet with such a long chin as Dr. Syntax, nor Anybody quite so large as Gogmagoglicus.”

1814: Letter 107 to Anna Austen Lefroy: “You describe a sweet place, but your descriptions are often more minute than will be liked. You give too many particulars of right hand and left. Mrs. Forester is not careful enough of Susan's health. Susan ought not to be walking out so soon after heavy rains, taking long walks in the dirt. An anxious mother would not suffer it. I like your Susan very much; she is a sweet creature, her playfulness of fancy is very delightful. I like her as she is now exceedingly, but I am not quite so well satisfied with her behavior to George R. At first she seems all over attachment and feeling, and afterwards to have none at all; she is so extremely confused at the ball, and so well satisfied apparently with Mr. Morgan. She seems to have changed her character. You are now collecting your people delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life. Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on, and I hope you will do a great deal more, and make full use of them while they are so very favourably arranged.”  

As usual, I will reveal the answer in about two days, but I hope that I will receive some correct answers before then.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

A long, agreeable, meaty Austenesque carriage ride in early May

June 21, 2016, 5:44 pm

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Pending my giving the answer to my pending quiz question posed yesterday, here’s another smaller-scale Austen quiz for which I’ll give you the answer, below, in this same post. As you’ll find out tomorrow when you see the answer to yesterday’s quiz, I stumbled upon today’s finding, while following up on yesterday’s.

Without further ado:

I’m thinking of a passage in Jane Austen’s writing, which includes all 15 of the following specific points:

1, 2, 3 & 4: It describes a long “agreeable” trip in a chaise taken by a few women from one part of England to another.

5: The trip includes a stop midway to eat at a roadside inn.

6: The trip takes place early in May.

7: The arrival of the chaise at a stop is observed from a window by a waiting observer.

8: We hear about meat and a cucumber during the food stop.

9: We hear about bonnets.

10: We hear about someone with “a long chin”.

11: We hear about someone who looks odd.

12: We hear about a servant.

13 & 14: We hear about someone named Chamlerlayne dressed in a gown.

15: The person doing all the talking is a young single women who speaks in a brash, jocular voice.

So, what passage am I thinking of?   Scroll down a bit for my answer….

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I think it safe to guess that most of you reading this quiz who recognized the answer, thought of the following scene in Chapter 39 of Pride &Prejudice (and I’ve put in ALL CAPS the 15 quiz points):

 “It was the SECOND WEEK IN MAY, in which the THREE young LADIES set out together from Gracechurch Street for the town of ——, in Hertfordshire; and, as they drew near the appointed INN where Mr. Bennet's carriage was to meet them, they quickly perceived, in token of the coachman's punctuality, both Kitty and Lydia LOOKING OUT of a dining-room up stairs. These two girls had been above an hour in the place, happily employed in visiting an opposite milliner, watching the sentinel on guard, and dressing a salad and CUCUMBER.

After welcoming their sisters, they triumphantly displayed a table set out with such cold MEAT as an inn larder usually affords, exclaiming, "Is not this nice? Is not this an AGREEABLE surprise?...

…Lydia laughed, and said -- "Ay, that is just like your formality and discretion. You thought the WAITER must not hear, as if he cared! I dare say he often hears worse things said than I am going to say. But he is an UGLY fellow! I am glad he is gone. I never saw such A LONG CHIN in my life. Well, but now for my news...How nicely we are all crammed in," cried Lydia. "I am glad I bought my BONNET, if it is only for the fun of having another bandbox!...and then, what do you think we did? 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!”

So what, I hear you saying, where’s the magic in those 14 scattered points?

Well, now let me now show you another passage, also written by Jane Austen, which ALSO contains all 14 of those same specific points! It is in Jane Austen’s own real life Letter 35 dated May 3-5, 1801, written by her just after her arrival to live in Bath, written, I believe, from her aunt & uncle’s residence  at the Paragon:

My Dear Cassandra, I have the pleasure of writing from my own room up two pair of stairs, with everything very comfortable about me. Our journey here was perfectly free from accident or event; we changed horses at the end of every stage, and paid at almost every turn-pike. We had charming weather, hardly any dust, and were exceedingly AGREEABLE, as we did not speak above once in three miles. Between Luggershall and Everley WE MADE OUR GRAND MEAL, and then with admiring astonishment perceived in what a magnificent manner our support had been provided for. We could not with the utmost exertion consume above the twentieth part of the BEEF. The CUCUMBER will, I believe, be a very acceptable present, as my uncle talks of having inquired the price of one lately, when he was told a shilling.

We had a very neat CHAISE from Devizes; it looked almost as well as a gentleman's, at least as a very shabby gentleman's; in spite of this advantage, however, we were above three hours coming from thence to Paragon, and it was half after seven by your clocks before we entered the house. FRANK, WHOSE BLACK HEAD was in WAITING IN THE HALL WINDOW, received us very kindly; and his master and mistress did not show less cordiality…One thing only among all our concerns has not arrived in safety: when I got into the CHAISE at Devizes I discovered that your drawing ruler was broke in two; it is just at the top where the cross-piece is fastened on. I beg pardon.

…The CHAMBERLAYNES are still here. I begin to think better of Mrs. C----, and upon recollection believe she has rather A LONG CHIN than otherwise, as she remembers us in Gloucestershire when we were very charming young women.

…My mother has ordered a new BONNET, and so have I; both white strip, TRIMMED with white ribbon. I find my straw BONNET looking very much like other people's, and quite as smart. BONNETS of cambric muslin on the plan of Lady Bridges' are a good deal worn, and some of them are very pretty; but I shall defer one of that sort till your arrival. …We have had Mrs. Lillingstone and the CHAMBERLAYNES to call on us. My mother was very much struck with the ODD LOOKS of the two latter; I have only seen her. Mrs. Busby drinks tea and plays at cribbage here to-morrow; and on Friday, I believe, we go to the CHAMBERLAYNES….”

So, what in the world does this mean?

Why would JA, in her 1813 novel, so obviously (to CEA, at least) go out of her way to make such a 15-pronged, extremely specific echoing of her letter, written to CEA 12 years earlier on the momentous occasion of the Austen family’s move to Bath?  

More specifically, why take the real life Mrs. Chamberlayne (who, from the several mentions we read of her in JA’s letters from May 1801, was someone JA really liked, and was genuinely sad when Mrs. Chamberlayne abruptly left Bath) and re-present her as a young, involuntarily cross-dressed militiaman, who is lewdly joked about by Lydia?

And most shocking of all, why in the world would JA choose to translate her own real-life words, written to her sister, into the fictional words spoken by the vulgar, outrageous Lydia Bennet to three of her sisters?

Isn’t this taking an Austen family in-joke a little far?

I leave you with my best guess at this moment:

First, I see this as strong further confirmation of the sense I got dozens of times during our long group read of JA’s 154 surviving letters --- i.e., that so many of these letters were always hoped/ intended by JA to be kept, to survive, and one day to be published, as a kind of codebook for readers to use to decipher the meaning of the shadows in her novels.

But that’s only half of it--in reverse, I believe she intended that the survival of these coded letters would also turn her novels into a codebook for those who personally knew her, for deciphering the meaning of the shadows of her letters, the better for her secret self, the secret story of her own life, to be safely revealed, to those with eyes to see.

And so my answer re why she so puzzlingly chose Lydia as her mouthpiece in this instance is the same reason, at other points in P&P, why she chose Mary as her mouthpiece. They are both reflections not of her actual character, but of sides of her own character, as she knew she was (inaccurately) perceived by her family and friends.

I.e., to some (like e.g., Mitford who famously referred to her as a sharp poker), JA had too big a mouth for her own good, and was an embarrassment to the Austen family, just as is Lydia in the Bennet family --- in contrast to the diffident, retiring Cassandra, who was like Jane in the Bennet family.

But, to others in her family circle, JA was perceived the way Elizabeth sees sister Mary, which is as a pompous, attention-hungry, piano-playing nerd and killjoy.  

So….what do you see? What I hope I will not hear is that this was a coincidence, of which JA was unaware when she wrote P&P, or that it had no meaning beyond a harmless little family joke.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter