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

Yesterday, by a random coincidence, I happened upon a prime, high-profile example of the mysterious process by which an author ends up hiding the personal and/or the political in the subtext of published words which then become famous. Those who follow this blog know I’ve found a few hundred such examples in Austen’s prose and Shakespeare’s verse, but today, as my Subject Line hints, I bring an example of Beatles lyrics which cast startling, ironic light on the Brexit occurring nearly a half century after those lyrics were written. As you’ll see, the “Get back to where you once belonged” chorus we’ve all sung along with Sir Paul has turned out to be eerily prescient of the Brexit now hogging the world’s headlines, and giving the jitters to all Americans (like myself) in the “Never NEVER Trump” camp.

To begin, listen to this YouTube audio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcjBF1uj6Do of an early version of “Get Back” with lyrics very different than the ones we all know, which of course are:

Jo-Jo was a man who thought he was a loner But he knew it wouldn't last
Jo-Jo left his home in Tucson, Arizona For some California grass
Get back, get backGet back to where you once belonged
Get back, get backGet back to where you once belongedGet back Jo-joGo home

Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a woman But she was another man
All the girls around her say she's got it coming But she gets it while she can [Chorus]

Get back, Loretta Your mama's waiting for you
Wearing her high-heel shoes And her low-neck sweater Get back home, Loretta

So, how did the Beatles get from there to here? To find out, now read the following informative 2013 Salon.com article, describing, with satisfying detail, how those edgy earlier lyrics morphed into the innocuous ones we’ve all known the past 45 years:

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/14/no_pakistanis_the_racial_satire_the_beatles_dont_want_you_to_hear/

Although I urge you to read the whole (not very long) article, here are the most relevant highlights:

“No Pakistanis”: The racial satire the Beatles don’t want you to hear by Alex Sayf Cummings

The song that became Get Back began as an anti-immigrant satire so easily misunderstood it remains in the vaults Imagine that a popular American rock band – say, the Black Keys – wrote a song about immigrants. There are too many of them, the lyrics suggest, and they take jobs away from native-born workers. The chorus recommends that they go back to their countries of origin, where they really belong. Though the song was meant to satirize xenophobia, “No Mexicans” could be easily interpreted as an anthem of racism. This was the situation that the Beatles faced in 1969, when they first concocted the song that would become “Get Back.” Better known as a playful take on counterculture, starring the gender-bending Sweet Loretta Martin and the grass-smoking Jo-Jo, the song originally dealt with South Asian immigration to the United Kingdom.

…The year, of course, was 1968 – a time of race riots, political assassinations, and social ferment. Into this heady atmosphere walked a British M.P. named Enoch Powell…Enoch borrowed the words of Virgil to describe the threat of continued immigration to the United Kingdom. “As I look ahead,” he said, “I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’” For maximum poignancy, he told the story of a gloomy constituent who wished he could afford to leave the country, because the influx of immigrants meant that “in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” A friend recalled that Powell expected the speech to “go up ‘fizz’ like a rocket,” and a local TV crew rushed down to tape what they expected to be a much-discussed news item after seeing an advance copy of speech.

The so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech caused the media firestorm that Powell had wanted. Accusations of racism led to his cabinet ouster by Prime Minister Edward Heath, but some citizens maintained that “Enoch was right” – a slogan that became a commonplace of racial resentment in the following decades. The Beatles, however, did not share this view, and Powell became the target of several songs the band recorded for…Let It Be in 1970. In a recording known as “Back to the Commonwealth” or “The Commonwealth Song,” the band blasts the politician by name. “Dirty Enoch Powell said to the immigrants, immigrants you better get back to your commonwealth homes,” McCartney warbles over a skittering beat. Soon enough, however, we learn that “Heath said to Enoch Powell you better get out, or heads are gonna roll.” …Lennon chimes in occasionally, in the voice of a prim old English woman, “The Commonwealth is much too common for me.

… Who McCartney was actually referring to is difficult to determine from the recording, but the Beatle later insisted that any pejorative racial tone was not intentional. “There were a lot of stories in the newspapers then about Pakistanis crowding out flats – you know, living 16 to a room or whatever,” McCartney said in 1986, one of the rare times he talked about the songs. “If there was any group that was not racist, it was the Beatles. I mean, all our favorite people were always black.”…“Get Back”… shed its racial implications on the way to wide release. Instead of a Puerto Rican and a Pakistani, the official version deals with Jo-Jo, who “left his home in Tucson, Arizona, for some California grass,” and a cross-dresser named Sweet Loretta Martin. McCartney advises Jo-Jo to get back to his roots, while warning that Martin will “get it” some day if she keeps up her transgressive ways. The Beatles evidently felt more comfortable addressing counterculture and sexual liberation in the song, rather than risk releasing a recording whose satirical intent could be misconstrued as an anthem of racial backlash.”

From that article, and other Net content, I take McCartney at his word– after all, only a few years earlier Lennon inadvertently ignited a firestorm with these candid ruminations from the cultural mountaintop he and his fellow Beatles sat atop in 1966: “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that. I’m right and I’ll be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first, rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.” Plus, McCartney, as the world knows, was devastated by the end of the Beatles, and also was aware of how the White Album had served as inadvertent inspiration to Charles Manson’s demonic cult.

McCartney must’ve recognized what my research on Austen has shown me countless times - how easily a clever satire can be missed entirely, and can instead be taken literally. So the last thing he was going to do in a recording, which he hoped would keep the group going by returning to its rock’n roll roots, was to risk triggering yet another nightmarish public uproar.

But that’s not quite the end of this story of surprising Lennon-McCartney subtext in “Get Back”. The stimulus that first prompted me to even look at the above Powell-Trump echo via the Beatles, was not, as you might’ve guessed, my experiencing a sudden epiphany of the aptness of the phrase “Get back to where you once belonged” to Brexit – you can go on Twitter right now and find several examples of Tweeps making that connection having no awareness of the history of the song.

Of all things, it was my happening to hear yesterday that one of John Lennon’s little known nicknames was “Jo-Jo”. It took me about 5 seconds to ask myself the following question --- did McCartney have Lennon specifically in mind when he wrote that chorus? Was this his way of telling John to “get back to where you once belonged”? I.e., was Tucson his metaphor for the Beatles before John left under the allure of California grass and Loretta in the low neck sweater (i.e., Yoko)?

I knew it was a long shot, but imagine my pleasure when I quickly came upon what I hope you’ll agree is a smoking gun in the Wikipedia entry for “Get Back”:

“In 1980, Lennon stated "there's some underlying thing about Yoko in there", saying that McCartney looked at Yoko Ono in the studio every time he sang "Get back to where you once belonged."“

Q.E.D.

So, who’d have thunk that “Get back to where you once belong” was a line that meant so much? In any event, while my generation’s fondest cultural fantasy, of a reuniting of the Beatles, can never be (except in the afterlife, if there is one and if the deity is especially merciful to Baby Boomers), at the very least we can all still hold out hope, and work hard, for some miraculous averting of implementation of Brexit, and for Trump to go down to ignominious defeat here in the States in November. For then we might once again imagine “all the people sharing all the world”, and hope that we all “get back to where we once belonged”—in a true Garden of Eden of world peace.

But as long as Trump still exists as a threat to our civilization, one final parting shot at him -- is there any way, in addition to his copy of Hitler writings by his bedside, did he happen to be an admirer of Enoch Powell as well, with his "River of Blood", and was that on his mind when he uttered his foul innuendoes to Megyn Kelly about "blood coming out"? It's so disgusting a possibility that it's probably true! For more in that vein, read this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/23/opinion/campaign-stops/donald-trump-and-the-rivers-of-blood.html?_r=0

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

A week ago, I posed what I called a “delightful” Jane Austen quiz to usher in the summer solstice. Today I return to give brief answers to all 9 of the quiz clues. In a series of followup posts in the coming weeks, I’ll unpack different aspects of each of those 9 summary answers at much greater length:

CLUE #1: There is a 2-sentence passage in Henry Austen’s (pretty short) 1818 Biographical Notice of JA… 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?

ANSWER #1: That 2-sentence passage is: “At a very early age she was enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque; and she seldom changed her opinions either on books or men”. It turns out that in P&P in particular, there is a broad, deep, and multifaceted allusion to Gilpin’s writings about the picturesque, which permeates many chapters of the novel, and therefore is far too large a topic to do more than introduce in this post, via my answers to the next 8 clues, presented via a chronology of JA’s writings.

CLUE #2: There is 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…”

ANSWER #2: At age 16, therefore more than two decades before Jane Austen published P&P, she precociously wrote the above well-recognized, sophisticated parody of the following dry wit of Gilpin about Henry VIII:

“What share of picturesque genius Cromwell might have, I know not. Certain however it is, that no man, since Henry the eighth, has contributed more to adorn this country with picturesque ruins. The difference between these two masters lay chiefly in the style of ruins, in which they composed. Henry adorned his landscapes with the ruins of abbeys; Cromwell, with those of castles. I have seen many pieces by this master, executed in a very grand style; but seldom a finer monument of his masterly hand than this.”

Plus, as Peter Sabor points out in “JA’s The History of England and 1066 And All That” (2015): “In her sketch of the dying Cardinal Wolsey, Austen quotes his words to the Abbot of Leicester Abbey ‘that “he was come to lay his bones among them” ‘. The line is taken from Goldsmith’s history, which in turn is indebted to a report of Wolsey’s words in Henry VIII: “O father abbot, An old man, broken with the storms of state, Is come to LAY HIS weary BONES AMONG ye.”

Most of all, all of the above in this Answer #2 fits perfectly with my post a month ago…. http://tinyurl.com/zkzutoo …about Shakespeare’s Henry VIII as a very significant allusive source for P&P, with Darcy (shockingly) as Henry!

CLUE #3: 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….”

ANSWER #3: It is also well recognized that Edward Ferrars’s above comments are a satire of Gilpin’s picturesque rules, but they’ve never before been connected to all the other Clues in this post.

CLUE #4: 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."

ANSWER #4: It seems to me that Henry Austen, in his apparently complimentary comment about the steadfastness of JA’s devotion to Gilpin (“she seldom changed her opinions either on books or men”), was himself doing a very sly parody of that famous last sentence spoken by Darcy, as to which Elizabeth Bennet rightly responds that she cannot laugh at such a dreadful steadfastness of resentfulness!

CLUE #5: 1813 P&P Chapter 29: Elizabeth found herself quite equal to THE SCENE, and could OBSERVE the THREE LADIES before her COMPOSDELY…"…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…”

ANSWER #5: In both Elizabeth’s thoughts about the group in the Rosings parlour, and also in Lady Catherine’s quoted comments about her local philanthropy, we see JA playing with the terminology of the picturesque, but applied to human beings as objects in a domestic scene.

This is a deliberate and (when recognized) hilarious revisiting of Elizabeth’s very very famous witty parody of Gilpin in Chapter 10, when she says the following to the threesome of Darcy and the two Bingley sisters in the Netherfield shrubbery:

"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 there are still more echoes of that scene to be revealed, below.

CLUE #6: 1813 P&P 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…”

ANSWER #6: Jane Austen must have been ROFL to an extreme degree when she composed the last part of that second sentence, which contains not one, not two, but THREE successive puns (ruined, blasted, & prospects) on picturesque terminology! And, what’s more, these exact same three picturesque terms had already been used literallyby Edward Ferrars two years earlier in S&S as I quoted above in Clue #3! And yet, no Austen scholar I can find ever noticed this and realized it was a quintessential example of JA’s hiding witty, meaningful wordplay in plain sight!

CLUE #7: 1813 P&P 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….”

ANSWER #7: (This one really knocked my socks off when I first decoded it!) Before today, no Austen scholar has ever satisfactorily explained which “unlucky recollections obtruded” in Elizabeth’s mind, which led her to fear her praise of Pemberley “might be mischievously construed”. I now claim that once the reader recognizes the pervasive significance of Gilpin’s picturesque in P&P, you then realize that Elizabeth’s “unlucky recollections” are triggered by the words “delight” and “charming”, which are the very words used by Elizabeth in her witty Gilpin-based putdown in Chapter 10 which I quoted in Answer #5 above, when Elizabeth covertly mocks Darcy and the Bingley sisters as if they were three cows being aesthetically arranged in the Netherfield shrubbery!

I.e., Elizabeth, who is in the quoted passage in Chapter 42 in the shrubbery of Pemberley, once again accidentally encounters Darcy, exactly as she did back in Chapter 10 in the shrubbery at Netherfield --- but this time her feelings are utterly different --- she is now firmly under the spell of Pemberley and the miraculously “reformed” Darcy, and so, of course, she does not wish to remind Darcy of how she skewered him back then.

And this desire of Elizabeth to obliterate her own memory of still fairly recent conflict with Darcy is then revisited twice more before the novel’s end: first in Chapter 58, when she says to Darcy, “You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.",and then again when she speaks to Jane in Chapter 59: “Perhaps I did not always love him so well as I do now. But in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever remember it myself."

But most extraordinary of all on this point, is how my above reading takes on shocking alternative significance, when the reader sees it in the context of the shadow story, and realizes, as I did several year ago, that Darcy has staged that latter “accidental” meeting in the Pemberley shrubbery, precisely so as to force Elizabeth to remember that earlier scene in the Netherfield shrubbery!! He deliberately coordinates his appearance from around the corner so as to reignite that earlier memory, and induce her to feel acutely embarrassed and ashamed—in effect, he is like Duke Vincentio in Meaure for Measure, stage-managing a reenactment of an earlier “scene”, but this time making sure that the “role” played by Elizabeth is to his own satisfaction! Or, to use picturesque terminology, Darcy thereby has repainted the picture of what happened between him and Elizabeth, in order to induce her to erase the part about her calling him out for repeatedly being a first class jerk to her---and she docilely complies, like one of Gilpin’s cows!

And the picturesque winking gets even better. It’s no wonder that Darcy, the shadowy stage manager, introduces another cast member, a housekeeper named “Reynolds” for assistance in inducing Elizabeth to reverse her formerly negative opinion of Darcy. After all, students of Gilpin’s picturesque could have immediately told you that this is yet another sly injoke on JA’s part, since it was Joshua Reynolds to whose august authority Gilpin explicitly appealed: Gilpin actually included the correspondence he exchanged with Reynolds in the publication of Gilpin’s influential Three Essays!

CLUE #8: 1814: Letter 97 to Cassandra Austen from London: “I have seen nobody in London yet with such a long chin as Dr. Syntax, nor Anybody quite so large as Gogmagoglicus.”

ANSWER #8: Here’s what A. Walton Litz had to say about that sentence in the 1979 debut issue of Persuasions:

“By the time she “lop’t and crop’t” Pride and Prejudice around 1811-12, the picturesque of William Gilpin was going out of fashion, replaced by the more sublime intimations of high Romanticism. It had also received a heavy blow in William Combe’s Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1809-12), which JA may have read while reworking Pride and Prejudice. Combe’s satire and the wonderful Rowlandson illustrations exposed all the absurdities [of Gilpin’s writings] that had so delighted the young Jane Austen.”

I believe that Litz grossly underestimated the significance of Combe’s Dr. Syntax satire in the subtext of P&P – for example, I see Dr. Syntax as one of the sources for Mr. Collins and his absurd flattery of Lady Catherine’s taste at Rosings, and also a source for the strange references to a “big chin” that I discussed in my post last week about the 15 detailed parallels between Lydia Bennet’s account of the edgy cross-dressing hijinks at the roadside inn in Chapter 39 of P&P, and Jane Austen’ own account of her and her mother’ trip moving to Bath in early May 1801.

Beyond that big picture, there’s simply no room in this post to unpack all the nuances of the Dr. Syntax subtext of P&P for now, but I wanted to get the big picture out there for purposes of this post.

CLUE #9: 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. “

ANSWER #9: This is the passage which actually first sent me down the research path that eventually led straight to all of the rest of the above Gilpinian picturesque subtext of P&P. As you can see from the words I have now put in ALL CAPS, Jane Austen’s very very famous critique of her niece’s nascent novel is completely saturated in the very specific verbiage of the picturesque. While no Austen scholar before me has ever specifically identified this passage as one giant sendup of the picturesque, Beatrice Battaglia came close in 2006, by including that quotation in an excellent discussion of JA’s authorial deployment of picturesque elements in her fiction in “The Politics of Narrative Picturesque: Gilpin 's Rules of Composition in Ann Radcliffe 's and JA's Fiction”.

It’s no coincidence, I say, that Letter 107 was written about one year after publication of P&P, because it shows that she has not for one second forgotten her amazing Gilpinesque achievement in the writing of P&P itself, most of all in that most famous line about “three or four families in a country village”.

Why? Because, once you take the proper point of view, and look at Letter 107 through the lens of P&P, you realize instantly (as I did last week) that “three or four families in a country village” is a subtle satire of Gilpin’s three or four cows arranged in a landscape, which JA parodied by having Elizabeth Bennet apply that image to the three “cows”, Darcy and the Bingley sisters, in the Netherfield shrubbery!

And so, in conclusion, and as I said upfront, the above is only the barest sketch of the rich Gilpin subtext of P&P which I now clearly see that Henry Austen so slyly alluded to in his Biographical Notice of his late sister Jane in 1818. While a handful of insightful Austen like those I’ve quoted above, have been aware for a very long time that Gilpin was somehow important to JA, none of them had any idea just how crucially and pervasively his rules of the picturesque inform her deepest and darkest meanings, especially in her shadow stories.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Today, I’ll elaborate on the hidden connection between 2 (Dr. Syntax & Elizabeth’s “unlucky recollections”) of the 8 points I made in my omnibus post yesterday.... http://tinyurl.com/h9mewg5

...about the pervasive Gilpinesque subtext of P&P. It’s a connection which significantly supports my longstanding interpretation of Mr. Darcy, in the shadow story, as in effect taking Elizabeth Bennet for a proverbial ride. He does this by covertly staging an ersatz picturesque tour for her, which includes “views” of him as a repentant, worthy lover & responsible master of the visually spectacular Pemberley; and along the way, he pulls for, and obtains, Elizabeth’s unwitting cooperation, as she (ironically) works very hard to erase all memory of the narcissistic, unfeeling, manipulative jerk he was, and in actuality never ceases to be.

I begin with the Dr. Syntax subtext of P&P, whom I briefly discussed yesterday as follows:

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

Here’s what A. Walton Litz had to say about that sentence in the 1979 debut issue of Persuasions:

“By the time she “lop’t and crop’t” P&P around 1811-12, the picturesque of William Gilpin was going out of fashion, replaced by the more sublime intimations of high Romanticism. It had also received a heavy blow in William Combe’s Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1809-12), which JA may have read while reworking P&P. Combe’s satire and the wonderful Rowlandson illustrations exposed all [of Gilpin’s] absurdities that had so delighted the young Jane Austen.”

What I didn’t make clear yesterday was that the gist of Combes’s satire was that Gilpin’s rules of the picturesque were an inadvertent guidebook for a modern-day Quixote, whose imagination runs wild seeing what is not actually there –sorta like Emma Woodhouse the imaginist all Janeites know, right? Combes’s collaborator Rowlandson provided the emblematic image of the first Dr. Syntax Tour in 1812 with his long-chinned Dr. Syntax riding up to a crossroads directional sign….

http://www.old-coconino.com/sites_auteurs/rowlandson/pres_syntax/im_syntax/syntax_lost.jpg

….and promptly turning the sign itself into a picturesque object, as wryly described in the following verses:

Thus as he ponder’d what to do, A GUIDE POST ROSE WITHIN HIS VIEW
And, when the pleasing shape he spied, He prick’d his steed and thither hied;
But some unheeding, senseless Wight, Who to fair learning ow’d a spite,

Had ev’ry letter’d mark defac’d, Which once its several pointers grac’d.
The mangled post thus long had stood, An uninforming piece of wood;

Like other guides, as some folks say, Who neither lead, nor tell the way.
The Sun, as hot as he was bright, Had got to his meridian height:
’Twas sultry noon—for not a breath Of cooling zephyr fann’d the heath ;
When Syntax cried—“ ’Tis all in vain To find my way across the plain;

So here my fortune I will try, And wait till some one passes by:
Upon that bank awhile I’ll sit, And let poor Grizzle graze a bit;
But, as my time shall not be lost, I’LL MAKE A DRAWING OF THE POST;

And, tho’ a flimsy taste may flout it, THERE’S SOMETHING PICTURESQUE ABOUT IT:
’Tis rude and rough, without a gloss, And is well cover’d o’er with moss;
And I’ve a right—(who dares deny it ?) To place yon group of asses by it.
Aye! this will do: and now I’m thinking, That self-same pond where Grizzle’s drinking
If hither brought ’twould better seem, And faith I’ll turn it to a stream:

I’ll make this flat a shaggy ridge, And o’er the water throw a bridge:
I’ll do as other sketchers do— Put any thing into the view;

And any object recollect, To add a grace, and give effect.

Thus, though from truth I haply err. The scene preserves its character.

What man of taste my right will doubt, To put things in, or leave them out?

’Tis more than right, it is a duty. If we consider landscape beauty:

He ne’er will as an artist shine, Who copies Nature line by line:
Whoe’er from Nature takes a view, Must copy and improve it too.

To heighten every work of art, Fancy should take an active part:

Thus I (which few I think can boast) HAVE MADE A LANDSCAPE OF A POST.

So, Dr. Syntax, like Cervantes’s Don Quixote (whom Combes actually mentions), rationalizes a major twisting of the mundane reality of a signpost into a landscape, i.e., absurdly confusing the symbol with the thing it symbolizes. I suggest to you that Jane Austen very deliberately wove an alternative view of Elizabeth Bennet as a Quixotic Dr. Syntax into P&P, such that what Elizabeth experiences as an epiphany in stages as to Darcy’s being the best of men, is actually the diametric opposite, a “tour” through a fake landscape that leads to marriage to a bad man who will not treat her well. And Jane Austen brilliantly plots P&P such that Elizabeth’s internal “tour” of epiphany corresponds precisely to her external, physical tour with the Gardiners, who literally act as the “signpost” who point her to Pemberley and Darcy.

With me so far? Now, I’ll bring in the other point from my post yesterday, about Elizabeth’s “unlucky recollections”, which I now re-quote:

“P&P 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….”

Before today, no Austen scholar has ever satisfactorily explained which “unlucky recollections obtruded” in Elizabeth’s mind, which led her to fear her praise of Pemberley “might be mischievously construed”. I now claim that once the reader recognizes the pervasive significance of Gilpin’s picturesque in P&P, you then realize that Elizabeth’s “unlucky recollections” are triggered by the words “delight” and “charming”, which are the very words used by Elizabeth in her witty Gilpin-based putdown in Chapter 10 which I quoted in Answer #5 above, when Elizabeth covertly mocks Darcy and the Bingley sisters as if they were three cows being aesthetically arranged in the Netherfield shrubbery!

And this desire of Elizabeth to obliterate her own memory of still fairly recent conflict with Darcy is then revisited twice more before the novel’s end:

first in Chapter 58, when she says to Darcy, “You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.",

and then again when she speaks to Jane in Chapter 59: “Perhaps I did not always love him so well as I do now. But in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever remember it myself."

It was only after rereading my last post, that I noticed the oddness of Elizabeth’s mantra at the end of the novel, as she twice (playfully yet insistently) touts the benefits of forgetting the past. And I see them as evidence that those “unlucky recollections” which Elizabeth wished to suppress in Chapter 43 had taken firm root in Elizabeth’s mind by novel’s end; and that became even clearer when I found yet another such statement by her in Chapter 58: "Oh! do not repeat what I then said. These recollections will not do at all. I assure you that I have long been most heartily ashamed of it."

In a conventional interpretation, readers who notice that pattern see Elizabeth as having made a fresh start, after painfully achieving a higher level of self awareness. They see her as having wisely learned to see the error of her former ways of overhasty critical judgment on others, particularly on Darcy. An example of that sort of analysis can be found in Doody’s "‘A Good Memory Is Unpardonable’: Self, Love, and the Irrational Irritation of Memory” in Eighteenth Century Fiction, 14/1 Oct. 2001 67-94, which includes comments like the following:

“She can indulge in some "forgetting" of her own personal resentment at Darcy's insult to her vanity by taking up this story that makes her a champion determined to right wrongs. She remembers what is in fact not her own memory at all. Both Elizabeth and Darcy are in danger when they approach each other or life on the basis of memory.”

As you surely have gathered, I see things topsy-turvy to Doody. I believe Jane Austen, the mistress of ambiguity, deliberately placed so much subtle emphasis on Elizabeth’s newfound horror of memory, in order to raise a subversive question in the suspicious reader’s mind --- what if Elizabeth is working so hard to erase her own memory of her former negative feelings toward Darcy, precisely because she has not really gone through a rigorous and healthy process of psychological growth, but instead has simply replaced one set of gullible, externally-induced beliefs with another? My idea of personal growth, and I am confident Jane Austen agreed, was that a person must work hard to remember their past errors, so that they won’t repeat them.

Mr. Bennet knows this all-too-human foible of forgetting as a recipe for repetition of error, as we hear in Chapter 48:

“…on her briefly expressing her sorrow for what he must have endured, he replied, "Say nothing of that. Who should suffer but myself? It has been my own doing, and I ought to feel it."

"You must not be too severe upon yourself," replied Elizabeth.

"You may well warn me against such an evil. Human nature is so prone to fall into it! No, Lizzy, let me once in my life feel how much I have been to blame. I am not afraid of being overpowered by the impression. It will pass away soon enough."

But Elizabeth is not listening to what her father is really saying, about how ephemeral awareness of one’s own fault is often is, and so she repeats her error of not being able to tolerate ambiguity.

I.e., Elizabeth fails to understand that if Wickham turns out to be a cad, this does not mean that Darcy is not one as well— and a far more dangerous one, because Wickham, with no money or status, achieves his deceptions using only his verbal facility and personal charm; whereas Darcy, a rich, powerful well educated man of the world, is able to pull off a far more effective and enduring deception of Elizabeth, by deploying his vast resources to (as I said at the start of this post) take Elizabeth (aka Dr. Syntax) for a proverbial ride through a picturesque landscape of the mind, a tour in which he induces her to turn a “post” (himself as he really is, a bad man) into a “landscape” (as he wishes her to see him, a good man).

And the Machiavellian brilliance of his deception is that he implements a Satanic strategy, whereby he takes advantage of Elizabeth’s love of the picturesque to give her the proverbial rope to hang herself with—and at the center of that strategy is the forgetting that Elizabeth so heartily embraces.

So, if you carefully read Chapters 36 & 37, you’ll find Elizabeth obsessively rereading Darcy’s letter, learning it by heart---and as she does so, at several points, she explicitly registers the need to rewrite her memories of Wickham.

If that were all there was on this point, that would be enough, I assert, to make my case. However, Jane Austen never missed the chance for a confirmatory wink to her knowing readers—and so I tell you now that there’s one additional layer, which is the most spectacular part of Jane Austen’s deep game playing with Elizabeth and her passion to erase unpleasant memories. I invite you now to read the following passages in P&P and view them through the lens of my above analysis, and see if you understand how it is the icing on the cake:

Chapter 27:

"We have not determined how far it shall carry us," said Mrs. Gardiner, "but, perhaps, to the Lakes."

No scheme could have been more agreeable to Elizabeth, and her acceptance of the invitation was most ready and grateful. "Oh, my dear, dear aunt," she rapturously cried, "what delight! what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour. Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are young men to rocks and mountains? Oh! what hours of transport we shall spend! And when we do return, it shall not be like other travellers, without being able to give one accurate idea of anything. We will know where we have gone—we will recollect what we have seen. Lakes, mountains, and rivers shall not be jumbled together in our imaginations; nor when we attempt to describe any particular scene, will we begin quarreling about its relative situation. Let our first effusions be less insupportable than those of the generality of travellers."

A string of Austen scholars (Litz, Tave, Ellington, Oppenheim, Buck) have all more or less taken Elizabeth literally, passively accepting that her excited vow, as an acolyte of Gilpin, to remember everything scenic about her upcoming Lakes tour, is all this passage is about.

Whereas I see in this passage spectacular Austenian irony --- we have Elizabeth Bennet rhapsodizing about how she is going to remember every single thing about her trip, and not jumble the details together, all so that, as she sums it up, “We will know where we have gone-we will recollect what we have seen.” And yet, as a direct result of that very same trip, suddenly Elizabeth espouses views about memory of her interpersonal landscape that are diametrically opposed to her views about memory of the physical landscape! I.e., to paraphrase Elizabeth’s own words, she tells Darcy and Jane that we ought NOT to know where we have gone, and we ought NOT to recollect what we have seen, when it comes to the behavior of ourselves and those we are closest to, when that recollection is “unlucky”, i.e., doesn’t fit with what we want to believe!

And, there’s one last delicious ironic coda in store for the reader of P&P who can see this line of subtext --- check out now the following passage in Chapter 51, as Elizabeth observes Lydia, Wickham and Mrs. Bennet:

“The bride and her mother could neither of them talk fast enough; and Wickham, who happened to sit near Elizabeth, began inquiring after his acquaintance in that neighbourhood, with a good humoured ease which she felt very unable to equal in her replies. They seemed each of them to have the happiest MEMORIES in the world. Nothing of the past was RECOLLECTED with pain; and Lydia led voluntarily to subjects which her sisters would not have alluded to for the world.”

Do you see why this is SO ironic? Elizabeth is clearly standing in harsh judgment of the three of them for being so happy, without regard to all their angst, misbehavior, foolishness, and the like, because things have nonetheless apparently ended well for the three of them. And yet, seven chapters later, in Chapters 58-59, Elizabeth is going to do exactly the same sort of memory erasure as her foolish relatives, and applaud herself for it to boot!

Yes, indeed, Elizabeth, in this shadow story, alternative reading ---which, I hope you will agree, was entirely intentional on Jane Austen’ part--- is a true Quixotean Dr. Syntax, hearing only what she wants to hear, and disregarding the rest (thank you, Paul Simon).

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

As another followup to my omnibus post about the pervasive picturesque subtext of P&P, I wish to revisit and expand the section of that earlier post which I now quote:

“CLUE #9: 1814: Letter 107 to Anna Austen Lefroy:

END QUOTE FROM MY OMNIBUS POST

I now suggest to you another passage in P&P which I believe Jane Austen held strongly in mind as she wrote to niece Anna, and that is the following dialog in the Netherfield salon in Chapter 9. I suggest you read it as a veiled commentary on the “picturesque” aspects of a country village, not in terms of the physical scenery of the village, but whether a person of taste and intelligence would enjoy the society there; and then compare that reading to the very closely related question addressed by JA’s famous advice to Anna, above, which was whether an author of taste and intelligence would choose a country village as a sufficiently picturesque (in that same human sense) setting for a novel. In other words, a place too boring to live in would also be a place too boring to set a story in:

"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."

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?"

"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."

"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."

I believe JA smiled to herself when she had Mrs. Bennet exaggerate the size of her social circle, which, as far as we can tell from the novel, really was limited to three or four families (the Bennets, the Lucases, the inhabitants of Netherfield Hall, and the Philipses), and a long way from four-and-twenty!

But in any event, it’s a fascinating exercise to compare Jane’s advice to Anna with how closely her advice tracks the events in P&P, such as Elizabeth’s long walk in the dirt to Netherfield after the rain, and her delightful playfulness of fancy. It’s clear that Anna had read P&P the year before, and had been inspired by that reading to attempt her own version of such a novel—an attempt which, whether due to her rapidfire pregnancies, or some other reason, came to nought in the end.

In the remainder of this post, I will quote passages in P&P into which JA has subtly and metaphorically worked the language of pictorial art and the picturesque deeply into the warp and weave of her fiction:

Chapter 8: "She has nothing, in short, to recommend her, but being an excellent walker. I shall never forget her APPEARANCE this morning. She really looked almost wild."

"She did, indeed, Louisa. I could hardly keep my countenance. Very nonsensical to come at all! Why must she be scampering about the country, because her sister had a cold? Her hair, so untidy, so blowsy!"

"Yes, and her petticoat; I hope you saw her petticoat, six inches deep in mud, I am absolutely certain; and the gown which had been let down to hide it not doing its office."

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

"You OBSERVED it, Mr. Darcy, I am sure," said Miss Bingley; "and I am inclined to think that you would not wish to see your sister make such an EXHIBITION."

"Certainly not."

"To walk three miles, or four miles, or five miles, or whatever it is, above her ankles in dirt, and alone, quite alone! What could she mean by it? It seems to me to SHOW an abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country-town indifference to decorum."

Chapter 18: “…I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb."

"This is no very STRIKING RESEMBLANCE of your own character, I am sure," said he. "How near it may be to mine, I cannot pretend to say. You think it a FAITHFUL PORTRAIT undoubtedly."

"I must not decide on my own PERFORMANCE."

He made no answer, and they were again silent…

...”May I ask to what these questions tend?"

"Merely to the ILLUSTRATION of your character," said she, endeavouring to shake off her gravity. "I am trying to make it out."

"And what is your success?"

She shook her head. "I do not get on at all. I hear such different accounts of you as puzzle me exceedingly."

"I can readily believe," answered he gravely, "that reports may vary greatly with respect to me; and I could wish, Miss Bennet, that you were not to SKETCH my character at the present moment, as there is reason to fear that the PERFORMANCE would reflect no credit on either."

"But if I do not take your LIKENESS now, I may never have another opportunity."

"I would by no means SUSPEND any pleasure of yours," he coldly replied…

As I have pointed out in the past, I love the pun on “suspend”, which can also refer to the sketch of Darcy’s character which would hang (i.e., suspend) on the wall of Elizabeth’s mind!

Chapter 26: The house, furniture, neighbourhood, and roads, were all to [Charlotte’s] TASTE, and Lady Catherine's behaviour was most friendly and obliging. It was Mr. Collins's PICTURE of Hunsford and Rosings rationally SOFTENED; and Elizabeth perceived that she must wait for her own visit there to know the rest.

Chapter 27: Absence had increased her desire of seeing Charlotte again, and weakened her disgust of Mr. Collins. There was NOVELTY in the scheme, and as, with such a mother and such uncompanionable sisters, home could not be faultless, A LITTLE CHANGE was not unwelcome for its own sake. The journey would moreover give her a PEEP at Jane; and, in short, as the time drew near, she would have been very sorry for any delay. Everything, however, went on smoothly, and was finally settled according to Charlotte's FIRST SKETCH. She was to accompany Sir William and his second daughter. The IMPROVEMENT of spending a night in London was ADDED in time, and the PLAN became perfect as PLAN could be.

So, more and more, it becomes clear that Gilpin’s picturesque was at the very center of JA’s authorial vision and metaphor as she wrote (and then lopt and cropt, terms oddly resonant to the functions in a computer image program!) P&P. Jane had indeed discovered the secret of translation of Gilpin’s visual theory into words on the page, just as I claim she adapted Holbein’s anamorphic technique in The Ambassadors to her double-story novels.

Cheer, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

There’s one episode in one of JA’s novels, and one episode in another famous novel written sometime before JA wrote her novels, as to which ALL FIVE of the following specific points are true. This strong parallelism suggests that the episode in JA’s novel was meant by JA to remind her well-read readers of the parallel episode in that earlier novel, for some reason(s).

Based on the following hints, can you name the Austen novel and then name the other author & his/her earlier novel?

There’s a male character with “a long chin”

There’s a transgressive female character who is ready to die of laughter

There’s a young male servant dressed up as a woman, whose disguise is good enough to fool a man

There’s a group of travelers on the road

There’s a “bewitched” man in love with a young woman whose looks are variously described in the novel as either beautiful or coarse in a country way

I’ll provide the answers by tomorrow afternoon, unless someone gives the answers sooner, and in any event I will also explain why I believe Jane Austen made this covert allusion.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

I’ve just gotten the 2015 Cambridge Companion to Emma from the library, and from my quick browse, I find it disappointing, it’s surprisingly thin on fresh insight into JA’s most complex creation. During the next few days, I’ll post about the handful of points that did catch my eye as I went through it, beginning today with a scholarly tidbit that supports two of my earlier claims….

ONE: That Jane Austen gave Mr. Woodhouse the first name “Henry”, because he is, at least in part, her ultra-sly representation of King Henry VIII.

TWO: That JA also alluded to Shakespeare’s Henry VIII in Pride & Prejudice.

…and leads to a third, new insight I’ve hinted at in the second half of my Subject Line, and which I will get to at the end of this post.

First, to briefly set the stage. In 1999, Jill Heydt-Stevenson published her explosive, persuasive speculations about Mr. Woodhouse’s dissolute past. She deduced this primarily from his struggle to recollect the entirety of Garrick’s Riddle, the latter stanza of which contains thinly veiled allusions to the barbaric yet all too common 18^th century European custom of men suffering from syphilis, who contrive to have “curative” sex with young (and very unfortunate) virgins/victims.

I’ve taken JHS’s pioneering work further, suggesting that Mr. Woodhouse is actually the bio father (through sex with several local women, including Miss Bates) of several members of the novel’s younger generation (i.e., not only Emma and Isabella, but also one or more of Harriet, Frank, and Jane as well). This pattern of course fits well with the real-life paternity history of Henry VIII, who sired children on half of his six wives, and whose greatest inheritance, the crown of England, passed to one of his daughters, just as will be the case with Highbury when Mr. Woodhouse’s diet changes to heavenly thin gruel.

I also found in Mr. Woodhouse’s obsession with Garrick’s Riddle further evidence of his being a stand-in for Henry VIII --- given the Riddle’s concern with venereal disease-- in the historical facts about Henry VIII set forth in the following 2011 online essay, which suggest that Henry VIII, like Henry Woodhouse, was no longer “all there” in the latter stages of his life:

http://www.history.com/news/did-blood-cause-henry-viiis-madness-and-reproductive-woes

“Why did Henry VIII have so many wives and mistresses yet so few children? What caused the Tudor monarch’s descent into mental instability and physical agony in the second half of his life? A rare blood group and a genetic disorder associated with it may provide clues, a new study suggests…The life of England’s King Henry VIII is a royal paradox. A lusty womanizer who married six times and canoodled with countless ladies-in-waiting in an era before reliable birth control, he only fathered four children who survived infancy. Handsome, vigorous and relatively benevolent in the early years of his reign, he ballooned into an ailing 300-pound tyrant whose capriciousness and paranoia sent many heads rolling—including those of two of his wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. A new study chalks these mystifying contradictions up to two related biological factors. Writing in The Historical Journal, bioarchaeologist Catrina Banks Whitley and anthropologist Kyra Kramer argue that Henry’s blood group may have doomed the Tudor monarch to a lifetime of desperately seeking—in the arms of one woman after another—a male heir, a pursuit that famously led him to break with the Roman Catholic Church in the 1530s. A disorder that affects members of his suspected blood group, meanwhile, may explain his midlife physical and psychological deterioration. The researchers suggest that Henry’s blood carried the rare Kell antigen—a protein that triggers immune responses—while that of his sexual partners did not, making them poor reproductive matches. In a first pregnancy, a Kell-positive man and a Kell-negative woman can have a healthy Kell-positive baby together. In subsequent pregnancies, however, the antibodies the mother produced during the first pregnancy can cross the placenta and attack a Kell-positive fetus, causing a late-term miscarriage, stillbirth or rapid neonatal death.

While an exact number is hard to determine, it is believed that Henry’s sexual encounters with his various wives and mistresses resulted in at least 11 and possibly more than 13 pregnancies. Records indicate that only four of these yielded healthy babies: the future Mary I, born to Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, after six children were stillborn or died shortly after birth; Henry FitzRoy, the king’s only child with his teenage mistress Bessie Blount; the future Elizabeth I, the first child born to Anne Boleyn, who went on to suffer several miscarriages before her date with the chopping block; and the future Edward VI, Henry’s son by his third wife, Jane Seymour, who died before the couple could try for a second. The survival of the three firstborn children—Henry FitzRoy, Elizabeth and Edward—is consistent with the Kell-positive reproductive pattern. As for Catherine of Aragon, the researchers note, “it is possible that some cases of Kell sensitization affect even the first pregnancy.” And Mary may have survived because she inherited the recessive Kell gene from Henry, making her impervious to her mother’s antibodies.

…The historian David Starkey has written of “two Henrys, the one old, the other young.” The young Henry was handsome, spry and generous, a devoted ruler who loved sports, music and Catherine of Aragon; the old Henry binged on rich foods, undermined his country’s stability to marry his mistress and launched a brutal campaign to eliminate foes both real and imagined. Beginning in middle age, the king also suffered leg pain that made walking nearly impossible….” END QUOTE

As I reread that article today, it now seems quite likely to me that the well-proven “Prince of Whales” subtext of Emma, which skewers the Prince Regent (and future King Georg IV) during JA’s lifetime, also did double duty for JA, by also skewering Henry VIII----that much earlier, and even more notorious, English royal glutton and rake.

Which brings me back to The Cambridge Companion to Emma. My above prior speculations about Mr. Woodhouse as a darkly comic version of Henry VIII are the reason why I read, with great interest, the following Henry VIII-related speculations in Janine Barchas’s chapter about Emma entitled “Setting and community”, about Nonsuch Park, a real life geographical model for the fictional Highbury, with a royal origin:

“…as Chapman stated, no single spot lies simultaneously 16 miles from London, 9 from Richmond, and 7 from Box Hill. In addition, even if Austen’s measurements demarcate the perimeter of Highbury’s community, no suitable village exists within this generous area of land that the world of Emma, with its fictional ‘parishes of Donwell and Highbury’, would have to occupy. The reason may be that Henry VIII erased just such a village from the map to build a royal palace. Around 1538, after buying the land that included the old village of Cuddington and wiping the slate clean, Henry VIII began construction on a lavish dwelling that would be unrivalled in all the world. Hence its name: NONSUCH Palace. With an army of architects and craftsmen, Henry VIII created two large parklands around the palace, called The Great Park and The Little Park, which, taken together with the palace grounds, amounted to well over 900 acres. The royal holdings of NONSUCH, at about one mile wide and at least 2 ½ miles in length, included much of the land that today lies between Ewell and Cheam along the Kingston/Leatherhead Road to Surrey. Provocatively, then, the original location of Nonsuch lies in the Surrey circle outlined by prior suggestions for Highbury’s supposed model.

By JA’s time, NONSUCH Park was a sliver of its former self, with only engravings and books to speak for its history. After the interruption of the Commonwealth, NONSUCH’s reign as royal showpiece ended when Charles II gave it to his mistress Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland and Baroness NONSUCH, who demolished the palace by 1683, and sold it off in pieces to pay for her gambling debts. In Emma, a novel by an avid reader of history that features frequent wordplay (including a charade about ‘the wealth and pomp of kings’ displayed in royal palaces), it is fitting that the location large enough to suit the distances recorded in the novel is not only part of England’s royal past but is already a play on words. The horizons of Emma stretch over a large area, with Hartfield ‘a mere sort of notch in the Donwell Abbey estate, to which all the rest of Highbury belonged’….If the world of Emma maps on to the historical lore of NONSUCH, Austen may hint at a strong connection between real and imaginary history, that is, between the larger story of England and her novel. Did Austen walk the actual grounds of the former NONSUCH and use the remaining buildings and farms as an architectural blueprint for her story. Like James Joyce, she may have intended to send her readers scurrying to triangulate distances to make them conclude that, of course, there is NONE SUCH idyll as Highbury, even as they searched inside the former parklands of NONSUCH for her fictional world.” END QUOTE FROM BARCHAS

Following up on Barchas’s intriguing geographical/historical detective work, I believe the following 2 passages in the Donwell Abbey episode of Emma were intended by JA to be very suggestive of the remains of NONSUCH that still existed during JA’s lifetime (It appears to me that Barchas did notice these two passages, but did not wish to explicitly tag the following passages, for some reason or another):

Barchas: “By JA’s time, Nonsuch Park was a sliver of its former self, with only engravings and books to speak for its history”:

Emma, Chapter 42:

“It was hot; and after walking some time over the gardens in a scattered, dispersed way, scarcely any three together, they insensibly followed one another to the delicious shade of a broad short avenue of limes, which stretching beyond the garden at an equal distance from the river, seemed the finish of the pleasure grounds.—It led to nothing; nothing but a view at the end over A LOW STONE WALL WITH HIGH PILLARS, which seemed intended, in their erection, to give the appearance of an approach to THE HOUSE, WHICH NEVER HAD BEEN THERE. Disputable, however, as might be the taste of such a termination, it was in itself a charming walk, and the view which closed it extremely pretty.”

It seems clear that Emma (whose thoughts we are clearly reading in that passage), in her typical leaping to wrong assumptions, believes there had never been a house there, and that the pillars and wall were a sort of Gilpinesque faux addition to the landscape. But doesn’t it seem far more likely that Emma is once again clueless, and that these are ruins, evidence that there once really was a substantial manor there---evidence which fits perfectly with the history of Nonsuch Park outlined by Barchas.

“Mr. Knightley had done all in his power for Mr. Woodhouse's entertainment. BOOKS OF ENGRAVINGS, drawers of medals, cameos, corals, shells, and every other family collection within his cabinets, had been prepared for his old friend, to while away the morning; and the kindness had perfectly answered. Mr. Woodhouse had been exceedingly well amused. Mrs. Weston had been shewing them all to him, and now he would shew them all to Emma;—fortunate in having no other resemblance to a child, than in a total want of taste for what he saw, for he was slow, constant, and methodical.”

And here again, if Mr. Woodhouse stands in for Henry VIII, it is very droll irony indeed to have Mr. Woodhouse be the one who obsesses over the Donwell collection, which appears to be a wink to the collectibles left at Nonsuch Hall after the rest of the estate had been destroyed or sold off.

So, based solely on all of the above, I’d say it was highly likely that Jane Austen did indeed intend to allude to Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Park, renamed as Donwell Abbey (another very old property with a punning name).

However, beyond all of that, there is very strong evidence of the Nonsuch Park allusion in Emma, which Jane Austen hid in plain sight in the text of another of JA’s novels that takes that high likelihood to the level of virtual certainty, as I will now explain.

In the first part of Chapter 34 of Mansfield Park, we find the very famous passage in which Henry Crawford reads aloud speeches by numerous characters from Shakespeare’s late history, Henry VIII, and then we have the often-quoted exchange between Henry and Edmund regarding Henry VIII:

“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.”

“No doubt one is familiar with Shakespeare in a degree,” said Edmund, “from one’s earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by everybody; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions; but this is totally distinct from giving his sense as you gave it. To know him in bits and scraps is common enough; to know him pretty thoroughly is, perhaps, not uncommon; but to read him well aloud is no everyday talent.”

And now we come to the cream, as Emma would say. Later in that same chapter, we read the following exchange between Henry and Fanny, right after Henry fantasizes about the pleasure of delivering a well-orated sermon, and Fanny shakes her head:

“[Henry] “You shook your head at my acknowledging that I should not like to engage in the duties of a clergyman always for a constancy. Yes, that was the word. Constancy: I am not afraid of the word. I would spell it, read it, write it with anybody. I see nothing alarming in the word. Did you think I ought?”

“Perhaps, sir,” said Fanny, wearied at last into speaking— “perhaps, sir, I thought it was a pity you did not always know yourself as well as you seemed to do at that moment.”

Crawford, delighted to get her to speak at any rate, was determined to keep it up; and poor Fanny, who had hoped to silence him by such an extremity of reproof, found herself sadly mistaken, and that it was only a change from one object of curiosity and one set of words to another. He had always something to entreat the explanation of. The opportunity was too fair. None such had occurred since his seeing her in her uncle’s room, none such might occur again before his leaving Mansfield. Lady Bertram’s being just on the other side of the table was a trifle, for she might always be considered as only half–awake, and Edmund’s advertisements were still of the first utility…..”

So, did you catch in that quoted passage Jane Austen’s broad, double wink at the erstwhile estate of Henry VIII in that passage, a wink which only becomes visible once we know what Barchas has detected in Emma?

Here it is: “NONE SUCH had occurred since his seeing her in her uncle’s room, NONE SUCH might occur again before his leaving Mansfield.”

Is it just a coincidence that the phrase “none such” appears twice in that one sentence in MP, even though it never appears anywhere else in JA’s writings; and that repetition of “none such” just happens to be used in the very same chapter which contains all of the above explicit and detailed references to Henry VIII? But wait, there’s even more!

It occurred to me to search “none such” in the text of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, wondering whether Shakespeare might also have slipped a sly reference to Henry VIII’s estate into the play. And look what I found. To give you a brief setup, in the play’s first scene, the Duke of Buckingham has been arrested and sent to the Tower, as a result of Wolsey having slandered him to the King as a traitor.

Then, in Act 1 Scene 2, Queen Katharine speaks to her husband the King to defend Buckingham, whereupon Henry, in reply, expresses sadness for having felt it necessary to punish Buckingham, given that Buckingham is such an extraordinarily gifted natural orator—and in that speech, Henry uses words very similar to the description of Fanny’s dazzled reaction to Henry Crawford’s oratorical skills in that same Chapter 34 ---- skills Henry has just used in delivering the speeches of various characters...including Buckingham!

And here’s the capper ---- look at the ALL CAPS words in the third line of Henry’s speech – they are “none” and “such”!:

QUEEN KATHARINE

I am sorry that the Duke of Buckingham
Is run in your displeasure.

KING HENRY VIII

It grieves many:
The gentleman is learn'd, and a most rare speaker;
To nature NONE more bound; his training SUCH,
That he may furnish and instruct great teachers,
And never seek for aid out of himself. Yet see,
When these so noble benefits shall prove
Not well disposed, the mind growing once corrupt,
They turn to vicious forms, ten times more ugly
Than ever they were fair. This man so complete,
Who was enroll'd 'mongst wonders, and when we,
Almost with ravish'd listening, could not find
His hour of speech a minute; he, my lady,
Hath into monstrous habits put the graces
That once were his, and is become as black
As if besmear'd in hell.Sit by us; you shall hear--
This was his gentleman in trust--of him
Things to strike honour sad. Bid him recount
The fore-recited practises; whereof
We cannot feel too little, hear too much.

In the remainder of that scene, Wolsey goes on to sticks the proverbial fork in Buckingham, by bringing forward to the King a witness who (falsely) attests to Buckingham’s murderous treasonous words.

All of which makes me wonder about the problematic ending of Mansfield Park, when we hear, indirectly, about Henry Crawford’s betrayal of Fanny (by running off with Maria) --- can we be certain that we’ve heard the whole truth and nothing but the truth, about the Buckingham-like Henry Crawford?

[ADDED THE FOLLOWING 7/2/2016 at 5:24 pm PST]

I have two points to add to my post yesterday “Austen’s Mr Woodhouse as Henry VIII; & Henry Crawford as Buckingham?” http://tinyurl.com/jx47mfg.

First, I found a 2014 Persuasions Online article by Kathryn Davis which provided a second quotation from Henry VIII which pointed to Henry Crawford as Buckingham:

“Again, when Crawford asks her to ‘advise’ him, she, demurring, famously asserts, ‘We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be’. Through this allusion to conscience as an aid to rational self-government, Fanny both honors and challenges Henry by suggesting that he has the capacity to govern not only his estate in Norfolk but also his own soul. [One might detect an allusion to the opening scene of Henry VIII here. When Buckingham’s anger rises up within him, Norfolk advises, “[T]here is no English soul / More stronger to direct you than yourself, / If with the sap of reason you would quench, / Or but allay, the fire of passion” (1.1.146-48)]”

I can’t tell whether Davis also realized what I did when I read her above analysis—i.e., that Jane Austen named Henry Crawford’s estate “Norfolk” in part in order to point to the character named “Norfolk” who gives Buckingham the above advice to be patient and not run to the King to inform him about Wolsey’s treasons, only to see Buckingham arrested and taken to the Tower before his advice is even entirely out of his mouth!

But I also realized something much larger about the allusion to Henry VIII , even beyond the excellent analyses by Marcia Folsom, Elaine Bander, to which I have previously added my own points. I.e., now I see Jane Austen giving the reader a giant decoder ring, when we read the following very famous passage in MP:

“Crawford took the volume. "Let me have the pleasure of finishing that speech to your ladyship," said he. "I shall find it immediately." And by carefully giving way to the inclination of the leaves, he did find it, or within a page or two, quite near enough to satisfy Lady Bertram, who assured him, as soon as he mentioned the name of Cardinal Wolsey, that he had got the very speech. Not a look or an offer of help had Fanny given; not a syllable for or against. All her attention was for her work. She seemed determined to be interested by nothing else. But taste was too strong in her. She could not abstract her mind five minutes: she was forced to listen; his reading was capital, and her pleasure in good reading extreme. To good reading, however, she 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. His acting had first taught Fanny what pleasure a play might give, and his reading brought all his acting before her again; nay, perhaps with greater enjoyment, for it came unexpectedly, and with no such drawback as she had been used to suffer in seeing him on the stage with Miss Bertram.”

What I realized today is that Henry Crawford, the charming chameleon, does merely have the knack to find and deliver the best speeches in Henry VIII, as if he were in a play onstage, he goes a quantum leap further than that: during the course of the action in MP, Henry actually applies that gift to his real life (real, of course, in the world of the action of the novel), i.e., at one time he speaks and behaves as if he were the King (when he decides to seduce Fanny, just as Henry VIII decides to seduce Anna Bullen); at another time, he is like Buckingham (when he is advised by Fanny to follow his inner moral voice); yet and at still other times, he is a scheming master manipulator like Wolsey, who in the end fails to get his ultimate prize. He is a true shape shifter.

So, my question then is --- can anyone think of any passage in MP when Henry Crawford is like Queen Katharine? Or like Wolsey’s loyal counselor Cromwell?

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Jane wrote: "The discussion of Austen and Gilpin came just when I was reading Evelyn. Can anyone find a reference that would have led Austen to have four white Cows which were disposed at equal distances from each other as part of a picturesque scene?"

Jane, it’s that same passage in Gilpin which I referred to last week, regarding Elizabeth Bennet's sly joke about Darcy and the Bingley sisters arranged in the Netherfield shrubbery as if they were cows arranged in a painting. Here is the full quote that JA riffed on in both P&P and in Evelyn:

Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque BEAUTY, Made in the Year 1772 by Gilpin

"…to explain the doctrine of grouping larger cattle. Two will hardly combine. There is indeed no way of forming two into a group, but by them, as they are represented in the former of these prints. If they stand apart, whatever their attitudes, or situation may be, there will be a deficiency. But with three, you are almost sure of a good group, except indeed they all stand in the same attitude, and at equal distances.

They generally however combine the most beautifully, when two are united, and the third a little

removed. Four introduce a new difficulty in grouping. Separate they would have a bad effect. Two, and two together would be equally bad. The only way, in which they will group well, is to unite three, as represented in the second of these prints, and to remove the fourth."

So that passage in Evelyn is yet more evidence, on top of the Gilpin satire in her satirical History of England, that the 16 year old Jane Austen read Gilpin very closely indeed, and took Gilpin’s ideas in literary directions he never dreamt of. And this also fits with my longstanding impression that Evelyn was one of her juvenilia which JA remembered, and wove into the fabric of P&P 20 years later.

But P&P was not the only Austen novel to revisit the learned subtext of Evelyn. Last spring, I wrote the following comment about the allusion in Evelyn to Shakespeare's late romance Pericles (in which father-daughter incest is the primary theme, Shakespeare’s primary source for Pericleshaving been the incest-drenched Confessio Amantis by John Gower, Chaucer’s most famous literary contemporary, and therefore, fittingly, the narrator of Shakespeare’s dark, fantastical play):

"the strange character Mr. Gower in JA’s juvenilia Evelyn, who shows up at the home of a young heiress, and is promptly (and absurdly) given both her hand in marriage, and also her parents’ family estate---just like Pericles when he marries Thaisa."

What I realized today upon revisiting this allusion is that Evelyn also tracks Pericles in three other, even more significant ways:

They both involve shipwrecks; and

They both involve a young woman relative of the hero (Marina, Pericles’s daughter, and Rose, Gower’s sister), from whom he is separated, and then is told she is dead, only to find out at a later time that he was deliberately deceived (Pericles by the evil Dionyza, Gower at the direction of Rose herself) and that she did not die when he thought she did; and….

….most telling of all is that, in Evelyn, Gower’s sister’s name “Rose” was surely chosen by the young Jane Austen, because of the following rose imagery which is cynically used by the panderer Boult and the Bawd in the latter part of Pericles, to describe Marina (whom I’ve also claimed is a model for Jane Fairfax in Emma) after she has been captured and forced to work in a brothel in Mytilene.

First we hear Marina compared to an unplucked rose by the panderer Boult, to ignite the jaded Lysimachus’s lechery, so that he will wish to become the unwilling Marina’s first customer:

LYSIMACHUS How now! How a dozen of virginities?

BAWD Now, the gods to-bless your honour!

BOULT I am glad to see your honour in good health.

LYSIMACHUS You may so; 'tis the better for you that your resorters stand upon sound legs. How now!wholesome iniquity have you that a man may deal withal, and defy the surgeon?

BAWD We have here one, sir, if she would--but there never came her like in Mytilene.

LYSIMACHUS If she'ld do the deed of darkness, thou wouldst say.

BAWD Your honour knows what 'tis to say well enough.

LYSIMACHUS Well, call forth, call forth.

BOULT For flesh and blood, sir, white and red, you shall see a ROSE; and she were a ROSE indeed, if she had but—

LYSIMACHUS What, prithee?

BOULT O, sir, I can be modest.

LYSIMACHUS That dignifies the renown of a bawd, no less than it gives a good report to a number to be chaste.

Exit BOULT

BAWD Here comes that which grows to the stalk; never plucked yet, I can assure you.

Re-enter BOULT with MARINA

Is she not a fair creature?

LYSIMACHUS

'Faith, she would serve after a long voyage at sea.
Well, there's for you: leave us.

And then, after Marina uses her extraordinary moral and persuasive powers to provoke an epiphany in Lysimachus, that induces him to repent his lechery and leave her be, we hear that same metaphor used by Gower (again, Shakespeare’s narrator, based on the actual John Gower) to describe Marina’s artistic gifts in distinctly rosy terms:

GOWER

Marina thus the brothel 'scapes, and chances
Into an honest house, our story says.
She sings like one immortal, and she dances
As goddess-like to her admired lays;
Deep clerks she dumbs; and with her needle composes
Nature's own shape, of bud, bird, branch, or berry,
That even her art sisters the natural ROSES;
Her inkle, silk, twin with the rubied cherry:
That pupils lacks she none of noble race,
Who pour their bounty on her; and her gain
She gives the cursed bawd. Here we her place;
And to her father turn our thoughts again,
Where we left him, on the sea. We there him lost;
Whence, driven before the winds, he is arrived
Here where his daughter dwells; and on this coast
Suppose him now at anchor.

So, what did the 16 year old Jane Austen mean by such very specific but veiled allusions to incest and prostitution in Evelyn? Whatever it meant, it continued to have a similar meaning for her 23 years later, when she wrote the character of Jane Fairfax in Emma –where, probably because she was 40 years old, and more adept at hiding disturbing subtext in plain sight, she made it possible for a reader like myself to realize that Mrs. Elton is the “bawd” who (unsuccessfully) tries to force the talented (and secretly pregnant) Jane Fairfax into prostitution. And now I understand for the first time why Jane Austen put the following specific (mis)quotation of the couplet in Gray’s famous Elegy about a flower in Mrs. Elton’s mouth, at the very moment in the story when she’s exerting maximum pressure on Jane:

“We must bring her forward. Such talent as hers must not be suffered to remain unknown.—I dare say you have heard those charming lines of the poet,

'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

'And waste its fragrance on the desert air.'

We must not allow them to be verified in sweet Jane Fairfax."

"I cannot think there is any danger of it," was Emma's calm answer—"and when you are better acquainted with Miss Fairfax's situation and understand what her home has been, with Colonel and Mrs. Campbell, I have no idea that you will suppose her talents can be unknown."

"Oh! but dear Miss Woodhouse, she is now in such retirement, such obscurity, so thrown away.—Whatever advantages she may have enjoyed with the Campbells are so palpably at an end! And I think she feels it. I am sure she does. She is very timid and silent. One can see that she feels the want of encouragement. I like her the better for it. I must confess it is a recommendation to me. I am a great advocate for timidity—and I am sure one does not often meet with it.—But in those who are at all inferior, it is extremely prepossessing. Oh! I assure you, Jane Fairfax is a very delightful character, and interests me more than I can express."

And I also just realized that it’s no accident that Mrs. Elton mentions the Campbells at that very moment, because they are Jane Austen’s version of Dionyza and Cleon, the couple who take Marina in, but then Dionyza tries to have Marina murdered out of jealousy for her own, less attractive & talented daughter.

So, what does this all tell us about Evelyn? I am not sure about the details, which are murky at best in this short, absurdist teenager’s production, but I do now know 100% for sure that Jane Austen intended a very dark subtext about a young woman in sexual danger.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

I recently read the 2015 Cambridge Companion to Emma (edited by Peter Sabor) in search of interesting new insights from the lineup of contributors predictably drawn from the elite of the Austen academic establishment: J. Fergus, B. Tandon, J., R.D. Hume, E. Copeland, L.Bree, J. Wiltshire, J. Barchas, R. Perry, J. Heydt-Stevenson, G. Dow, and D. S. Lynch. The only one of the eleven who reads Austen against the grain in a significant way is Heydt-Stevenson, and this is no surprise. She first blew the roof off of Austen studies nearly 2 decades ago with her groundbreaking discoveries of disturbing sexual subtext in Emma and MP. And her essay in the Companion, while not breaking new ground, was nonetheless excellent—I highly recommend it.

However, I was very disappointed in the other ten essays; I found them too safe, too predicable, indeed clueless, about the clues to the many layers of mystery that Jane Austen wove deeply into the fabric of Emma. And the best illustration of this lack of fresh insight, and clinging to safe old notions of a safe Jane Austen, is the manner in which her dedication of Emma to the Prince Regent was discussed by two of the contributors.

But first, please read the short letter which JA wrote to Court Librarian James Stanier Clarke, which is the prime evidence on this subject:

"Nov. 15, 1815. Sir, I must take the liberty of asking you a question. Among the many flattering attentions which I received from you at Carlton House on Monday last was the information of my being at liberty to dedicate any future work to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent, without the necessity of any solicitation on my part. Such, at least, I believed to be your words; but as I am very anxious to be quite certain of what was intended, I entreat you to have the goodness to inform me how such a permission is to be understood, and whether it is incumbent on me to show my sense of the honour by inscribing the work now in the press to His Royal Highness. I should be equally concerned to appear either presumptuous or ungrateful.””

For over a decade I’ve read the above letter as a total put-on by Jane Austen, part and parcel of all the put-on letters that JA wrote to Clarke about Emma. I.e., I have not wavered in my conviction that JA had somehow worked behind the scenes, via her brother Henry’s extensive London social network, in order to elicit from the gullible Clarke an offer from the P.R. which she could not safely refuse, of dedicating Emma to the PR.

It was while Colleen Sheehan and I were brainstorming on that very topic in early 2006 that she then came up with her remarkable discovery of the “Prince of Whales” second solution to the charade in Emma, which, to me, makes it abundantly clear that JA viewed the Dedication as an opportunity for further covert skewering of the narcissistic Prince—but this time, at his own “invitation”!

With all that as background, now read three takes on the same topic:

First, here is the utterly conventional discussion by Jan Fergus in her essay on “Composition and Publication”:

“Having admired P&P, the Regent directed the librarian at his London residence, James Stanier Clarke, to call on Austen—at which visit Clarke offered to show her the Regent’s library at Carlton House. Austen accepted, but the consequence of this meeting on 13 November was highly annoying to her: Clarke told her that she was ‘at liberty’ to dedicate her next work to the Regent. Because the Regent took no subsequent notice of Austen or Emma, Clarke may well have slightly overstepped his authority here, perhaps having suggested to the Regent the possibility of a dedication, not the other way about. He would readily assume that Austen would be delighted by the prospect of flattering a prince. Austen seems to have suspected that something was amiss: she wrote to Clarke inquiring whether it were ‘incumbent’ on her to ‘shew my sense of the Honour, by inscribing the Work now in the Press, to HRH – I should be equally concerned to appear either presumptuous or Ungrateful’. Austen’s earlier letters show that she had no admiration for the Prince Regent. Although Clarke assured Austen in reply that dedication was not incumbent on her, her family advised that she must consider this permission a command.

Austen was well aware that a dedication would normally be seen as an author’s blatant plea for support, favour or cash. Her joke to Cassandra on 26 November shows both her sense of being forced into this dedication and her awareness that ordinarily she could expect financial reward from it: “I hope you have told Martha of my first resolution of letting nobody know that I might dedicate &c -for fear of being obliged to do it -- & that she is thoroughly convinced of my being influenced now by nothing but the most mercenary motives.’ Many of Austen’s juvenilia had been humorously dedicated to friends and family, and Henry had jokingly responded with a pretended cheque for 100 guineas when Austen dedicated “Lesley Castle” to him, probably in 1792. But Austen clearly was unable to choose hypocrisy over greed: she simply could not write the sort of fulsome dedication to the Regent that might bring her a handsome gift. She or Henry or perhaps John Murray (who informed her that the dedication must appear on a page to itself, not on the title-page) wrote out one page that mentions dedication by permission and includes no compliments. It is almost insulting in its brevity compared to other royal dedications, such as Frances Burney’s to Camilla (1796). Clarke was sent in December a bound copy for the Regent which cost Austen almost two pounds along with incalculable exasperation. He wrote on 21 December that ‘You were very good to send me Emma—which I have in no respect deserved. It is gone to the Prince Regent. I have read only a few Pages which I very much admired’: he seems to conflate the copy Austen mentions sending to him for his own use and the expensive bound copy intended for the Regent. In any case, Clarke did not report any response from the PR until the following March, when ‘thanks’ for ‘the handsome Copy’ are offered, along with a vague mention of praise from ‘many of the Nobility’ staying with the Regent at the Pavilion in Brighton. The Regent may not have read Emma and certainly sent no money. …”

Fergus has no clue that Jane Austen was actually putting Clarke on with her faux humility and deference. Now, second, here is Janine Barchas in “Setting and Community”, who, it seems to me, is being very very coy. She briefly discusses Sheehan’s groundbreaking article, and then raises the key question of whether the Austen’s family’s cover story might not be true, giving hope she will then land that plane--- only to entirely duck giving her own view:

“…Douglas Murray and Laurie Kaplan are among those who locate strong allusions in this novel to the royal family, finding in its wordplay and story extended satirical portraits of George III and the PR. In addition, Colleen A. Sheehan sees the apposite names of Miss Nash and Miss Prince, two of Mrs. Goddard’s pupils, in conjunction with Mr. Knightley’s ‘idea of moving the path to Langham’, as invoking a royal squabble between the PR and his architect John Nash. The ‘courtship’ charade may have a second solution that ciphers out the clues to arrive at an equally plausible alternative, that is, ‘Prince of Whales’ [fn to Sheehan’s articles]. While local allusions remain the stuff of critical debate, Emma’s official dedication to ‘His Royal Highness, The Prince Regent” unambiguously points to a royal reader. The dedication, a public paratext that welcomes a royal into the novel’s community of readers, packaged Emma as Austen’s most reaching book. Irrespective of whether one believes the family’s insistence that Austen was reluctant to accept the implied royal endorsement (illogical for any struggling author), the dedication enhanced Emma’s status. Provocatively, the publication of Austen’s only novel with a high profile dedicatee prompted Sir Walter Scott’s lone review of her work. Perhaps knowledge of the prominent dedication lubricated John Murray’s request that Scott ‘dash off an article on Emma.”

And now, in contrast to the above, here is what Sheehan actually wrote in 2006 about JA’s Dedication to the PR, with fearless, insightful, and subversive speculations in synch with my own:

“JA’s “Tribute” to the Prince Regent: A Gentleman Riddled with Difficulty” Persuasions Online (2006)

“I’ve often wondered, for example, how Jane Austen could have stomached dedicating Emma to the self-indulgent, profligate, rotund buffoon extraordinaire, George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales and, from 1811 to 1820, Prince Regent, prior to becoming King George IV. We know that Austen “hate[d]” the Prince Regent but could “hardly forgive” his wife, Princess Caroline, “for calling herself ‘attached & affectionate’ to a Man whom she must detest” (16 February 1813). In an 1814 scathing, personal letter to her husband, which was afterwards made public, Caroline repeatedly addressed her husband as “His Royal Highness.” Whether this was done deferentially or mockingly one can only surmise, but it is interesting to note that in Austen’s short dedication of Emma to the Prince she too employed the title “His Royal Highness” three times. Exaggerated deference is of course a tool of satire, used to insinuate that something fishy is going on.

What must Jane Austen have felt when James Stanier Clarke, the Mr. Collins-like royal librarian, conveyed to her His Royal Highness’s “permission” to dedicate her next work to him? Could she have done it with a straight face? I think not, or at least if she did, it must have been because she knew that she, and her attentive readers, would eventually have the last laugh. The conventional wisdom is that Austen tried to squirm out of the tribute to the Prince. Was it “incumbent on [her] to shew her sense of the Honour” by dedicating her forthcoming novel to His Royal Highness? she asked Clarke. “It is certainly not incumbent on you” to do so, he responded, “but if you wish to do the Regent that honour either now or at any future period, I am happy to send you that permission which need not require any more trouble or solicitation on your Part” (16 November 1815).

The entire affair of the dedication seems to have been a matter of chance. Here’s how the episode unfolded: According to her sister, Cassandra, Austen began writing Emma 21 January 1814 and completed it 29 March 1815. In August or September 1815 she turned the manuscript in to her publisher, John Murray of London. Revisions (apparently minor) were made in the ensuing months, and the novel was published in December. Prior to this date, in early October, Austen arrived in London to stay with her brother Henry at his residence in Hans Place. In mid-October he fell ill, and a doctor was consulted. Henry’s condition was serious enough to require a second opinion, and another physician, Dr. Baillie, who just happened to be the Prince Regent’s physician, was called in. During his visit at Hans Place, Dr. Baillie mentioned to Jane Austen that the Prince was a great admirer of her novels and that he had a set of them in each of his lodgings. The Prince’s librarian, James Stanier Clarke, would call upon her, he said. Shortly thereafter Clarke invited Jane Austen to the Prince’s august residence at Carlton House. She paid the visit on 13 November 1815, at which time Clarke told her that she was at liberty to dedicate her next novel to the Prince Regent. After much apparent hand-wringing and reluctance, Austen decided to dedicate Emma to the Prince Regent. Since the novel was already in press at this time, she wrote her publisher and added the perfectly proper dedication (Austen-Leigh). Henry recovered. There seems to have been no more to the episode than this.

But, of course, things are not always what they seem, or as others try to make them appear. Seeking to establish his good repute, the Prince Regent proclaimed himself ‘The First Gentleman of Europe.’

Interestingly, one of the questions explored in Emma is what constitutes a true gentleman. Austen surely laughed at the Prince’s self-appointed title, being well aware of his deserved reputation as a gambler, a glutton, a spendthrift, and an adulterer (reputed to have fathered numerous illegitimate children by a number of women). As the long-running “king” of the English tabloids, he was ferociously caricatured and skewered throughout his long public career, from the grotesque images of Gillray, like the one shown at the beginning of this article, published in 1792, to the particularly imaginative one by Cruikshank in May 1812. It was a tricky business for the lampooners, though, as Leigh and John Hunt, the editors of the Examiner, discovered when they were prosecuted, heavily fined, and jailed for two years for their public attack on the Prince in March of 1812.

I believe that Jane Austen got in on the game too. But she was careful and cagey and seems not to have in the least aroused the suspicions of the Prince, who continued to admire and bestow his praise on her work after Emma was published. If he read past the novel’s dedication, he did not take Emma’s warning that “‘such extreme and perpetual cautiousness of word and manner . . . is apt to suggest suspicions of there being something to conceal’”.

…If Austen made this cheeky but veiled critique of the Prince’s planned scheme for Regent Street prior to any knowledge that she might be invited to dedicate Emma to him, then the encounter with his surgeon, the invitation to Carlton House, and the permission to dedicate the novel to the Prince Regent would seem to constitute an uncanny coincidence at the hands of Fortuna. One can hardly believe it; it is all too pat. Could it have been the case that she revised the novel after it went to the publishers but before it was printed? Or could she have somehow orchestrated the invitation for the dedication? I know of no extant evidence that would solve this riddle. So, for now I must settle with being

suspicious.””

“Lampooning the Prince: A Second Solution to the Second Charade in Emma”: “…We recall that the second charade in chapter 9 of Emma is to be considered a kind of “‘prologue to the play’”. The second solution to this charade is precisely a prologue to the play: it is a second dedication to HRH, the Prince of Whales. Moreover, as I have argued in the essay preceding this one, the novel itself includes numerous mischievous plays on the Prince and his exploits, though of course, as Austen expected, he seems never to have picked up on them.” END QUOTE FROM SHEEHAN ARTICLE

So I conclude by pointing out that we can see from the above, in the bicentennial of Emma, that the (good) news about Jane Austen’s subversive shadows, including her covert but powerful feminist political satire, is slowly wending its way into the periphery of the still-strong current of the orthodox version of JA’s writing and life. But I sure hope we won’t have to wait till the tricentennial for it to reach the mainstream!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

In the entirety of Pride & Prejudice, there’s a total of 35 usages of a cluster of 4 related words (common, uncommon, commonly, uncommonly, and commonest). What is most striking about them as a group (a la Homer’s and Conan Doyle’s dogs which do not bark) is that none of them are used explicitly in the sense of a commoner, as opposed to a peer, in this particular novel, in which the outcomes of the two central love stories (Darcy/Elizabeth, Bingley/Jane) so explicitly turn on the bridging of the social chasm between those of high and low birth. Darcy makes this chasm insultingly clear in his botched first proposal, when he so narcissistically describes the struggle between his attraction to Eliza and his abhorrence of her family connections. And then Lady Catherine waxes rhetorical on the same theme during her memorable verbal joust with Elizabeth in the Longbourn wilderness:

"I will not be interrupted. Hear me in silence. My daughter and my nephew are formed for each other. They are descended, on the maternal side, from the same noble line; and, on the father's, from respectable, honourable, and ancient—though untitled—families. Their fortune on both sides is splendid. They are destined for each other by the voice of every member of their respective houses; and what is to divide them? The upstart pretensions of a young woman without family, connections, or fortune. Is this to be endured! But it must not, shall not be. If you were sensible of your own good, you would not wish to quit the sphere in which you have been brought up."

"In marrying your nephew, I should not consider myself as quitting that sphere. He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal."

"True. You are a gentleman's daughter. But who was your mother? Who are your uncles and aunts? Do not imagine me ignorant of their condition."

"Whatever my connections may be," said Elizabeth, "if your nephew does not object to them, they can be nothing to you."

So, you may ask, why did I mention those 35 “common” usages, if not a single one of them relates to the explicit meaning of “common” as the opposite of high-born? Because, as with Ulysses’s dog Argos, whose silence reveals that he knows his old master as returned, and Sherlock Holmes’s sly allusion to Homer in “Silver Blaze”, the absence of explicit status-based usages of “common” conceals a vast network of punning, implicit “common” usages throughout P&P, and I’ll now show you the highlights:

Chapter 3: "Come, Darcy," said [Bingley], "I must have you dance. I hate to see you standing about by yourself in this stupid manner. You had much better dance."

"I certainly shall not. You know how I detest it, unless I am particularly acquainted with my partner. At such an assembly as this it would be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to stand up with."

"I would not be so fastidious as you are," cried Mr. Bingley, "for a kingdom! Upon my honour, I never met with so many pleasant girls in my life as I have this evening; and there are several of them you see UNCOMMONLY pretty."

This excellent pun may plausibly be read as intentional on Bingley’s part. In rebuttal to Darcy’s snobby refusal to dance with any of the local girls at the Meryton assembly, because, as far as Darcy knows, they’re all too “common” for him (i.e., by birth), Bingley’s witty riposte refers to several of the girls as “uncommonly” pretty, which decodes as, “Yes, these girls may be common in status, but they are nobly ranked by their looks.

Chapter 5: "That is very true," replied Elizabeth, "and I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine."

"Pride," observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, "is a very COMMON failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very COMMON indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. ..”

This witty pun by Mary relates to the pride (i.e., status aspirations) of Elizabeth, a commoner, vis a vis the pride (i.e., snobbery) of the highborn Mr. Darcy. Mary drolly notes that those of lower birth, like Eliza, do indeed often aspire to move on up in the world.

Chapter 6: Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty; he had looked at her without admiration at the ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticise. But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she hardly had a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered UNCOMMONLY intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes.

…"Did you not think, Mr. Darcy, that I expressed myself UNCOMMONLY well just now, when I was teasing Colonel Forster to give us a ball at Meryton?"

That same punning is here picked up by Darcy in his thoughts, and by Elizabeth (who seems to read Darcy’s mind). Darcy has evidently been influenced by Bingley’s earlier comment at the Meryton assembly, and he begins to see Eliza’s intelligence and beauty as compensating for her lack of status. And Elizabeth’s ESP tells her that her verbal facility and wit have charmed him.

Chapter 8: [Caroline Bingley] “Yes, all of them, I think. They all paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I scarcely know anyone who cannot do all this, and I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time, without being informed that she was very accomplished."

"Your list of the COMMON extent of accomplishments," said Darcy, "has too much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no otherwise than by netting a purse or covering a screen. But I am very far from agreeing with you in your estimation of ladies in general. I cannot boast of knowing more than half-a-dozen, in the whole range of my acquaintance, that are really accomplished."

Here, Darcy uses the word “common” in regard to accomplishment and education, seeming to thereby hint that it is a petit-bourgeois commoner’s upward-striving notion of female education that looks to the surface rather than to truly substantive accomplishments of the mind.

Chapter 10: [Elizabeth] ”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."

This usage is my favorite of the whole bunch, because, when fully decoded, we see that Eliza’s punning wit blends two covert satirical themes very artfully.

First, we have the hidden (but for a long while very well recognized) Gilpin allusion—which I discussed in my major Gilpin post last week. Eliza uses Gilpin to mockingly suggest that Darcy and the Bingley sisters are akin to three cows grazing in a picturesque landscape.

Second, we now we also see further evidence of the claim I made previously…

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2015/04/eavesdropping-in-netherfield-shrubbery.html

…i.e., that Elizabeth actually overhears (eavesdrops on) Darcy and Miss Bingley while they are strolling in the Netherfield shrubbery, in particular when the following repartee occurs on the theme (what else?) Darcy’s being too highborn for Elizabeth: "I hope," said [Miss Bingley], as they were walking together in the shrubbery the next day, "you will give your mother-in-law a few hints, when this desirable event takes place, as to the advantage of holding her tongue; and if you can compass it, do cure the younger girls of running after officers. And, if I may mention so delicate a subject, endeavour to check that little something, bordering on conceit and impertinence, which your lady possesses."

"Have you anything else to propose for my domestic felicity?"

"Oh! yes. Do let the portraits of your uncle and aunt Phillips be placed in the gallery at Pemberley. Put them next to your great-uncle the judge. They are in the same profession, you know, only in different lines. As for your Elizabeth's picture, you must not have it taken, for what painter could do justice to those beautiful eyes?"

"It would not be easy, indeed, to catch their expression, but their colour and shape, and the eyelashes, so remarkably fine, might be copied."

At that moment they were met from another walk by Mrs. Hurst and Elizabeth herself.

"I did not know that you intended to walk," said Miss Bingley, in some confusion, lest they had been overheard….”

So now we see that Elizabeth deliberately and precisely chooses the verbiage “to uncommonadvantage” in order to suggest to Darcy that in contrast to her own fine eyes, the Bingley sisters and he, for all their snobbery toward commoners, still are no better than cattle in a meadow, and so, turning the snobbery tables, she does not deign to be part of that unflattering picture alongside them. Ouch! I.e., what to conventional Austen scholarship appears to be a simple, straightforward satire on Gilpin actually is a complex, multilayered allusion of great depth.

And that verbiage in Chapter 10 also connects right back to Bingley’s witty noodging of Darcy in Chapter 3, and to Elizabeth’s witty repartee with Darcy in Chapter 6, both previously discussed above.

And it also connects right back to Darcy’s reference to “common” in Chapter 8, also discussed above, as to what constitutes true accomplishment in a woman.

In full context, we see that all of these seemingly unconnected, insignificant usages of “common” are actually all about how a combination of uncommon (rare) intelligence and beauty can compensate for a lack of high birth status—and that’s Elizabeth’s allure in Darcy’s eyes—which of course is at the heart of the novel’s love story.

So I hope I’ve already convinced you that JA deliberately avoided using “common” to explicitly refer to status, precisely so that she could hint at this them in every conceivable and ingenious implicitway!

We’ve still got 4/5 of the novel remaining, so here are several more examples in that same rich vein.

Chapter 11: [Darcy] "You either choose this method of passing the evening because you are in each other's confidence, and have secret affairs to discuss, or because you are conscious that your figures appear to the GREATEST advantage in walking; if the first, I would be completely in your way, and if the second, I can admire you much better as I sit by the fire."

"Oh! shocking!" cried Miss Bingley. "I never heard anything so abominable. How shall we punish him for such a speech?"

"Nothing so easy, if you have but the inclination," said Elizabeth. "We can all plague and punish one another. Tease him—laugh at him. Intimate as you are, you must know how it is to be done."

"But upon my honour, I do not. I do assure you that my intimacy has not yet taught me that. Tease calmness of manner and presence of mind! No, no; I feel he may defy us there. And as to laughter, we will not expose ourselves, if you please, by attempting to laugh without a subject. Mr. Darcy may hug himself."

"Mr. Darcy is not to be laughed at!" cried Elizabeth. "That is an UNCOMMON advantage, and UNCOMMON I hope it will continue, for it would be a great loss to me to have many such acquaintances. I dearly love a laugh."

Here we see Darcy and Eliza engaged in sophisticated wordplay with each other. Darcy first picks up on Eliza’s Gilpinesque joke, when he says Eliza’s and Caroline’s figures appear to “the greatest” (instead of “uncommon”) advantage as they walk, and then Eliza seizes on Caroline’s claim that Darcy is not to be laughed at, and repeats her earlier verbiage in the shrubbery by mocking his “uncommon advantage” of being too great (as opposed to common) a man to be laughed at.

Then in Chapter 16, we get the pun on “common” three times, through the opposite end of the telescope, as it were, in the context of the lowborn Wickham: “Mr. Wickham was the happy man towards whom almost every female eye was turned, and Elizabeth was the happy woman by whom he finally seated himself; and the agreeable manner in which he immediately fell into conversation, though it was only on its being a wet night, made her feel that the COMMONEST, dullest, most threadbare topic might be rendered interesting by the skill of the speaker.”

We’re back to that same pun from earlier chapters, but this time as to a man of common birth who transcends his low status via his rhetorical gifts. And then later in that same scene, we hear Wickham deploy that same word: "A thorough, determined dislike of me—a dislike which I cannot but attribute in some measure to jealousy. Had the late Mr. Darcy liked me less, his son might have borne with me better; but his father's UNCOMMON attachment to me irritated him, I believe, very early in life. He had not a temper to bear the sort of competition in which we stood—the sort of preference which was often given me."

Here Wickham uses the late elder Mr. Darcy’s “uncommon” attachment to him as a way to hint at his being the illegitimate son of a highborn (i.e., “uncommon”) father.

And Jane gets in on the same pun in Chapter 17: "Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion. My dearest Lizzy, do but consider in what a disgraceful light it places Mr. Darcy, to be treating his father's favourite in such a manner, one whom his father had promised to provide for. It is impossible. No man of COMMON humanity, no man who had any value for his character, could be capable of it. Can his most intimate friends be so excessively deceived in him? Oh! no."

And we stay with the connection of Wickham and commonness in Chapter 25: “To Mrs. Gardiner, Wickham had one means of affording pleasure, unconnected with his general powers. About ten or a dozen years ago, before her marriage, she had spent a considerable time in that very part of Derbyshire to which he belonged. They had, therefore, many acquaintances in COMMON; and though Wickham had been little there since the death of Darcy's father, it was yet in his power to give her fresher intelligence of her former friends than she had been in the way of procuring….”

This suggests to us that Mrs. Gardiner came from the same humble, common stock as Wickham.

Chapter 29: "I am the less surprised at what has happened," replied Sir William, "from that knowledge of what the manners of the great really are, which my situation in life has allowed me to acquire. About the court, such instances of elegant breeding are not UNCOMMON."

Sir William’s pun is very broad, as he explicitly sets the context as the royal court, and then refers to elegant breeding as “not uncommon”, i.e., “common” – a wonderful punny paradox!

Chapter 33: "I know them a little. Their brother is a pleasant gentlemanlike man—he is a great friend of Darcy's."

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

Here Elizabeth mocks Darcy’s haughty condescension toward his “subject” the “commoner” Bingley.

Chapter 40: "There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it."

"I never thought Mr. Darcy so deficient in the appearance of it as you used to do."

"And yet I meant to be UNCOMMONLY clever in taking so decided a dislike to him, without any reason. It is such a spur to one's genius, such an opening for wit, to have a dislike of that kind. One may be continually abusive without saying anything just; but one cannot always be laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty."

Both Darcy and Wickham are under consideration, and Elizabeth, by using “uncommonly”, winks at the previous witty satires on Darcy she made, all involving the word “uncommon”.

Chapter 44: Nothing had ever suggested it before, but they felt that there was no other way of accounting for such attentions from such a quarter than by supposing a partiality for their niece. While these newly-born notions were passing in their heads, the perturbation of Elizabeth's feelings was at every moment increasing. She was quite amazed at her own discomposure; but amongst other causes of disquiet, she dreaded lest the partiality of the brother should have said too much in her favour; and, more than COMMONLY anxious to please, she naturally suspected that every power of pleasing would fail her.

Now that Elizabeth has been bowled over by Pemberley, after first reading Darcy’s letter which detailed her own family’s deficiencies, her class anxiety is now acute, hence she is “more than commonly” anxious to please the high born Georgiana, whom she is about to meet.

Chapter 45: “Her teeth are tolerable, but not out of the COMMON way; and as for her eyes, which have sometimes been called so fine, I could never see anything extraordinary in them. “

And here we have Caroline taking one last swipe at the much earlier references to Elizabeth’s “uncommon” beauty and wit.

Chapter 52: "I have heard, indeed, that she is UNCOMMONLY improved within this year or two. When I last saw her, she was not very promising. I am very glad you liked her. I hope she will turn out well."

"I dare say she will; she has got over the most trying age."

And Wickham’s usage of “uncommonly” comes in a speech in which he speaks of personal merit.

Chapter 54: "Well girls," said she, as soon as they were left to themselves, "What say you to the day? I think every thing has passed off UNCOMMONLY well, I assure you. The dinner was as well dressed as any I ever saw. "Well girls," said she, as soon as they were left to themselves, "What say you to the day? I think every thing has passed off UNCOMMONLY well, I assure you. The dinner was as well dressed as any I ever saw. ..”

And Mrs. Bennet uses “uncommonly” twice to refer to bridging of the chasm between Bingley and Jane.

Chapter 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.”

And there it is again re Jane and Bingley’s engagement.

Chapter 58: Elizabeth, feeling all the more than COMMON awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances.

Here, in the final usage in the novel, the pun is ironic as is fitting to the romantic climax. I.e., now that Elizabeth and Darcy are engaged, the chasm has been bridged, and so Eliza can finally see him as “common” in his awkwardness and anxiety, no longer higher than she on a societal status pedestal.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this picturesque tour of JA’s uncommonly brilliant usage of “common” in P&P!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

This is in followup to my post yesterday about Jane Austen’s uncommonly clever punning on variants of the word “common” in P&P. I was curious to know whether any Janeite had ever noticed any of this punning before myself, and so far I’ve found only one, who did pick up on part of it --- and, to my great delight, it turns out to have been only 20 years after P&P was published, and the name of that clever elf was Thomas Babington Macaulay!

For those who don’t recognize the name, Macaulay is well known to modern Austen scholars for having been a very influential very early adopter of what we would today call Austenmania— his great claim to Austenian fame is that he dared to speak of Jane Austen in the same breath with Shakespeare in the following passage of a published essay of his more than a century and half ago:

“Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second. But among the writers who, in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings.”

As I’ll show you, below, I now believe that the above, lavish praise for JA’s writing was in part based on Macaulay’s subtle appreciation of JA’s sharp sense of punning humor, which was nothing less than…Shakespearean, as you’ll see yet another example of in this post – let me take you step by step.

First, in December 2011 I pointed out the following pun in the narration introducing Sir William Lucas in P&P:

“For, though elated by his rank, it did not render him supercilious; on the contrary, he was all attention to everybody. By nature inoffensive, friendly, and obliging, his presentation at St. James's had made him COURTEOUS."

Of course JA’s pun is that Sir William’s presentation at “court” had made him “courteous”, and it’s especially clever, because it is not only funny, it also reveals JA’s awareness of the origin of the word “courteous”, which surely was coined to describe the carefully deferential behavior of a courtier at a court, before the word spread to the wider, non-royal, social world.

Second, in April 2014, I pointed out that I believed JA had linked the words “courteous” and “uncommon” to Sir Wiliam Lucas, in no small part so as to draw a parallel between him and Shakespeare’s word-drunk, holy fool Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; specifically, when Oberon sends Puck to give Bottom a jackass’s head, and to charm Titania into loving (and making love to) Bottom. I claimed that JA was pointing to the following speeches by Titania (the first of which also happens to include the famous Titania Acrostic first discovered by the Baconian William Stone Booth a century ago), speeches which contain, in close proximity, both “no common” and “courteous”:

TITANIA

O, Out of this wood do not desire to go:
T Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no;

I        I am a spirit of NO COMMON rate;
T       The summer still doth tend upon my state;
AN And I do love thee: therefore, go with me;
I        I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee,
A     And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,

TITANIA
Be kind and COURTEOUS to this gentleman;
Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes;
Feed him with apricocks and dewberries,
With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries…

And that brings me to my main point, which is the following anecdote first written about by JASNA member Anita Fielding in the 1993 issue of Persuasions, and then summarized in Jane Austen and her Readers, 1786–1945 by Katie Halsey (2012), at p. 193, which I found by Googling “elegant breeding not being uncommon”:

“Macaulay used the medium of a repeated reference to P&P’s Sir William Lucas to signal his amused disapproval of the pomposity of particular acquaintances. In June 1832, he wrote to [sisters] Hannah and Margaret: ‘He [Mr. Edwin Pearson] condescended to quiz me through his glass, and then to extend his hand and congratulate me on my appointment [to the House of Commons]. ‘Such instances of elegant breeding,” as Sir William Lucas says, “are not uncommon at the Court”. A year later, he repeated the joke, writing to Margaret, “On Monday the House does not sit on account of the Queen’s Birthday. But Lord Goderich has asked me to dinner—such instances of elegant breeding not being uncommon, as Sir William Lucas well observed, about the court; and I must go in all my official finery.” END QUOTE

And now I come to the punch line of this post--- did you notice what were the specific circumstances of both occasions, one year apart, on which Macaulay invoked Sir William’s bon mot?

The first was the occasion of the young Macaulay’s appointment to the House of Commons, when Macaulay kissed the King’s ring. The latter was a year later, on the occasion of the Queen’s Birthday, which, as Macaulay point out, occurred on a day when the House of Commons was not in session.

House of Commons, get it? ;)

But here’s the final irony. If you read Anita Fielding’s much more detailed account of the first of Macaulay’s two “uncommon” moments, you have to wonder how it was possible that Macaulay, in calling Pearson a Sir William Lucas-like fool, did not realize that he was also inadvertently hoisting himself on that same petard of fawning adulation toward royalty:

Anita Fielding Persuasions (1993) “Macaulay and Miss Austen”:

“Later in the month, when Macaulay is back in London, one of his letters is inspired by a rare parliamentary event. He relates to his sisters how the House of Commons had gone in a body to St. James’s Palace to present an address to King William on his safe escape from a discharged Greenwich pensioner who had thrown a stone at him and hit his hat. Macaulay describes the day, along with an aside from Jane Austen.

“Oh if you but knew of the pleasure of being admitted to the Royal presence! I cannot keep my elation to myself. I cannot describe my feelings in dull creeping prose. I burst forth in unpremeditated verse, worthy of the judicious poet I so often quote.

I passed in adorning The whole of the morning When the hand of the King must be kissed, must be kissed.

I put on my back A fine suit of black And twelve ells of lace on my wrist on my wrist.

I went to the levee And squeezed through the bevy Till I made good my way to his fist to his fist.

But my wing fails me. I must creep in prose for a few lines. At one we assembled in the House of Commons. For this was the day appointed for taking up our address to the King … The House looked like a parterre of tulips – all red and blue … Much gold lace was there and much silver lace – many military uniforms – yeomanry uniforms – navy uniforms, official uniforms … Then the Speaker rose and walked majestically down stairs to his state carriage, – an old thing covered with painting and gilding of the days of Queen Anne … We came behind in about a hundred carriages … at hearse pace, forming a string from Westminster Hall to St James’s palace. The carriage stopped. We alighted at the door of a long passage, matted, and furnished only with large wooden benches. Along this passage we went to a stone staircase. On the landing places guards with their swords and carbines were in attendance to slay us if we behaved improperly. At the top of the staircase we passed through two ranks of beef-eaters, blazing in scarlet and gold, to a table, where we wrote our names, each on two cards. One card we left on the table with the page. The other we took with us to give to the Lord in Waiting.

As a member of the House of Commons, I had peculiar advantages. For before the levee we were admitted to present our address. The throne room was however so crowded that while we were going through the ceremony I heard little, and saw nothing. But I mistake – one thing I saw – a great fool with a cocked hat and a coat like that of the fifer of a band, Mr. Edwin Pearson, who was performing his duties as Exon. He condescended to quiz me through his glass, and then to extend his hand and congratulate me on my appointment. “Such instances of elegant breeding,” – as Sir William Lucas says, “are not uncommon at the Court.” When we had walked out backward, trampling on each other’s toes and kicking the skin of each other’s shins, the levee began, and we were re-admitted singly to the apartment which we had just left in a body. The King stood near a door. We marched before him and out at a door on the other side, bowing and scraping the whole way. When I came to him, I gave my card to the Lord in Waiting who notified the name to the King. His Majesty put forth his hand. I kneeled, or rather curtseyed, and kissed the sacred object most reverently. Then I walked away backwards bowing down my head like a bulrush, and made my way through the rooms into the street with all expedition. (2:141-2)”

I am pretty sure that Jane Austen would have smiled at the irony of Macaulay simultaneously being so uncommonly clueful about Sir William Lucas, and yet so clueless about his own inner Sir William Lucas, without any apparent awareness of that irony.

ADDED 7/10/16 at 6:30 pm PST:

In response to my above claim that Macaulay had hoist himself on his own Sir William Lucasian petard with his effusions about kissing the King’s ring, I received two dissenting responses:

Nancy Mayer: “Why do you say he had a bit of Sir William in him? His tone is entirely different from that of that William….I may be misreading, but to me he sounds like he is, or is trying to be, satirical.”

Jane Fox: “That was my impression. He isn't making fun of Sir William so much as comparing himself to him and making fun of his own involvement.”

You ladies are ABSOLUTELY correct, I read too quickly, and was too happy to find Macaulay being inconsistent to go back and double check. Mea culpa. There is no question Macaulay was being ironic the entire way through. The doggerel about the King makes it crystal clear.

There is an irony, Nancy and Jane, in having both of you catch me being insensitive to irony. It is poetic justice, and will be a good reminder to me in the future to double check before opining on such matters. Irony is a slippery matter --- it can be tied down, but it requires patience to reach reliable readings.

And Macaulay being satirical about meeting the King would of course be entirely consistent with his detecting JA’s complex irony about “common” in P&P. If only Macaulay could have known about the “Prince of Whales” secret answer to the charade in Emma , and the satirical insincerity of the Dedication to the Prince Regent, it would have greatly added to his pleasure in all things Austen, I am sure.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

In followup to my posts the other day about Jane Austen’s punning on variants of the word “common” in P&P with respect to social class, I was just browsing in Emma, which perhaps is the Austen novel most pervasively concerned with matters of social class – mainly because Emma is, far and away, the Austen heroine most obsessed with such matters, and in the snobbiest way imaginable! I figured there has to be some revisiting of that punning somewhere in Emma, and as you’ll see, below, there is.

My eye was quickly caught by the following passage in Chapter 3:

“Mrs. Bates, the widow of a former vicar of Highbury, was a very old lady, almost past every thing but tea and quadrille. She lived with her single daughter in a very small way, and was considered with all the regard and respect which a harmless old lady, under such untoward circumstances, can excite. Her daughter enjoyed A MOST UNCOMMON DEGREE OF POPULARITY for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married.”

While the surface meaning of “uncommon” as “unusual” is perfectly intelligible, I also detect that alternative, punny meaning of “uncommon” as “not a commoner” as having been intended by JA. Here we have JA setting Miss Bates (whom JA doesn’t even name beyond “her single daughter”, so as to subtly emphasize her being “nobody”, in Emma’s terminology) in the context of her social world. So this is precisely where a pun on status would be most appropriate and telling.

The whiff of royalty in that punning “most uncommon” also reminded me of Princess Caroline, who was very popular among the English people despite her all-too-public missteps, and I believe JA meant for the unfortunate Princess to come to mind for her contemporary readers as well, when reading those introductory words about Miss Bates. This is especially so, given (as I wrote not long ago) that JA, later in the novel, covertly, but unmistakably, alludes to Princess Caroline and her open letter to her husband the Prince Regent strenuously objecting to being denied parental access to her own daughter, Princess Charlotte.

I went on searching in Emma for further punning on “common” vis a vis Miss Bates, and look what I found next, in this noblesse oblige passage in Chapter 21:

“Emma saw [Knightley’s] anxiety, and wishing to appease it, at least for the present, said, and with a sincerity which no one could question—"[Jane] is a sort of elegant creature that one cannot keep one's eyes from. I am always watching her to admire; and I do pity her from my heart."

Mr. Knightley looked as if he were more gratified than he cared to express; and before he could make any reply, Mr. Woodhouse, whose thoughts were on the Bates's, said—"It is a great pity that their circumstances should be so confined! a great pity indeed! and I have often wished—but it is so little one can venture to do—small, trifling presents, of ANY THING UNCOMMON—Now we have killed a porker, and Emma thinks of sending them a loin or a leg…”

This passage is all about the condescension of the (self-styled) great to the little people, and so it is a wry irony indeed for Mr. Woodhouse to refer to his own hypocritical self congratulation via the word “uncommon”!

Based on those two examples, we cannot be surprised to find a third at the very end of the Box Hill episode in Chapter 43, as Emma reflects on her own behavior:

“She felt it at her heart. How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to Miss Bates! How could she have exposed herself to such ill opinion in any one she valued! And how suffer him to leave her without saying one word of gratitude, of concurrence, OF COMMON KINDNESS!”

But then, two chapters later, “common” pops up again in the context of Emma’s attempts to repair the classist damage she caused at Box Hill:

“…Dear Emma has been to call on Mrs. and Miss Bates, Mr. Knightley, as I told you before. She is always so attentive to them!"

Emma's colour was heightened by this unjust praise; and with a smile, and shake of the head, which spoke much, she looked at Mr. Knightley.—It seemed as if there were an instantaneous impression in her favour, as if his eyes received the truth from hers, and all that had passed of good in her feelings were at once caught and honoured.--He looked at her with a glow of regard. She was warmly gratified—and in another moment still more so, by a little movement of more than COMMON FRIENDLINESS on his part.—He took her hand…”

In Chapter 52, we read one of Miss Bates’s shorter effusions, which includes the word “commonly”:

"Thank you, dear Miss Woodhouse, you are all kindness.—It is impossible to say—Yes, indeed, I quite understand—dearest Jane's prospects—that is, I do not mean.—But she is charmingly recovered.—How is Mr. Woodhouse?—I am so glad.—Quite out of my power.—Such a happy little circle as you find us here.—Yes, indeed.—Charming young man!—that is—so very friendly; I mean good Mr. Perry!—such attention to Jane!"—And from her great, her MORE THAN COMMONLY THANKFUL DELIGHT towards Mrs. Elton for being there, Emma guessed that there had been a little show of resentment towards Jane, from the vicarage quarter, which was now graciously overcome.”

It’s very interesting to see the phrase “more than commonly” used to describe the thankfulness expressed by Miss Bates to Mrs. Elton for visiting. Emma guesses that this is Miss Bates’s response to some prior expression of resentment not witnessed by Emma, arising from Jane’s ultimate rejection of Mrs. Elton’s endless parade of noblesse oblige, in seeking to strand Jane in a governessing position. Once more the word “common” has been used with respect to Miss Bates in a context saturated with interclass relations.

And finally, in Chapter 54, we get an echo of Darcy’s and Eliza’s “uncommon” repartee at the Netherfield Ball (which I wrote about the other day), when Frank speaks to Emma about his now unconcealed fiancée Jane:

“…Emma was delighted, and only wanted him to go on in the same style; but [Frank’s] mind was the next moment in his own concerns and with his own Jane, and his next words were, "Did you ever see such a skin?—such smoothness! such delicacy!—and yet without being actually fair.—One cannot call her fair. It is A MOST UNCOMMON COMPLEXION, with her dark eye-lashes and hair—A MOST DISTINGUISHING COMPLEXION! SO PECULIARLY THE LADY IN IT.—Just colour enough for beauty."

“So peculiarly the lady in it”--- the pun on class in “uncommon” is in this final iteration in Emma subtly but clearly foregrounded by Frank explicitly suggesting that Jane’s delicate beauty gives her a free pass into the higher class. The arc begun with emphasis on the lowness of Miss Bates has now been turned topsy turvy, as her beloved niece is now not only “nobody” anymore, but is expected to shortly become the great lady of Enscombe, taking the place recently occupied by Frank’s imperious aunt – so in that sense, we may expect Miss Bates to join her niece at Enscombe, whereupon we may channel Mr. Weston and say that Miss Bates will regain and even outstrip her long-lost social elevation, and thereby out-Churchill the late great Mrs. Churchill! ;)

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

I've been saying for years that many of my blog readership come fromcountries like Pakistan and the Middle East, where conditions for women in2016 are, sadly, all too similar in a number of ways to the conditions forwomen which faced women in Jane Austen's England in 1816. It makes perfectsense that female readers in those countries would be drawn to Austen, and I believe they'd be even more interested in her novels if they were aware of Jane Austen's strong, unswerving feminist outrage about the subordinate position of women in her world, hidden just beneath the surface of all of her novels.

And now I just read the following wonderful article about the thriving newJane Austen Society of Pakistan, so I reproduce the article here, because Ifound the website a pain in the butt to go from page to page in the article:

http://www.catchnews.com/culture-news/jane-austen-has-a-new-cult-following-and-it-is-in-pakistan-1468341752.html Jane Austen has a new cult following. And it is in Pakistan by Lamat Hasan

“You've probably heard of the Jane Austen cults in America and Australia. What you wouldn't have heard of is such a cult in Pakistan that meets to read Austen, sometimes in Regency-inspired attire. But such a cult exists, and this makes Pakistanis just as huge devotees of the English writer as the rest of the world.

The story began in Islamabad two years ago when Laaleen Khan, an ardent Austen fan since her childhood, decided to float the Jane Austen Society of Pakistan (JASP). An eclectic bunch of Austen fans - all women - started to meet up in Islamabad to take an Austen quotes quiz or play the Jane Austen Matchmaker card game. Or, better still, dress up in Regency-inspired attire. Two years down the line, there are nearly 800 members of the society, with chapters in Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore.

Khan tells Catch why.

"There are so many parallels between Austen's Regency-era society and South Asian society today. The obsession with the marriage market, for one thing, complete with concern for reputation, eligibility, decorum, propriety and ancestry juxtaposed with elements of snobbery, misogyny and hypocrisy. We have our share of disapproving Lady Catherine de Bourgh-esque society aunties, rakish Wickhams and Willoughbys, pretentious Mrs Eltons and holier-than-thou Mr Collins types!"

Jane Austen died in 1817 at the age of 41 with six novels to her name and with ironically little fame in her own lifetime. Yet the clubs of Janeites are bursting at the seams across the globe. The world may find this fetish for Austen a little odd, especially in a country which is viewed as one of the most dangerous in the world, but Khan has an answer to that. "Radicalisation, extremism and bigotry are tragic and terrifying phenomena happening all over the world, in both eastern and western hemispheres and among various socio-political groups and ethnicities. I honestly can't see its direct relevance with literary pursuits in Pakistan."

Khan says that Austen fans have universal similarities and shared interests despite any disparities in personal, professional, geographical or ethnic backgrounds: “Those of us in the Commonwealth including South Asia often grow up with an affinity for British authors. I'd say Austen isn't mainstream but more of a niche, though in recent years she's also been part of trans-Atlantic popular culture. She remains a perennial favourite for those of us who were introduced to her, often through books passed along by family members or part of an O level curriculum, for instance."

For Khan, Austen's words contain societal truths and witty dialogue juxtaposed with brief descriptions - quite contemporary in style. "She isn't a tedious read unlike, say, Henry James or - dare I say it-Tolstoy! She's constantly evolving thanks to recurring screen adaptations and fan fiction along with academic analyses, festivals, tours, merchandise and the efforts of Jane Austen societies all over the world. She's been translated into many languages, including Urdu and Hindi. In fact, Urdu television drama narratives often resemble Austen storylines. She's here to stay."

Within two years the membership has grown to 800. And, apart from the Islamabad chapter, there's talk of chapters in Karachi and Lahore too. "Our online community is 94% female, eclectic and very international. Many authors, bloggers and professionals from various fields including banking, international development, medicine and law are part of JASP, ranging primarily from 21 to 55 but mostly in our 30s," says Khan. Members she has met up with in person are mostly journalists and media correspondents, but also health professionals and doctors, academics and barristers ranging from about 25 to 42 and 100% female. The criterion is basically enthusiasm along with a keen interest in all things Austen. Our online community members are approaching 800 in number, including 45 nationalities around the world and many expat Pakistanis. 250 of our community members reside in Pakistan. About 30 have met in person so far and a few more via Skype."

She describes JASP as a private literary group which is very welcoming. "We meet every month or two at cafés and discuss pertinent topics, indulge in themed quizzes and games and discuss our plans. Our annual Regency-inspired tea party is whimsical and a little eccentric so a residence is best for that."

"So far, our Islamabad members have been meeting up for one year. Some of our Karachi members met up for the first time recently. Lahore's next on our agenda," she says.

Khan tells Catch who came first in her life - Colin Firth or Jane Austen? "Colin Firth is an incredible actor and a wonderful human being. I'm a Firthie for sure. In my case, the novels came first."

The love affair with Austen began when Khan received a box set of Austen titles on her twelfth birthday from her English aunt. She was immediately intrigued. At the time, she adored Pride and Prejudice, found Mansfield Park a little dull and thought Persuasion was about 'older' people - one of the reasons she is so drawn to it now. Of the other Austen novels she says she related to Northanger Abbey instantly as she has been obsessed with Agatha Christie mysteries since the age of 10, so she empathised with Catherine Morland's inherent curiosity. But she didn't appreciate Sense and Sensibility and Emma properly until she watched the films in 1995-96.

By the time she was enrolled at university she'd caught Darcy Fever thanks to the BBC's Pride and Prejudice series, and her thesis was an analysis of postmodernism in Austen screen adaptations.

"I'm enthralled by Austenian screen adaptations and fandom - the estates, the costumes, the accessories, the Regency world that's also been depicted so charmingly by Georgette Heyer. Last year, I visited Bath for the first time and I was in heaven!"

JASP is a literary group that connects based on shared interests that bear absolutely no relevance with social cliques. The group isn't supported or funded by any programme so there is limited outreach and resources.“But between us, there's always positive energy. We exchange dynamic thoughts and ideas so our chats are inspiring as well as loads of fun," says Khan. The group hopes to raise funds for literacy programmes in Pakistan through the Jane Austen Literacy Foundation, founded by Caroline Jane Knight, Austen's fifth great niece. Khan has worn several hats in the past decade or so - from television production in New York, Lahore and the UK to marketing and PR consulting in Islamabad and Lahore to lifestyle journalism. "I'm now committed to authoring Austen-inspired commercial fiction, starting with an exciting anthology by contributors from Pakistan. There's been an encouraging response from international publishers already."

She is happy that JASP received generous editorial coverage in Jane Austen's Regency World Magazine, the official magazine of the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, and that she won a short essay contest hosted by the Jane Austen Society of Europe. Khan is now preparing to be a panellist at the Jane Austen Society of North America's 'Emma At 200' Annual General Meeting in Washington DC in October, representing Pakistan. With fans like Khan in Pakistan, it's no wonder Jane Austen's legacy continues to live on across the world.” END QUOTE FROM ARTICLE

I would love to have a Skype conversation with members of JASP, and talk about those parallels between 2016 Pakistan and 1816 England.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

I suppose there are still some mainstream Austen scholars who don’t believe Mary Wollstonecraft was a significant influence on Jane Austen’s fiction, but they are fewer in number, and their influence wanes year by year. The bad old days 3 or 4 decades ago--when conservative scholars like Marilyn Butler and Deirdre Le Faye ruled the roost, and dictated opinion about Jane Austen’s supposedly hostile response to Wollstonecraft, the highest profile of the “dangerous”, “Jacobin” “unsex’d females” who dared to challenge male domination of English society in the aftermath of the French Revolution---are long gone.

Instead, we have the likes of Jocelyn Harris convincingly showing the dozen ways in which JA alluded in Emma to Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary A Vindication of the Rights of Women (AVOTROW), and Susan Allen Ford, who, in the 2010 Persuasions Online persuasively demonstrated an allusion to AVOTROW’s extensive coverage of the topic of female education and knowledge, in the witty exchanges between Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, which track Wollstonecraft’s critique of Dr. Gregory’s conduct book, sexist “wisdom”: ‘Dr. Gregory…gives his daughters similar advice, irony carefully excluded: “Be even cautious of displaying your good sense. It will be thought you assume a superiority over the rest of the company. But if you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts, and a cultivated understanding.’ Gregory defines the exception to his rule—“A man of real genius and candour is far superior to this meanness”—but adds a note of practical caution: “such a one will seldom fall in your way; and if by accident he should, do not be anxious to shew the full extent of your knowledge”. “ END QUOTE FROM FORD ARTICLE

In that same vein, I had been unaware until just the other day that my recent take on Austen’s late juvenilia villainess/heroine Lady Susan as a superpowerful female Nemesis, sicced on the arrogant, complacent patriarchy by Jane Austen, the goddess of gender equity…. http://tinyurl.com/h72mqm3 …..actually also has Wollstonecraftian roots! As I’ll discuss in greater detail in a future post, I strongly recommend you read two excellent articles, which articulate a number of significant ways in which the young Jane Austen drew upon Wollstonecraft’s protofeminist ideas in constructing Lady Susan, her avenging female “Austen-stein monster”:

[A quick, easy read] “Jane Austen Vindicates the Rights of Women” by Sarah Skwire June 2016

https://fee.org/articles/jane-austen-vindicates-the-rights-of-women/

[This article is longer, requires careful reading] Persuasions Online #27 (2006) by Betsy Tontiplaphol

“Justice in Epistolary Matters: Revised Rights and Deconstructed Duties in Austen's Lady Susan”

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

Which is all prelude to my topic today: a stunning Wollstonecraft allusion in Pride & Prejudice. I’ve previously argued that the wonky Bennet sister Mary is based in no small part upon her namesake Mary Wollstonecraft. In 2009, I first identified Mary Bennet as the ‘Good Satan of Longbourn’, whispering "The men shan't come and part us, I am determined. We want none of them; do we?" in sister Eliza’s ear, trying (in vain) to warn her next elder sister to resist the irresistible Satanic temptation of Darcy-cum-Pemberley. But today, as my Subject Line hints, I’ll lay out for you even more Wollstonecraft – this time on female education---in P&P, hidden in plain sight in one of the most famous passages in the novel—exactly where it ought to be, as you will shortly see.

At the center of Wollstonecraft’s protofeminist ideology was her assertion that the path to autonomy and equality for women would have to be paved by a program of serious, society-wide female education, coordinated with encouragement of women not to conceal, but to give public demonstration of, their intellectual capacities as improved by that serious education.

In AVOTROW Chapter 5, Wollstonecraft gets down to the nitty gritty, as she first (in Section 5.1) takes on, and demolishes, the great sacred cow of female education, Rousseau:

"Whatever is, is right," [Rousseau] then proceeds triumphantly to infer. Granted; yet, perhaps, no aphorism ever contained a more paradoxical assertion. It is a solemn truth with respect to God. He, reverentially I speak, sees the whole at once, and saw its just proportions in the womb of time; but man, who can only inspect disjointed parts, finds many things wrong; and it is a part of the system, and therefore right, that he should endeavour to alter what appears to him to be so, even while he bows to the wisdom of his Creator, and respects the darkness he labours to disperse.

The inference that follows is just, supposing the principle to be sound: "The superiority of ADDRESS, peculiar to the female sex, is a very equitable indemnification for their inferiority in point of strength: without this, woman would not be the companion of man; but his slave: it is by her superiour ART and ingenuity that she preserves her equality, and governs him while she affects to obey. Woman has every thing against her, as well our faults as her own timidity and weakness: she has nothing in her favour, but her subtilty and her beauty. Is it not very reasonable, therefore, she should cultivate both?" GREATNESS OF MIND can never dwell with CUNNING or ADDRESS; for I shall not boggle about words, when their direct signification is insincerity and falsehood; but content myself with observing, that if any class of mankind be so created that it must necessarily be educated by rules, not strictly deducible from truth, virtue is an affair of convention. How could Rousseau dare to assert, after giving this advice, that in the grand end of existence, the object of both sexes should be the same, when he well knew, that the mind formed by its pursuits, is expanded by great views swallowing up little ones, or that it becomes itself little?

Note in particular this line: “Greatness of mind can never dwell with cunning or address” – does it ring any bells for you Janeites? (hint hint)

Now go on to Section 5.3, where it’s the turn of the genial conduct-book god Dr. Gregory (whom Susan Allen Ford discussed, above) to be taken down a peg or three by Wollstonecraft:

“Such paternal solicitude pervades Dr. Gregory's Legacy to his daughters, that I enter on the task of criticism with affectionate respect; but as this little volume has many attractions to recommend it to the notice of the most respectable part of my sex, I cannot silently pass over arguments that so speciously support opinions which, I think, have had the most baneful effect on the morals and manners of the female world….

…The remarks relative to behaviour, though many of them very sensible, I entirely disapprove of, because it appears to me to be beginning, as it were at the wrong end. A cultivated understanding, and an affectionate heart, will never want starched rules of decorum, something more substantial than seemliness will be the result; and, without understanding, the behaviour here recommended, would be rank affectation. Decorum, indeed, is the one thing needful! decorum is to supplant nature, and banish all simplicity and variety of character out of the female world. Yet what good end can all this superficial counsel produce? It is, however, much easier to point out this or that mode of behaviour, than to set the reason to work; but, when the mind has been stored with useful KNOWLEDGE, and strengthened by being employed, the regulation of the behaviour may safely be left to its guidance.

Why, for instance, should the following caution be given, when ART of every kind must contaminate the mind; and why entangle the grand motives of action, which reason and religion equally combine to enforce, with pitiful worldly shifts and slight of hand tricks to gain the applause of gaping tasteless fools? "Be even cautious in displaying your good sense.” It will be thought you assume a superiority over the rest of the company— But if you happen to have any learning keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts, and a cultivated understanding." If men of real merit, as he afterwards observes, are superior to this MEANNESS, where is the necessity that the behaviour of the whole sex should be modulated to please fools, or men, who having little claim to respect as individuals, choose to keep close in their phalanx. Men, indeed, who insist on their common superiority, having only this sexual superiority, are certainly very excusable.

...Surely it would have been wiser to have advised women to IMPROVE themselves till they rose above the fumes of vanity; and then to let the public opinion come round—for where are rules of accommodation to stop? The narrow path of truth and virtue inclines neither to the right nor left, it is a straight-forward business, and they who are earnestly pursuing their road, may bound over many decorous prejudices, without leaving modesty behind. Make the heart clean, and give the head employment, and I will venture to predict that there will be nothing offensive in the behaviour.

The AIR OF FASHION, which many young people are so eager to attain, always strikes me like the studied attitudes of some modern prints, copied with tasteless servility after the antiques; the soul is left out, and none of the parts are tied together by what may properly be termed character. This varnish of fashion, which seldom sticks very close to sense, may dazzle the weak; but leave nature to itself, and it will seldom disgust the wise. Besides, when a woman has sufficient sense not to pretend to any thing which she does not understand in some degree, there is no need of determining to hide her talents under a bushel. Let things take their natural course, and all will be well.

It is this system of DISSIMULATION, throughout the volume, that I DESPISE. Women are always to seem to be this and that—yet virtue might apostrophize them, in the words of Hamlet—Seems! I KNOW not seems!—Have that within that passeth show!—“

Did you also hear a little ‘ping’ of Austenian remembrance when you read “It is this system of dissimulation…that I despise”?

In short….if you’ve read these passages in AVOTROW with reasonable care, and have paid particular attention to the ALL CAPS words and phrases, the Janeites among you must have already guessed which passage I am going to present to you now from P&P, which I claim was JA’s deliberate echoing of those very same passages in AVOTROW. It’s the scene in Chapter 8 in which the subject of (shocking!) true female accomplishment comes up – and once again, note that the ALL CAPS words and phrases are the very same ones we saw in the AVOTROW passages quoted above:

"Oh! certainly," cried [Darcy’s] faithful assistant [Miss Bingley], "no one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough KNOWLEDGE of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her AIR and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her ADDRESS and expressions, or the word will be but half-deserved."

"All this she must possess," added Darcy, "and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the IMPROVEMENT of her mind by extensive reading."

"I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any."

"Are you so severe upon your own sex as to doubt the possibility of all this?"

"I never saw such a woman. I never saw such capacity, and taste, and application, and elegance, as you describe united."

Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley both cried out against the injustice of her implied doubt, and were both protesting that they knew many women who answered this description, when Mr. Hurst called them to order, with bitter complaints of their inattention to what was going forward. As all conversation was thereby at an end, Elizabeth soon afterwards left the room.

"Elizabeth Bennet," said Miss Bingley, when the door was closed on her, "is one of those young ladies who seek to recommend themselves to the other sex by undervaluing their own; and with many men, I dare say, it succeeds. But, in my opinion, it is a paltry device, a very MEAN ART."

"Undoubtedly," replied Darcy, to whom this remark was chiefly ADDRESSED, "there is a MEANNESS in all the ARTS which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation. Whatever bears affinity to CUNNING is DESPICABLE."

Miss Bingley was not so entirely satisfied with this reply as to continue the subject….”

And while we’re at it, also have a peek at these two other lines in P&P, which, I suggest, constitute additional tips of the literary hat by JA to those same passages in Chapter 5 of AVOTROW:

Chapter 3: “[Bingley’s] sisters were fine women, with an AIR OF decided FASHION.”

Ch. 48: [Mr. Bennet] "Lizzy, I bear you no ill-will for being justified in your advice to me last May, which, considering the event, shows some GREATNESS OF MIND."

So, what to make of all of this? My preliminary take is as follows. Over a year ago, I suggested here…

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2015/05/when-in-doubt-lead-jane-austens.html

…that the book of which Darcy was reading Volume 1 in the Netherfield salon was surely a novel, and probably Burney’s Cecilia. I’d like to now amend my earlier guess, and instead suggest that the book was none other than Wollstonecraft’s Vindication! I.e., Darcy at that moment is trying to get Elizabeth’s attention, and show her what a great guy he really is, by winking repeatedly at Wollstonecraft, whom he guesses (I believe correctly) is a writer whom Elizabeth has read and admired.

And the spectacular climax to that scene occurs when the witty Darcy (ergo also, obviously, the witty Jane Austen) comes up a devastating bon mot right after Eliza leaves the room (but when he knew Eliza would be listening at the keyhole!). Caroline Bingley (the quintessence of the elegant female Rousseau, Gregory, et al. held up as an ideal) attempts to diss Elizabeth’s “paltry device, a very mean art”, and Darcy’s memorable riposte has, we all now can see, an unmistakable Wollstonecraftian subtext!:

"Undoubtedly there is a MEANNESS in all the ARTS which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation. Whatever bears affinity to CUNNING is DESPICABLE."

No wonder “Miss Bingley was not so entirely satisfied with this reply as to continue the subject”! And you will also be interested to know ---as Darcy clearly knew-- that the word “cunning” is used an extraordinary total of TWENTY NINE times by Wollstonecraft in AVOTROW, in almost all cases to refer to the actions of “ladies” like Miss Bingley! I believe his true audience was Elizabeth eavesdropping at the door, who must have been delighted to hear herself so cleverly defended!

I conclude with two other passages in P&P which are undoubtedly JA’s final winks in the novel at Wollstonecraft in general, and at Darcy’s “cunning” stratagems in the Netherfield salon in particular:

Chapter 39: She then spoke of the letter, repeating the whole of its contents as far as they concerned George Wickham. What a stroke was this for poor Jane! who would willingly have gone through the world without believing that so much wickedness existed in the whole race of mankind, as was here collected in one individual. Nor was DARCY’S VINDICATION, though grateful to her feelings, capable of consoling her for such discovery. Most earnestly did she labour to prove the probability of error, and seek to clear the one without involving the other.

Chapter 43: Elizabeth here felt herself called on to say something in VINDICATION of his behaviour to Wickham; and therefore gave them to understand, in as guarded a manner as she could, that by what she had heard from his relations in Kent, his actions were capable of a very different construction; and that his character was by no means so faulty, nor Wickham's so amiable, as they had been considered in Hertfordshire. In confirmation of this, she related the particulars of all the pecuniary transactions in which they had been connected, without actually naming her authority, but stating it to be such as might be relied on.

In both instances, we grasp the sad, almost tragic, irony that Elizabeth has come to revere Darcy’s letter to her as a kind of Vindication of the Right Behaviour of Mr. Darcy! It is almost tragic, because, in the shadow story of P&P, we can see the clear progression of Elizabeth in precisely the opposite direction to the one advocated so passionately by Wollstonecraft. I.e., Elizabeth, in the first half of P&P, nails Darcy for the narcissistic, cruel jerk he is—but then, as illustrated by these two passages in the second half of the novel, as a result of reading Darcy’s self-serving, mendacious “Vindication” (which stands in relation to Wollstonecraft’s classic as a Satanic text compares to the Bible!), Elizabeth surrenders her spirit, her intellect, even her conscience (vis a vis Jane), all in a craven, desperate capitulation to Darcy’s systematic, cunning, and entirely successful campaign of persuasion.

Eliza, you shoulda listened to “Mary”.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S. The next Austen novel I am going to comb for traces of Wollstonecraft influence will be Sense & Sensibility, given that four of the other five usages of the word “vindication” in the entire Austen novelistic canon, besides the two in P&P, appear in the novel which JA completed between writing Lady Susan and completing Pride & Prejudice, all of which suggests JA’s sustained and constant interest in Wollstonecraft’s ideas throughout JA’s writing career:

“When the particulars of this conversation were repeated by Miss Dashwood to her sister, as they very soon were, the effect on her was not entirely such as the former had hoped to see. Not that Marianne appeared to distrust the truth of any part of it, for she listened to it all with the most steady and submissive attention, made neither objection nor remark, attempted no VINDICATION of Willoughby, and seemed to shew by her tears that she felt it to be impossible.

…Elinor was to be the comforter of others in her own distresses, no less than in theirs; and all the comfort that could be given by assurances of her own composure of mind, and a very earnest VINDICATION of Edward from every charge but of imprudence, was readily offered.

…Willoughby, "poor Willoughby," as she now allowed herself to call him, was constantly in her thoughts; she would not but have heard his VINDICATION for the world, and now blamed, now acquitted herself for having judged him so harshly before.

…Mrs. Dashwood did not hear unmoved the VINDICATION of her former favourite. She rejoiced in his being cleared from some part of his imputed guilt;--she was sorry for him;--she wished him happy. “

For those of you who haven’t yet seen Love and Friendship (Whit Stillman’s brilliant film adaptation---but with a confusing new title---of Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan); or for those who’ve seen it, but were puzzled and/or troubled by the seeming irreconcilable contradictions between its subversive anti-romantic themes, on the one hand, and the sophisticated positive romance most people see in Jane Austen’s six novels and the film adaptations thereof, on the other, here’s some background for you to consider, that I hope will help reconcile those apparent contradictions. I’ve previously written several times about the deliberate, subversively feminist, wish-fulfilment fantasy aspects I see in Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, and here are my current thoughts, which have evolved during the past six months, after rereading Austen’s novella, and seeing Stillman’s film twice.

How is it that the aspiring novelist JA decided to make a conscienceless female rake, who revels in her effortless ability to manipulate others, but especially men, the heroine of a novella? And how did Austen also manage to make Lady Susan so irresistibly witty, daring, and entertaining, that we actually fall under her spell, and somehow forget to recoil in disgust at her machinations? For those of you who’ve only seen Kate Beckinsale’s brilliant, indeed award-worthy, performance as Lady Susan in Stillman’s film, and haven’t read Austen’s novella… http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/manuscripts/lady_susan/1.html…rest assured that pretty much all those amazing zingers that Beckinsale delivers so perfectly were, almost word for word, Jane Austen’s own – so the film is not anachronistic, it doesn’t impose a modern sensibility on a late 18^thcentury woman, it’s faithful to the sociopathic brilliance of JA’s own heroine.

I think that part of what makes many readers (and viewers), like myself, lack sympathy for the victims of Lady Susan's guile --- especially the male victims--- is that Lady Susan manages to turn what is ordinarily a kind of death sentence for middle-aged women in that era --becoming a widow without money--into opportunity for herself --- sorta like a self-serving Robin Hood. I see Lady Susan as a kind of “Austenstein” monster, a female Nemesis sicced on the male-dominated world Jane Austen grew up in, as poetic justice for the abuse and oppression of all women, both married and single, in that world.

While Lady Susan doesn’t resemble any of the heroines of Austen’s six novels, it’s often been noted that she is a lot like Mary Crawford, the enigmatic siren of Mansfield Park. I’m firmly in the camp of those who see Mary C. as a sympathetic character, a courageous whistle-blower who tries to warn the heroine Fanny Price against the abusive hypocrisy of the Bertram family. I also see a resemblance between Lady Susan and another seemingly negative Austen character not often compared to her --- Lucy Steele in Sense & Sensibility --- whose married name, as I pointed out in 2005, is LUCY FERRARS aka "Lucifer!

How so? After all, Lady Susan is well educated, with impeccable social graces, whereas Lucy seems an uneducated social climber. The deeper similarity I see between the two, is that Lady Susan, like Lucy, is a woman without scruples, who gets her way by using her own superior, nearly Satanic psychological acumen to exert influence over others - and she particularly rises to the challenge when someone dares to stand in her path and attempt to thwart her. In particular, they both boldly invade a respectable, wealthy family, and wreak havoc in it, the way a skilled borderline personality can do (apropos my friend Christine Shih’s claims that borderline personality was a key theme in Austen’s writing).

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

I also see a continuation of JA’s grudging admiration for a transgressive female like Lady Susan, in JA’s famous and very candid comment to Martha Lloyd in her January 1812 letter: "I suppose all the World is sitting in Judgement upon the Princess of Wales's Letter. Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I can, because she is a Woman, & because I hate her Husband -- but I can hardly forgive her for calling herself ``attached & affectionate' to a Man whom she must detest -- & the intimacy said to subsist between her & Lady Oxford is bad -- I do not know what to do about it; but if I must give up the Princess, I am resolved at least always to think that she would have been respectable, if the Prince had behaved only tolerably by her at first. --"

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

And finally, in case anyone thinks Jane Austen as she got older was no longer in tune with having a villainess as heroine of an Austen story, just remember what JA wrote in her next to last surviving letter, in May 1817, to her old dear friend Anne Sharp, only months before JA's death (and Diana Parker in Sanditon, the novel JA began writing just before she died, also resembles Lady Susan in her exertion of influence on several people at once, like a circus juggler with ten dishes twirling atop ten poles):

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

"the influence of Strength over Weakness indeed"! That could very well be Lady Susan’s motto as well! I am thinking in particular about what Lady Susan writes to his bosom buddy Alicia Johnson about her current “mark”, Reginald de Courcy, that partakes of the same attitude: “He is lively & seems clever, & when I have inspired him with greater respect for me than his sister's kind offices have implanted, he may be an agreable Flirt. There is exquisite pleasure in subduing an insolent spirit, in making a person predetermined to dislike, acknowledge one's superiority. I have disconcerted him already by my calm reserve; & it shall be my endeavour to humble the Pride of these self-important De Courcies still lower, to convince M^rs . Vernon that her sisterly cautions have been bestowed in vain, & to persuade Reginald that she has scandalously belied me. This project will serve at least to amuse me, &prevent my feeling so acutely this dreadful separation from You & all whom I love. Adeiu. Yours Ever S. Vernon.”

And Jane Austen herself, from the time she first picked up a quill pen as a teenaged author, to the day she died when she was too sick to even hold a pen, and despite her being a woman with little money, managed to use the enormous strength of her mind to achieve true immortality, and give inspiration to countless women oppressed by the patriarchy, who've read her novels, and derived strength and inspiration to be strong despite gender-based obstacles still placed in their path. Austen was herself a rebel, who dared to satirize the greatest and most powerful in her novels, because she knew her own extraordinary psychological powers. Even Don Juan was of interest to her, as she wrote in 1814, a decade or more after she created Lady Susan: “I have seen nobody on the stage who has been a more interesting Character than that compound of Cruelty and Lust”.

Now here are links, with excerpts, from three excellent articles on Lady Susan I’ve collected recently:

First, a great review of the novella and film, with which I am in total agreement: http://kathmandupost.ekantipur.com/news/2016-07-16/true-and-false.html

“True and false” by Preena Shrestha,Jul 16, 2016

“…look closely, and you’ll realise that as much as [Austen] indulges in the frivolous trappings of that society, she is actually, with great subtlety, wit and flair, skewering them at the same time. These satirical jabs are never more evident than in her portrayals of the lives of women at a time when their desires and individualities were consistently suppressed by the rules of social decorum and the all-encompassing need to Find A Husband—constraints that her heroines were always quietly struggling against in some form or the other. In this regard, Austen was a woman beyond her time: her work wasn’t just a catalogue of the fashions and habits of her time, but more a dig into the human condition at large, into relationships and behaviours shaped by the competing forces of romance and pragmatism, self and society—universal themes all, and still relevant to this day. …there’s such a churning of emotional complexity and conflict under that shiny surface of propriety, and so much to be gleaned from not just what is said indirectly, but also what isn’t said at all.

…Over the course of [Love and Friendship], we watch as our heroine (or anti-heroine more like) expertly manipulates them, and others in the periphery, to carve out the most advantageous deal for herself, leaving behind the usual wreckage in her wake. You might not agree with everything Lady Susan says or does—she can be a selfish b***h of the first order at the best of times—but you also can’t help but marvel at how well she’s learned to navigate around the strictures placed on her by society. Options for women back then, widows even more so, were painfully limited after all, given that they generally could not inherit property and were discouraged from working—a premise that basically fueled six whole series of Downton Abbey—so that survival was contingent on making the right match. So while her power over men might not translate to power in the real sense, it’s satisfying to see that at least she’s not submitting quietly, and has no delusions about her situation. She uses what she has—her looks, her charms and that devious mind-to get what she wants, and there’s a certain delight in watching her bludgeon her way through the mores of such an oppressive society. She isn’t vain; she’s practical. The only time we ever glimpse any softness in Lady Susan would be when it comes to Mrs Johnson, as loyal and intimate a connection as could be; love and romance might have been brought down a couple of pegs in the film, but it doesn’t appear to have lost its faith in friendship.
…Love & Friendship is the sort of thing I can see myself going back to time and again over the years in the tradition of other Austen films. Speaking of the lady herself, would she approve of Stillman’s adaptation had she been here to see it? I like to think she’d have been laughing out loud.” END QUOTE

Shrestha’s comments about the “friendship” between Lady Susan and Mrs. Johnson made me wonder whether JA, in this “anti-romance”, in fact hid a genuine love affair in plain sight– one between these two naughty ladies, who remain faithful to each other, and, indeed, do all they can to be together!

Second, here’s a great, brief summary of the influence of Mary Wollstonecraft on Austen’s novella:

https://fee.org/articles/jane-austen-vindicates-the-rights-of-women/“Jane Austen Vindicates the Rights of Women” by Sarah Skwire June 2016

“JA’s Lady Susan is a wrecking ball in petticoats. JA's Lady Susan is a powerful adjunct to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women. The main character of the new film Love and Friendship, drawn from JA’s novella Lady Susan, is a widowed mother of a marriageable daughter. She is also widely known as “the most accomplished Coquette in England.” She has a married lover. She seduces wealthy young men who are courting eligible young women, including her own daughter. She tries to force her daughter into marriage with a young man who would take a blue ribbon in Monty Python’s “Upper Class Twit of the Year” competition. She lies. She runs out on her debts. She is thoroughly reprehensible. And she is enormous fun to watch….Love and Friendship and Lady Susan are antidotes to the limiting vision of JA as “quaint and darling, doe-eyed and demure, parochial if not pastoral, and dizzily, swooningly romantic,” as novelist Robert Rodi put it. But I’m not interested in Lady Susan just because she’s one of the great antiheroines of English literature — up there with Thackeray’s Becky Sharp and Trollope’s Lizzie Eustace. I’m not interested just because she highlights Austen’s often overlooked sharp intelligence and acerbic wit. I’m interested because I am persuaded that in her creation of Lady Susan, Austen was drawing heavily on the work of one of the great early classical liberal feminists — Mary Wollstonecraft.Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792. Austen, it seems likely, composed Lady Susan around 1793 or 1794. Austen scholars agree that she must have read Wollstonecraft’s work. But reading A Vindication and

Lady Susan together makes me think that Austen wasn’t just influenced by reading Wollstonecraft’s book; she seems to have used it as a template for the main character’s behavior. And that makes Lady Susan a lot more interesting. Wollstonecraft argues that the women of her time — and Austen’s time — were “weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and affections of their race, in a premature unnatural manner, [who] undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society.” Their corrupting influence, though, is not due to some sort of original sin handed down from Eve after the Garden of Eden. It is the result of the conscious and intentional educating of women out of natural virtue and into habituated weakness, dependence, and immorality. She continues: “Women are, in fact, so much degraded by mistaken notions of female excellence, that I do not mean to add a paradox when I assert, that this artificial weakness produces a propensity to tyrannize, and gives birth to cunning, the natural opponent of strength, which leads them to play off those contemptible infantine airs that undermine esteem even whilst they excite desire.” This is Lady Susan in a nutshell. Her tyrannical hold over her daughter’s future, her constant deceptions in matters large and small, and her pretended helplessness and innocence, which her male acquaintances interpret as charm — these are all hallmarks of her character. Even more apropos is Wollstonecraft’s description of women who have been educated in this fashion and who are then left, as is Lady Susan, widowed and with a family to care for: “But supposing, no very improbable conjecture, that a being only taught to please must still find her happiness in pleasing; — what an example of folly, not to say vice, will she be to her innocent daughters! The mother will be lost in the coquette, and, instead of making friends of her daughters, view them with eyes askance, for they are rivals — rivals more cruel than any other, for they invite a comparison, and drive her from the throne of beauty, who has never thought of a seat on the bench of reason.” Wollstonecraft adds that it doesn’t take a literary genius to imagine the “domestic miseries and petty vices” occasioned by such a mother.

A world without real education for women, a world without legal equality for women — this is a world that is rife with Lady Susans. But in Austen’s imagining of Lady Susan, we have precisely that — a literary genius turning her considerable talents (though in early days) to delineating a portrait of a woman who has become precisely what she has been educated to be. In that way, Lady Susan becomes a powerful adjunct to Wollstonecraft’s Vindication. A world without real education for women, a world without legal equality for women — this is a world that is rife with Lady Susans, grappling for power and money in the marriage market and in the gray market of sexual favors, because that is the only sphere open to women with ambition. While Austen’s and Wollstonecraft’s works are more than capable of standing on their own, taken together they provide a persuasive argument — philosophical and artistic — for the importance of women’s liberty and for the crippling effects of denying that liberty.”

And finally, for true wonks like me, here’s the first portion of a scholarly article that excavates the deeper scholarly roots of Austen’s Lady Susan: “Justice in Epistolary Matters: Revised Rights and Deconstructed Duties in Austen's Lady Susan” by Betsy Tontiplaphol in Persuasions Online #27 (2006) http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol27no1/tontiplaphol.htm

“Jane Austen’s Lady Susan has been called a plotter, a flirt, and a villain, but none of these designations effectively accounts for the peculiarities—her linguistic industriousness, distaste for motherhood, and chameleon-like adaptability, to name but a few—that render her characterization so memorable.

Brodie describes Lady Susan as a figure devoid of psychological depth; when measured against the “the psychological complexity of Anne Elliot,” Brodie argues, Susan represents “the stereotype of the Merry Widow”.

Anderson, in contrast, reads Austen’s anti-heroine as nothing but psychology. Lady Susan, Anderson maintains, is a psychopath, a diagnosis that she supports with evidence of “superficial charm, adequate intelligence, absence of anxiety, insincerity, lack of remorse or shame, antisocial behavior, and poor judgment”. What is Lady Susan? A stock character, a case study, or something else entirely?

As McKellar contends, her story “fits into the Austen canon no more neatly than Aesop’s bat fit in with the birds or with the beasts”, but such an observation, however fair, does little to resolve the myriad conflicts that face the reader struggling to decipher Susan’s—or, for that matter, Austen’s—motives and objectives.

It is strangely easy to overlook the fact that Lady Susan is, at a fundamental level, a trial novel, trial

not only in the sense of “attempt” but trial also in the significant judicial sense. The book is one of Austen’s early attempts at epistolary fiction; perhaps more important, however, is the fact that LS has at its center a woman on trial, a figure whose motives and actions are presented to and scrutinized by a jury composed of characters, readers, and ultimately a narrator. Susan’s stated goal to have Reginald “doubt the justice of” his sister’s opinion and Mrs. Vernon’s complaint that Susan has “persuaded [Reginald] not merely to forget, but to justify her conduct” are only two of many instances in which the legal-contractual language of justice surfaces in Austen’s rhetoric. Indeed, careful attention to LS’s writing and behavior reveals her to be less a criminal than a would-be legislator. Her abiding interest in her own rights and duties—and her obsession with manipulating the assumptions and language that define and distribute them—locates her within a theoretical tradition that ranges from John Locke to Mary WOLLSTONECRAFT and beyond. …”

So, now go see Stillman’s film with all these thoughts in your mind, and I hope it will leave you less puzzled and/or disturbed, and even more entertained, by Austen’s subversive, way-ahead-of-its-time feminist genius, and Stillman’s remarkably fine and faithful adaptation thereof.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

In the following three posts in late 2014….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/11/does-lizzy-wrongly-rationalize-not.html
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/12/lizzy-bennet-selfish-being-who-never.html
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/12/prudence-forbad-disclosure-is-undercut.html

…I first made the case for Elizabeth Bennet having been clueless about her own unconsciously selfish failure to tell sister Jane that Darcy had intentionally interfered in Bingley’s courtship of Jane. She apparently wanted a husband for herself more than she wanted one for Jane, and she behaved as if this was a zero sum game of love, in which only one of the two eldest Bennet sisters was going to get a rich husband who loved her, and Eliza wanted it to be herself.

The other day, prompted by a post by Diana Birchall about Caroline Bingley’s intense of jealousy of Elizabeth, I broadened my 2014 claims about Elizabeth’s selfishness vis a vis Jane, by adding the other side of the coin of her selfishness: i.e., her equally unconscious, strong jealousy of her sister Jane.

Jealousy of what? First of all, jealousy of Jane having Bingley fall in love with her, while Eliza was enduring the double whammy of (1) getting jilted by Wickham, plus (2) receiving mixed romantic signals from Darcy. That situational jealousy, combined with her aforesaid selfishness, led Eliza to not lift a finger at any point when she had chances, in order to undo Darcy’s meddling, and to try to bring Jane and Bingley back together again.

But behind that cocktail of selfishness and short-term jealousy, I now also see far deeper roots of Elizabeth’s jealousy, based on years of having to hear how extraordinarily beautiful her elder sister was, a cocktail so potent that it could account for Eliza’s clueless neglect of Jane’s happiness.

In 2016, it’s easy to forget how much the bright light of Jane’s great beauty in the novel casts Eliza’s less brilliant beauty in the shade. This is especially so for modern re-readers of P&P who’ve come to know by heart each of the romantic scenes in which we hear about Darcy’s obsession with Elizabeth’s fine dark eyes---even though it’s an obsession which no member of the Bennet family ever knows about. And it’s even more the case for modern devotees of the many film adaptations of P&P, who must try to glimpse the true Eliza of the novel obscured behind the vivid images of gorgeous screen Elizabeths from Greer Garson to Elizabeth Garvie to Jennifer Ehle to Keira Knightley to Lily James.

With all that, it’s easy to forget that in the novel text, the Bennet girl who gets the most and the strongest praise for her beauty---and nearly always in Elizabeth’s presence---isn’t Eliza, it’s Jane. We all know about this ancient pattern in families with sisters, which has repeated itself down through the ages in the stories and fairy tales of many cultures and eras: mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?

The only Austen scholar I can find other than myself to have considered this beauty issue at all vis a vis P&P is Stephanie Eddleman, who, in the 2009 Persuasions Online, #30, wrote the following in her article “ ‘Not half so handsome as Jane’: Sisters, Brothers, and Beauty in the Novels of Jane Austen“:

“…the labeling of sisters according to attractiveness causes pain. In Austen’s families this labeling is often done by a parent, quite likely within the hearing of the children being labeled…In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s own mother declares that she is “‘not half so handsome as Jane’”, and throughout the novel Mrs. Bennet repeatedly affirms Jane’s position as the most beautiful of the sisters. Although these mothers are quite likely worried about the marriageability of their eldest daughters and therefore further motivated to elevate their beauty, the repeated rankings must have some effect on the self esteem of their younger daughters...Female beauty was even more necessary and valued in Austen’s culture…”

Eddleman’s article, although replete with psychological insights like the above passage, skips past P&P too quickly to notice the crucial implications of her own acute observation that “the repeated rankings must have some effect on the self esteem of their younger daughters.” I’m not just talking about Mary Bennet, as to whom the narrator makes this point explicitly at the very end of the novel: “…she was no longer mortified by comparisons between her sisters' beauty and her own…”

No, I’m talking about the jealousy of Jane I believe Eliza must’ve struggled with all the years (no less than seven) of growing up as the beautiful, angelic, lovely Jane’s “tolerable, not handsome enough” sister, whose face was only rendered attractive to Darcy by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. It would require an extraordinary level of self-confidence for a young woman like Elizabeth to endure such chronic mortification, and not eventually be overtaken by a powerful jealousy of her elder sister, regardless of how much Eliza loved Jane. I.e., I detect, behind Eliza’s mask of witty bravado, the tears of a very sad clown.

Think I’m exaggerating things? For the remainder of this post, I’m going to try to counteract that forgetting, by presenting to you every passage in the text of P&P in which Eliza must endure hearing about Jane’s superior beauty. As you read them, put yourself in Elizabeth’s ears, and ask yourself why we do not even once do we hear her consciously express, either aloud or to herself, distress or irritation at this state of affairs.

What this tells me is not that Eliza wasn’t suffering, but that, in the dynamics of the Bennet family, there was simply no room for Eliza to even allow herself to think, let alone complain out loud, about the unfairness of this relentless drumbeat of Jane’s greater beauty favoritism. While her father never misses a chance to praise her wit---and that’s certainly a great thing, don’t get me wrong—he is not one to praise her looks. And don’t you think Elizabeth, who is after all, a girl of not one-and-twenty, has long since gotten really, really tired of being admired only for her mind?

Now read all these passages through that lens and tell me if the teenaged you could have avoided the terrible allure of poisonous jealousy, even of a beloved elder sister:

Ch. 1: "But consider your daughters. Only think what an establishment it would be for one of them. Sir William and Lady Lucas are determined to go, merely on that account, for in general, you know, they visit no newcomers. Indeed you must go, for it will be impossible for us to visit him if you do not."

"You are over-scrupulous, surely. I dare say Mr. Bingley will be very glad to see you; and I will send a few lines by you to assure him of my hearty consent to his marrying whichever he chooses of the girls; though I must throw in a good word for my little Lizzy."

"I desire you will do no such thing. Lizzy is not a bit better than the others; and I am sure she is not half so handsome as Jane, nor half so good-humoured as Lydia. But you are always giving her the preference."

Ch. 3: "You are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room," said Mr. Darcy, looking at the eldest Miss Bennet.

"Oh! She is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! But there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is very pretty, and I dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my partner to introduce you."

"Which do you mean?" and turning round he looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said: "She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me."

Mr. Bingley followed his advice. Mr. Darcy walked off; and Elizabeth remained with no very cordial feelings toward him. She told the story, however, with great spirit among her friends; for she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous.

…."Oh! my dear Mr. Bennet," as she entered the room, "we have had a most delightful evening, a most excellent ball. I wish you had been there. Jane was so admired, nothing could be like it. Everybody said how well she looked; and Mr. Bingley thought her quite beautiful, and danced with her twice! Only think of that, my dear; he actually danced with her twice! and she was the only creature in the room that he asked a second time. First of all, he asked Miss Lucas. I was so vexed to see him stand up with her! But, however, he did not admire her at all; indeed, nobody can, you know; and he seemed quite struck with Jane as she was going down the dance. So he inquired who she was, and got introduced, and asked her for the two next. Then the two third he danced with Miss King, and the two fourth with Maria Lucas, and the two fifth with Jane again, and the two sixth with Lizzy, and the Boulanger—"

… "But I can assure you," she added, "that Lizzy does not lose much by not suiting his fancy; for he is a most disagreeable, horrid man, not at all worth pleasing. So high and so conceited that there was no enduring him! He walked here, and he walked there, fancying himself so very great! Not handsome enough to dance with! I wish you had been there, my dear, to have given him one of your set-downs. I quite detest the man."

Ch. 4: [Jane] "I was very much flattered by his asking me to dance a second time. I did not expect such a compliment."

"Did not you? I did for you. But that is one great difference between us. Compliments always take you

by surprise, and me never. What could be more natural than his asking you again? He could not help seeing that you were about five times as pretty as every other woman in the room. No thanks to his gallantry for that….”

…The manner in which they spoke of the Meryton assembly was sufficiently characteristic. Bingley had never met with more pleasant people or prettier girls in his life; everybody had been most kind and attentive to him; there had been no formality, no stiffness; he had soon felt acquainted with all the room; and, as to Miss Bennet, he could not conceive an angel more beautiful. Darcy, on the contrary, had seen a collection of people in whom there was little beauty and no fashion, for none of whom he had felt the smallest interest, and from none received either attention or pleasure. Miss Bennet he acknowledged to be pretty, but she smiled too much.

Ch. 5: "Perhaps you mean what I overheard between him and Mr. Robinson; did not I mention it to you? Mr. Robinson's asking him how he liked our Meryton assemblies, and whether he did not think there were a great many pretty women in the room, and which he thought the prettiest? and his answering immediately to the last question: 'Oh! the eldest Miss Bennet, beyond a doubt; there cannot be two opinions on that point.'"

Ch. 8: When dinner was over, [Eliza] returned directly to Jane, and Miss Bingley began abusing her as soon as she was out of the room. Her manners were pronounced to be very bad indeed, a mixture of pride and impertinence; she had no conversation, no style, no beauty. Mrs. Hurst thought the same, and added: "She has nothing, in short, to recommend her, but being an excellent walker. I shall never forget her appearance this morning. She really looked almost wild."

Ch. 9: "Oh! dear, yes; but you must own [Charlotte] 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."

"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.

"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;

Ch. 15: His plan did not vary on seeing them. Miss Bennet's lovely face confirmed his views, and established all his strictest notions of what was due to seniority; and for the first evening she was his settled choice.

…Mr. Collins had only to change from Jane to Elizabeth—and it was soon done—done while Mrs. Bennet was stirring the fire. Elizabeth, equally next to Jane in birth and beauty, succeeded her of course.

Ch. 25: When alone with Elizabeth afterwards, she spoke more on the subject. "It seems likely to have been a desirable match for Jane," said she. "I am sorry it went off. But these things happen so often! A young man, such as you describe Mr. Bingley, so easily falls in love with a pretty girl for a few weeks, and when accident separates them, so easily forgets her, that these sort of inconsistencies are very frequent."

27: It was a journey of only twenty-four miles, and they began it so early as to be in Gracechurch Street by noon. As they drove to Mr. Gardiner's door, Jane was at a drawing-room window watching their arrival; when they entered the passage she was there to welcome them, and Elizabeth, looking earnestly in her face, was pleased to see it healthful and lovely as ever.

Ch. 33: "To Jane herself," [Eliza] exclaimed, "there could be no possibility of objection; all loveliness and goodness as she is!—her understanding excellent, her mind improved, and her manners captivating. Neither could anything be urged against my father, who, though with some peculiarities, has abilities Mr. Darcy himself need not disdain, and respectability which he will probably never reach."

Ch. 39: Their reception at home was most kind. Mrs. Bennet rejoiced to see Jane in undiminished beauty; and more than once during dinner did Mr. Bennet say voluntarily to Elizabeth: "I am glad you are come back, Lizzy."

Ch. 53: Elizabeth's misery increased, at such unnecessary, such officious attention! Were the same fair prospect to arise at present as had flattered them a year ago, every thing, she was persuaded, would be hastening to the same vexatious conclusion. At that instant, she felt that years of happiness could not make Jane or herself amends for moments of such painful confusion.

"The first wish of my heart," said she to herself, "is never more to be in company with either of them. Their society can afford no pleasure that will atone for such wretchedness as this! Let me never see either one or the other again!"

Yet the misery, for which years of happiness were to offer no compensation, received soon afterwards material relief, from observing how much the beauty of her sister re-kindled the admiration of her former lover. When first he came in, he had spoken to her but little; but every five minutes seemed to be giving her more of his attention. He found her as handsome as she had been last year; as good natured, and as unaffected, though not quite so chatty. Jane was anxious that no difference should be perceived in her at all, and was really persuaded that she talked as much as ever. But her mind was so busily engaged, that she did not always know when she was silent.

Ch. 54: “…And, my dear Jane, I never saw you look in greater beauty. Mrs. Long said so too, for I asked her whether you did not. And what do you think she said besides? 'Ah! Mrs. Bennet, we shall have her at Netherfield at last.' She did indeed….”

Ch. 55: Then addressing her daughter, "Oh! my dear, dear Jane, I am so happy! I am sure I shan't get a wink of sleep all night. I knew how it would be. I always said it must be so, at last. I was sure you could not be so beautiful for nothing! I remember, as soon as ever I saw him, when he first came into Hertfordshire last year, I thought how likely it was that you should come together. Oh! he is the handsomest young man that ever was seen!"

Wickham, Lydia, were all forgotten. Jane was beyond competition her favourite child. At that moment, she cared for no other.

… 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. Mrs. Bennet could not give her consent or speak her approbation in terms warm enough to satisfy her feelings, though she talked to Bingley of nothing else for half an hour; and when Mr. Bennet joined them at supper, his voice and manner plainly showed how really happy he was.

Ch. 61: Mary was the only daughter who remained at home; and she was necessarily drawn from the pursuit of accomplishments by Mrs. Bennet's being quite unable to sit alone. Mary was obliged to mix more with the world, but she could still moralize over every morning visit; and as she was no longer mortified by comparisons between her sisters' beauty and her own, it was suspected by her father that she submitted to the change without much reluctance.

So now you know why I am convinced that Elizabeth was indeed mortified by comparisons between Jane’s beauty and her own, a jealous mortification, which, when combined with the selfish motive of not wanting to upset Darcy, led her to take a terrible risk with Jane’s happiness with Bingley, only (ironically) to have Darcy cover her tracks and right his own wrong without any help from Eliza.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Last night at the 2016 Republican Convention, Donald Trump’s old friend Tom Barrack gave a stirring personal testimonial to The Donald’s character, as a key leadup to Trump’s own acceptance speech. Here’s a transcription of key sections of Barrack’s 13-minute Rhapsody in Trump:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRhBLl6q-Jg Donald Trump has been one of my closest friends for 40 years...I’m the son of a very humble Lebanese grocer from Culver City California...for me to be here tonight to talk about my friend, my partner, and the future president of the United States, Donald Trump…I have nothing negative to say about Hillary I have only amazing things to tell you about Donald. He's tough enough, smart enough, and he's well-versed enough to do it on his own merits….I’m talking to you about...the man without his armor, without his weaponry…what is he made out of... You've all had the great opportunity to see his kids over the last couple days what do you think of that? …my mother used to say you learn what a man is by listening to your mother, but you learn how to be a man by watching your father. You watch this man, you get it. Those of us who are married or have a partner understand that the best reflection on us is our wives…in Donald's case for sure it's his wife Melania….and her grace under pressure.

…I’m going to use words that you probably haven't heard about him…I had the great fortune of working for Robert Bass in Fort Worth Texas in the 80s. We bought a company which, in addition to lots of other things, happened to own the hotel that was right behind Donald's window at his office. Well, you know Donald well enough by now to know that he neededthat hotel. I was a young pup, he was a big giant in New York real estate at the time…I'm scared to death because my boss is going to fire me for selling to Donald, who is smarter & better, and who will end up getting a much better deal. In the midst of this, Donald did something I’d never seen before…He said ”I want to do this, but I don't know what I should know. So I will pay your boss the price that he wants and I'll close it in one week on one condition: that you tell me everything I should know that I don't know…I'm not doing a contract, you and I shake hands right here, you just tell me the things that I should know how to fix it and I'll do this deal”…. He played me like a Steinway piano…He was incredible.

He practices an unbelievable set of disciplines. Everybody says OK that the man is rich…how does he do it? He is relentless and something beautiful happens. He shows up on time, he believes punctuality is the courtesy of kings. He pushes everybody, including you, to go over barriers that I never thought that they could ever ever shatter. He does all this with the discipline of an animal in the jungle. His motto is if a lion wakes up every morning and knows one thing, that it has to run faster than the fastest gazelle. And that gazelle knows something, she knows that she needs run faster than the fastest lion. Whether a gazelle or a lion, when you wake up in the morning, you get the hell going.
…I want to share with you two stories that really stuck in my mind…I'm telling you after 35 years of being with a man through the valleys in the mountains he really is better than the billing that you see--
as an administrator, as an executive, as a guy who can actually take care of the people he works with… It was 1989…it was a Tyson fight, it was big and Atlantic City, and he calls me and says, OK let's go... I said I had with my little sons with me. He said no problem I'll bring Johnny…we hop in the Trump helicopter, fly to Atlantic City. When we land, 1,000 paparazzi, 1,000 people everywhere. We go in his limo, go to the front of the convention center and there's 10,000 cameras….we start walking in, people harassing him like mad. At the side of the door there's a little nondescript man and he calls out to Donald. He walks over to the door, and he says, “I'm so happy to see you and thank you for what you done for my boys and thank you for what you do for me and I just want you know that my critically ill son thinks you’re the greatest man in the world.”
Well everything is going crazy to get to the fight, but Donald he's focused on this man who at that moment thought that he was the only star in Donald’s universe. He said, “Louie, I'm not the greatest man in the world, you are.” So we take the kids, and it's five minutes into the fight, and Donald is fidgeting. I can't figure what happened, I said what's wrong, he said give me your program, he wrote something, and calls the security guards over and sends it back to the guy. I asked, what was that you said, I just want to know what the note said. He wrote, “Louie, I came here tonight to see 2 champions, Mike Tyson and your dad. “ True story. In the middle of his celebrityship, he has the presence to focus on the littlest guy in the shop. And that is Donald Trump.

10 years later the greatest man in Donald's life passed away, Fred Trump. The funeral was being held, he calls me, says I'm going to go over early, come over, I said fine. We’re sitting, two middle-age guys thinking about when your father leaves, what's the difference between relevancy and mortality… we are really questioning what's important and what's not important. It's not about money, it's not about power. ….And all the agony that you have with your father at that instant just evaporates.…I said how do you feel? He said, “I'm thankful that I have my dad’s strength and my mom’s sensitivity and all I want to do is leave a legacy of the Trump name that they build, brick by brick, a little bit better than I found it.” He's done it.
The world is a mess, this necklace of globalism that we talk about has crumbled and shattered into 1000 shards, we need a jeweler to take those jewels one by one starting with America its diamond, and polish it, and put it back together….We’ve been on an adventure, and people say wow Donald, it's like a fairy tale from businessman to celebrity to father to potential president of United States. And I say to you, it is a tale. But it's up to you…to make once upon a time once upon this time. Thank you.”

Powerful stuff, right? As much as I’m appalled, daily, by Trump’s candidacy, and his frightening ability to stay close in the polls despite (or because of) his daily gaffes, lies, and excesses, I had to acknowledge that Barrack’s testimonial sounded really good. I had to work to remind myself, more than once, that just because a gifted motivational speaker is skilled at humanizing even a moral monster, it doesn’t prove his vignettes were true. We’re all vulnerable to persuasion by talented orators and writers --it’s hard wired into our deeply social human genetic inheritance to believe a simple, “sincere” version of a complicated reality, and it’s hard to hear, and read, against that “natural” grain.

I say all of this because what immediately came to my mind’s eye as I listened to Barrack’s paean to Trump, was the imposing profile of Mr. Darcy in Pride & Prejudice---who, during the first 42 chapters of the novel, gives every evidence of being exactly the same sort of narcissistic, selfish, super-rich, status-obsessed (i.e., Trumpian) jerk he seems to be upon his arrival at the Meryton assembly:

“[Bingley’s] friend Mr. Darcy soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien, and the report which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year. The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud; to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend….What a contrast between [Bingley] and his friend!...His character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world, and everybody hoped that he would never come there again. Amongst the most violent against him was Mrs. Bennet, whose dislike of his general behaviour was sharpened into particular resentment by his having slighted one of her daughters…”

Those who know the story of P&P well do not need me to recount the dozens of ways, in the first 42 chapters, that Darcy behaves and speaks, providing confirmation of such very negative universal first impression of him. Most of all we have his over-the-top narcissistic, insulting first proposal of marriage to the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet: http://www.pemberley.com/etext/PandP/chapter34.htm

Barrack’s speech about Trump specifically brought Darcy to my mind, however, because of the uncanny and disturbing resonance of his political testimonial to the following passage in Chapter 43 of Pride & Prejudice, in which we observe, firsthand, the conversion experience of Elizabeth and the Gardiners. This “miracle” is crucially enabled by the compelling, salt-of-the-earth testimonial to the excellence of the “real” character of Mr. Darcy, given by a seemingly unimpeachable “witness”, claiming to have known his true character since he was a child. As you read along, substitute “Pemberley” with “Trump Tower”, “the housekeeper Mrs. Reynolds” with “Tom Barrack”, and “Georgiana, Darcy’s ward & accomplished younger sister” with “Trump’s accomplished children”, and see if the parallels don’t give you shivers:

“The housekeeper came; a respectable-looking elderly woman, much less fine, and more civil, than she had any notion of finding her. They followed her into the dining-parlour. It was a large, well proportioned room, handsomely fitted up. Elizabeth, after slightly surveying it, went to a window to enjoy its prospect. The hill, crowned with wood, which they had descended, receiving increased abruptness from the distance, was a beautiful object. Every disposition of the ground was good; and she looked on the whole scene, the river, the trees scattered on its banks and the winding of the valley, as far as she could trace it, with delight. As they passed into other rooms these objects were taking different positions; but from every window there were beauties to be seen. The rooms were lofty and handsome, and their furniture suitable to the fortune of its proprietor; but Elizabeth saw, with admiration of his taste, that it was neither gaudy nor uselessly fine; with less of splendour, and more real elegance, than the furniture of Rosings.

"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, and welcomed to them as visitors my uncle and aunt. But no,"—recollecting herself—"that could never be; my uncle and aunt would have been lost to me; I should not have been allowed to invite them."

This was a lucky recollection—it saved her from something very like regret. She longed to inquire of the housekeeper whether her master was really absent, but had not the courage for it. At length however, the question was asked by her uncle; and she turned away with alarm, while Mrs. Reynolds replied that he was, adding, ‘But we expect him to-morrow, with a large party of friends.’ How rejoiced was Elizabeth that their own journey had not by any circumstance been delayed a day!

Her aunt now called her to look at a picture. She approached and saw the likeness of Mr. Wickham, suspended, amongst several other miniatures, over the mantelpiece. Her aunt asked her, smilingly, how she liked it. The housekeeper came forward, and told them it was a picture of a young gentleman, the son of her late master's steward, who had been brought up by him at his own expense. "He is now gone into the army," she added; "but I am afraid he has turned out very wild."

Mrs. Gardiner looked at her niece with a smile, but Elizabeth could not return it.

"And that," said Mrs. Reynolds, pointing to another of the miniatures, "is my master—and very like him. It was drawn at the same time as the other—about eight years ago."

"I have heard much of your master's fine person," said Mrs. Gardiner, looking at the picture; "it is a handsome face. But, Lizzy, you can tell us whether it is like or not."

Mrs. Reynolds respect for Elizabeth seemed to increase on this intimation of her knowing her master.

"Does that young lady know Mr. Darcy?"

Elizabeth coloured, and said: "A little."

"And do not you think him a very handsome gentleman, ma'am?"

"Yes, very handsome."

"I am sure I know none so handsome; but in the gallery up stairs you will see a finer, larger picture of him than this. This room was my late master's favourite room, and these miniatures are just as they used to be then. He was very fond of them."

This accounted to Elizabeth for Mr. Wickham's being among them.

Mrs. Reynolds then directed their attention to one of Miss Darcy, drawn when she was only eight years old.

"And is Miss Darcy as handsome as her brother?" said Mrs. Gardiner.

"Oh! yes—the handsomest young lady that ever was seen; and so accomplished!—She plays and sings all day long. In the next room is a new instrument just come down for her—a present from my master; she comes here to-morrow with him."

Mr. Gardiner, whose manners were very easy and pleasant, encouraged her communicativeness by his questions and remarks; Mrs. Reynolds, either by pride or attachment, had evidently great pleasure in talking of her master and his sister.

"Is your master much at Pemberley in the course of the year?"

"Not so much as I could wish, sir; but I dare say he may spend half his time here; and Miss Darcy is always down for the summer months."

"Except," thought Elizabeth, "when she goes to Ramsgate."

"If your master would marry, you might see more of him."

"Yes, sir; but I do not know when that will be. I do not know who is good enough for him."

Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner smiled. Elizabeth could not help saying, "It is very much to his credit, I am sure, that you should think so."

"I say no more than the truth, and everybody will say that knows him," replied the other. Elizabeth thought this was going pretty far; and she listened with increasing astonishment as the housekeeper added, "I have never known a cross word from him in my life, and I have known him ever since he was four years old."

This was praise, of all others most extraordinary, most opposite to her ideas. That he was not a good-tempered man had been her firmest opinion. Her keenest attention was awakened; she longed to hear more, and was grateful to her uncle for saying:

"There are very few people of whom so much can be said. You are lucky in having such a master."

"Yes, sir, I know I am. If I were to go through the world, I could not meet with a better. But I have always observed, that they who are good-natured when children, are good-natured when they grow up; and he was always the sweetest-tempered, most generous-hearted boy in the world."

Elizabeth almost stared at her. "Can this be Mr. Darcy?" thought she.

"His father was an excellent man," said Mrs. Gardiner.

"Yes, ma'am, that he was indeed; and his son will be just like him—just as affable to the poor."

Elizabeth listened, wondered, doubted, and was impatient for more. Mrs. Reynolds could interest her on no other point. She related the subjects of the pictures, the dimensions of the rooms, and the price of the furniture, in vain. Mr. Gardiner, highly amused by the kind of family prejudice to which he attributed her excessive commendation of her master, soon led again to the subject; and she dwelt with energy on his many merits as they proceeded together up the great staircase.

"He is the best landlord, and the best master," said she, "that ever lived; not like the wild young men nowadays, who think of nothing but themselves. There is not one of his tenants or servants but will give him a good name. Some people call him proud; but I am sure I never saw anything of it. To my fancy, it is only because he does not rattle away like other young men."

"In what an amiable light does this place him!" thought Elizabeth.

"This fine account of him," whispered her aunt as they walked, "is not quite consistent with his behaviour to our poor friend."

"Perhaps we might be deceived."

"That is not very likely; our authority was too good."

On reaching the spacious lobby above they were shown into a very pretty sitting-room, lately fitted up with greater elegance and lightness than the apartments below; and were informed that it was but just done to give pleasure to Miss Darcy, who had taken a liking to the room when last at Pemberley.

"He is certainly a good brother," said Elizabeth, as she walked towards one of the windows.

Mrs. Reynolds anticipated Miss Darcy's delight, when she should enter the room. "And this is always the way with him," she added. "Whatever can give his sister any pleasure is sure to be done in a moment. There is nothing he would not do for her."

The picture-gallery, and two or three of the principal bedrooms, were all that remained to be shown. In the former were many good paintings; but Elizabeth knew nothing of the art; and from such as had been already visible below, she had willingly turned to look at some drawings of Miss Darcy's, in crayons, whose subjects were usually more interesting, and also more intelligible.

In the gallery there were many family portraits, but they could have little to fix the attention of a stranger. Elizabeth walked in quest of the only face whose features would be known to her. At last it arrested her—and she beheld a striking resemblance to Mr. Darcy, with such a smile over the face as she remembered to have sometimes seen when he looked at her. She stood several minutes before the picture, in earnest contemplation, and returned to it again before they quitted the gallery. Mrs. Reynolds informed them that it had been taken in his father's lifetime.

There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth's mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original than she had ever felt at the height of their acquaintance. The commendation bestowed on him by Mrs. Reynolds was of no trifling nature. What praise is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant? 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! Every idea that had been brought forward by the housekeeper was favourable to his character, 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.

When all of the house that was open to general inspection had been seen, they returned downstairs, and, taking leave of the housekeeper, were consigned over to the gardener, who met them at the hall-door.” END QUOTE

But those of you who know Pride & Prejudice are now objecting, “Hey, Mrs. Reynolds was telling the truth about Mr. Darcy being a really good man, who has been unfairly misjudged to be a bad man.” And my reply, which will be familiar to those who know my theory of Jane Austen’s six novels (including Pride & Prejudice) as being double stories, is this: (1) in the overt story of P&P which is familiar to all, Darcy is indeed a good man who is sincere in his loving motivation for repairing damage to the Bennet family caused by his earlier behavior-which makes P&P one of literature’s greatest love stories. But (2) in the cautionary shadow story of P&P which I’ve been “excavating” during the past decade, Mr. Darcy is in fact and indeed every bit the dreadfully narcissistic jerk he seems to be at first, and he only pretends to reform and repent, because he is, like Donald Trump, the kind of man who just can’t take “No” for an answer, especially when that answer has been given to him by a woman who dares to challenge his “droit du seigneur” as a Master of the Universe to have whatever—and whomever—he wants.

So, please, don’t be taken in by Tom Barrack, and recognize that two centuries ago, Jane Austen was very familiar with the dangers posed by powerful men who offer us a feeling of security and status, who have the resources and influence to be able to deploy “honest” surrogates who “prove” to us that their “masters” are really good men. She satirized the dissolute Prince Regent as the “Prince of Whales” in Emma, and my more recent research has shown that the character of Darcy is based on disturbingly dark models like King Henry VIII, Fielding’s Blifil, and the Marquis de Gange.Janeites thinks Mr. Bennet is just being ironical, when he says the following to beloved daughter Elizabeth when she asks him for his consent to her accepting Darcy’s second proposal, but now you know better:

"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."

America, let us not have the grief (and grave danger) of seeing us, after January 2017, unable to respect our President. Don’t drink the tasty Kool-Aid offered by snake oil salesmen likeTom Barrack; dare to refuse Donald Trump the most powerful office in the world.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

For a century, the deeper meaning of the heroine’s strange name “Undine Spragg” has intrigued readers of Edith Wharton’s 1913 late masterpiece The Custom of the Country (as to which, by the way, the first and eagerly anticipated film adaptation, to star Scarlett Johansson, has been in development since late 2014). That curiosity was surely first sparked by the following salient and suggestive passage early (in Chapter 6) in Custom, in which Undine’s mother explains the origin of her daughter’s odd name:

“Mrs. Spragg, once reconciled-or at least resigned-to the mysterious necessity of having to "entertain" a friend of Undine's, had yielded to the first touch on the weak springs of her garrulity. She had not seen Mrs. Heeny for two days, and this friendly young man with the gentle manner was almost as easy to talk to as the masseuse. And then she could tell him things that Mrs. Heeny already knew, and Mrs. Spragg liked to repeat her stories. To do so gave her almost her sole sense of permanence among the shifting scenes of life. So that, after she had lengthily deplored the untoward accident of Undine's absence, and her visitor, with a smile, and echoes of divers et ondoyant in his brain, had repeated her daughter's name after her, saying: "It's a wonderful find—how could you tell it would be such a fit?"-it came to her quite easily to answer: "Why, we called her after a hair-waver father put on the market the week she was born—" and then to explain, as he remained struck and silent: "It's from UNdoolay, you know, the French for crimping; father always thought the name made it take. He was quite a scholar, and had the greatest knack for finding names. I remember the time he invented his Goliath Glue he sat up all night over the Bible to get the name…“

As an prelude to my own explanation of Wharton’s choice of the name “Undine Spragg”, which I’ve hinted at in my Subject Line, and which I’ll reveal, below, here are three insightful explanations of Wharton’s choice, which collectively pick up on several of Wharton’s subtle literary hints:

https://interpolations.wordpress.com/2010/11/15/an-undine-by-any-other-name/

“An Undine by Any Other Name?” by Kevin Nelson

“According to the Wikipedia entry on The Custom of the Country, some have called Undine Spragg’s name “the worst character name [ever] conceived...It’s an ugly, dreadful name. But that doesn’t subtract from its consummate perfection. Undine’s parents, however, aren’t likely to agree with me. [The above ‘greatest knack’ quotation] This is a stroke of genius by Wharton. The name Undine, then, stands as much for a product with a market value as it does the elegant curl or wave that a fashion-conscious social diva might impart to her hair. Not to mention a preoccupation for all things French.

Now interestingly, Undine’s second husband, Ralph Marvell, a shy, reserved, and intelligent man with a deeply poetic cast of mind, sees something slightly different than the Spragg’s in Undine’s name. He and his wife are on their honeymoon in Italy, and the fact that they’re a terrific mismatch hasn’t occurred to Ralph yet:

“He spoke in the bantering tone which had become the habitual expression of his tenderness; but his eyes softened as they absorbed in a last glance the glimmering submarine light of the ancient grove, through which Undine’s figure wavered nereid-like above him. “You never looked your name more than you do now,” he said, kneeling at her side and putting his arm about her. She smiled back a little vaguely, as if not seizing his allusion, and being content to let it drop into the store of unexplained references which had once stimulated her curiosity but now merely gave her leisure to think of other things.”

In Greek legend, a nereid is a sea nymph, and even more pertinently in European mythology, an ondine (or undine) is a water spirit that becomes ensouled through marriage and child birth. So we have the wavering insubstantiality of a beautiful nereid who has so little depth that she’s not even shallow, as Nietzsche might say. And we have Undine’s quest to become something significant and worthwhile through serial monogamist marriages. Undine Spragg may be an ugly guttural choke of a name. But it’s perfectly conceived.” END QUOTE FROM NELSON

http://agirlwalksintoabookstore.blogspot.com/2012/09/review-customs-of-country-by-edith.html

“Review of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country” 9/26/12 by blogger Katherine ___

“…I was intrigued by the author's choice of the name Undine for her protagonist. An undine is a water spirit, said to gain a soul by marrying and having a child. So you might easily see the connection between the mythological creature and Undine Spragg and the hope that Wharton might have had for her main character as she created her. There's also the German folktale of Ondine, in which a woman curses her unfaithful husband to cease breathing. Shoe-on-the-other-foot syndrome, maybe? You get the sense that Edith Wharton was not only fascinated with the monster she created, but repelled by her actions at the same time. As such, the reader doesn’t quite know whether to dislike Undine or laugh at her, because half the time her antics are really quite ridiculous. At the end of the day, though, the reader has to wonder: what’s all of this social striving for? To what end? That’s why this novel is sometimes tinged with a hint of sadness.” END QUOTE FROM KATHERINE

https://sarahemsley.com/2013/07/18/the-greatest-knack-for-finding-names/

“The greatest knack for finding names” by Sarah Emsley 7/18/13

“In a wonderful conversation between Undine Spragg’s future husband Ralph Marvell and her mother, Mrs. Spragg, Ralph learns the source of Undine’s beautiful first name. He has been thinking of her as a water-spirit, hearing “echoes of divers et ondoyant in his brain” (the quotation is from Montaigne’s

Essays, and in the 19th Century the story of Undine the water-spirit was retold in a book by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, and later in two operas, with music by E.T.A. Hoffman & Albert Lortzing). But when he says the name is “‘a wonderful find’” and asks, “‘how could you tell it would be such a fit?’” Mrs. Spragg disappoints him with her explanation: “‘Why, we called her after a hair-waver father put on the market the week she was born.’” Undine is named for a product, a brand. Ralph is “struck and silent.” No literary reference is intended, though Mrs. Spragg claims her husband is “‘quite a scholar’”—the name is “‘from undoolay, you know, the French for crimping,’” she adds.

What Mrs. Spragg says of her husband is true of Edith Wharton as well: both have “‘the greatest knack for finding names.’” I love the name Wharton chose for the heroine of this novel: “Undine Spragg” is such a great combination of beautiful and harsh sounds (much like “Lily Bart” in The House of Mirth). It’s no coincidence that her initials, U.S., also stand for “United States.” Neither is it a coincidence that she’s from a place called Apex, which makes her “U.S. of A.”…For further reading: Undine, or, the Water Spirit; and Sintram and his Companions, by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, trans. Thomas Tracy (1855). (There are also excerpts from Undine, or, the Water Spirit in the appendices in my Broadview edition of The Custom of the Country).” END QUOTE FROM EMSLEY

I was led to retrieve from the Internet the above three explanations by my realization yesterday, while delving into Wharton’s Custom for another reason entirely, that there was something very suspicious in that peculiar name “Undine Spragg”, something smacking of a word code. I’m particularly sensitive to coded wordplay in character names, because of over a decade of experience decoding Jane Austen’s and Shakespeare’s shadow stories.

In 2005 I recognized that LUCY FERRARS--being Lucy Steele’s married name which comes into being when she marries Robert Ferrars at the very end of Austen’s Sense & Sensibility --- was Austen’s coded reference to the LUCIFEResque aspects of Lucy’s character, in particular Lucy’s Satanic ability to manipulate others into unwittingly doing her bidding – in S&S, to allow Lucy to become the de facto power behind the throne in the wealthy Ferrars family. I’ve also blogged numerous times about the anagram-acrostics that Shakespeare scattered everywhere throughout his plays, including perhaps most notably the disturbing perfect “SATAN” acrostic in Friar Laurence’s speech to Juliet about the safety of her drinking the sleeping potion.

So, my approach to decoding the meaning of “Undine Spragg” was to suspect Wharton of the same kind of anagrammatical wordplay that I already knew was part and parcel of the subtext of both Shakespeare and Jane Austen. It took me less than two minutes to come up with a working hypothesis of the two-word phrase which Wharton expected her knowing readers to figure out, and then an enjoyable day of additional research, in order to make sense of Wharton’s meaning in that two-word code, which turned out to be spot-on, in ways I had no idea about before I found it, as I will explain below.

If you’re not anagrammatically inclined, the following is the link to the online anagram generator into which I fed “undinespragg”. Can you scroll through the “hits” and find the two-word phrase that caught my eye? I’ll give my answer a little further down: http://wordsmith.org/anagram/anagram.cgi?anagram=UndineSpragg&t=1000&a=n

(scroll down)

My answer is: GASPING UNDER

Finding that answer was when my real literary-sleuthing fun began, as it took me an enjoyable two hours of browsing in the online text of The Custom of the Country directed by strategic word searching, in order to verify that this was actually the two-word phrase which Edith Wharton was winking at so strongly –and indeed, Edith Wharton, speaking ventriloquistically through her fictional puppet Mrs. Spragg, had a very great knack for finding a name that would go to the heart of the deepest themes of The Custom of the Country.

First I suggest to you that, in furtherance of Sarah Emsley’s wonderful 2012 article about the influence of Jane Austen’s fiction on Edith Wharton, [Persuasions Online #33/1 “Nothing against her, but her husband & her Conscience: JA’s Lady Susan in Edith Wharton’s Old New York” ] that Wharton, in Mrs. Spragg’s claim of her husband’s “knack”, also intended to produce a distinct echo of the following, equally winking speech in Mansfield Park:

“To good reading, however, she 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. His acting had first taught Fanny what pleasure a play might give, and his reading brought all his acting before her again; nay, perhaps with greater enjoyment, for it came unexpectedly, and with no such drawback as she had been used to suffer in seeing him on the stage with Miss Bertram….”

I’ve believed for some time that the reference to Henry Crawford’s “happiest knack” in the above passage is a giant wink by Jane Austen that points to a much deeper and broader allusion to Shakespeare’s late history, Henry VIII, not only in Mansfield Park, but also in Austen’s preceding novel, Pride & Prejudice. And similarly, I now claim that Wharton had exactly the same covert authorial agenda.

So I was encouraged to take an even deeper dive into the literary subtext of Custom than the above-quoted Wharton scholars had previously attempted. I started from Emsley’s observations (“the quotation is from Montaigne’s Essays, and in the 19th Century the story of Undine the water-spirit was retold in a book by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, and later in two operas, with music by E.T.A. Hoffman & Albert Lortzing”) and also this one by Katherine ___ (“There's also the German folktale of Ondine, in which a woman curses her unfaithful husband to cease breathing”), and look where it quickly took me.

The full quotation from Montaigne, Essays, Book 1, pointed to by Mrs. Spragg’s “visitor, with a smile, and echoes of divers et ondoyant” is as follows:

“Truly man is a marvellously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgement on him.”

So, it seems, Mrs. Spragg’s learned, smiling young visitor understood that Undine Spragg’s name marks her as a quintessential Montaignesque character---“marvelously vain, diverse and undulating”—inconstant and therefore almost impossible to judge accurately.

Next, I turned to Wikipedia for more detail on Fouque’s novella:

“the story of Ondine and Hans, characters in Ondine, a 1938 play by Jean Giraudoux based on traditions tracing back through Undine (a novella of 1811) to earlier European folk tales. Ondine tells her future husband Hans, whom she had just met, that "I shall be the shoes of your feet ... I shall be the breath of your lungs". Ondine makes a pact with her uncle the King of the Ondines that if Hans ever deceives her he will die. After their honeymoon, Hans is reunited with his first love Princess Bertha and Ondine leaves Hans only to be captured by a fisherman six months later. On meeting Ondine again on the day of his wedding to Bertha, Hans tells her that "all the things my body once did by itself, it does now only by special order ... A single moment of inattention and I forget to breathe". Hans and Ondine kiss, after which he dies.”

You can imagine my excitement to read that greater detail, as I’d be hard pressed to better encapsulate the fatally dangerous power of Fouque’s Undine than in “gasping under”, the two-word phrase Wharton hid in plain sight in the name of her own dangerously powerful heroine Ondine Spragg.

I.e., I claim Wharton started from the folk name “Undine”, so as to tag her novel to Touque’s novella, and then Wharton precisely constructed the surname “Spragg” letter-by-letter so as to be a perfect anagram of “GASPING UNDER”, so as to bring in that concept of fatal suffocation as the hard price of unfaithfulness.

And there I’ll end this first half of my discussion of Wharton’s heroine’s name “Undine Spragg”. Tomorrow, I’ll return with a detailed textual unpacking of the many ways in which Wharton subliminally echoed the motif of suffocation from Fouque’s novella, and brilliantly grafted the simple folk tale onto a complex feminist critique of Wharton’s sexist world, which (as predicted by Mary Wollstonecraft) turned women into Undine Spraggs, who would leave men gasping under water in their wake, because their society suffocated their aspirations, and gave them no honorable path toward self-realization.

Which all dramatically validates Emsley’s brilliant detection of resonance between Jane Austen’s Lady Susan and Wharton’s Undine Spragg. In both, we see a woman behaving very badly, but somehow we cannot entirely blame her, because she is in a larger sense a Nemesis sicced on a deserving patriarchy.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

I recently had the pleasure to make the online acquaintance of a sharp literary elf from across the Big Pond, Andrew Shields, who blogs at http://andrewjshields.blogspot.com:

I call Andrew a sharp elf, because he is sensitive to ambiguity in literature, and asks the right sort of questions when he encounters it. For example, in his 04/11/16 post, he wrote the following:

“The idea of “reading something into” a poem came up in a discussion just now. I was supposedly “reading something into” a poem; hence my reading of the poem was implied to be wrong. Whether or not I was doing so, I’m curious if anyone knows of any essays/research that address the issue of “reading into”. It seems like several issues are involved:

“Reading” the poem is distinguished from “reading into” the poem.

“Reading” the poem is *distinguishable* from “reading into” the poem.

The claim that someone is “reading something into” the poem, that something is being “read into” it, is used to call the validity of that reading into question.

The person making that claim is rhetorically staking out a position of being a better “reader” of the poem: “I am not ‘reading into’ the poem; you are. And my reading is thus better…” END QUOTE

Of course, Andrew’s question reminded me of how many times people have suggested to me that I read too much into Jane Austen’s words – and that indeed is the $64,000 question in close reading – how does each reader decide what sort of meaning it is valid to extract from a given text by a given author, and where’s the line that separates the valid reading from reading “too much” and going beyond the author’s intention? My experience on the ground has consistently been that writers like Austen and Shakespeare did leave much under the surface to be excavated by their readers.

So, Andrew and I are kindred spirits in our approach to literature—plus he has the very good taste of being a Janeite! Which brings me to the point---a great example of Andrew’s sharp intuition about Jane Austen can be found in his 03/26/14 post, which begins as follows: “[T]here are many…appearances of "TO BE SURE" in Austen's Emma. I really wonder about how to interpret this expression. It's quite slippery. Suggestions?“ Andrew then gave seven examples from the text of Emma– three spoken by Harriet, one spoken by Miss Bates, and three spoken/thought by Emma. Immediately upon reading Andrew’s question, my gut told me that Andrew had identified a phrase which needed to be added to my lexicon of the Jane Austen Code—but what did it mean in Emma?

There are, notably, a total of 25 such usages in Emma. Miss Bates, Mrs. Cole, and Mr. Weston each use it once, Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates each use it 3 times, but I realized that it was likely significant that Emma and Harriet each use it a total of eight times! And so it seemed to me that Andrew’s sharp intuition had similarly led him to mostly choose 6 of his 7 examples from those spoken by Emma or Harriet.

After collecting all 25 and reading them as a group, applying the principles of the Jane Austen Code I’ve mapped over the past dozen years, I just figured out the answer to Andrew’s excellent question. It is indeed connected to that skewed distribution of usages among her characters in Emma. And, as I will now explain, it is verysignificant, catching Jane Austen in another of her myriad acts of subliminal greatness.

Emma uses the phrase “To be sure” routinely, both in her speech to others, and also in unspoken thoughts. In five cases, she uses or thinks it unironically, but the three exceptions to that general rule, all spoken to Mr. Knightley, are of special interest:

Chapter 8: "Come," said [Emma], "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."

…"Upon my word, Emma, to hear you abusing the reason you have, is almost enough to make me think so too. Better be without sense, than misapply it as you do."

"TO BE SURE!" cried she playfully. "I know that is the feeling of you all. I know that such a girl as Harriet is exactly what every man delights in—what at once bewitches his senses and satisfies his judgment. Oh! Harriet may pick and chuse. Were you, yourself, ever to marry, she is the very woman for you. And is she, at seventeen, just entering into life, just beginning to be known, to be wondered at because she does not accept the first offer she receives? No—pray let her have time to look about her."

Chapter 12:

"What a comfort it is, that we think alike about our nephews and nieces. As to men and women, our opinions are sometimes very different; but with regard to these children, I observe we never disagree."

"If you were as much guided by nature in your estimate of men and women, and as little under the power of fancy and whim in your dealings with them, as you are where these children are concerned, we might always think alike."

"TO BE SURE—our discordancies must always arise from my being in the wrong."

"Yes," said he, smiling—"and reason good. I was sixteen years old when you were born."

As you can see, Emma, saucy with self-confidence despite being 16 years younger, doesn’t defer, but is repeatedly playful, as she teases him for his claim to wisdom in regard to the Harriet Smith-Robert Martin relationship. And she emphasizes her satire by using that particular phrase “to be sure” ironically---she makes it clear that Knightley’s alleged superior wisdom is not assured in her mind!

The next important point is that all of Emma’s 8 usages of “to be sure”, whether ironic or serious, are in distinct contrast to the first 6 usages of “to be sure” by Harriet. In every one of those six, Harriet uses it the exact same way that Horatio repeatedly says “Yes, my lord” to Hamlet –i.e., as a clear signal of obedient, humble deference to the wisdom of someone (Emma) of far greater status and intelligence.

To hammer that subliminal point home, Jane Austen gives us a rapid-fire series of five such usages (not just the two of them that Andrew quoted) in one single, long conversation (actually, it’s more a lecture by Emma, punctuated by Harriet’s obedient agreements) in Chapter 4, all on the topic of the unsuitability (or should I say, “un-suitor-ability”?) of Robert Martin as a husband for Harriet:

"That may be, and I may have seen him fifty times, but without having any idea of his name. A young farmer, whether on horseback or on foot, is the very last sort of person to raise my curiosity. The yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I feel I can have nothing to do. A degree or two lower, and a creditable appearance might interest me; I might hope to be useful to their families in some way or other. But a farmer can need none of my help, and is, therefore, in one sense, as much above my notice as in every other he is below it."

"TO BE SURE. OH YES! It is not likely you should ever have observed him; but he knows you very well indeed—I mean by sight."

…"Well, and that is as early as most men can afford to marry, who are not born to an independence. Mr. Martin, I imagine, has his fortune entirely to make—cannot be at all beforehand with the world. Whatever money he might come into when his father died, whatever his share of the family property, it is, I dare say, all afloat, all employed in his stock, and so forth; and though, with diligence and good luck, he may be rich in time, it is next to impossible that he should have realised any thing yet."

"TO BE SURE, SO IT IS. But they live very comfortably. They have no indoors man, else they do not want for any thing; and Mrs. Martin talks of taking a boy another year."

"I wish you may not get into a scrape, Harriet, whenever he does marry;—I mean, as to being acquainted with his wife—for though his sisters, from a superior education, are not to be altogether objected to, it does not follow that he might marry any body at all fit for you to notice. The misfortune of your birth ought to make you particularly careful as to your associates. There can be no doubt of your being a gentleman's daughter, and you must support your claim to that station by every thing within your own power, or there will be plenty of people who would take pleasure in degrading you."

"YES, TO BE SURE, I SUPPOSE THERE ARE. But while I visit at Hartfield, and you are so kind to me, Miss Woodhouse, I am not afraid of what any body can do."

"You understand the force of influence pretty well, Harriet; but I would have you so firmly established in good society, as to be independent even of Hartfield and Miss Woodhouse. I want to see you permanently well connected, and to that end it will be advisable to have as few odd acquaintance as may be; and, therefore, I say that if you should still be in this country when Mr. Martin marries, I wish you may not be drawn in by your intimacy with the sisters, to be acquainted with the wife, who will probably be some mere farmer's daughter, without education."

"TO BE SURE. YES. Not that I think Mr. Martin would ever marry any body but what had had some education—and been very well brought up. However, I do not mean to set up my opinion against yours—and I am sure I shall not wish for the acquaintance of his wife. I shall always have a great regard for the Miss Martins, especially Elizabeth, and should be very sorry to give them up, for they are quite as well educated as me. But if he marries a very ignorant, vulgar woman, certainly I had better not visit her, if I can help it."

Emma watched her through the fluctuations of this speech, and saw no alarming symptoms of love. The young man had been the first admirer, but she trusted there was no other hold, and that there would be no serious difficulty, on Harriet's side, to oppose any friendly arrangement of her own.

They met Mr. Martin the very next day, as they were walking on the Donwell road…..

…"He is very plain, undoubtedly—remarkably plain:—but that is nothing compared with his entire want of gentility. I had no right to expect much, and I did not expect much; but I had no idea that he could be so very clownish, so totally without air. I had imagined him, I confess, a degree or two nearer gentility."

"TO BE SURE," said Harriet, IN A MORTIFIED VOICE, "he is not so genteel as real gentlemen."

"I think, Harriet, since your acquaintance with us, you have been repeatedly in the company of some such very real gentlemen, that you must yourself be struck with the difference in Mr. Martin. At Hartfield, you have had very good specimens of well educated, well bred men. I should be surprized if, after seeing them, you could be in company with Mr. Martin again without perceiving him to be a very inferior creature—and rather wondering at yourself for having ever thought him at all agreeable before. Do not you begin to feel that now? Were not you struck? I am sure you must have been struck by his awkward look and abrupt manner, and the uncouthness of a voice which I heard to be wholly unmodulated as I stood here."

"CERTAINLY, he is not like Mr. Knightley. He has not such a fine air and way of walking as Mr. Knightley. I see the difference plain enough. But Mr. Knightley is so very fine a man!"

And then, for good measure, Jane Austen adds a sixth, in exactly the same vein, soon after in Chapter 7:

Harriet had not surmised her own danger, but the idea of it struck her forcibly.

"You could not have visited me!" she cried, looking aghast. "NO, TO BE SURE YOU COULD NOT; but I never thought of that before. That would have been too dreadful!—What an escape!—Dear Miss Woodhouse, I would not give up the pleasure and honour of being intimate with you for any thing in the world."

"Indeed, Harriet, it would have been a severe pang to lose you; but it must have been. You would have thrown yourself out of all good society. I must have given you up."

So, we can infer from these six usages that Harriet demonstrates her obedience to Emma not only by agreeing frequently with the substance of Emma’s opinions (about Harriet’s love life!), but by using one of Emma’s pet expressions, “to be sure”, as the very words by which Harriet agrees –which doubles the impact of Harriet’s deference. Emma’s insouciant usages with Knightley are therefore the opposite of Harriet’s usages thereof with Emma, which are all unambiguously deferential………

…or are they??? Forgive me, but I was not sincere with you in the immediately preceding paragraph, in order to make my main point. Those who follow my posts about Jane Austen, and Emma in particular, know that I have long identified Harriet Smith as a completely ambiguous character, in the following sense:

In the overt story of Emma, Harriet is----to be sure-----the obsequious, naïve, foolish, impulsive teenager that readers of Emma see when they read the novel text with the grain, taking Harriet at face value.

However, in the shadow story, Harriet is the opposite – a clever, worldly-wise, calculating young woman (very much like Fielding’s Shamela) who is determined to even the courtship playing field that is so heavily tilted against her by a hypocritical, unjust, sexist, classist society, by using (as Jane Austen put it in a letter to her dear friend Ann Sharpe) the power of the strong mind over the weak.

And in this instance, shocking as it may sound to many Janeite ears, the weak minded individual in this equation is Emma! I.e., it is Emma, whom the shadow Harriet plays like a drum, by sucking up to Emma, playing on Emma’s narcissism with faux deference, all in order to get close to Harriet’s true goal, which from Day One of the action of the novel has been……marriage to Knightley!

So, while I’ve long believed there are these two Harriets, today Andrew’s brilliant intuition gave me yet another piece of textual evidence to support my alternative subversive reading of Harriet againstthe grain. And I’ve saved the “cream” of this implicit textual riddle (borrowing Emma’s phraseology from the charade scene in Chapter 9) for last. It is not delivered to the reader aware of JA’s authorial game, until near the end of the novel, in Chapter 47, when Harriet delivers a massive, totally unexpected shock to Emma:

“Harriet, who was standing at some distance, and with face turned from her, did not immediately say any thing; and when she did speak, it was in a voice nearly as agitated as Emma's.

"I should not have thought it possible," she began, "that you could have misunderstood me! I know we agreed never to name him—but considering how infinitely superior he is to every body else, I should not have thought it possible that I could be supposed to mean any other person. Mr. Frank Churchill, indeed! I do not know who would ever look at him in the company of the other. I hope I have a better taste than to think of Mr. Frank Churchill, who is like nobody by his side. And that you should have been so mistaken, is amazing!—I am sure, but for believing that you entirely approved and meant to encourage me in my attachment, I should have considered it at first too great a presumption almost, to dare to think of him. At first, if you had not told me that more wonderful things had happened; that there had been matches of greater disparity (those were your very words);—I should not have dared to give way to—I should not have thought it possible—But if you, who had been always acquainted with him—"

"Harriet!" cried Emma, collecting herself resolutely—"Let us understand each other now, without the possibility of farther mistake. Are you speaking of—Mr. Knightley?"

"TO BE SURE I AM. I never could have an idea of any body else—and so I thought you knew. When we talked about him, it was as clear as possible."“

Note that when Emma asks, in horror, whether Harriet is attached to Mr. Knightley, Harriet delivers the final blow to Emma’s pride using that very same phrase, “to be sure”, which, 40 chapters earlier, she had used while fawning on Emma by playing on her pride—now that’s poetic justice! Harriet has taken off her mask, and the same words once spoken deferentially are now uttered with cool self-assurance.

This is deliberate, Harriet’s little bit of revenge on Emma, releasing anger she must have been stifling for 40 chapters, finally believing that pretense is no longer necessary. That Emma winds up with Knightley anyway suggests that the joke was on Harriet after all, but the topic of how that final reversal of fortune comes about in the shadow story is a subject for another day. For today, I am just grateful to Andrew Shields for his good question prompting me to reach this further understanding of the enigma known as Harriet Smith.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The lines from President Obama’s remarkable speech tonight at the Democratic National Convention that I suspect, and hope, will be most often repeated, retweeted, and shared during the coming weeks and months, as the American electorate lurches toward its November appointment with destiny, choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, is the following rousing climactic passage:

“And there is only one candidate in this race who believes in that future, and has devoted her life to it; a mother and grandmother who'd do anything to help our children thrive; a leader with real plans to break down barriers, blast through glass ceilings, and widen the circle of opportunity to every single American, the next president of the United States, Hillary Clinton.

That's the Hillary I know. That's the Hillary I've come to admire. And that's why I can say with confidence there has never been a man or a woman — not me, not Bill, nobody — more qualified than Hillary Clinton to serve as president of the United States of America.”

As I floated along at that moment, deeply moved, on the magic carpet of the President’s tastefully eloquent, persuasive rhetoric, I realized that we were all witnessing the precise karmic instant at which the decade-long, complicated, seesaw history between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton finally came to a soft landing. More than eight years ago, of course, Obama narrowly bested Clinton in a long, bruising primary race, followed thereafter by Hillary’s extraordinarily gracious concession, her supporting Obama in his first victorious race to the White House, and his appointing her as his secretary of state for his first term.

During the current campaign, the President cautiously held back from endorsing Hillary over Bernie until the result of theirbruising primary battle had itself become a foregone mathematical conclusion, but this time with Hillary on the other side of the seesaw this time, just far enough ahead to win. And now, finally, tonight, this powerful moment of full reconciliation and positive payback of a debt, and healing of all old wounds.

As I watched the President finish his speech, and then Hillary appeared at the side of the stage, and then they embraced warmly and held onto each other, I could not help but notice the remarkable (albeit entirely coincidental) parallels between this heartwarming climax of a real life political drama played out between a remarkable man and equally remarkable woman, and a fictional tale about a different sort of second chances, this one in love instead of politics, played out over a similar time span between a fictional male-female pair whose characters have also held millions spellbound.

Rather than give you an explanation, I will just let the creator of that fictional pair tell you in her own words, and I am sure you will be more than capable of discerning and enjoying the richness of the parallels:

“Eight years, almost eight years had passed, since all had been given up. How absurd to be resuming the agitation which such an interval had banished into distance and indistinctness! What might not eight years do? Events of every description, changes, alienations, removals--all, all must be comprised in it, and oblivion of the past-- how natural, how certain too!”

"Then it is settled, Musgrove," cried Captain Wentworth, "that you stay, and that I take care of your sister home. But as to the rest, as to the others, if one stays to assist Mrs Harville, I think it need be only one. Mrs Charles Musgrove will, of course, wish to get back to her children; but if Anne will stay, no one so proper, so capable as Anne."

She paused a moment to recover from the emotion of hearing herself so spoken of. The other two warmly agreed with what he said, and she then appeared.

"You will stay, I am sure; you will stay and nurse her;" cried he, turning to her and speaking with a glow, and yet a gentleness, which seemed almost restoring the past. She coloured deeply, and he recollected himself and moved away. She expressed herself most willing, ready, happy to remain. "It was what she had been thinking of, and wishing to be allowed to do. A bed on the floor in Louisa's room would be sufficient for her, if Mrs Harville would but think so."

‘I am not yet so much changed,’ cried Anne and stopped, fearing she hardly knew what misconstruction. After waiting a few moments he said, and as if it were the result of immediate feeling, "It is a period, indeed! Eight years and a half is a period."

It is a period, indeed! How wonderful to think about these parallels, and to know that the deep love of country that unites Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is a true one that has healed wounds first suffered eight years ago; and that we, the American people, will be the beneficiaries of that love in November, when we elect the first American female president, an event that I am pretty darned sure would have brought a smile to Jane Austen’s face, even as she might also have added with a twinkle in her eye:

"A strange business this in America….but very pleasing, to be sure!”

Before I close, I cannot resist adding this final quotation from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a description of the “not altogether completely agreeable” John Thorpe, which tells us, as if we didn’t already know, that there were men walking around in England two centuries ago who were uncannily similar in character, judgment, and temperament, to a certain candidate for President in 2016 who does not need to be named (although he makes sure his name is always on everyone’s lips nonetheless):

“…all the rest of his conversation, or rather talk, began and ended with himself and his own concerns. He told her of horses which he had bought for a trifle and sold for incredible sums; of racing matches, in which his judgment had infallibly foretold the winner; of shooting parties, in which he had killed more birds (though without having one good shot) than all his companions together; and described to her some famous day's sport, with the fox-hounds, in which his foresight and skill in directing the dogs had repaired the mistakes of the most experienced huntsman, and in which the boldness of his riding, though it had never endangered his own life for a moment, had been constantly leading others into difficulties, which he calmly concluded had broken the necks of many.

Little as Catherine was in the habit of judging for herself, and unfixed as were her general notions of what men ought to be, she could not entirely repress a doubt, while she bore with the effusions of his endless conceit, of his being altogether completely agreeable….”

I mean, really! Could anyone give a more telling textbook definition of Narcissistic Personality Disorder than that? The only thing she left out was the size of John Thorpe’s hands! ;)

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

As I hoped and expected, yesterday I received an excellent, thought provoking response from Andrew Shields to my post… http://tinyurl.com/h2w9qr2…in which I took up the friendly challenge of answering Andrew’s question as to how to interpret the “to be sure” usages in Emma, and I’d like to respond to the first, and for my purposes, most important, paragraph of his response:

Andrew wrote: “You sum up your thorough and helpful reading of Harriet's early uses of "to be sure" as follows: "fawning on Emma by playing on her pride". I can see that element in her responses, but I also read her "to be sure" as a marker of her struggle with herself as she tries to understand Emma's take on Robert Martin. Harriet wants to accept his offer, after all, and is quite surprised to discover that Emma thinks she should reject it. At the same time, she wants to agree with Emma. She is "mortified" by this conflict between her two desires, and "to be sure" is the phrase that marks that conflict.”

Andrew, your excellent further development of my idea has in turn led me to a deeper understanding of Harriet Smith’s “to be sures” on even more levels, and to now see even more clearly how that phrase resonates at the deepest levels of Emma, the greatest of all novels, as I will now explain.

First, your above reading is spot-on vis a vis the naïve, impulsive, deferential Harriet Smith of the overtstory – Harriet does indeed articulate, in detail, her grappling with Emma’s pontifications, trying to find a way to act on her desire to say yes to Mr. Martin, but finding Emma’s counterarguments too strong to overcome. And those repeated “too be sures” are indeed the marker and mantra of Harriet’s conflict.

It is equally clear, I suggest, that Harriet’s articulation of her ongoing struggles also prompts Emma to repeatedly press and elaborate her advice (that Emma repeatedly tries to mask, and pretend she is not really giving advice). This process makes Emma feel like Perry Mason: a clever expert—in her own mind---in the study of human character. Emma is pushed to work harder to achieve the result of convincing Harriet to make the “right” choice, without Emma having had to be explicit in her directives. A job well done, is clearly how Emma feels about her own campaign of subtle persuasion, precisely because she had to work so hard to achieve her goal, it did not come easy. That which must be fought for is all the more satisfying.

But, as you may have already guessed where I was going with that last paragraph, Andrew, your reading is also spot-on vis a vis the worldly wise, calculating, faux-deferential Harriet Smith I see in the shadow story! I.e., Harriet’s seeming to put up a struggle, and seeming to keep struggling over and over again in different ways, all makes for far more satisfying flattery of Emma’s bloated vanity than a few simple “Yes, Miss Woodhouse” replies could ever have produced---and Harriet knows it! Emma’s excessive pride is stroked by every twist and turn in Harriet’s apparent struggle. If you don’t believe me, just ask Mr. Knightley, who puts it (or should I better say, predicts it) to a tee three chapters earlier, in Chapter 5, as he confidentially vents his spleen to Mrs. Weston:

“But Harriet Smith—I have not half done about Harriet Smith. I think her the very worst sort of companion that Emma could possibly have. She knows nothing herself, and looks upon Emma as knowing every thing. She is a flatterer in all her ways; and so much the worse, because undesigned. Her ignorance is hourly flattery. How can Emma imagine she has any thing to learn herself, while Harriet is presenting such a delightful inferiority?”

By the way, I was just kidding about Knightley as prophet. That Knightley, three chapters earlier, can so accurately describe the effect of Harriet’s slavish orientation toward Emma in Chapter 8, is actually telling evidence that Harriet has not just started flattering Emma in this way at that moment. No, she must have started doing it, both in and out of Knightley’s presence, from the first minute Harriet showed up at Hartfield! Indeed, besides her alluringly plump blond beauty, perhaps the most essential part of what makes Harriet’s company so attractive and necessary to Emma is precisely that Harriet is such a continual flatterer in so many ways.

So, as I said, the threshold question, for purposes of interpreting these scenes, is whether Harriet’s flattery via “delightful inferiority” is, as Knightley refers to it, “undersigned” –that is the Harriet of the overt story---or designed, in which alternative reading of the novel it is Emma who is from start to finish Harriet’s “delightful inferior”---or, to be more specific, it is Emma who is a foolish narcissist who is easily led around by the nose via Harriet’s flattery!

I’m reminded very strongly of that episode in the original Star Trek TV series, the one when Kirk, McCoy and other members of the Enterprise crew beam down on a planet where their deepest desires and fantastical wishes are satisfyingly gratified (and by the way, wow, is it an eye-opener to see the crude blatant sexism that permeates this 1969 episode---how far we’ve come in 47 years!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2HAgQYSv5w

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shore_Leave_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series)

Just as the advanced race that created the “amusement park” that so dazzles Kirk, McCoy et al, have the power to provide satisfying wish fulfilment experiences---perhaps most perfectly symbolized by Kirk’s getting the chance to brawl with, and after a mighty struggle vanquish, the classmate at the Starfleet Academy who tormented him in his youth, so too does the scheming Harriet of the shadow story provide a satisfying but completely ersatz “victory” experience to Emma---who is so clueless she never realizes how she has been so easily manipulated—or, to put it more accurately, how she has been Satanically tricked by Harriet into fooling herself!

The above extended peek behind the curtain at Harriet the Wizard of Highbury, and how she performs her magic on Emma in Chapter 8 is (I only realized while writing this post) symbolized and heightened by the satisfying flattery of Emma’s ego in the very next chapter, Chapter 9, in which Emma (seems to) solve Mr. Elton’s charade by finding what Emma blithely assumes to be its only answer, “courtship”.

As Colleen Sheehan brilliantly showed in her 2007 article here… http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol27no1/sheehan2.htm ….Harriet’s “wrong” guesses about the superficially correct answer to Mr. Elton’s charade turn out to be 100% spot-on vis a vis the covertly correct second answer to the charade, “the Prince of Whales”. Sheehan brilliantly elaborates:

“…Emma quickly and confidently dismisses Harriet Smith’s guesses to the charade and readily offers the solution: court and ship, or courtship. While this is a perfectly credible solution to the riddle, I do not think it is the only one. Harriet’s more literal guesses to the charade include kingdom, Neptune, trident, mermaid, and shark. If unlike Emma we are not so quick to reject the more literal approach to solving the charade, then “Lords of the earth” could be princes or, in the singular, prince. (Since in later lines “Lords” becomes “Lord,” we are encouraged to change plurals to singulars, and vice versa.) And the “monarch of the seas” is certainly whale or, in the plural, whales. United? Well, you have it: Prince [of] Whales! On 15 March 1812 a satirical poem about the Prince was published in the Examiner, the English periodical edited by James Henry Leigh Hunt and his brother John Hunt. The poem was entitled “THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE,” replete with kings, sharks, mermaids, and a Regent to boot…”

END QUOTE FROM SHEEHAN

But the ultimate triumph of Jane Austen’s genius in her subtle depiction of Harriet’s ambiguous undesigned/designed flattery of Emma is, I suggest, the following passage in Chapter 47 (only a few paragraphs before Harriet springs her trap on Emma and reveals, with her utterlyunflattering“to be sure”, that she has her sights on Mr. Knightley, to Emma’s utter horror):

"Harriet, poor Harriet!"—Those were the words; in them lay the tormenting ideas which Emma could not get rid of, and which constituted the real misery of the business to her. Frank Churchill had behaved very ill by herself—very ill in many ways,—but it was not so much his behaviour as her own, which made her so angry with him. It was the scrape which he had drawn her into on Harriet's account, that gave the deepest hue to his offence.—Poor Harriet! to be a second time the dupe of her misconceptions and flattery. Mr. Knightley had spoken prophetically, when he once said, "Emma, you have been no friend to Harriet Smith."—She was afraid she had done her nothing but disservice.—It was true that she had not to charge herself, in this instance as in the former, with being the sole and original author of the mischief; with having suggested such feelings as might otherwise never have entered Harriet's imagination; for Harriet had acknowledged her admiration and preference of Frank Churchill before she had ever given her a hint on the subject; but she felt completely guilty of having encouraged what she might have repressed. She might have prevented the indulgence and increase of such sentiments. Her influence would have been enough. And now she was very conscious that she ought to have prevented them.—She felt that she had been risking her friend's happiness on most insufficient grounds. Common sense would have directed her to tell Harriet, that she must not allow herself to think of him, and that there were five hundred chances to one against his ever caring for her.—"But, with common sense," she added, "I am afraid I have had little to do."

END QUOTE FROM EMMA

Could Knightley have read Emma’s mind at the moment she thought “Poor Harriet! to be a second time the dupe of her misconceptions and flattery”, he might’ve wittily responded (as he did back in Chapter 1 when Mr. Woodhouse pitied “poor Miss Taylor”), “Not poor Harriet, but poor Emma to be a second time the dupe of her misconceptions and Harriet’s flattery”!

I.e., everything Emma cluelessly and mistakenly thinks at this moment, in that fleeting intervals when Emma believes that Harriet will be crushed by the shocking news that Frank Churchill is not free to marry Harriet, is clearly designed by Jane Austen to actually be applicable to Emma, when Harriet drops her shattering courtship bombshell on Emma minutes later.

I suggest to you that there is no more elegant, decisive, brilliant, and mind-blowing example than the above, of Jane Austen’s mastery of anamorphism by the time she was writing Emma at the height of her powers—the creation of a double story that works with equal, extraordinary power in two completely different interpretations of the same novel.

Cheers, ARNIE

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