In Janeites, Nancy Mayer posted a
link today, the 195th anniversary of Jane Austen’s tragically
premature death, to a post at austenonly.
I have previously posted my thoughts about Jane Austen’s
interment in Winchester Cathedral, mostly in relation to JA’s final (and
intensely subversive) poem, Winchester Races….
…but I had been unaware of the
following tidbit revealed in the austenonly blog post Nancy linked to:
“In 1898 a request for donations by
way of public subscription, with an individual limit of 5 guineas, was made in
a letter to The Times, and it was signed by the Earl of
Selborne, Lord Northbrook, W.W B Beach and Montague G. Knight of Chawton,
in order that a memorial window could be erected in Jane Austen’s memory in
addition to the two existing memorials. This window was designed by
Charles Ea[m]er Kempe, and was installed in the north wall directly above
Jane Austen’s memorial tablet:
The imagery in the window is
astounding, and I should imagine, for many visitors to the Cathedral, difficult
to interpret today. At the head of the window is a figure of St.
Augustine, whose name in its abbreviated form is St Austin. It is
therefore a visual pun on Jane Austen’s surname. The central figure in the
top row of the window is King David playing his harp. Directly under him is St
John, who displays his Gospel, opened at the first words: “In the
beginning was the Word…” A Latin inscription to Jane Austen is also
included, and this can be translated as follows: Remember in the Lord
Jane Austen who died July 18th A.D. 1817.
The figures in the four
remaining lights are the sons of Korah who each carry a scroll upon which are
inscribed sentences in Latin which allude to the religious nature of Jane
Austen’s character. How interesting that even in this window the references to
her genius are oblique by today’s standards. And I do often wonder how many
visitors to her grave notice the window, for there is only a small notice to
the side of the brass tablet which explains it significance. How fascinating to
see how, as her fame rose, the memorials to her got greater in size, but were
not necessarily plain acknowledgments of her genius.”
I became curious to know the text of
those four “inscribed sentences in Latin which allude to the religious nature
of Jane Austen’s character” and Google quickly led me to the following passage
in Geraldine
Mitton’s 1905 bio, Jane Austen and Her Times, at p. 321-2, which not only
supplied that text, it also _clearly_ was the (completely unacknowledged —tsk tsk)
primary source for austenonly’s description:
“In 1900 a memorial window was
inserted as the result of a public subscription; it was designed and executed
by C. E. Kemp. In the head of the window is a figure of St. Augustine whose
name in its abbreviated form is St. Austin. In the centre of the upper row of
lights is David with his harp. Below his figure, in Latin, are the words,
"Remember in the Lord Jane Austen who died July 18, A.D. 1817." In
the centre of the bottom row is the figure of St. John, and the remaining
figures are those of the sons of Korah carrying scrolls, with sentences in
Latin, indicative of the religious side of Jane Austen's character, namely,
" Come ye children, hearken unto me; I will teach you the fear of the
Lord." "Them that are meek shall He guide in judgement, and such as
are gentle them shall He teach His way." "My mouth shall speak of
wisdom and my heart shall muse on understanding." "My mouth shall
daily speak of Thy righteousness and Thy salvation."
Some quick Googling showed that the remaining figures (other
than David and “St. Austin”) are holding, respectively, Latin versions of Psalms
34:11, 25:9, 49:3,
and 71:15,
and still more confirmed to me that the Bible has indeed long ascribed these
Psalms (as well some others) to the four
sons of Korah.
The name “Korah” caught my eye from
my earliest days of literary sleuthing in 1998-9, when I first read Richard
Elliot Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible? &
The Hidden Book in the Bible, in which Friedman made a (to my mind) compelling
argument (adapted from the heyday of the “Documentary Hypothesis” in 19th
century Germany) for the centrality of the Yahwist strand of the Torah.
Friedman also speculated that the
Yahwist might have been a woman, and Harold Bloom took that idea of Friedman’s and
ran (wild) with it in The Book of J. So, as I progressed in my Austenian sleuthing,
and became aware of more and more veiled Biblical allusions in Jane Austen’s
writing, I fancied that JA was aware of the early strands of the Documentary
Hypothesis wafting about in the free air of England during her lifetime, and
that she intuited that there was a distinctly female and subversive voice
hiding in plain sight in the Torah, which the later priestly writers had
coopted but had not destroyed. I also believe that she emulated the Yahwist in
her own novelistic “Heptateuch”, which, as I have argued countless times, are a
kind of female Torah, covertly and highly subversive of the hypocritical
Anglican church hierarchy and dogma of her day.
And so…that last thought led me to the
Torah tale of the rebellion of Korah in Numbers 16. Wikipedia’s summary is as good as any:
“The
Korah who fought against Israel was the…great-grandson of Levi, the third son
of Jacob born to Leah who became the progenitor of the tribe of Levi (Num.16:1;
Gen. 29:31-35). …They resisted Moses' leadership and as a result were swallowed
by the earth along with many of their households. However the children of Korah
were spared and remained alive (Numbers 26:11) and later wrote some Psalms…”
So…why did the designers of 1900
memorial include windows for the 4 Psalmist sons of Korah in addition to the
window for the greatest Psalmist of them all, David? Was this suggesting that
Jane Austen was a kind of literary Psalmist? Or was this suggesting that Jane Austen
was, like the sons of Korah (who got out of Dodge in the nick of time, before
the earth moved), a survivor, who was willing to generate superficially
conformist writing---but who, unlike those sons, was meticulous in her creation
of subversive subtext, challenging religious orthodoxy, like Korah, but subtext
that was (safely) accessible only by those who could learn to read off-center?
Now…is it possible that Charles Eamer
Kempe, a century ago, might have had any of this in mind as he constructed
these windows? On the anniversary of JA’s
death, it is intriguing to speculate about it!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
P.S. I realized as I wrote the above
post that the death of Don Juan/Giovanni in the grip of the Stone Guest must
have been inspired, in part, by the tale
of Korah, and that in turn reminded me of JA’s comments after seeing a
performance of a Don Juan pantomime in
London:
“I must say that I have seen nobody on the stage who has
been a more interesting Character than that compound of Cruelty & Lust.”
That is my view of Jane Austen herself,
except that she was, unlike Don Juan and Korah, too pragmatic and tricky to so
openly rebel—had Korah been like Jane Austen, he’d have created a covert satire
of Moses instead of openly challenging him—JA knew that overt rebels tend to
get swallowed up in the earth.
P.P.S.: My friend Prof. Diane
Capitani, who, as I reported last Fall, gave a brilliant presentation at the Ft.
Worth JASNA AGM about allusions to St. Augustine in S&S, will be interested, I am sure, to
hear about the sixth window devoted to “St. Austin”, if Diane did not already
know about it…
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