I
just wrote the following in response to a post in Austen-L by Anielka Briggs:
Anielka,
You
just wrote "Harriet is definitely very clever and the reader should not be
tricked along with Emma. The most revealing scene that "proves" Harriet
is clever is when she reveals, in front of Emma, that she knows the answer to
The Charade perfectly well. In fact she knows the real answer is
"Leviathan" (which Colleen Sheehan also sees as a parody on Prince of
Wales). I've posted this several times but here's the scene that proves without
a shadow of a doubt that Harriet knows the answer to the charade and cannot be
a "moron" ".
To be
clear, your (excellent) discovery about Harriet reciting the Royal Navy ship
names in proper order of rank, was the _second_ discovery that Harriet is a
sharp elf at charade solving, not the first.
Colleen
was the first to show Harriet's brilliance, in 2006:
Here
is what Colleen wrote on that specific point, it deserves to be repeated:
"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..."
So,
when we step back a pace and observe the above in full perspective, we can see
that your discovery shows that Harriet was a sharp elf in seeing not one but
_two_ solutions to the charade, and, what's more, your discovery shows that
Harriet, with true Austenian parsimony, manages to wink at _both_ of those
secret and _related_ answers (Prince of Whales and Leviathan) by means of the
_same_ "wrong" (in Emma's clueless opinion) answers!
But
that's only the beginning of the wonder of all this. Stepping back one step
further, we gain additional perspective, when we take note that this sort of
tightly bound, parsimonious, double-duty structure of hidden meaning is exactly
analogous to the tightly bound structure of hidden meaning which Colleen also
opened the door to in 2006, when she pointed out that each of the two stanzas
of this charade has an anagrammed acrostic on the word/name "Lamb".
Just
as Colleen inspired _you_ to identify Harriet's ship-naming prowess pointing to
the secret answer "Leviathan", Colleen's acrostic discovery provided
_me_ with the clue I needed in order to realize that this charade was also one
and the same as the "acrostic" which Mrs. Elton is given by the
"abominable puppy" whom I had in 2005 already identified as Frank Churchill
himself!
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/10/jane-austens-rosetta-stone-mrs-eltons.html
So
all of the above, i.e., Colleen's initial discoveries which inspired you and
me, reveals that this charade truly is the Rosetta Stone of Jane Austen's
fiction, both for all these multiple intertwined structures of
hidden
meaning, but also, on a metaphorical level, because JA is practically screaming
to us that it is not only this charade which is structured this way, but also
Jane Austen's _novels_, most of all _Emma_,
which
_also_ have multiple meanings--i.e., my
discovery of JA's "shadow stories" and your later claims of multiple
additional layers of meaning.
It
means that with Jane Austen, it never was just about parlor tricks and clever
charades, but it _always_ comes down to
the stories themselves, and the characters.
Or as
Stephen Hawking famously put it in A Brief History of Time: "It's turtles
all the way down!"
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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