In Jane Austen's Letter 93 dated in
late 1813, we read the following famous passage, which pertains to George
Crabbe, the then famous English author/poet who today is largely unknown:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Crabbe
"No; I have never seen the
death of Mrs Crabbe.' I have only just been making out from one of his prefaces
that he probably was married. It is almost ridiculous. Poor woman! I will
comfort him as well as I can, but I do not undertake to be good to her children.
She had better not leave any."
It just occurred to me as I read the
above passage in Letter 93, that it was strikingly, indeed unmistakably
parallel to another passage in a letter Jane Austen wrote barely nine months
earlier to close friend Martha Lloyd, in which JA referred to another, even
more famous man and his wife:
"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. --"
This striking parallelism of
verbiage and sentence structure (just read them both a couple of times each)
shows us first that JA enjoyed writing in mock high rhetoric when the subject
was famous people, almost as if she were writing an op/ed piece in a modern
newspaper.
But that striking parallelism of
structure is vividly contrasted in tone. Whereas the passage about the Prince
and Princess is remarkably irony-free, the passage about Crabbe and his wife
has the unmistakably scent of heavy absurdist irony, with a distinct shade of
gallows humor. It's as though the later passage was a conscious parody of the
earlier passage.
I suggest that absurdist irony is
the shade of tone that JA invariably turned to in her letters, when the veiled
subtext was death in childbirth and serial pregnancy, and I believe that was
the case in the Crabbe passage in Letter 93.
From what I've read about the Crabbe
marriage, there were at least a half dozen pregnancies, probably more (with
miscarriages), and poor Mrs Crabbe went mad in the last half dozen years of her
life, and George Crabbe took good care of her.
From that set of facts, of which JA
may well have been fully aware despite her disclaimer of background knowledge
at the beginning of that passage, I infer that her long-standing anger about
English wives as breeding cows was activated by the recent death of mad Mrs.
Crabbe, apparently during a last visit to London.
And that's the key point in the
comparison between the the above two quoted passages. It was a no-brainer that
Jane Austen considered the brazenly dissolute prince as a marital villain.
But the deeper more important story
is that JA even had complicated negative feelings about good ordinary English
husbands like George Crabbe, who surely
never cheated on his wife and provided for her to the best of his
ability all of their married life.
Even in his case, Jane Austen
attributed some of the fault for Mrs. Crabbe's breakdown to the cumulative
stress of overloaded motherhood over several decades. And if the very moral and
clever Mr. Crabbe had been more careful about the number of pregnancies he
caused his wife to endure, JA apparently believed, with good cause I say, his
wife might've lived a longer and saner life.
If you look back through the
letters, the passages which have been considered most shocking for their
apparent callous mockery, are pretty much all about the pregnancy and/or death
of wives.
This one is right on that same
strike zone. This is not, as some have claimed, JA's callous indifference to
suffering of others. Rather it is the opposite – it is JA's righteous, bitter
anger over Injustice cluelessly perpetrated on innocent English wives by their
"innocent" English husbands.
So, once again, we see that Henry
Crawford's famous rant in Northanger Abbey was meant by Jane Austen to
be understood ironically:
"If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I
have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature
of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from?
Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are
English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own
sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you.
Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at
them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like
this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where
every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where
roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas
have you been admitting?"
The answer is, Jane Austen herself had been admitting such ideas for a very long time before she wrote Letter 93!
Cheers,
Arnie
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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