In followup to...
...with
a little more digging, I found that Frank Austen’s naval service in the West
Indies occurred not only early in his career, but also very late as well, actually
for the duration of the latter half of the 1840's. Here is a passage from Jane
Austen's Sailor Brothers, 281 et seq., that summarizes the elderly Frank's return
to the West Indies, where one could imagine ocean water warm enough for English
sailors to swim in:
"In
1845 he took command of the North American and West Indies Station. This
command in the Vindictive forms a notable contrast to his earlier experiences
in the West Indies. How often he must have called to mind as he visited
Barbadoes, Jamaica, or Antigua, the excitements of the Canopus cruises of forty
years ago! How different too the surroundings had become with the regular
English mail service, and the paddle-wheel sloops of war in place of brigs such
as the Curieux — and, greatest change of all, no such urgent services to be
performed as that of warning England against the approach of an enemy's fleet!
Nevertheless, there was plenty to be done. The Naval Commander-in-Chief has no
easy berth, even in time of peace. His letters tell us of some of the toils
which fell to his share: ‘Our passage
from Bermuda was somewhat tedious; we left it on February 6, called oft Antigua
on the 15th, and, without anchoring the ship, I landed for an hour to inspect
the naval yard," rather an exertion in the tropics, for a man of
seventy-three...’ “
So
that alters my sense of the timeline of the “shark of the blue species” anecdote. I now believe it
originated after Frank’s late-career stint in the Caribbean. Also,
character-wise, Frank as Sir Francis (he was knighted in 1837) and as an
admiral in his mid-seventies would fit better with the rigid Mr. Spock-like
persona depicted in Lord Brabourne's anecdote than Frank as a relatively young
captain.
So,
if I am correct in this inference, then JA's color-coded admiral wordplay in
Persuasion was not based on the anecdote, but vice versa, i.e., Frank was covertly
pointing to Persuasion. So I now see Frank, after his return to England around
1850, and further elevation up the ranks of the admiralty, as coming up with
the tale of the "shark of the blue
species" in reminiscence of sister Jane's
color-coded wordplay around admirals in Persuasion.
That
would have been very close in time to 1852, when he made his thinly veiled
allusion to Mansfield Park’s "Rears and Vices" pun in his letter to
Susan Quincy. I would imagine further that his encounter with Susan Quincy, and
answering all her questions about Jane's novels and the navy, itself sent Frank
back to rereading Persuasion and
Mansfield Park in particular-- because of course they are JA’s two most “naval”
novels, and perhaps that revisiting, and thinking about what must have been Susan
Quincy’s barrage of questions about all
the novels, that led Frank to see things in the novels that perhaps he had
overlooked four decades earlier when he
first read them.
And...the
part that decides this interpretation for me is that I was able to decode a
second covert reference to Persuasion hiding in plain sight in Lord Brabourne’s
anecdote, which I believe was placed there intentionally by Frank Austen
himself, an allusion of which Lord Brabourne was, I am certain, blissfully
unaware.
And (to
Everjane in Janeites), as I will now demonstrate, sometimes a Biblical allusion
really is intentional and thematic!
The
break in the case came when I returned to the allusion to the Book of Job that
I mentioned yesterday:
"Whereupon
Pakenham, becoming alive to his danger, acted upon the advice thus deliberately
given, and, says the story, saved himself 'by the skin of his teeth' from the
shark."
Job
19:20 My bone cleaveth to my skin and
to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.
In
Chapter 19, Job is complaining bitterly about his being persecuted by God, and
this is just one small part of his despairing litany. And Brabourne does put “by the skin of his teeth” in quotes. So…I
became curious to know if any Austen
scholar had ever suggested that there might be an allusion to the Book of Job
in Persuasion, and that turned out to be a direct hit amidships, courtesy of
Jocelyn Harris in her 2007 book about
Persuasion, A Revolution
Almost Beyond Expression, at page 192:
“Austen
seems even to play with sacred scenes when at Lyme, Wentworth 's "tone of
despair," as if "all his own strength
were gone."
[Is there no one to help me?" were the first words which burst from
Captain Wentworth, in a tone of despair, and as if all his own strength were
gone. ]
For instance, when Austen
writes, "They were wretched comforters for one another!" (122), she
surely echoes "miserable comforters are ye all" in the book of Job (16:2), that
difficult explanation for evil and pain — two large words that resonate
throughout Persuasion… If Job loses family, flocks, and health, only to have them all
restored to him, Anne similarly loses then recovers everything. Such concepts
of restoration, recovery, and. revival grant characters the
merciful dispensation of a second chance ..”
END QUOTE
I applaud Harris’s discoverhy, and add that it seems
that Frank’s motive in including a line from the Book of Job in the anecdote
was to demonstrate, to a knowing reader, that he understood the Book of Job
subtext in Persuasion.
First, here are the two full passages Harris was
pointing to:
Persuasion Chapter 13: “Anne was to leave them on the
morrow, an event which they all dreaded. "What should they do without her?
They were wretched comforters for one another." And so much was said in
this way, that Anne thought she could not do better than impart among them the
general inclination to which she was privy, and persuaded them all to go to
Lyme at once.”
Job Chapter
16: 1-3: Then Job answered and said, I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all.
Shall vain words have an end? or what emboldeneth thee that
thou answerest?
And
here’s the thing---Chapter 16 of Job is very similar to Chapter 19 of Job, the
chapter that includes the skin of Job’s teeth! Both are litanies of bitter despairing responses
by Job to the group trying to comfort him about his many ills, and each Chapter
begins very similarly as you can see:
Job
19: 1-3: Then Job answered and said, How long will
ye vex my soul, and break me in pieces with words? These ten times have ye reproached me: ye are not ashamed that ye
make yourselves strange to me.
So I see
Frank, by overtly alluding to Job 19, showing that he understands perfectly the
veiled allusion to the Book of Job in Persuasion. In his fable, Pakenham has
recklessly exposed himself to danger by swimming with blue sharks, and in Jane
Austen’s fable, Louisa Musgrove has recklessly exposed herself to danger by jumping
from heights.
This
is a literary game worthy of his sister Jane, and I see nothing in Brabourne’s
telling of the anecdote that indicates that he is in on this ultra-subtle
literary game played by the elderly Frank Austen.
We’ll
never know how much help Jane gave Frank in decoding her novels, but my guess
is that she did not give him too much,
and that he, a very clever fellow to the end, figured some of it out himself as
an old man.
Now,
in conclusion, I’ll quickly toss out for your perusal additional passages in
Persuasion which seem to me to be part of the allusion to the Book of Job in
Persuasion:
Job 1:2:
His substance also was seven thousand sheep, and three
thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and
a very great household; so that this man was the greatest of all the men of the
east.
Job
is represented in Persuasion as Mr.
Musgrove, a rich squire with a very great household. This fits perfectly with the despair Wentworth feels when Louisa seems to be
dying, and he imagines the reaction of her parents, just as Job feels when all
his children are suddenly killed. But of course
Louisa comes back to life, as to Job’s children.
Then
we have the following curious comment by
the ever inscrutable Mr. Shepherd, reaching for the name Wentworth:
"Bless
me! how very odd! I shall forget my own name soon, I suppose. A name that I am
so very well acquainted with; knew the gentleman so well by sight; seen him a
hundred times; came to consult me once, I remember, about a TRESPASS of one of
his neighbours; farmer's man breaking into his orchard; WALL TORN DOWN; apples
stolen; caught in the fact; and afterwards, contrary to my judgement, submitted
to an amicable compromise. Very odd indeed!"
In
addition to the Biblical word “trespass”, we have the “wall torn down” which
sounds a lot like what happens metaphorically to Job, who is described by Satan
in the following verse as being protected by God, before Job is stripped of
that solid protection by God as a test:
1:10:
Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that
he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his
substance is increased in the land.
Is
it an accident that we read of high walls in the description of Uppercross?:
Chapter
5: Uppercross
was a moderate-sized village, which a few years back had been completely in the
old English style, containing only two houses superior in appearance to those
of the yeomen and labourers; the mansion of the squire, with its HIGH WALLS,
great gates, and old trees, substantial and unmodernized, and the compact,
tight parsonage, enclosed in its own neat garden, with a vine and a pear-tree
trained round its casements;
And
how about this—there are a total of 30 usages of the word “CLAY” in the entire
Bible, most of which are not metaphorical, but 6 of those 30 usages appear in
the Book of Job, where, as numerous commentators have observed, it is used as a
strong motif to suggest how fragile and fleeting our time is in the frail human
body which will return to clay and dust all too soon. So we see another good
reason why Mr. Shepherd’s daughter is
named “Mrs.Clay”! Here are those usages in Job:
4:19 How much less in them that dwell in houses of
CLAY, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth?
10:9 Remember, I beseech thee, that thou hast made
me as the CLAY; and wilt thou bring me into dust again?
13:12
Your remembrances are like unto ashes, your bodies to bodies
of CLAY.
27:16 Though he heap up silver as
the dust, and prepare raiment as the CLAY;
33:6 Behold, I am according to thy
wish in God's stead: I also am formed out of the CLAY.
38:14 It is turned as CLAY to the seal; and they stand as a garment.
And I will conclude (for now) with
my personal favorite, Admiral Croft’s winking allusion to Psalm 74 (one of only
four passages in the entire Bible referring to Leviathan, another being in the
Book of Job—which has sometimes been speculated to be a shark) and the breaking
of heads, the event which triggers the allusion to the wretched comforters in
Persuasion:
Psalm 74: 13-15 Thou didst
divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the
waters. Thou brakest the heads of
leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the
wilderness. Thou didst cleave the fountain
and the flood: thou driedst up mighty rivers.
Persuasion Chapter 13: The Admiral wound it up summarily
by exclaiming-- "Ay, a very bad business indeed. A new sort of way this,
for a young fellow to be making love, by breaking his mistress's head, is not it,
Miss Elliot? This is breaking a head and giving a plaster, truly!"
So, for all these reasons, and more
that I am sure will pop up upon further examination, I assert that we now have
two examples of what can with justification be called The Frank Austen Code.
Cheers,ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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