One of
my important sub-arguments was that there is a pervasive allusion to
Shakespeare’s Hamlet spread throughout Jane Austen’s gothic novel, from
beginning to end. In a nutshell, I
claimed, and still claim, that the ghost of the murdered King Hamlet’s father
haunts Elsinore, crying out for justice, and, likewise, metaphorically, the ghost
of Mrs. Tilney, who was “murdered” by childbirth, haunts Northanger Abbey and
cries out for justice for all the similarly “murdered” English wives, including
three of Jane Austen’s own sisters-in-law.
In my
JASNA talk, I outlined many of the passages in NA which I’ve identified as covertly
pointing to passages in Hamlet. One of the most significant is the following famous
passage in Chapter 14 of Northanger Abbey….
[Catherine]
“That is, I can read POETRY and PLAYS, and things of that sort, and do not
dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in.
Can you?”
[Eleanor]
“Yes, I am fond of history.”
[Catherine] “I wish I were too. I read it a little as a
duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either VEX OR WEARY ME. The
quarrels of popes and KINGS, with wars or PESTILENCES, in every page; the men
all so good for nothing, and HARDLY ANY WOMEN AT ALL — it is very TIRESOME: and
yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must
be invention. The SPEECHES that are put into the HEROES’ mouths, their thoughts
and designs — the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what DELIGHTS
me in other books.”
…which,
to my eyes, unmistakably points to Hamlet’s even more famous speech in Act 2,
Scene 2:
“I
have of late—but
wherefore I know not—LOST ALL MY MIRTH, FORGONE all custom of exercises; and indeed it GOES SO HEAVILY with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and PESTILENT congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what
is this quintessence of dust? man DELIGHTS NOT ME: no, nor
woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”
As I
analyze it, JA is enjoying the rich
irony of having Catherine say she enjoys reading plays and poetry (Hamlet is of
course both), as opposed to reading history, and yet…Hamlet is also all about
quarrels of kings, and has only two female characters, as opposed to a dozen
male characters!
Shakespeare,
as an adapter of history into poetic plays, seems to fall somewhere in the gray
area, between the reading Catherine says she enjoys, and the reading she says
she does not enjoy. By this veiled allusion, JA seems to be suggesting that
these categories are much more complicated than Catherine realizes. And on a
metafictional level, JA, by alluding so pervasively to Hamlet in NA, is in
effect blending poetry and prose, fiction and history, in one complicated
meta-text!
But,
as it turns out, that is only half of the Austenian subtext in NA pointing to
Hamlet’s famous speech. Today,
I realized that Jane Austen also had that same speech by Hamlet in mind as she
wrote the following passage in Chapter 25 of NA, which occurs after Catherine
has just learned that Isabella Thorpe has jilted the modest James Morland for the
rakish Frederick Tilney:
[Henry
to Catherine] "Your brother is certainly very much to be pitied at
present; but we must not, in our concern for his sufferings, undervalue yours.
You feel, I suppose, that in losing Isabella, you lose half yourself: you feel
a void in your heart which nothing else can occupy. SOCIETY IS BECOMING IRKSOME;
and as for the AMUSEMENTS in which you were wont to share at Bath, the very
idea of them without her IS ABHORRENT. You would not, for instance, now go to a
ball for THE WORLD. You feel that you have no longer any friend to whom you can
speak with unreserve, on whose regard you can place dependence, or whose
counsel, in any difficulty, you could rely on. You feel all this?"
Here
Henry---in a manner reminiscent of the scene a few chapters earlier, when he deliberately
stoked the fires of Catherine’s imaginative anticipations of Gothic horrors to
come as they approach the Abbey--- describes the world-weary Hamletian angst
which he supposes Catherine feels after reading that James has been jilted by
Isabella.
And
the ironic parallel is enhanced, when we
recall that Hamlet makes his above-quoted speech to Rosencrantz &
Guildenstern, his old school chums whom he has, in Act 2 Scene 2, rapidly
exposed as false friends, just like Isabella vis a vis Catherine. Hamlet is
weary of the false world filled with false friends like them, and Henry (and of
course, JA, pulling the strings behind
him) hints that Catherine, having been shocked by her “best friend’s”
romantic treachery, should feel as Hamlet feels.
But
then, after all of that fevered buildup toward an excessively emotional response
by Catherine, JA, in classic ironic
mode, pops the balloon of expectations, and abruptly brings us down to earth, from
the heated imaginary world of Gothic
excess to the real world of Catherine’s commonsensical, pragmatic, self-awareness
of her actual feelings.
In response
to Henry’s leading question, “You feel all this?”, this time the less gullible Catherine
fails to rise to Henry’s bait, and instead responds in quite the opposite
fashion as she did as they approached the Abbey:
“ "No,"
said Catherine, after a few moments' reflection, "I do not—ought I? To say
the truth, though I am hurt and grieved, that I cannot still love her, that I
am never to hear from her, perhaps never to see her again, I do not feel so
very, very much afflicted as one would have thought."
[Henry]
"You feel, as you always do, what is most to the credit of human nature. Such
feelings ought to be investigated, that they may know themselves."
Catherine,
by some chance or other, found her spirits so very much relieved by this
conversation that she could not regret her being led on, though so
unaccountably, to mention the circumstance which had produced it.” END QUOTE
The
attentive reader cheers along with Henry, and is confident that Catherine will
indeed follow Henry’s excellent advice and further investigate her feelings about
Isabella, uninfluenced by notions of the tragic Hamletian ennui and angst which
Henry has so deftly and subtly alluded to in his set-up.
And
the final lovely touch in all of this is that once again (as when, as I argued
at the AGM, JA leaves broad textual hints that the play which everyone goes to
see in Bath is actually Hamlet) JA has slipped a wink at the actual, tangible text
of Hamlet into this passage. It’s right there under the reader’s nose.
I.e., when we read earlier in that passage in
Chapter 25 the following exchange….
“Nothing
further was said for a few minutes; and then speaking through her tears, she
added, "I do not think I shall ever wish for a letter again!"
"I
am sorry," said Henry, closing the book he had just opened; "if I had
suspected the letter of containing anything unwelcome, I should have given it
with very different feelings."
….I
suggest to you that the book that JA so inobtrusively mentions that Henry had
just opened but then closes, is nothing less than the Northanger Abbey edition
of Shakespeare’s plays, where he had just been reading…Hamlet’s above quoted
speech!
Words,
words, words, indeed!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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