Yesterday,
the following passage in Jane Austen's Letter 120…
"...They
will come Monday instead; it must be before Wednesday, since then she is going
to London with Henry. "If Monday therefore should appear too DIRTY for
walking, & Mr. B.L. would be so kind as to come & fetch me to spend
some part of the morning with you, I should be much obliged to him,"
…was brilliantly
decoded as follows by Diana Birchall in Janeites and Austen-L:
“Jane
writes, reminding us once again of the difficulty of transportation in the
neighborhood, or any neighborhood, at that period. The smallest trip involving
"solitary female walking" involves anxious study of the state of the
road - it's all just dirt of course, and raining as much as it does in England,
the muddy roads thick with horse droppings would have been something fearful.
When Elizabeth Bennet's petticoats were inches deep in mud, we must remember
she was bringing horse dung into the Netherfield drawing-room. "
I immediately
and enthusiastically endorsed Diana’s sharp and persuasive reading of Elizabeth
Bennet’s famous walk from Longbourn to Netherfield as follows:
Excellent point, Diana! And actually, that does make the Bingley sisters seem a bit less nasty in their joking about Elizabeth, because Elizabeth is indeed more than a little insensitive to the bad smells she was importing into the Netherfield salon, even taking into account that bathing was not as regular during the Regency Era as it is today, even for the elite. Elizabeth is oversensitive to the bad impression that sister Mary makes when she eagerly displays her musical skills to a crowd at a ball, but she herself literally ignores that she brings a very bad smell into a roomful of snobs, and doesn't seem to know or care--there is a disconnect there that Jane Austen does intend us to notice--Elizabeth really is presenting herself as a country girl.
Then,
after Diana's suggestion was stoutly challenged in Janeites, I responded as
follows:
Here's a photo I found online when I Googled "stile":
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2489808
That sure looks to me like there's one stile where the worn path is, and one through the field next to the path. I agree with those who would say Lizzy would have followed footpaths in part, but how can anyone be so sure that Jane, e.g., would not have ridden her horse on the identical path over fields, stiles, and footpaths, that Lizzy did? What if that was THE preferred path between Longbourn and Netherfield, which over years had become codified in the minds of the Bennet girls? Why should we assume that there'd have always been separate paths for pedestrians and horseback riders? I'd think they'd use the same paths in the countryside.
And actually, I strongly suspect that it was Lizzy walking in part over horse trails, and not the reverse, because everyone is so surprised to hear that Lizzy walked such a long distance. Which suggests that probably nobody else ever made that same walk, at least in dirty weather, and that suggests to me that by default she'd be following the same route that Jane (and anyone else going back and forth on that route) took a few days earlier to get to Netherfield.
I know nothing about horses and their bodily functions, but I bet that someone who does could comment about where, when, and how often horses tend to make their "deposits" on the ground--perhaps there was a larger accumulation at stiles, the junction points where BOTH pedestrians and horse riders had to pass, and where there'd be a short stop while getting over the stile. And that would account for the SIX inches of "mud" on Lizzy's petticoat-when you jump down from even a small height, you would tend to sink deeper into the mud (that included horse manure) than just by normal walking. Tiny, seemingly insignificant details mean something in JA's writing!
What's for sure is that the Bingley sisters react, and Bingley and Darcy respond to them, as if they were all talking about more than just plain mud, but nobody wants to say it straight out. And it would also make sense that a country girl like Lizzy would have gotten used to country smells that these city girls like the Bingley sisters would, like Mary Crawford, be totally unfamiliar with--so the latter would probably be much more sensitive to those country smells than Lizzy.
And finally, remember that Jane Austen is the author who created Mr. Woodhouse, the man who was obsessed with "bad air" at "south end" (classic ribald humor!) and also wrote the following exchange about another rustic walk and the dangers of dirty feet:
"But you must have found it very damp and DIRTY. I wish you may not catch cold."
"DIRTY, sir! Look at my shoes. Not a speck on them."
"Well! that is quite surprising, for we have had a vast deal of rain here. It rained dreadfully hard for half an hour while we were at breakfast. I wanted them to put off the wedding."
I find it drolly funny to wonder whether Mr. Woodhouse is slyly hinting that Knightley might have gotten poop on his shoes. And I believe JA was perfectly capable of some subtle country humor about the "process of elimination" in man and beast. I'd say the question is up in the air, pending more evidence tending one direction or another.
Here's a photo I found online when I Googled "stile":
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2489808
That sure looks to me like there's one stile where the worn path is, and one through the field next to the path. I agree with those who would say Lizzy would have followed footpaths in part, but how can anyone be so sure that Jane, e.g., would not have ridden her horse on the identical path over fields, stiles, and footpaths, that Lizzy did? What if that was THE preferred path between Longbourn and Netherfield, which over years had become codified in the minds of the Bennet girls? Why should we assume that there'd have always been separate paths for pedestrians and horseback riders? I'd think they'd use the same paths in the countryside.
And actually, I strongly suspect that it was Lizzy walking in part over horse trails, and not the reverse, because everyone is so surprised to hear that Lizzy walked such a long distance. Which suggests that probably nobody else ever made that same walk, at least in dirty weather, and that suggests to me that by default she'd be following the same route that Jane (and anyone else going back and forth on that route) took a few days earlier to get to Netherfield.
I know nothing about horses and their bodily functions, but I bet that someone who does could comment about where, when, and how often horses tend to make their "deposits" on the ground--perhaps there was a larger accumulation at stiles, the junction points where BOTH pedestrians and horse riders had to pass, and where there'd be a short stop while getting over the stile. And that would account for the SIX inches of "mud" on Lizzy's petticoat-when you jump down from even a small height, you would tend to sink deeper into the mud (that included horse manure) than just by normal walking. Tiny, seemingly insignificant details mean something in JA's writing!
What's for sure is that the Bingley sisters react, and Bingley and Darcy respond to them, as if they were all talking about more than just plain mud, but nobody wants to say it straight out. And it would also make sense that a country girl like Lizzy would have gotten used to country smells that these city girls like the Bingley sisters would, like Mary Crawford, be totally unfamiliar with--so the latter would probably be much more sensitive to those country smells than Lizzy.
And finally, remember that Jane Austen is the author who created Mr. Woodhouse, the man who was obsessed with "bad air" at "south end" (classic ribald humor!) and also wrote the following exchange about another rustic walk and the dangers of dirty feet:
"But you must have found it very damp and DIRTY. I wish you may not catch cold."
"DIRTY, sir! Look at my shoes. Not a speck on them."
"Well! that is quite surprising, for we have had a vast deal of rain here. It rained dreadfully hard for half an hour while we were at breakfast. I wanted them to put off the wedding."
I find it drolly funny to wonder whether Mr. Woodhouse is slyly hinting that Knightley might have gotten poop on his shoes. And I believe JA was perfectly capable of some subtle country humor about the "process of elimination" in man and beast. I'd say the question is up in the air, pending more evidence tending one direction or another.
And
then, today, in the final stage (so far) of this smelly tale (I couldn’t
resist) of subtextual interpretation, Diana did a very creditable channeling of
Sir Walter Scott, writing in the lingo of an illiterate British shepherd, in
order to reiterate her claim:
Diana
wrote: "(darkly, in Hertfordshire peasant voice) Ah, there's no a-tellin'
what mixes in t' mud in yon part of t' world, ye knows. Them as thinks as no horses, an' no cows, an'
no sheepses goes paradin' over thar self same fields as Miss Liza Bennet
trompled over, th' hussy, they be city folks and don' know nothin' about what
manner o' dirt we got in these here parts. Loam, mon. What you be thinkin' loam are made
of? Ye demned fules!
Diana
(who in walking from Selborne to Chawton very narrowly missed stepping into a
violently oozy cow-pat and will guarantee that English country mud has always
been as liberally mixed with horse dung as my cappuccino is with cocoa.)"
END QUOTE
And
that inspired me to further chime in, in support of Diana:
And
as to any who object to such a reading, I suggest it's enough that Jane Austen
raised a suggestion (a whiff, if you will) of scatology in her descriptions of
Lizzy's six inches of dirty petticoats (three times as long
as the ivory she used to writer her novels!). Maybe Lizzy stepped in poop,
maybe it was a mixture of poop and ordinary dirt, maybe it smelled a lot or
maybe it smelled a little. The point is that this is a reasonable question
raised by the text itself, a question which cannot be resolved definitively
either way based on the text.
So
Diana's excellent sensitivity to the subliminal aroma of JA's language in
Letter 120 and in P&P has brought fresh perspective on that passage in P&P
which is pretty significant.
In
fact, if you think about it, aren't Lizzy's possibly poopy petticoats (say that
ten times in a row very fast!) the perfect symbol of the way Lizzy feels A LOT
when she's around Darcy, a feeling that Caroline Bingley does not hesitate to
bolster at every opportunity.
We've
all heard or used the expression "Now you've REALLY stepped in it", and
isn't that exactly how Lizzy feels when Mary performs at Netherfield ball, when
Lydia brazenly cavorts around, and most of all when Mrs. Bennet does her thing?
It's
a classic Jane Austen mixture of crude sexual innuendo wrapped in a tactful textual
package that creates just enough doubt about JA's intentions, that readers like
Nancy will feel justified in denying any dirty meanings, while readers like
Diana and myself will feel equally justified in opening the package and enjoying the rich,
complicated aroma of those same dirty meanings.
But
then, just as was getting ready to conclude this post, I realized with an
electric jolt what had been tickling my memory ever since I first read Diana’s
provocative suggestion, which absolutely clinches her interpretation, in spades,
and shows that this was not an isolated deployment of subtle scatology by JA,
in fact parts of her oeuvre are literally “covered” in it!
THE
GREAT “DIRTY” JOKE OF SENSE & SENSIBILITY
First,
the part I remembered. Three years ago, I posted the following claim of thinly
veiled scatological innuendo…
…in
the following passage in S&S Chapter 16:
"Dear,
dear Norland," said Elinor, "probably looks much as it always does at
this time of the year. The woods and walks thickly covered with dead
leaves."
"Oh,"
cried Marianne, "with what transporting sensation have I formerly seen
them fall! How have I delighted, as I walked, to see them driven in showers
about me by the wind! What feelings have they, the season, the air altogether
inspired! Now there is no one to regard them. They are seen only as a nuisance,
swept hastily off, and driven as much as possible from the sight."
"It
is not every one," said Elinor, "who has your passion for dead
leaves."
"No;
my feelings are not often shared, not often understood. But SOMETIMES they
are."—As she said this, she sunk into a reverie for a few moments;—but
rousing herself again, "Now, Edward," said she, calling his attention
to the prospect, "here is Barton valley. Look up to it, and be tranquil if
you can. Look at those hills! Did you ever see their equals? To the left is
Barton park, amongst those woods and plantations. You may see the end of the
house. And there, beneath that farthest hill, which rises with such grandeur,
is our cottage."
"It
is a beautiful country," he replied; "but these bottoms must be dirty in winter."
"How can you think of dirt, with such objects
before you?"
"Because,"
replied he, smiling, "among the
rest of the objects before me, I see a
very dirty lane."
"How strange!" said Marianne to
herself as she walked on.
It
should be obvious, I think, from the italicized words in Edward’s surprisingly risqué
repartee with Marianne—which, like so much of what happens in S&S, utterly
eludes the clueless Elinor---that when Elizabeth Bennet strode into the
Netherfield parlor with legs coated in a dark brown wet substance, JA was
having a really really good time revisiting the “dirty” motif she had so
cleverly and brilliantly introduced in the above passage in S&S.
And,
interestingly, it also makes it extremely likely that JA’s reference to a walk
being too “dirty” in Letter 120 to Anna was probably meant to be understood by
her intelligent and earthy niece as (literally) a “dirty” joke!
In
short, in thinking about the path taken by Elizabeth to Netherfield, and
paraphrasing the smiling Edward Ferrars, I see a VERY “dirty” lane!
THE SANITIZED
“DIRTY” JOKE OF THE WATSONS
I
also checked in JA’s juvenilia and fragments and found no evidence of this “dirty”
joke in the former, but found a very interesting example of it in The Watsons:
"Have
you been walking this morning?"
"No,
my Lord. We thought it
too DIRTY."
"You
should wear half-boots." – After another pause, "Nothing sets off a
neat ancle more than a half-boot; nankin galoshed with
black looks very well [have a very good air]
“Do
not you like Half-boots? “
“Yes
‒ but unless they are so stout as to injure their beauty, they [have not
advantage in the deep dirt of] are not fit for Country
walking.‐Ladies
should ride in DIRTY weather. ‐
…. He
recommended Exercise in defiance of DIRT ‐
spoke again in praise of Half-boots ‐
wanted her to begged that his Sister might be allow 'd allowed his sister to
send her Emma the name of her Shoemaker”
What’s
most interesting are the two substitutions that JA makes. She initially writes
that half-boots “have a very good air” (which is clearly a pun on “air” as
meaning either the overt meaning of “style” or the covert satirical meaning of “smell”—i.e.,
JA was attributing to the speaker a witty suggestion that the half boots smell
better after a walk on a “dirty” road!
But then for whatever reason (perhaps the disapproval of one or more of
JA’s siblings or parents) , she instead substitutes the sanitized “looks very
well”.
And
then, only two lines later, she at first makes reference to “have not advantage
in the deep dirt” of “country walking”, which conveys the notion of manure
piled high in the countryside, but then sanitizes that into the harmless “are
not fit for”.
While
these two substitutions could otherwise have had some stylistic motivation, I
think that the coincidence of not one but two substitutions in the same
conversation, which both sanitize “dirty” punning, is beyond the realm of
reasonable coincidence. This was entirely intentional!
THE PERVASIVE
“DIRTY” JOKE OF THE BATH EPISODE OF NORTHANGER ABBEY
But
something apparently happened between 1804 and 1811 that gave JA the courage to
keep her “dirty” jokes in her texts, hidden in plain sight in S&S and then
again in P&P. But these are one-shot deals in S&S and P&P, as it
turns out, and maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that the most pervasive
deployment by JA of this “dirty” scatological joke in all of JA’s novels, is in
the most overtly youthful, exuberant, and satirical of her novels---Northanger Abbey.
Read
in amazement (as I was amazed) at how many times she goes to the well on this same
“dirty” joke in the following passages, especially in Chapter 11, which must
henceforth be known as the epicenter of “dirt” in JA’s novels! All you have to
do every time you see the word “dirt” or “dirty”, is to hear that other
4-letter word which “dirt” stands in for, and the rest will be laughter, and
lots of it, unless your name is Malvolio and you just don’t approve of such
humor:
Ch.
1: “Her love of DIRT gave way to an
inclination for finery, and she grew
clean as she grew smart; she had now the pleasure of sometimes hearing her
father and mother remark on her personal
improvement.”
MY COMMENT:
Indeed a more careful attention on Catherine’s part to “dirt” than the Prince
Regent’s wife exhibited when he was first introduced to her in person would be
considered an “improvement”!
Ch.
5: “ ….if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still
resolute in meeting in defiance of wet
and DIRT, and shut themselves up, to read novels together.”
MY COMMENT:
So Catherine and Isabella would still get together, even though they had to
navigate through Bath’s “dirty” streets to do so.
Ch.9:
“Unsafe! Oh, lord! What is there in that? They will only get a roll if it does
break down; and there is plenty of DIRT;
it will be excellent falling….”
MY COMMENT:
I.e., if the carriage rolls over on the road, not to worry, because all the
muddy horse manure will cushion the fall!
Ch.
11: "No walk for me today," sighed Catherine; "but perhaps it
may come to nothing, or it may hold up before twelve."
"Perhaps it may, but then, my
dear, it will be so DIRTY."
"Oh! That will not signify; I
never mind DIRT."
"No," replied her friend
very placidly, "I know you never
mind DIRT."
After
a short pause…”
MY COMMENT: That last part is pitch
perfect subtle sarcasm on Mrs. Allen’s part—Catherine obliviously says she
never minds getting poop on her legs, and Mrs. Allen, who has been smelling
Catherine’s disregard for leg hygiene for quite a while, drops that sarcasm on
Catherine, who, being a sharp elf herself, picks up on the sarcasm, hence the “short
pause” before conversation resumes. This is priceless!
Also Ch. 11: “…whether
Catherine might still expect her friends, whether there had not been too much
rain for Miss Tilney to venture, must yet be a question. It was too DIRTY for
Mrs. Allen to accompany her husband to the pump-room…”
MY COMMENT:
Again, Mrs. Allen most definitely does not want to get poop on her legs.
Ch.
11 yet again!: "Well, I saw him at that moment turn up the Lansdown Road,
driving a smart-looking girl."
"Did you indeed?"
"Did upon my soul; knew him
again directly, and he seemed to have got some
very pretty cattle too."
"It is very odd! But I suppose
they thought it would be too DIRTY for a
walk."
"And well they might, for I never saw so much DIRT in my life.
Walk! You could no more walk than you could fly! It has not been so DIRTY the whole winter; it is ANKLE-DEEP everywhere."
Isabella corroborated it: "My
dearest Catherine, you cannot form an
idea of the DIRT; come, you must go; you cannot refuse going now."
MY COMMENT:
No comment is necessary, I think, to convey the hilarious humor implicit in
this passage, if you only substitute for “dirt” that other 4-letter word!
And
CH. 11 yet AGAIN: “It was now but an hour later than the time fixed on for the
beginning of their walk; and, in spite of what she had heard of the prodigious accumulation of DIRT in
the course of that hour, she could not from her own observation help thinking
that they might have gone with very little inconvenience.”
MY COMMENT:
“prodigious accumulation” indeed! The echoes of Swiftian scatalogy are
unmistakable!
And
the last round of the joke in Ch. 11: “…Why were not they more punctual? It was
DIRTY, indeed, but what did that signify? I am sure John and I should not have
minded it. I never mind going through
anything, where a friend is concerned…”
MY COMMENT:
Again, think about Isabella in effect saying, I don’t mind through s-t, when a
friend is concerned!
Sure,
one can read all of these “dirt” usages in a PG way, but you have to ask
yourself why JA would repeat this joke over and over and over again in Chapter
11 in particular, if it was only that and nothing more.
THE “DIRTY”
JOKES OF THE REST OF JA’S NOVELS:
Anyway,
as for the other JA novels, while JA also briefly revisits this “dirty” joke in
MP, Emma and Persuasion, it’s like the joking in S&S and P&P, but less
overt—essentially one-shot deals (like Mr. Knightley’s shoes which have “not a
speck” on them). They’re not on a scale that we see in the above quoted passages
in the “Bath” episode of NA, and that’s significant, I suggest. It has been asserted,
and I agree, that the “Bath” episode was not substantially rewritten after JA
took it back from the publisher, but that the “Abbey” episode was significantly
rewritten thereafter. My findings,
above, which show that the “dirty” joke is almost entirely confined to the “Bath”
episode only, together with its next strongest presence being otherwise present
in the first two novels to be
published, tell me that JA did not want to wear her youthful joke out with too
much revisiting in her last three novels to be written, but she never did let
go of it entirely, either.
That’s
why I think it fitting to end this post with what Mrs. Smith says to Anne about
Cousin Elliot’s feelings about Kellynch in her last completed novel, Persuasion:
“His
chance for the Kellynch estate was something, but all the honour of the family
he held as cheap as DIRT.”
This
has nothing to do with “dirt” on shoes, boots, or petticoats, but nonetheless I
think it clear that Mrs. Smith has sanitized what she really means when she
speaks of “dirt”, because only the crude Anglo-Saxon 4-letter word (that “dirt”
stands in for) accurately embodies the depth and intensity of the contempt and
anger that Mr. Elliot felt for the “honour” of the Elliot family. This is no longer a “dirty” joke, it’s an
appropriate novelistic way of conveying, in a single word, this powerful
meaning, which is why human language will never abandon ‘dirty words”, as they
fulfill an invaluable purpose when not abused.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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