I just wrote the following message to Anielka Briggs in Austen-L in response to several messages she wrote there about my recent postings here and in Austen L about Samuel Morland.
Anielka, apropos
your several recent repeated critiques of my longstanding claim that the late
17th century historical figure Samuel Morland was a major allusive
source for General Tilney, I have just been waiting in amazement as you have by
now hoisted yourself on several petards of your own construction, before
lighting the fuses you provided, and now I will allow you to blow yourself at
the moon, as it were, entirely with your own words.
Anielka
wrote, at various places in her recent posts: "But that's just it. You're
working backwards. In order to prove Samuel Morland represents General Tilney
in "your" thread you have started with a "hunch" and then
forced Samuel Morland to fit it. To prove something you have to start the other
way round: you have to find the elements of the subtext where English husband's
"murder" their wives and then attribute the same to General Tilney
and then extend the suspicion to Samuel Morland. General Tilney doesn't match well
to Samuel Morland….
There
are only three possible conclusions 1.) Mansfield park is secretly about
Samuel Morland too. 2. ) ALL the books
are secretly about Samuel Morland. (possible! See below*) 3.) By directing your
searches to Samuel-Morland-Connected words in Northanger Abbey.....you simply
prove yourself right when in fact there is no more evidence of Samuel Morland's
maths in Northanger Abbey than in any of the other books….
The "maths proof" of
Samuel Morland is terribly unsound. It would work if charisma and force of
will or unbiased ignorance was the state of the argument and the audience but the
average intellectual Janeite likes their answers logically parsed. Take a look
at these quotes from Mansfield Park…” END QUOTE
I
will avoid all jargon about “null hypothesis” and highblown claims about being
so rigorously scientific, and just write in plain straightforward English words.
The basis
of my repeated claim that Samuel Morland is such an extraordinary fit as an
allusive source for General Tilney in Northanger
Abbey, is the intersection, in one historical person, of the collective of ALL of
the following eight parallels:
ONE: Samuel
Morland’s surname is identical to that of the protagonist of Northanger Abbey.
TWO:
Samuel Morland created not one but two “awful memorials” to his dead wives in
an ancient Abbey. I saw them with my own eyes in July 2009, and have provided
photos of same in my previous posts. General Tilney of course created his own
memorial to his dead wife in his ancient Abbey.
THREE:
Samuel Morland’s two dead wives were both very close in age to Catherine
Morland when they married him, and he was, like General Tilney vis a vis Catherine,
decades older than they were. I have
asserted since 2009 that General Tilney is actually wooing the much younger Catherine
for himself in Northanger Abbey, not, as almost all Janeites believe, on behalf of
his son Henry. And by the way, my interpretation must have been shared by
Maggie Wadey, screenwriter of the Robert Hardy Northanger Abbey, because her screenplay unmistakably hints at that
very same reading of General Tilney’s amorous intentions toward Catherine in a
very clever way.
FOUR:
Samuel Morland’s two young wives both died in childbirth, and I was the first
to claim that General Tilney is the poster child for Jane Austen’s most
persistent and explicit feminist hobby horse, her deep abiding outrage over the
“plague” of serial pregnancy leading to a “Russian Roulette” scenario of
frequent death in childbirth among English gentlewomen/wives that was still
raging in full force during JA’s lifetime. Her letters are filled with examples
of her sarcastic outrage at this state of affairs.
In a
nutshell, I claim that Mrs. Tilney is the “ghost” of all the English wives “murdered”
in childbirth by their Bluebeard-like husbands----a ghost whose voice Catherine
Morland “hears”, in Hamletian fashion. And I therefore claim that Henry Tilney’s
famous “We are Christians” rant is meant
to be read topsy turvy, i.e., as Jane Austen’s condemnation of the corrupt and
hypocritical moral, political, spiritual, and familial patriarchal authorities
of the day, for their collective failure to lift one finger to protect those
English wives, or to even acknowledge the existence of that plague.
FIVE:
Samuel Morland was famous for his work with ciphers, which of course is what
prompted my recent endorsement of your excellent detection of the most direct
sigh for/cipher wordplay in Northanger
Abbey, which I then supplemented with other textual evidence from NA, as
well as from Shakespeare.
SIX:
Samuel Morland was famous for his political intrigues on behalf of aristocratic
patrons, which are strikingly echoed by General Tilney’s burning the midnight
oil toiling over “stupid pamphlets”.
SEVEN: Samuel Morland, in later middle age, became a true marital mercenary just like General Tilney-i.e., Samuel Morland tried to marry a woman of some wealth, in order to help him pay his considerable debts.
EIGHT:
Samuel Morland was famous for inventing calculating machines, and in one of my
last posts I demonstrated that Northanger
Abbey contains wordplay about calculating and numbers which winks at Samuel
Morland’s fame in this regard.
Now,
note that, even though you explicitly attributed it to me, I never made any
suggestion that Item EIGHT, above, standing alone, was particularly strong
evidence that Jane Austen meant for General Tilney to stand in for Samuel
Morland. All I suggested was that the first 7 such Items, taken together, comprise
the most compelling and extraordinary sort of textual evidence in support of my
claim. I.e., the chances that all of these 7 parallels might have arisen
together by chance are, I think any reasonable observer would agree, minuscule.
Only in that context does the less laser-focused Item EIGHT become
significant—i.e., Item EIGHT becomes a “tail” only because the first 7 Items
comprise a fully-fleshed-out “dog”!
Now,
in contrast, let’s look at the counter-example you brought forward trying to
rebut my claim--Sir Thomas Bertram from Mansfield Park. Sir Thomas is, I do think it fair
to say, the most “General Tilneyesque” character from among all the other
Austen novels. And yes (as I have previously written, by the way, here….
…),
Sir Thomas is most definitely a greedy mercenary, powerful SOB who values his
monetary wealth infinitely more than he values the unfortunate people who
comprise his family.
But…Sir
Thomas does not have any of those
other parallels to Samuel Morland that General Tilney does. Run them down, one
by one, and you’ll see that it’s so. Sure, Sir Thomas shows a creepy “dirty old
man” interest in Fanny’s body when he returns from Antigua, and sure he is a
member of Parliament who, based on his owning a slave plantation and his
abhorrence of the theatre, was probably a strong anti-Jacobin like General
Tilney. But Sir Thomas at most has a very weak connection to Samuel Morland,
negligible in comparison to General Tilney’s connections. No “awful memorials”,
no dead wife, no cipher expertise, no late night spying on fellow Englishmen,
no common surname. I.e., no allusion worth the trouble to analyze. And forget about any of the other Austen
patriarchs, they are all much further away from even a whiff of Samuel Morland.
No, General Tilney stands uniquely alone in this regard.
So…without
recourse to jargon or lengthy recitals of War of the Roses history, Anielka, if
you have any rebuttal to the above specific points, feel free to quote from my
examples, and show how you believe I am in error.
But
before I finish, I have two more items presented by you to respond to, which
actually also relate to my above answers so far:
Anielka
wrote: “As to WESTminster and NORTHanger abbey. To be honest, like trying to fit
a size 12 foot into a glass slipper. Might as well bring in all the ugly
sisters and try and ram SOUTHerton in as well.”
As a
matter of fact, Jane Austen used three directions
in names of her great estates: NORTHanger Abbey, SOTHerton, and NORland. The
only one she did not use was “west”, and I think the reason for this omission
is obvious---the name was already taken by WESTminster Abbey, which after all
was arguably the most famous early modern edifice in all of Great Britain.
So, I
think anyone reading the above would find your metaphors about Cinderella
completely wrong, because the “foot” consisting of the collective of JA’s directional
names for those three fictional edifices could not fit more perfectly into the “slipper”
of clever wordplay of the kind you of all people should acknowledge as classic,
vintage Jane Austen wordplay!
But
there’s still one more claim you made, in response to my measured and (I think)
polite and non-aggressive framing of our difference of opinion as being merely
that, and not evidence of my rightness and your wrongness. It turns out that in
this last claim of yours, you are very wrong, in a particularly ironic and
meaningful way:
Anielka
wrote: “Whilst we may march to the beat of a different drum there is only one common
direction in
which we can be headed if we use cracking Austen's code as a goal.
Suggesting that there are two different interpretations or that one can
"vive the difference" in code breaking is like suggesting we can fill
in different words on the same crossword grid when given the same clues by the
same author. Or that we can be given the same set of jigsaw pieces and come up
with our own, different, creative jigsaws. Or that if you encrypt a piece
of text with a code-word that you can produce two completely different but
equally cogent deciphered texts. There's only one answer. That's the point of
codes.” END QUOTE
In
reply to the above, I start by pointing you to the following post by me
simultaneously 2 ½ years ago in both Austen L and in my blog…
…in
which I acknowledged you as a puzzle solver, by the way, and in which I also
wrote about a New York Times puzzle I had done that day which was extraordinary
for its bravura hiding in plain sight of some extraordinary anagrammatical wordplay
that Jane Austen would have been proud to have generated herself.
Well….what
I did not mention then, but should have, was something that you’d know if you
had been doing NY Times crossword puzzles since 1992 or earlier, and/or if you
had seen the 2006 documentary film Wordplay….
…one
of the highlights of which is some footage of former US President Bill Clinton
being interviewed about his longstanding passion for solving Will Shortz
crossword puzzles. That
interview is very entertaining, but the part of the film that uncannily
demolishes your claim that it would be impossible to “fill in different words
on the same crossword grid when given the same clues by the same author” is the
scene when we are shown the following about the November 5, 1996 crossword
puzzle, which, not coincidentally was the day after the US Presidential
election in which Clinton, as it turned out, defeated Dole:
By
now you’ve probably guessed what the above clip from the film (and related blog
post) both explain. I.e., the puzzle was cleverly constructed by Jerry Farrell
under Will Shortz’s usual editorship, such that the 7-letter answer to the clue
asking, in effect, for the winner of the election, would work perfectly fine
with either “Clinton” or “BobDole”!!!
How
could that be? Because, as Clinton himself and that blogger both explain, the
7-letter horizontal answer to that clue intersects seven different vertical
answers, each of which has two
completely plausible and satisfying answers. So if the solver had entered
“Clinton” for 39 Across, he or she would then find that there were seven
vertical answers intersecting the letters of “Clinton” which work just fine.
But…if the solver had entered “BobDole”, then there was also a set of seven other vertical answers, varying from
their twin vertical answers by only that one letter, intersecting the letters
of “BobDole”, which also work just fine!!
No
wonder Will Shortz refers to this puzzle as his favorite of all time---And now
you see, Anielka, that you actually made a claim that could not be more
profoundly wrong, not just regarding crossword puzzles, but, much more
importantly, regarding Jane Austen and literature in general!
You
were so wrong, because, bringing things back to Samuel Morland and General
Tilney, I draw the very apt analogy to the 1996 Presidential Puzzle, and opine
that it is possible for various textual clues in Northanger Abbey to collectively allude to Samuel Morland, while at
the same time, a different configuration of textual clues in Northanger Abbey can collectively allude
to other historical or literary sources, such as, e.g., your Tudor subtexts
(which as I responded last week, I find interesting, even though I consider
them “tails” and not “dogs”).
And
then, the most satisfying (and subtly difficult) puzzle of all, once one has
assembled enough of these allusive sources in Northanger Abbey, is to analyze them side by side, and to think
about how they might somehow interact with each other. And then at the peak of the summit, analyzing
how the gestalt of all these covert allusive sources might inform the reader as
to how to find what I call the coherent “shadow story” of the entire novel!
If
you think this highest level of analysis can be reduced to a single word that
is utterly objective and supersedes all other levels, then I say you are living
in a fantasy world of your own entire creation.
Jane
Austen was interested, I suggest, in creating meaningful simulacra of the messy,
muddy experience of real life. In real life, we don’t have Will Shortz or Jane
Austen sitting on our shoulder whispering the meaning of our lives to us—the
whispers we hear are our own voice, the sum total of our own wisdom and folly,
pride and prejudice, knowledge and delusion, and there is no such animal as
“objective reality”. Quite the contrary, there are lots of people in our lives,
including perhaps most of all our own selves, who look like “ducks” sometimes,
but like “rabbits” some other times. Such a puzzlement! But that is real human
life, we are born into this sort of uncertainty, and would do best to just
embrace it, rather than to lust for certainty where no certainty exists.
But
back to Jane Austen one more time---as an author of layered allusions, she
buried inside her characters multiple
allusive sources drawn from history, politics, literature, her own family,
etc., and so she knew she did have the luxury of a perfect fit for each of
those allusive sources. But, who cares that Samuel Morland was married three
times, what matters are not the 50 ways he is different from General Tilney,
but the seven ways he is the same. Those seven connected parallels are already
statistically significant, and they give Jane Austen the luxury of creating
quadrophonic layering of allusions for each of her characters. Otherwise, any
single allusion that worked in every way would not only be totally heavy handed
and obvious, and therefore unworthy of a great author, it would also be a kind
of Procrustean bed, which would prohibit any other allusion from working.
Jane
Austen was such a sophisticated student of epistemology—how we know what we
know---that she knew that the best way she could teach her readers to be better
readers of life would be to give them
engaging novels which they’re read and reread enough to eventually see deeper
and deeper into the depths of these riddling texts. In so doing, they’d be
practicing skills they could then apply in real life, looking upon their real
life family and friends as mysterious characters as to whom it would be
perilous to jump to too-quick conclusions based on “first impressions”. Gradually,
she clearly hoped, her readers would learn to be humble in the face of the enormous and
never-ceasing struggle to get closer to the most elusive beast of all in the
human jungle---truth.
So…thank
you, Anielka, for prompting me to put all of the above together in rebutting
your claims and arguments, it has been a most refreshing turn around the room!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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