In my
last post, I took note of Jane Austen’s (very thinly veiled) allusion to one of
Mary Wollstonecraft’s most powerful feminist statements, about how the laws of
England are toxic to married women:
"The
laws respecting woman, which I mean to discuss in a future part, make an absurd unit of a man and his wife; and
then by the easy transition of only considering him as responsible, she is
reduced to a mere
CIPHER." A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman, Chapter 9, at page 307.
I
then noted that Jane Austen had clearly used the word “cipher” in Northanger Abbey (both overtly and in
the veiled wordplay identified by Anielka and supplemented by myself) in part
as an allusion to that very statement by Wollstonecraft, which must have made a
powerful impact on the teenaged Jane Austen when she read them (as I believe
she did) when they were published in 1792.
I
believe they made such a powerful impact on Jane Austen, in fact, that she
included a very prominent and very ironic reference to those toxic marital laws
of England in Henry Tilney’s rant about Englishmen as Christians who could
never commit atrocities. Northanger Abbey
was a novel, after all, that she revised for the last time in 1816, and
therefore it represented the views of JA at the end of her life, just as much
as it did when she was barely into her twenties and writing Susan, the first version of NA nearly
twenty years earlier.
But
now I see some even more brilliant wordplay hiding in plain sight in JA’s subversive
homage to Wollstonecraft’s above passage about English marital laws---allusive
wordplay which points to that passage very specifically!
Can
you spot it? It’s really a
quintessential Austenian veiled wordplay allusion:
Wollstonecraft’s
irony is withering as she describes the subtle casuistry, the Catch-22 that
undergirds the horrid effects of English marital law on English wives. She points
out the diabolical chain of logic involved—first they pass a law absurdly
giving the husband power over every legal aspect of marriage, including
everything to do with the wife. By then the horse is already outside the barn,
and therefore it is an “easy transition” from this absurd, grotesque premise to
the “natural” conclusion, which is that a married women is not merely legally powerless,
she almost ceases to exist as
independent moral, psychological, emotional being—she is “reduced to a mere cipher”, or as we might say
today, she becomes a zombie (and that reminds me, what a great opportunity was missed
by the author of Pride &Prejudice
& Zombies—he could have tapped into Jane Austen’s actual feminist subtext,
instead of merely exploiting the current popularity of P&P by linking it in
the most simple-minded, montonic way to the modern fantasy horror genre craze).
But
back to Wollstonecraft’s quote---where have Janeites heard that sort of ironic
chain of perverse logic involving an “easy transition” before in the novels of
Jane Austen? I bet some of you do hear
the echo, but for those who don’t here it is, in two places, both in the very same paragraph of Northanger Abbey:
“[Henry]
talked of foregrounds, distances, and second distances—side-screens and perspectives—lights
and shades; and Catherine was so hopeful a scholar that when they gained the
top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath as
unworthy to make part of a landscape. Delighted with her progress, and fearful
of wearying her with too much wisdom at once, Henry suffered the subject to
decline, and by AN EASY TRANSITION from a piece of rocky fragment and the
withered oak which he had placed near its summit, to oaks in general, to
forests, the enclosure of them, waste lands, crown lands and government, he
shortly found himself arrived at politics; and from politics, it was AN EASY
STEP to silence. The general pause which succeeded his short disquisition on
the state of the nation was put an end to by Catherine….”
So
how remarkable it is that this passage so closely resembles Henry Tilney’s “We
are Christians” rant, which itself could be perfectly described as a “short
disquisition on the state of the nation”? It’s clear that Jane Austen means for
the close reader to connect them. In
each of them, we have an edict by Henry about “weighty” topics, in which he
assumes the self-appointed mantle of Great Teacher, as he moves from one
subtopic to the next, overawing (or so he believes) Catherine with his great erudition.
And
how fitting---how perfect!---, that both of these passages in NA which subvert
of patriarchal authority are also both veiled allusions to Wollstonecraft’s
inspiring condemnation of English
marriage laws. In one passage, JA makes prominent ironic reference to English
laws which supposedly protect women, in the other passage, she makes wordplay
reference to Wollstonecraft, by using the identical
phrase, “an easy transition “ to describe pure casuistry by a man claiming
exclusive authority about The Truth.
This dual
veiled allusion to Wollstonecraft in Northanger
Abbey validates and reaffirms my claim that Mrs. Tilney is the symbol of
married English women who got the shaft (in all nuances of that word) from
English laws, customs, religion and philosophy. I had not previously fully
understood how important, in a very specific thematic way, Wollstonecraft was
to that symbolism. Wollstonecraft may not have written about death in childbirth/serial
pregnancy as a kind of mass epidemic afflicting English wives, but the clear
implications of what she did write were fully noted by Jane Austen, and that is
why JA included this double allusion to Wollstonecraft, as an homage to the
intellectual mentor who inspired JA to her own original insights.
Has
an allusion to Wollstonecraft’s famous “mere cipher” passage this been argued
before? No, but I did find a remarkable passage in an outside-the-box 2006 article
by Terry Robinson, where he does everything
but mention Mary Wollstonecraft as being integral to a subversive
reading of Northanger Abbey:
“In
the end, Catherine appears a convert. The narrator notifies the reader that
“The visions of romance were over,” and that after Henry chastises her,
Catherine “hate[s] herself more than she c[an] express”
(Austen
173). Later, though, the narrator adds an ironic and revealing twist: It was
not three months ago since, wild with joyful expectation, [Catherine] had there
run backwards and forwards some ten times a-day, with an heart light, gay, and
independent; looking forward to pleasures untasted and unalloyed, and free from
the apprehension of evil as from the knowledge of it. Three months ago had seen
her all this; and now, how altered a being did she return! (207)
The
critical tendency to read this passage (which undoubtedly suggests a move from
innocence to experience) as evidence of Catherine’s maturation (her successful
entrance into and participation in society as aided by Henry Tilney) fails to
capture a more complicated possibility: that despite Henry’s countless
impositions, Catherine has not become his protégée, A MERE CIPHER of his aesthetic.
Rather, Catherine gains “knowledge” and “apprehension of evil” as a direct
result of her associative and interpretive powers.” “ END QUOTE
As
must be obvious, I could not agree more with Robinson’s capturing of the “more complicated
possibility” that Catherine is the true wise one in the novel, not Henry. But I
also find it clear that Robinson---even though he does not cite, or even
mention, Wollstonecraft by name anywhere in his article---has clearly got Vindication in mind when he (apparently
unconsciously) quotes from it, and totally aptly, in opining that
Catherine has not become “a mere cipher” of Henry’s aesthetic.
I
conclude with the acknowledgment that while Jane Austen probably would have
preferred to have the above explanations of her covert radical feminism be
given by women, I believe it would have been a genuinely easy step for her to approve of its being expressed even
by men, so long as it was done in recognition of her worthy (and, sadly, still relevant)
feminist purposes.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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