Inspired by a brilliant insight
by Diana Birchall two weeks ago…..
…as to the organic post-digestive
origin (to put it delicately) of the “mud” on Lizzy Bennet’s petticoat after
she walks through the lanes, stiles, and meadows en route ot Netherfield early
in Pride & Prejudice, I, during
the past two weeks, posted six variations on Diana’s theme, making a
comprehensive, multi-faceted argument for Jane Austen having alluded not only
in P&P, but also in Emma and Persuasion, to poop---mostly but not all
of the equine variety--on both the rural paths and the urban streets where her
heroines:
What I did not attempt till
today, however, was to determine whether JA, serial alluder that she was, had any
literary antecedents which inspired her to use “dirt” as code for “poop” in her
writing. Given that her two most favorite literary sources were Shakespeare and
the Bible, I started there, by the simple expedient of searching the word
“dirt” in databases for those respective sources, and I struck gold (of the intellectual
variety) in both cases, gold which, as you will see by the end of my tale, is
interconnected!
BIBLICAL DIRT
Judges
3:12-30 of the Hebrew Bible, the brief tale of Ehud and Eglon, is not long, so
I will reproduce it in full, here (from King James Version, the one Jane Austen
would have had at hand). I have set apart in the middle of this chapter the
line which uses the word “dirt” as code for “poop”:
And
the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the LORD: and the LORD
strengthened Eglon the king of Moab against Israel, because they had done evil
in the sight of the LORD. And he gathered unto him the children of Ammon and
Amalek, and went and smote Israel, and possessed the city of palm trees. So the children of Israel served Eglon the king of Moab eighteen years. But
when the children of Israel cried unto the LORD, the LORD raised them up a
deliverer, Ehud the son of Gera, a Benjamite, a man lefthanded: and by him the
children of Israel sent a present unto Eglon the king of Moab. But Ehud made
him a dagger which had two edges, of a cubit length; and he did gird it under
his raiment upon his right thigh. And he brought the present unto Eglon king of
Moab: and Eglon was a very fat man. And when he had made an end to offer the
present, he sent away the people that bare the present. But he himself turned
again from the quarries that were by Gilgal, and said, I have a secret errand
unto thee, O king: who said, Keep silence. And all that stood by him went out
from him. And Ehud came unto him; and he was sitting in a summer parlour, which
he had for himself alone. And Ehud said, I have a message from God unto thee.
And he arose out of his seat. And Ehud put forth his left hand, and took the
dagger from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly
And
the haft also went in after the blade; and the fat closed upon the blade, so
that he could not draw the dagger out of his belly; AND THE DIRT CAME OUT.
Then
Ehud went forth through the porch, and shut the doors of the parlour upon him,
and locked them. When
he was gone out, his servants came; and when they saw that, behold, the doors
of the parlour were locked, they said, Surely he covereth his feet in his
summer chamber. And they tarried till they were ashamed: and, behold, he opened
not the doors of the parlour; therefore they took a key, and opened them: and, behold,
their lord was fallen down dead on the earth. And Ehud escaped while they
tarried, and passed beyond the quarries, and escaped unto Seirath. And it came to pass, when he was come, that
he blew a trumpet in the mountain of Ephraim, and the children of Israel went
down with him from the mount, and he before them. And he said unto them, Follow
after me: for the LORD hath delivered your enemies the Moabites into your hand.
And they went down after him, and took the fords of Jordan toward Moab, and
suffered not a man to pass over. And they slew of Moab at that time about ten
thousand men, all lusty, and all men of valour; and there escaped not a man. So
Moab was subdued that day under the hand of Israel. And the land had rest
fourscore years. END QUOTE
Simply and tactfully put, the
phrase “and the dirt came out” was the translator’s discreet way of saying that
when Ehud stabbed Eglon to death, Eglon involuntarily defecated as he died. My
point is simple—the code word for poop that the translator chose, which was the
word every reader of the story of Eglon and Ehud in the King James Bible would
have seen, was DIRT.
HAMLET’S DIRT
In Act 5, Scene 1, of Hamlet, Hamlet considers human mortality
very closely indeed, as he chats with Horatio, and they observe the
Gravediggers (getting ready, as it turns out, for Ophelia’s interment). Hamlet
reflects on the odor and the dirt of the undiscovered country we all, emperor,
lawyer and common man, must eventually arrive at:
Hamlet: There's another: why may
not that be the skull of a
lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a DIRTY shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery? Hum! This fellow might be in's time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries: is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have HIS FINE PATE FULL OF
FINE DIRT? Will his vouchers vouch him
no more of his purchases, and double ones too, than the
length and breadth of a pair of indentures? The very
conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box; and
must the inheritor himself have no more, ha?
….
Horatio: What's
that, my lord?
Horatio: E'en so.
Hamlet: AND SMELT SO?
PAH!
Puts down the skull
Horatio: E'en so, my lord.
Hamlet: To what base
uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace
the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it STOPPING A
BUNG-HOLE?
I
always laugh out loud when reading Horatio’s marvelously understated graveside humor
in that last riposte to Hamlet. It reminds me of the other line of Horatio’s
that also makes me laugh every time ---his response to Hamlet’s report that
“There's ne'er a villain dwelling
in all Denmark
But he's an arrant knave”:
But I
quoted the above passage from Hamlet 5.1 not (just) to make you laugh, but to
show that Hamlet uses the word “dirt” twice in Hamlet’s first quoted speech,
the latter of them referring to the contents of a skull; and then, in the
exchange with Horatio that follows shortly thereafter, Hamlet comments on the
foul smell of a skull he is holding, and then in effect connects that smell to
a graphic image of human remains as being relocated to just inside a human rear
end.
So,
there is, I claim, a second major, world-famous literary source and inspiration
for JA to use “dirt” as code for “poop” in her novels.
CONCLUSION
Even
though the above would have been probative enough, the capper of these two allusive
sources is that I had already previously determined, during my extensive
research on Hamlet some years ago,
that Shakespeare very consciously and spectacularly alluded to this same
episode of Eglon and Ehud, in Act 3, Scene 3 of Hamlet, when Hamlet contemplates Claudius alone in his “closet”,
and debates whether to kill Claudius then, or to wait (and of course he makes
the latter choice).
Claudius
begins his famous soliloquy with the line “O, my offence is rank it
smells to heaven”—I don’t think I need to explain to anyone how that connects
to the tale of Eglon and Ehud!
So,
to sum up, I suggest that both Hamlet, with
its full Second Quarto published in 1603, and its First Folio version in 1623,
and the King James Bible published in 1611 after 7 years of work, are both
using the word “dirt” to refer to poop, in a coordinated manner, and there are
no two works of literature with which Jane Austen was more familiar, I assert,
than those two.
But it turned out that it did need a scholar come from the Internet to tell you all that Jane Austen used “dirt” as code for “poop” in several of her novels, but particularly in Emma and Persuasion, and she was in doing so very slyly alluding to the Bible and Shakespeare!
Which
also tells you what I think about the current universal opinion that JA (or
Shakespeare, for that matter) would never have engaged in such a sacrilegious
enterprise! I say, she, like Shakespeare, felt it was her sacred right as an
author of fine literature to appropriate what she needed from the amazing
literary source known as the Bible, including its graphically profane as well
as its ethereally holy content.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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