In addition to the “eye weakness”
subtext of Letter 123 to which I devoted an entire post earlier today….
…I will now make the case for additional,
similar subtext, of equal significance to that of the “eye weakness” subtext, all
crammed into this short, seemingly trivial & innocuous Letter 123 to 10
year old niece Caroline Austen.
Letter 123 now seems to me to be a textbook
example of how JA effortlessly and frequently met the challenge of writing her
letters so as to communicate dicey and even explosive meaning in code to knowing
readers of those letters other than the named addressee, while at the same time
preserving total opacity to a reader not “looking for trouble”. I’ve divided this post into four topical
sections, and this is one post you really
want to read all the way to the end, because I’ve saved the best (or the worst,
depending on your point of view) for the fourth and last section.
The Delights of Taking Care of
Children:
“It gives us great pleasure that you
should be at Chawton. I am sure Cassy must be delighted to have you.”
Of course on the surface these two
sentences appear merely to be Aunt Jane delighting in the prospect of her two
age-similar nieces, Caroline (age 10) and Cassy (age 7), getting to spend some
quality time together at Chawton.
But first, I believe it did not
escape Jane Austen that “Cassy” also just happened to be the childhood nickname
of sister Cassandra, who was at that very moment at Chawton taking care of
Caroline and Cassy. So, that second sentence takes on a new ironic layer of
meaning, if it is read to refer to Aunt Cassandra’s own feelings about now having
Caroline around to attend to and contend with, along with the younger, perhaps more
difficult, Cassy, who was already there, and for whom, as Diana pointed out,
the recent death of her mother was a still-fresh wound.
For that matter, I also wonder how delighted 7-year old Cassy
really was to suddenly have an older rival for her aunt Cassandra’s attentions right
there in the Cottage. Sounds like droll irony on JA’s part, because we know JA
was already aware of Cassy’s jealous bossiness as JA described it in Letter 120
to Anna Lefroy, when little Cassy, less than a month earlier, put the kibosh on
a visit with her aunts to the very pregnant Anna at Wyards in favor of a trip
to the fair that she really wanted to take.
Jane Austen would not have been
blind to these family dynamics, and I think she was working for a wry smile from
Cassandra upon reading the above, as if to say, I just bet you must be delighted to have more children to care for.
Jane Austen’s Precious Pianoforte:
“You will practise your Music of
course, & I trust to you for taking care of my Instrument & not letting
it be ill used in any respect.-Do not allow anything to be put on it, but what
is very light.”
Here, what comes through loud and
clear, without resort to hints, and from the rapid fire repetition of several emphatic
warnings and prohibitions, is the real fear that JA has that somehow Caroline
will mess up JA’s precious pianoforte. My guess is that Caroline minded her
aunt’s stern admonitions. For sure, it tells us just how important that
pianoforte was to JA’s mental and spiritual health—I imagine her piano playing
as a deeply nourishing private discipline & practice, a time for communing
with her own imagination in preparation for the sacred act of literary
composition. So, JA was not leaving her pianoforte vulnerable to the vagaries
of a 10-year old’s judgment, and was being crystal clear about the supreme
importance of its not being “ill used in any respect”.
The Hermit:
“I hope you will try to make out
some other tune besides the Hermit.”
Thanks to Diana, for pointing out Le
Faye’s gloss on this sentence, and then quoting the first stanza and giving us
that brief bio re Beattie’s sad family history. I think that brief bio is the key
to understanding JA’s subtext in the above sentence.
First, I think it clear that JA was
aware of the deep sadness underlying Beattie’s familiar lyrics (which are the
voice of human grief, agonizing over the pain and despair of knowing that deceased
loved ones are, unlike the perennial fruits of Mother Nature, never going to return in the spring—Beattie’s
dead wife and children were gone forever.
Was it just a coincidence, then,
that the overarching theme of Letter 123 is the Austen family dynamics at
Chawton , in particular the presence at Chawton of a little girl who has just
lost her mother, and perhaps, with a 7-year-old’s mind, was at times lost in
fantasies of a return of her mother, in defiance of the cold, harsh finality of
those lryics?
So this is what leads me to
speculate that Caroline Austen in fact had not
playing the Hermit all the time, or even at all, on Jane Austen’s
pianoforte! This was another one of JA’s spontaneous fantasies which dramatize
an important message—and that message, which I believe she thought Caroline
capable of understanding, even at 10, was that Caroline should be extra
sensitive to little Cassy’s needs during her visit at Chawton. In effect, “don’t
play the Hermit all the time” could be translated as “Be a good cousin, and do what you can to
raise the little girls spirits, perhaps by playing cheery songs!”.
My Dear Sister-Aunt:
“Now that you are become an Aunt,
you are a person of some consequence & must excite great Interest whatever
you do. I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible,
& I am sure of your doing the same now. Beleive me my dear Sister-Aunt”
On the surface, this appears to be a
charming attempt by JA to make Caroline Austen feel some sense of herself as
special, given her seniority, at least in comparison to the younger Austen
cousins from the two naval families. Whereas, in her birth family, Caroline was
“the baby”.
This charming attempt takes on more significance
when viewed in the context of the veiled request that I suggested in my third
section, above, that JA was making to Caroline, i.e., that Caroline not do
anything to rekindle little Cassy’s grief over losing her mother. JA takes this
final moment, then, to reiterate this theme of Caroline as playing an
adult-like role vis a vis younger relatives, whether it be a grieving 7 year
old cousin or a newborn niece.
But in her characteristic mode of hiding
her biggest secrets in plain sight, JA casually tosses in something extra from
left field as she signs off on Letter 123, something that gives the informed
reader pause…in this case, it’s JA’s calling Caroline “my dear Sister-Aunt”.
If this peculiar turn of phrase sounds
familiar to a reader familiar with literature that Jane Austen might have been familiar
with, there’s a very very good reason. There are (at least) two famous works of
literature which I believe Jane Austen knew very well indeed, which contain dialog
which refers to exactly that same sort of familial double-relationship:
Act 2 Scene 2 Hamlet:
Sophocles’ Antigone:
Ismene:
Bethink
thee, sister, of our father's fate,
Abhorred,
dishonored, self-convinced of sin,
Blinded,
himself his executioner.
Think
of his MOTHER-WIFE (ill sorted names)
Done
by a noose herself had twined to death
And
last, our hapless brethren in one day,
Both
in a mutual destiny involved,
Self-slaughtered,
both the slayer and the slain
Now why in the world would JA, in a
letter to her young niece, make a veiled allusion to
(1) Hamlet’s hint to Guildenstern that he is
only pretending to Claudius and Gertrude that he is crazy, even as he slips in
a dig about the incestuous nature of Claudius’ marriage with Gertrude, and/or
to
(2) Ismene’s (in talking to sister
Antigone) description of the ill-fated incestuousness of their own family, in
which Jocasta, mother of Oedipus as well as of Ismene and Antigone, was also the
wife of Oedipus, hence Ismene’s epithet for Jocasta?
And actually, Shakespeare had the
entire Oedipus Trilogy firmly in mind
when he wrote Hamlet- so what better
way for JA to kill two allusive birds with one stone than to select this
double-relatedness epithet format, which uniquely appears in both of those
sources, one ancient and one early modern.
But that’s all background, so let’s
cut to the chase. The common theme in these two literary sources, it is
obvious, is incest—incest with tragic consequences.
And so, incredible as this will
sound, this allusion becomes ten times more explosive, when we realize that there
actually is a very plausible reason, based on real textual evidence, why JA, in
a letter written while Emma was on
the verge of being published, might make a veiled allusion to this theme of incest,
i.e., why JA would in effect cast herself and Caroline in an amateur mini-theatrical
based on the two most tragic instances of incest in Western literature.
This more than decided whiff of
incestuous innuendo would of course be utterly imperceptible by a 10 year old,
but might just be brought to mind in any adult who was “intimate by instinct”
with Shakespeare, as I suspect many members of the Austen family were besides
Jane Austen.
So…try to wrap your mind around the
possibility that JA, in this way, was hinting in Letter 123 at the explosive riddle
she had hidden, double-wrapped for safekeeping, at the end of Emma (which she was on the verge of
publishing). For those of who for whom
this double-wrapped riddle does not ring a bell as to what I am referring to, I
am suggesting that in Letter 123 JA combined:
(1) Jane Fairfax’s concealed
pregnancy, with Jane covertly giving her newborn baby girl to Mrs. Weston [all discovered
by me in 2005), with
(2) Anielka Briggs’s 2007 discovery (right
after I revealed #1 to her) of Jane Austen’s word game in Emma, with the newborn Anna Weston === > Ann Aweston === >
Anna Austen, who just happened to be Caroline Austen’s elder half-sister.
Translated into simple English, the
combination of (1) and (2) leads to the inference---whether imagined by JA or
factually lived by her, I believe we will never know for sure either way—that Jane
Austen was the biological mother of Anna Austen Lefroy, but gave her newborn
daughter to her brother James Austen, and his wife, to raise as if their own
biological child.
And so, there would be an odd
consistency in JA including an epistolary hint to this event, that may or may
not have occurred in 1793 when JA was 17, in a letter to Caroline Austen, who,
according to this ambiguity, would be the younger “sister-cousin” of Anna.
And you thought Letter 123 was
nothing special when you first read it, right?
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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