The
past few days I’ve been going back & forth with Diana Birchall in Austen L
in a friendly, productive debate about my claims that Captain Benwick in Persuasion is a not very flattering
representation of Jane Austen’s younger sailor brother, Charles Austen.
First,
Diana summarized further references to Charles’s young children in Letter 128
from late 1815, and I responded as follows: Diana, a month and a half ago, I
wrote about Jane Austen's Letter 123 (written to Caroline Austen less than a month before JA
wrote Letter 128 to CEA) as reflecting Jane Austen's thinly veiled sarcasm
unmistakably directed toward her sailor brother Charles's shockingly quick
recovery from grief for his wife Fanny, and his way too rapid re-attachment to
Fanny's elder sister Harriet. Here is a
key excerpt from those earlier posts of mine:
"So, viewing Letter 123 through the lens of JA making a veiled
commentary on Charles's blossoming relationship with his young sister in law,
we can see that the reference to Cassy playing The Hermit was doubly loaded. I.e., JA was sarcastically but
veiledly commenting that Charles was the furthest thing from Beattie's hermit,
and he was anything but a husband consumed with grief over the death of his
wife. And JA was in effect casting little Cassy as Hamlet, who (metaphorically)
is the Hermit of Hamlet, the brooding
child mourning the death of a beloved parent, and watching the surviving parent
in effect marry with the funeral meats used to furnish the marriage table!...”
I
am sure, therefore, that during this latest visit to Keppel Street reported in
Letter 128, JA, in addition to feeling very real pity for the motherless young
children of brother Charles, was also very pragmatically gathering more grist
for her authorial mill, that she would immediately put to use in her portrait
of Captain Benwick in Persuasion--which
makes me really wonder what Charles Austen thought about Persuasion when he finally got to read it!
Diana
replied to that last speculation as follows: “Doubt he saw himself in it. His
justification would be that he had three little daughters who needed a mother.
The poetical, sentimental, depressed, susceptible Benwick wasn't much like him
(and had no children). Jane Austen may have used her brother's situation but as
always she altered it and gave it to a very different sort of person. I agree
that bits and pieces of people and situations could be ‘grist for the authorial
mill’ but seldom recognizable."
I
then responded to Diana as follows: Charles would have had to be a complete
moron not to recognize himself in Benwick, especially because by 1816, when JA
completed Persuasion, his
relationship with his dead wife's sister would have been going on for a couple
of years already by then, and was clearly going to end some time in marriage.
In addition to Benwick having been a Captain in the Royal Navy, exactly like
Charles, I've read Charles's diary entries at the National Maritime Museum in
Greenwich--and I can tell you he was indeed sentimental, depressed,
susceptible, maudlin---all of those things!
I
think JA was reacting to the hypocrisy of the situation--there must've been
some reason why Charles and Harriet waited six years to marry, when it's clear
that they were intimately involved with each other (if not physically, then in
every other way--she became the de facto mother of his young children in 1814)
long before 1820-and it had to be the stigma of the Biblical injunction (strong
evidence of which is found in the 1832 obituary for Harriet and Fanny Palmer’s
father, which refers to only ONE of his daughters having married Charles
Austen, not two!)
I
would imagine that Charles and Harriet got seriously involved very quickly, and
it appalled Jane, not because of any Biblical injunction, but because of the
shocking speed with which Charles leapt from dead sister to living sister,
while ostentatiously grieving.
THIS
one is probably at the top of the list of the allusions to real people in NA
and Persuasion that prompted Henry
Austen to write his infamous lies about Jane Austen never having written about
real people. We see Charles Austen not only in the inconstant lover Benwick in Persuasion, but also in General Tilney,
the poster child of clueless English husbands "murdering" their wives
in childbirth and saying, basically "What me worry?"
Clueless
hypocrisy was much worse in JA's book than villains who did their ill deeds
openly and without hypocrisy. Why?
Because a straightforward villain is not difficult to spot--it's the hypocrites
who are much more dangerous, as they do their ill deeds without even realizing
they are doing wrong.
Diana
then responded to the above as follows: "As for whether Charles Austen was
like Benwick, well you have read his diaries and I haven't, so I must bow to
you there. Though I still doubt Jane Austen was referencing Charles in her
portrayal of Benwick. His first wife Frances died at Sheerness in September
1814 (and I'm sorry I said they had three daughters, there were four - all the
more need for a surrogate mother, especially as the youngest was only a baby,
born in 1814!) Jane Austen's death occurred only twenty months after Frances's,
and with Harriet busy with four children under the age of six (!) it is
impossible to see the situation as a romance anything like that of Benwick's
when he forgot his lost fiancee and fell in love with another girl. Benwick was
a "young mourner," having lost his Fanny last summer, and it was then
November, so he only mourned for about four months. But he did not fall in love
with her sister, so it's situationally very different. Also, even if Harriet
moved into his house to care for the four children (as was very often done in
like circumstances), in the year of her being there at the time this letter was
written, it's highly unlikely there would have been hanky-panky blatant enough
for Jane Austen to observe or put into Persuasion.
Harriet would have been too busy wiping noses, and in fact the marriage did not
take place for another five years, or four years after the completion of Persuasion. So no, I don't see Charles's
and Benwick's situations as literally resembling each other, though she could
hardly help having her sorrowing sailor brother in her mind."
And
here’s my final response: Diana, that might well have left us at "agree to
disagree", except that..... you are not recalling that, in addition to the
situational "aroma" of Captain Austen that I suggest clings to
Captain Benwick as I've argued in my last two posts, what actually gave me the
idea of Benwick as Charles Austen in the first place, six weeks ago, was Jane Austen's
allusion to Beattie's famous poem (later
set to music), The Hermit, in Letter 123 to niece Caroline Austen....
...a
letter to a 10 year old girl in which JA hid, in plain sight for any literarily
knowledgeable adult (like, e.g., Caroline's father and Charles's brother, James
Austen, another widower who, two decades earlier, perhaps also did not wait
very long to start courting a new wife after the death of HIS first wife?), a
conjoined allusion to Beattie's poem about a spouse's death, The Hermit, and to Hamlet's bitter
reflections on his mother's too-quick remarriage to Claudius after the death of
her spouse, King Hamlet!
Please
reread my above-linked post, and tell me if you don't think that the reference
to "my dear sister-aunt", plus the mock-warning not to sing the lyrics
of Beattie's heartsick poetry (expressing overpowering mourning for a dead
wife) in front of children who've just lost their mother, doesn't ALL point to
Benwick's deeply hypocritical mourning for his dead fiancee?---and the allusion
to Hamlet is especially apt, because, again, I've been asserting since 2009
that the subtext of Northanger Abbey
is all about the "murder" of ordinary English wives, by their
ordinary English husbands, via death-in-childbirth--so in Charles Austen we
have united both the "murderer" and the "quick
remarrier"--in effect, Charles is Claudius--the only difference is that in
Hamlet, Claudius murdered his brother and married his brother's wife, his
former sister in law, whereas in real life, Charles Austen "murdered"
his wife and married his wife's sister, his former sister in law.
And
all of that also, finally, connects to my wondering what it was, exactly, that
killed Fanny Harville, a young unmarried woman--we never hear about the cause
of death, do we? Makes me wonder whether
Captain Benwick, during his last visit with Fanny Harville in between tours of duty,
might not have knocked her up, and then she died in childbirth along with their
illegitimate newborn child? It sure would close the circle of all of the above
argument I've been making!
But
back to the real life of the Austen family one last time. Of course, JA could
not just come out in a letter and explicitly state that she was appalled at the
way Harriet Palmer was coming on strong to grieving brother Charles, and how
readily Charles was responding to his former sister in law. But.....using
exactly the same sort of coded allusions to poetry---to Beattie's poem and to
Hamlet's blank verse--that JA used a thousand times in her novels, JA made sure
to memorialize, on paper, that very message for those who understood the Jane
Austen Code, that she was not okay with the way Charles and Harriet were
carrying on together, all the while that Charles was putting on the great show
of grieving for his dead wife.
And
then, in her very next novel, Persuasion,
JA made sure to reiterate that theme, front and center, placing Benwick's
hypocrisy right smack in the middle of the romantic climax of the novel--the
scene at the White Hart Inn, when Benwick's inconstancy and hypocritical
faux-grieving is set in the strongest possible contrast to the authentic
constancy of the true lovers. She could not possibly have chosen a more
prominent setting for this message---and we also happen to know that this was
still her intent in July 1816, when she finished writing Persuasion, because we have the cancelled chapters, which do not
mention Benwick's inconstancy at all!
This
tells us that JA woke up one day in July 1816 a few days after thinking she was
done writing Persuasion, and realized
that she felt a strong compulsion to revisit Benwick's inconstancy, and fake
grieving, in the most memorable way possible. The ending of Persuasion is in a very real sense,
then, JA's literary swan song--so it tells you just how strongly she felt,
during the last years of her own life and career, about Benwick's (and Charles
Austen's) sins.
As
I suggested, for JA, the greatest sin was hypocrisy---or, in the lingo of that
great 20th century closet Janeite, J.D. Salinger---"phonies".
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment