What
is today, December 16, 2013, to Janeites? Of course, as you all have probably
been reminded several times already by emails, it is Jane Austen's 238th
birthday, our favorite novelist having been born on December 16, 1775. And it
is a special Jane Austen birthday, because it signals the impending end of the
bicentennial of her most famous, most popular, most beloved novel—Pride & Prejudice.
So
today, in recognition of such a portentous intersection of Jane Austen’s real
life and Jane Austen’s fiction, I’d like to bring you something really special, a subtextual treat that
has been brewing in my imagination for the past few days, which came to a boil
this morning when I woke up, as often is the case with my adventures with the
Jane Austen Code.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus
explains why dreaming is so integral to understanding of subtextually rich,
suggestive art like Jane Austen’s fiction:
Lovers
and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact
Today
I will share with you the result of my own seething brain’s fruitful fantasies
last night! More specifically I will
show how the hidden “vingt-un” code
of P&P unlocks the deepest secrets of Pride
& Prejudice, and reveals that Elizabeth Bennet is much more like Fanny
Burney’s Cecilia than has ever previously been understood, because Elizabeth,
too, is an orphan/heiress.
I was
prompted to investigate this motif by a recent thread in another online Austen
venue, in which the following curious dialog between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy to
Elizabeth in Chapter 32 was scrutinized:
[Elizabeth]
"I do not mean to say that a woman may not be settled too near her family.
The far and the near must be relative, and depend on many varying
circumstances. Where there is fortune to make the expenses of travelling
unimportant, distance becomes no evil. But that is not the case here. Mr. and
Mrs. Collins have a comfortable income, but not such a one as will allow of
frequent journeys—and I am persuaded my friend would not call herself near her
family under less than half the present distance."
Mr.
Darcy drew his chair a little towards her, and said, "You cannot have a
right to such very strong local attachment. You
cannot have been always at Longbourn."
Elizabeth
looked surprised. The gentleman experienced some change of feeling .... END QUOTE
Discussants
speculated as to what Mr. Darcy meant by the second of these two sentences,
which seems literally to contemplate the possibility that Lizzy has not lived
her whole life at Longbourn. However, the consensus emerged that Darcy wasn’t
really looking backwards asking for a literal answer about Lizzy’s Longbourn tenure, so much as looking forward
in time, as per the first sentence, seeking reassurance that Lizzy wouldn’t
mind living far away from Longbourn at say….Pemberley! I.e., Darcy’s first sentence would be the
relevant one, the second one being superfluous, a wild extrapolation which
Darcy’s anxious mind plucks out of the air, as a hypothetical circumstance in
which Lizzy might not have formed a very strong local attachment to her current
home, i.e., because she had not lived there very long.
Darcy
presumably has no knowledge of Bennet family history, and therefore would not
assume that Lizzy had been BORN (and therefore had not lived that LONG) at LongBOURN
(and surely the name of the Bennet estate is in some way a pun on those very
words cleverly designed by Jane Austen).
Perhaps
the Bennets had moved into Longbourn when Lizzy was, e.g., 9 years old, exactly
the way that the Dashwoods moved into Norland after the death of the unmarried
cousin Mr. Dashwood, when the three Dashwood girls were between the ages of 3
and 11. Indeed, that parallel to S&S rings eerily apt, as the very event
which Mrs. Bennet fears most, i.e., the death of Mr. Bennet and the resultant
expulsion of herself and her five daughters from Longbourn, is exactly what
does befall the Dashwood females after the death of husband/father Mr.
Dashwood!
So
Darcy’s hope that Lizzy was not a Longbourn resident from birth would seem to
rest on a speculative but plausible extrapolation from actual family histories
in JA’s era in which inheritance of estates leads to relocation of families,
sometimes for serendipitously good and sometimes for calamitously bad.
And
the possibility of the Bennet family having taken possession of Longbourn ten (as
opposed to 20 or 25) years earlier would also go a long way toward explaining
the way the five Bennet girls matured in such strikingly different ways—the two
eldest, Jane and Lizzy are so different from the two youngest, Lydia and Kitty,
and this would make perfect sense, from a modern psychological perspective, if
one major developmental factor were very different between the two opposing
groups (Mary being the transitional figure)---i.e., what if Jane and Lizzy, who
have modest expectations in general, grew to their early teens in an earlier, much
more humble pre-inheritance Bennet residence, while the much more entitled
Kitty and Lydia grew to their early teens in a much more privileged post-inheritance
environment at Longbourn.
And,
taking that line of reasoning a plausible step further, perhaps Mrs. Bennet’s jittery
“nerves” were “born” during that earlier Bennet family era, when, perhaps, the
young family was living on the financial edge, waiting for an elderly relative
to die in order to vest Mr. Bennet in Longbourn? And, taking that line of
reasoning still further, perhaps the
bitter enmity between Mr. Collins’s father and Mr. Bennet could have been the
sour grapes (or olives) of the former directed at the latter, in regard to the
inheritance of Longbourn, whereby Mr. Bennet’s inheritance of Longbourn was a
bitter pill for Mr. Collins’s father to swallow—perhaps a preferential bequest
to the former at the expense of the latter?
In
any event, so many mysteries explained so well by one simple assumption—maybe
it’s not so crazy a line of reasoning?
But
let’s now return to Darcy and Elizabeth at Rosings, when Darcy suddenly pulls
his chair in closer to Elizabeth before asking his two questions. Why would he
do this? Is it that he is so overcome with emotion that he unconsciously draws
in closer to her, feeling a need for the greater intimacy of physical
proximity, even perhaps invading Elizabeth’s personal space? Or maybe, reading
more suspiciously, does he move in closer so that he can then speak sotto voce, out of a desire not to be
overheard by one of the servants in the Collins residence, who, Darcy seems to
worry, might be eavesdropping?
Either
of these motivations would be consistent with his revealing by his words an
interest in marrying Elizabeth, which of course, in hindsight, would fit
perfectly, as he proposes to Elizabeth only three chapters later! In Chapter 35,
we hear Darcy himself express his wrenching ambivalence about proposing to
Lizzy, so it would fit that he would wish to be very secretive in Chapter 32,
and not let the cat out of the bag to nosy third parties, while he was still,
in his careful, almost lawyerly way, carefully testing the waters.
THE
INTERPRETIVE ROAD LESS TRAVELED
But,
even though that is certainly a plausible and satisfying explanation for Mr.
Darcy’s inquiry….let’s take a second, off-center perspective on Darcy’s curiously
leading question before considering the matter conclusively settled. I say “curiously”, because his question
reminds me of the kind of leading question that clever lawyers pose during
cross-examination, in an effort to trip up hostile witnesses in a courtroom
trial. At a climactic moment, after first softening up the hostile witness for
a while, Perry Mason might suddenly spring a surprising question like, “You
cannot have always been in love with the deceased…” which is designed to
provoke a confession as to a key fact the witness has previously been unwilling
to admit.
With
Jane Austen, once one has a passage like this in mind, I’ve found that the best
solution is to start by thinking about other passages in the same novel which
seem resonant in some way. And that’s what happened as I was falling asleep
last night, I was mulling over this particular passage, and hoping that upon
rising I would find inspiration on my pillow-and luckily, so it went!
I
realized that I needed to think about what comes up elsewhere in P&P when
we ask whether Darcy might have had some reason—unknown to Elizabeth and
therefore also unknown to the reader—for thinking that Lizzy has not lived her
whole life at Longbourn. Might this seemingly significant question posed so
anxiously to Elizabeth have a deeper meaning?
Thinking
about how long Lizzy has lived at Longbourn led me straight to the key clue,
which is that only three chapters earlier, in Chapter 29, Lizzy has been
cross-examined in a more direct way by Lady Catherine, on a curiously similar
topic:
"Upon
my word," said her ladyship, "you give your opinion very decidedly
for so young a person. Pray, WHAT IS YOUR AGE?"
"With
three younger sisters grown up," replied Elizabeth, smiling, "your ladyship
can hardly expect me to own it."
Lady
Catherine seemed quite astonished at not receiving a direct answer; and
Elizabeth suspected herself to be the first creature who had ever dared to
trifle with so much dignified impertinence.
"You
CANNOT BE MORE THAN TWENTY, I am sure, therefore you need not conceal your
age."
"I
am NOT ONE-AND-TWENTY."
While
it could be that Lady Catherine really was prompted to inquire after
Elizabeth’s age by Elizabeth’s brash opinion-giving, it also could be the case
that Lady Catherine has some specific, but undisclosed, motivation for wanting
to know exactly how old Elizabeth is, and has used Lizzy’s brashness as a “cover
story” to allow Lady Catherine to persist in seeking an answer to a question
that has peculiar meaning to Lady Catherine that she is not disclosing to
Elizabeth.
And
now, that speculation about Lady C’s concealed motivation makes me wonder--perhaps
Darcy also has asked Lizzy the
question about Lizzy always living at Longbourn, out of a similar curiosity
born of motives also not disclosed to Lizzy?
Is it
starting to sound like an Agatha Christie novel to you? I hope so, because I am
convinced that this is exactly the line of inquiry that JA wished her readers
to pursue, to see where else it leads!
So,
the reader of P&P who has just read the above passage ought to be reminded
of Lady Catherine’s question when we read Mr. Darcy’s question, also posed to
Elizabeth, a short while later. And reading the above two passages in this shared
light in turn got me thinking about other passages in P&P which also seem
to focus on a time period of just over twenty years.
And
that’s when I was reminded of the post I wrote 3 months ago…
…in
which I demonstrated that the motif of the number “twenty” as an exaggerated
amount is repeated early and often in both As
You Like It and in P&P. (The hardcore amongst you will now want to take
a pause in reading my current post to go back and read that earlier one, but it
is not required to do so in order to understand my point today.)
And
that’s what made me realize that the number “twenty” is the key to solving the
puzzle of Darcy’s and Lady Catherine’s cross examinations of Elizabeth about
the duration of her life and of her residency at Longbourn, respectively---now
I see that they are intimately connected via that number, which not only points
back to similarly thematic usage in Shakespeare’s romantic comedy which
provides so much allusive background to P&P, but also shines light into the
shadows of the backstory (and the climax) of P&P! Read on for the payoff!
First,
think back to Chapter 1:
"Mr.
Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in
vexing me. You have no compassion for my poor nerves." "You mistake
me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I
have heard you mention them with consideration these last TWENTY YEARS AT
LEAST."
"Ah,
you do not know what I suffer."
"But
I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young men of four thousand a
year come into the neighbourhood."
"It
will be no use to us, if TWENTY such should come, since you will not visit
them."
"Depend
upon it, my dear, that when there are TWENTY, I will visit them all."
Mr.
Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and
caprice, that the experience of THREE-AND-TWENTY years had been insufficient to
make his wife understand his character.
So in
the above passage, isn’t it interesting that Mr. Bennet chooses as the
beginning of his acquaintance with Mrs. Bennet’s nerves a time period of just
over twenty years, even though the narrator almost immediately informs us that
they have been married 23 years? What reason could there be for this three year
gap? Is Mr. Bennet being imprecise about a gap of three years, or…..was Mrs.
Bennet not a nervous wreck during the
first three years of their marriage? If so, why not? What changed 20 years (and
a bit more) earlier? Was it Lizzy’s birth?
But
there’s even more suggestive smoke in the text of P&P---now look at this
passage near the end of P&P, in Chapter 58:
[Darcy]
“…Unfortunately an only son (for many years an only child), I was spoilt by my
parents, who, though good themselves (my father, particularly, all that was
benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and
overbearing; to care for none beyond my own family
circle;
to think meanly of all the rest of the world; to wish at least to think meanly
of their sense and worth compared with my own. Such I was, FROM EIGHT TO EIGHT
AND TWENTY; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest
Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first,
but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled.
Think
about it—Darcy is 28, and for some reason he
measures the commencement of his being spoiled from when he was eight years
old, which just happens to be the
identical starting point for (a) Lizzy’s life
and for (b) Mr. Bennet’s acquaintance with Mrs. Bennet’s nerves.
Hmmm…..
So….just
like the unexplained quadruple coincidence (or if you will, the “quadrille”)
that supposedly, without any prior planning or scheming on anyone’s part,
brings all four of the closely mutually interconnected Mr. Collins, Mr. Darcy, Mr.
Wickham, and Mrs. Gardiner “dancing” into direct contact with Elizabeth at
almost the same time, I now suggest an additional
unexplained triple coincidence involving the three time periods of just over
twenty years, involving Mr. & Mrs. Bennet, Elizabeth, and Mr. Darcy, which
I’ve just outlined for you.
And
here’s the piece de resistance in
this literary game-playing on “just over twenty”---even beyond the examples of
“twenty” in P&P that I discussed in my earlier blog post, now I see that JA
has winked at us further with one final textual bread crumb, diabolically dropped
into the reader’s unwitting mind under the disguise of another anguage, in
Chapter 6:
"Yes;
these four evenings have enabled them to ascertain that they both like VINGT-UN
better than Commerce; but with respect to any other leading characteristic, I
do not imagine that much has been unfolded."
Why
diabolical? Because of the central rule of vingt-un
(known today in English as twenty-one or blackjack), which is described in the
following Wikipedia entry:
“Blackjack's
precursor was twenty-one, a game of unknown origin. The first written
reference is found in a book by...Cervantes [who] was a gambler, and the main
characters of his tale Rinconete y
Cortadillo, from Novelas Ejemplares,
are a couple of cheats working in Seville. They are proficient at cheating at ventiuna
(Spanish for twenty-one), and state that the object of the game is to reach 21
points without going over and that the ace values 1 or 11….This short story was
written between 1601 and 1602, implying that ventiuna was played in Castilla
since the beginning of the 17th century or earlier. Later references to this
game are found in France and Spain.” END
QUOTE
So, in
vingt-un the winner, as between player
and house/dealer, is the one gets closest to 21 without exceeding 21, with all
ties being victories for the latter. So, absent a tie, a player who actually
scores 21 and no more will win.
Now…follow
me in one last conceit---if we think of the action of P&P as a kind of “game”
being played by many “players”, each with his or her own complex and concealed
goals or ways of “winning”—and I think that JA clearly meant for us to think
that—then what would constitute “winning” upon reaching 21 years of age?
Or,
to paraphrase Darcy, my inner lawyer puts it this way, in the form of a leading
question: you cannot be so wedded to the
idea that there is no hidden meaning in P&P, that you cannot see how
attaining the age of 21 might constitute “winning” for someone like Elizabeth
Bennet.
By this
devious means, I think I have already suggested to you the answer I am
“fishing” for, which is that 21 was in Jane Austen’s era, as in our own, a
frequently chosen age milestone, upon which an heir received his or her
inheritance! And somehow Lizzy’s
inheritance could be Pemberley itself, because something happened in Darcy’s
life when he was eight—and that “something” might just have been Lizzy, the
true heir of Pemberley, being sent away from home in order for Darcy to remain
the heir?
Think
I’m completely off the wall? Well, at
the JASNA AGM I attended in late September in Minneapolis, one of the
highlights for me was the presentation by my friend Prof. Elaine Bander, who
spoke about parallels and contrasts between Pride
& Prejudice and Fanny Burney’s Cecilia:
Here,
in fact, is the link to Elaine’s paper just published today in Persuasions Online:
And
here is the excerpt from Elaine’s article that is most germane to my speculations
in this post:
“Apart
from the common phrase, then, Cecilia and Pride and Prejudice
share only two elements. First, both heroines are courted by a man whose
family pride revolts against their match, and second, both novels offer an
ironic version of a moral. So far they are equal. In Cecilia, Dr.
Lyster pronounces this ironic moral to the penitent lovers. Austen is
similarly playful in uniting her lovers, although without a magisterial Dr.
Lyster to negotiate a truce. Instead, Elizabeth Bennet herself
characteristically mocks conventional novel moralizing in her teasing
conversation with her new fiancé, Fitzwilliam Darcy, while Darcy, like Dr.
Lyster, suggests that the faulty behavior of those who had tried to separate
the lovers has also served to unite them: “‘The moral will be perfectly
fair,’” he assures Elizabeth. “‘Lady Catherine’s unjustifiable endeavours
to separate us, were the means of removing all my doubts’” (423).
Apart from these two
similarities, however, the differences of plot and character are striking. Thus Cecilia is heiress
to a great fortune while Elizabeth is practically portionless. Cecilia is
an orphan whereas Elizabeth is blessed with a beloved sister and burdened with
a large, embarrassing family. Elizabeth despises Darcy until at least
halfway through the novel while Cecilia early on admires and loves
Mortimer. Mortimer is caught between his love for Cecilia and his duty to
his parents while Darcy contends only with his own pride. Cecilia herself
is scrupulously deferential to the Mortimer family’s opposition to their
marriage, extolling the virtues of filial obedience. She is therefore
vulnerable to anyone who invokes claims of duty, honor, and gratitude, and she
promises Mrs. Delvile never to marry Mortimer. Elizabeth, in contrast,
wittily defies Lady Catherine’s snobbish intervention, refusing to give such a
promise, declaring, “‘Neither duty, nor honour, nor gratitude . . .
have any possible claim on me, in the present instance. No principle of
either, would be violated by my marriage with Mr. Darcy’” (397).” END QUOTE
I
would like to propose the following codicil to Elaine’s first-rate article, by
suggesting that the “vingt-un” code in
Pride & Prejudice shows us that
in Austen’s shadow story, Cecilia and Elizabeth are the same, and I can best
show this byrewriting one key part of Ellen’s analysis as follows:
“Apart
from these two similarities, however, the differences of plot and character are
striking, BUT ONLY ON THE SURFACE AS TO ONE CRUCIAL POINT. Thus Cecilia
is heiress to a great fortune while Elizabeth APPEARS TO BE practically
portionless, BUT ACTUALLY IS ALSO AN HEIRESS, ATTRACTING THE SAME BUZZING BAND
OF SUITORS AS CECIILIA. Cecilia is an orphan whereas Elizabeth APPEARS TO
BE blessed with a beloved sister and burdened with a large, embarrassing family,
BUT ACTUALLY IS ALSO AN ORPHAN.”
In
other words, I am suggesting that, in reading the subtext of P&P, we think
about Cecilia, who will inherit an income of 3,000 pounds per year, together
with a lump sum payment of 10,000 pounds, upon reaching the age of 21, and
realize that THIS is the explanation for why all the bees are suddenly buzzing
around Elizabeth when she is approaching her 21st birthday, and why
everyone is so focused on a moment in family history a little more than 20
years ago, i.e., right around the time that Elizabeth Bennet was born! Mrs.
Bennet’s nerves came to unfortunate prominence at that exact moment when the
orphan Elizabeth was brought to the Bennet residence house under cover of night!
Final
Note re Mr. Darcy & Tom Lefroy:
I conclude
with a final resonance of the “20 but not quite 21” code of P&P that I’ve
outlined above. In real life, JA turned 21 on December 16, 1796, exactly 217
years ago today. Interestingly, Jane
Austen’s first surviving letters are from January, 1796, when JA was the very
same age as Elizabeth Bennet was when she was cross examined by Lady Catherine and
then Mr. Darcy at Rosings. At that time, all of the following was true of Jane
Austen, just as it was true of Elizabeth Bennet:
(a)
Being the age of 20 and not quite 21,
(b) Spending
time dancing and sparring/flirting wittily with an ambitious young man from out
of town,
And the
following is also true of both Mr. Darcy and Tom Lefroy:
(c) Each
is linked by JA’s writing to Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and
(d) Each
had recently arrived in the “heroine’s”
rural neighbourhood from far away (Ireland being of course much further away
from Steventon than Pemberley was from Longbourn).
I am
far from the first to suggest parallels between JA’s and Tom Lefroy’s mysterious
romantic interlude in Steventon, and the one between Lizzy and Darcy in Meryton. I think it fair to say that the
consensus is that this parallel makes P&P a wish fulfillment, in which the
marriage that JA presumably wished for with Tom Lefroy, but was cruelly denied
because she was considered a poor marriage option for Tom Lefroy by his family,
is enacted in the most dramatic and romantically satisfying way in P&P.
And
that’s why I think it is no coincidence that JA was not quite 21 when she had
her marriage chances with Tom Lefroy, and why JA memorialized that
chronological fact in P&P with its literary “game” of “vingt-un”.
Does
this mean that P&P is then also a wish fulfillment fantasy of Jane Austen’s,
which is that she imagined what it would be like had she been a secret heiress
courted by men from all over Great Britain?
As
much as I’d enjoy keeping going, I’ll leave off there!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
P.S.:
Apropos the word game on “twenty” in P&P, here’s a final gem of wit
courtesy of JA--note how Mr. Bennet reflects the change in his attitude as a
parent to a much sterner mode, by his in effect halving his hyperbolic assertions,
from his habitual twenty in Chapter 1, down to ten by Chapter 48:
“…And
you are never to stir out of doors till you can prove that you have spent TEN
minutes of every day in a rational manner."
Kitty,
who took all these threats in a serious light, began to cry.
"Well,
well," said he, "do not make yourself unhappy. If you are a good girl
for the next TEN years, I will take you to a review at the end of them."
P.P.S.:
Before posting this post today, I checked in the usual places online to see
whether any other Janeites might have already taken a step or two down this
road I have just gone down today, and I did find a post by Anielka Briggs from
10/1/12 about mysteries and riddles scattered through all of JA’s novels which
post included the following 2 questions, from among about 15 questions in total:
“…How old, then is Elizabeth Bennet who is NOT "one-and-twenty"?
Why have Mrs. Bennet's nerves been particularly taxed for twenty years at least?...”
Anielka has ingeniously suggested that Elizabeth Bennet, by saying to Lady Catherine that she was
“not one-and-twenty”, has left open the possibility of being any other age than 21. Today, I’ve
taken that phrase at its more commonly attributed meaning, and still have been able to give answers
to those 2 excellent questions of Anielka’s, answers which show those 2 questions, and their answers,
to be connected, via the issue of Elizabeth Bennet, secret heiress, who, unbeknownst to her, will
inherit a fortune at “one-and-twenty”!
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