Right after the passage (in
JA’s May 1801 letter from Bath to CEA in Kintbury) about (Revd.) Mr. Pickford, the
so-called “disciple of Godwin” (whom I’ve asserted was the son of the famous
architect Joseph Pickford, a longtime close associate of the politically “radical”
Lunar Society luminaries), we read the following closing lines of such letter:
“We drink tea to-night
with Mrs. Busby. I scandalized her nephew cruelly; he has but three children
instead of ten. Best love to everybody.”
In Janeites & Austen L, Diane Reynolds has just made a
brilliant outside-the-box interpretation of the above passage:
“I thought that meant JA
was afraid the man thought she might be implying he had had seven children out
of wedlock.”
That is so spot-on, Diane,
of course you must be right! And it also
fits with the train of wickedly satirical thought that JA was on as she wrote
that, because if Revd. Pickford was a disciple of Godwin, then that name Godwin
would immediately bring to mind Godwin’s even more famous late wife Mary
Wollstonecraft, who had scandalized the
conservatives and anti-Jacobins of England in 1794 by bearing an illegitimate
child.
So, after first subtly invoking
the ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft, JA cannot resist a followup with an absurdist
echo, drawing the unfortunate nephew of Mrs. Busby into her web of subversively
“raffish” jest about illegitimacy.
And….the bonus of your brilliant
catch, Diane, is that you in turn caused me to free associate to the one other
place in JA’s writing I know of where she made reference to ‘ten children’---
of course the following famous passage in
Northanger Abbey
“[Catherine’s] mother was
a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more
remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was
born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody
might expect, she still lived on—lived to have six children more—to see them
growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family of ten
children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads and arms
and legs enough for the number; but the Morlands had little other right to the
word, for they were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her
life, as plain as any.”
This passage has caused a
multitude of Janeites to chuckle imagining the absurd and somewhat grotesquely
Gothic conceit of tallying body parts---heads, arms and legs-- as a yardstick
for measuring the number of children in a fine family. But….what I only just
realized today, after reading Diane’s catch about Mrs. Busby’s nephew’s head
count for children as a hint at illegitimacy, was that, in that same passage in
NA, the narrator never actually says that Catherine was the biological daughter of
Mrs. Morland!!
I.e., in the midst of the account
of Mrs. Morland’s miraculous survival of the gauntlet of bearing a very large
number of children, we hear first about three born to her prior to Catherine, and then six born to her after Catherine’s birth---but the negative implication of the
intervening connective statement (“before Catherine was born”) is that there is
probable cause to wonder whether Catherine herself was born to Mrs. Morland, or
was born to some other mother, and then quietly given to the sturdy Mrs. Morland after birth---just like Anna Weston born
to Jane Fairfax and quietly given to Mrs. Weston, in Emma.
And why I find that interpretation
so exciting is that I have, since 2009---for reasons having nothing to do with the
narrator leaving Catherine out of the category of children clearly born to Mrs.
Morland in that passage---speculated about Catherine as a “transplanted olive
branch”, i.e., as being illegitimate—and, more specifically, as being the
illegitimate daughter of the late Mrs. Tilney!
So, how devilishly clever
JA was, then, to hide this hint at Catherine’s
illegitimacy in plain sight in that passage. It’s yet another example of how JA played fair
with her readers, by forcing the reader to be very “nice” (in the sense of very
careful and discriminating) in parsing JA’s writing, and in resisting the urge to read too quickly and leap into
taking things at face value, such as assuming that the narrator told you that
Catherine was legitimate, when, in punctilious
fact, that was not the case. Every
family has secrets, as the narrator of Emma
alerts us, and this is one of those secrets.
And finally, also, how characteristic
of JA to hide a hint at this novelistic legerdemain in a parallel passage in
one of her letters, and tagging the hint with keywords—in this case “ten
children” described in a joking passage—so I will just add this example to the long
list I’ve accumulated during our long group read of JA’s letters.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment