Earlier today, Diana Birchall posted.....
....the first part of her new story in which she uses her fertile imagination to conjure up a name and a personality for the scene-painter whom Tom Bertram invites to Mansfield Park from London to paint the backdrops for the amateur theatrical of Lovers Vows. I really enjoyed her story, and have the following reaction:
Diana,
thank you for that pleasing flight of well-crafted fancy, which you managed to tease
out of those two very short passages in MP which mention the unnamed Scene-Painter
whose artwork never sees the light of theatrical day, thanks to the premature return
of Sir Thomas. You got me thinking about that shadowy personage the Scene-Painter,
and here are some of the lines of inquiry you inspired me to—which validate your
suggestion that one good way to see more deeply into JA’s dark textual corners is
by riffing fiction on them:
FIRST: Behind your witty emulation of one of JA’s memorable
comic ensemble scenes (such as the post office discussion in Emma), you’ve implicitly raised a very
interesting question-- i.e., what sorts of scenes and images did the Scene-Painter
create for the Mansfield Park edition (so to speak) of Lovers Vows? What allusive
subtext did JA create for this peripheral character?
Your
having Mr. Rushworth request cherubs in the backdrop for his scenes playing the
slimy Count Cassel was not only funny, it was learned as well. Behind the
grotesque comedy, you seem to be pointing to the well-established Paradise Lost subtext of this most
Biblical of JA’s novels. In Genesis 3:24
we read of the final human exit from the Edenic wilderness: “So he drove out the man;
and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword
which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” And of course there are also countless
references to Cherubim in Milton’s epic inspired by Genesis.
It is
hard to read Genesis 3:24 and not recall the various ways that the gates
guarding the Sotherton wilderness are circumvented by various transgressors,
yet Rushworth, in effect, obeys the Cherubim who guard the gate, and obediently
goes to get the key! And it’s fruitful (ha ha) to take this one step further
and think of the young soldier Frederick in Lover’s
Vows as an avenging cherub who returns to restore his mother (and himself) to
the “Eden” whence they were expelled by his father Baron Wildenhaim when Frederick
was conceived in sin. So Frederick can then be seen to be both Adam and Cherub,
while his father the hypocritical Baron is seen to play three roles in
succession—the seductive serpent, the punitive God, and then the reluctant Adam—in
the end, Paradise Regained, if you will. I wonder if Kotzebue, Inchbald, and/or
Jane Austen herself had any of that in mind?
Anyway,
if you tell me that none of that was a conscious allusion on your part, Diana, and
that sometimes a Cherub is just a Cherub, I suppose I’ll have to believe you! ;)
SECOND:
Returning to my longstanding belief that
the Lover’s Vows episode in Mansfield Park has its most significant
allusive source in the Mousetrap episode in Hamlet,
I think we can see the Scene-Painter as a one-man version of the troupe of itinerant
players who show up at Elsinore and inspire Hamlet (like Tom Bertram) to spontaneously
stage a theatrical mousetrap.
Diana
dramatized Tom’s having invited the Scene-Painter to Mansfield Park, she picked
up on the implied portrait of him as an outsider/ theater person, and made
comedic hay out of the question of where he will be housed. She thereby
prompted me to recall the following very famous exchange in Hamlet:
HAMLET 'Tis well: I'll have thee speak out the rest
soon. Good my lord, will you see the players well
bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the
time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.
bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the
time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.
HAMLET God's bodykins, man, much better: use every
man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty. Take them in.
And
now follow me to my third and most
out-there speculative reaction to Diana’s story…
THIRD:
When Sir Thomas puts the kibosh on the Scene-Painter--both his person and his
work-product--in Chapter 20…
“…active
and methodical, [Sir Thomas] had not only done all this before he resumed his
seat as master of the house at dinner, he had also set the carpenter to work in
pulling down what had been so lately put up in the billiard-room, and given the
scene-painter his dismissal long enough to justify the pleasing belief of his
being then at least as far off as Northampton. The scene-painter was gone,
having spoilt only the floor of one room, ruined all the coachman's sponges,
and made five of the under-servants idle and dissatisfied…..”
…I
read that last sentence as coming from Sir Thomas’s point of view, and not as
an objective account of what really happened. I.e., just as Claudius freaks out
while watching the Mousetrap and probably sends the traveling players packing from
Elsinore, so too does Sir Thomas reserve special animus for the Scene-Painter,
who is treated like a walking Ebola virus!
And as
I follow that train of thought, I go immediately to Sir Thomas’s final act of
purging Mansfield Park of the infection of Lovers
Vows and other dramatic mousetraps for powerful hypocrites like himself:
“…and
Sir Thomas was in hopes that another day or two would suffice to wipe away
every outward memento of what had been, even to the destruction of every
unbound copy of Lovers' Vows in the house, for he was burning all that met his
eye...”
BURNING
all that met his eye….hmmm…reading that while thinking about all that
negativity about the Scene-PAINTER in the same compound sentence, made my mind
leap to what at first seems a very tenuous connection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Painter
When
Jane Austen was a little baby, the infamous John the Painter was, briefly, the
terror of England. And here’s the part of John the Painter’s wild ride that so weirdly
reminds me of the Scene-Painter at Mansfield Park:
“At
some point after a 1775 return trip to England he developed his scheme of
political arson. …striking a blow on behalf of the American revolutionaries…The
British dockyards, Aitken believed, were vulnerable to attack, and he was
convinced that one highly motivated arsonist could cripple the Royal Navy by
destroying ships in the harbours, but more importantly the dockyards and ropewalks
used to build, refit and repair the massive Royal Navy. Despite being a wanted criminal for his other
crimes, Aitken travelled freely to several dockyards to determine their
vulnerability. …Using his training with mixing chemicals and paint solvents
from his trade as a painter, Aitken solicited the help of several others into
constructing crude incendiary devices with the intention of burning down the
highly flammable buildings in the Royal Dockyards. Over the course of several
months Aitken attacked facilities in Portsmouth and Bristol, creating the
impression that a band of terrorists was on the loose in England.
...Aitken's
exploits, though only marginally successful at causing actual damage, did
succeed in generating a significant amount of panic among the British public
and government. Unsurprisingly, other fires detected during the same time
period were incorrectly attributed to Aitken, fanning the alarm… Eventually,
through the help of Sir John Fielding, a description of Aitken and a reward for
his capture were posted. Soon after, Aitken was arrested while travelling
through the country. …British authorities hanged John the Painter on 10 March
1777 [on] the highest gallows ever to be used in an execution in England. Some
20,000 people reportedly witnessed the hanging. “
What
makes this history interesting to me is that Mansfield Park has been recognized by mainstream Austen scholars
for a number of years as having in its shadowy subtext various contemporary
national and world events relating to revolts and rebellions—Edgeworth’s Grateful Negro, with its slave revolt in
the West Indies, the mutinies at Noor and Spithead, the American Revolution---all
these insurrections are hinted at in MP. And Mrs. Norris worries about the
(supposedly) dangerous “encroachments” of the Jacksons.
So
maybe, just maybe, that’s John the Painter hiding there behind the
backdrop in Sir Thomas’s room, getting ready
to burn the joint down, with the help of the Player King and a cherub or two.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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