In Austen-L and Janeites, Diana Birchall wrote:
"My "Mary Musgrove's Complaint" story....
"My "Mary Musgrove's Complaint" story....
http://austenvariations.com/persuasion-200-mary-musgroves-complaint/
...has now been posted. It's
kind of different because I was trying to show that Mary’s complaints, instead
of just being funny, might have some basis in medical reality, given the
terrible state of medicine and the dreadfully high maternal death rate in those
days. A minor obstetrical or gynecological problem today could have been lethal
then. And yet, Jane Austen has Mary being quite well and cheerful at the end of
Persuasion, which meant I couldn’t depart too far from that! So it was an
interesting exercise..." END QUOTE
Please read her short story inspired of course by Jane Austen's Persuasion, and then read the following response I wrote to her:
Diana, your fine little story shows
that you paid very close attention, as the entire audience did, 3 years ago when
Dr. Cheryl Kinney gave her amazing (riveting, hugely entertaining and horrifying at
the same time), presentation to the JASNA chapter in Los Angeles about female
health issues underlying Jane Austen’s life, times and fiction. Cheryl took us
all through the tragic absurdity and pervasiveness of the horrors that faced
women every time men got anywhere near women’s bodies, whether as sexual
partners or, even worse, doctors!
As I said when I gave my
presentation to the group immediately following Cheryl, being the next act
after her on the program was very much like being a rock band whose opening act
was the Beatles ---there was just no way to match the combination of erudition
and showmanship that Cheryl effortlessly achieved. Truly unforgettable.
Anyway, back to the enigmatic Mary
Musgrove and her medical complaints---I am guessing you don’t recall that earlier
in 2011, I had written about the compelling validity hidden beneath Mary’s
seemingly groundless medical complaints, a conclusion which I arrived at in the
aftermath of my JASNA AGM presentation about Mrs. Tilney and the pervasive
death-in-childbirth theme of Northanger Abbey. Here is the link to that blog
post of mine, which was very much in synch with Dr. Cheryl’s expert medical
analysis….
…and here are my comments in that
earlier post which are so resonant with your little story—the context is that I
am explaining the subtext behind Henry Tilney’s famous (and entirely Unjustified)
rant at Catherine Morland about England as a Christian nation, etc etc:
"And
JA was also pointing out that English laws did
connive at these atrocities, by stripping wives of all their property, by
allowing husbands total control over their sex lives (unless, like Mrs. Bennet,
Mary Musgrove, or Lady Bertram, they contrived to have a permanent
"headache")..."
So you see it has long been my
belief that we hear Mary Musgrove constantly whining, just as we hear Mrs.
Bennet constantly complaining about her nerves, because both of these English wives
have perhaps in sheer desperation arrived at a conscious and very clever strategy
for wifely survival, basically two variants on the theme of “Not tonight, dear,
I have a headache”.
In that regard, it’s no accident, I
maintain, that there are no babies crawling around the Charles Musgrove household
during the action of Persuasion, and there
are “only” (by Regency Era standards) two ambulatory and somewhat older children,
Charles and Walter, even though Mary is quite obviously still very clearly of
childbearing age. So, Mary may complain about Charles hunting all the time, but
you may safely infer that part of the reason Charles hunts all day in the
fields around Uppercross is that he does NOT get to “hunt” at night when he
gets home to Mary!
And, similarly, it’s no accident
that Mrs. Bennet mysteriously stopped having children after Lydia 16 years before
the action of the novel begins, and therefore long before she would have reached
the safe haven of menopause. And JA makes a point of telling us, right off the
bat, that Mrs. Bennet’s “nerves” began
their long acquaintance with Mr. Bennet about 20 years earlier---the inference
I take is that it took Mrs. Bennet’s nerves only about 4 years to permanently
intervene between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet in the bedroom—eventually Mr. Bennet retreated
into his library, exactly analogous to Charles Musgrove’s retreat into hunting,
in search of intellectual knowledge, since carnal knowledge was no longer an
option open to him!
And finally, apropos Persuasion, Diana’s delicate spot of poignant
sisterly reminiscence the late Lady Elliot….
“I think I do remember our mother
having this,” Mary said after a little while. “The odour brings her back to
me.”
Anne put her hand on Mary’s. “And to
me, too,” she said softly, and they sat quietly for a little while, in sisterly
silence, enjoying their tea, and lost in thought….
….sparked in me the speculation that,
entirely unknown to Anne, her mother Lady Elliot died in childbirth when Anne was a young teenager—a “dirty” secret that was
never disclosed to her. And I also believe that the same sort of secrecy shrouded
the death of Mrs. Tilney for the same reason, with the young Henry never being
made privy to the truth, until his own speculations about Catherine’s Gothic
fantasies (which she NEVER explicitly expresses to him) trigger a sudden flash
of bitter and upsetting insight in his now grown-up mind, when he reflects back
on his mother’s awful death and realizes what he was never told by his father.
So Mary Musgrove’s strategy for
surviving the gauntlet of English marriage during the Regency Era turns out to
be one her own mother would have benefited from, had she been willing to
concoct “medical” excuses for refusing Sir Walter’s amorous advances.
Deadly serious business indeed.
I
do want to also rebut to what Ellen wrote in response to Diana’s story:
“To
write a good sequel -- a sequel is the kind of continuation or Austen-induced
franchise where you stick with the specific characters and situation of
Austen's novel -- it seems to me one must find some way to break away from
Austen's endings and some of her more egregious justifications of the status
quo and attacks on those who protest it.”
Ellen,
I fear that your misunderstanding of Jane Austen’s authorial enterprise is so
profound that there is no remedy for it—if you are waiting for Jane Austen to
reveal her subversive views of her world overtly and without masking it in
layers of irony, then you will be waiting for Godot. The sexist, racist,
classist, homophobic status quo of Regency Era England may appear to be
celebrated (or at least, tolerated) at the end of each of the novels, but to
think that reflects Jane Austen’s own views is to miss everything JA really
intended to be discernible by irony-attuned readers. And Mary Musgrove and Mrs.
Bennet are perfect examples—two wives who are made the object of mockery on the
surface of their respective novels, but who can be seen to be much more
complex, enigmatic characters beneath the surface, when the reader frees him or
herself from the prison of believing that all of JA’s narration is objective.
I.e.,
just because Elizabeth Bennet sees her mother as a carping fool, and just
because Anne Elliot sees her sister Mary as a whining fool, does not
necessarily make them so.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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