As I told my friend Diane Reynolds a few hours ago, it has
become increasingly clear to me during the past 2 days that she opened an
entire new and very large Pandora’s Box of hidden allusion involving Jane
Austen and Harriet Beecher Stowe, when she wrote the following the other night:
“Austen
in P&P whitewashes and softens the reality of English aristocratic
landowners like Mr. Darcy. In Uncle Tom’s
Cabin--AND YOU COULD ALMOST THINK STOWE HAS READ P&P--Mr. St. Clare, a
"good" slave owner caught up in a system he despises, likens all
aristocrats to each other, particularly naming English aristocrats (and others)
as similar to slave owners….”
This will be the third post I’ve written in response to
Diane’s suggestion that Stowe might have been a closet Janeite, as I continue
to take inventory of the astonishing interconnected treasures which lay hidden in
Pride & Prejudice and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which are (in a
positive sense) a literary Pandora’s Box. It’s positive, because now more than
ever, the hoary Myth of Jane Austen to which I’ve been taking a hammer for a
decade—the heretofore “universally acknowledged” notion that Jane Austen was a
tame, pious, modest, straightforward, strait-laced, prudish, conservative lady---is,
thanks to Stowe, in even greater danger of collapsing from the sheer weight of its
numerous inconsistencies on all major fronts.
[For those following along, my fourth post about Stowe will
be forthcoming tomorrow, and it will expand my investigation of the “Thomas
Jefferson” subtext in Uncle Tom’s Cabin]
STOWE & AUSTEN AS CRITICS OF SEXIST LAWS AS LEGALIZED
SLAVERY
I begin this post by quoting Harriet Beecher Stowe circa 1869,
i.e., nearly 2 decades after she (in the famous wartime words of Abraham
Lincoln) “wrote the
book that started this great war.”:
“[T]he
position of a married woman ... is, in many respects, precisely similar to that
of the negro slave. She can make no contract and hold no property; whatever she
inherits or earns becomes at that moment the property of her husband.... Though
he acquired a fortune through her, or though she earned a fortune through her
talents, he is the sole master of it, and she cannot draw a penny....[I]n the
English common law a married woman is nothing at all. She passes out of legal
existence.”
This
is EXACTLY the same view on legalized-slavery-disguised-as-marriage that I’ve
long attributed to Jane Austen, the covert radical feminist, covertly
championed in her novels as her fundamental principle. But, being the ironic satirist that she was,
Jane Austen presented her feminist
manifesto parodically, via Henry Tilney’s famous rant which drives poor
Catherine to tears. His rant has been mistakenly taken literally by 99% of
Janeites over the past 2 centuries, when it was actually meant by JA to be read
topsy-turvy:
"If
I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have
hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the
suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the
country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are
Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable,
your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare
us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated
without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary
intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a
neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything
open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"
I.e.,
Jane Austen’s actual answer is, YES!! English laws DID connive at these
domestic horrors which were grotesquely unfair to women, and YES!! Those laws,
and the actions taken to enforce them, WERE routinely perpetrated on women without
being criticized, let alone repealed.
But
we may then ask the question---did Stowe interpret Henry Tilney’s rant the way
I do? Given that she and Jane Austen were both of the opinion that women got
the short end of the stick, can we infer from Stowe’s having alluded to Mr.
& Mrs. Bennet in the characters of Mr. & Mrs. St. Clare, that Stowe was
aware of JA’s covert feminist agenda? I think you know my answer, but let me
show you the amazingly powerful evidence that my answer (again) is YES!!!!
LADY
CATHERINE, MRS. BENNET & ANOTHER PREGNANT STOWE QUOTATION
First,
it is a wonderful Austenian irony that, in one sense, we cannot imagine two
women more UNLIKE than Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mrs. Bennet—and yet, what
these two ladies had very strongly in common was a relentless, nearly fanatical
drive to marry off their daughters to the right man selected, of course, by
their mama. And…they also had something else in common----Lady Catherine de
Bourgh and Mrs. Bennet were strange protofeminist bedfellows---they both decried
(in Lady C’s words) “entailing estates from the female line”---i.e., they were
both critics of the customary deployment of the English law of inheritance and
real property in ways which reduced women to powerless legal ciphers – which legal
non-existence is, not so strangely, exactly the situation that Stowe depicted
in UTC, and documented in her Key, as
the plight of the African-American slaves!
So, again, we have a resonance in P&P to marriage as
legal slavery, the theme Stowe took up as her principal hobby horse after the
end of the Civil War. Women like Lady C and Mrs. B were so desperate to marry
their daughters off, even though they knew that they were losing all their
rights in marriage, because marriage was to many only the frying pan, and
trying to survive as a single woman without financial resources was the fire.
So, was
this another strand in P&P that caught Stowe’s eye? I think so, and here’s
why! Now you’re finally ready to hear the nitty-gritty.
You may recall that in my immediately preceding post, I
posted a quotation from Stowe’s Key to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which I identified Stowe’s sly disjointed allusion to
the title “Pride & Prejudice” in the very chapter which discussed the character
of Mr. St. Clare, whom I claim is Stowe’s version of Mr. Bennet:
“THE
AUTHOR inserts a few testimonials from Southern men, not without some PRIDE in
being thus kindly judged by those who might have been naturally expected to
read HER BOOK with PREJUDICE against it.”
In
the aftermath of my said post, I wondered what percentage of those who read it
were skeptical of my inference that Stowe meant for her readers to connect that
“pride” to that “prejudice”, and to thereby realize that “The author” and “her
book” could refer as much to Jane Austen as it did to Harriet Beecher Stowe
herself.
Well,
for all of you diehard skeptics who didn’t buy what I was selling then, how (as
Matt Damon said in Good Will Hunting)
about THESE apples, from the chapter in Stowe’s Key entitled “A COMPARISON OF THE ROMAN LAW OF SLAVERY WITH THE
AMERICAN.”:
“There
are other respects, in which American legislation has reached a refinement in
tyranny of which the despots of those early days never conceived. The following
is THE LANGUAGE OF GIBBON:— “Hope, the best comfort of our imperfect condition,
was not denied to the Roman slave; and if he had any opportunity of rendering
himself either useful or agreeable, he might very naturally expect that the
diligence and fidelity of a few years would be rewarded with the inestimable
gift of freedom. * * * Without destroying the distinction of ranks, a distant
prospect of freedom and honours was presented even to those whom PRIDE AND
PREJUDICE almost disdained to number among the human species. The youths
of promising genius were instructed in the arts and sciences, and their price
was ascertained by the degree of their skill and talents. Almost every
profession, either liberal or mechanical, might be found in the household of an
opulent senator.” END QUOTE FROM STOWE QUOTING GIBBON
So….what are the odds that, purely by coincidence, in a very
short space within her Key, Harriet
Beecher Stowe would write TWO such passages: one with the words “pride” and
“prejudice” within the same sentence and in Jane Austen’s word order, albeit
separated; and the other a quotation from a very famous book that Jane Austen
could very well have read, a quotation in which Austen’s exact title, “pride
and prejudice” is stated?
Those odds are vanishingly close to zero! And…to take you all
the way to zero, I wonder if any sharp elf reading Gibbon’s sentence containing
the phrase “pride and prejudice” noticed ANOTHER distinctive Austenian echo,
this one pointing to a passage IN the text of Pride & Prejudice?
STOWE RECOGNIZED THAT AUSTEN HAD ALLUDED TO GIBBON!
That phrase is “the distinction of ranks”, and here is the
passage in Chapter 29 of P&P that Stowe had picked up on (I claim) in BOTH
the Gibbon source, AND in the Austen veiled allusion to Gibbon:
“Scarcely anything was talked of the
whole day or next morning but their visit to Rosings. Mr. Collins was carefully
instructing them in what they were to expect, that the sight of such rooms, so
many servants, and so splendid a dinner, might not wholly overpower them.
When the ladies were separating for
the toilette, he said to Elizabeth— "Do not make yourself uneasy, my dear
cousin, about your apparel. Lady Catherine is far from requiring that ELEGANCE
OF DRESS in us which becomes herself and her daughter. I would advise you
merely to put on whatever of your clothes is superior to the rest—there is no
occasion for anything more. Lady Catherine will not think the worse of you FOR
BEING SIMPLY DRESSED. SHE LIKES TO HAVE THE DISTINCTION OF RANK
PRESERVED."
While they were dressing, he came
two or three times to their different doors, to recommend their being quick, as
Lady Catherine very much objected to be kept waiting for her dinner. Such
formidable accounts of her ladyship, and her manner of living, quite frightened
Maria Lucas who had been little used to company, and she looked forward to her
introduction at Rosings with as much apprehension as her father had done to his
presentation at St. James's…” END QUOTE
FROM P&P
Still skeptical that Jane Austen had that sentence from
Gibbon’s Volume I in mind when she entitled her novel, and put the above words about
“the distinction of rank” in Mr. Collins’s mouth? Well then, check out the FULL
context of the quotation from Gibbon, which Stowe failed to provide:
Gibbon 1776, Volume 1 of his History of the Rise & Fall of the Roman Empire:
“It
was a maxim of ancient jurisprudence, that a slave had not any country of his
own; he acquired with his liberty an admission into the political society of
which his patron was a member. The consequences of this maxim would have
prostituted the privileges of the Roman city to a mean and promiscuous
multitude. Some seasonable exceptions were therefore provided; and the
honourable distinction was confined to such slaves only as, for just causes and
with the approbation of the magistrate, should receive a solemn and legal manumission.
Even these chosen freedmen obtained no more than the private rights of
citizens, and were rigorously excluded from civil or military honours. Whatever
might be the merit or fortune of their sons, they likewise were esteemed unworthy
of a seat in the senate; nor were the traces of a servile origin allowed to be
completely obliterated till the third or fourth generation. WITHOUT DESTROYING
THE DISTINCTION OF RANKS, a distant prospect of freedom and honours was
presented, even to those whom PRIDE AND PREJUDICE almost
disdained to number among the human species.
Ikt
was once proposed TO DISCRIMINATE THE SLAVES BY A PECULIAR HABIT; but it was
justly apprehended that there might be some danger in acquainting them with
their own numbers!”
Aside
from Gibbon’s epigrammatic cadences, which Jane Austen surely and subtly
parodied with her own epigrammatism in phrasing like “It is a truth universally
acknowledged”, the key point here is that in Gibbon’s very next sentence after
the one referring to the preservation of “the distinction of ranks” in ancient
Rome, we read that one of the Roman methods of preserving that distinction was
by having SLAVES DRESS differently from free persons.
You
get it now, right? What puts a hilarious spin on Mr. Collins’s usual pompous, smarmy
condescension to Elizabeth, is that when he tells her not to worry about being dressed
simply—what he’s saying, unwittingly, is that by dressing like a country girl,
Elizabeth will be preserving the distinction of rank between herself, as a
low-status quasi-“slave” visiting the court of a Roman empress, Lady Catherine!
And
THAT, all Janeites must universally acknowledge, is precisely the kind of witty,
withering satire that Jane Austen scattered in a thousand places in her
writings!
So, in
summary, then:
ONE:
Jane Austen, in P&P, specifically alluded TWICE to that specific sentence
in Gibbon’s great History, in order to subliminally hint that gentlewomen in
England without resources were treated like slaves, even by other (wealthy)
women; and
TWO:
Stowe, in her Key to UTC, quoted that
particular passage from Gibbon precisely so as to show that she had spotted,
understood, AND SUPPORTED Jane Austen’s veiled feminist channeling of Gibbon on
slavery in P&P.
And
all of this was Stowe’s way of reiterating her later-life mantra about the
metaphorical slavery of women in American society—and what better way to do it
than to demonstrate, for those with eyes to see, that she was following in the
sure footsteps of her literary and feminist mentor in absentia, Jane Austen.
I.e., the main reason Stowe alluded to P&P in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was precisely to hint at this metaphorical
resonance she detected in JA’s fiction, between the actual enslavement of
Africans in the West Indies and the metaphorical enslavement of women in Great
Britain—the latter being a slavery which was not even acknowledged except by a
tiny fringe of radical progressives who were treated as lepers by the
conservative sexist mainstream.
But
now, finally, as the 202 year old secrets of Jane Austen, and the 163 year old
secrets of Harriet Beecher Stowe, are finally coming to light, isn’t it long
overdue that the United States finally takes another major step toward ending
that metaphorical slavery Stowe and Austen were so appalled by, by electing a
female President in 2016?
And
then maybe, just maybe, all people of good conscience will finally begin to
work together to accomplish the universal moral imperative of making all people
of color, and all women, and all people whatever their sexual preferences—in
short, all the victims of past and persisting slavery--truly equal citizens, entitled
to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
I
hope you’ll say, Amen.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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