Tomorrow
night, my wife and I are very much looking forward to attending a launch celebration
at the Portland Center Stage at 6:30 pm for a worthy new local tax-exempt
organization here in Portland which we just became aware of, Age & Gender Equity in
the Arts, founded by our new friend, Jane Vogel….
…
which has as its stated mission “to empower and promote the visibility of women
across the life span in the performing arts, affecting a paradigm shift in the
culture”.
One
of AGE’s promising initiatives, beginning in 2016, will be to recognize and
provide support to theater entities in the Portland metropolitan area “which
promote and exhibit age and gender equity in their programming” —and that
latter goal is epitomized by a quote at the website, “A theater that is missing
the work of women is missing half the story, half the canon, half the life of
our time." (Marsha Norman, author, inter alia, of the critically acclaimed
play which Jackie and I saw many years ago,“ ‘Night, Mother”).
Of
course, like any Janeite worth his or her salt, I immediately connected that Marsha
Norman quotation to Anne Elliot’s famous and inspiring feminist rebuttal to
Captain Harville’s sexist take on literature in Jane Austen’s final completed novel,
Persuasion:
[Harville]:
“…If I had such a memory as Benwick, I could bring you fifty quotations in a
moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my
life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and
proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were
all written by men."
[Anne]
"Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in
books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education
has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I
will not allow books to prove anything."
If
AGE is successful, many more pens (and stages) will eventually wind up in the
hands of women of all colors and sexual orientations, a worthy goal that I am
certain Jane Austen wished to promote in her own extraordinary way, and would
be glad to know that her name was being used to help AGE accomplish its mission.
One
of the parts of tomorrow night’s AGE program I am especially looking forward
to, for personal reasons, is the presentation by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner,
English Prof. at Linfield College, on the subject of strong female characters
in Shakespeare’s plays. I was sorry to have missed his talk to the local JASNA
chapter here in Portland last May (because my wife and I only moved out here
six months ago), when he presented his 2013 article (in SEL, 1500-1900
53.4, ppg. 763-92) entitled “Jane Austen, the Prose Shakespeare”.
I
read his article a while ago when it was first published, and I highly recommend
it, in its entirety, to all studious Janeites,
as it represents high quality mainstream Austen scholarship – by which I mean
that while he (unlike myself) does not venture that far outside the box
theoretically, he provides a great deal of excellent and meaty close textual
reading and imaginative inference therefrom, and coats it all in a relatively
modest amount of litcrit jargon (and that’s most welcome and rare in much scholarly
criticism these days). In other words, he writes in mostly plain English, and
he writes for the lay reader as well as the academic, and he has something
original and important to say about Jane Austen.
An
excellent example of how he integrates his expertise in both Jane Austen and Shakespeare
is when he sleuths out the particular passage in Persuasion which acoustically echoes Viola’s famous “Patience on a
Monument” speech in Twelfth Night,
thereby providing subliminal evidence accounting for the more than century-old
critical tradition of connecting Anne Elliot’s speech about female constancy (which
I quoted above) to Viola’s said speech, even though it is not explicitly
alluded to. Pollack-Pelzner thereby shows me he understands Jane Austen’s
subtle allusive mastery, which was first really shown in its glory by Jocelyn
Harris in her influential 1986 Jane
Austen’s Art of Memory.
And
by the way, a couple of years ago, I also read an excellent series of articles
he wrote for the general public at that time, when Oregon had the luxury of not
one but two quality stagings of The
Taming of the Shrew (my wife and I really loved the one we saw at the
Ashland Shakespeare Festival). So I know Pollack-Pelzner will have some very interesting
things to say about those strong Shakespearean women at the AGE event tomorrow
night.
For
the remainder of this post, I will focus on a few specifics in his article on Jane
Austen as the Prose Shakespeare---here is Pollack-Pelzner’s abstract:
“This
essay explores the connection between Shakespearean drama and the novel’s
representation of interiority. Jane Austen’s celebrated use of free indirect
discourse, I argue, is linked to Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb’s Tales from
Shakespeare, which turned dramatic soliloquies into prose narration,
rendering a character’s thought and idiom in a third-person voice. Heralded as
a “prose Shakespeare” by 19th-century critics, Austen also developed an inverse
free indirect discourse, the infusion of the narrative voice into characters’
dialogue. Scenes from Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion offer
mini-Shakespearean plays of attention, for Shakespearean technique and
quotation script Austen’s dramas of reading.”
Those
who read along in this blog know that I gave a talk at both the JASNA AGM and
to the local Portland JASNA chapter last Fall on the topic of “The Five
Shakespeare Plays Hidden in Plain Sight in Mansfield
Park”, so it’s obvious that Pollack-Pelzner and I have very congruent
interests. My purpose below is to add a couple of points from my own research
which intersect and synergize in interesting and unexpected ways with his
arguments.
First,
while discussing Emma, he writes: “A
less restrained Austen heroine, however, opposes prose to drama. Emma Woodhouse
interprets Mr. Elton’s puzzling charade, with its seductive solution,
“Courtship,” as a veiled marriage proposal to her friend Harriet, and assures
her that “It is a sort of prologue to the play, a motto to the chapter; and
will soon be followed by matter-of-fact prose”…”
What Pollack-Pelzner
was apparently unaware of regarding his reference to the “courtship” charade in
Emma is that it is that very same
charade which provides the strongest possible evidence in support of his claim
that Jane Austen drew significant inspiration from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare in blazing the
trail of free indirect discourse in her novels. Why? Because, if you read the
following-linked pair of 2007 articles in Persuasions
Online by Colleen Sheehan….
about
the “Prince of Whales” alternative answer to the “courtship” charade in Emma that Colleen was the first reader
of Emma in 190 years to spot, you
will see that one of the two sources for Jane Austen’s savage satire on the
corpulent, debauched Prince Regent (and future King George IV) was a satirical
poem written not long before Emma (and
published anonymously, not surprisingly) by none other than Charles Lamb,
entitled “The Triumph of the Whale”!
Suffice
to say that Lamb in that parodic poem is as unkind to the Prince as the other
principal source for that secret answer, which I discovered right after Colleen
first revealed that alternative answer to me. It was the well known caricature
drawn by Cruikshank which I use as the masthead image at my blog, showing the
Prince as a giant spouting whale, like Milton’s Satan, beached in the surf, with
his various cronies and toadies circling around him like so many lesser fallen
angels.
And…there’s
even more to the Charles Lamb-Jane Austen connection than that, which further
supports Pollack-Pelzner’s central thesis about Lamb’s influence on Jane Austen’s
free indirect discourse form of narration. He points out in his article that
Lamb was an outspoken and high profile advocate for reading Shakespeare’s plays
in order to fully appreciate them: “During
the period Austen was writing, …Charles Lamb…offered the most famous argument
that Shakespeare’s texts could only be realized fully by reading them, not by
seeing them acted. The inner thoughts and feelings that Shakespeare excelled in
depicting, he contended, could not be represented by a histrionic actor
strutting and fretting on the stage.”
I am
pretty sure that Lamb, in making his arguments in favor of reading Shakespeare,
did not mention something that I have been saying for a number of years now, which
is that there are a surprisingly large number of thematically significant acrostics (including anagram-acrostics
as well) scattered through all 38 plays, which can only be detected while
reading the play texts, and are utterly inaccessible to a theater audience
which (obviously) cannot see and identify the capitalized first letters of the words
at the beginning of every line of blank verse Shakespeare put on the page.
Most
recently, I disclosed what I consider one of the two or three most interesting and
significant Shakespearean acrostics in the entire canon, the “SATAN” which
appears right in the heart of Friar Laurence’s famous speech to Juliet when he quells
her fears about drinking the potion and going to sleep in the family tomb:
As I
revealed there, Shakespeare clearly got the idea for that SATAN acrostic from
Arthur Brooke, whose earlier Romeus &
Juliet contains two SATAN
acrostics at almost the identical point in the action, and, in turn, John Milton
got the idea for his SATAN acrostic in Book 8 of Paradise Lost from Romeo
& Juliet. And, as I outlined in those posts, those linked acrostics
open the door to a whole new layer of hidden allusive meaning in both Romeo & Juliet and Paradise Lost.
But
what does all of this have to do with Charles Lamb? Only that, in addition to
his having alluded to Paradise Lost in
“Triumph of the Whale” (making me wonder if Lamb recognized the Satan acrostic
there, too?), he was well known in Jane
Austen’s lifetime as the author of a number of more mundane, published acrostic poems---which is why, as
Colleen Sheehan also pointed out in her brilliant article that I linked above,
there are not only concealed alternative answers to the charade, there are also
actually not one but two anagram
acrostics hidden in plain sight in the two stanzas of the “Prince of Whales”
charade in Emma, ---and here’s the
best part----they BOTH have as their solution the name “LAMB”!
So, I
believe that Jane Austen was, among many other purposes in creating these anagram-acrostics,
intending to pay veiled homage to Lamb’s, Milton’s, and Shakespeare’s acrostics.
And, I’d suggest in light of Pollack-Pilzner’s article, she was also tipping
her hat to Lamb’s argument in favor of reading
Shakespeare’s plays, which, again, contained so many acrostics which would have
never been detected except on the printed page. In other words, I believe Jane
Austen was the very sort of outside-the-box reader of Shakespeare whom Lamb had
in mind!
But I’ve
left my biggest point for last—what is most significant of all for my own
theory of Jane Austen’s shadow stories…
....is the significance of JA’s revolutionary advances in free indirect
discourse in narration, far surpassing Lamb’s model. What I’ve been saying for
over a decade now is that all of Jane Austen’s novels are double stories, with
the overt stories being what you get when you read the narrative as if it were
mostly objective (and therefore highly reliable) description of “what really
happens”, but the shadow stories are what you get when you read the narrative
as if it were mostly subjective (and
therefore highly unreliable) description of what the heroine of each novel, in
all her pride, prejudice, sensibility, and persuadability, thinks she sees.
In that latter case, Jane Austen provides hundreds of subtle clues which
eventually allow a determined reader (like myself) to excavate and eventually
piece together the alternative coherent narrative I call the shadow story.
And don’t you see how this all fits with the “courtship/Prince of Whales”
charade, with its anagram acrostics? It is a symbol of Jane Austen’s novels
themselves, with their double stories, and at the same time a giant tip of the
hat to Shakespeare, whom Jane Austen emulated in a dozen important ways, as she
translated and transmuted his genius into her own prose, including that
double-story anamorphic structure--- with a nod to Charles Lamb as well.
But more about that last paragraph in the future….meanwhile, see those of
you in Portland at the AGE event tomorrow!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment