Several
days ago, I posted about what I called ”The
Danteesque/Miltonian/Austenian/AcrosticTriumph of Charles Lamb’s Prince of
Whales” http://tinyurl.com/nspggbn In that post, I expanded upon
Colleen Sheehan’s 2006 discovery of Jane Austen’s allusion (in her “courtship”
charade in Chapter 9 of Emma) to
Charles Lamb’s 1812 anonymous skewering of the Prince of Wales as “the Prince
of Whales”. I concluded thusly:
“So
when Jane Austen chose to mold her courtship charade around this Dante, Milton
& Lamb imagery of Satan in hell, and to wink at the multiple acrostics in
Lamb's poem with her two anagram acrostics on "Lamb", it tells us all
she really meant it when she confided to close friend (and more) Martha Lloyd
in 1812 that she really hated the Prince Regent. And it also tells us that she
enjoyed the sacrilegious content of Lamb’s poem, and saw in it a kindred spirit
to her own teenage Sharade on James I. And finally, it confirms to me what I have
long believed, which is that Mr. Knightley is the Prince of Whales of Emma, and that Jane Austen is hinting to
us that he swallows Emma whole at the end of the novel, to Emma's grave
detriment.”
Subsequently,
I did some followup delving into the allusive depths beneath Austen’s superficially
trivial charade, and even I was amazed at where the trail led me. Turns out
that Lamb’s satirical poem, and Austen’s allusion thereto, both sit at the
convergence of several other significant threads of literary allusion, going
both forward and backward in literary history from the Regency Era.
It
would take a long post to explicate this
multiple convergence in full textual detail, so today I’ll instead present an outline,
with highlights, to give you the big picture in a few pages. But if anyone honors
my work with a request for more details on particular claims, I’ll be glad to comply
in a followup post.
Without
further ado, then, here is my outline:
LAMB’S
“PRINCE OF WHALES” IN AUSTEN’S EMMA: I
just summarized this allusion, above, and spelled it out in detail in the above
linked prior post.
SHAKESPEARE’S PERICLES IN AUSTEN’S EMMA: I’ve been claiming for a number of
years that there is a complex allusion to Shakespeare’s late romance, Pericles Prince of Tyre in Emma via the following subthreads, the Shakespearean
common denominator of which has never been recognized before:
ONE:
Garrick’s Riddle, which Mr. Woodhouse struggles to recollect, and which begins
with “Kitty a fair but frozen maid” is a Jane Austen wink at Antiochus’s father-daughter
incest riddle, which Pericles solves, thereby putting himself in mortal danger.
Mr. Woodhouse’s horror of anyone, but especially Emma, getting married, is a dark
black humor parody of Antiochus vis a vis his daughter.
TWO:
In 1999, Jill Heydt-Stevenson demonstrated the lurid sexual subtext of Garrick’s
Riddle, which hints at sex with virgins to cure syphilis, which is closely akin
to Antiochus’s relationship with his daughter (and by the way, David Garrick,
at his death in 1779, bequeathed to the British Library both a 2nd and
a 6th quarto of Pericles).
THREE:
I first argued last year that Mr. Perry
was actually Mr. Woodhouse’s imaginary friend, and that his surname is Jane
Austen’s wink at both Shakespeare’s Pericles and also at the Peri Banou (“peri”
being Farsi for “fairy”) in one of the famous Scheherazade tales.
FOUR:
I argued very recently that Jane Fairfax in Emma
is closely modeled in several key aspects on Pericles’s daughter Marina,
and, as a corollary, that the Bates residence is modeled on the Mytilene
brothel where Marina resists being forced to sell her (human) flesh. This
particularly fits with my longstanding claim that Jane Fairfax is the shadow
heroine of Emma, given that Marina is
the undisputed heroine of Pericles.
So, you see there are four independently
discovered threads that all connect Emma to
Pericles, thereby making each of them
more likely to reflect Jane Austen’s intention. But I must conclude this
section with reference to a massive “Trojan Horse Moment” of Margaret Doody in
this regard. I.e., she could have seen this allusion 20 years ago, had her scholarly
philosophy dreamt of Jane Austen as a subversively brilliant Shakespeare
scholar. Here’s the relevant excerpt from Doody’s The True Story of the Novel (1996)
about “Ap;ollonius of Tyre…Fathers
and Daughters, and Unriddling Mother’s Plot”
[Doody was referring to the original Latin novel Apollonius, the likely ultimate source for Gower’s 14th
century adaptation that Shakespeare relied on]:
;
“The
worst things done in Apollonius are
done within the family or in the name of its values. … Apollonius, I would suggest, is about rendering visible or knowable
the psychosocial abuses that lie beneath the cultural surface. To render such
open secrets knowable is to engage in the heavy psychic labor of unriddling.
This labor oversets Apollonius.…Should
we take Tharsia’s riddles as an example of --and thus a collusion with—incest
itself? On the contrary, Tharsia’s riddles reenact some of the elements of
incest, but as an antidote. As the novel has shown us, what is depressing is
the normality of the breaking of the assumed taboo. In order to break out of
the dull and painful normality created by the patterns of possessiveness, we
need to look at everything as if we had no ready-made understanding or
definition of it—and that is what riddles do. Riddles figuratively enact the
possibility of radical redefinition. Rhetorically they are paradoxes, in every
sense, including the sense of surprise…When Tharsia uses riddles, she engages
in a serious erotic activity of self preservation, for her father and herself.
She represents the desire of the mind to move outside the prison of custom…IN
JANE AUSTEN’S EMMA, SILLY OLD MR.
WOODHOUSE (a comically depressive father) laments ‘that young people would be
in such a hurry to marry—and to marry strangers too”. But fiction is heartily
in favor of union with the stranger…ANTIOCHUS CARRIED MR. WOODHOUSE’S
POSSESSIVE GREED TOO FAR. In his perverse cutting out of the stranger who might
take his daughter from him. (Mr. Woodhouse, too, is enveloped in riddles, but
he is too foolish to pose any.). …”
Wow!
Did Doody simply blank on the fact that Mr. Woodhouse DOES (as I wrote earlier) specifically recall Garrick’s Riddle? Doody
just could not conceive of a Jane Austen who’d intentionally foreground this disturbing
incestuous subtext from Pericles! And
yet, Doody’s analysis of the role riddles play vis a vis “psychosocial abuses [such
as incest] that lie beneath the cultural surface” is chillingly applicable to
my longstanding interpretation of Mr. Woodhouse as a former serial incestuous
sexual abuser!
SHAKESPEARE’S
PERICLES IN LAMB’S “TRIUMPH OF THE
WHALE”:
Susan
Allen Ford, editing Sheehan’s “Prince of Whales” article, pointed out that Lamb’s
poem alluded to Paradise Lost, and my
above-linked prior post mentioned that Lamb’s poem alluded to Dante’s Inferno (which of course was itself an
obvious source for Milton’s epic), but now I also have determined that Lamb’s
poem also alluded to Shakespeare’s Pericles,
with the epicenter of that allusion being as follows:
The beginning
of Lamb’s poem, with the unusual word “finny”, and including a stanza about a human
whale swallowing people a la the Biblical Jonah (who was also an obvious source
for Shakespeare’s Pericles vis a vis shipwrecks, washing up in Tarsus, etc)…
;
Io!
Paean! Io! Sing
To
the FINNY people’s King.
Not a
mightier WHALE than this
In
the vast Atlantic is;
…as
well as the acrostic “FIN” which I identified in my previous post, are both
Lamb’s winks at Act 2, Scene 1, of Pericles,
when Pericles is rescued by fishermen after washing up onshore in Tarsus:
THIRD
FISHERMAN
Nay, master, said not I as much when I saw the PORPUS how he bounced and tumbled?
they say
they're half fish, half flesh: a plague on them, they ne'er come but I look to be
washed. Master, I marvel how the FISHES live in THE SEA.
FIRST
FISHERMAN Why,
as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones: I
can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a
WHALE; a' plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before
him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful: such WHALES have I heard on o' the land, who never leave gaping till they've swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells, and all.
PERICLES
[Aside] A pretty moral.
THIRD
FISHERMAN
Because he should have
SWALLOWED me too: and when I had been in his belly, I would
have kept such a jangling of the bells, that he should never
have left, TILL HE CAST bells, steeple, church, and parish up again. But if the good King Simonides
were of my mind,--
PERICLES
[Aside] Simonides!
PERICLES
[Aside]
How
from the FINNY subject of THE SEA
These fishers tell the infirmities of men;
And from their watery EMPIRE recollect
All that may men approve or men detect!
Peace be at your labour, honest fishermen.
These fishers tell the infirmities of men;
And from their watery EMPIRE recollect
All that may men approve or men detect!
Peace be at your labour, honest fishermen.
You
can, as easily as I did, detect the half dozen parallels between the Miltonian
aspects of both the Shakespeare and the Lamb passages, most of all in that
Pericles has washed up on shore in Tarsus, after in effect being cast out of “heaven”
(i.e., Antioch, with “heaven” used several times in that scene to refer to both Antioch and Antiochus’s
daughter) for what Antiochus perceives as a kind of presumptuous insurrection, just
as Lamb has specifically alluded to the part of when Satan has washed up in
Hell after being cast out of Heaven for his insurrection.
And Charles
and Mary Lamb’s 1807 Tales of Shakespeare
includes Pericles, and has the
following very obliquely avoidant way of addressing Antiochus’s incest in their
opening paragraph:
“Pericles,
prince of Tyre, became a voluntary exile from his
dominions, to avert the dreadful calamities which Antiochus, the wicked emperor
of Greece, threatened to bring upon his subjects
and city of Tyre, in revenge for a discovery which
the PRINCE had made of A SHOCKING DEED which the
emperor had DONE IN SECRET; as commonly it proves DANGEROUS TO PRY INTO THE
HIDDEN CRIMES OF GREAT ONES.”
The
second half of that long sentence could serve perfectly as a description of the
fate of the Hunt brothers in 1812, who not only published Lamb’s poem, but also
wrote an openly satirical editorial about the Prince Regent, which earned them
both two years in prison. I.e.,, for them, it did indeed “prove dangerous to
pry into the hidden crimes of great ones”!!!
And
beyond Lamb, my recent research shows that both Byron and Shelley were also
very much actively involved in the loose association of disaffected authors who
took on the Prince Regent with various levels of overtness, in tandem with the
Hunts, Lamb, and Jane Austen. And finally…even Edgar Alan Poe gets into the
act, in his 1845 poem “Hop-Frog”, which also points to Lamb’s poem!
And as
a final link in that later literary lineage—for now, at least---there is also:
AUSTEN’S
EMMA & LAMB’S “TRIUMPH OF THE
WHALE” IN MELVILLE’S MOBY DICK
A few
years ago, I posted about Melville’s having alluded to Lamb’s poem (which
Melville actually reproduced a portion of in Moby Dick) and also to Emma.
Whether Melville saw the connection between Lamb’s poem and the charade in Emma –at present, I can’t say, but I am
still looking….
All
of this puts Jane Austen’s covert satire of the Prince Regent in a much larger
social and literary context---it was not merely her private beef with his
abuses of power, she was part of a great covert tradition involving the
greatest writers.
GOWER’S
CONFESSIO AMANTIS & MIRROR OF MANKIND in PERICLES & PARADISE LOST
And
finally, the other big news I have is that the common root of all of these
works (including the obvious allusion in Shakespeare’s Pericles), are John Gower’s
14th century works Confessio
Amantis & The Mirror of Mankind, the former of which includes more than one tale
about incest.
In
particular, Milton scholars have missed the significance of Pericles in Paradise Lost, and have failed to connect the dots from that
allusion to the well recognized striking parallel between Paradise Lost and Gower’s Mirror,
re Satan, Sin, and Death being in an incestuous family relationship. They
are all of a piece, and demonstrate that Milton knew his literary history well.
No
Lamb scholar has ever realized that “Triumph of the Whale” alludes not only to Paradise Lost, but also to Pericles. And Charles Lamb’s
correspondence reveals a strong familiarity with Gower’s works as well.
And
at the top of the pile, no Austen scholar has ever peered down beneath the surface
of Emma and identified all these
sources, all of them connected by the common thread of incestuous sex.
And somewhere
in among all of this we also have Jane Austen’s epistolary reference to “sisters
in Lucina” (Lucina being not only a Greek goddess of childbirth, but also the
name of Pericles’s wife in Gower’s Confessio
Amantis) and also the strange character Mr. Gower in JA’s juvenilia Evelyn, who shows up at the home of a
young heiress, and is promptly (and absurdly) given both her hand in marriage,
and also her parents’ family estate---just like Pericles when he marries
Thaisa.
And
there I will leave off from my Ahabian obsessive quest for all of the Prince of
Whales subtext in Jane Austen’s Emma.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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