Earlier
today, I posted a link to an article about Enchantments
(a new modernized film version of Emma
with a Wiccan lesbian twist, which I’m eager to see), which prompted me to
search for Jane Austen’ usages of the word “enchantment” in her writing. I was
curious as to whether JA, arch punster, might’ve used “enchant” punningly, too,
so as to covertly allude to the dreadfully serious subject of “witches” (i.e.,
powerful women) burnt at the stake in early modern times. I already knew this
to be a subject in which Jane took an eager interest—from Joan La Pucelle (in
Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 1), to
poor English women subjected to witch trials, to Maria de Medici’s “particular
friend” Eleanor de Galigai.
It
was only after noticing, two months ago, the veiled allusion in P&P to the
Bard’s brash, spirit-conjuring Joan, that I also grasped for the first time the
deep emotion hidden just beneath the surface of the 16 year old Jane’s “casual”
take on Joan in Jane’s History of England: “It was in [Henry VI’s] reign that Joan of Arc lived & made such a
row among the English. They should not have burnt her — but they did.”
But
they did---three words carrying three tons
of anger (so much for the nonsense about Jane the English patriot mistrusting
everything French—her allegiance was to her fellow women). And I had also noticed that Shakespeare made much of Joan’s
“enchantment”: she is tagged with this witchy pun twice in Henry VI, Part 1, both of them tellingly focused on the power Joan
exerts through words:
King
Charles (of France): Speak, Pucelle, and ENCHANT him with thy
words.
It’s
so easy to see how Jane Austen, among the most powerful female wielders of
words in history, would identify with Shakespeare’s Joan, who was so famously
and fatally “condemned” by men. So I had high expectations of finding the
mature published author Jane using “enchantment” similarly; but, to my disappointment,
I found only three usages in her published novels---one in NA, two in Emma---and not a one of the three was
punny. A swing and a big miss.
Little
did I suspect that vindication of my hunch was in the on-deck circle. The next
search in my queue was, as always, in her Juvenilia (separate search engine), and
there I found a handful. And all of them were also insignificant….except the one
that turned out to be the mother lode—and in the most unlikely place---in “Frederic
& Elfrida” (“F&E” for short), written by Jane Austen when she was ONLY
TWELVE YEARS OLD! In other words, the very earliest surviving writing of JA!
Specifically,
I am talking about the passage in “Chapter the Second” of F&E, where we
read about the welcome of the young hero & heroine into the home of their
new neighbors, the Fitzroys:
“On
being shewn into an elegant dressing room, ornamented with festoons of artificial
flowers, they were struck with the engaging Exterior & beautifull outside
of Jezalinda the eldest of the young Ladies; but e'er they had been many
minutes seated, the Wit & Charms which shone resplendant in the
conversation of the amiable Rebecca, ENCHANTED them so much that they all with
one accord jumped up & exclaimed. Lovely & too charming Fair one,
notwithstanding your forbidding squint, your greasy tresses & your swelling
back, which are more frightfull than imagination can paint or pen describe, I
cannot refrain from expressing my raptures, at the engaging Qualities of your
Mind, which so amply atone for the HORROR, with which your first appearance
must ever inspire the unwary visitor."
"Your sentiments so nobly
expressed on the different excellencies of Indian & English Muslins, &
the judicious preference you give the former, have excited in me an admiration
of which I can alone give an adequate idea, by assuring you it is nearly equal to
what I feel for myself."
Then making a profound Curtesy to
the amiable & abashed Rebecca, they left the room & hurried home.
From this period, the intimacy
between the Families of Fitzroy, Drummond, and Falknor, daily encreased till at
length it grew to such a pitch, that they did not scruple to kick one another
out of the window on the slightest provocation…”
I
hope it is obvious that what confirms the punning meaning of “enchantment” as
referring to witches is…..practically everything in that passage! (but I’ll
spell it all out anyway). We have an unusually
detailed description of “the
amiable Rebecca”, the new girlfriend who “ENCHANTED” them, was “too CHARMING”,
had a “forbidding SQUINT”, “GREASY tresses”, and a “SWELLING back”, all of which
are “FRIGHTFULL” and inspire “HORROR” in “the unwary visitor”. In a half dozen ways, that passage screams a caricature of a “witch”—like
the portrait of Queen Elizabeth that Cassandra drew for Jane’s History four years later---without ever having
to write the word “witch” itself!
And
that would have been enough----but I soon discovered that those vivid
descriptors were only the periphera of the allusion to witchcraft that the extraordinary
genius12 year old Jane Austen hid behind that short passage. And my next clue that
led me to that further discovery turned out to be the name of Rebecca’s elder
sister-----Jezalinda. Did it catch your eye too?
At
first, I thought I was reminded of the name of one of those witches from Wicked, but Google promptly disabused me
of that suspicion: they were Elphaba, Glinda, and Nessarose—not a Jezalinda in
sight. But then I thought—might Jane have had the Biblical JEZebel in mind? That sounded promising, as I knew enough about Kings to know that Jezebel was an arch
villainess in the eyes of the Israelite priestly writers, because she had in
some way led her husband, Ahab, King of Israel, down the road to
corruption—sorta like a witch, right?
I was
ready to go to the Bible to find out more about Jezebel, but first I took a
quick segue to Google, and searched “Jezebel Austen Jezalinda”, thinking that
perhaps some Austen scholar had already seen the Jezebel connection to Jezalinda,
and had beaten me to the punch. And a few hits did pop up. Margaret Doody, in
her new book Jane Austen’s Names, wrote:
“
‘Jezalinda’ is pure invention, in affectionate mockery of Mrs. Smith’s
‘Ethelinde’ combined with ‘Jessica’ and ‘Jezebel’”, and then Doody cited Peter
Sabor.
I
then saw that Peter Sabor had previously written pretty much the same thing a
few years earlier:
“Jezalinda:
a nonce name, combining the biblical Jezebel with ‘Ethelinde’, the name of the
eponymous heroine of Charlotte Smith’s novel…”
But
no others worth noting. Sure, there had been several prior scholarly notings of
the name “Jezalinda”--by Mudrick, Castellanos, Small, Lynch, and Poplawski,
among others— but each was only in passing. No Austen scholar had apparently ever
thought of Jezebel as a name chosen by JA for a reason besides Sabor and Doody.
So it seemed like virgin scholarly acreage waiting to be tilled.
So my
next stop was the Bible, to quickly get up to speed on the story of Jezebel,
and see if anything popped out at me that might somehow connect to that
“witchy” passage about Jezalinda and Rebecca. Are you ready for a lightning
quick tour of Jezebel in the Bible?:
1 Kings 16:31 Ahab marries princess Jezebel
and
worships her father’s god, Baal.
1Kings
18 When Jezebel cuts off the prophets of
the Lord, Obadiah takes 100 prophets, and
hides them in a cave, and feeds them. Elijah then confronts Ahab, challenges
Baal’s prophets (who eat at Jezebel’s table) with God’s, and---no big
surprise!-- things go badly for the Baalim.
1 Kings 19: 1-4: And Ahab told Jezebel
all that Elijah had done, and withal how he had slain all the prophets with the
sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger
unto Elijah, saying, So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy
life as the life of one of them by to morrow about this time.
And
when he saw that, he arose, and went for his life, and came to Beersheba, which
belongeth to Judah, and left his servant there [where God sends angels to feed
and encourage Elijah].
1 Kings 21: Jezebel incites Ahab to glom
Naboth’s desirable vineyard writes letters and hires two sons of Belial to bear
false witness against Naboth for blasphemy, whereupon Naboth is stoned to death
and Ahab gets his vineyard. Whereupon, God sends Elijah with his version of a
horse’s head in bed:
“Thus
saith the Lord, In the place where dogs licked
the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood, even thine.”
“And of JEZEBEL
also spake the Lord, saying, The
dogs shall eat JEZEBEL by the wall of Jezreel.”
Ahab
repents whereupon God shows mercy:
“Seest thou how
Ahab humbleth himself before me? because he humbleth himself before me, I will
not bring the evil in his days: but in his son's days will I bring the evil
upon his house.”
Then
a gap till the right point in the reign of Ahab’s son, Joram:
2
Kings 9: Elisha sends a message to Jehu that he is the future king of Israel,
plus:
”And
thou shalt smite the house of Ahab thy master, that I may avenge the blood of
my servants the prophets, and the blood of all the servants of the Lord,
at the hand of Jezebel.”
Jehu
eventually heads out to fulfill his destiny. Joram spots him, sends messengers
twice to ask if Jehu comes in peace, gets no answer. Then:
21-23:
And Joram said, Make ready. And his chariot was made ready.
And Joram king of Israel and Ahaziah king of Judah went out, each in his
chariot, and they went out against Jehu, and met him in the portion of Naboth
the Jezreelite. And it came to pass, when Joram saw
Jehu, that he said, Is it peace, Jehu? And he answered, What peace, so long as the
whoredoms of THY MOTHER JEZEBEL AND HER WITCHCRAFTS are so many?”
Jehu
slaughters Joram in Naboth’s vineyard—Biblical poetic justice.
And
all of that was just prelude to the part that Jane Austen must have read with
ESPECIALLY eager interest. So I suggest that you do the same, and look for the
part that Jane hid in plain sight in F&A:
30-37: And when Jehu
was come to Jezreel, JEZEBEL heard of it; and she painted her face, and tired
her head, and looked out at a window. And as Jehu
entered in at the gate, she said, Had Zimri peace, who slew his master? And he lifted up his face to the window, and said, Who is on my
side? who? And there looked out to him two or three eunuchs. And he said, THROW HER DOWN. So THEY THREW HER DOWN: and some of her
blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses: and he trode her under
foot.
34 And when he was
come in, he did eat and drink, and said, Go, see now this cursed woman, and
bury her: for she is a king's daughter. And they went to bury her: but
they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her
hands. Wherefore they came again, and told him. And he
said, This is the word of the Lord, which he
spake by his servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, In the portion of Jezreel
shall dogs eat the flesh of JEZEBEL: And the carcase of
JEZEBEL shall be as dung upon the face of the field in the portion of Jezreel;
so that they shall not say, This is JEZEBEL.
So NOW you know why the 12 year old
Jane Austen wrote “they did not scruple to kick one another out of the window
on the slightest provocation”.
It wasn’t that she was a silly preteen giving vent to her overactive Gothic
imagination. She was confirming to her learned readers that “witch-like” Rebecca
(another Hebrew Biblical female name) and her sister Jezalinda were supposed to
remind us in some way of the most evil witch of the Bible---Jezebel, who
infamously had the unique Biblical status of being thrown out of a window—or,
as they said it in JA’s day—defenestrated—hence my Subject Line.
By the way, as a Christian P.S. to
the above Hebrew narrative, we do hear about Jezebel one last time in Revelation
2:20-23:
“Notwithstanding
I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel,
which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to
commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols. And I gave her
space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not. Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery
with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall
know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto
every one of you according to your works.”
The
unrepentant Jezebel we hear about there sounds a LOT like Joan La Pucelle at
the end of Henry VI, Part 1, and
Eleanor de Galigai, too---all thumbing their female noses at overwhelming male brute
force, even in the face of an imminent tortured death. And so I leave off my
interpretation there, I am sure those who are interested will want to reflect
on all of the above, and come up with your own explanation of the meaning of
Jane Austen’s veiled allusion to Jezebel.
But
before I close, think about how it comes to be that I am the first Austen scholar
to ever take note of any of the above. What it shows you, yet again, I suggest,
is the extraordinary passivity and lack of imagination in interpreting Jane
Austen’s writing---from her juvenilia to her surviving letters to her published
novels----that seems to still be the universal default mode for Austen
scholarship, as it has been for two centuries.
What’s
most ironic in that, I think, in this particular instance, is that even Peter
Leithart (who has made a cottage industry in recent years out of generating exegeses
of safe, unthreatening—and, in my view, totally invalid---Christian Biblical
allusions in JA’s writing) actually quoted the passage in F&A about intimate
friends tossing each other out of windows, without recognizing that this was
the 12 year old Jane Austen’s massive wink at the fate of Jezebel in the Bible.
How strong is the blindness that arises from the unshakable belief that Jane
Austen could not write something like that—it is a blindness which no
spectacles, even those of Mrs. Bates, can correct.
And that,
my fellow Janeites, is only the Biblical part of the allusions in “Frederic
& Elfrida”. Stand by tomorrow for my followup post, in which I will lay out
the classical allusions, which are almost as amazing.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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