In the Janeites group, Jane
Fox asked: “Kitty asks, "When is your next ball to be, Lizzy?" Why YOUR?”
Diana
Birchall replied: “But Kitty does not ask. She does not say that line at all.
In the digital text version on Pemberley.com, and possibly other such texts,
the line is erroneously run together with the next, thus:
"I do not cough for my own
amusement," replied Kitty fretfully. "When is your next ball to be,
Lizzy?"
Consulting the obviously more scrupulously correct
Chapman edition, the speeches run as separate paragraphs:
"I do not cough for my own amusement,"
replied Kitty fretfully.
"When is your next ball to be, Lizzy?"
"To-morrow fortnight."
"To-morrow fortnight."
"Aye, so it is," cried her mother. “
The question is not attributed, but it is certainly
not Kitty who calls the ball "your ball," since she will be
there herself. It is more likely Mrs. Bennet who asks, or possibly
Mr. Bennet…”
Jane, as is often the case, you posed a very interesting question.
And Diana, your reply, although you did not answer Jane’s question, nonetheless
was excellent because you raised an equally important, related question. I will give my answers to both of you, below.
I begin by quoting Jane Austen’s famous letter to Cassandra
in the immediate aftermath of publication of P&P: “There
are a few Typical errors–& a ‘said he’ or a ‘said she’ would sometimes make
the Dialogue more immediately clear–but ‘I do not write for such dull Elves as
have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.'”
I’ve
argued many times that the conventional reading of that quote as an admission
of carelessness on JA’s part (in not being more clear about speech attributions
in P&P) is a complete misreading of what I think is an obvious irony. Jane
is, to me, clearly saying, with a smile, that she writes for the sharp elves
who have the ingenuity (and patience) to take the time to figure out who said
what in each case --- and also the openness to the possibility that Jane might,
in some cases, have deliberately ambiguated
some of those speaker attributions (and, indeed, many other aspects of the
novel as well).
And I
also suggest that the unattributed statement that Jane Fox inquired about is
only one of the first of a steady novel-long stream of such unattributed statements,
which Jane Austen deliberately scattered throughout the text of P&P, for
the purpose of encouraging her readers to develop the ingenuity and nimbleness to
figure out who said what, and, more broadly, also the flexibility to allow for
more than one plausible interpretation of what we understand, upon “first
impressions”.
With
all of that in mind, in this case I see only one really plausible candidate for
the identity of the poser of that question to Lizzy, and it is indeed Mr.
Bennet, whom Diana named as one of two possibilities, and then Jane concurred.
I think it is useful to provide a detailed explanation of why he is the best choice—so as to begin to bring out how artfully
Jane Austen has constructed this seemingly simple family conversation, which
actually conceals layers of deliberate complexity and nuance beneath its light
bright and sparkling surface.
So, I
say the most likely speaker, by a wide margin, is Mr. Bennet, for the following
four reasons:
ONE: He
is in general one of the two principal attributed speakers in the enacted
portion of this family conversation, and he takes special precedence because he
is the one who starts that line of conversation, and he is the one who finishes it;
TWO: He
begins that thread of conversation with
another question to Lizzy---one posed seemingly out of the blue, after observing
her trimming a hat, but which we eventually see as the first setup question for
springing his “Gotcha!” on his wife and daughters: "I hope Mr. Bingley
will like it, Lizzy."
Therefore,
“When is your next ball to be, Lizzy?” can be seen as Mr. Bennet’s second setup
question in that same vein.
THREE:
We also see, in this interpretation, that in response to each of Mr. Bennet’s first
two questions, Mrs. Bennet predictably rises to his bait with her plaintive interjections,
which is surely Mr. Bennet’s goal. He is like Perry Mason cross-examining a
hostile witness on the stand, expertly raising his wife’s frustration level incrementally,
all playing on the theme of his (seemingly) not having gone to meet Mr.
Bingley.
Or,
more significantly (as I’ll post about in a separate post during the next week
or two), he is Jane Austen’s most perfect version of Plato’s Socrates: the “true
philosopher” (Mr. Bennet’s words) and greatest symbol in Western intellectual
history as the poser of irritating, subversive questions which lead to truth—he’s
even got his own Xanthippe—Mrs. Bennet! And this conversation is a classic
Socratic dialog – complete with a sudden twist at the end which is sprung on an
unsuspecting conversation partner.
FOUR:
The above attribution fits perfectly with what I’ve previously written on a
couple of occasions about Kitty’s coughing in that same scene….
….and
how I believe JA meant for us to discern that Kitty is actually coughing sarcastically at what, like Mrs. Bennet’s
nerves, must have been a frequently reprised act in the never-ending Bennet family
circus. So, how perfectly timed to have Mr. Bennet be the one who in effect responds
to Kitty’s sarcastic coughing by continuing with his little comic charade using
Mrs. Bennet as the butt of his humor. And how fitting that after Mr. Bennet,
with perfect comic timing, lands his plane, he leaves with the following flourish: "Now, Kitty, you may cough as much as
you choose…" In other words, he
tips his hat to Kitty for her earlier clever coughing interjection, in effect
saying “Now that I’ve had my fun at the expense of your mother, be as sarcastic
as you like about my indulging in such unworthy pleasures.”
And so, although theoretically the poser of that speaker-unattributed
question to Lizzy could have been Mrs. Bennet, Kitty, or even Lydia, none of
those other attributions fits at all well with the rest of Chapter 2, as I
briefly explain as follows:
Mrs. Bennet already knows when the next ball will be (“Aye,
so it is”), and would not respond irritably to a straightforward answer to her
own question;
Kitty might have wished to deflect attention to her coughing,
but she’d also know; and
Lydia would have been more interested than any of the girls
in the date of the next ball, but she too would presumably have been in the
loop already too.
Whereas, in sharp contrast, Mr. Bennet’s being the speaker
fits so beautifully in so many ways, as I outlined above.
So now I think it’s clear that this is indeed a prime example
of what Jane Austen meant by her cryptic sly comment to Cassandra. I.e., by
lopping and cropping out the “Mr. Bennet asked” she perhaps originally included
after that question in earlier versions of the novel, she pulls the reader out
of a reverie of floating along in passive reading, and into high mental activity—actually
needing to pause to reread the chapter a few times, and test different theories
of who spoke that one short line---before continuing on. And thereafter hopefully
alert to the possibility—indeed the likelihood—that there will be many more
such opportunities as the novel progresses for the reader to play an active
role in the full telling of the story. And… hopefully then willing to look at their own lives in the same active fashion,
questioning snap judgments about our everyday lives.
And there’s even more still in this one line of dialog. If we
think about 99% of the novel as being told from Lizzy’s point of view, then
recall that Jane Austen inobtrusively alerts us that Lizzy is actively engaged
in trimming a hat during this scene. If you reflect on that, you quickly realize
that this would to some extent (I don’t know what trimming a hat involved—was it
something, like knitting, that could be done while looking around the room?) divert
her attention, both in sound and in sight, from the general conversation. So, a
non-attribution of a given line of dialogue is in that sense a lifelike
re-creation of Lizzy’s own cognitive experience of the moment, like our only
hearing the famous strawberry-dashes scene in Emma, because we are hearing it while Emma lies drowsily in the sun
with her eyes closed.
This may also be why we have so little narration in this
scene, so little commentary on the other speakers —because Lizzy is not doing
her usual close observation of the faces and nonverbals of those in a room with
her. So, if Lizzy is half-zoning out on her parents’s dog-and-pony show, and only
half paying attention to the room, this is also consistent with Lizzy not quite
registering who was speaking to her.
And this is all a part of what I see as Jane Austen’s
consistent strong interest in depicting the way human beings process the world
they experience --- Hume, Smith, and Kant had nothing on her!
And there is one more final question----which was actually
Jane Fox’s original question --- why “your next ball” and not “the next ball”? That
answer, at first blush, seems very straightforward. If Mr. Bennet is indeed the
speaker, then it makes perfect sense that he’d say “your”. Why? Because, as
Diana perhaps meant to say about him but instead said about Mrs. Bennet----he’s
actually the only person in the Bennet family who does not attend the “next ball”, i.e., the Meryton assembly. And so,
even though he was addressing Lizzy, his “your” could just as easily have
referred not only to Lizzy but to everyone else in the room, with Lizzy, as Mr.
Bennet’s favorite, being the focal point and representative, in his mind, of
the larger group.
But
that’s not the last turn of the literary sleuthing screw. Apropos my
interpretation of JA’s letter to Cassandra as embracing ambiguity in all
aspects of P&P and not merely in speaker attributions, I leave you with the
suggestion that we might put a whole different slant on the meaning of Mr.
Bennet’s referring to “your next ball”, if we view his question through the
lens of my very recent post…
…about
the veiled allusion to the Earl of Rochester’s “A Ramble in St. James’s Park”
in P&P.
As I
stated in that post, part of that allusion was to the extraordinary “ball”
which the Earl, John Wilmot, and his “Ballers” arranged with Lady Jane Bennet,
the illustrious Restoration Era madam to King Charles II’s bawdy circle, and
the dirty “dancing” which went on there--- extraordinary, in no small part, because,
like the “savage” dancing that Darcy cryptically refers to at the Netherfield
ball, it was performed while not clothed!
Now, did I hear one of you coughing? ;)
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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