A few days ago, my friend Diane
Reynolds shared a post at her blog Jane
Austen & Other Writers by her colleague Professor EmeritusTom Flynn…
…about his own personal Jane Austen
journey. My eye was caught by something he wrote about Elizabeth Bennet’s and Mr.
Wickham’s final encounter in Pride &
Prejudice, after Wickham has just married Lydia:
“Elizabeth’s economical and layered
response both condemns him and also permits him to save face, should he choose
to do so. She reports that the housekeeper said “That [Wickham] had gone into
the army, and she was afraid had—not turned out well. At such a
distance as that, you know, things are strangely misrepresented.”
Austen reports that Elizabeth
intends this information to silence Wickham, and he does bite his lip. Yet
Wickham emerges from this first encounter relatively unscathed. He
has not been so wounded that he considers retreating; rather, he adopts the
dangerous strategy of returning to one of his earlier misrepresentations.” END QUOTE FROM FLYNN POST
What caught my eye was that Wickham “bites
his lip”. Jane Austen is typically sparing in such nonverbal details, and so I checked
the context of that usage in P&P, to get a hang on this unusual detail (only
one other Austen character bites her lip: Lucy Steele in Sense & Sensibility --in anger at her sister). Was this a clue
to a covert allusion by to some prior literary work in which lips are bitten?:
“…And so, my dear sister, I find, from our
uncle and aunt, that you have actually seen Pemberley."
She replied in the
affirmative.
"I almost envy you
the pleasure, and yet I believe it would be too much for me, or else I could
take it in my way to Newcastle. And you saw the old housekeeper, I suppose?
Poor Reynolds, she was always very fond of me. But of course she did not
mention my name to you."
"Yes, she
did." "And what did she
say?"
"That you were gone
into the army, and she was afraid had—not turned out well. At such a distance
as that, you know, things are strangely misrepresented."
"Certainly,"
he replied, BITING HIS LIPS…. "
What emotion was Wickham leaking?
Was it anger, like Lucy (who, you’ll recall, becomes Lucy Ferrars à
Lucifer, after she marries), or anxiety, or a combination of the two? I was also
reminded of the angry thumb-biting of Montague at Capulet in the first scene of
Romeo & Juliet:
SAMPSON
Nay, as they dare. I will bite my thumb at
them; which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it.
ABRAHAM Do you
bite your thumb at us, sir? SAMPSON [Aside to GREGORY] Is the law of our
side, if I say ay?
That encouraged me to check to see
if any Shakespeare play in which a character bit his/her lips---as opposed (ha
ha) to their thumbs--and I found four of them. After looking them over, and
sleuthing things out, I’ve now concluded that one of them is indeed a
Shakespeare play which JA intentionally tagged, when she wrote the seemingly
trivial detail that Wickham bit his lips.
For those of you who enjoy my
literary quizzes, I give the following NINE hints (this is a very solvable
quiz, ladies and gentlemen!); but, in all events, as usual, I’ll reveal my
answer and give my analysis, within the next two days:
ONE: There is a character in the
Shakespeare play who, like Wickham, bites his lips in anger.
TWO: There is a character in the
play who twice calls another
character “not sound”, just as Eliza says the following to BFF Charlotte Lucas:
[Charlotte] “…it is better to know
as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass
your life."
"You make me laugh, Charlotte;
but it is NOT SOUND. You know it is NOT SOUND, and that you would never act in
this way yourself."
THREE: There is in an exchange in
the play which is specifically echoed by Miss Bingley’s withering criticism of
Eliza’s suntanned appearance:
"How very ill Miss Eliza Bennet
looks this morning, Mr. Darcy," she cried; "I never in my life saw
anyone so much altered as she is since the winter. She is grown SO BROWN and COARSE!
Louisa and I were agreeing that we should not have known her again."
So far, these hinted echoes may
sound trivial, but the remaining hints make clear that this is not a casual
allusion, it goes to the heart of Pride
& Prejudice, specifically how we are to think about Elizabeth, Darcy,
Wickham, and another major character in P&P to be named later—see Hint
EIGHT, below.
FOUR: There is a character who, like
Mrs. Bennet, is on a determined quest for a male to preserve the family
“inheritance”.
FIVE: There is a charismatic, manipulative
character in the play who takes a precipitous—dare I say, Satanic?---fall from
grace, because of some shady financial and other dealings, very much like that
described in the following passage about Wickham in P&P:
“All Meryton seemed striving to
blacken the man who, but three months before, had been almost an ANGEL OF LIGHT.
He was declared to be in debt to every tradesman in the place, and his
intrigues, all honoured with the title of seduction, had been extended into
every tradesman's family. Everybody declared that he was the wickedest young
man in the world; and everybody began to find out that they had always
distrusted the appearance of his goodness. Elizabeth, though she did not credit
above half of what was said, believed enough to make her former assurance of
her sister's ruin more certain…”
SIX: That same character described
in Hint FIVE, above, is explicitly named in one of Jane Austen’s juvenilia, in
a passage that is significantly echoed by this letter from Mrs. Gardiner to
niece Elizabeth Bennet: "Pray
forgive me if I have been very presuming, or at least do not punish me so far
as to exclude me from P[emberley]. I shall never be quite happy till I have
been all round the park. A low PHAETON, with a nice little pair of ponies,
would be the very thing.”
SEVEN: There is a very powerful,
noble male character in the play who casts his eye on one particular young
lady, who is described as having a vivacious, charismatic personality—and by
the end of the play, they have indeed married, and that young lady gets to be “mistress”
of a real life “Pemberley” -albeit, not for very long.
EIGHT: There is an enigmatic
character in the play who has exactly the same name as a key character in
P&P, and who (according to my reading of the shadow story of P&P) plays
a similarly crucial behind the scenes role in both the play and in P&P.
NINE: (For those diligent souls who
go so far as to do a Shakespeare word search) The play is NOT Coriolanus, Taming of the Shrew, & Richard III --- it’s the fourth one! ;)
Happy sleuthing, y’all- --- as I
said, I’ll be back….in two days with my best explanation as to what it all
means!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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