Diana
Birchall replied to me: "Hi Arnie, I much enjoyed your most interesting
and creative extension of the meaning of Jacob's Ladder as it applies to themes
in Northanger Abbey.”
I’m
so glad, Diana! You’ve once again given me an extremely suggestive nugget, on which
I did not have to chisel too hard to extract some pure scholarly gold!
Diana:
“Unfortunately, I can't answer your question as to whether the phrase used in
Jane Austen's day to describe the stairs leading to Beechen Cliff, as it is
now. I'm sure there are people who are steeped in the history of Bath, and
know; perhaps my friend who took me there does, and I can ask. It would
certainly be an old name, not newly bestowed, though I don't know if it goes
back to JA's day. "
I already Tweeted Jane Odiwe that very question before I read your reply, she kindly replied that she will look into it when she returns to Bath from London – but as you will see, below, I believe the odds that it was in use by 1816 are already much greater than I knew when I wrote my post yesterday!
I already Tweeted Jane Odiwe that very question before I read your reply, she kindly replied that she will look into it when she returns to Bath from London – but as you will see, below, I believe the odds that it was in use by 1816 are already much greater than I knew when I wrote my post yesterday!
Diana
added: "However, whether the literal stairs were called Jacob's Ladder
then or not, it is of course absolutely certain that JA knew the term;
she knew her Bible, and then (as you've probably found out) there is a
"Jacob's Ladder" sculpture on the front of Bath Abbey. And your image
of Catherine climbing to heaven, from her heavenly (to her) talk with Henry on
Beechen Cliff, to the attaining of her real heaven in their marriage, is so
delightful, it's hard to think JA didn't mean to convey the association to
us."
Thanks again, and I of course agree with you, it is indeed so lovely and apt that it can’t be a coincidence – that would be (to paraphrase the wry narration in the Beechen Cliff scene) too much serendipity for one scholarly question!
Thanks again, and I of course agree with you, it is indeed so lovely and apt that it can’t be a coincidence – that would be (to paraphrase the wry narration in the Beechen Cliff scene) too much serendipity for one scholarly question!
But no,
I did not know about that sculpture
before you just mentioned it, so it’s a really good thing that you mentioned
it! It turns out you’ve given me an even more suggestive clue to add to the
first one. You don’t realize just how significant an additional fact that
really is! Let me show you:
First here's an excellent close-up photo of that spectacular sculpture on the exterior of the Abbey front wall: https://www.flickr.com/photos/david_lewis_baker_arts/1906570248
Second, here’s what Wikipedia tells us about its origin: "The west front [of Bath Abbey] which was originally constructed in 1520, has a large arched window and detailed carvings. Above the window are carvings of angels and to either side LONG STONE LADDERS WITH ANGELS CLIMBING UP THEM……Oliver King (1432-1503) was a Bishop of Exeter and Bishop of Bath and Wells who restored Bath Abbey after 1500….The story of the refounding is told on the front of the Abbey in carved Bath stone. King had a dream in which he saw a host of angels on a ladder, the Holy Trinity, and an olive tree with a crown on it. He heard a voice: 'Let an Olive establish the crown, and let a King restore the Church.' King believed this was a call for him to support the candidature of Henry Tudor as King, and to restore the Abbey. These images are carved on the West Front of the Abbey…this is a direct reference to the dream of the prophet Jacob mentioned in the Bible and commonly called Jacob’s Ladder.”
I almost can’t type the rest of this post, I am SO amazed and
thrilled at how well that all fits with my speculations about those wooden
steps at Beechen Cliff in my previous post! The above facts show that Jacob’s
Ladder was indeed an iconic image and Biblical story on frequent display to all
visitors to England’s stone city, Bath—Bath Abbey was after all the most
prominent structure in the entire town! But that’s only the start.
That iconic image is on display on the front of an abbey that was restored not long before
Henry VIII took the throne. That raises an obvious and strong ironic resonance
with Catherine Morland’s Gothic famous imaginings (and also those of the
teenaged Jane Austen in her wry spin on Gilpin in her History of England) vis a vis the beauty of ruined abbeys!
It seems to me an especially plausible and solid inference
that the wooden steps at Beechen Cliff were given the name Jacob’s Ladder a very
long time ago, precisely because people in the 17th and 18th
centuries who climbed up and enjoyed the “heavenly” views from the top of
Beechen Cliff would have found Bath Abbey as perhaps the most prominent
landmark in the middle of the vista they enjoyed!:
Although
the Jacob’s Ladder statue is not visible today in 2016 from Beechen Cliff,
because the view of it is blocked by a smaller building in front of the abbey,
the following much older photo of that view seems to show that the view of the
statue would have been unobstructed in JA’s lifetime:
Now,
I acknowledge that we don’t explicitly read in the novel about Catherine
visiting Bath Abbey, but don’t you think she’d have walked over to look at it
at some point during her long stay in Bath, given her obsession with abbeys
born from her Gothic novel addiction, manifest also in her eagerness to visit
Blaize Castle? It would be shocking if she had not taken a stroll there, and especially so after that Beechen
Cliff outing. I.e., it would have been the most natural thing in the world for Eleanor,
after viewing the Abbey with Catherine from atop Beechen Cliff, to have taken
her curious young friend to Bath Abbey in order to give her a closeup view of a
real abbey. Eleanor would surely have delighted in introducing her protégée,
with her absorbent sponge of a mind, to this wonderful aesthetic and historic experience,
filling her in perhaps on the unfortunate history of Henry VIII’s wives all the
while!
And, speaking
of those angels climbing Jacob’s Ladder, is it not also delightful to think of
Catherine as Jane Austen’s most angelic heroine?
Should we not then read, with a wry smile, the following intense colloquy
between Catherine and Isabella in Chapter 6 involving a different spin on
angels, as an inadvertent satire of King’s statue?:
“Dear creature! How much I am
obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho,
we will read the Italian together;
and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”
“Have you, indeed! How glad I am!
What are they all?”
“I will read you their names
directly; here they are, in my pocketbook. Castle
of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest,
Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last
us some time.”
“Yes, pretty well; but are they all
horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”
“Yes, quite sure; for a particular
friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in
the world, has read every one of them. I wish you knew Miss Andrews, you would
be delighted with her. She is netting herself the sweetest cloak you can
conceive. I THINK HER AS BEAUTIFUL AS AN
ANGEL, and I am so vexed with the men for not admiring her! I scold them all
amazingly about it.”
“Scold them! Do you scold them for
not admiring her?”
“Yes, that I do. There is nothing I
would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving
people by halves; it is not my nature. My attachments are always excessively
strong. I told Captain Hunt at one of our assemblies this winter that if he was
to tease me all night, I would not dance with him, unless he would allow MISS ANDREWS TO BE AS BEAUTIFUL AS AN ANGEL.
The men think us incapable of real friendship, you know, and I am determined to
show them the difference. Now, if I were to hear anybody speak slightingly of
you, I should fire up in a moment: but that is not at all likely, for you are
just the kind of girl to be a great favourite with the men.”
“Oh, dear!” cried Catherine,
colouring. “How can you say so?”
“I know you very well; you have so
much animation, which is exactly what Miss Andrews wants, for I must confess
there is something amazingly insipid about her. Oh! I must tell you, that just
after we parted yesterday, I saw a young man looking at you so earnestly—I am
sure he is in love with you.” Catherine coloured, and disclaimed again.
Isabella laughed. “It is very true, upon my honour, but I see how it is; you
are indifferent to everybody’s admiration, except that of one gentleman, who
shall be nameless. Nay, I cannot blame you”—speaking more seriously—“your
feelings are easily understood. Where the heart is really attached, I know very
well how little one can be pleased with the attention of anybody else.
Everything is so insipid, so uninteresting, that does not relate to the beloved
object! I can perfectly comprehend your feelings.”
In that passage I see yet another
wink by JA at Jacob’s Ladder, this time at the statue of the angels on the
front of Bath Abbey --- i.e., Isabella’s hyperbolic rhapsodies about Miss
Andrews being as beautiful as an “angel” suggest to me that even when not atop
Beechen Cliff, a visitor to Bath would be doing a great deal of gazing at
picturesque beauty – in this case, at female
beauty--- at ground level and indoors!
And as for Oliver King, the man who
dreamt of putting Jacob’s Ladder on the front of the Abbey, might JA have
winked at him thrice in the text of the novel?:
First,
in Henry Tilney’s witty ventriloquistic description of himself viewed from
Catherine’s perspective: “I danced with a very agreeable young man,
introduced by MR. KING; had a great deal of conversation with him—seems a most
extraordinary genius—hope I may know more of him. That, madam, is what I wish
you to say.” [I know that there was another real-life Mr. King who was the
master of the lower, and then of the upper, assembly rooms – but JA was fond of
double allusions]
Second in this conversation between
Isabella and Catherine with its sly reference to “kings” in a card game, one in
which, perhaps not coincidentally, we hear yet again about Catherine’s dreaming:
“…What a delightful hand you have
got! KINGS, I VOW! I never was so happy in my life! I would fifty times rather
you should have them than myself.”
And now I may dismiss my heroine to
the sleepless couch, which is the true heroine’s portion; to a pillow strewed
with thorns and wet with tears. And lucky may she think herself, if she get
another good night’s rest in the course of the next three months….”
And third in that conversation about
history and novels atop Beechen Cliff – in that regard, how fitting that
Catherine should mention the actual historical quarrel of Henry VIII and Pope
Clement VIII in 1527 (over Henry’s wish to marry as many women as he pleased, that
led to Henry’s being excommunicated, and then to his seizure of the monasteries)
while looking down at Bath Abbey:
“…I
read [history] a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either
vex or weary me. The QUARRELS OF POPES AND KINGS, with wars or pestilences, in
every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is
very tiresome…”
And as
if that were not enough, I found an excellent scholarly article entitled “Luther and the Ascent of Jacob's Ladder” by David
C. Steinmetz in Church History, Vol.
55, No. 2 (Jun., 1986), pp. 179-192. After
reading it, I am now convinced that Jane Austen herself, with her extraordinary
erudition that she found amusement in pretending she did not have, had in mind
the very same sorts of exegesis of the Biblical Jacob’s Ladder, as engaged the
mind of Martin Luther centuries before her: [trust me, it’s worth taking the
time to read the following analysis closely]
“On
the west front of Bath Abbey there are carved two stone ladders stretching from
heaven to earth on which twelve angels are climbing, six on each ladder. A
tourist who sees the west front of the abbey for the first time is told that
the carvings represent the dream of Oliver King, Bishop of Bath and Wells under
Henry VII and his former chief secretary. The bishop had a nocturnal vision of
angels climbing ladders to heaven. As he stood before the ladders in amazement,
he heard voices saying that an olive should establish the crown and that the
king should restore the church. He took the reference to olives and kings to be
an allusion to his own name and concluded that he, Oliver King, should support
the Tudor monarchy and rebuild the abbey at Bath.
In
the bishop's dream about politics and architecture, however, there more than a
hint of something familiar, of a dream even more famous and ancient. The
biblical setting and inspiration for Oliver King's dream of intrigue and
ecclesiastical ambition is Genesis 28, the story of Jacob's dream as Jacob
camped by night at Bethel on his lonely journey from Beersheba to Haran. Like
Bishop King, Jacob dreamed of a ladder stretching from earth to heaven, a
ladder along which angels ascended and descended in a never- ending procession.
While Jacob did not restore a ruined shrine (or support the political
aspirations of that Labanesque monarch Henry VII), he did erect a stone
monument at the place where he had slept as a memorial of astonishing and
wholly unanticipated vision.
If we
leave the front of Bath Abbey and consult the biblical commentaries in the
abbey library, we discover that there are even more connections between Jacob's
dream and the dream of Bishop King than we first thought. The commentaries on
Genesis 28-the Ordinary Gloss, and the Postils Hugh of Saint Cher, Nicholas of
Lyra, and Denis the Carthusian-all establish the relationship between Jacob's
dream and sacred space. According to the medieval commentators, Jacob had slept
by accident on the site of the future temple, a site which therefore would
become famous both as the cultic center of ancient Israel and as the focal
point for the activity of Jesus.
In
other words, Jacob rested in the shadow of the altar and under the sign of the
cross. Wherever the cross and altar are found, there is the place where Jacob
slept, the place where heaven and earth are joined by an angelic ladder. Denis
the Carthusian, Bishop King's older contemporary, put the matter this way: “The
place where Jacob rested is not only the universal church but also any particular
church, no, rather, even a material basilica dedicated to the Lord,which,
because of the presence of the highest majesty, because of the presence of sacraments
of Christ, because of the celebration of the divine office, because of the devoted
gathering and holy prayer of the faithful, is nothing other than the “house of
God," "the gate of heaven." For in it sins are taken away
through sacramental confession and the virtues infused through which the gates
of the heavenly kingdom are opened.”
Bishop
King's dream took him back to Bethel, to the sacred space where a stone
monument to God should be erected. It took him, like Jacob, to the "house
of God" and the "gate of heaven," where the sacramental presence
of Christ could be adored and celebrated. Bath Abbey is the place where Jacob rested.
I mention this dream because of what seems to me a shining and obvious fact all
too frequently overlooked or undervalued, namely that the biblical stories,
images, and themes which pervade the culture of late medieval and Reformation
Europe have their own history in that culture.
The
story of Jacob's dream has had a particularly rich history of interpretation in
Western Christendom. Anders Nygren…identified three principle strands in the
dogmatic traditions of medieval Christianity which relied on the story of
Jacob's dream for their inspiration and at least partial justification.
According to Nygren, medieval theologians identified Jacob's ladder with the
ladder of grace and merit, the analogical ladder of speculation, and the
anagogical ladder of mysticism.
The
first ladder, the ladder of grace and merit, was by far the most common. It was
the ladder by which every Christian ascended from a state of sin to the
beatific vision of God. The analogical ladder of speculation, on the other
hand, was reserved for a smaller group of Christian intellectuals who were able
to use the material and sensible elements of this world as a ladder to enable
them to rise to the contemplations of the immaterial and invisible realities of
the spiritual world. The third ladder, the anagogical ladder of mysticism, was
open in principle to every Christian, though in actual fact relatively few
Christians attempted the ascent to the more rarefied heights of spiritual
ecstasy. Nygren argued that Martin Luther rejected all three of these
interpretations of Jacob's ladder because they rested on a faulty conception of
Christian love.” END QUOTE
I can
already tell, from my extremely preliminary analysis, that a very interesting
follouwp scholarly article could be written about Catherine Morland as a
Regency Era, female Jacob, seeking to climb those ladders toward grace and
merit, but also her largely unrecognized gift for speculation as well!
And finally, I’ve saved for last what
I believe is Jane Austen’s slyest hint of all. Henry Tilney hands down his
tablets of wisdom about perspective to Catherine as they stand atop Beechen
Cliff, gazing down and TO THE NORTH
at Bath Abbey! So, as my Subject Line playfully hints, those climbing angels constructed
by Oliver King, when viewed from the unique perspective of Beechen Cliff, would
have literally been, in that perspetival sense, “northangels”!
And therefore perhaps that was part of what led Jane Austen to choose the name
“Northanger Abbey” for the edifice where the second half of her novel takes place,
changing only that final letter from “l” to “r”! ;)
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment