I
expect this post will be the last of the new wrinkles in S&S that I’m
bringing forward this week, after poking my nose into the shadow story of
S&S for the first time in a long while.
Just over a year ago, I last revisited my claim that Marianne D. (like Jane F.
in Emma) endures a secret pregnancy
during the action of the novel in which she is the shadow heroine: http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2015/10/jane-austen-masturb-i-mean-parturating.html
In that
last revisiting, I asserted that (also like Jane F.) Marianne must give up her newborn
baby to a married woman who pretends to have borne it– in this case Mrs. Palmer.
But I’ve never tried to explain how and when Marianne manages to give birth to
her child, without Elinor, her frequent companion, knowing about it. Why? Because
I hadn’t ever sleuthed it out! Whereas, with Jane Fairfax, I long ago spotted
the textual hints in Emma --the
“bustle” going on behind closed doors at the Bates apartment, when Emma drops
by to visit Jane and Miss Bates after Box Hill, but Jane refuses to greet the
penitent Emma. Miss Bates tearfully reports Jane’s words, “It must be born(e)”—and
it (or rather, she, meaning Anna
Weston) was indeed born just then.
Until
this week, I never could locate the comparable climax of Marianne’s concealed childbirth
ordeal. I was sure that the extreme distress Marianne suffers at the end of Ch.
28 and start of Ch. 29 is in large part the onset of labor pains, the deeper
explanation for Marianne’s acute physical symptoms and crying, which Elinor
believes are only due to Marianne’s upset over Willoughby. But then I saw it—it’s
actually very similar to Jane Fairfax’s “It must be born(e)”---in the following
passage –see if you can spot it:
“[Mrs.
Jennings] then went away, walking on tiptoe out of the room, as if she supposed
her young friend's affliction could be increased by noise. Marianne, to the
surprise of her sister, determined on dining with them. Elinor even advised her
against it. But "no, she would go down; she could bear it very well, and
the bustle about her would be less." Elinor, pleased to have her governed
for a moment by such a motive, though believing it hardly possible that she
could sit out the dinner, said no more; and adjusting her dress for her as well
as she could, while Marianne still remained on the bed, was ready to assist her
into the dining room as soon as they were summoned to it….” END QUOTE
Here it
is ---- “She would go down; she could bear it very well, and the bustle about
her would be less.” I now see that this was Marianne speaking in code, understood
only by Mrs Jennings’ eavesdropping ears just outside the door --- to be
translated by the kindly old lady (who, despite the decoy of Marianne’s
negative comments about her, actually fulfills the identical protective role as
Miss Bates, in shielding a pregnant young charge through a safe, secret
childbirth) as follows:
“The
baby is going down” i.e., it is beginning to drop, and therefore I, Marianne, could
bear the pain very well by myself for the next several hours; but...when it
gets down to crunch time, later tonight, it will be necessary to eliminate all
“bustle” (the identical word used in Emma
when Emma visits while Jane F. is giving birth) around her---i.e., Marianne
wants Mrs. Jennings to do something
to take Elinor out of the picture during the final part of the delivery
process, so that Elinor will not witness what must be concealed from her (irony
of ironies, given that Marianne claims to conceal nothing!).
But is
there also a veiled description of that final stage of Marianne’s childbirth? It
could not, as I originally speculated, be the day of Elinor’s outing to
Kensington Gardens in Ch. 38. While that seemed a promising lead, because it is a pretty long
outing from which Marianne begs off on the excuse of not wanting to run into
the Willoughbys there, it couldn’t be, for the major reason that it was about 8
weeks after Marianne’s night of labor
pains. No, it had to be much earlier, soon after those labor pains began.
And
that sets the stage for what I also noticed earlier this week, while working on
my post about Mrs. Jennings’s Constantia wine as a marker of JA’s Eve of St.
Agnes/St. Constantia subtext. The additional textual clues popped out at me, so
to speak, right there at the end of Ch. 30:
“And
then rising, [Elinor] went away to join Marianne, whom she found, as she
expected, in her own room, leaning, in silent misery, over the small remains of
a fire, which, till Elinor's entrance, had been her only light.
"You
had better leave me," was all the notice that her sister received from
her.
"I
will leave you," said Elinor, "if you will go to bed." But this,
from the momentary perverseness of impatient suffering, she at first refused to
do. Her sister's earnest, though gentle persuasion, however, soon softened her
to compliance, and Elinor saw her lay her aching head on the pillow, and as she
hoped, in a way to get some quiet rest before she left her.”
So in
this scene, Marianne plays her part by making sure that Elinor will not
approach her again that evening, while Mrs. Jennings and Elinor socialize with
friends. Then, it’s Mrs. Jennings’s turn to take care of the later part, and here’s
what that resourceful lady comes up with:
“In the
drawing-room, whither [Elinor] then repaired, she was soon joined by Mrs.
Jennings, with a wine-glass, full of something, in her hand. "My
dear," said she, entering, "I have just recollected that I have some
of the finest old Constantia wine in the house that ever was tasted, so I have
brought a glass of it for your sister. My poor husband! how fond he was of it!
Whenever he had a touch of his old colicky gout, he said it did him more good
than any thing else in the world. Do take it to your sister."
"Dear
Ma'am," replied Elinor, smiling at the difference of the complaints for
which it was recommended, "how good you are! But I have just left Marianne
in bed, and, I hope, almost asleep; and as I think nothing will be of so much
service to her as rest, if you will give me leave, I will drink the wine
myself."
Mrs.
Jennings, though regretting that she had not been five minutes earlier, was
satisfied with the compromise; and Elinor, as she swallowed the chief of it,
reflected, that though its effects on a colicky gout were, at present, of
little importance to her, its healing powers, on a disappointed heart might be
as reasonably tried on herself as on her sister.” END QUOTE
Here's
my shadow story interpretation: Mrs. Jennings would already have known that
Marianne had sent Elinor away for the rest of the evening, and so Mrs.
Jennings’s offer, accompanied by a little spiel touting the benefits of
Constantia wine were actually intended solely for Elinor’s own ears all along!
And note that Elinor takes Mrs. Jennings’s bait, hook, line, and sinker! We
read that Elinor “swallowed the chief of it”; and that brings us to the key
point.
That phrase
“wine-glass, full of something” could have the totally innocent meaning that
Elinor sees the wine-glass in Mrs. Jennings’s hand, but has no idea what sort
of wine it is, a suspense which lasts only two seconds, until she learns that
it is Constantia wine. But…that phrasing is deliberately ambiguous on JA’s
part, since it also has the connotation that the wine in the glass is “full of
something” – and that “something” that the Constantia wine is “full of” was a
slow-acting Regency Era sleeping draught, the kind that would take a couple of
hours to really knock Elinor out, and then keep her sound asleep for a dozen
hours (not quite as long as the “two and forty” hours that Juliet sleeps in the
tomb)!
And the
next clue I see in the text, that fits with that subversive reading is what we eventually
read, after Colonel Brandon and the other guests have left, is the following sentence
at the beginning of Chapter 31:
“From a
night of more sleep than she had expected, Marianne awoke the next morning to
the same consciousness of misery in which she had closed her eyes.”
What
does “more sleep than she had expected” refer to? The normal reading of that
sentence is that it refers to Marianne, because who else could the two “she’s”
refer to? Well, allow me to suggest a radical alternative –how about Elinor! I.e., what if that sentence is a
reflection of Elinor’s own perceptions as she
awakens from a very long sleep? She looks at the clock, notices it is far
beyond her own usual hour of waking, and then looks over at Marianne, who
appears to Elinor to be in the same miserable state as she was when Elinor went
to sleep. But what Elinor has no clue about is that, just like Juliet awakening
from her long sleep in the tomb after taking the sleeping potion, only to see Romeo’s
and Paris’s corpses, without any idea as to how this occurred, so too does
Elinor, who has been drugged by Mrs. Jennings, have no idea that in the
intervening 12 hours Elinor has slept through the noisy bustle of Marianne’s
delivery!
But
there’s still one more subtle clue in the text that addresses the next question
that must be in your mind by now—where is the newborn baby when Elinor wakes
up? Just follow Mrs. Jennings the next morning, and you can deduce the answer:
“Mrs.
Jennings left them earlier than usual; for she could not be easy till the
Middletons and Palmers were able to grieve as much as herself; and positively
refusing Elinor's offered attendance, went out alone for the rest of the
morning.”
END QUOTE
We may readily infer that the real reason Mrs.
Jennings had to leave “earlier than usual” and go to the Palmers who were
staying with the Middletons, and why she went without Elinor, was in order to
drop the baby off with his new (secretly) adoptive mother, Charlotte Palmer!
And
that is my version of Marianne Dashwood’s childbirth, with the following two
postscripts:
First,
getting back to the Eve of St. Agnes, how ironic, then, if that same night witnessed
both:
the
virgin Elinor having a long dream-filled sleep just a few days before the Eve
of St. Agnes, the patron saint of virgins, and also
the
birth of a child to Elinor’s non-virginal sister, Marianne.
Second
and last, I wonder whether it is relevant to my above interpretation of
Marianne’s childbirth that Fanny Austen (later Knight), the firstborn of all
the Austen nieces and nephews, was born on Jan 23, 1793, when Jane Austen was
seventeen – and that was the same date in real life as the fictional date in
S&S when Marianne’s daughter was born. Almost a sister indeed!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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