Sunday
night, my Facebook/Twitter friend, Andrew Shields --- a very sharp elf who has engaged
with me about Jane Austen’s shadows, and who is also a talented author of
artful and witty songs and poetry in his own write [ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/andrew-shields
] --- wrote the following enigmatic post to me:
“we are
not to be addressing our conduct to fools” --- Jane Austen”, Emma.
I was
unable to recall when that epigram is uttered in Emma, but I knew the pompous speaker had to be Emma herself. When I
searched, I found that it was indeed Emma, pontificating to Harriet about the
obvious benefits of a match with Mr. Elton for her low status protegee. Elton has
just delivered a charade (which Emma believes is for Harriet, but is actually “addressed”
to Emma), and Emma is inspired to spin an elaborate web of fantasy about the
match:
“When
Miss Smiths and Mr. Eltons get acquainted—they do indeed—and really it is
strange; it is out of the common course that what is so evidently, so palpably
desirable---what courts the prearrangement of other people, should so
immediately shape itself into the proper form. You and Mr. Elton are by
situation called together; you belong to one another by every circumstance of
your respective homes. Your marrying will be equal to the match at Randalls.
There does seem to be a something in the air of Hartfield which gives love
exactly the right direction, and sends it into the very channel where it ought
to flow.
The
course of true love never did run smooth— A Hartfield edition of Shakespeare would have a long
note on that passage…This is an alliance which, whoever—whatever your friends
may be, must be agreeable to them, provided at least they have common sense;
and WE ARE NOT TO BE ADDRESSING OUR CONDUCT TO FOOLS. If they are anxious to
see you happily married, here is a man whose amiable character
gives every assurance of it;—if they wish to have you settled in the same
country and circle which they have chosen to place you in, here it will be
accomplished; and if their only object is that you should, in the common
phrase, be well married, here is the comfortable fortune, the
respectable establishment, the rise in the world which must satisfy them.”
So, in
the epigram Andrew quoted to me, Emma’s basically saying that only a fool
lacking common sense could fail to see all those plusses, so don’t even bother
thinking about them. And Harriet obliges:
“Yes,
very true. How nicely you talk; I love to hear you. You understand every thing.
You and Mr. Elton are one as clever as the other. This charade!—If I had
studied a twelvemonth, I could never have made any thing like it.”
My antennae
went up when I noted that Emma speaks the quoted words in Chapter 9, which I’ve
often referred to as the “Rosetta Stone” of Emma,
because it contains three word puzzles: two charades, plus a stanza from
Garrick’s Riddle. Thanks primarily to Colleen Sheehan, we know that each of
those three puzzles has not only the expected overt answer, but also a concealed answer as well –especially
“the “Prince of Whales” solution to Mr. Elton’s just-delivered charade, which
Emma is so confident has only one correct answer, “courtship”. These puzzles collectively
symbolize Austen’s six novels, which, as I’ve long claimed, all have both an
overt story and a shadow story.
So I
responded to Andrew that in the shadow story, Harriet
is a pretending Shamela who, in the guise of a naïve fool, is convincingly enacting
a very clever, real-life “charade” which fools Emma completely. Andrew replied:
“My favorite thing about the "courtship" charade is the Lamb
anagram-acrostic [also discovered by Colleen Sheehan in 2006]. -- When I saw
you'd made a comment, I expected you to connect the quotation to the Austen
line about "dull elves"! “ I could only reply: “Andrew, you were WAY
ahead of me on this one, I'm the dull elf this time! ... Actually the famous “dull
elves” quote (the inspiration for my blog title, Sharp Elves Society) did flash
briefly through my brain when I read your post, but I didn't pause and think
about it…”
After a good night’s
sleep, I realized Andrew was onto something significant, so I took a closer
look at the parallels between (i) Emma’s
condescending advice to Harriet not to address her conduct to fools, and (ii) JA’s
famous “dull elves” epigram in her January 1813 letter to her sister, written a
few years earlier than Emma. In the
latter, JA (as I’ve often asserted) was hinting, with characteristic irony,
that there was much more going on in her fiction than meets the eye of the passive
reader: “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.'”
In a nutshell, just as
Emma explicitly asserted to Harriet that only a fool lacking common sense would
fail to grasp what a great match Elton was for Harriet, so too was JA teasingly
hinting to her sister that only a dull reader lacking ingenuity would see the
ambiguity of pronoun attributions in Pride
& Prejudice as authorial errors, whereas the sharper elves would
realize these were deliberate ambiguities on JA’s part, the decoding of which would
illuminate the “secret answer” of the novel, i.e., its shadow story.
But was
this parallelism an intentional revisiting
by JA of her 1813 epistolary bon mot,
and did JA mean for that epigram to be recognized as significant by her sharp
readers? As the rest of this post will show, I believe that is all the case,
and that JA gave several additional clues in the text of Emma to make that clear. Even though the parallel was solely for
the private edification of a handful of trusted, savvy family and friend elves,
who’d have been in on this very private 1813 joke, the joke has long since gone
public, as a result of the publication of JA’s letters, so we’re all in on it
now.
First,
earlier in that same Chapter 9, we read Emma’s thoughts about Harriet, which
echo the “dull” in “dull elves”:
“She
cast her eye over it, pondered, caught the meaning, read it through again to be
quite certain, and quite mistress of the lines, and then passing it to Harriet,
sat happily smiling, and saying to herself, while Harriet was puzzling over the paper in all the confusion of hope and DULLNESS…”
And
then we also see that Emma’s stern warning to Harriet not to “address” her
conduct to her foolish friends has been subtly prepared in a passage in Chapter
9 when that same word, ironically, twice describes Elton’s (misunderstood)
romantic “addresses”:
“He
called for a few moments, just to leave a piece of paper on the table
containing, as he said, a charade, which
a friend of his had ADDRESSED to a young lady, the object of his
admiration, but which, from his manner, Emma was immediately convinced must be
his own.
'Pray, Miss Smith, give me leave to
pay my ADDRESSES to you.
Approve my charade and my intentions in the same glance.'
So,
since we know that Elton has actually addressed the charade to Emma, in her
referring to “addresses” to “fools”, she thereby unwittingly suggests that she
herself is the fool in this
situation!
Then, at
the end of Chapter 10, with the disaster of the carriage ride with the drunken
Elton still five chapters in the future, Emma echoes the “ingenuity” of the
sharp elf readers JA wrote for, as Emma pats herself on the back for her
matchmaking skills:
“Still,
however, though every thing had not been accomplished
by her INGENIOUS device, she could not but flatter herself that it had been
the occasion of much present enjoyment to both, and must be leading them
forward to the great event.”
But
then in Chapter 15, during that fateful carriage ride, first Emma, and then
Elton, both inadvertently echo Emma’s earlier usage of “address” yet again, and
what an exquisite irony that this time around Elton happens to rebut each and
every one of the benefits of a match to Harriet:
“After
such behaviour, as I have witnessed during the last month, to Miss Smith—such
attentions as I have been in the daily habit of observing—to be ADDRESSING me in this manner—this is an unsteadiness of
character, indeed, which I had not supposed possible! Believe me, sir, I am
far, very far, from gratified in being the object of such professions."
"Good
Heaven!" cried Mr. Elton, "what can be the meaning of this?—Miss
Smith!—I never thought of Miss Smith in the whole course of my existence—never
paid her any attentions, but as your friend: never cared whether she were dead
or alive, but as your friend. If she has fancied otherwise, her own wishes have
misled her, and I am very sorry--extremely sorry--But, Miss Smith, indeed!—Oh!
Miss Woodhouse! who can think of Miss Smith, when Miss Woodhouse is near! No,
upon my honour, there is no unsteadiness of character. I have thought only of
you. I protest against having paid the smallest attention to any one else.
Every thing that I have said or done, for many weeks past, has been with the
sole view of marking my adoration of yourself. You cannot really, seriously,
doubt it. No!—(in an accent meant to be insinuating)—I am sure you have seen
and understood me."
…”Am I
to believe that you have never sought to recommend yourself particularly to
Miss Smith?—that you have never thought seriously of her?"
"Never,
madam," cried he, affronted in his turn: "never, I assure you. I
think seriously of Miss Smith!—Miss Smith is a very good sort of girl; and I should
be happy to see her respectably settled. I wish her extremely well: and, no
doubt, there are men who might not object to—Every body has their level: but as
for myself, I am not, I think, quite so much at a loss. I need not so totally despair of an equal alliance, as to be ADDRESSING
myself to Miss Smith!—No, madam, my visits to Hartfield have been for
yourself only; and the encouragement I received—"
But
there’s still more. Much later on, in Chapter 43, as the Box Hill episode begins,
an episode which will include yet another word puzzle (Mr. Weston’s
Hutchinsonian play on “EM-MA”), we find not one, not two, but three usages of that word “dull” from
JA’s letter to her sister:
“At first it was downright DULNESS
to Emma. She had
never seen Frank Churchill so silent and stupid. He said nothing worth
hearing—looked without seeing—admired without intelligence—listened without
knowing what she said. While he was so DULL,
it was no wonder that Harriet should be DULL likewise; and they were both
insufferable…”
And finally
in Chapter 54, JA one more time echoes the “ingenuity” from that 1813 letter,
in describing the unexpected and unexplained event which triggers Mr.
Woodhouse’s sudden reversal, in acquiescing in Mr. Knightley’s marrying Emma
and moving in at Hartfield:
“In
this state of suspense they were befriended, not by any sudden illumination of
Mr. Woodhouse’s mind, or any wonderful change of his nervous system, but by the
operation of the same system in another way. Mrs. Weston’s poultry-house was
robbed one night of all her turkeys—evidently
by the INGENUITY of man. Other poultry-yards in the neighbourhood also
suffered.—Pilfering was housebreaking to
Mr. Woodhouse’s fears.—He was very uneasy; and but for the sense of his
son-in-law’s protection, would have been under wretched alarm every night of
his life.”
I am not alone in suggesting that an alternate explanation
for the pilfering is staring us in the face. As with Mrs. Churchill’s sudden
death “after a brief struggle” which solves all of Frank Churchill’s seemingly
intransigent problems (and which Leland Monk, in 1990, was the first to argue
was Frank murdering his aunt), we may plausibly guess that the “man” whose
“ingenuity” the narrator teasingly refers to is Mr. Knightley himself, who has
taken to heart the proverb about those whom God helps, and has “addressed” the
rumor of local housebreaking to foolish Mr. Woodhouse, so as to obtain his
cooperation.
But there’s still one more piece of this particular literary
jigsaw puzzle to fit in its place. Emma’s epigram is spoken right after she
quotes Shakespeare, and I find in that quotation the final confirmation that JA
meant to wink back at the lack of ingenuity in dull elves reading her novels. Once more, let us thank the clueless Emma for unwittingly
providing the clue to solving yet another puzzle in her eponymous novel.
In 1993, Stuart Tave 1993 gave an orthodox scholarly take
on how A Midsummer Night’s Dream is
invoked in Emma’s epigram: “There may
be some without common sense who will not find agreeable Harriet’s match with
Mr. Elton, she says, but “we are not to be addressing our conduct to fools”.
She is, like Puck, above that mortal condition...She has some real talent in
[the] Puckish line of acting and of mimicry and of seeing into others and
directing them…”
As I read the words “fools” and “Puck” in quick
succession, I immediately thought of Puck’s line, one of the most famous in all
of Shakespeare, which Puck speaks in Act 3, Scene 2, after he and Oberon
discover that Puck has administered the love charm to Lysander instead of
Demetrius, such that Lysander now lusts after Helena instead of his true love
Hermia:
Captain of our fairy band,
Helena is here at hand;
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover's fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what FOOLS these mortals be!
Helena is here at hand;
And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover's fee.
Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what FOOLS these mortals be!
Of course, apropos JA’s 1813 “dull elves” letter, we
all know that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is
the Shakespeare play which has a fairy world populated by many elves. And earlier, in Act 2, Scene 2, after
Puck misapplies the love potion to Lysander, we realize why JA chose “address”
as a keyword for Elton’s courtship of Emma. Just like Elton, Lysander is caught
in a web of romantic confusion between young ladies, in which he vows to “address”
his love to the wrong one (Helen[a]):
She
sees not Hermia. Hermia, sleep thou there:
And never mayst thou come Lysander near!
For as a surfeit of the sweetest things
The deepest loathing to the stomach brings,
Or as tie heresies that men do leave
Are hated most of those they did deceive,
So thou, my surfeit and my heresy,
Of all be hated, but the most of me!
And, all my powers, ADDRESS YOUR LOVE and might
To honour Helen and to be her knight! [knight, as in “Knightley”?]
And never mayst thou come Lysander near!
For as a surfeit of the sweetest things
The deepest loathing to the stomach brings,
Or as tie heresies that men do leave
Are hated most of those they did deceive,
So thou, my surfeit and my heresy,
Of all be hated, but the most of me!
And, all my powers, ADDRESS YOUR LOVE and might
To honour Helen and to be her knight! [knight, as in “Knightley”?]
So, in
closing, I thank Andrew Shields very much for sprinkling some insight on my
sleeping brain, and enabling me to suss out Jane Austen’s revisiting, in Emma, of her “dull elves” paraphrase
from Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion. It
makes even clearer and more obvious to me that Jane Austen, in the full flush
of the publication of Pride &
Prejudice. was justifiably proud of her own skill in writing novels worthy
to be read by ingenious elves; but also that she was so self-confident and
secure in her own genius, that she could enjoy a bit of witty parody of herself
via Emma’s clueless pontification!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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