Nancy Mayer in Janeites:
“All in all, I don't think anyone has such toxic relatives as Anne.”
Nancy,
as you gathered, I was struck by your above statement, because the female
character in English literature who more closely fits your above description than
Anne Elliot is Clarissa Harlowe – Clarissa, who has far more toxic siblings,
and who is not simply ignored, but is actively harassed and preyed on by those
closest to her, for various sinister motives.
Nancy:
"Clarissa is not among the novels Jane Austen wrote."
But I
persist in claiming that it is most definitely one of the few novels which Jane
Austen wove into pretty much all of her own novels (including Sanditon), in a
powerful and thematically significant way, as I will now elaborate further.
What I
was going to post yesterday is that with further research, browsing and reading
various additional articles, book chapters, and dissertations, I now add the
following claims to those I asserted last week regarding Richardson's fiction
and Austen's Persuasion:
1. It
turns out that in Persuasion, Jane Austen also included an extraordinarily
detailed and complex, but covert, allusion to Richardson's Sir Charles
Grandison (SCG), as well as to Clarissa. Since I previously was so unfamiliar with the
elaborate plot of SCG, I was unaware of those extensive parallels.
At
first blush, I find the most intriguing aspect of that allusion to be the
parallel between the relationship of paterfamilias Sir Thomas Grandison with
Mrs. Oldham, on the one hand, and the relationship of paterfamilias Sir Walter
Elliot and Mrs. Clay, on the other. It is explicit in SCG that Sir Thomas G.
sires two illegitimate children on his mistress, Mrs. Oldham.
As I am
not the first to observe, that obviously leads to the fascinating question of
what that might tell us about the fathering of Mrs. Clay's two children whom we
never see, and many have wondered about –does knowing what happens in SCG
suggest that the intimate relationship between Sir Walter and Mrs. Clay that Anne
fears so much is actually a longstanding one that she has cluelessly been
unaware of? And perhaps those two children are girls, and therefore, even
though sired by Sir Walter, they stand in line behind Cousin Elliot, so their
existence does not constitute a problem for Cousin Elliots inheriting Kellynch-hall?
2. When
I commented in one of my earlier posts that the complex parallel between
Clarissa H. and Anne E. includes their parallel state of repression of intense
sexuality which nonetheless makes its presence known, I did not yet recognize
that this parallel is foregrounded by the repeated references to Wentworth's
"pen" in the White Hart Inn scene --- it turns out, as I previously
had blogged about in the context of writing about the sexual heat between Anna
Howe and Clarissa, that this exact same phallic pun on "pen" is
repeatedly used by Richardson in Clarissa.
So, in
a remarkable way, that scene in the White Hart Inn can now be seen as a
brilliant, profound, telescoped microcosm of the many pages of Clarissa, in
that both Richardson's novel and Austen's chapter involve letter writing,
sexual tension, and a debate on constancy, and both occur in the specific
context of Prior’s poem “Henry and Emma”.
And so,
how ironic and telling in this regard that it was SCG which Jane Austen
burlesqued in a super-short juvenile playlet. It would seem that Jane
Austen enjoyed turning Richardson's gargantuan novels into smaller versions of
her own - much as she did with the ponderous tomes of history that she
telescoped down to a matter of a handful of pages in her History of England.
3. And
finally and speaking of “Henry and Emma”, I became aware only today, courtesy
of a brilliant article by Emily Friedman, that Sarah Fielding's Remarks on
Clarissa contains the following remarkable passage, which explicitly suggests
that “Henry and Emma” is totally ambiguous as to its fundamental meaning:
“But
had the Poet thought proper, that Henry should have turned out
the Murderer, the Vagabond, the insolent and ungrateful Scorner of her Love he
represented himself to be; had her Father's Sorrow for her Fate shortned his
miserable Days; had she been abandoned by the Wretch she had so much Reason to
expect the worst of Treatment from, and, between Rage, Despair, and a thousand
conflicting Passions, been led by a natural Gradation from one Vice to another,
till she had been lost in the most abandoned Profligacy; instead of being
proposed for an Example, her Name would have been only mentioned to deter
others from the like rash Steps. That this was the natural Consequence of her
Actions is very apparent: Nor do I think from her Behaviour, that Henry had
the least Reason to be convinced that she would not leave him for the first Man
who would try to seduce her, provided the Colour of his Complexion suited her
Fancy.”
In other words, it’s not clear whether the reader is meant to believe
in Emma’s constancy. So,
just as Sarah Fielding's famous brother Henry picked up on Richardson’s ambiguous
Pamela and made the shadow Pamela Shamela, so too in the above comment does
Sarah Fielding’s wise reader Miss Gibson makes explicit the strong ambiguity of
Prior’s Emma as she compares to Clarissa!
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
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