It has become a mantra of
mine that Jane Austen often, if not always, chose her most memorable passages
as the ideal places to hide, in plain sight, “trivial” hints at alternative,
subversive, significant meanings in her novels. Recently, I came across another
such hint, in a guest post by Kate Scarth in Sarah Emsley’s Austen-themed blog,
on the topic of horses in Northanger
Abbey. My attention was caught by Scarth’s reference to an equine detail I’d
never noticed before in Chapter 22 of Northanger
Abbey:
“[John] Thorpe’s
deficiencies reveal Northanger Abbey’s connection between equine care and
proper masculinity. His horse obsession extends to his clothes, which resemble
a groomsman’s or coachman’s, a not so subtle dig at his dubious claims to the
title of gentleman. Northanger Abbey relays
a message that, unlike Thorpe, hero-gentlemen treat animals, well, gently. For
example, while Austen tells us little about Eleanor Tilney’s husband, we do
know that his servant left a farrier’s bill (Catherine’s imagined mysterious
manuscript), reading “To poultice
chestnut mare”…While we see Thorpe abusing horses, in this brief glimpse of
Eleanor’s future husband, Austen chooses to cast him as a man paying to ease a
horse’s ailment.”
END QUOTE FROM SCARTH BLOG POST
I went back to the novel text
to find the full paragraph containing that entry for “To poultice chestnut
mare”. It’s this famous one, which describes Catherine’s stinging disappointment
as she reads what is on the pages of the manuscript in the chest in her room. She’s
been working herself up into an imaginative fever over the answers to murderous
gothic secrets she anticipates finding there, but then is sadly deflated to
learn instead that the papers seem so boringly mundane:
“[Catherine’s] greedy eye
glanced rapidly over a page. She started at its import. Could it be possible,
or did not her senses play her false? An inventory of linen, in coarse and
modern characters, seemed all that was before her! If the evidence of sight
might be trusted, she held a washing-bill in her hand. She seized another
sheet, and saw the same articles with little variation; a third, a fourth, and
a fifth presented nothing new. Shirts, stockings, cravats, and waistcoats faced
her in each. Two others, penned by the same hand, marked an expenditure
scarcely more interesting, in letters, hair-powder, shoe-string, and
breeches-ball. And the larger sheet,
which had enclosed the rest, seemed by its first cramp line, “To poultice
chestnut mare”—a farrier’s bill! Such was the collection of papers (left
perhaps, as she could then suppose, by the negligence of a servant in the place
whence she had taken them) which had filled her with expectation and alarm, and
robbed her of half her night’s rest! She felt humbled to the dust. Could not
the adventure of the chest have taught her wisdom? A corner of it, catching her
eye as she lay, seemed to rise up in judgment against her. Nothing could now be
clearer than the absurdity of her recent fancies. To suppose that a manuscript
of many generations back could have remained undiscovered in a room such as
that, so modern, so habitable!—Or that she should be the first to possess the
skill of unlocking a cabinet, the key of which was open to all!”
For those not very
familiar with Northanger Abbey, this
is the second of three familiar passages in which, per mainstream Austen
scholarly interpretation, Catherine’s overheated Gothic expectations and
illusions are gradually (and appropriately) extinguished by three consecutive splashes
of cold water.
The first is Catherine’s
disappointment upon first looking into the interior of the Abbey in Chapter 20,
and finding all too modern, even antiseptic, architecture:
“The breeze had not seemed
to waft the sighs of the murdered to her; it had wafted nothing worse than a
thick mizzling rain; and having given a good shake to her habit, she was ready
to be shown into the common drawing-room, and capable of considering where she
was. An abbey! Yes, it was delightful to be really in an abbey! But she
doubted, as she looked round the room, whether anything within her observation
would have given her the consciousness. The furniture was in all the profusion
and elegance of modern taste. The fireplace, where she had expected the ample
width and ponderous carving of former times, was contracted to a Rumford, with
slabs of plain though handsome marble, and ornaments over it of the prettiest
English china. The windows, to which she looked with peculiar dependence, from
having heard the general talk of his preserving them in their Gothic form with
reverential care, were yet less what her fancy had portrayed. To be sure, the
pointed arch was preserved—the form of them was Gothic—they might be even
casements—but every pane was so large, so clear, so light! To an imagination
which had hoped for the smallest divisions, and the heaviest stone-work, for
painted glass, dirt, and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing.”
Then, after the passage
with the farrier’s bill, the third is Henry’s excoriation of Catherine for her
ghoulish imaginings about General Tilney, at the end of Ch. 24:
“If I understand you
rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to--Dear
Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have
entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age
in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians.Consult
your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of
what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities?
Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in
a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a
footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies,
and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what
ideas have you been admitting?” They had reached the end of the gallery, and
with tears of shame she ran off to her own room.
In my 2010 JASNA AGM
presentation, I argued that the third passage is the epicenter of what is
actually Austen’s virtuosic ANTI-parody of the Gothic. I.e., the knowing reader
is meant to see past the apparent satire of Gothic imagination, and instead
grasp the tragic irony that such imaginings are all-too-apt as to the actual nightmare
of ordinary English marriage for wives trapped in a ‘dungeon’, an endless cycle
of serial pregnancy and death in childbirth, a nightmare cruelly ignored by the
patriarchal powers-that-be.
However, before reading
Scarth’s comment, I hadn’t previously considered, let alone analyzed, the
subtle but strong narrative emphasis on that particular entry for “a farrier’s
bill”. I now see that it’s no accident that for this entry alone are we given
its actual verbiage; that we’re told that it’s on “the larger sheet, which had
enclosed the rest”; and finally that it is on “its first cramp line”. By this
succession of subtle hints, Austen silently hints that this is, somehow, the
most prominent verbiage in all those papers; so it must carry especially
significant meaning, when properly understood in all its nuances. But how to decode
it?
Scarth cites this entry as
evidence for John Thorpe’s cruel treatment of horses, in stark contrast to the
benevolent treatment of animals by Eleanor’s secret beloved. That is certainly
the case, it’s a valid interpretation, but as I will explain, there’s much more
even than that in this line entry on a farrier’s bill.
In my opinion, Jill
Heydt-Stevenson came very close to correctly decoding this passage in Unbecoming Conjunctions. First she
analyzed it as follows: ‘This mortifying inventory gazes at her. It may be
permissible to spy on the sensational, but the passage exposes how it is
forbidden to look voyeuristically at the mundane, especially when it includes
references to the private parts of the male body, which the language here
personifies…’ She then noted the monetization of marriage which is implicit
therein. And at another point in her book, Heydt-Stevenson discussed the heavy Freudian
sexual significance of John Thorpe’s disturbing, even perverted, obsession with
horses in Northanger Abbey. However,
she didn’t connect the dots between the two—which connection, I now assert, is
the key that unlocks the deeper, more significant meaning of that entry.
To wit: just as John Thorpe
treats women and horses alike as objects of his physical abuse, I believe that
the “chestnut mare” who was “poulticed” was meant by JA to suggest not merely
Eleanor’s chestnut mare, but also Eleanor herself! Let me explain.
First, we know that
Eleanor is not fair-haired, from the following mean girl comments by Isabella
Thorpe:
“Oh! They [Henry and
Eleanor] give themselves such airs. They are the most conceited creatures in
the world, and think themselves of so much importance! By the by, though I have
thought of it a hundred times, I have always forgot to ask you what is your
favourite complexion in a man. Do you like them best dark or fair?” “I hardly know. I never much thought about
it. Something between both, I think. Brown—not fair, and—and not very dark.” “Very well, Catherine. That is exactly he. I
have not forgot your description of Mr. Tilney—‘a brown skin, with dark eyes,
and rather dark hair.’ Well, my taste is different. I prefer light eyes, and as
to complexion—do you know—I like a sallow better than any other. You must not
betray me, if you should ever meet with one of your acquaintance answering that
description.”
And then, much later in
the novel, as Catherine gazes up at the portrait of the late Mrs. Tilney:
“It represented a very
lovely woman, with a mild and pensive countenance, justifying, so far, the
expectations of its new observer; but they were not in every respect answered,
for Catherine had depended upon meeting with features, hair, complexion, that
should be the very counterpart, the very image, if not of Henry’s, of
Eleanor’s—the only portraits of which she had been in the habit of thinking,
bearing always an equal resemblance of mother and child. A face once taken was
taken for generations. But here she was obliged to look and consider and study for
a likeness. She contemplated it, however, in spite of this drawback, with much
emotion, and, but for a yet stronger interest, would have left it unwillingly.”
There is a subtle
suggestion in Mrs. Tilney’s not resembling either Henry or Eleanor, that Eleanor’s
complexion and hair color are somewhere in the middle between Mrs. Tilney’s
fairness and Henry’s darkness—and that medium would be…chestnut coloration!
And there is one more huge
hint of an association of Eleanor with a “chestnut mare”, as Catherine
worriedly waits for Henry and Eleanor to visit her as agreed, and attempts to stave
off the pressuring Thorpes:
“I cannot go [to Blaize
Castle], because”—looking down as she spoke, fearful of Isabella’s smile—“I
expect Miss Tilney and her brother to call on me to take a country walk. They
promised to come at twelve, only it rained; but now, as it is so fine, I dare
say they will be here soon.” “Not they indeed,” cried Thorpe; “for, as we
turned into Broad Street, I saw them—does he not drive a phaeton with bright
chestnuts?” “I do not know indeed.” “Yes, I know he does; I saw him. You are
talking of the man you danced with last night, are not you?” “Yes.” “Well, I saw him at that moment turn up the
Lansdown Road, driving a smart-looking girl...”
Which raises another
question-- was it Henry with Eleanor in that phaeton drawn by two chestnut
mares, or Eleanor’s future husband? I think, the latter!
But, putting that detail aside,
I want to now zero in on what I consider the key point, if we really run with
the idea of Eleanor as symbolized by the chestnut mare who is treated with a ‘poultice”.
The entry is written on ‘the first cramp line’, and that conjures up for me a
narrow space at the top of a lined invoice, in which there is very little room
to write, hence a “cramped” handwriting is required.
But Jane Austen, like
Shakespeare, never saw a pun she did not like, and so I immediately noted that
“cramp”, in Jane Austen’s time as well as our own, referred to a
muscle-tightening spasm, the kind which afflict athletes in hot weather, but
also, far more significantly vis a vis the pregnancy/childbirth theme of Northanger Abbey which I addressed the
JASNA AGM about!
And guess what---healing
cramps is precisely what poultices were designed for (there are numerous concoctions
to be found in contemporary veterinary guides) in Jane Austen’s era: both the cramps
in horse’s hooves (as the farrier’s bill suggests), but also for the cramps
suffered by women as a result of their bodies being the “phaetons”, so to
speak, of reproduction for the human race!
And last but not least, thinking
about cramps, and also wounds (another ailment for which poultices were applied
to both horses and humans in that era), I was then immediately reminded of yet
another famous passage in Northanger
Abbey, about the collective injured female body, which novels written by
women were uniquely responsive to:
“Yes, novels; for I will
not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of
degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of
which they are themselves adding…Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body….there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity
and undervaluing the labour of the
novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit,
and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do
not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such
is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a
novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected
indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in
which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough
knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the
liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the
best-chosen language….”
I would not dare to
attempt any further explanation of why I believe that the above passage is the very
one which Jane Austen wished her readers to eventually think of, when they read
that farrier’s bill entry on “poultice chestnut mare” (or should I say, “mere”,
for all the mothers who, like Mrs. Tilney, suffered). The ultimate Gothic
horror was the one suffered by women in their daily lives as the “poor animals”
of English society, and Jane Austen’s novels were themselves intended as “poultices’
for the psychic wounds which accompanied the physical.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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