The many (in)direct boasts of Pride & Prejudice

Pride & Prejudice, even more than Jane Austen’s other novels, is a kind of encyclopedia of dramatized interpersonal dynamics and personality theory---or, as Jane Austen put it, the study of character. Pride, prejudice, vanity, reputation, prudence, and numerous other intertwined psychological traits are enacted, foregrounded, and minutely examined via explicit dialogue and narration, all of which invites and challenges readers to (re)consider our own opinions on these psychological and moral subjects, which  of course are the stuff of our own lives as well.

The special genius of P&P in this regard is that JA makes this study so witty, entertaining and moving at the same time, that it must be a very stupid reader indeed who does not get hooked into coming back to the same scenes over and over again in never-ending rereading----not because we’re coerced, but because we’re seduced, to do so. We see JA’s brilliant didactic strategy in action. She demonstrates her great skill at teaching what is worth knowing about human nature and morality, not by tedious, sententious, sexist lectures, a la Fordyce’s sermons, but by a stream of teasing provocations of the reader toward subversive autodidactic exploration of complexity beyond simplistic maxims. And Jane Austen book clubs and societies like JASNA are, we can see in hindsight, the natural evolutionary endpoint of this process, as the greatest pleasure is to share that exploration in the best company of like-minded lovers of her writing.

One of the less obvious examples in P&P of this provocation to knowledge, is the subject of boasting. I hope to tempt you to give this topic fresh consideration that you may not have previously given to it. The scene that comes to mind first for Janeites regarding boasting is surely the lively exchange in Chapter 10 in the Netherfield drawing-room, which begins when Bingley attempts to explain away his haphazard method of letter-writing, and Darcy pounces, attacking him with cold, incisive logic:

"My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them—by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents."

"Your humility, Mr. Bingley," said Elizabeth, "must disarm reproof."

"Nothing is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect BOAST."

"And which of the two do you call my little recent piece of modesty?"

"The indirect BOAST; for you are really proud of your defects in writing, because you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of thought and carelessness of execution, which, if not estimable, you think at least highly interesting. The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance. When you told Mrs. Bennet this morning that if you ever resolved upon quitting Netherfield you should be gone in five minutes, you meant it to be a sort of panegyric, of compliment to yourself—and yet what is there so very laudable in a precipitance which must leave very necessary business undone, and can be of no real advantage to yourself or anyone else?"

An hour could be profitably and enjoyably spent just discussing the pros and cons of Darcy’s lawyer-like analysis, and of his companions’s responses—especially Eliza’s “Your humility, Mr. Bingley, must disarm reproof”, a witty, poetic epigram Shakespeare himself would have been proud to have composed---but today I will instead draw your attention to the surprisingly large number of other passages in P&P, in which boasting is either explicitly or implicitly presented, and to show that many of them were skillfully written by JA so as to subliminally echo and reignite the debate explicitly initiated by Darcy in  the above-quoted famous passage.

The first one I find is actually an earlier scene in the Netherfield drawing room, in Chapter 8, when Darcy, curmudgeonly mounting one of his other hobby horses, takes aim at the sacred cow of female “accomplishment” posed by Miss Bingley.

"Your list of the common extent of accomplishments," said Darcy, "has too much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no otherwise than by netting a purse or covering a screen. But I am very far from agreeing with you in your estimation of ladies in general. I cannot BOAST of knowing more than half-a-dozen, in the whole range of my acquaintance, that are really accomplished.”

It only occurred to me for the first time today, that Darcy is actually guilty here of  the very sort of indirect boast that he accuses Bingley of two chapters later! He adopts a rhetorical stance of false humility, when he says he “cannot boast” of knowing more than six really accomplished women, according to his exalted standards. To her great credit, Elizabeth quickly and brilliantly exposes and punctures Dardy’s self-inflating indirect boast as follows:

"I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any."

"Are you so severe upon your own sex as to doubt the possibility of all this?"

"I never saw such a woman. I never saw such capacity, and taste, and application, and elegance, as you describe united."

So, isn’t it wonderful that when we view the famous Chapter 10 scene through the lens of this Chapter 8 scene, it becomes clear that Darcy suffered embarrassment—indeed, a narcissistic injury--when Lizzy exposed his indirect boast, which he couldn’t get out of his mind, and so that is why Darcy seized the moment when Bingley rationalized his own lack of accomplishment in letter-writing, and then Elizabeth let Bingley completely off the hook --- it was as if Darcy childishly wanted to say to Eliza, “Hey, no fair! If you won’t let me get away with an indirect boast, then you must do the same  to Bingley!”

This must be the umpteenth example of the utter mastery of hidden structure in P&P, where a keyword (in this case “boast”) turns out to be the key that opens the door to an interconnection between two or more scenes in the novel, which turns out to give startling new explanation for the behavior of the characters.

And it’s only just the first variation on this theme of Darcy’s own indirect boasting. Only one chapter after he accuses Bingley of doing what he himself did not long before, Darcy repeats this same offense in Chapter 11 in the following famous passage:

"No," said Darcy, "I have made no such pretension. I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch for. It is, I believe, too little yielding—certainly too little for the convenience of the world. I cannot forget the follies and vices of others so soon as I ought, nor their offenses against myself. My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost, is lost forever."

"That is a failing indeed!" cried Elizabeth. "Implacable resentment is a shade in a character. But you have chosen your fault well. I really cannot laugh at it. You are safe from me."

Once again, he starts out by seeming to confess to having “faults enough”, in particular his resentful unforgiving temper, only to undo his confession by justifying and in effect boasting about this very same trait, his resentful character. And JA gives an extra hint that she has put these phony words into Darcy’s mouth, when Eliza, in Chapter 16, recalls this very speech of Darcy’s to Wickham as yet another indirect boast on Darcy’s part:

"I do remember his BOASTING  one day, at Netherfield, of the implacability of his resentments, of his having an unforgiving temper. His disposition must be dreadful."

I just checked and saw that I was preceded in this catch by Mary Waldron in 1999 (who was then echoed, without attribution, by David Shapard in his 2013 annotated P&P), who described that same speech of Darcy’s very similarly to mine, above:

“…we find that far from modifying Elizabeth’s spontaneity, [Darcy] renders himself extremely vulnerable to it, ending by informing the company of his faults in a way he has seen fit to reprove Bingley about earlier…In his conversation with Elizabeth at the end of chapter 11, he has to resort to the indirect boast himself, after Elizabeth has expressed herself ‘perfectly convinced that Mr. Darcy has no defect. He owns it himself without disguise.”…There is a sense of self-defence here---Darcy has been boxed into a corner…His remarks are not, as Marilyn Butler has described them, ‘careful, scrupulous, truthful’, but pretentious and intended to inhibit discussion which might put him at a disadvantage…”

So, here we have three passages in pretty quick succession, which collectively present a veiled portrait of Darcy as an unconscious stone-throwing hypocrite, who fails to realize that Pemberley is a proverbial glass house, so to speak.

But that’s still only the tip of the iceberg of the “boasting” theme in P&P. In the remainder of this post, I will quickly identify and parse the other passages in P&P I see as part of this “boasting” matrix:

First, in Chapter 9, we have Mrs. Bennet engaging in her typical sort of VERY thinly veiled indirect boasting about Jane’s beauty:

 "Oh! dear, yes; but you must own she is very plain. Lady Lucas herself has often said so, and envied me Jane's beauty. I DO NOT LIKE TO BOAST of my own child, but to be sure, Jane—one does not often see anybody better looking. It is what everybody says. I do not trust my own partiality. When she was only fifteen, there was a man at my brother Gardiner's in town so much in love with her that my sister-in-law was sure he would make her an offer before we came away. But, however, he did not. Perhaps he thought her too young. However, he wrote some verses on her, and very pretty they were."

But, as I’ve asserted on a number of occasions, the further irony here is that the unnamed versifier six years earlier was that indirect boaster himself, Darcy, who is there listening to Mrs. Bennet!

In Chapter 31, we first get Lady Catherine’s absurd direct boast about the delightful quality of  her daughter’s purely hypothetical musical performance, which is however followed shortly by another indirect boast by Darcy, this time rationalizing his deficient social skills as beyond his own control, which Lizzy once again rises to the occasion and deflates, this time so brilliantly that even Darcy in effect must smile and say “Touche”:

"…but I am ill-qualified to recommend myself to strangers."

"Shall we ask your cousin the reason of this?" said Elizabeth, still addressing Colonel Fitzwilliam. "Shall we ask him why a man of sense and education, and who has lived in the world, is ill qualified to recommend himself to strangers?"

"I can answer your question," said Fitzwilliam, "without applying to him. It is because he will not give himself the trouble."

"I certainly have not the talent which some people possess," said Darcy, "of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done."

"My fingers," said Elizabeth, "do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault—because I will not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman's of superior execution."

Darcy smiled and said, "You are perfectly right. You have employed your time much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you can think anything wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers."

And then it’s a short further leap ahead to the passages I’ve recently written about in relation to Darcy’s “triumph” in separating Bingley from Jane. After Fitzwilliam tells Eliza of Darcy’s exultation, and she confronts Darcy, we get a very dark version of an indirect boast from Darcy when he sneers:

 "I have no wish of denying that I did everything in my power to separate my friend from your sister, or that I rejoice in my success. Towards him I have been kinder than towards myself."

As Eliza reflects on this very point while reading Darcy’s letter, that word “boast” pops into her head one more time:

“Elizabeth noticed every sentence conveying the idea of uneasiness, with an attention which it had hardly received on the first perusal. Mr. Darcy's shameful BOAST of what misery he had been able to inflict, gave her a keener sense of her sister's sufferings. It was some consolation to think that his visit to Rosings was to end on the day after the next—and, a still greater, that in less than a fortnight she should herself be with Jane again, and enabled to contribute to the recovery of her spirits, by all that affection could do.”

There are several other passages which P&P boasts (sorry, I couldn’t resist) which, while they don’t relate to Darcy, are nonetheless part of the same semantic matrix, so I urge you to find them and see if you can discern the Austenian irony and wit they also embody. And finally, for a 2012 post of mine about Jane Austen’s own deliberate, playful indirect boasts, I give you:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/jane-austen-or-secret-of-style-jane.html

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Reading Jane Austen’s “a few typical errors--& a ‘said he’ or a ‘said she’ “ like a sharp elf

In response to my post providing a dozen links to posts of mine during the past year about the dark Darcy of the shadow story of Pride & Prejudice, my friendly and polite skeptic Nancy, pithily observed:

“I don't think you will convince many that Darcy , KNIGHTLEY  and Wentworth are villains. “

To which I reply, at least let's be clear on what I do wish to convince anyone to believe. I claim that there are two Darcys, two Knightleys, two Brandons, etc.—i.e., in each case, an Austen character is either a hero or a villain—and both are plausible interpretations of their characters, fully intended and skillfully created by Jane Austen. Each has a full life, independent of the other, in their respective fictional worlds.

So, I am not trying to convince anyone that the "normal" way of seeing these characters as heroes is wrong, merely that this is not the exclusively correct interpretation. As I’ve said a thousand times, Jane Austen was all about giving the reader a direct experience of the ambiguities of human cognition and perception, the better to enable each of us to teach ourselves how to be more flexible in interpreting our own real lives.  This is best exemplified by Jane Austen’s famous comment to Cassandra about the recently published P&P in January 1813:

“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.'”

I have long believed that many Austen scholars and lay Janeites have missed the irony undergirding this passage, and have understood Jane Austen to sincerely mean that any immediate unclarity of reference to characters in P&P was such a “typical error”. However it was only today that I realized they are actually misreading her actual syntax, as I will demonstrate, below.

The following is a typical misreading by Anne Toner in her 2012 Persuasions article: “What we seem to see in this letter is both anxiety and justification about missing said hes and shes, or rather anxiety swiftly followed by justification. Austen's thoughts run from printer's errors to a potential authorial misjudgment, but she concludes by shifting responsibility to the less able of readers. Fascinatingly, Austen seems to be grappling here with the risks she took with the dialogue of Pride and Prejudice, dialogue that would become celebrated for its vivacious dramatic qualities.”

But go back and carefully reread the above quotation. What Toner describes as “anxiety” about “a potential authorial misjudgment” is NOT what Jane Austen actually wrote! She said there were a few typical errors---by which we may all fairly infer she was referring to what we today call “typos”---but then that dash, followed by an ampersand, was NOT Jane Austen calling the occasional lack of clarity (in identification of speakers in dialogue) an error!

Parse the syntax carefully, and you will see that Jane Austen was actually giving two independent examples of instances in which she expected her readers to be sharp elves applying ingenuity:

 --- the first example was the lower-grade ingenuity required in order to recognize and then mentally correct any typos caused during the printing process;

---the second was the higher-grade ingenuity required in order to figure out who said what in certain passages, and to be ready for the possibility that Jane Austen deliberately wrote some of her dialogue so as to be plausibly interpretable in two different ways!

I.e., JA was not saying that unclarity was her own misjudgment, but was instead saying it was her own deliberate outside-the-box authorial strategy!

I am also certain that Jane Austen deliberately wrote this famous bons mot about her fiction to NOT be “immediately clear”, and therefore so as to be easily misconstrued. In other words, she creates an epigrammatical matrioshka, in which her saying itself invites the same sort of misreading as she describes vis a vis her novel! She writes so that any careless reader of her letter (especially one who did not accord her sufficient respect) would jump to the erroneous conclusion that she was cheerfully acknowledging that she was a careless editor of her own “darling child”, a novel which she had revised so many times over 15 years before final publication. To which I say, “Nonsense!”

This is the same Jane Austen who put into Lizzy Bennet’s mouth the startling Zen Buddhist aphorism I’ve so often quoted: “We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing.” Her comment to Cassandra is a perfect example of the paradox of a sort of teaching what is worth knowing by a kind of  “not teaching”. In the act of navigating the narrow channel between the Scylla of that dash and the Charybdis of that ampersand, the alert reader teaches him or her self how to read very carefully and flexibly. Such a careful flexible reader avoids the temptation of lazy reading based on the assumption that Jane Austen was the kind of writer who would have cheerfully accepted producing a slovenly product with errors that first time readers (of much inferior intelligence to herself) would immediately spot on first reading. To which I again say, “Nonsense!”

In short, it requires one level of ingenuity to spot typos and to figure out the correct word—that is merely the job of a skillful editor. But it requires an entirely different, and higher level of ingenuity to spot deliberate ambiguities in dialogue (and narration, for that matter) and then to discern both plausible “right” answers that a sly, riddling author might have left behind to be found—like “courtship” and “Prince of Whales” as (two out of several plausible) answers to the Chapter 9 charade in Emma..

In checking the archives of Janeites, I see that Elissa wrote the following relevant comment in relation to the above quote from JA’s 1813 letter:  “…this reminds me of Dr. Johnson's famous quip when he was compiling his Dictionary "'Tis a dull mind, truly, that can think of only one way to spell a word."

At first, I got excited when I read that, as it appeared very promising as a common ancestor of both Austen’s famous quote, and also of Scott’s line in Marmion. However, when I checked via various online resources, I could not find that Samuel Johnson actually wrote this, or anything close to it. If he did, I’d love it, but it doesn’t appear to be the case. But he did address, in the Preface to his great and influential 1755 Dictionary, the issue of spelling variation, not as a witty epigram, but  in the following lengthy discussion:

“When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetic without rules. Wherever 1 turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated. Choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection. Adulterations were to be detected, without any settled test of purity, and modes of expression to be rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority. …In adjusting the Orthography, which has been to this time unsettled and fortuitous, I found it necessary to distinguish those irregularities that are inherent in our tongue, and perhaps coeval with it, from others which the ignorance or negligence of later writers has produced. Every language has its anomalies, which, though inconvenient, and in themselves once unnecessary, must be tolerated among the imperfections of human things, and which require only to be registered, that they may not be increased, and ascertained, that they may not be confounded: but every language has likewise its improprieties and absurdities, which it is the duty of the lexicographer to correct or proscribe.

In examining the orthography of any doubtful word, the mode of spelling by which it is inserted in the series of the dictionary, is to be considered as that to which I give, perhaps not often rashly, the preference.  I have left, in the examples, to every author his own practice unmolested, that the reader may balance suffrages, and judge between us: but this question is not always to be determined by reputed or by real learning; some men, intent upon greater things, have thought little on sounds and derivations; some, knowing in the ancient tongues, have neglected those in which our words are commonly to be sought…In this part of the work, where caprice has long wantoned without control, and vanity sought praise by petty reformation, I have endeavored to proceed with a scholar’s reverence for antiquity, and a grammarian’s regard to the genius of our tongue. I have attempted few alterations…”

If I may attempt a very brief summary of Johnson’s elegant formulations re spelling, he seems to be saying that his monumental effort in determining proper spelling was an art as much as a science. And given his enormous influence, it is ironic the case that from 1755 onward, his influence was so great that spelling in English became more of a learning standardized spelling, rather than creating it.

But…Elissa’s quotation did not spring from her imagination-as best as I can ascertain from Google, the actual quotation was spoken in a different form by some famous figure (who was George Washington, or Andrew Jackson, or Horace Greeley, depending on who was repeating it) ---it more or less went like this:

“I didn’t suppose that you were one of those damned fools, who think that there is only one way to spell a word.”

For me, the significance of all of this is the same when it comes to an accurate understanding of what Jane Austen meant about unclarity in her fictional dialogue---we all need to break the chains of slavish rigid adherence to a belief in objective, unitary meaning, and to use our imagination to see many worlds of possibility of meaning, and then use ingenuity to make difficult and subtle judgments about how to balance multiple perspectives, and proceed more effectively in daily life.

And so, to come full circle, I say that the ability to see both the shadow Darcy and the overt Darcy, and to recognize that neither is the only “right” answer, is the ingenuity I have worked hard to develop over the past 13 years, and that I believe Jane Austen hoped her “darling children” would receive from her best readers.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Another Austen Quiz

Can you find the name of a famous person hidden in plain sight in clues scattered among the following three passages in Volume 3 of Emma?

Chapter 39: Such an adventure as this,—a fine young man and a lovely young woman thrown together in such a way, could hardly fail of suggesting certain ideas to the coldest heart and the steadiest brain. So Emma thought, at least. Could a linguist, could a grammarian, could even a mathematician have seen what she did, have witnessed their appearance together, and heard their history of it, without feeling that circumstances had been at work to make them peculiarly interesting to each other?—How much more must an imaginist, like herself, be on fire with speculation and foresight!—especially with such a groundwork of anticipation as her mind had already made.

Chapter 42: The considerable slope, at nearly the foot of which the Abbey stood, gradually acquired a steeper form beyond its grounds; and at half a mile distant was a bank of considerable abruptness and grandeur, well clothed with wood;—and at the bottom of this bank, favourably placed and sheltered, rose the Abbey Mill Farm, with meadows in front, and the river making a close and handsome curve around it.

It was a sweet view—sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.

Chapter 53: Mrs. Weston's friends were all made happy by her safety; and if the satisfaction of her well-doing could be increased to Emma, it was by knowing her to be the mother of a little girl. She had been decided in wishing for a Miss Weston. She would not acknowledge that it was with any view of making a match for her, hereafter, with either of Isabella's sons;

Hint: This person was one of the earliest Janeites, and one of the earliest readers of Emma.

It’s hard for me to judge, but I think the answer is obvious even without the clue.

I’ll post the answer tomorrow by 6 pm PST, if someone else does not guess it first.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter