“On, Blunder! On, Dixon!”: The Strange Case of the Swept-Away Third Word at Hartfield

Several days ago, Diane Reynolds posed this intriguing question in Janeites: “…In Vol III [Chapter 41 of Emma], Frank spells out ‘blunder’ and ‘Dixon’--and then a third word for Jane Fairfax, which we are told she angrily brushes away without reading. Any speculation on that word?”

Ellen Moody was the first to reply: “Was there a third word? I remember only the two: blunder (which Emma does not see) and Dixon (which she does and which Mr Knightley also sees). Blunder is swept away too quickly. Were Mr Knightley (the POV of this chapter) or Emma to see it, we would know it, and we would immediately work out for sure that Frank and Jane have a clandestine relationship, the blunder being his comment about Mr Perry having a carriage. We'd guess it was in a letter because of Jane's trips to the post office.”

Diane then clarified: “There is a third word: after blunder and Dixon, Jane signals to her aunt her desire to leave and then, “Mr. Knightley thought he saw another collection of letters anxiously pushed towards her, and resolutely swept away by her unexamined.” This is after blunder and Dixon: Dixon makes Jane angry enough to leave.  Now it's not entirely sure--Mr. Knightley just "thought he saw," but I am convinced he saw something.”

Ellen then replied again:  “You're right. There is a third. I just reread the passage. Yes the "he thought he saw" is a reaffirmation of the sudden switch in POV. This being an older fiction, we are supposed to work it out by the end of the book…Guessing as if I'd never finished the novel but understood by this point Frank and Jane have a clandestine relationship (which I did guess the first time I read the novel at this chapter though not that they were engaged), I'd say "forgive" or "pardon." Does anyone remember what the third word was?”

Diane, I’m so glad you’ve raised this question, which I see as another significant word puzzle that Jane Austen intended her most alert readers (like you) to spot. I’ve donned my deerskin cap and puffed on my sleuthing pipe for the past few days, and, with the aid of my faithful partner in detection, Mr. Google, I’ve arrived at two complementary solutions to this strange case -- solutions which, as I hoped, go to the heart of the shadow story of Emma I began to delineate nearly 13 years ago. It was in January 2005 when I first realized that Jane Fairfax’s “illness” could plausibly be read as (concealed) pregnancy, with Jane F. as the “shadow heroine” of the novel, but with her story in effect told by the most clueless observer in Highbury – Emma herself! And these two new posts of mine will illustrate how Emma is the literary puzzle which keeps on yielding fresh delights and insights, year after year!

As has, during the past two decades, been well established in Austen scholarly circles not frequented by the majority of Janeites, it is in Emma in particular that the “trivial” word games and puzzles which abound therein [most of all, the “courtship” charade, which I’ve long argued is one and the same as the “acrostic” poem given to Mrs. Elton by an unnamed “abominable puppy” (who I claim is actually Frank Churchill, as I last outlined a few years ago here: http://tinyurl.com/nenmw71 ] collectively function as a Rosetta Stone provided by JA in order to aid in decoding Emma’s shadow story. Diane, your question has catalyzed my figuring out the deeper meaning of that third word which is not explicitly stated in the novel text, but which, as I will demonstrate, is everywhere in Emma implied.

To keep this post from getting too long, I will lay out my solution to The Strange Case of the Third Word at Hartfield in two distinct stages, this post today being Part One. I’ll finish writing up Part Two, which will explicate a deeper layer of allusive meaning, within the next few days, after (hopefully) first prompting a lively round of interesting responses to Part One from the sharp elves in our virtual “room” who are so inclined, and who enjoy this sort of shadowy delving.

First, as was pointed out in Janeites after the initial posts quoted above, what Ellen was remembering was that Diane’s question was answered 150 years ago by James Edward Austen Leigh (JEAL) in his 1869 Memoir when he wrote that his aunt “certainly took a kind of parental interest in the beings whom she had created, and did not dismiss them from her thoughts when she had finished her last chapter...She would, if asked, tell us many little particulars about the subsequent career of some of her people. In this traditionary way we learned that…the letters placed by Frank Churchill before Jane Fairfax, which she swept away unread, contained the word ‘pardon’…”.

I also was reminded of another extratextual data point about Jane Fairfax which, as far as I can tell, was first published by JEAL’s nephew, W. Austen Leigh, in his 1914 Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters:

“According to a less well-known tradition, Jane Fairfax survived her elevation [to marriage] only nine or ten years.”

Do you find it interesting, as I do, that, from among the half dozen extratextual hints that JA gave about her novels, the actions and fate of the mysterious Jane Fairfax were, according to the report of members of the Austen family, sufficiently intriguing to have elicited not one but two of those six precious hints from JA? It’s even more interesting, because JA would have had to provide these glosses during the brief 18-month window between publication of Emma and JA’s tragic premature death, to family members who probably had only had the chance to read Emma once. That reinforces my gut feeling that Diane’s question is a very important one, worthy of serious analysis.

Mainstream Austen scholars have uncritically accepted JEAL’s report of Jane Austen’s “pardon” gloss without questioning it, whereas I, like Diane, believe skepticism is always called for with JEAL, given his long rap sheet of unreliability as a reporter of many aspects of his aunt’s life and work, including a few whopping lies, as well as several Bowdlerizing editorial deletions and alterations of passages in her surviving letters. So I started from a flexible position, seeking to determine if JEAL’s report was accurate or not:

Possibility #1: Was JEAL’s answer a smokescreen, i.e., a deliberately false answer invented by him, intended to discourage close readers from even asking that question left hanging in JA’s novel? Did he thereby wish to avoid some suspicious reader sleuthing out the correct answer, because the actual answer being concealed by JEAL would’ve revealed his aunt Jane not to have been a prim, unambitious, conservative, but instead the subversive radical feminist I assert she was? As I said, above, I would not put such an editorial deception past JEAL; or

Possibility #2: Did JA, as JEAL stated, actually share that answer “pardon” with some member(s) of her family, who (as JEAL implied) posed that same question to her two centuries ago?

That second possibility immediately led me to a further question:

If JEAL was telling the truth, did JA merely intend for unsuspicious readers of the overt story to infer that Jane F. was feeling guilty (i.e., wishing for a “pardon”) for her deception of Emma et al in Highbury, and therefore was furious at Frank for once again --- as with his “dream” about “Mr. Perry’s carriage” right before while standing at the Highbury sweep-gate --- nearly exposing their secret?

Or…was JA’s answer a clue not only as to the overt story, but also a clue, but with a radically different meaning, to the shadow story?

The second version of Possibility #2 sprang off the screen at me as I typed it, because it fits Jane Austen’s M.O. to a tee. I.e.,  I cannot count the number of times in Jane Austen’s novels when one of her many fools is made to unwittingly expose something they would devoutly wish to keep secret. So that would turn JEAL’s 1869 Memoir, with its mention of her answer “pardon”, a kind of literary Trojan Horse, whereby JEAL, despite his fervent desire to keep a lid on whatever was simmering in his aunt’s literary pot, was unwittingly providing a vital clue for solving the subversive meaning of the Strange Case of the Third Word! As I reread that passage in Emma very closely and in context with the entire chapter it appears in, keeping “pardon” in the foreground, I quickly realized that this “Trojan Horse” was my ticket to ride, sleuthily speaking, a “carriage” that led me straight back to Jane Fairfax’s concealed pregnancy!

I start with a quotation of the relevant passage, beginning with Jane’s reaction to the word “Dixon”:

“…[Jane] was immediately up, and wanting to quit the table; but so many were also moving, that she could not get away; and Mr. Knightley thought he saw another collection of letters anxiously pushed towards her, and resolutely swept away by her unexamined. She was afterwards looking for her shawl—Frank Churchill was looking also—it was growing dusk, and the room was in confusion; and how they parted, Mr. Knightley could not tell.

He remained at Hartfield after all the rest, his thoughts full of what he had seen; so full, that when the candles came to assist his observations, he must—yes, he certainly must, as a friend—an anxious friend—give Emma some hint, ask her some question. He could not see her in a situation of such danger, without trying to preserve her. It was his duty.

“Pray, Emma,” said he, “may I ask in what lay the great amusement, the poignant sting of the last word given to you and Miss Fairfax? I SAW THE WORD, and am curious to know how it could be so very entertaining to the one, and so very distressing to the other.”

Emma was extremely confused. She could not endure to give him the true explanation; for though her suspicions were by no means removed, she was really ashamed of having ever imparted them.

“Oh!” she cried in evident embarrassment, “it all meant nothing; a mere joke among ourselves.”

“The joke,” he replied gravely, “seemed confined to you and Mr. Churchill.”

END QUOTE FROM EMMA

First, I respectfully disagree with you, Diane, and believe I can convince you to change your view, on one key point: I do not believe Knightley actually sees The Third Word. While I acknowledge that it is not impossible that Knightley sees it, I find the far more likely reading to be that Knightley is referring to the second word, “Dixon” as the word he actually saw, and I have three reasons to back me up, all arising out of the subtly ambiguous narration in that passage that I believe was entirely deliberate on JA’s part:

A: “Dixon” was the last word that we know for sure was presented to both Emma and Miss Fairfax; whereas the third word may very possibly have been presented only to Jane;

B: “Dixon” was the name as to which Emma and Frank shared “a mere joke among [them]selves” many chapters earlier –I don’t recall reading about another joke being shared by Emma and Frank, do you?; and

C: the word “Dixon”, we know for certain, was seen by Knightley.

Second, and equally destabilizing of the normative reading, I’ve noticed for the first time that it is not necessarily the case that Frank is the person who pushes the third word toward Jane Fairfax!:   

“…so many were also moving, that she could not get away; and Mr. Knightley thought he saw another collection of letters anxiously pushed towards her, and resolutely swept away by her unexamined….”

“Anxiously pushed towards” Jane, yes, but by whom? As JA does in a hundred other places in her writing, here she once again leads us all down a garden path of unfounded assumption---in this case, the illusion that we know for certain that it was Frank who pushed the third word in Jane’s direction. But all we really know for sure is that Frank presented Jane with the first two words – the identity of the “pusher” of the third word is, I argue, a matter of pure speculation.  And, as with the question of what Knightley hears, that uncertainty is deliberately heightened by JA by the data points that “so many were also moving” and “it was growing dusk”. In other words, JA is informing us, in the subtlest way, that it was very difficult to see who was doing what at that crucial instant.

So…if we assume for purposes of argument that it wasn’t Frank, and we know it wasn’t Knightley or Emma, then who could it have been? Viewing that question through the lens of the shadow story, I take note that in the scene in question, Jane is rapidly approaching her final hours before delivery, which is why, among other things, she is busy with her shawl as she walks by Knightley to enter the salon at Hartfield, so as to better conceal her very advanced pregnancy (we get other hints as well of Jane’s surprising wearing of a “large shawl” in the summer heat, because she needs protective covering of her late-term bulge).

As I’ve often noted, there are several key characters who already know about Jane’s pregnancy, but the reader never hears this explicitly, because the entire story (except for this and one other scene) is told through the eyes of Emma, who is utterly clueless about Jane in every way, but most of all in that regard.

But I believe the third word is pushed towards Jane by one of the other characters who is the opposite of clueless—a clueful character who would have the motive to expose Jane in Knightley’s presence – that rules out Miss Bates and Mrs. Weston, because I believe they are actually Jane’s most dedicated protectors, and leaves only two other suspects – Mr. Weston and Harriet.

These two “fools” would seem to be the least likely to engage in a deep game of psychological warfare against anyone, let alone against Jane Fairfax. But, that brings me back to the lessons of Mr. Elton’s charade. I’ve long asserted that the Harriet Smith of the shadow story is actually a very sharp elf who, e.g., sees the secret answer (“Prince of Whales”) of the charade, that Emma never even imagines could exist. The shadow Harriet I’ve come to know is a master manipulator, a “Shamela”, who has set her cap at Mr. Knightley from the start of the novel.

That’s why, during the first chapters of the novel, Harriet already ‘luckily’ finds herself firmly ensconced in close proximity to the two Highbury residents closest to Knightley: his principal tenant and friend, Robert Martin, and his local “favourite”, Emma. But Harriet also has a strong motive to put the kibosh on any romantic interest of Mr. Knightley’s in his other favourite, Jane (recall that Mrs. Weston explicitly suggests Knightley’s interest in Jane, to Emma’s horror). In short, then, Harriet has two romantic rivals whom Mr. Knightley might wish to marry besides herself, and one of them is Jane.

Harriet knows that Jane is pregnant, so I believe Harriet seizes the moment of confusion when the Hartfield game table group is breaking up, in order to deliver a third, veiled threat to Jane, also hoping to plant some doubt in Mr. Knightley’s mind about Jane’s purity. So I say it is Harriet who inobtrusively pushes the word “pardon” toward Jane. Why not “baby” or “pregnant”, you ask? Because Harriet is too clever to be obvious, she instead acts subtly, to threaten Jane with exposure (after observing Mrs. Elton repeatedly harass Jane in a very unsubtle way). And recall also who it was who said the word “blunder” aloud?: “The word was blunder; and as Harriet exultingly proclaimed it, there was a blush on Jane’s cheek which gave it a meaning not otherwise ostensible.” Harriet is no fool, she is actually, like Lucy Steele, a daring young woman who is proactive in promoting her own interest.

And finally, we can add the Strange Case of the Swept-Away Third Word to the numerous other plays on the number 3 in Emma (which points to the allusive presence of Mozart’s The Magic Flute): the 3 come-at-able ladies, the 3 teachers at Mrs. Goddard’s school, the 3 turns that Mr. Woodhouse takes during his constitutional, the apples baked 3 times at Hartfield, Mrs. Smallridge’s 3 girls, and the “three things very dull indeed” that Frank solicits at Box Hill – to that we can now add, the 3 words at the Hartfield game table!

And that brings me to the end of Part One. In Part Two, which, as I promised, will be forthcoming in the next few days, I will demonstrate that there’s a whole lot more to the word “pardon” at the Hartfield game table than I have discussed above. There’s a Shakespearean meaning which points the finger ten times more pointedly at Jane’s concealed pregnancy!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.: I will also be writing a post during the next few days to pick up on the hint in the first part of my Subject Line which will discuss another strange case—the remarkable resonance of “The Night Before Christmas” with Emma!

Jane Austen was poetically aWakened to the unhappy fate of women pushed to jump at husbands

I’ve recently revisited one of Jane Austen’s short poems:

Camilla, good humoured, & merry, & small

For a Husband was at her last stake;

And having in vain danced at many a Ball

Is now happy to jump at a Wake.

As I reread it for the first time in over a decade, I quickly realized that there was much more to these four lines than met my still scholarly naïve eyes in 2006, and this post presents to you the fruits of my consequent delvings into its deeper, darker, and very subversive meanings.

FIRST, I noted that this poem appears in the text of Letter 77 written by JA to Martha Lloyd on 11/30/1812. I’ve long recognized that the handful of surviving letters written by JA to Martha are much more likely to contain overtly subversive material than the large cache of surviving letters to Cassandra. It seems it was only while writing to Martha that JA felt free to include edgy material like “ejaculations about cocks and hens” and hating the Prince Regent, although it’s also possible that CEA later destroyed any and all comparably edgy letters that JA wrote to her.

SECOND, I took a closer look at the pun on the word/name “Wake”. Le Faye’s footnote states that JA was marking the engagement of the 38 year old Camilla Wallop to the “elderly curate” Reverend Henry Wake.  Le Faye thereby delicately implies that in marrying a much older man, Camilla Wallop’s marriage baked meats (pace Hamlet, but in reverse) might well shortly furnish forth the funeral tables for her husband. Thus, the pun on the imminent wake for Revd. Wake would appear to express the identical sentiment as the non-joking comment we find in Letter 60 to CEA dated over four years earlier, on 10/25/1808:  “Tomorrow I hope to hear from you, and tomorrow we must think of poor Catherine.”

As I noted in 2015, Le Faye, in her typical editorial obscurantism, minimally footnotes that line thusly:

Catherine: “Bigg”.       One must read Le Faye’s bio note for Revd. Herbert Hill in order to deduce that poor Catherine Bigg (age 33) and Revd. Hill (age 59) were united in marital “bliss” on (surprise, surprise) the very same date as JA’s Letter 60!  

JA, in writing the “Wake” poem, would thus initially appear to be registering a protest at the desperate decision of a single woman -- in the eyes of her family already long past her “bloom” --- making a decidedly unromantic marital choice, under pressure, when faced with the looming prospect of falling into Miss Batesian genteel poverty and social isolation. This reminds us of the fictional Charlotte Lucas stooping to marry a man like Mr. Collins, and also of the real life Jane Austen in 1802, when she almost married Catherine Bigg’s less-than-desirable brother Harris under comparable circumstances.

THIRD, I noted that JEAL went out of his way, in his 1869 Memoir, to spin JA’s “Wake” poem as her mockery of “the marriage of a middle-aged flirt with a Mr. Wake, who, it was supposed, she would scarcely have accepted in her youth”. JEAL also altered “Camilla” to “Maria”, seemingly in order to obscure the connection to the real life Camilla Wallop.

Hmmm… Given that I’ve shown in a dozen different ways over the past decade how Le Faye’s misleading obscurantism is only a misdemeanor in comparison to JEAL’s numerous outright editorial “felonies”, i.e., his whopping lies and Bowdlerizations. So I guessed there must be more hidden ore to be mined from the poem, for JEAL to have wielded his deceitful red pen so forcefully on it. In particular, the Jane Austen I know would not have meanly mocked the plight of a 38 year old single woman, especially when writing to her dear friend Martha who was single and even older. What else, I wondered, might JEAL have been trying to hide?

FOURTH, I also noted that Camilla Wallop was the niece of Lord Portsmouth, who (as I’ve recognized since I learned Lord Portsmouth’s sad story a decade ago) was one of Jane Austen’s principal sources for the character of Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion --- an ageing aristocrat of very weak intellectual capacity, who was vulnerable to being captured in marriage by a fortune-hunting woman. And so, how curious that the misogynist portrait JEAL painted in the Memoir of Lord Portsmouth’s niece as a fortune hunter, resembled JA’s fictional Mrs. Clay in that significant aspect.

FIFTH, I checked to see whether any other Austen scholars had ever looked at JA’s “wake” poem, and found two instances:

This excellent observation several years ago by Barbara Seeber: “[I]n the 4-line stanza "Camilla, good humoured, & merry, & small", occasioned by the impending marriage of her friend Urania Catherine Camilla Wallop, 38 years of age, to Reverend Henry Wake, Austen puns on the groom's name and connects marriage to death: Camilla "having in vain danced at many a Ball / Is now happy to jump at a Wake."

And this informative gloss by Kathryn Sutherland: “…The reference is to a four-line quatrain written in anticipation of the marriage of the middle-aged and, to Austen’s comic mind, desperate Urania Wallop and the elderly Revd Henry Wake. Like others of her comic verses, the joke hangs upon the punning associations of the victims’ names…The text as reproduced by Chapman and more recently by Margaret Doody comes from Austen-Leigh’s Memoir, and presumably is the version improved by James Austen, Austen-Leigh’s father, and handed down in the family .. a variant text preserved in the diary of Stephen Terry, father in law to Anna Lefroy’s fourth daughter, Georgiana, confirms that two versions were circulated in the family…”.  How interesting that the “Wake” poem was considered significant enough by others in JA’s family that it was passed from hand to hand to hand, and was not treated as disposable ephemera.

With all that background in hand, I decided to dig further into the real life of Revd. Henry Wake, and I quickly learned that I was right to mistrust Le Faye’s May-December explanation. Google and Google Books showed me that the Revd. Henry Wake was actually only 4 years older than Miss Wallop, a totally insignificant age difference when she was 38 and he was 42! So, if Jane Austen knew, as she surely did, that Camilla Wallop was actually entering into a May-June marriage, what else could JA have meant by her dark pun on “wake”?

It took me a few minutes of checking my own assumptions to realize that it wasn’t Mr. Wake’s wake JA was winking at, but Camilla’s! And not just a wake for a metaphorical death in a marriage to a much older man –which Henry Wake was not--- but Camilla’s grave risk of literal death upon marrying a still-virile man who might get her pregnant and thereby “murder” her in childbirth! That would fit all too perfectly with both the death-in-childbirth theme which I’ve argued countless times is, in the ghostly character of the late Mrs. Tilney, at the center of the shadow story of Northanger Abbey; and also with the repeated sarcastic references to numerous English gentlewives in JA’s social circle, imprisoned in the endless cycle of serial pregnancy whiich afflicted so many of JA’s married “sisters in Lucina”.

That in turn led me to check a little further online, to see if I could determine the order of “wakes” which actually occurred in the wake of the 1813 marriage of Camilla Wallop and Henry Wake. It will give you a shiver.

From his obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine, I learned that Henry Wake died four decades later at the ripe old age of 82; but I also learned a more revealing fact --- i.e., that he “was presented…to the rectory of Over Wallop in 1813 by the Earl of Portsmouth”. Do you see what that latter factoid tells us? It means that he was given a desirable living by his new cousin by marriage, the Earl of Portsmouth, at the same time as he married the Earl’s niece Camilla.

This adds an even darker and more subversive shade to JA’s meaning in her poem, because it suggests that the grant of the living was a form of “payment” by her patriarch to Henry Wake, in exchange for his marrying Camilla Wallop, and thereby taking her off the hands of the Wallop family. Now we come to the point of JEAL’s editorial deception -- the actual “fortune hunter” in this instance would appear to have been Henry Wake, not Camilla Wallop! JEAL, himself a clergyman who was given wealth and position which he did nothing to earn, seems to have been motivated to spin JA’s “Wake” poem backwards, and turn the bride into the fortune hunter – so as not to see himself in the mirror when looking at the fortune-hunting Henry Wake!

Which brings me to the most chilling part --- the death of the real life Camilla Wallop, the 38 year old woman who was at her last marital stake, and therefore jumped at a Wake. She died less than two years after her wedding day, and only a month after turning 40! Whether she died in childbirth, we may never know, but I’m pretty sure JA was saddened and angered, but not surprised, when she heard that tragic news about the death of her old friend, only a year older than JA herself. Camilla gambled her life, and lost, because the sexist odds of her country were stacked against her.

Old friend, you ask? Did Le Faye ever mention Camilla Wallop was JA’s old friend? No, she did not, nor, for that matter, did any Austen biographer other than Seeber, as far as I can tell. So, why do I nonetheless feel so confident that this was indeed the case? Because I found strong evidence for that inference hidden in plain sight in another one of JA’s letters, a letter written 7 ½ long years before JA wrote Letter 77:

Letter # 43 dated 04/11/1805 to CEA from Bath to Godmersham near the end of the Bath years, includes the following playful passage:

“I was not able to go on yesterday, all my Wit & leisure were bestowed on letters to Charles & Henry. To the former, I wrote in consequence of my Mother’s having seen in the papers that the Urania was waiting at Portsmouth for the Convoy for Halifax;--this is nice, as it is only three weeks ago that you wrote by the Camilla.—The Wallop race seem very fond of Nova Scotia…”

Le Faye’s footnote states: “The surname of the Earls of Portsmouth was Wallop, and many of the ladies of that family were Camilla or Urania—the ships so named reminded JA of this”. That might just take the cake, when it comes to Le Fayean editorial misdirection. How so? Because while it is certainly true that “many of the ladies of that family were Camilla or Urania”, I’d be willing to bet that only one member of the “Wallop race” living during the Regency Era had a name that included both of those names, and that one lady was Urania Catherine Camilla Wallop, the “heroine” of JA’s Wake poem written much later!

So, if JA was punning on two of Camilla’s names in an 1805 letter, and then punning on Camilla’s prospective husband’s name in a poem in an 1812 letter, this strongly suggests, at a minimum, an ongoing personal relationship between JA and her peer Camilla Wallop. It also suggests more to me –it speaks to an affection strong enough to induce JA to pun on both to her sister and to Martha. Why Le Faye would wish to obscure that close relationship is a question only Le Faye can answer for sure, but I believe it sounded uncomfortably romantic to the redoubtable protector of the Myth of Jane Austen.

And that’s when it all came together for me, and I realized the final forbidden element hidden in plain sight in that poem by JA --- like JA herself, I imagine that Camilla did not wish to marry at all, and, at age 38, had held out nearly to the end of her childbearing years, but then was forced to jump at it, and thereby, within a year, into the pregnancy that led to her own death. And that’s when I also realized that it is no coincidence that Jane Austen wrote her “jump at a Wake” poem in November 1812, during the exact same time period when JA was lopping and cropping First Impressions into Pride & Prejudice.

How so? Because I see, in Camilla jumping at a Wake, precisely the same punning import as I saw a few years ago in Elizabeth Bennet “jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity, and finding herself at last within view of the house, with weary ankles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise.” The common theme is of women jumping at the order of men, like slaves on a slave ship forced by their sadistic captors/ transporters into “dancing” in their shackles.

I’ve previously argued that Caroline Bingley’s mockery of Elizabeth’s sunburnt skin and dirty petticoats is coded racist sneering at Elizabeth being biracial http://tinyurl.com/oqh8e9k , as also is Mr. Darcy’s sarcastic “Every savage can dance” riposte to Sir William Lucas’s admiration of dancing at Lucas Lodge::  http://tinyurl.com/lbwwocx  .

For Jane Austen, as for one of her inspirational mentors, Mary Wollstonecraft, marriage was in many ways a form of metaphorical slavery for women; but in JA’s sharper, more radical feminist imagination, she extended that metaphor far beyond Wollstonecraft’s usage, by hinting at women being made to “jump” into marriage and “dance at a ball” (i.e., submit to sex leading to pregnancy).

In conclusion, then, I believe that Jane Austen’s seemingly trivial “Wake” poem was in actuality a coded, radical feminist complement to her undisguised expression of feminist hatred toward the Prince Regent, contained in Letter #82, also written to Martha, less than three months after Letter 77. It shows yet again that JA was fully awakened not only to the dangerous, everyday reality of womanhood in her profoundly sexist society, but also, with her utter clarity and freedom from illusion, to the danger to the career of any female writer who dared to openly express such awareness. Indeed, unless expressed in code, no such radical feminist message could successfully run the gauntlet of misogynist critics (like Hazlitt, who savagely attacked Burney’s Wanderer, with its overt catalog of women’s “difficulties”). Jane Austen was determined that her "darling children", i.e., her novels, would survive, and live on to spread her message throughout the world.

[THE FOLLOWING REFLECTS TWO REPLIES I RECEIVED, & MY REACTION THERETO]

I will now respond to the two wonderful replies I received to my post earlier today:

Diane Reynolds wrote: “Arnie, Great post. You should publish this, though I too wouldn't take out to the last leg, so to speak, on Elizabeth Bennet--and you don't need that! You have plenty to work with!!”

Thank you very much, Diane. Perhaps I will give that a try, but you know that for me, the real payoff is that last leg. 😊 (and wait till you read the end of this post)

Diane also wrote: “ I have to say when I read about the 38 yo Camila married to the "elderly" Mr.Wake with no date given, all my red flags began to quiver: How old is the guy???? Even I was stunned at age 42!”

When I initially looked at Le Faye’s Bio entry for Henry Wake, expecting to see how old he was when he married Miss Wallop, I knew something was fishy when there was no date of birth or date of death. But my first suspicion
was like yours—I figured that he must’ve been* so* old that Le Faye did not want to give any sign of the age differential.  I too was shocked at what I learned, but simultaneously thrilled, because then I knew there had to be
an interesting reason for the editorial deception – and I believe I sleuthed it out.

Diane: “I agree with you on JEAL: "In particular, the Jane Austen I know would not have meanly mocked the plight of a 38 year old single woman, especially when writing to her dear friend Martha who was single and even
older." Agreed, agreed, agreed. And I agree it is interesting to see this attempt to distort the age difference. You might jump to the conclusion that a pun on wake meant the man was old ... but a little checking???? I
also liked your catch on the poem being circulated. ”

The bottom line is that hardly ny mainstream Austen scholar has ever thought to check hardly anything in Le Faye’s annotations, even though my probings over the past decade demonstrate that it is often required in
order to their true significance. I will pay her a backhanded compliment -- Le Faye was quite skilled in using selective omission and emphasis in order to misdirect all but the most suspicious readers (like me) from
learning inconvenient (at least, from Le Faye’s conservative perspective) truths about JA and people in her world.

Diane: “It would be great if you could find more evidence of a friendship between Camilla and Austen: it makes sense since they were a year apart, both single women most/all of their lives and because JA wrote the poem. As
you know, I love this kind of sleuthing.”

I’d love it too, and your comment gives me the idea to inquire to find out if there is an archive of the Wallop family papers (a family which, I see in Wikipedia, is still going strong, with the current patriarch being the 10
th Earl of Portsmouth) which just might contain some letters written by Camilla – but I’d guess that is a very long shot, as I suspect that she lived and died a largely invisible female life of the kind that Thomas Gray poignantly wrote of (and Mrs Elton partly misquoted).


Elissa Schiff also replied: “Well, I certainly thought this long, tangled posting was surely leading to a veiled reference to a "jumping the broom ceremony" as a customary wedding among Africans enslaved in the Americas.”

What’s wonderful about these groups is there’s often at least one person reading along, who knows something very relevant to what you wrote, which you never heard of. So thank you very much, Elissa, as indeed, to use your
words, I do believe “this can be added to the numbered list as an additional referencing to Eliza Bennet's "biracial" heritage.” Like everyone else my age, I saw the original *Roots *in 1977,  but I had absolutely no recollection of that term “jumping the broom” being used to describe marriages between black slaves in North America, nor did I know
that the term has come to be used since then by modern African Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_broom tells me that this expression was around in Jane Austen’s lifetime, and would fit with uncanny aptness with Jane Austen’s dubious take on Camilla’s impending marriage to Henry Wake:

“ ‘Jumping the broom’ is a phrase and custom relating to a wedding ceremony where the couple jumps over a broom. It has been suggested that the custom is based on an 18th-century idiomatic expression for ‘sham marriage’, ‘marriage of doubtful validity’ “

And apropos JA’s particular, longstanding interest in the Prince Regent, this caught my eye in that article as well:  “In 1789 the rumoured clandestine marriage between the Prince Regent and Maria Fitzherbert is similarly referred to in a satirical song in The Times:  ‘Their way to consummation was by hopping o’er a broom, sir.”

But working on this reply also prompted me to think about yet another meaning of the word “wake”, one  which would have been well known to the sister of two future admirals:
“the waves that a ship leaves behind as it slices through the water.”

A new shiver ran down my spine as I connected that particular nautical meaning to my previous interpretation of Darcy’s “every savage can dance” as a thinly veiled allusion to the savage practice of forcing captive slaves en route on the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas to "dance", in order to keep them healthy enough to get a better price for them on the auction block.

I shivered because I recalled another unimaginably horrific historical fact, which I readily retrieved from the Wikipedia page on the Middle Passage, information which I believe was accessible to JA and the rest of
the English public via abolitionist literature:

“Slaves resisted in a variety of ways. The two most common types of resistance were refusal to eat and suicide. Suicide was a frequent occurrence, often by…jumping overboard…Both suicide and self-starving were prevented as much as possible by slaver crews…slaves were kept away from means of suicide, and the sides of the deck were often netted. Slaves were still successful, especially at jumping overboard. Often when an uprising failed, the mutineers would jump *en masse* into the sea. Slaves generally believed that if they jumped overboard, they would be returned to their family and friends in their village or to their ancestors in the afterlife. Suicide by jumping overboard was such a problem that captains had to address it directly in many cases. They used the sharks that followed the ships as a terror weapon...”

So, “jumping at a wake” could very plausibly be read as describing that heroic act of self-destruction in order to avoid a life of slavery. And so I believe JA meant to say that in the case of Camilla Wallop, faced with a metaphorical version of that Catch-22, marriage to Henry Wake was a form of suicide.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

THE ARTIFICIAL STUPIDITY RACE AMERICA IS LOSING!

I can no longer stay silent, Janeites & Bardolaters will just have to wait for my next post about Will and Jane, I must exercise my First Amendment rights, come what may. Are you sitting down? 

The real significance of the recent escalation in sheer, unadulterated idiocy that has been belching out of the White House chimney in the past few weeks continues to be missed, and it's my patriotic duty to reveal it. The real issue is Russia, but I'm not talking about petty issues like destroying our democratic governmental and electoral processes. No, I'm talking about really paying attention to history, because you know what they say, right?? "They" say a lot of stuff to Trump, of course, but it's about time we started listening, too!

Remember when the Ruskies' Sputnik launches caught America by surprise in the Fifties, and we were lucky to catch up in the Space Race? Well, what's being missed by all the so-called pundits today is that while America thinks it's getting a leg up on the rest of the world with advances in computers, in particular in Artificial Intelligence, Putin, that sly bear, has been quietly making dramatic advances in the unrecognized but crucial field of Artificial Stupidity.

When we listen to the words (and read the Tweets) coming out of the Oval Office, the West Wing, and (at times), clearly from the Fearless Leader while sitting on The Throne, is it not obvious that the Russians have managed to slip a deadly Artificial Stupidity virus into the air via the a/c ducts?

How else to explain the astonishingly consistent level of stupid s-t pouring out of the White House on an hourly basis?

So, get with it, America, it's time to make sure we keep up with the Russians before we fall fatally behind in Artificial Stupidity!

John McCain's revenge on Donald Drumpf is now complete indeed

I am certain Jane Austen would have approved of the following creative appropriation of Mr. Darcy's letter after his botched first proposal, had she witnessed politics in the USA during the past 2 years:

"I cannot help supposing that the hope of revenging himself on Trump was a strong additional inducement for McCain to surprise everyone, just when the bad guys thought they finally had their evil goal (of destroying ObamaCare, and depriving tens of millions of Americans of decent and affordable medical care) seemingly within their grasp. McCain's revenge on Trump (and all Republicans who have worked with Trump) for trashing McCain's war heroism IS NOW complete indeed."

Jane Austen's Dead Silence: The History of Slavery Subtext in Mansfield Park

Eleven years ago, I submitted the following article to the editor of Persuasions & Persuasions Online, the two JASNA journals, but it was not accepted for publication. In the intervening eleven years, I can't count how many times I have seen articles, whether scholarly or popular, which give credit to Edward Said for being the first scholar to point out what is now commonly referred to as the "slavery subtext" of Jane Austen's third published novel, Mansfield Park. That honor, as you will see as you read along, below, belongs to Avrom Fleishman, who first wrote about that topic a quarter century before Said said what he said (sorry, I couldn't resist)

It was only today, when I read the following in an otherwise brilliant 2014 article about the movie Belle by Prof. Tricia Matthew... " In the twenty years since Edward Said’s focus on the “dead silence” [in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park] in his post-colonial manifesto Culture and Imperialism  scholars and other storytellers are paying more attention to the presence of people in color in historical British narratives.." ...that it occurred to me that I ought to finally self publish my 2006 article (which I'll update some time in the near future), exactly as I wrote it then, in order to tell the true story of the many twists and turns in the evolution of the idea of Jane Austen's really being focused on English colonial slavery in MP, both literally and also as a metaphor for the servitude of many subtler kinds which are depicted in MP, her least romantic novel.

With that brief intro, then, I give you:

"Jane Austen's Dead Silence: The History of Slavery Subtext in Mansfield Park" (2006) by Arnie Perlstein

Introduction:

For almost two centuries, Mansfield Park has been Jane Austen’s problem novel, in the sense that the term “problem play” is used to describe some of Shakespeare’s plays. Like All’s Well That Ends Well, Mansfield Park defies categorization as either comedy or tragedy. Both are love stories that seem to end well, but not decisively. Austen even flags this parallel by giving her irresolute male hero the surname Bertram from that play; just as, for other reasons, she also gives him the Shakespearean first name Edmund.

Controversy among readers about Mansfield Park goes back a long way, but in recent years, the perennial Fanny Wars have been upstaged by one major controversy: the existence and/or meaning of what may be called the novel’s slavery subtext. This refers to oblique textual references to the real world of slavery and abolitionism, a social issue to which Jane Austen has long been thought by many to have been indifferent.

That controversy has piqued the interest of many readers, but even one familiar with the novel would be hard-pressed to describe all its contours, let alone make an informed decision as to their opinion about it. The flurry of words written on the topic from a range of lay and scholarly (particularly feminist and postcolonialist) perspectives during the past fifteen years is confusing and nearly impenetrable even to an Austen scholar. Ideology has further clouded matters, because some have seized upon its controversial aspects and dismissed the entire subject as an ivory tower confabulation, with little connection to the novel’s text, or meaning for most Austen readers.

One can readily discern why this has happened; the stakes are high. The existence of significant and potentially disturbing slavery references in a novel by the author of  widely cherished love stories, is the hottest of buttons. It goes to the heart of the matter: what is Mansfield Park really about?

Amidst the ideological conflict, insufficient attention has been paid to the prosaic, detail-oriented questions of whether (and, if so, how) that subtext was embedded in the novel by Austen. Periodically, there have been claims of detection of references to slavery in Mansfield Park, and also in Emma, involving character surnames. However, no single example, standing alone, seems truly convincing, and no previous commentator has presented a unifying principle for linking them all as a group that cannot be gainsaid.  

This article claims to be the first definitive intellectual history of the idea of slavery subtext in Mansfield Park. Delightfully, such history turns out to have its own intrinsic interest, filled with the same sorts of ironies, reversals, secrets, near-misses, unintended communications, and suspense that we find in every Austen novel.

The Slavery Text in Mansfield Park

The starting point for study of slavery subtext must be the only two specific instances that everybody acknowledges to be some sort of reference to slavery in Mansfield Park: 

1. Sir Thomas Bertram has business in Antigua that requires him to spend two years there. Mrs. Norris expresses concern that the loss of income from Antigua may materially adversely affect the high standard of living at Mansfield Park.  (30-34)  It is clearly implied that Sir Thomas’s income from Antigua arises from an enterprise related, directly or indirectly, to the raising of sugar cane on plantations relying on slave labor.

and

2. Later on, Edmund has just gently chided Fanny for not speaking up more with her father, and Fanny defends herself: “Did not you hear me ask him about the slave–trade last night?” and adds that her question was met with “such a dead silence”. (196)

The meaning of this exchange has been debated for years, and the cause is obvious: the extraordinary ambiguity of what Brian Southam has called “the silence of the Bertrams”. Their silence may be a reflection of narcissistic boredom; or of horror at a taboo subject explicitly raised; or something else. Austen’s narrator exceeds even her normal coy reticence; she never explains that silence. Given that all the other references in the novel to slavery are oblique or implicit, the reader is left in an information vacuum.

Why would Austen tantalize readers with a pointed reference to the slave-trade, but then leave that reference ambiguous and never subsequently explain it? We cannot imagine such an omission from an author so meticulous with even seemingly trivial details.

So, is Sir Thomas’s trip to Antigua merely a Hitchcockian “McGuffin”? A plausible plot device designed to get the cat away for an extended time, so that the naughty mice can have sufficient time to (put on a) play, only to be trapped by the cat in the act? Or is it a Stoppardian inversion, with Antigua the submerged bulk of the iceberg, of which the Mansfield Park action comprises the exposed tip? I suggest that the answer is both, that Austen’s dead silence on this subject is intentional, and that it would have pleased her greatly to have us be brave, follow Edmund’s sensible  advice (which maybe Fanny did, but we never were told), and inquire of it farther. Let us start with the history.    

Nineteenth Century Sources:

With some other authors, we might look to their correspondence to learn about a major literary strategy such as concealing references to large-scale world phenomena like slavery. It’s not so easy with Austen. If she ever explicitly wrote in a letter about subtext in any of her novels, it did not survive. Similarly, the opinions about Mansfield Park that Austen collected upon its publication contain no explicit references to slavery or Antigua. Nor do any nineteenth century writers, fiction or nonfiction, take any explicit notice of it, we find only a couple of vague associations.

Not much to show for an entire century, but this nineteenth century indifference to slavery in Mansfield Park is not surprising. Once Austen’s own generation has died, followed decades later by the end of English colonial slavery itself, any contemporary awareness of allusions to slavery in Mansfield Park has faded as well. The world’s issues with slavery focus on the U.S. Civil War. And so a century and more passes in silence on that subject. It remains for the latter part of the twentieth century for Mansfield Park to begin to yield up its secrets.

On Looking Into Chapman’s Austen

Within ten years after the 1932 publication of R.W. Chapman’s first edition of the Letters, one of them plays a role in the origination of ideas about the slavery subtext. Her January 24, 1813 letter states:

We quite run over with books. She [Mrs. Austen] has got Sir John Carr's Travels in Spain, and I am reading a Society octavo, an Essay on the Military Police and Institutions of the British Empire, by Capt. Pasley of the Engineers, a book which I protested against at first, but which upon trial I find delightfully written and highly entertaining. I am as much in love with the author as I ever was with Clarkson or Buchanan… (198)

Chapman’s 1932 edition includes the following entry in its “Other Persons, Places, Authors, etc.” appendix, implicitly explaining Austen’s reference to the book by Clarkson which generated her great admiration for him: "Clarkson, Thomas, 1760 – 1846, perhaps Abolition of the African Slave Trade (1808), or more probably Life of William Penn (1813)”  Chapman does not explain why he believes the later book of Clarkson’s would be the more probable reference.

There matters lie until 1942, when Sheila Kay-Smith and G.B. Stern intone that “the shadow which has fallen over Mansfield Park is nothing less than the Evangelical Revival”. (40) They get this idea from an ironically improbable source---Mary Crawford.

In Chapter 40, an impatient Mary sarcastically explains Edmund’s delayed arrival: "There may be some old woman at Thornton Lacey to be converted." (394) Then an agitated Mary varies and expands upon that theme in Chapter 47, this time directing her sarcasm at Edmund: “At this rate you will soon reform everybody at Mansfield and Thornton Lacey; and when I hear of you next, it may be as a celebrated preacher in some great society of Methodists, or as a missionary into foreign parts.”     (458) 

Smith and Stern do well to realize that Mary’s jibes at Edmund are significant subtextual clues, and much has been made since, pro and con, of their speculation that Austen became an Evangelical in 1810. But, what concerns us here is that they fail to ask whether there might be a second meaning of those clues, beyond the purely religious meaning they perceive.

What they do instead is akin to discovering an oblique reference to Martin Luther King in a novel set in the Sixties, inferring therefrom only that the author became a Southern Baptist, but never asking whether he also marched in Selma. The Evangelicals were the leading lights of the English abolitionist movement, and few, then or today, would have known Clarkson’s name had he never led that great struggle.

During the next twenty five years, the former silence reemerges, but those claims have not been for naught, because Chapman makes subtle changes in his appendix note, which is reproduced below exactly as it appears in his 1955 edition:  “Clarkson, Thomas, 1760-1846, abolitionist. JA may refer to his Life of Penn 1813 (too late?) or to his Abolition of the …Slave Trade 1808”  (221)

Chapman now describes Clarkson as an abolitionist. Plus, he downgrades Life of Penn from priority of likelihood, and also suggests that it may have been published too late to have been read by Austen before January, 1813. We read between his carefully worded lines that he has read Mary’s jibes, and the gloss thereon by Smith and Stern, and has detected that second, antislavery meaning in them that they did not. However, he seems too cautious or ambivalent to dispense with the Penn safety net.

The Slavery Subtext Unveiled, Then Reclothed

 The pioneer who first publishes an explicit claim of slavery subtext in Mansfield Park is Avrom Fleishman. His 1967 article ends the 153-year dead silence, and initiates the process of finally answering Fanny’s question. He begins by placing Mansfield Park in the historical context of a “crisis” or “turning point in the gentry’s fortunes.” (15) Per Fleishman, Mansfield Park depends on Antiguan income, and Sir Thomas is Antiguan. Fleishman then writes: “And if a question about off-stage action may be admitted, what does Sir Thomas do in Antigua to make secure the sources of his income?”  (16)

  Fleishman goes on to provide economic history and claims that Antigua was an exception to the rule of absentee ownership that prevailed elsewhere in the British West Indies, but that it had just been adversely impacted by the abolition of the slave trade. He wonders whether it is economic necessity that drives Sir Thomas “to improve conditions for the slaves,” and he believes that the “strange business. . .in America” that Tom mentions to Dr. Grant (Mansfield Park, 119) is a reference to Sir Thomas’s crisis in Antigua. (17)

Fleishman combines the best ideas of Smith, Stern and Chapman when he points out the importance of Austen’s familiarity with Clarkson’s The Abolition of the African Slave Trade. He then takes the step that Chapman did not, arguing that the Evangelically-driven abolitionist movement must have been very much in Austen’s awareness as she wrote this novel. Regarding Sir Thomas’s startling display of affection for Fanny, Fleishman writes that “it is inescapably significant that she is the only member of the family interested in hearing from him about the slave trade.”   (17)

Fleishman thus presents persuasive and unequivocal advocacy for Sir Thomas as absentee plantation owner, and for Clarkson’s abolitionism on Austen’s radar screen. However, as valuable as these explicit insights are, his indirect implications are even better.  His approach implies that there can be offstage, unreported action in an Austen novel worthy of serious thematic consideration. There is enormous power in this approach, and, so energized, he goes on to achieve what seem to me to be four distinct insights:

1. Sir Thomas’s “bullying” (14) of Fanny—this is the first conceptualization, however indistinct, of the allegory of Fanny as slave and Sir Thomas as master, which Kirkham will make explicit in 1983, and is fundamental to much thinking ever since about Austen’s slavery references.

2. Sir Thomas’s children as “bitter fruit” (15). This is a prescient grasping of the pervasive allusive import of  Paradise Lost in the novel, the image of bitter fruit being specifically and ironically tagged by Dr. Grant’s deriding Mrs. Norris’s Moor Park apricots as “insipid” and inedible (Mansfield Park 54) .

3. “The large and airy rooms” (16) of Mansfield Park-- the central symbolism of the magical power of English air stated in the slave-freeing 1772 Mansfield Judgment.

4. Fleishman’s quoting D.W. Harding, who in turn is clearly riffing on Mary,  about Austen’s intentions as a writer: “Her object is not missionary” (18).  Mary’s mocking portrayals of Edmund as a missionary comprise one instance among many in Austen’s novels in which Austen ventriloquistically uses a character as a mouthpiece for her reflections, in this case on her own role as a writer in morally sick Regency Era England. Does Mary speak of Austen? Harding thinks not, but others like Smith and Stern might disagree.

Fleishman’s article fertilizes the examination of slavery subtext in Mansfield Park, but its gestation will be long and difficult. Despite the wealth of his radically new ideas about slavery in the novel, no commentator will, until 1982, respond positively to him. However, he does, in the interim, have a few particular, adverse respondents. 

Writing in 1969, B.C. Southam never acknowledges Fleishman by name, but seems to be reacting to Fleishman’s provocative imagining of Sir Thomas as absentee Antiguan planter. Whatever prompts Southam to check Vere Langford Oliver’s obscure 1896 history of Antigua, it is fortunate, because it is where Southam finds the name of George Austen, mentioned in 1760 and 1788 entries, as trustee of the Haddons plantation in Antigua owned by James Langford Nibbs. That appears to be the same Mr. Nibbs whose portrait hung at Steventon, and whom Chapman was unable to identify even as late as his 1952 edition of the Letters.

 This is the first mention in print of the Austen family’s Antiguan connection, a dramatic validation of Fleishman’s ideas. However, Southam promptly minimizes the significance of his own discovery:

“These facts are trivial and add nothing to the meaning of Mansfield Park. But they do enable us to see Jane Austen’s reliance upon the known world and her fond habit of introducing family associations into her fiction.”  (19-20)

Southam’s words echo Fanny Price’s letter to Mary (“The rest of your note I know means nothing”) (   ) and Fanny’s struggle to shield herself from Henry Crawford’s powerful and dangerous charm. There is a finality to his dismissal of slavery subtext, but, to paraphrase Blake on Milton, perhaps Southam was of the party and didn’t know it, because his later words on this subject--twenty six years later—will evidence a very different point of view.

In 1975, A. Walton Litz explicitly rebuts Fleishman: “Surely if Jane Austen had thought them [details of the English colonial slavery crisis] crucial she would have included them in her description and dialogue.” (678) Litz explicitly rejects Fleishman’s contention that Jane Austen was dropping hints to contemporaries sophisticated about history and current events.

And in 1977, David Monaghan seems to echoes Litz, in passing, as he rebuts Kaye-Smith’s claims of Austen as evangelical :

“Fanny’s questioning of Sir Thomas about slavery cannot be taken as evidence of Jane Austen’s sympathy with the abolition campaign because it tells us no more than that she was aware of the problem….The subject [of whether Austen was alluding to Evangelicalism in Mansfield Park] can be illuminated only if we begin with coherent statements of the religious and social positions adopted by the Clapham Sect [the key Evangelical abolitionists, to be discussed later in this article] and by Jane Austen in Mansfield Park”  (219)

Very Strange Business in Antigua

Things do not heat up again until Frank Gibbon, in 1982, starts from Southam’s kernel of discovery about Reverend Austen’s Antigua connection, and adds to it a wealth of well-organized data about what turns out to be an extensive and decades-long Austen-Nibbs family connection. Gibbon’s facts go far beyond the simple trusteeship first described by Southam. He recites that Southam’s “odd little item of information has lain buried ever since” but then dryly suggests that “the role of the Nibbs family is not quite so trivial a factor as Mr. Southam believes.” (299) Gibbon does not merely show the real lives of the Nibbses, he shows several major parallels between their lives and the lives of characters in Mansfield Park. He does not cite Fleishman’s discoveries, but surely they’ve inspired him, as he broadens them to include private family allusions that seem to only have significance for those who know the Austen and Nibbs family histories.

Gibbon introduces several other noteworthy insights. He explicitly connects the slavery subtext of Mansfield Park and Emma, when he mentions Austen’s use of Bristol, a main slave-trade port, as the hometown of the Hawkinses and Sucklings. Gibbons also and infers “that the Sucklings were retired West Indian merchants with at least an indirect financial interest in the slave trade.” (303)

He is the first to bring Mrs. Norris into the slavery mix. He suggests that Austen “possibly nam[ed] Mrs. Norris after its [Clarkson’s History’s] most obnoxious character.” (303) He does not try to match all attributes of Mrs. Norris to Robert Norris, her slaver namesake (who will be discussed later), but recognizes that Austen’s art of allusion is too flexible for that. Gibbon’s only error seems to be that of not grasping all the implications of his discoveries. Had he done so, he might have noticed other character (or even place) names which alluded to other names prominent in the world of slavery, which will be described in my companion article.  

Gibbon expands Fleishman’s allegorical implication: “[Sir Thomas’s] estate must be handled by managers, who, as a class, were about as efficient and kindly as Mrs. Norris turned out to be in her managerial role during Sir Thomas’s absence from the Park.”  (302) In so doing, Gibbon, like Fleishman fifteen years earlier, comes close to realizing that even the genteel life at Mansfield Park is itself an allegory for a metaphorical plantation, where the “slaves” pick spouses, instead of sugar cane, at the whim of their overseers.  

Lastly, he takes a deep dive into the murkiest depths of the subtext of the novel when he writes “Jane Austen would certainly have been aware of the likelihood of a family such as her fictional Bertrams having numerous mulatto relatives in Antigua…” (304-5)   

Gibbon’s ideas, surprisingly, receive little critical reaction, and the ship of slavery subtext study seems stalled once again. However, things are finally about to change.  

Traffic in Female Flesh

Margaret Kirkham does not cite Fleishman, Gibbon or even Southam, but her chapter on Mansfield Park nonetheless is a turning point in the study of its oblique slavery references. First and foremost, she trumpets Austen’s application of the metaphor of slavery to the condition of women in England, famously championed by Mary Wollstonecraft who died thirteen years before Mansfield Park. “The resemblance between Wollstonecraft and Austen as feminine moralists is so striking that it seems extraordinary that it has not always been recognized, but that is to leave out of account the Great Wollstonecraft Scandal of 1798.” (48) That last refers to the scandal which polarized women in England and seriously set back the cause of women’s rights.

Kirkham is also the first to refer to the Mansfield Judgment as an allusive source for the novel, and to link them both to Wollstonecraft:

“The title of Mansfield Park is allusive and ironic, but the allusion in this case is not to philosophical fiction like Emile or to the theatre, but to a legal judgment, generally regarded as having ensured that slavery could not be held to be in accordance with the manners and customs of the English….Jane Austen follows an analogy used in [Wollstonecraft’s] Vindication between the slaves in the colonies and women, especially married women, at home.” (116-7) 

In summarizing Clarkson’s book, which would have been an important source for Austen in its detailed description of the Somerset case (decided by the Mansfield Judgment),  Kirkham briefly but indelibly inscribes the Mansfield Judgment on the map of Mansfield Park scholarship.  Kirkham also breaks new ground when she notes that  “at the house of her brother Edward Knight, she [Austen] met Lord Mansfield’s niece on a number of occasions,” (118) thereby establishing an Austen personal connection to Lord Mansfield’s family, the significance of which is addressed in the companion article.

Finally, she shows how the actual words (both proper and ordinary names) of  Mansfield Park constitute a language of slavery--the “captivation” of Miss “Ward” of “Huntingdon”--and of law--the “air” of Mansfield Park (118) echoing the famous words of the Mansfield Judgment. Kirkham shows a sharp sensitivity to Austen’s creativity in detecting the subliminal aura of slavery into the novel.

Although Gibbon and Kirkham both blaze new paths, Kirkham is the one who ignites a fire, perhaps bcause her frank feminism is timely at that moment in history, with the result that this short section of her book has been cited in most of the hundred-plus articles that have addressed this issue since 1983.

The Discreet Charm of Edward Said And The Feminist Wave

As the Eighties progress, the slavery subtext begins to appear regularly in print, mostly pertaining to the feminist metaphor, but the discourse about Austen and slavery is completely altered by the entrance of Edward Said. Per Fraiman, “Mansfield Park takes relatively little space in the vastness of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993), yet one reviewer after another has seized on Austen’s novel as emblematic of the cultural tradition Said shows to be inextricable from European colonialism.”  (805)

This is good news and bad news. A lot of people who have never given a second thought to slavery in Mansfield Park become aware of the issue, and the novel begins to be more widely viewed in a new light. However, as stated earlier, the slavery subtext becomes entangled with Said’s ideology, such that those who oppose his ideology use it to deny the existence of the slavery subtext altogether.

What did Said actually say about Mansfield Park? I quote at length, because of the singular impact of his enigmatic words on the study of the even more enigmatic shadow of slavery in Mansfield Park:

It would be silly to expect Jane Austen to treat slavery with anything like the passion of an abolitionist or a newly liberated slave….Yes, Austen belonged to a slave-owning society, but do we therefore jettison her novels as so many trivial exercises in aesthetic frumpery? Not at all, I would argue, if we….make connections, to deal with as much of the evidence as possible, fully and actually, to read what is there or is not there…Mansfield Park is a rich work in that its aesthetic intellectual complexity requires that longer and slower analysis that is also required by its geographical problematic, a novel based in an England relying for the maintenance of its style on a Caribbean island. . .But precisely because Austen is so summary in one context, so provocatively rich in the other, precisely because of that imbalance, we are able to move in on the novel, reveal and accentuate the interdependence scarcely mentioned on its brilliant pages. A lesser work wears its historical affiliation more plainly. …..Mansfield Park encodes experiences and does not simply repeat them.  (366)

            With a poet’s voice, Said captures subtle aspects of Jane Austen’s mystery-generating art. It will be very hard, but also very rewarding, work, to struggle to grasp the experiences encoded beneath the surface of the novel. Whatever else his impact, Said’s  penetration is undeniable.

In 1993, a new element is introduced by Maaja Stewart, who adds to the catalogue of historical antecedents of Mansfield Park two fictional stories by Inchbald and Edgeworth, respectively, which Stewart sees as congruent with the slavery subtext of the novel. Here is her metaphorical reading of Lady Bertram as a planter’s wife:

Lady Bertram is further mirrored in Maria Edgeworth’s portraits of these wives in The Grateful Negro: ‘Mrs. Jeffries was a languid beauty, or rather a languid fine lady who had been a beauty, and who spent all that part of the day which was not devoted to the pleasures of the table, or to reclining on a couch, in dress.’  (129-30) 

Stewart’s breakthrough to an entirely new domain of the slavery subtext, and beginning to flesh out the Bertram family portrait in the slavery album, is significant. However, she fails to realize that the resemblance that Lady Bertram bears to Mrs. Jeffries in The Grateful Negro is no coincidence.

In the same vein, Deirdre Coleman and Moira Ferguson, two other influential Nineties feminist commentators write about the complex interface between antislavery and feminism in Jane Austen’s and other novels.

Antiracism and Feminism Then & Now

The ideas of Kirkham, Stewart, Coleman and Ferguson, as well as those of Fleishman two decades earlier, illustrate the crucial role that contemporary politics then and now have played in all this. Austen’s creation of an elaborate slavery subtext in Mansfield Park seems to have been an outgrowth of the abolitionist movement’s galvanization of early women’s rights advocates such as Wollstonecraft. The modern decoding of her slavery subtext seems to have been an outgrowth of the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century, and its galvanization of modern feminism. 

The Return of Southam & Other Recent Highlights

Brian Southam returns to slavery in Mansfield Park in 1995 with a bang. As we read his “The Silence of the Bertrams”, we see a shift from denial to acceptance. Southam now takes as given that the Nibbs family allusion in Mansfield Park is intentional, although he remains enigmatic as to exactly what sort of meaning in the novel might be implied by that allusion: 

A silence not unlike the ‘dead silence’ at Mansfield Park may have begun to gather over Mr. Austen’s West Indian connections—connections which extended deeper into the household. . .Like Sir Thomas Bertram, Mr. Nibbs had a spendthrift elder son, James Junior; and like Tom Bertram, James junior was taken off to Antigua by his father to detach him from his ‘unwholesome connections’. (14)

            The greatest portion of Southam’s article provides a welcome and extensive analysis of the chronology of Sir Thomas’s trip to Antigua in the context of world politics, particularly involving the colonial slavery system. Surprisingly, he fails to mention Gibbon, but perhaps more surprising, he not only mentions Edward Said, but even pays tribute to Said’s vision of Austen’s global perspective.

The Present  

In the last decade, there have been a number of articles on the subject of slavery in Mansfield Park. It remains as lively an area as any in Austen studies, although radically new ground is not broken in them. Here are two highlights.

In 2000, Elaine Jordan follows Stewart’s lead in her application of Antiguan patterns of behavior to the actual characters of the Bertrams. She sees Sir Thomas as a nouveau riche from the West Indies trying to buy himself legitimacy and gravitas, but she also extends Gibbon’s 1982 insights in one intriguing respect: “James Langston Nibbs. . .took his son and heir, named after himself, out to Antigua to cure his extravagances in England. Unlike Tom Bertram, this son did not return. His half-brother, Christopher, a slave, also died in Antigua.”   (40)  .

            Moreland Perkins, in 2005, convincingly establishes the depth of the allusions by Austen to her “loves” Clarkson and Pasley, but, even more important, Perkins looks all the way back to Chapman and Fleishman, and makes an open-and-shut case for Austen’s profound ambivalence between Pasley’s strength-through-empire theories and Clarkson’s abolitionist eloquence.

In The Opposition:

There are still those who continue to deny and/or limit the significance of slavery subtext in the novel. The most articulate and prominent is John Wiltshire. In 2003, he draws a bead on what he calls the “postcolonial criticism” of Said and Rozema. He asserts that the postcolonial critic “actively colonises the novel by placing more value on the ‘history’ within which the text is putatively embedded than on the artifact of the novel itself.” (Decolonising Mansfield Park 317), and that Rozema’s film is  “an attack on colonialism, it is itself a neo-colonialist enterprise, the promotion of ‘Jane Austen’.”  (Recreating Jane Austen 136) Wiltshire gives alternative interpretations for the association of the names Mansfield and Norris with slavery in the novel. But even he  allows a metaphorical reading of slavery applied to women in England.

Rozema’s Film Adaptation

Chronological order has been breached slightly to devote the last words hereof to Patricia Rozema’s 1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park. Its impact on perceptions of  slavery subtext in the novel cannot be overstated. She foregrounds the issue of slavery for the first time in the awareness of people who have never read a Jane Austen novel, and has heated up the controversy. Rozema both depicted slavery subtext implied in the novel, and also frankly wove in her own inventions as well, radically altering the character of Fanny Price, and those two creative decisions have often been conflated by critics. Just as the brilliance of Said’s suggestions have been overshadowed by his ideology, so too Rozema’s sensitive grasp of Austen’s slavery subtext has been widely dismissed as merely Rozema’s own inventions.

Despite all of this, the film is a milestone in the history of understanding slavery references in Mansfield Park,  with its horrific depictions of slavery and its practice by Sir Thomas, giving painfully vivid reality to Clarkson’s and others’s written descriptions, Rozema also brilliantly encapsulates Austen’s likely intentions when she states  "I actually believe that Mansfield Park was Austen’s meditation on servitude and slavery . . . She was kind of exploring what it is to treat humans as property, women, blacks, and the poor especially." (audio commentary) With her film, the slavery subtext of Mansfield Park  goes public, nearly two centuries after publication.  

Conclusion:

That completes the history of the slavery subtext in Mansfield Park up to publication of this article. With the perspective of this detailed history, we can see how, and how far, our collective understanding of Austen’s slavery subtext has grown, even though the ending of this history is, like the ending of the novel itself, not decisive.The  rest of the story of slavery subtext in Mansfield Park remains to be told.

Works Cited

Austen, Jane.  Jane Austen’s Letters. Ed. Deirdre Le Faye 3^rd ed., Oxford: OUP, 1995.

_________.  Jane Austen: Selected Letters. Ed. Chapman 1st ed., Oxford: OUP, 1932.

_________.  Jane Austen: Selected Letters. Ed. Chapman 2nd ed., Oxford: OUP, 1955.

_________.  Mansfield Park.  Ed. R. W. Chapman 3rd ed., Oxford: OUP, 1934.

_________. “Opinions: Collected by Jane Austen” in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 1811-1870. Ed. Southam,  London: Routledge, 1979.

Clarkson, Thomas. History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament. 1808.  Ed. John W. Parker. A New Edition, with Prefatory Remarks on the Subsequent Abolition of Slavery, London: John W. Parker, 1839.

Coleman, Deirdre. "Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Women's Protest Writing in the 1790's", ELH Vol. 61, 341-62, Baltimore: JHUP, 1994.

Edgeworth, Maria. “The Grateful Negro” in Tales and Novels, Volume 2, London: Baldwin & Cradock, 1832.

Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. 1873. Ed. Carole Jones. Hare: Wordsworth Classics,  2003                  

Ferguson, Moira.  “Mansfield Park: Slavery, Colonialism, and Gender” in Oxford Literary Review, Volume 13, Oxford: OUP, 1991  .

Fleishman, Avrom.  “Mansfield Park in its Time” in Nineteenth Century Fiction, Vol. 22. No. 1. Berkeley: UOCP, 1967.

Fraiman, Susan. “Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and Imperialism” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, 805-823, Chicago: UOC, 1995.

Gibbon, Frank.  “The Antiguan Connection: Some New Light on Mansfield Park” in Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 2, Oxford: OUP, 1982.

Jordan, Elaine.  “Jane Austen goes to the seaside: Sanditon, English identity and the ‘West Indian schoolgirl’ “ in The Postcolonial Jane Austen, Ed. You-Me Park & Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, 39-41, London: Routledge, 2000. 

Kirkham, Margaret. Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction, Brighton: Harvester Press Ltd. 1983 .

Litz, A. Walton. “Recollecting Jane Austen” in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 1, No. 3, Chicago: UOCP, 1975  

Monaghan, David. “Mansfield Park and Evangelicalism: A Reassessment”, Nineteenth Century Fiction, Vol. 33, No. 2, Berkeley: UOCP, 1978

Pasley, Charles.  Essay on The Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire.  1810. 4^th ed., 1812. Re-issued (with author given as Major-General Sir C. W. Pasley), London: John Weale, 1847.

Perkins, Moreland.  “Mansfield Park and Austen’s Reading on Slavery and Imperial Warfare” Persuasions Online, Vol. 26 No. 1, 2005

Rozema, Patricia. “Director/screenwriter’s audio commentary” on DVD of Mansfield Park, Miramax, 2000.

Said, Edward. “Jane Austen and Empire” in The Edward Said Reader, 347-367,  NY: Vintage, 2000. 

Southam, Brian.  “The Silence of the Bertrams: Slavery and the Chronology of Mansfield Park“ in Times Literary Supplement, 13-14 in 17 February 1995 issue.

___________. “Jane Austen and Antigua”, Jane Austen Society Report 1969.

Steffes, Michael.   “Slavery and Mansfield Park: The Historical And Biographical Context” in English Language Notes. Vol. 34, Boulder: UOCP, 1996    

Smith, Sheila-Kay & Stern, G.B. Speaking of Jane Austen, London: Cassell & Co., 1943

Stewart, Maaja.  “The Shadow Behind the Country House: West Indian Slavery and Female Virtue in Mansfield Park” in Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions, 110-136, Athens: UOGP, 1993.

Wiltshire, John.  “Decolonising Mansfield Park” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 53 No. 4, 303-321, Oxford: OUP, 2003.

______________. Recreating Jane Austen, Cambridge: CUP, 2001.