A very pretty sort of young lady

In Chapter 32, when the Eltons return the visit which Emma and Harriet quickly paid at the vicarage to welcome the newlyweds to Highbury, we have our first, hilarious acquaintance with the formidable Mrs. Elton. But what I just noticed today for the first time was something Mr. Woodhouse says to Emma as soon as they begin "debriefing" the visit after the Eltons have left Hartfield, and Emma has had time to chill out. Here’s what the kindly old gentleman has to say to Emma:

""Well, my dear," he deliberately began, "considering we never saw her before, she seems a very pretty sort of young lady...."

What exactly does Mr. Woodhouse mean by this? Bizarre as his thinking often is, he always (to the best of my recollection) expresses his bizarre thoughts clearly, even to the point of punctiliousness. But here, he seems to have left out a sentence or two of explanation as to the connection between the first and second clauses in that sentence. The structure of that sentence, and in particular the word “considering”, sets us up for the notion that he was surprised that Mrs. Elton was very pretty and young, BECAUSE he and Emma had never seen her before!

But why exactly would his and Emma’s never having seen Mrs. Elton before have made it less likely (or MORE likely, for that matter) that Mrs. Elton would turn out, upon first viewing, to be a "very pretty sort of young lady"? It’s as absurd as if he had said “considering that it’s Tuesday, she seems a very pretty sort of young lady…” He is absurd and Mr. Magooish, but he’s not that absurd!

Any thoughts as to what he means? Is he implying that there was some expectation that Mrs. Elton would NOT be pretty or young, based on some OTHER factor? But then, what would that other factor be?

Elton’s prior track record in the courtship department, if known at all to Mr. Woodhouse, would suggest that Elton has an eye for very pretty young girls. After all, we know that he had his eye on Emma, and Emma thought he had his eye on the very pretty Harriet Smith.

Or would it be that Elton was not a rich man, and therefore he would not command a pretty young bride? But, unless I am forgetting something, we have no previous (or subsequent) hint in the novel to suggest that Mr. Woodhouse does not like or respect or admire Mr. Elton, or think he’s a great catch .

So why would Mr. Woodhouse have had an expectation that Mrs. Elton would NOT be pretty and young? I began to search around earlier in Chapter 32 to see if I could find some additional textual clues to help me out, and, sure enough, I immediately noticed that the beginning of Chapter 32 is unmistakably connected to Mr. Woodhouse's comment:

"Mrs. Elton was first seen at church: but though devotion might be interrupted, curiosity could not be satisfied by a bride in a pew, and it must be left for the visits in form which were then to be paid, to settle whether she were very pretty indeed, or only rather pretty, or not pretty at all."

So JA wants us to know that it has already been a topic of gossipy conversation, not only generally in Highbury but even between Emma and her father, as to where Mrs. Elton falls on the prettiness spectrum. And that seems promising. Is there some implication that Emma, while speculating with her father about Mr. Elton’s bride, has been less than complimentary in her comments? We know that Emma was unnerved at the rapidity with which Elton found his bride, and it would fit perfectly with Emma’s character for her to have spun a fantasy or two about how hideous and old Mrs. Elton must be, for her to be available at the drop of a hat when Elton desperately saved face and recovered from the devastation of Emma’s rejection (or so Emma’s fantasy would go).

We actually have already witnessed Emma’s dissing of Robert Martin’s clownishness, and later on we will witeness her dissing of Miss Bates’s volubility. For Emma to have trashed Mrs. Elton’s looks to her father, before seeing her, would be par for the course.

And so Mr. Woodhouse’s comment would be the tail-end of earlier unreported conversations on that subject (and how subtle of JA to do this—it reminds me a lot of the way Shakespeare would often begin scenes in the middle of a conversation, and leave it to the audience to figure out what was discussed BEFORE the play began!)

But that introductory passage in Chapter 32 raises fresh questions for me. Why exactly could curiosity NOT be satisfied by a bride in a pew? Is it that it was difficult at church to get a good look at Mrs. Elton? Wouldn’t she have been in close proximity to the other parishioners, before during and after the service? It’s not like they were worshipping in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, it was presumably a small country church, a very intimate setting. And note that Mr. Woodhouse did NOT say that it was merely that they did not get a good look at her in church, he is very clear that he believes that neither he NOR Emma has seen Mrs. Elton at all. It’s quite puzzling to me.

That leads me also the question of whether Mr. Woodhouse and Emma had not seen Mrs. Elton in church because they had not gone to church when she made her “debut” there! But a quick search of the word “church” led me to the following passage in Chapter 16, where it is clearly stated that bad weather gives Emma a perfect excuse not to go to church right after the unpleasantness with Mr. Elton in the carriage. So it seems clear, by negative implication, that Emma did indeed attend church regularly on other days when weather did permit. But isn’t it also equally suggested that Mr. Woodhouse NEVER attended church?:

“The weather was most favourable for her; though Christmas-day, she could not go to church. Mr. Woodhouse would have been miserable had his daughter attempted it, and she was therefore safe from either exciting or receiving unpleasant and most unsuitable ideas. The ground covered with snow, and the atmosphere in that unsettled state between frost and thaw, which is of all others the most unfriendly for exercise, every morning beginning in rain or snow, and every evening setting in to freeze, she was for many days a most honourable prisoner. No intercourse with Harriet possible but by note; no church for her on Sunday any more than on Christmas-day; and no need to find excuses for Mr. Elton's absenting himself.”

So could THAT be the explanation? If Mr. Woodhouse did not attend church, and let Emma go by herself, then perhaps when he says “WE never saw her before”, it’s a kind of unconscious “royal we”, consistent with all his many other narcissisms, and it merely means that if he has not seen Mrs. Elton, then he just assumes Emma has not seen her either?

But then again, as I said, I have this distinct impression of Mr. Woodhouse being very precise in his expression of his ideas (that’s part of what makes him such a memorable character, he is not stupid, just very very very strange). And so I think it would be a pretty big leap to argue that all the times he assumes that Emma shares his feelings about marriage, or his (imagined or real) illnesses and frailties, permits us to infer that he also goes so far as to assume that Emma (physically) sees only what he sees as well!

I just took a quick tour of Austen online sites and Google to see if anyone else has ever noticed any of these questions, and I see that the very discerning Richard Jenkyns in his excellent A Fine Brush on Ivory did address some of them at ppg. 159-60. He notes first that Mr. Woodhouse tends to describe pretty much EVERY young woman he sees, whether a servant or Jane Fairfax or Mrs. Elton, as being… pretty! But Jenkyns also catches the oddness of Mr. Woodhouse’s strange sentence, which first caught my own eye, and has this to say about it:

“…There is in this a mixture of imperceptiveness and solipsism…a person has no characteristics until she is before Mr. Woodhouse’s eyes…”

So Jenkyns comes down on the side of Mr. Woodhouse being Mr. Magoo. But, as I have questioned the standard reading of Miss Bates, so too I see unmistakable signs that we are also meant to see Mr. Woodhouse in a more complicated light.

There must be other passages in the novel which bear on the above questions, but I am tuckered out from this round, so I throw this out to you and ask for help in sorting this out.

What say ye all?

Cheers,
Arnie

The Food of Love

I was just thinking about the passage in Chapter 9 of P&P in which Darcy famously opines "I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love," and then Lizzy punctures his argument with the wickedly satirical notion that some poetry may starve "a slight, thin sort of inclination". It just occurred to me that this is a particularly great example of how complexly and sophisticatedly JA alludes to Shakespeare in her fiction.

It has often been noted that Darcy is, obviously, paraphrasing Duke Orsino, who, at the very beginning of Twelfth Night, says, "If music is the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die. "

Most Austen critics have either ignored this allusion, and the handful who have taken note of it have not made much of it. The sterling exception is John Wiltshire, whose Recreating Jane Austen has been lauded for, inter alia, its interpretations of JA's Shakespearean allusions, and rightly so. His discussion, at p. 71 of his book, of Darcy's and Lizzy's exchange, is perhaps the most eloquent and persuasive of Wiltshire's elegant and insightful criticism, and is worth quoting at length:

"The dialogue is used to suggest how the participants have rather more in common with each other than they know....When Elizabeth says, 'I wonder who first discovered...?' she is putting lightly a historical or cultural question and it is this hint that Darcy is able to respond to with his play on Shakespeare's line. He in fact feeds her this line so that--at his rather tense moment in front of her relations--she can go on to cap her earlier comment. But it's also notable that Elizabeth's remark expresses a refreshing skepticism about the relation of true feeling to literary, or received expression. So whilst the exchange is 'feeding off' both of Shakespeare's comedies [earlier, Wiltshire has referred to Lizzy as playing "Beatrice" from Much Ado About Nothing], it is simultaneously questioning whether rehearsing the language of another can ever reliably express true feeling.
As Marianne Novy comments '[w]hile Austen is making fun of cultural uses of Shakespearean quotations, she is also employing a technique rather like his own: both of them include and parody ideas of love associated with literary convention'....Darcy and Elizabeth are playing together in the presence of Shakespeare. That is to say their freedom (or perhaps it is only Elizabeth's freedom?) to play with Shakespeare is attained through Shakespeare but is in no way dependent on him. The passage is offering a kind of metacritical commentary on what it is performing, suggesting the idea of literature (or at any rate of writing) as nourishment of one's feelings, and critiquing the notion of feelings needing the bolstering or mediation of writing. JA's relation to Shakespeare seems often to involve simultaneously resumption and mockery or scepticism, trashing, even..."

I endorse everything Wiltshire says in that carefully articulated formulation--it may sound at first like jargony lit crit, but it's really not, and it's well worth reading slowly to savor each of his points. But in his insightful unpacking of JA's complex layering of allusive meanings, he (and Novy) have missed the most basic one of all, the one that connects what is actually happening in the action of P&P at that moment to what is happening in the action at the beginning of Twelfth Night, and the one that knits everything together.

Think about what Duke Orsino is saying at that moment--we find out very soon that he is sick with unrequited love for Olivia, and so he is spinning out the irrational poetical fantasy that the fire of emotion generated by listening to music will somehow, paradoxically, extinguish the flame of his love. Sort of like the real life technique of fighting wild fires by lighting fires around them.

And isn't that EXACTLY the mode Darcy is in at that moment of the story! He has been captured by Lizzy's fine eyes, but he is so deeply ambivalent that he has antagonized Lizzy, who has taken several potshots at him already, and so he, too, wishes to extinguish his own attraction to Lizzy. And, being the intellectual snob that he is, rather than reciting poetry of his own (and perhaps he has actually written some, in private), he elects instead to take the safe route and QUOTE some high-quality, tried-and-true poetry (and Duke Orsino's famous line is, after all, written in blank verse, Shakespeare's preferred form of poetic expression).

And, predictably, his pompous paraphrase of Shakespeare has the effect, as Wiltshire suggests, of acting as a set-up line for Lizzy's punch (and it is a sort of verbal punch she throws at Darcy) line. Almost as though he enjoys taking her punches, because at least he is the focus of her attention at that moment--just like Beatrice and Benedick play the same game over the course of at least half of Much Ado About Nothing.

But (and here is MY punch line)--the best part of JA's having Darcy allude to Duke Orsino is that the "food" which feeds Darcy's infatuation for Lizzy, and finally causes it to blossom into "love", is none other than Lizzy's playing of MUSIC at Rosings! That's where JA lands the plane of this allusion to Duke Orsino, undoing Darcy's original paraphrase and restoring the original metaphor of music, rather than poetry, in Chapter 31:

"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 would 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."
Here they were interrupted by Lady Catherine, who called out to know what they were talking of. Elizabeth immediately began playing again. Lady Catherine approached, and, after listening for a few minutes, said to Darcy --
"Miss Bennet would not play at all amiss if she practised more, and could have the advantage of a London master. She has a very good notion of fingering, though her taste is not equal to Anne's. Anne would have been a delightful performer, had her health allowed her to learn."
Elizabeth looked at Darcy to see how cordially he assented to his cousin's praise; but NEITHER AT THAT MOMENT NOR AT ANY OTHER COULD SHE DISCERN ANY SYMPTOM OF LOVE; and from the whole of his behaviour to Miss De Bourgh she derived this comfort for Miss Bingley, that he might have been just as likely to marry her, had she been his relation."

On the one hand, we see that music has indeed been the food of love, between Lizzy and Darcy. But JA can't resist a final wrinkle, by depicting Lizzy, ever the empiricist, as making field observations, and Lizzy concludes from her data collecting that Anne's music has most definitely NOT been the "food of love" to "surfeit" Darcy's "appetite", but instead has been (like Anne's own sad self) too "slight" and "thin" for the task.

Now that I've pointed it out, isn't this an exquisite structure created by JA, linking, with a rich metaphorical twine, two scenes in Chapters 9 and 31, respectively, via the seemingly throwaway paraphrasing of Duke Orsino by Darcy.

And some critics have actually wondered how well JA really knew Shakespeare! The above allusion illustrates that one generation after Samuel Johnson wrote his "great" volume of Shakespeare criticism, JA was quietly writing some of the greatest "criticism" of Shakespeare's writing that has EVER been written, and was content to have it be understood only by a tiny handful of close readers.

Cheers, Arnie

LUCY FERrars's HELL-BORN Cousins

"These cousins may be mentioned in Volume 3, the chapter where Elinor encounters Nancy Steele in Kensington Gardens and Nancy refers to the Richardsons as people she is staying with. I'm not sure that it's specified the Richardsons are these cousins from Holborn."

Thank you very much for your reply, Ellen, indeed you zeroed in on the very passage in Ch. 38 where we have several references both to the Holborn cousins and to the Richardsons. As I read that passage, I think it is clear from Anne Steele's speaking about BOTH the Richardsons AND her cousins in the same sentence on two occasions, that the Richardsons are NOT Anne Steele's cousins, but are instead a family closely connected to those cousins. Otherwise, Anne would not only be a gossipping, inane ditz, she would be so MONSTROUSLY stupid as to TWICE refer to the same people in two different ways in the same sentence. Anne even refers at one point to her cousin RICHARD--which seems JA's very sly way of confirming that he is not a Richardson, because then his name would be the ridiculous "Richard Richardson", and why on earth would JA want to even hint at such a silly name!


"I offer the idea that Austen has not worked out the details of these outer rings of the world of S&S -- who the cousins are, for example; rather she has imagined these cousins sheerly as the sort of people who rent in Holborn. It's probably a snobbish slur (in effect). Austen's implied narrator looks down on the Steeles; both are given a language that stigmatizes them; Mrs Ferrars would much prefer even Elinor (comparatively broke as she is) to Lucy. Despite the venom (justified) Austen's portrait of Mrs Ferrars reeks with, we see here she did not altogether repudiate Mrs Ferrars's values."

With all due respect, Ellen, I think you are completely offbase---as my Subject Line for this message suggests, I realized yesterday after I sent my message asking for further info re Lucy's cousins, that all of the above is connected to the "Lucy Ferrars" ==> Lucifer allusion to Paradise Lost and the Bible, which I discovered 5 years ago, but as to which I am STILL finding additional wrinkles every so often. Please read along to see the zigzag, exciting path I took in realizing this.

My starting point was my hunch, based on successful hunches in the past, that the reference to Lucy's Holborn cousins was not gratuitous. Serendipity almost always seems to come my way because I believe in my hunches, and also because I am so persistent in my searching of Internet resources, following my hunches. It is one of my fundamental tenets of Austen interpretation that ALL the character and place names have multiple, but covert, allusive meanings.

So I searched "Holborn" in the Janeites and Austen L archives, and I came upon a message from 10 years ago written by our very own Nancy Mayer, in which Nancy presented some excerpts from Fanny Burney's diaries, in which Samuel Johnson and Mrs. Thrale were teasing Fanny Burney about the "Holborn beau" of Burney's first very famous heroine, Evelina.

I was struck by the joinder of "Holborn" to "beau", and immediately thought about Anne Steele's harping on her "beau" the Doctor, and I realized, of course, JA by placing Lucy's and Anne's cousins in Holborn, was slyly pointing her readers to Evelina! It turns out that Dr. Johnson was playfully referring to Mr. Smith, a character in Evelina who is specifically referred to as a "beau" in the novel itself. So I knew I was onto something good here, but how far would it lead me?

I became curious to see what the significance of Holborn was in Evelina, and that's when I found out that Evelina stays with her social-climbing cousins, the Branghtons, who live in the undesirable neighborhood of--where else?--Holborn! Lucy Steele stays with cousins in Holborn, Evelina stays with cousins in Holborn. Bingo!!!

And then I did some quick checking, and sure enough, there have been several Austen scholars (including you, Ellen!) who have perceived S&S as alluding to Evelina. Which is no surprise when we recall not only that JA was, famously, a subscriber to Burney's novels, and but also that Reverend Austen's November 1797 letter to Cadell enclosed a novel written by JA which "comprised in three Vols about the length of Miss Burney's Evelina." It has often been speculated that the novel was First Impressions, and there's no doubt that there are many obvious echoes of Evelina in P&P, as well as in S&S--but based on what I write about in this message, I think it is equally possible that the novel Reverend Austen sent to Cadell was Elinor and Marianne. In either case, the reference to Evelina in his letter is, I would argue, a sly one, in that the reason the enclosed novel is "about the length" of Evelina is that it ALLUDES to Evelina so pervasively! I hear the playful ironic sense of humor of JA behind that seemingly innocuous description, and my (of course unprovable) hunch is that JA playfully pushed her father to make that reference to Evelina in exactly that way.

But there's more.....I also had recalled from my prior research that one of the most significant allusive sources for Burney in Evelina was Paradise Lost, with Evelina's name being an obvious pun on "Eve", the innocent who is subject to strenuous efforts by more than one male "Satan" to corrupt her sexually before she ends up happily with her "Adam", i.e., Lord Orville.

And although of course Holborn was an actual neighborhood in London in JA's day, it came to me this morning that Holborn was also a pun on "Hell-Born" (a phrase Milton uses in Paradise Lost, of course to refer to Satan--or Lucifer!), and how apt that pun was to Evelina with its Paradise Lost allusions, and also to S&S with its Lucy-Ferrars Paradise Lost allusions!

And then, when I read your reply this morning, Ellen, it was the icing on the allusive cake--of course JA's tossing the surname "Richardson" in was no more gratuitous than any of the other sly jokes and puns I've been outlining above. Of course the other novelist who was himself obsessed with Paradise Lost (could there be a more definitive portrait of Milton's Satan than Richardson's Lovelace?) was Samuel Richardson--the novelist who was a huge influence on both Burney and Austen!

There's much more going on, but I will not flesh it all out in this message. Suffice to say that this is a paradigmatic example of how I have been able to find so much material that has lain hidden in plain sight for 200 years, and which others--including truly brilliant and encyclopedically learned scholars like yourself-- have not perceived. The serendipitous bouncing from one connection to the next which I have described, above, is comparable to 1,000 prior experiences I have had with JA's novels over the past 5 1/2 years. These seemingly throwaway, peripheral, random, atmospheric names and characters are actually bearers of very significant, but COVERT, meanings, which go to the heart of JA's shadow stories.

Cheers, ARNIE

P.S.: It's no accident that Elinor "accidentally" encounters Anne Steele in Kensington GARDENS! ;)

She's Everywhere: Pretty thin gruel and Mr. Woodhouse's constitutional laws

As I watched President Obama field questions on a variety of subjects yesterday at the press conference which marked the close of the G20 summit in Toronto, my Janeite antennae were triggered into full activation when Obama answered a question about the leadup to the confirmation hearings (which began today) for Elena Kagan, who, as most of you probably know, is his latest nominee to the US Supreme Court:

“As I examine some of the arguments that have been floated against her nomination over the past several weeks, it's PRETTY THIN GRUEL...”

My first reaction was--of COURSE he has read some Jane Austen, and therefore he knows very well that he is making an allusion to Emma!

After all, he's not only a very intelligent guy, he's also a very literate guy with a gift for rhetorical expression who has himself written two best-selling books; he has a strong, independent wife, and two precocious and well loved daughters; and his behavior is unusually gentlemanly for a participant in the political arena, especially the brutal US politics of the past decade. In fact, he catches criticism from some of his supporters for being too much of a gentleman, and yet, he almost always keeps his cool and composure, even when passions are highly elevated all around him--like Mr. Knightley deftly deflecting Mrs. Elton's verbal thrusts, or Colonel Brandon tactfully absorbing Marianne's disdain.

And I also instantly recalled, as I am sure many of you did, too, as you read this message, that only 6 short weeks ago, the factoid that Elena Kagan was a literature lover who reread P&P every year briefly went viral in the Janeite online world.

So, given all of that, is it just a coincidence that Obama happened to use an expression regarding Kagan's confirmation which would automatically trigger a very specific association in the minds of every Janeites (especially the many American female Janeites who would take particular pride and interest in Kagan's nomination) to the following passage in Emma:

"The GRUEL came and supplied a great deal to be said -- much praise and many comments -- undoubting DECISION of its wholesomeness for EVERY CONSTITUTION, and PRETTY severe PHILIPPICS upon THE MANY HOUSES where it was never met with tolerable; -- but, unfortunately, among the failures which the daughter had to instance, the most recent, and therefore most prominent, was in her own cook at South End, a young woman hired for the time, who never had been able to understand what she meant by a basin of nice smooth GRUEL, THIN, BUT NOT TOO THIN."

And isn't it also quite interesting that in that same passage, we read references (which I've shown in ALL CAPS) to Philippics, houses, decisions and constitutions, all of which are terms associated, in JA's Great Britain as surely as in today's U.S.A, with the judicial, legislative AND executive branches of government--branches which just happen to be the three protagonists in the political drama about to unfold in the American Capitol? And recall also that Obama made his reputation as a Constitutional law professor, and that he is most famous as a politician who can deliver a pretty powerful Philippic when he needs to!

Strange business indeed, I think Tom Bertram would have said to Dr. Grant, if they had heard that press conference. But we know what Mr. Woodhouse would have said about Kagan had he been asked his opinion about Kagan's nomination:

"Young ladies are delicate plants."

;)

Cheers, ARNIE

P.S.: Google gave me the icing on the cake of this message, when it informed me that the Democratic National Committee's communications chairman is named "Dick Woodhouse"!

“Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have?”

The conversation has continued in Janeites regarding Tom Bertram and his father's billiard table, thanks to some excellent comments there by Derrick Leigh, in quotes below:

“Arnie's post seems on cue to me, because as he was writing it, I was watching the actress Jane Horrocks exploring her Lancashire family roots on TV. Among the family mysteries was a great uncle Ernest Cunliffe, who emigrated to Australia. He was stated to be the black sheep of the family, because his occupation was 'billiard marker' a man who arranges matches, refreshments, betting and referees. This would not have gone down well with the strict Methodist and temperance aspirations of the family. "A bit of a cad" was the verdict from an expert on billiards history, and this reflects the long-held image of the game as an amusement to pass the time of idle wastrels.”

Sounds like a bookie to me, and indeed Tom Bertram would have known all about billiard markers in the course of his many escapades with games of chance.

“On the subject of slavery, there were tears on learning of the death of a 3-year old sibling in the Manchester 'cotton famine' of the 1860's. The US civil war ended raw cotton imports to Lancashire for four years, causing mass unemployment, starvation, and a large increase in deaths from disease. The Lancashire workers, however, held mass meetings and voted to continue support for Lincoln's efforts to put an end to slavery. After the civil war Lincoln sent a statue of himself to Manchester, and it still holds pride of place in the city.”

Unsung (at least in the U.S.) heroes of the (American) Civil War, thanks for teaching us some important American history!

“Arnie, I'm actually a little surprised that you didn't mention another symbolic connection between the billiard table and the other theme of MP that has been bandied about. The most important part of the table is the baize cloth that provides its playing surface, green to represent the lawns of other pursuits such as croquet.”

You are so right, Derrick, thanks! Elissa and I bandied about that green baize cloth in passing, without stopping to consider that it was there in the text for much more than just its green color.

Look here at the passages in MP which refer to the green baize. Even before I reread them, I realized that you had led me to the answer to my questions about why Tom speaks so venomously about an inanimate object like the billiard table, and also why Sir Thomas also specifically notes its absence—read on, gentle reader, for that one answer to both of those questions!:

"We must have a curtain," said Tom Bertram; "a few yards of green baize for a curtain, and perhaps that may be enough."….An enormous roll of green baize had arrived from Northampton, and been cut out by Mrs Norris (with a saving by her good management of full three-quarters of a yard), and was actually forming into a curtain by the housemaids, and still the play was wanting; and as two or three days passed away in this manner, Edmund began almost to hope that none might ever be found…..

Note that even after commandeering the enormous roll of green baize which had arrived from Northampton (and I wonder now whether Tom himself had previously and VERY quietly ordered it, as soon as he returned from Antigua, having already formed the plan to propose the theatricals BEFORE he stated it aloud, pretending it was “the thought of the moment”), there was still insufficient green baize to fulfill all theatrical requirements. Hmm….. “Edmund began almost to hope that none might ever be found” Hmm…. As usual, Edmund the wuss just THINKS things, he truly never acts, not out of principle but out of a lack of courage and decisiveness.

That’s when I realized that OF COURSE! The shortfall of green baize is made up out of the green baize cloth ALREADY INSTALLED ON THE BILLIARD TABLE!!!! When Tom says the billiard table is vile and he cannot stand it any longer, he means it—because he completely dismantles it, and turns it into curtains and, for good measure, also cannibalizes the table’s wood structure for scaffolding, props, etc for the show!

And as you say, Derrick, the symbolism of these actions speaks very loudly, once we tune our ears to the proper frequency, so as to hear it---the billiard table symbolizes the status quo of Sir Thomas’s colonial and familial empire (and, as Sales puts in his book, also King George III’s colonial empire), where human beings, whether African slaves or young women, or even male heirs who don’t want to take orders, are bought and sold like commodities. And therefore the DISMANTLING of that billiard table, for use in a play which ITSELF thematically symbolizes the humbling of an arrogant, unrepentant old sinner (Waldenheim), is the ultimate act of rebellion, not merely destroying the status quo, but enacting the reasons WHY that dismantling is a moral imperative.

What a complete reversal of the conventional understanding of the “impropriety” of Lovers Vows (actually based on Kotzebue’s The Natural Son), and its racy sexual subtext. JA is vividly demonstrating that the misdemeanors of romantic flirtation are as nothing next to the gross felonies of powerful men like Baron Wildenhaim (and, by inference, Sir Thomas and King George III)!

The play is INDEED the thing to catch the conscience of “the king”—and so it’s hardly a surprise when the “king” returns, and, like Claudius, puts an immediate stop to the disturbing performance which exposes his longstanding, secret sins under the bright lights of the chandeliers (no electric lighting back then!) of Sir Thomas’s own billiard room, the space which previously had, as JA so acutely observed at Godmersham, been an exclusive bastion of male privilege. Tom Bertram has indeed had his moment of glory in telling truths which had previously been more than a little disguised.

And, as usual, JA cannot resist a couple of ironic, epilogical moments. First we have Mrs. Norris, the “slave designated by the master to lord it over the other slaves”, scavenging the remains of the “carcass” of the billiard table for her own private purposes, like a “capo” at a concentration camp skimming off largesse as “compensation” for “services rendered”:

“The curtain, over which she had presided with such talent and such success, went off with her to her cottage, where she happened to be particularly in want of green baize.”

And then we have the master himself taking some special personal satisfaction in the complete and utter annihilation of all traces of the slave revolt, symbolized by the cannibalization of both the wood and the green baize from his beloved billiard table, which his early arrival had so fortuitously aborted:

“he had also set the carpenter to work in pulling down what had been so lately put up in the billiard-room, and given the scene-painter his dismissal long enough to justify the pleasing belief of his being then at least as far off as Northampton.”

Indeed, the “scenes” from the past and present which Sir Thomas at all costs wished to prevent from being enacted and “seen” had to be exiled far, far, far away from Mansfield Park—if this debris could not be conveniently sent to Antigua, at least as far away as the big town whence came the additional green baize which symbolized the insurrection.

“There is another symbolism of the cloth. By the middle of the eighteenth century it was customary to separate the servants' quarters in a staffed house by means of a door which was lined with green baize to provide some sound insulation. Thus the phrase 'the green baize door' became synonymous for the partition between the servants and their masters. There's even a book titled 'Behind the green baize door'
on the subject.”

YES! And of course, as you obviously were aware in mentioning that wonderful detail, Derrick, we have the EXPLICIT statement by Tom that “my father’s room will be AN EXCELLENT GREENROOM. It seems to join the billiard–room on purpose.” Could there be any greater poetic justice than to turn the master’s most private space into a room, just beyond “the green baize door”, where the “servants” (recall the famous discussion in Hamlet about the low social status of actors, as being worthy of being whipp’d, etc.) will wait for their “cues”!

Cheers,
Arnie
sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com

Almost PURELY governed

In Austen L, Maria wrote the following about Mary Crawford:

“The "...almost purely governed..." feels more general than particular to me as well; and there are instances throughout our acquaintance with her where we do see that there are really good feelings manifesting.”

I responded as follows:

Maria, I did not recall the passage you were quoting in regard to Mary Crawford, and I hadn’t previously ever attended to the exquisite phrase “almost purely governed”. In isolation, it struck me very drolly, acidly funny, a prototypical Austenian irony. It has that perfect pitch of absurd paradox which we see so often in JA’s narration---in particular, when she wants to sound like she is saying one thing, but is actually completely undercutting, with a razor-sharp blade of irony, the superficial meaning.

Here is the passage you were recalling regarding Mary Crawford’s intervention after Mrs. Norris verbally savages Fanny:

“Edmund was too angry to speak; but Miss Crawford, looking for a moment with astonished eyes at Mrs. Norris, and then at Fanny, whose tears were beginning to shew themselves, immediately said, with some keenness, “I do not like my situation: this _place_ is too hot for me,” and moved away her chair to the opposite side of the table, close to Fanny, saying to her, in a kind, low whisper, as she placed herself, “Never mind, my dear Miss Price, this is a cross evening: everybody is cross and teasing, but do not let us mind them”; and with pointed attention continued to talk to her and endeavour to raise her spirits, in spite of being out of spirits herself. By a look at her brother she prevented any farther entreaty from the theatrical board, and the really good feelings by which she was almost purely governed were rapidly restoring her to all the little she had lost in Edmund’s favour. Fanny did not love Miss Crawford; but she felt very much obliged to her for her present kindness; and when, from taking notice of her work, and wishing _she_ could work as well, and begging for the pattern, and supposing Fanny was now preparing for her _appearance_, as of course she would come out when her cousin was married, Miss Crawford proceeded to inquire if she had heard lately from her brother at sea, and said that she had quite a curiosity to see him, and imagined him a very fine young man, and advised Fanny to get his picture drawn before he went to sea again—she could not help admitting it to be very agreeable flattery, or help listening, and answering with more animation than she had intended.”

First, I just have to comment on the beginning of that passage—I also just paid attention for the first time to that line: “Edmund was too angry to speak”—Um, I’d say, rather, “Edmund was too much of a WUSS to speak”—that narration is Fanny’s instantaneous “love is blind” idealization of Edmund, giving him the benefit of the doubt on what an objective observer would characterize as his plain and totally unsatisfactory failure to man up and defend his defenseless cousin from a vicious broadside from Mrs. Norris.

Second, as to Mary’s intervention, that is the one instance in the novel when the narrator seems to be saying that Mary is really a good person after all, because she seems to belt a moral home run right out of the park, by saying precisely the right thing at the right moment after Fanny has been leveled by a vicious jab to the solar plexus by Mrs. Norris. But then, that word “almost”, as the group archive tells me that Edith has pointed out in the past, completely undoes the “purely”!

I think the importance of that word “almost” is magnified by how well it fits with the context of what is happening at that moment in the story, which is Henry’s courtship of Fanny. Seen in that light, we can see that Fanny is the target of a veritable fusillade of “false advertising” worthy of a Super Bowl ad blitz for a particularly toxic product like a Big Mac with supersized fries and soft drink, and Mary’s kind rescue of Fanny is just one part of it..

Look at how Mary quickly follows up with several additional actions which closely resemble the way Henry C. suddenly makes so nice toward Fanny in support of his courtship of her, and then (as I posted the other day) Sir Thomas joins in with a sudden uptick in kindness and attention toward Fanny, what with providing Fanny’s East room with a fire, and not telling Mrs. Norris about Fanny’s initial refusal to consider Henry C’s as a prospective husband.

There is something particularly vile and IMPURE about manipulation and oppression masquerading as generosity and kindness, especially when it is a masquerade which rises to the level of an entire cast of characters in a play, as it were, with all three of these manipulators working in concert with one goal—to make a hole in Fanny’s heart, to push her to marry Henry Crawford against her will, her heart, her conscience, and her desire. Mrs. Norris (the “bad cop”) does not mask her ugliness, but it is necessary to identify everyone in the precinct house, including the cops who have gone “undercover”!

And speaking of “purity”, as in “almost PURELY governed”, that is a word which receives much more attention in MP than in any other JA novel, and surely that is not surprising, given that MP is the novel most explicitly concerned with the moral and the spiritual.

In Chapter 28, we see a second passage where the word “pure” pertains to Mary in an ironic way:

Well, then," replied Miss Crawford, laughing, "I must suppose it*/ /*[i.e., Henry going with William to London] to be PURELY for the pleasure of conveying your brother, and of talking of you by the way."

Mary is laughing, I say, because she knows that Henry has his ulterior motive in mind to force Fanny into feeling gratitude toward him, and that laugh does not say much for Mary’s good intentions toward Fanny. Mary may defend Fanny against Mrs. Norris, but she does everything in her power to render Fanny DEFENSELESS against Henry! And there is NOTHING pure about Henry’s intentions toward Fanny, and Mary is EXPLICITLY aware of this, as it was she he was speaking to about making a hole in Fanny’s heart!

Mary, like Sir Thomas, is a panderer, and it only mitigates Mary’s sin a bit to take note that she has entered into this “career” as a result of herself having been a victim, at a young age, of a similar gambit on the part of an adult she thought she could trust, i.e., the Admiral. So Mary playing the role of “Pandarus” in MP resonates deeply with the parallelism I have mentioned in the past between the character of Mary and the character of Cressida in Shakespeare’s deeply cynical play,where the “commodity” for “sale” at a very low “price” is Cressida.

In Act 2, Scene 2, Troilus asks this pointed question to his fellow Trojans: "Why keep we [Helen]? the Grecians keep our aunt: Is she worth keeping? why, she is a pearl, Whose PRICE hath launch'd above a thousand ships, And turn'd crown'd kings to merchants."

It seems to me that Fanny’s “price” hath launch’d at least several gambits by these cynical manipulators who surround her, and if any fictional character was, metaphorically speaking, a “crown’d king” turned “merchant”, it is Sir Thomas!

And in Chapter 35, we have yet another passage where the word “pure" pertains to Mary, and this one fits with my interpretation of Edmund as a moral coward of great magnitude, as Edmund, speaking to Fanny, puts this truly absurd spin on Henry’s attentions toward Fanny:

“It does him the highest honour; it shews his proper estimation of the blessing of domestic happiness and PURE attachment.”

The only possible reaction to this would be to stick a flaming torch of flame in Edmund’s face, to wake him up, like Indiana Jones, from the deep trance he has fallen into under Mary’s spell because he drank the hot blood, he listened to her siren song. And that is what eventually happens by the end of the novel, Tom’s illness and Mary’s reaction to it function as that flaming torch…..but not till Fanny has served her lengthy “hard labor” sentence at Portsmouth.

So, Maria, with all due respect and with acknowledgment of the varied bits of evidence you adduced in your subsequent message that Mary is not so bad as she seems, I think that she IS as bad as she seems—she’s just not as bad as Henry.

She’s bad the way Sir Thomas is bad—unlike Henry, neither Mary nor Sir Thomas takes a malicious delight in planning to ruin other people’s lives for sport---but I think JA is saying that there is evil which revels unashamedly in itself, and there is evil which rationalizes itself as being moral, and the greatest harm to the innocent occurs when both sorts of evil join forces.

And needless to say, I am no fan of Edmund Bertram, whose culpability is not that far below that of Mary or Sir Thomas, in my eyes—it’s just that Fanny forgives him, and so therefore do most readers of the novel.

Cheers, Arnie

P.S.: Apropos the word “pure”, JA does show Fanny thinking that word a LOT in terms of her own moral deliberations—Fanny is the only one at Mansfield Park who even questions the moral purity of her own actions and feelings, and we hear about it repeatedly:

Chapter 16: It would be so horrible to [Fanny] to act [in Lover's Vows] that she was inclined to suspect the truth and PURITY of her own scruples;*/ /*and as she looked around her, the claims of her cousins to being obliged were strengthened by the sight of present upon present that she had received from them.

Chapter 20: With a PURER spirit [than Julia’s malice] did Fanny rejoice in the intelligence [that Henry C had left MP].

Chapter 32: For the PURITY of her intentions*/ /*[in refusing Henry, Fanny] could answer, and she was willing to hope, secondly, that her uncle's displeasure was abating, and would abate farther as he considered the matter with more impartiality, and felt, as a good man must feel, how wretched, and how unpardonable, how hopeless, and how wicked it was to marry without affection.

Chapter 44: [Fanny] could just find selfishness enough to wonder whether Edmund _had_ written to Miss Crawford before this summons [back to MP] came, but no sentiment dwelt long with her that was not PURELY affectionate and disinterestedly anxious.*//*

Chapter 44: Without any particular affection for her eldest cousin, her tenderness of heart made her feel that she could not spare him, and the PURITY of her principles added yet a keener solicitude, when she considered how little useful, how little self-denying his life had (apparently) been.

Chapter 48: All that followed was the result of [Maria’s] imprudence; and [Henry] went off with her at last, because he could not help it, regretting Fanny even at the moment, but regretting her infinitely more when all the bustle of the intrigue was over, and a very few months had taught [Henry], by the force of contrast, to place a yet higher value on the sweetness of [Fanny’s] temper, the PURITY of her mind, and the excellence of her principles.

Tom Bertram's Dancing and Studying myself to death

The topic of Tom Bertram's possibly being a closeted gay man being discussed in Janeites led me to take a closer look at certain comments Tom makes to Fanny at Mansfield Park during the first ball:

"[Tom] came towards their little circle; but instead of asking her to dance, drew a chair near her, and gave her an account of the present state of a sick horse, and the opinion of the groom, from whom he had just parted."

I think this is meant to suggest that Tom and the groom have been doing a good deal more than exchanging opinions about that sick horse--sounds like a very convenient excuse, in fact.

And we might therefore fairly infer more than a straightforward meaning in Tom's immediately ensuing rant, which somehow seems like an overreaction completely out of proportion to the circumstance of passing time in tedious dancing at a country ball:

"When he had told of his horse, he took a newspaper from the table, and looking over it, said in a languid way, “If you want to dance, Fanny, I will stand up with you.” With more than equal civility the offer was declined; she did not wish to dance. “I am glad of it,” said he, in a much brisker tone, and throwing down the newspaper again, “for I am tired to death. I only wonder how the good people can keep it up so long. They had need be _all_ in love, to find any amusement in such folly; and so they are, I fancy. If you look at them you may see they are so many couple of lovers—all but Yates and Mrs. Grant—and, between ourselves, she, poor woman, must want a lover as much as any one of them. A desperate dull life hers must be with the doctor,” making a sly face as he spoke towards the chair of the latter"

Indeed the mandatory "dance" of the sexes would tire a closeted gay man to death, and would, after a number of years, justifiably feel like complete folly to him. And surely Tom is not merely referring to purely emotional needs not being met when he refers to Mrs. Grant--and so perhaps Tom's suspicion of Dr. Grant's lack of husbandly attention-giving is based on more than Dr. Grant's preoccupation with his next meal of food. And, as I reflect upon it further, I personally would not be completely surprised if Henry Crawford, ever attentive to such things, did not ALSO notice his sad half-sister's woeful lack, and, ever ready to be of service in such matters, to somehow find a remedy for it.

And I also wonder if the resonance to the following passage from another fictional universe holds anything like the same veiled significance THERE that I am suggesting Tom's rant does in MP:

""Very well. If the Westons think it worth while to be at all this trouble for a few hours of noisy entertainment, I have nothing to say against it, but that they shall not choose pleasures for me. Oh! yes, I must be there; I could not refuse; and I will keep as much awake as I can; but I would rather be at home, looking over William Larkins's week's account; much rather, I confess. Pleasure in seeing dancing! not I, indeed -- I never look at it -- I do not know who does. Fine dancing, I believe, like virtue, must be its own reward. Those who are standing by are usually thinking of something very different."

William Larkins's week's account....the sick horse and the groom.......hmmm......

And which all combine to make the following suggestion by Mrs. Norris sound like "strange business" indeed:

“My dear Tom,” cried his aunt soon afterwards, “as you are not dancing, I dare say you will have no objection to join us in a rubber; shall you?”

The last thing on the planet that Tom wants to do is join Aunt Norris in a "rubber"--as he demonstrates, he'd even rather go through the motions of 'dancing' with poor neglected Fanny than do that!

And isn't there an interesting resonance in Tom's asking Fanny to dance, to a later moment, also involving dancing, in that same other fictional universe:

"In another moment a happier sight caught her -- Mr. Knightley leading Harriet to the set! Never had she been more surprised, seldom more delighted, than at that instant. She was all pleasure and gratitude, both for Harriet and herself, and longed to be thanking him; and though too distant for speech, her countenance said much, as soon as she could catch his eye again."

And that resonance is only expanded when we consider all the speculation that has been generated in the past in JA-related discussions about Mr. Elton's "end of an old pencil, the part without any lead."

JA sure did a whole lot of dancing around some things..................

Cheers, ARNIE

P.S.: Just for fun, after thinking about Tom Bertram whining about being "tired to death" of dancing, dancing, dancing, I did a word search in JA's novels of the phrase "to death", just to see what came up, and here are the results, for the amusement of those who, like me, like to see the way JA played with certain phrases throughout her novels, especially those involving breathlessness, exaggeration and hyperbole, which lend themselves so readily to irony, such as "to death":

EMMA TO HARRIET, Chapter 10: "I wish Jane Fairfax very well; but she tires me TO DEATH."

FRANK TO MRS. WESTON, Chapter 27: "[My aunt] says I fidget her TO DEATH; and Miss Woodhouse looks as if she could almost say the same.

Apropos the recent thread about Reginald Hill's "Poor Emma", I must say that I never noticed before that this seemingly throwaway comment by Frank has a distinctly strong resonance to Hill's story (where Frank "assists" Knightley in choking on food, a la Dr. Grant), and also to Lelank Monk's 1990 article which was the first explicit suggestion in print that Frank did more than fidget his aunt to death at Windsor!

SOME BODY participating in the Donwell Abbey strawberry scene, Chapter 42: Morning decidedly the best time -- never tired -- every sort good -- hautboy infinitely superior -- no comparison -- the others hardly eatable -- hautboys very scarce -- Chili preferred -- white wood finest flavour of all -- price of strawberries in London -- abundance about Bristol -- Maple Grove -- cultivation -- beds when to be renewed -- gardeners thinking exactly different -- no general rule -- gardeners never to be put out of their way -- delicious fruit -- only too rich to be eaten much of -- inferior to cherries -- currants more refreshing -- only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping -- glaring sun -- tired TO DEATH -- could bear it no longer -- must go and sit in the shade."

My personal vote is that it is Jane F. who, due to her "interesting condition", is forced to gasp out those last four phrases....

TOM TO FANNY, Chapter 12: "I am glad of it," said he, in a much brisker tone, and throwing down the newspaper again, "for I am tired TO DEATH.


CATHERINE TO HENRY, Chapter 3: We are sadly off in the country; not but what we have very good shops in Salisbury, but it is so far to go -- eight miles is a long way; Mr Allen says it is nine, measured nine; but I am sure it cannot be more than eight; and it is such a fag -- I come back tired TO DEATH.

ISABELLA TO CATHERINE, Chapter 16: Charles Hodges will plague me TO DEATH, I dare say; but I shall cut him very short.....The friends were not able to get together for any confidential discourse till all the dancing was over; but then, as they walked about the room arm in arm, Isabella thus explained herself: "I do not wonder at your surprise; and I am really fatigued TO DEATH.


NARRATOR, Chapter 10: [Charles Hayter] had even refused one regular invitation to dinner; and having been found on the occasion by Mr Musgrove with some large books before him, Mr and Mrs Musgrove were sure all could not be right, and talked, with grave faces, of his studying himself TO DEATH.

I think that last sentence is my personal favorite of the bunch, maybe because I am myself often accused of STUDYING JA's novels and letters TO DEATH, and also of my alleged breathlessness, hyperbole, and exaggeration, and also because my writing about JA seems to tire a number of Janeites TO DEATH!

But, as Diana often quotes Emma, and as, I believe, JA herself anticipated reactions to her writing by her readers:

"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."

This is, I think, true of the Janeite world, in a hundred ways, even more so than in the rest of the world at large. ;)

Cheers, ARNIE