Another Missing Party-cipant in one of Jane Austen’s Novels

I’ve received no answer to my tricky quiz, so now I will give the final (decisive) hints necessary to figure it out. HINT #1: The Austen novel (other than Emma, with Mr. K, like a svelte Santa Claus, missing from most of the Randalls Christmas dinner party) with the missing party-cipant in a small social gathering is PERSUASION. HINT #2: The following passage in Persuasion will greatly assist you in ascertaining which character that might be. You then need to figure out which gathering that character is a surprising no-show at, even though the clueless Anne Elliot never notices that absence, and therefore neither does the narrator!: Ch. 16: “She longed to see the Crofts; but when the meeting took place, it was evident that no rumour of the news had yet reached them. The visit of ceremony was paid and returned; and Louisa Musgrove was mentioned, and Captain Benwick, too, without even half a smile. The Crofts had placed themselves in lodgings in Gay Street, perfectly to Sir Walter's satisfaction. He was not at all ashamed of the acquaintance, and did, in fact, think and talk a great deal more about the Admiral, than the Admiral ever thought or talked about him. The Crofts knew quite as many people in Bath as they wished for, and considered their intercourse with the Elliots as a mere matter of form, and not in the least likely to afford them any pleasure. They brought with them their country habit of being almost always together. He was ordered to walk to keep off the gout, and Mrs Croft seemed to go shares with him in everything, and to walk for her life to do him good. Anne saw them wherever she went. Lady Russell took her out in her carriage almost every morning, and she never failed to think of them, and never failed to see them. Knowing their feelings as she did, it was a most attractive picture of happiness to her. She always watched them as long as she could, delighted to fancy she understood what they might be talking of, as they walked along in happy independence, or equally delighted to see the Admiral's hearty shake of the hand when he encountered an old friend, and observe their eagerness of conversation when occasionally forming into a little knot of the navy, Mrs Croft looking as intelligent and keen as any of the officers around her.” HINT #3: The following passage (that begins the scene in the first cancelled chapter of Persuasion that Jane Austen completely deleted in her final published version) is a further (oblique) clue as to the identity of the missing party-cipant, and also perhaps a clue as to why that character might have no-showed. Recall that at this moment in the story, Anne has just left Mrs. Smith’s apartment after hearing all about Cousin Elliot: “With all this knowledge of Mr E--& this authority to impart it, Anne left Westgate Buildgs--her mind deeply busy in revolving what she had heard, feeling, thinking, recalling & forseeing everything; shocked at Mr Elliot--sighing over future Kellynch, and pained for Lady Russell, whose confidence in him had been entire.--The Embarrassment which much be felt from this hour in his presence!--How to behave to him?--how to get rid of him?--what to do by any of the Party at home?--where to be blind? where to be active?—It was altogether a confusion of Images & Doubts--a perplexity, an agitation which she could not see the end of— -and she was in Gay St & still so much engrossed, that she started on being addressed by Adml Croft, as if he were a person unlikely to be met there. It was within a few steps of his own door.--"You are going to call upon my wife, said he, she will be very glad to see you."--Anne denied it "No--she really had not time, she was in her way home"--but while she spoke, the Adml had stepped back & knocked at the door, calling out, "Yes, yes do go in; she is all alone. go in & rest yourself."--Anne felt so little disposed at this time to be in company of any sort, that it vexed her to be thus constrained--but she was obliged to stop. "Since you are so very kind, said she, I will just ask Mrs Croft how she does, but I really cannot stay 5 minutes.--You are sure she is quite alone."— -The possibility of Capt. W. had occurred--and most fearfully anxious was she to be assured--either that he was within or that he was not; which, might have been a question.--"Oh! yes, quite alone--Nobody but her Mantuamaker with her, & they have been shut up together this half hour, so it must be over soon."--"Her Mantua maker!--then I am sure my calling now, wd be most inconvenient.--Indeed you must allow me to leave my Card & be so good as to explain it afterwards to Mrs C." "No, no, not at all, not at all. She will be very happy to see you. Mind--I will not swear that she has not something particular to say to you--but that will all come out in the right place. I give no hints.--Why, Miss Elliot, we begin to hear strange things of you--(smiling in her face)--But you have not much the Look of it--as Grave as a little Judge." --Anne blushed.--"Aye, aye, that will do. Now, it is right. I thought we were not mistaken." She was left to guess at the direction of his Suspicions….” At our Zoom on Thursday, I will be giving my interpretation of how the mysterious no-show fits within the broader context of the shadow story of Persuasion – at this point, please do not respond in this group before then, but feel free to email me privately if you wish to discuss any of this before Thursday. ARNIE MY PRIOR POSTS In Persuasions #18 (1996)… https://jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number18/austen-leigh.pdf …Joan Austen-Leigh famously speculated that Jane Austen had nodded, i.e., that she had forgotten about Mr. Knightley while writing the Randalls dinner party in the (very light) snow, until late in the party, when he suddenly is just there. As Austen-Leigh argues: “Mr. Knightley is silent. He says not a single word until there is an alarm about snow and we are told he "left the room immediately" (but we have not been told that he was ever in it!). When he returns it is to "answer for there not being the smallest difficulty in their getting home, whenever they liked it". Also "he had seen the coachmen and they both agreed with him". Both! Only two coachmen, so he did not bring his own carriage. Poor fellow, I hope he did not get his feet wet. But it is no matter. It is as we expect, while the others are flapping and fussing to no purpose, Mr. Knightley takes charge. He and Emma settle it all between them, which is entirely satisfactory and exactly what we have counted upon their doing. For this purpose and no other was he present at Randalls.” I don’t agree with her, I believe instead that Jane Austen knew exactly what she was doing, and that she meant her most attentive readers to not only notice his absence during most of the party, but also to then wonder what Mr. Knightley might have been doing, and where he was doing it, while he was discreetly absent from Emma’s observant eye for that crucial few hours. Well… just yesterday, in one of Austen’s other novels besides Emma, I happened upon what appears to me to be another unexplained absence of a character who we would have expected to be present at a party – but in that other case, the missing character never shows up at all, and the heroine never notices that absence! So, unless I have overlooked an explanation, whether oblique or explicit, for that absence, I believe this is another instance in which Jane Austen wanted her best readers to notice that missing “party-cipant”, and to wonder where that character might have been during the party. And now I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t one or two more of these hidden puzzles scattered among Austen’s novels, which have not (yet) been noted. One hint, to make your solving this puzzle less onerous. The instance I have in mind is found in one of the following three novels: Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, or Persuasion. Please respond to me privately at arnieperlstein@gmail.com with any answer you come up with, and I will announce my answer (and any other answer that I receive that fits my parameters) on Monday evening 7 pm PST, October 25. Happy hunting, ARNIE MY FOLLOWUP QUIZ POST Here is one necessary clarification, and two more hints: I realized a few minutes ago that I was unintentionally very misleading, when I referred to the gathering that a certain character was absent from as a "party". The gathering actually had no dancing, or food served as far as I can tell, it was a small informal group, and most of the activity was just conversation among them. My apologies! My only excuse is that when I started out my quiz talking about Knightley being absent from the Randalls Christmas dinner party, I had parties on the brain, when I drew the parallel between the two scenes! Anyway, as penance, I will now give you a few more significant clues. First: the absent character is one whom orthodox Janeites would never in a million years think of as being Machiavellian offstage; and yet, there is some Austen scholarship that has been out there for nearly 30 years, and documentary evidence dating back to Jane Austen's lifetime, that fits really, really well with the idea of that missing character being manipulative. Second: I said before, that this scene occurs in one of the following three novels: NA, Mansfield Park, or Persuasion. Well, now I will narrow it down still further, to save you time - it's not in NA, it is in either MP or Persuasion. Okay, so now I think you have enough (non-misleading) clues, so as to have a fair chance of figuring out which scene I am referring to. And if you get that far, I believe that if you make a list of the characters who are clearly present and speaking, then you will be able to immediately recognize who you might have expected to be there, too, but who is AWOL, so to speak.

“…matter and impertinency mix'd!”: I am the Walrus as Lennon’s Shakespearean “reason in madness!”

[Be sure to read this post to the very end, I've added a couple of significant points since I first posted this]

I’ve long suspected Lennon & McCartney of being sneakily serious readers of English literature, and that John Lennon in particular loved pretending that his most cryptic lyrics were mere jokes. Even as he  tweaked the beards of those who looked for his hidden meanings, he actually took great delight in being very slyly erudite, and I think he wanted to make the search for hidden meaning more fun and more challenging, by denying that it was there.

For example, Lennon claimed with a straight face, that Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, with its iconic psychedelic imagery, was not at all about LSD. Yeah, right. How he must have laughed on the inside, when most of the wider world, including many hardcore Beatles fans who shoulda known better, swallowed that obvious whopper.

Anyway, as a result of my suspicions, I’m always on the alert for insight into literary allusions in the Beatles canon, and over the past decade, I’ve been rewarded with insights into 3 Beatles songs that I see as having a surprising, hidden, English literary pedigree, as I’ve blogged at the linked posts:

https://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2017/01/shakespeares-king-henry-vi-was.html

“Shakespeare’s holy hilltop fool Henry VI was McCartney’s Fool on the Hill!”

https://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-view-from-fords-beatles-magical.html

“The View from Ford’s: The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour of PeRRy Lane & Strawberry Fields for Emma”

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/12/living-is-easy-with-eyes-closed.html

“ ‘Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see’---The Song of Emma Woodhouse”

Those 3 songs, The Fool on the Hill (Sept. 1967), Penny Lane (Jan. 1967), and Strawberry Fields Forever (Dec. 1966), were all recorded within 9 months of each other, and all 3 appear on the same Beatles album – Magical Mystery Tour. Not a coincidence, in my view. 

And yet, you may ask, what about the other Beatles song on Magical Mystery Tour that has raised more speculation about its cryptic lyrics and hidden meanings than any of the others? Of course, I refer to the one in my Subject Line, I Am The Walrus (Sept. 1967).  

Well, funny you should ask, because literary lightning struck again the other day for me. While listening to the Beatles Channel on Sirius Radio, my attention was caught by the commentary about Walrus of Kevin Howlett on one of his “Magical History Tour” segments.

Specifically, Howlett repeated what I had heard a few times before, but had never paused to consider more curiously – that the spoken word dialog that pops out through the writhing rhythms of Lennon’s grotesque imagery late in that song, is actually taken from a live performance of a very specific source – two speeches in Act 4, Scene 6 of King Lear.

Howlett essentially repeated the following conventional understanding of how Shakespeare happened to wander into Lennon’s nightmarish tableau: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/11/i-am-the-walrus-50-years-later/546698/

“To further tantalize literary types, at the end of the song listeners hear a scene from King Lear in the background, with Oswald’s final words, “O, untimely death!” standing out. (That line ended up as grist for the “Paul is dead” conspiracy mill, of course.) 

As it turns out, the performance of Lear just happened to be on a radio that was tuned to the BBC while they were mixing the song. The studio engineer Geoff Emerick said it was Lennon’s idea to get some “random radio noise” from “twiddling the dial,” an injection of John Cage–style found audio. Talking about the song with the New York radio DJ Dennis Elsas, Lennon claimed he “never knew it was King Lear until years later” when someone told him…”

END QUOTE

However, with all my prior suspicions of Lennon’s literary slyness about L.S.D, and those 3 other Beatles songs that I claim draw upon Shakespeare and Austen, I read Lennon’s disclaimer the same way I read the following famous comments by that very same Jane Austen, whom was capable of infinite sly misdirection and faux modesty (and who inspired the name of my blog 12 years ago), as epitomized in this famous bon mot about Pride and Prejudice:

“There are a few Typical errors–& a ‘said he’ or a ‘said she’ would sometimes make the Dialogue more immediately clear–but ‘I do not write for such dull Elves as have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.'”

If you actually believe that Austen sincerely thought that her pronomial ambiguities in Pride & Prejudice were “typical errors”, rather than intentional acts of genius on her part, well, this post is not for you – but for the rest of you, please read on!

Back to I am the Walrus --I knew instinctively that Lennon was thinking of the sharp elves in his audience, and was up to something ambitiously literary with that Lear insertion, but what? Well, it took me less than an hour to gather the following passages from the text of King Lear, in addition to the brief snippets of dialogue in 4.6 that we actually hear on Walrus. To figure out his meaning, I had to first assemble all the relevant textual evidence.

And one quick and necessary caveat- of course I am already aware that numerous explanations have been presented over the past 54 years as to sources for many of Lennon’s word choices in his lyrics for Walrus, including, most notably, The Walrus and the Carpenter. But this in no proves or even suggests that Lennon could not have also had Shakespeare on the brain as he wrote the song.

So, please meet me on the other side of these quotations, and I will then progress to my speculations as to what this King Lear subtext meant to John Lennon. 

“I am the Egg-Man”:  King Lear 1.4, 4.6

FOOL …………….Give me an EGG, nuncle, and I'll give thee two crowns.

KING LEAR What two crowns shall they be?

FOOL Why, after I have cut the EGG i' the middle, and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the EGG. When thou clovest thy crown i' the middle, and gavest away both parts, thou borest thy ass on thy back o'er the dirt: thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown, when thou gavest thy golden one away. If I speak

like myself in this, let him be whipped that first finds it so.

GLOUCESTER Away, and let me die.
EDGAR

Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air,

So many fathom down precipitating,

Thou'dst shiver'd like an EGG: but thou dost breathe;

Hast heavy substance; bleed'st not; speak'st; art sound.

Ten masts at each make not the altitude

Which thou hast perpendicularly fell:

Thy life's a miracle. Speak yet again.

“Cuckoo-ka-choo”  King Lear 1.4

FOOL

For, you trow, nuncle,

The hedge-sparrow fed the CUCKOO so long,

That it's had it head bit off by it young.

So, out went the candle, and we were left darkling.

So we have two speeches in the same scene, in which the Fool speaks words which Lennon seemed to echo in Walrus – might we also say, then, that Lennon was channeling Lear’s witty Fool, with his penchant for acidic riddling directed at King Lear, in this line?:

“Don't you think the JOKER LAUGHS AT YOU (ho ho ho, hee hee hee, hah hah hah)”

“See how they SMILE like PIGS in a sty, see how they snide”

“Dripping from a DEAD DOG's eye”:  King Lear 2.2

When Kent lights into Oswald, the toadying courtier of Goneril and Ragan, he is thinking of pigs in a sty who snidely smile:

KENT

That such a slave as this should wear a sword,

Who wears no honesty. Such SMILING rogues as these,

Like rats, oft bite the holy cords a-twain

Which are too intrinse t' unloose; smooth every passion

That in the natures of their lords rebel;

Bring oil to fire, snow to their colder moods;

Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks

With every gale and vary of their masters,

Knowing nought, like DOGS, but following.

A plague upon your epileptic visage!

SMILE you my speeches, as I were a fool?

Goose, if I had you upon Sarum plain,

I'ld drive ye cackling home to Camelot.

“Man you've been a NAUGHTY boy”

“Boy, you've been a NAUGHTY girl, you let your knickers down”:  King Lear 3.7

And when Regan torments Gloucester before savagely blinding him, and then takes up with Edmund, does she not fit Lennon’s description of a naughty girl?

REGAN plucks his beard

GLOUCESTER

By the kind gods, 'tis most ignobly done

To pluck me by the beard.

REGAN So white, and such a traitor!

GLOUCESTER

NAUGHTY lady,

These hairs, which thou dost ravish from my chin,

Will quicken, and accuse thee…

“I'm CRYING, I'm CRYING

I'm CRYING, I'm CRYING”: King Lear 4.6. 

And so Lennon’s repeated weeping wails remind us of Lear’s, in that very same Act 4, Scene 6 from which Lennon “accidentally” chose to record from the BBC, and then insert in his song:

EDGAR   O, matter and impertinency mix'd! Reason in madness!

KING LEAR

If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.

I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester:

Thou must be patient; we came CRYING hither:

Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air,

We wawl and CRY. I will preach to thee: mark.

GLOUCESTER Alack, alack the day!

KING LEAR

When we are born, we CRY that we are come

To this great stage of fools…

“Sitting on a corn FLAKE”

“Dripping from a DEAD DOG's eye”

“See how they SMILE like PIGS in a sty, see how they snide”: King Lear 4.7

CORDELIA

Had you not been their father, these white FLAKES

Had challenged pity of them. Was this a face

To be opposed against the warring winds?

To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder?

In the most terrible and nimble stroke

Of quick, cross lightning? to watch--poor perdu!--

With this thin helm? Mine enemy's DOG,

Though he had bit me, should have stood that night

Against my fire; and wast thou fain, poor father,

To hovel thee with SWINE, and rogues forlorn,

In short and musty straw? Alack, alack!

Cordelia has returned, and Lennon “tags” that return with the “cornflake” he sits upon, like little miss muffet. 

And that brings us to what I see as the emotional center of Lennon’s veiled allusion to King Lear:

“Dripping from a DEAD DOG's eye”:  King Lear 5.3

KING LEAR

And my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!

Why should a DOG, a horse, a rat, have life,

And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never!

In other words, Lear bemoans that there is no “dead dog”, but there is a “dead Cordelia”!

After collecting those passages from King Lear with this very distinctive imagery that seems to be obliquely echoed in Walrus, I stepped back a pace and considered these parallels in a more global way. It’s safe to say that Shakespeare was never more sour, pessimistic, cynical, and sexually grotesque than in King Lear, and the same can also be said about John Lennon and Walrus – don’t you think the latter would work really well as a soundtrack for a modernized film version of Lear?

What also leapt off the page at me about that final quotation, when Lear wails in extreme grief at the death of his beloved Cordelia, we cannot help but be reminded of what has been pointed out by some clever Beatles elves who haven’t connected it to King Lear – that Brian Epstein, the “glue” that had held the Beatles together since their rise to fame, had suddenly and shockingly died, right before Lennon wrote Walrus.

But also, we can look at the first lines of Walrus as obliquely pointing to King Lear himself:

“I am he as you are he as you are me

And we are all together”

In his very first speech in the play, Lear repeatedly speaks in the royal “we”. And yet, by the final scene of the play, Lear speaks repeatedly and only in the personal “I” – not a royal “we” in sight. So we may well say that Lennon has, in brilliantly absurdist poetry, captured that metamorphosis from king to father. 

And so, that was where I stood after applying my usual methods to parsing texts for allusions. But I just could not believe that I was the first to reach this sort of insight into Walrus – and here’s the spooky part – after further diligent search, I still could not find any written commentary on this topic that got this far – it seemed that Lennon’s claims of “accidental” inclusion of Lear had not been challenged for nearly 54 years.

However, what I did find was a recording of the My Favourite Beatles Song podcast that aired only a week ago, on August 31, 2021:

https://myfavouritebeatlessong.buzzsprout.com/1820033/9108381-i-am-the-walrus-scott-rowley?t=0

In it, host Tim Tucker interviewed musician and music analyst Scott Rowley, and their topic was I am the Walrus. As their fascinating discussion progressed, I held my breath, as they described it as both playful and nightmarish, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, with a dark vision, as if Lennon sought the sharpest possible contrast to the psychedelic sermon on the mount that is All You Need is Love.

Things then got really exciting when Rowley noted that “I’m crying” seemed to be an expression of grief for Brian Epstein, a really bad trip that Lennon had been hurled into in his grief. 

And then, beginning at 24:00 running time, and then continuing for about 4 minutes, Rowley took that same giant imaginative leap that I had, and realized that Act 4, Scene 6 was exactly where Lennon wanted his sharpest elf listeners to go in their imaginations!

So all kudos to Rowley (and to Tucker for providing the perfect catalytic environment for Rowley to make his leap) for connecting those dots several days before I did – but I do believe that the echoes of imagery and verbiage that I retrieved and outlined, above, seal the deal – it all can’t be one humongous coincidence, or even unconscious echoing by Lennon – no, this was all entirely intentional on his part, a tribute to his own (apparent) secret love of Shakespeare, and of grief for the loss of Brian Epstein.

And there’s one final textual goodie, that Rowley caught, but I had missed, in that crucial Act 4, Scene 6, when Edgar is confronted by Oswald, right before Edgar courageously takes out that “serviceable villain”:

EDGAR  Good gentleman, go your gait, and let poor volk pass. An chud ha' bin zwaggered out of my life, 'twould not ha' bin zo long as 'tis by a vortnight. Nay, come not near th' old man; keep out, che vor

ye, or ise try whether your COSTARD or my ballow be the harder: ch'ill be plain with you.

OSWALD Out, dunghill!

Of course that is indeed the “Yellow matter CUSTARD” that drips from the “dead dog’s eye”, immediately after Lennon’s four Learian repetitions of “I’m crying”! 

I close by observing that this was a prophetic moment for Lennon, in which he played the Fool (in the highest sense of the word) as he foretold that the kingdom that was the Beatles was about to fracture apart into several pieces, just like Lear’s kingdom, now that the human “glue” that had held it together, Brian Epstein, had died. 

And also, perhaps, Lennon was, paradoxically, also celebrating his own liberation as an artist.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

ADDED 09/07/21 AT 11 AM PST

John Lennon in a 1970 Interview:

„When I was about twelve, I used to think I must be a genius, but nobody's noticed. Either I'm a genius or I'm mad, which is it? "No," I said, "I can't be mad because nobody's put me away; therefore I'm a genius."“

ADDED 09/11/21 AT 1 PM PST

This extraordinary article by Richard Gerber is the missing link in the chain of Lennon’s literary subtexts in I am the Walrus – Lennon read Joyce reading Lear & Carroll, in turn reading Shakespeare’s King Lear: 

https://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=nepca

&

Last but not least, perhaps John Lennon somehow heard about the following sometime between 1961 and 1967, perhaps by reading this:

11/17/1961 Life Magazine 51/20 p198

“A Deep Freeze Lear in Eskimo Land”

The old king strode into his court dressed in Eskimo furs. He wore a weird crown of WALRUS tusks. He held a harpoonlike spear. A strange get-up for Shakespeare's frosty hero, King Lear, but he was appearing in a new production of the bleak tragedy, set and costumed in Eskimo style. 

....This deep freeze King Lear was put on by Toronto’s talented Canadian Players and is now on a tour of 22 American cities.

The Pious Hypocrite of Hunton….or Hunsford?: Austen's Anti-Slavery Parody in Pride & Prejudice

My eye was caught today by a retweet by a sharp Twitter elf of the following article: 

“The ‘Slave Bible’ is Not What You Think” by Jill Hicks-Keeton June 3, 2020

https://therevealer.org/the-slave-bible-is-not-what-you-think/

Hicks-Keeton presents a sharp critique of the hypocrisy of The Museum of the Bible, skewering it for its deceitful attempts to whitewash the Bible’s pivotal role in the historical development of colonial slavery, for which scripture provided “moral justification” for enslaving other human beings.

I’ve long been aware of the subversive subtext of slavery in Austen’s novels – not just in Mansfield Park, but also significantly in Emma and Pride and Prejudice, too -- and that’s why the title of that article caught my eye – what exactly was the “Slave Bible”, and did it have any Austen connection?

I was not disappointed when I read the following excerpts:

“On one exhibit wall [at the Museum of the Bible] appeared an 1808 quotation attributed to Rev. Beilby Porteus, identified as Bishop of London and Founder of the Society for the Conversion & Religious Instruction and Education of the Negro Slaves. It read: “Prepare a short form of public prayers for them . . . together with select portions of Scripture . . . particularly those which relate to the duties of slaves towards their masters”….The quotation is excerpted from a letter to “the Governors, Legislatures, and Proprietors of Plantations, in The British West-India Islands.” 

Rev. Porteus’s aim is to convince these readers to allow enslaved Africans time and resources to receive Christian religious instruction. Porteus envisions a labor-free Sunday so that the enslaved can gather and be formed into Christian slaves.

He speculates that local clergy would be willing to prepare “a short form of public prayers for them [the enslaved], consisting of a number of the best Collects of the Liturgy, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, together with Select portions of Scripture, taken principally from the Psalms and Proverbs, the Gospels, and the plainest and most practical parts of the Epistles, particularly those which relate to the duties of slaves towards their masters.”

The museum has taken Porteus’s quotation out of its context and edited it to make it say something it does not say. When we read the unabridged statement, we find that he was not issuing a command, and specifically that he was not issuing a command to produce a Bible. Porteus envisioned a collection that expanded beyond biblical texts and included liturgy for public worship. Such an anthology would have been similar to other compilations of biblical and religious texts intended for liturgical or devotional use, examples of which can be found displayed with appreciative tone at the museum.

…The full context of Porteus’s statement gives us a clue as to what his criteria for inclusion of material would have been. Museum curators have excised a significant segment of Porteus’s statement that makes the phrase “particularly those which relate to the duties of slaves towards their masters” appear to refer to all of scripture, when it actually refers to “the plainest and most practical parts of the Epistles”—a phrase which shows that Porteus was motivated principally by a desire to offer enslaved readers texts deemed easily digestible and relevant to their experiences. He was not playing seek and hide with freedom-themed Bible verses.

[….]

Plenty of people with “whole” Bibles have read their Bibles and concluded that they supported slavery. Even though the missionaries who produced Select Parts of the Holy Bible were not manipulating a Bible with malintent, they were engaged in other activities that we are likely to find abhorrent today. Lest Reverend Porteus be exculpated, we must note that racism and paternalism fueled his commendation of Christian education for the enslaved. 

In his letter, Porteus portrays converted slaves as feathers in the caps of their owners, calling them a “pleasing and interesting spectacle, of a new and most numerous race of Christians ‘plucked as a brand out of the fire,’ rescued from the horrors and superstitions of Paganism.” Yet if conversion was intended to rescue enslaved Africans from horrors, it was not horrors in the here-and-now. 

Porteus reasons that Christian slaves work harder and are more compliant than those who do not convert. He argues that plantation owners should allow their slaves to receive Christian religious education so that their sexual activity can be controlled with the hope of producing more offspring. More enslaved babies, more slaves, more labor, more profit…”

END QUOTE FROM HICKS-KEETON ARTICLE

When I read the above, two words immediately popped into my head:   MR. COLLINS!

Now, two hours later, rather than making an elaborate argument as to why I’m certain that Bishop Porteus (the abolitionist who gave helpful advice to slaveowners) was a primary real-life inspiration for Mr. Collins, Jane Austen’s incomparable portrait of clerical hypocrisy, I will simply quote for you the relevant passages from each of their writings, and it will be obvious to all.

First, here are all the relevant passages from Porteus’s 1809 “masterpiece” that Hicks-Keeton brought to our attention, as he explains how he would implement his plan to convert all the slaves in the British West Indies to Christianity -- all, basically, for their own good, and also, incidentally, that of their masters as well. Note in particular how he lists his reasons, one by excruciating one, just like Mr. Collins:

“Assuming, then, that you are resolved upon the measure, the next consideration is, how are sufficient funds to be provided for carrying it into effect? Now I apprehend that in this there will be very little difficulty, as one great excellence of Dr. Bell's plan is, that it is attended with but a very trifling expence. To defray this expence, I would propose:

1: That a general subscription should be set on foot in this country, which I am persuaded would be an extensive and a liberal one. In my own diocese, and particularly in the opulent cities of London and Westminster, I would exert my utmost influence to promote it, and would myself begin it with the sum of £.500; and if the occasion called for it, would at any time be ready to double that sum. 

2: I can entertain no doubt but that the British legislature, which has already manifested so laudable a concern for the temporal happiness of the Negroes, will not be indifferent to their spiritual welfare, nor refuse their assistance in promoting it, by encouraging the establishment of these parochial schools.

3: The Society for the Conversion and religious Instruction and Education of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India Islands (of which I have the honour to be President) have I think the power, and would not, I am confident, want the inclination to contribute some share of their moderate revenue towards forwarding the plan proposed; as one part of their institution is the education of the young Negroes, and they are allowed by their charter to send out schoolmasters to the islands, as well as missionaries. 

4: Lastly. If these funds should not prove sufficient, a very small parochial rate might be raised on the Proprietors of lands in every island, to which (as they are to reap all the benefits of the institution, in the increase of their native Negroes, and will consequently save all the enormous sums formerly expended in the importation of fresh Slaves from Africa) they cannot, I think, reasonably object.

These are the sources which will, I doubt not, furnish an abundant supply for the support of the establishment here proposed; and the Planters will in a few years, at a very trivial expence to the Proprietor, raise up a race of young Christian Negroes, who will amply repay their kindness by the increase of their population, by their fidelity, their industry, their honesty, their sobriety, their humility, submission, and obedience to their masters; all which virtues are most strictly enjoined, under pain of eternal punishment, by that divine religion in which they will have been educated, and render them far superior to their unconverted fellow-labourers. 

This is not merely assertion and speculation. It is proved by fact and by experience; by the conduct of the Slaves who have been converted from Paganism and instructed in the Christian religion by the Moravian missionaries in the English and Danish islands, where the number of converted Negroes amounts to upwards of 24,000; who so far excel the unconverted Negroes, in the conscientious discharge of all the duties attached to their humble station, that they are held by the Planters in the highest estimation, and are purchased at a higher price than their Heathen brethren.

I cannot therefore help flattering myself that you will, without hesitation, adopt this benevolent system. It may be tried at first in one parish in any of the islands, and if it should succeed in that (of which there can be no doubt) it will of course encourage you to extend it gradually through every parish in every British island.”

“…the clergyman of the parish in which they reside will probably have the goodness to add his influence and exhortations for the same important purpose; and also to prepare a short form of public prayers for them, consisting of a certain number of the best Collects of the Liturgy, the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, together with select portions of Scripture, taken principally from the Psalms and Proverbs, the Gospels, and the plainest and most practical parts of the Epistles, particularly those which relate to the duties of slaves towards their masters. 

“…The other objection which may possibly impede the introduction of the parochial schools into the West-India islands is the idea taken up by some of the Proprietors, that by making their Negroes good Christians they make them bad Slaves; that by admitting them to baptism, to divine worship, to the holy sacrament, and the other privileges and advantages of the Gospel, they bring them too much on a level with themselves, they. raise their ideas above their condition, they inspire them with pride and ambition, render them less fit for labour, less disposed to fulfil the duties of their humble station, and less submissive and obedient to their masters.”

“…As well might it be affirmed that the laws of England have a natural tendency to encourage despotism, tyranny, oppression, and persecution. But there is no need for reasoning upon the subject. Let us go to experience and to fact. There are, as I have already observed, many thousands of Negro Slaves converted to Christianity in some of the British islands, especially that of Antigua; and what is the case with them? Are they by conversion rendered proud, insolent, idle, disinclined to labour, rebellious and disobedient to their masters? 

Quite the contrary. They so much excel all the unconverted Slaves in sobriety, industry, honesty, fidelity, submission and attachment to their masters, that every Proprietor is anxious to procure them, and, as I have before observed, will give a higher price for them than for their Heathen brethren. 

And how can we wonder at this superiority over their Pagan fellow-labourers, when we recollect that the DIVINE RELIGION which they have embraced most expressly enjoins them, under pain of God's displeasure here, and of the severest punishment hereafter, “to be subject to their masters with all fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward: to please them well in all things, not answering again; not purloining, but shewing all good fidelity; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, but as the servants of Christ, with “goodwill doing service as to the Lord and not to man. 

If anyone wished to form a slave exactly to his mind, could he possibly do it in terms more adapted to the purpose than these? And accordingly such effects have been produced on the minds and conduct of converted Negroes as might naturally be expected from them. Having thus, I trust, effectually answered the only plausible objections which I have ever heard stated against the introduction of Christianity among the Negro Slaves, and shewn that such a measure would be no less conducive to your temporal advantage than to their eternal interests; I should hope that this consideration alone would be sufficient to determine you in favour of the proposition here made to you. 

But you must allow me, Gentlemen, to add, that I by no means rest this great question on the ground cither of private or public utility, but on much higher and nobler principles; on the principles of justice, of humanity, of religion, of duty; by which most sacred ties you are bound as men and as Christians, to take care of the souls as well as of the bodies of that numerous race of men, over whom you have obtained the most absolute dominion. 

They are yours, the whole man, both body and soul. They are your sole and entire property. Their welfare is placed exclusively in your hands; their happiness or misery depends absolutely on your care of them, and by taking entire possession of them, you have made yourselves responsible for them, both here and here after. To you they look up as their masters, governors, guardians, and protectors; as the guides that are to open to them the way to a better world; and they will not, I trust, look up to you in vain. It is a debt which is strictly due to them; an act of compassion to which they have the strongest possible claim.

By that very large share which the British Nation and the British Islands have, for several centuries, taken in the importation of Slaves from Africa, many thousands, many millions of innocent unoffending human beings have been torn from their native land, from every blessing that was valuable, every connexion that was dear to them, have been conveyed against their will to a country and to a people unknown to them , and without any offence or fault of theirs have been doomed 'TO PERPETUAL SERVITUDE, a servitude too which at their death they leave (the only inheritance they have to leave) entailed upon their latest posterity. 

These surely are sufferings which call for some compensation; and what better, what more proper compensation can there be, than that of communicating to them the blessings of the Gospel, and opening to them the reviving prospect of eternal felicity in another life, since their fate has been so unfortunate in this. This will be an act of kindness, of benevolence, of charity in its highest and sublimest form, and productive of the most extensive and substantial good. It is a boon which, comparatively speaking, will cost you nothing, but to the objects of it will be invaluable. It will be a cordial to their hearts, and a support under their toils; it will sooth their minds with all the consolations of religion; it will make even servitude itself sit light upon them, and cheer their souls with the hope of eternal freedom and felicity in another world. 

Instead of lessening their inclination to labour, it will increase their industry and their desire (in conformity to the commands of the religion they have embraced) to please their masters in all things. It will redouble their attachment to those masters, and bind them down to the performance of all their duties by the strongest ties of affection and gratitude. Nor will you, Gentlemen, be without your reward, and that the highest and most gratifying that a human being can receive, the approbation of God , and the applause of the whole world. 

You will have the immortal honour of founding a new school for piety and virtue in the bosom of the Atlantic Ocean, of erecting a noble structure of religion and morality in the Western world, of exhibiting to mankind the interesting spectacle of a very large community of truly Christian Negroes, and of leading the way to the salvation of more than 500, 000 human beings, (immersed before in the grossest ignorance, superstition, wickedness, and idolatry) with all their countless descendants to the end of time. 

END QUOTES FROM PORTEUS’S LETTER:

What a load of crap! And now, here are the passages in P&P relating to Mr. Collins that I suggest clearly were inspired, in no small part, by Porteus’s exotic mixture of hypocrisy and self-importance:

Ch. 17: “She was not the better pleased with [Mr. Collins’s] gallantry from the idea it suggested of something more. It now first struck her, that she was SELECTED from among her sisters as worthy of being mistress of Hunsford Parsonage, and of assisting to form a quadrille table at Rosings, in the absence of more eligible visitors.

Ch. 19: “Believe me, my dear Miss Elizabeth, that your modesty, so far from doing you any disservice, rather adds to your other perfections. You would have been less amiable in my eyes had there not been this little unwillingness; but allow me to assure you, that I have your respected mother’s permission for this address. You can hardly doubt the purport of my discourse, however your natural delicacy may lead you to dissemble; my attentions have been too marked to be mistaken. Almost as soon as I entered the house, I singled you out as the companion of my future life. But before I am run away with by my feelings on this subject, perhaps it would be advisable for me to state my reasons for marrying—and, moreover, for coming into Hertfordshire with the design of SELECTING a wife, as I certainly did.”

The idea of Mr. Collins, with all his solemn composure, being run away with by his feelings, made Elizabeth so near laughing, that she could not use the short pause he allowed in any attempt to stop him further, and he continued:

“My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony in his parish; secondly, that I am convinced that it will add very greatly to my happiness; and thirdly—which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling patroness. 

Twice has she condescended to give me her opinion (unasked too!) on this subject; and it was but the very Saturday night before I left HUNSFORD—between our pools at quadrille, while Mrs. Jenkinson was arranging Miss de Bourgh’s footstool, that she said, ‘Mr. Collins, you must marry. A clergyman like you must marry. Choose properly, choose a gentlewoman for my sake; and for your own, let her be an active, useful sort of person, not brought up high, but able to make a small income go a good way. This is my advice. Find such a woman as soon as you can, bring her to Hunsford, and I will visit her.’ 

[…]

“Really, Mr. Collins,” cried Elizabeth with some warmth, “you puzzle me exceedingly. If what I have hitherto said can appear to you in the form of encouragement, I know not how to express my refusal in such a way as to convince you of its being one.”

“You must give me leave to flatter myself, my dear cousin, that your refusal of my addresses is merely words of course. My reasons for believing it are briefly these: It does not appear to me that my hand is unworthy of your acceptance, or that the establishment I can offer would be any other than highly desirable. My situation in life, my connections with the family of de Bourgh, and my relationship to your own, are circumstances highly in my favour; and you should take it into further consideration, that in spite of your manifold attractions, it is by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made you. Your portion is unhappily so small that it will in all likelihood undo the effects of your loveliness and amiable qualifications. As I must therefore conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females.”

Ch. 57: “…Mr. Collins moreover adds, ‘I am truly rejoiced that my cousin Lydia’s sad business has been so well hushed up, and am only concerned that their living together before the marriage took place should be so generally known. I must not, however, neglect the duties of my station, or refrain from declaring my amazement at hearing that you received the young couple into your house as soon as they were married. It was an encouragement of vice; and had I been the rector of Longbourn, I should very strenuously have opposed it. You ought certainly to forgive them, as a Christian, but never to admit them in your sight, or allow their names to be mentioned in your hearing.’ That is his notion of Christian forgiveness!...” 

And it turns out that Porteus’s striking resemblance to Mr. Collins was actually first noticed 120 years ago:

The Home Counties Magazine 1901

“Sundridge, Kent” by Arthur Maude

“Sundridge… is a village of some interest. The manor has been in the hands of various well- known houses… it is entered in Domesday Book as the property of the archbishop…

…The most important grave in the churchyard is that of Dr. Porteus, once Bishop of Chester, whom Pitt made Bishop of London in 1787. He lived in the house in Sundridge still known as Bishop's Cottage, and was buried there in 1809. Porteus is almost forgotten now, but was a hierarch of importance in his day. He was one of the many scandalous pluralists of that time; he held the living of HUNTON at the same time as Lambeth, kept both when master of St. Cross Hospital, and was rector of HUNTON as long as he was Bishop of Chester. 

He was not a great scholar, and was coarsely attacked by Porson, and by that ponderous pedant Parr (who would attack any bishop whom Pitt appointed ), as “a poor paltry prelate, proud of petty popularity and perpetually preaching to petticoats. 

There is very good internal evidence in Pride and Prejudice that the diction and foibles of the good bishop were in Jane Austen's mind when she produced that delicate satire on the clergy of the day, the character of Mr. Collins. 

We should prefer to remember the excellent position taken by Dr. Porteus on the slavery question, and his judicious support of Robert Raikes' movement for the establishment of Sunday schools.” 

Did you notice that little touch – that “Hunton” became “Hunsford”???

And from Anecdotal Reminiscences of Distinguished Literary and Political Characters

by Leigh Cliffe, Esq. (1830, we also learn these Mr. Collins-esque details:

“Though Dr. Porteous was religious in the strictest sense of the term, no man was a stronger advocate for rational amusement. He liked his rubber at whist, and could be pleased with a song.”

However, I doubt that Maude, despite his good ear for echoes of diction, understood that this was not just Jane Austen covertly satirizing a ridiculous hypocrite. It was also, under the surface, a searing condemnation of the complicity of the Anglican clergy in colonial slavery – and of the kind of self-deluding absurdity that could, without a trace of irony (a la The Onion or Borat), construct an elaborate argument for why abolition of the slave trade was good -- and yet, at the same time, making slaves good Christians would also make them good (meaning, productive) slaves – all the while, as Jane Austen would put it, “keeping his countenance” (i.e,. a straight face).

ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

For Love, Money….and Worldly Wisdom: How to Read Jane Austen Better

Today, a good (non-Janeite) friend alerted me to the publication of yet another article about Jane Austen:

“How to Misread Jane Austen (or, For Love or Money)” by Louis Menand in The New Yorker 09/28/20

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/05/how-to-misread-jane-austen

(I believe this link is now openly accessible, even without a New Yorker subscription) 

I just read with great interest this serious, comprehensive article, by a well-respected public intellectual, Louis Menand, a Harvard prof. He made a number of good points, in particular in his detailed analysis of the nuts and bolts of Regency Era dollars and cents (no, make that pounds). And he didn't shy away from  grappling with the Big Picture, trying to bring a fresh perspective on the central  mystery of Jane Austen, which is "Why she is read so differently by readers coming from varied perspectives?"

Nevertheless, every so often, Menand popped out a statement that I believe would benefit from clarification (and in a couple of cases, correction) from my admittedly non-mainstream perspective on Austen, so here goes. I quote selectively, but obviously you will want to read Menand's full article, to see the full context of his claims:

Menand: “[Jane Austen’s surviving] letters that remain are not especially “Austenian,” and they can be a little hard-hearted and judgy, which does not match very well the image of Austen in the pious biographical sketch written by her brother Henry, shortly after her death, or in the memoir by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, published more than fifty years later, which is mainly family oral remembrance, and in which she is “dear Aunt Jane.”

The problem of misrepresentation of the real Jane Austen by his nephew is far more serious. The surviving letters indeed do not match the bowdlerized portrait of Austen both literally and figuratively provided by the 1870 Memoir. This was not because her nephew wore rose-colored glasses, however, it was because, as my research has shown, her nephew deliberately distorted his Aunt Jane, both as a person and as a writer, to the world. 

This was, I further assert, a deliberate erasure of the real Jane Austen, who was a strong feminist and probably not heterosexual. But it was also personal -- it was a long-delayed revenge on behalf of his late mother, Mary Lloyd Austen, who was not kindly disposed to her sister-in-law, Jane; and, when you look at veiled portraits of Mary in Jane Austen’s fiction, most notably Fanny Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, you see that the antipathy was entirely mutual.

Menand: “Instead of asking what Austen is trying to tell us [in her fiction], we might ask what she’s trying to show us. But the answer to that seems to be: It depends on who’s looking.”

That is both accurate and highly significant, and I will explain what that means to me, further, below.

Menand: “The critical line on her, even from admirers like Sir Walter Scott, was that she was a miniaturist specializing in an exceedingly narrow sector of British society, the landed gentry. Everyone agreed that she captured that world with astonishing precision; not everyone felt that it was a world worth capturing. “A carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers,” Charlotte Brontë described P&P to a friend. “I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.”

I believe it’s much more complicated, and much more interesting, than that, both as to Scott and even more so as to Charlotte Bronte:

Scott’s 1816 review of Emma shows that he actually was the first to recognize Austen’s towering genius, especially her subtle subversiveness. Check out how, e.g., in that same review, he captured, in passing, the anti-romance hidden just beneath the romantic climax of Pride and Prejudice:

Scott: " The lady [Elizabeth], on the contrary, hurt at the contempt of her connections, which the lover [Darcy] does not even attempt to suppress, and prejudiced against him on other accounts, refuses the hand which he ungraciously offers, and does not perceive that she has done a foolish thing until she accidentally visits a very handsome seat and grounds belonging to her admirer. They chance to meet exactly as her prudence had begun to subdue her prejudice; and after some essential services rendered to her family, the lover becomes encouraged to renew his addresses, and the novel ends happily."

So much for the romantic ending of Pride and Prejudice! Scott slyly suggests that the joke is actually on Elizabeth, when she unwittingly reveals her own “prudence” to the reader, as she answers her sister Jane’s question at the end of the novel:

Jane: “My dearest sister, now be serious. I want to talk very seriously. Let me know every thing that I am to know, without delay. Will you tell me how long you have loved [Darcy]?”

Eliza: “It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.”

I could not agree more with Scott, and tip my hat to him for reading Austen through an Audenesque lens.

As for Charlotte Bronte, her famous comments about Austen’s fiction were not written to “a friend” – they were written to George Henry Lewes, one of the most prominent literary critics of her day, who also just happened to become, not much later, the long-time S.O. of the next great English female novelist, George Eliot. 

Oh, and I assert that C. Bronte, in complaining about the lack of passion in Austen’s novels, was pulling Lewes’s pompous leg, in just the same way that Mark Twain would do with his friend and avid Janeite, William Dean Howells, a half century later – Jane Eyre is actually crammed from one end to the other with veiled allusions to each and every one of Austen’s six published novels; and Mark Twain, I assert, lurved Austen’s writing – of course he did, because she was an inspiration to him in the Art of the Put-on.

Menand: “Still, there were readers who detected an edge. Woolf was one. “I would rather not find myself in the room alone with her,” she wrote. The British critic D. W. Harding, in 1939, proposed that Austen’s books were enjoyed “by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked; she is a literary classic of the society which attitudes like hers, held widely enough, would undermine.” The title of his essay was “Regulated Hatred.” Lionel Trilling, in 1955, called Austen “an agent of the Terror,” meaning that she is merciless in forcing us to confront our moral weaknesses.”

Harding, 80 years ago, was one of the first to “get” the real Jane Austen. However, it should be noted that his brilliant insight has still not become mainstream in Austen scholarly circles, even now in 2020. 

Menand: “Today, there are two Austens, with, probably, a fair amount of overlap: the recreational reader’s Austen and the English professor’s Austen… the professor thinks that the novels are about things that people like Churchill and Leslie Stephen thought they leave out: the French Revolution, slavery, the empire, patriarchy, the rights of women…”

As Menand goes on to clarify a bit later in his essay, it’s a much more complicated readerly landscape than that. There are many recreational, non-scholarly readers of Austen who “get” what Harding got, and also see that Austen was what we today would call a strong feminist; and conversely, there are still a fair number of Austen scholars who (100% wrongly, in my view) still read Austen as a pious conservative, who was not concerned with the wider world. And by they way, I am also, as I mentioned above, firmly of the small camp that sees Austen herself as non-heterosexual, and I also see that as present in every one of what I call her "shadow stories" (a central term of my way of reading Austen's fiction, as I explained in an 2016 interview which I've linked below.

Menand: “Literature professors love the notion of texts “interrogating” things; I am a literature professor, and I have certainly used that line. But, in this case, it feels like fence-straddling. It asks us to accept an Austen who is somehow simultaneously conservative as a person and subversive as a writer. Keymer says things like “The courtship plot that structures all 6 of Austen’s published novels, though sometimes held to imply her endorsement of a patriarchal status quo, is equally a means of exploring themes of female disempowerment.” It’s hard to see how the novels can be “equally” endorsements of patriarchy and criticisms of it.”

My answer is, simply, that the apparent endorsements of heterosexual white patriarchy were a necessary cover or ‘beard’ (or else Austen could never have gotten published) for her own genuine, savage, but veiled, critique of white male oppression of women and POC. Jane Austen, as I see her, was not of two minds in this regard. However, what she was perhaps most interested in, was in teaching her female readers how to read the male-dominated world they lived in.

Menand: “[Helena] Kelly’s Mr. Knightley, in short, is a heartless landowner intent on building a private fiefdom. She thinks the reason he marries Emma is that he wants to absorb her property, one of the few parcels of land around Highbury he does not already own, into his estate. Keymer would not object to this line of interpretation, presumably—“implication, not explication, was Austen’s way,” he says—but would be reluctant to conclude that it means that Austen was a revolutionary.”

Helena Kelly learned a thing or two from me, as I explained in this blog post 4 years ago:

https://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2016/11/all-shadow-stories-of-jane-austen.html

I also believe that Austen’s primary subversive focus was eerily prescient of the culture wars raging at this very second in the U.S. – the battle for control over women’s bodies and sexuality. Her hobby horse, revealed a dozen times over in surviving letters she wrote over the entire last 20 years of her all-too-short life, was the plague which afflicted married English gentlewoman in “normal” English marriages – bearing the heavy cross of serial pregnancy, the ever-present danger of death in childbirth, and the lack of any sort of creative life for those wives lucky enough to run that gauntlet and survive physically.

That is the essence of the shadow story of Northanger Abbey that I spoke about at the 2010 Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA). Hovering over that "lightest" of Austen's six novels is the ghost of Mrs. Tilney as the symbol of all the dead or deadened English wives “murdered” by their Bluebeard-like “normal” husbands via sex -- unwilling soldiers conscripted into a domestic war they never asked to fight in, fought to perpetuate male domination.

Menand: “…Isn’t it because Austen’s texts are so indeterminate that she is beloved by people who come to her with different prejudices and expectations? And isn’t her mythic stature produced by her writing, rather than projected by her readers? Isn’t inscrutability part of the intention? That we don’t know much about Austen from her letters (or from what we have of them) suggests that she didn’t want people to know much about her, period.”

I was with Menand in that passage till that last sentence. We can know a great deal from her fiction and her letters, if we are prepared to learn how to read what I call The Jane Austen Code, as I explained in this 2017 interview:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9WkpqjJPR4

Anyone who enjoys solving Will Shortz’s Thursday-Saturday crossword puzzles will really love solving Jane Austen’s literary puzzles – I believe she meant them to be difficult, but not unsolvable!

Menand: “All of Austen’s novels are about misinterpretation, about people reading other people incorrectly. Catherine Morland, in NA, reads General Tilney wrong. Elizabeth Bennet reads Mr. Darcy wrong. Marianne Dashwood, in S&S, gets Willoughby wrong, and Edmund Bertram, in MP, gets Mary Crawford wrong. Emma gets everybody wrong. There might be a warning to the reader here: do not think that you are getting it right, either.”

Half-correct. I say Jane Austen’s literary game was much more complicated (and brilliant), The above only describes the essence of Austen’s overt stories. But it turns out that in her shadow stories, all of that is topsy turvy --Catherine reads the General right; Elizabeth Bennet initially reads Darcy right, but then gets conned by his imposture of a repentant narcissist; Mary Crawford is the true heroine of Mansfield Park, etc. etc. Although it never came to pass, I believe that Austen's dream was that her readers, in being able to see both of these realities in each novel, would be better equipped to deal with the ambiguity of their own lives.

Menand: “Emma, for instance, is the only mature novel Austen named for a character, and that is because the entire narrative, except for one chapter, is from Emma’s point of view.”

NO!!! That was the only truly wrong statement by Menand that initially prompted me to write this post. Although it is almost never noted by Austen scholars other than myself, all 6 of Austen’s published novels (and also her 3 fragments Catharine, or the Bower, The Watsons, and Sanditon) are written 98% from the focal heroine’s point of view. Emma is merely the one Austen novel in which Austen foregrounds that near-exclusivity of point of view – in the others, it's there, but she seems to deliberately conceal it, hoping it would eventually be detected - but that never came to pass in the 2-century history of people reading her novels.

That is the foundation upon which Austen’s entire fictional enterprise rests. The focal heroines of each novel, and not just Emma, are almost entirely the only eyes and minds through which we know their respective fictional worlds. There are therefore two completely different ways to read Austen’s famous third person narrative voice: as largely objective, and therefore largely reliable; or as largely subjective, and therefore potentially largely unreliable.

This is precisely what enabled Jane Austen to write double stories – if the reader accepts the focal heroine’s hundreds of judgments on what they see, feel, hear, etc., then we have the overt story; but if the reader makes a concerted effort to get outside that bubble, then the shadow stories – with all their pervasive subversion of the patriarchy that I have found there – become accessible. 

Best example: If Darcy actually reforms and repents, then it is a truly happy romantic ending. But if he only pretends to reform and repent, and then devotes all his energy toward conning Elizabeth into believing a fake version of his character, then it’s the ultimate cautionary tale. Both fictional worlds are contained in the same words, depending on the reader’s point of view -- an omniscient narrator or a fallible young person.

Menand: “The people who read Austen for the romance and the people who read Austen for the sociology are both reading her correctly, because Austen understands courtship as an attempt to achieve the maximum point of intersection between love and money. Characters who are in the marriage game just for love, like Marianne Dashwood, in S&S, are likely to get burned. Characters in it just for the money, like Maria Bertram, in MP, are likely to be unhappy.”

And, for all my above criticisms of Menand’s statements, I am largely in accord with the above, pithy summation, and the rest of his detailed analysis of Austen’s meticulous focus on the actual income and wealth of each of the characters. 

Menand’s final words: “Does this mean that [Austen] was pressing her nose against the glass imagining a life she was largely excluded from? Or does it mean that she could see with the clarity and unsentimentality of the outsider the fatuity of those people and the injustices and inequalities their comforts were built on? We can only guess.”

The latter. But we can do much more than guess, and I will let “Mrs. Pole”, one of the persons whose opinion of Mansfield Park Jane Austen collected in 1814, explain:

"There is a particular satisfaction in reading all Miss A----'s works -- they are so evidently written by a Gentlewoman --most Novellists fail & betray themselves in attempting to describe familiar scenes in high Life; some little vulgarism escapes & shews that they are not EXPERIMENTALLY ACQUAINTED with what they describe, but here it is quite different. Everything is natural, & the situations & incidents are told in a manner which clearly evinces the Writer to belong to the Society whose Manners she so ably delineates.” 

[Mrs. Pole is then quoted by Austen in third person] 

Mrs. Pole also said that no Books had ever occasioned so much canvassing & doubt, & that everybody was desirous to attribute them to some of their own friends, or to some person of whom they thought highly.”

But who was this “Mrs. Pole”, and why should be trust her high praise for the accuracy of Austen's portrait of those aristocrats whom Harding (rightly) said she hated? It’s a reflection of the lack of curiosity about Jane Austen’s possible connectivity to the highest levels of English intellectual society, that it was not until 2005, when I was the first Austen scholar to ever take the time to figure out who, exactly, this “Mrs. Pole” was, who wrote such a startlingly brilliant reaction to Mansfield Park. 

She was born Elizabeth Colyear, the illegitimate daughter of an Earl (like a character in one of Austen’s wild juvenilia). And she then became Mrs. Pole. But, after her husband died, the world came to know her by her final married name: “Elizabeth Darwin”, the wife of Erasmus Darwin! 

She was also the inspiration for Erasmus Darwin's famous erotic poem “The Botanic Garden”, which I believe was part of the subtext of Austen’s Catharine, or the Bower. And she was also the stepgrandmama of Charles Darwin, the passionate Janeite who was a great scientist of the natural world the way Jane Austen was, as Mrs Pole implied, a great scientist of the social world.

So, as I said, we don’t have to guess – we know that Jane Austen was the ultimate social critic; and, what’s even more remarkable, she found a way to share some of her insight with her readers, for them to learn about life as she saw it, by reading these novels which function as Zen koans. 

Or as Elizabeth Bennet put it, in a line that never makes it into any of the Austen film adaptations, because nobody knows what the hell she means: “We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing.”

Jane Austen ultimately was all about teaching by not teaching, what was worth knowing. And we can all agree that she not only gave us the highest quality fiction reading experience, she also taught us how to live better. 

Cheers, ARNIE 

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.: I checked my old files, and saw that Menand, in The NY Review of Books in February 1996, opined that Emma Thompson’s making Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon much more sexy and appealing as romantic heroes were “improvements on Austen’s original”. Menand further wrote that the chief problem of Sense and Sensibility that Thompson solved was “the stupefying dullness of the men the Dashwood sisters eventually pair off with”.

What I hope I’ve made clear in my above post is that Jane Austen fully intended to de-romanticize Edward and the Colonel, because, in the shadow story of the novel, they are neither of them good men, not by a long shot – Marianne Dashwood was right, not Elinor!

Quiz about two famous stories, seemingly unrelated, which actually have (at least) 9 parallels between them

[Answer is given below when you scroll down]

I’m thinking of two famous stories which are parallel with each other in each of the following nine ways. In each story:

ONE: There is an unreliable narrative point of view;

TWO: The plot involves multiple interwoven, doomed extramarital affairs;

THREE: There is a death of a major character near the end of the story which occurs in water, and it may be a homicide;

FOUR: We repeatedly witness the careless arrogance of the rich toward the less well off;

FIVE: Most or all of the action takes place in a small seaside community on Long Island, and in nearby NYC;

SIX: A key plot turn involves the death of one character by hit-and-run in a car driven by a woman; but then the man who loves her in their doomed affair takes responsibility, and falsely claims to have been the driver, in order to save her from prosecution; 

SEVEN: A major male character is covertly involved in the distribution of an illegal intoxicating substance,

and, last but not least, these two word clues:

EIGHT: One of the male characters whose point of view is major in the story has a first name beginning with the letter N, and a last name ending with the syllable "way", and

NINE: The first name of the character who is killed in the hit and run in one story is the same as the first name of the famous author of the other story.

Any guesses? Rather than tease around, I will give you the answer below, but if you want to have some fun, wait to scroll down. You may well recognize one of the answers right away, but not the other. 

NOTE: Spoilers as to certain plot points in both stories

[SCROLL DOWN]

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The two correct answers are The Great Gatsby and The Affair. Now for a brief unpacking of all this. First the actual parallels (and this is massive spoilers for both The Affair and The Great Gatsby)

I first got the idea for this post, when my friend Elaine Bander wrote in Facebook the other day, that she had noticed for the first time that there were structural parallels between Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. 

I was curious to try to figure out what those parallels might be, given that I had read both WH and TGG, and I always love investigating intertextuality hidden in plain sight – and it was while reading the Wikipedia synopsis of TGG, and I was reminded that there was a hit-and-run negligent homicide in it, which was a pivotal plot twist leading to the tragic climax of the novel. 

That immediately brought to my mind one of the most pivotal plot points of the recently concluded 5-season Showtime series The Affair, in which a hit-and-run negligent homicide similarly functions as a pivotal plot twist, although it occurs near the start of the series, a terrible event that shapes the arc of the entire rest of the story.

Now, as of 2 days later, I have collected the above 9 parallels between The Great Gatsby and The Affair, which, trebly over, confirm that Sarah Treem, the show creator, was being very very sly about alluding to The Great Gatsby, hiding it in plain sight, but only for those who were familiar with The Great Gatsby. I am sure there are more that I have not yet found, as I need to reread TGG to see what else rings a bell in The Affair. 

And, beyond the scavenger hunt, puzzle solving fun of the above, the more significant question is to ask what light this hidden-in-plain-sight allusion in The Affair casts on The Great Gatsby? And also, in reverse, what light does The Great Gatsby cast on how we should understand The Affair? I don’t have any developed answers yet, but I have a strong hunch that this was not just a literary parlor trick by Treem, and that both of these inquiries will enrich our understanding of both works.

In this regard, check out this answer by Treem to a question in an August 2016 interview about The Affair:

https://observer.com/2016/08/the-affair-creator-answers-key-question-is-noah-solloway-actually-a-good-writer/

“The Affair’ Creator Answers Key Question: Is Noah Solloway Actually a Good Writer?”

By Vinnie Mancuso  08/11/16 

But the one trait we can’t confirm with absolute certainty is whether Noah Solloway–two time novelist, literary dynamo, pillar of masculinity, etc etc–is actually a talented writer. We posed that question to The Affair creator Sarah Treem, as part of a larger interview that will run closer to season 3’s November premiere date.

“Oh, you mean THE Noah Solloway? I think Noah has the potential to be a great writer,” Treem said, sitting in the lobby bar of the Beverly Hilton hotel. “I’m not sure he’s reached it yet. But I think he’s got it in him.

“I think in a lot of ways,” she continued, “Noah is writing to be known. He’s writing basically for the sake of having that reputation, of being known as a writer. But I think some people that are heavily invested in the identity of a writer are incredible writers. You go back to the F. Scott Fitzgeralds and the Ernest Hemingways, they all cared very deeply about being seen as a writer.”

Well, there you have it. Noah Solloway is basically F. Scott Fitzgerald mixed with Ernest Hemingway. Suck it, Bruce Butler." 

END QUOTE FROM SARAH TREEM INTERVIEW

So Sarah Treem played fair with her fans, and couldn’t resist leaving an extra-textual Easter Egg (or should I say, East Egg?) for fans of The Affair! 

And now that I reread that quote, it also makes me wonder whether it is only my relative lack of familiarity with Hemingway’s fiction is the reason why I haven’t yet realized that Hemingway might be a spice in Treem’s literary stew as well --- “Sollo-WAY” as pointing not only to “Nick Carraway” but also…..to “Nick Adams” the protagonist of Hemingway’s autobiographical story collection?

But for today, I will finish with a quotation of the final paragraphs of The Great Gatsby. I defy anyone who has watched The Affair to tell me that they’re not strangely reminded of it, especially of the tragic character of Allison:

On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

I can almost hear the haunting strains of Fiona Apple's compelling song "Container" that is the theme music of The Affair.

Cheers, ARNIE

Austen's Persuasion & Richardson's Clarissa

It seems like the author, Christopher Fanning, of one of the articles in the latest Persuasions #41 (2019) failed to use Google in checking for prior scholarly commentary – specifically, mine -- on his topic. However, I am glad for his article, as I’ll explain below.

First, here is a link to the post I wrote in my blog (and in Janeites, while it was still at Yahoo) on January 8, 2018: https://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-faces-of-griselda-chaucer-prior.html

“The Faces of Griselda: Chaucer, Prior, Richardson….and Shakespeare & Austen, too!”

I began as follows:

“In this followup post to my earlier ones (responding to Ellen Moody’s initial post) about the allusion in Austen’s Persuasion to Matthew Prior’s Henry and Emma, I’m now ready, after further scholarly delving and reflection, to confidently explain the full significance of Austen’s allusion, to wit: Austen’s revised ending of Persuasion, with its memorable debate between Anne and Harville about male-dominated literature’s denial of female constancy, is part of Austen’s complex response to Prior’s famous poem; with the crucial additional insight that Austen filtered her response to Prior through Sarah Fielding’s protofeminist Remarks on (Richardson’s) Clarissa, which illuminates an intertextual matrix that includes Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale (and the Wife of Bath’s Tale), and one of Shakespeare’s great comedies as well!

Within that overview, I see Austen as having particularly engaged in a variety of subtle ways with Richardson’s complex, tragic dyad of Clarissa and Lovelace, in constructing the relationship between her own couple, Anne and Wentworth; and having left several key textual hints in Persuasion pointing in that direction. That’s a lot to unpack, so I’ll get right to it….”

In my 2018 blogpost, I then went, in detail, through SIX different parallels I saw between Persuasion and Clarissa, including one that is of particular relevance to my post today, in which I credited Jocelyn Harris’s for her 2006 spotting of a striking parallel”

“V: THE TWO “REPULSIVELY’S”: And there’s still more that unites Persuasion and Clarissa. Please now read the following excerpt from Jocelyn Harris’s A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression (2006):

“In the 1818 text [of Persuasion], Anne’s eloquence contrasts vividly with her silence in the manuscript. When Wentworth meets Anne in Union Street, it is he who ‘said nothing- only looked,’ while Anne  ‘could command herself enough to receive that look, and not repulsively’, meaning in a repelling manner. Perhaps Austen recalled Clarissa here, for that compulsive neologist Samuel Richardson seems to have invented the word for a scene where the heroine, discomposed by abduction from her father’s house to a St. Alban’s inn, shows ‘uneasiness’ before the curious servants: ‘She cast a conscious glance, as she alighted,’ and ‘repulsively, as I may say, quitted my assisting hand, and hurried into the house.’ In a typical challenge to her mentor, Austen makes Charles Musgrove incurious and Anne glad rather than disgusted by her suitor’s advances. Those readers who were familiar with Richardson, like Cassandra Austen, would understand that Anne acts in pointed denial of Clarissa’s revulsion from Lovelace when she signals to Wentworth her willingness to walk with him and accepts the offer of his arm. Also, instead of occurring at an early stage of the relationship, as with Clarissa and Lovelace, Austen’s scene occurs in the 1818 text only after Anne speaks out to refute all the old, misogynistic arguments about woman’s inconstancy, after she offers herself implicitly as an example of a faithful woman.” END QUOTE FROM JOCELYN HARRIS

Here’s the full passage in Persuasion: 

“They were on Union Street, when a quicker step behind, a something of familiar sound, gave her two moments' preparation for the sight of Captain Wentworth. He joined them; but, as if irresolute whether to join or to pass on, said nothing, only looked. Anne could command herself enough to receive that look, and not REPULSIVELY. The cheeks which had been pale now glowed, and the movements which had hesitated were decided. He walked by her side.”

And here is the parallel passage in Lovelace’s letter:

“At their alighting at the inn at St. Alban's on Monday night, thus [Lovelace] writes:  ‘The people who came about us, as we alighted, seemed by their jaw-fallen faces, and goggling eyes, to wonder at beholding a charming young lady, majesty in her air and aspect, so composedly dressed, yet with features so discomposed, come off a journey which had made the cattle smoke, and the servants sweat. I read their curiosity in their faces, and my beloved's uneasiness in hers. She cast a conscious glance, as she alighted, upon her habit, which was no habit; and repulsively, as I may say, quitting my hand, hurried into the house…’

Harris’s sharp ear has alerted her to a parallel which takes on tenfold greater meaning, when it is viewed in the context of all the parallels between Clarissa and the Persuasion scene at the White Hart Inn….”

ENDQUOTE FROM MY 2018 BLOG POST

Prior to my post, the only suggestions of parallels between Clarissa and Persuasion were in passing:

(1 the “repulsively” parallel spotted, and noted in passing, by Jocelyn Harris, as quoted above, and

(2) Anthony M. Kearney, Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1975):

“When Fanny is strongly advised to marry Henry Crawford (another Lovelace figure) by her uncle, in fact, we are almost back into Clarissa. Similarly in Persuasion Anne Elliot's situation as a young girl whose own inclination to marry the man she loves is thwarted by someone who has what amounts to parental authority over her, echoes the familiar theme, and the ending where parental authority over children is endorsed, despite everything, has a Richardsonian ambivalence about it.

In both novels Jane Austen develops Richardson's way of experiencing things through the consciousness of a central character with even greater subtlety, and avoids the occasional clumsiness and prolixity of Clarissa by dropping the epistolary form…”

That means that the first scholarly claim of a comprehensive allusion by Austen in Persuasion to Richardson’s Clarissa was my January, 2018 blog post, and my followups shortly thereafter, written by me almost exactly two centuries after publication of Persuasion.

Now… with that background, take a look at the following quotation from “Austen and Richardson’s Clarissa: The Case of Persuasion” by Christopher Fanning, in that newest Persuasions #41 (2019) that we are looking at:

“…Jocelyn Harris postulates a renewal of Austen’s youthful engagement with Richardson, dating from the publication of Barbauld’s edition of the Richardson correspondence in 1804, suggesting that Barbauld’s discussion of particular scenes in Clarissa as well as questions of technique offered Austen both materials and methods for her own writing (Jane Austen’s Art of Memory). In this study Harris moves on to discuss Richardson, including sustained attention to Clarissa, with particular regard to Sense and Sensibility. Elsewhere, however, she also notes a verbal echo of Clarissa in Persuasion in the important scene in which Anne Elliot accepts Captain Wentworth (discussed below).

I wish to add to this verbal echo an additional and hitherto unnoticed use of a coinage unique to Clarissa in Persuasion, and, moving beyond Harris’s argument that the usage in the scene between Anne and Wentworth is a clue to readers of Clarissa for understanding the local passage in which it is found, I develop an understanding of Persuasion as a whole as a response to and critique of Richardson’s Clarissa.

Harris provides a convincing reading of a Richardsonian neologism in a quiet but climactic scene at the end of Persuasion, when “Anne could command herself enough to receive that look [from Captain Wentworth], and not repulsively”. Important here is the negation of “repulsively,” a word more or less unique to the scene in which the rake Lovelace completes his abduction of Clarissa and takes her to the inn at St. Albans: “She cast a conscious glance as she alighted . . . and repulsively, as I may say, quitting my assisting hand, hurried into the house as fast as she could”. Harris writes: “Those readers who were familiar with Richardson . . . would understand that Anne acts in pointed denial of Clarissa’s revulsion from Lovelace when she signals to Wentworth her willingness to walk with him and accepts the offer of his arm” (Revolution).

The Richardsonian coinage is limited to the adverb, and so Austen’s use of “repulsive” earlier in the novel seems not to interest Harris. It is noteworthy, however, that “repulsive” appears in a sentence containing another quite uniquely Richardsonian word, “unsisterly.”

In Clarissa, the term is used mainly by the heroine, describing her relationship with her cruel sister, Arabella. For example: “do not, dear Bella, give me cause to suspect, that I have found a reason for your unsisterly behaviour to me; and which till now was wholly unaccountable from sister to sister”.

Implicit in its use is a moral framework about the meaning of family, something also of concern to Anne Elliot in Persuasion, as when she makes an interior judgment while preparing to visit her sister Mary and the Musgrove family at Uppercross: “Mary was not so repulsive and unsisterly as Elizabeth”. “Unsisterly” is found nowhere in the corpus of 18th-century literature (at least in the 180,000 titles on ECCO) other than in its 11 uses in Clarissa, and the OED’s 2nd example after Richardson is Austen’s.

Austen’s interest in Clarissa in general is thus well attested, and Harris’s “repulsively” combined with my own “unsisterly” (and other parallels noted below) would seem to place Clarissa in Austen’s hands—or on her desk—as she writes Persuasion.” END QUOTE FROM FANNING

Fanning then goes on to detail his take on the allusion to Clarissa in Persuasion.

So, what is the upshot of the above for me? I do wish that Fanning had just Googled “Persuasion Clarissa Austen” while he was researching for his article, as one of my January 2018 blog posts would have been the second “hit” – that would have earned me a paragraph in his article, right after Jocelyn Harris.

However, notwithstanding that, I tip my hat to Fanning for sleuthing out a couple of really good parallels that I did not catch (confession: I have only read parts of Clarissa, totalling less than 2% of its massive length, mostly focused on the complex relationship between Clarissa and Anna Howe) – and I was glad to see no overlap between his catches and mine – so that, when my and his arguments are read together, they synergize, and remove even the remotest trace of a doubt that JA was indeed deeply engaged with Clarissa as she wrote Persuasion (as well as all of her earlier novels, except maybe NA).

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter