This is
a followup to my two recent posts “Harriet Smith’s a riddle, “to be sure”, in
Jane Austen’s Emma“ http://tinyurl.com/h2w9qr2 and “Not
poor Harriet, but poor Emma to be the dupe of her misconceptions and Harriet’s (designed) flattery!” http://tinyurl.com/zqdyjlh, both about
Harriet Smith as the designing (i.e., intentional) flatterer of Emma Woodhouse
in the shadow story of Emma,
As I
was mulling them both over again this morning, I took a second, closer look at one
parallel I had briefly touched on, the one between Harriet’s flattery of Emma
in regard to Harriet’s decision as to how to respond to Robert Martin’s
proposal in Chapter 4, and Harriet’s flattery of Emma in regard to the correct
answer to Mr. Elton’s charade in Chapter 9.
Upon that
further consideration, I noticed an additional strong parallel, hidden in plain
sight by the diabolically clever Jane Austen. I.e., when you compare those two
situations on a more abstract level, in both
cases Emma blithely assumes she has come up with the correct answer to a puzzle
connected to Mr. Elton, but then Emma turns out to be wrong. Allow me to explain more specifically:
In
Chapter 4, the puzzle facing Emma and Harriet is the question as to whether
Harriet should accept Robert Martin’s proposal, or not. Emma, because she’s so
certain that Mr. Elton is courting Harriet, does not hesitate to meddle and dissuade
Harriet from accepting that proposal, and so suggests that the Martins would be
bad connections for Harriet. Emma simply rolls right over Harriet’s obvious
ambivalence. However, as we all know, we find out a dozen chapters later that
Mr. Elton was courting Emma, not Harriet, and so Harriet is left out in the
courtship cold.
Similarly,
in Chapter 9, the puzzle is Mr. Elton’s charade, an actual poem pointing to an
answer Because Emma thinks she’s much smarter than Harriet, Emma blithely
ignores and overrides Harriet’s guesses at possible answers, suggesting instead
that “courtship” is the obvious and only answer. However, thanks to Colleen
Sheehan in 2007, we know that there is indeed an additional alternative correct
answer to Mr. Elton’s charade, “Prince of Whales”, which is Lamb’s and
Cruikshank’s joint, insulting moniker for the corpulent Prince Regent, an
answer which validates Harriet’s “wrong” guesses!
So, laying
these two scenarios side by side, I note that Mr. Elton’s courtship behavior
toward Emma and Harriet has functioned as a kind of “charade”, requiring a
“solution” by Emma and Harriet, just like his literal charade. Therefore, what
a lovely irony there is in this parallelism, that the answer to the charade
that Emma arrives at is….”courtship” – is an answer which hints at that
subversive answer to the charade, which is about Prince George, the great
“Whale” who rules the British court as well as the ships of the British navy!
And
that brings me to the crucial point that really made me smile this morning. As
I thought about “Prince of Whales” as the unflattering public nickname for the
Prince Regent, I also thought about the gambit I and Colleen Sheehan have both
long believed Jane Austen engaged in, i.e., that Austen induced the Prince
Regent to “invite” her to dedicate Emma to
him! Here’s how Colleen put it:
“If Austen made this cheeky but veiled critique of the
Prince’s planned scheme for Regent Street prior to any knowledge that she might
be invited to dedicate Emma to him, then the encounter with his
surgeon, the invitation to Carlton House, and the permission to dedicate the
novel to the Prince Regent would seem to constitute an uncanny coincidence at
the hands of Fortuna. One
can hardly believe it; it is all too pat.
Could it have been the case that she revised the novel after it
went to the publishers but before it was printed? Or could she have somehow orchestrated
the invitation for the dedication? I
know of no extant evidence that would solve this riddle. So, for now, I must settle with being suspicious.
….The second solution to this charade is precisely a prologue
to the play: it is a second dedication to HRH, the Prince of Whales. Moreover, as I have argued in
the essay preceding this one, the novel itself includes numerous mischievous
plays on the Prince and his exploits, though of course, as Austen expected, he
seems never to have picked up on them. “
END QUOTE FROM SHEEHAN ARTICLES
So, go
with me on this, even further outside the box. What if Jane Austen meant for
the reader like myself who had sleuthed out all of the above, to then recognize
that the novel Emma itself could
reasonabley be viewed as a kind of “charade” with two “correct answers”? What
would this mean exactly?
I say
it would mean that this feeds right into my theory of Austen’s anamorphic
novels. I.e., as is the case with all of Austen’s six novels, in Emma there is both an overt story and a
shadow story, both of them plausible, coherent interpretations of the same words.
This is Jane Austen Code 101. If you read Emma
with the grain, as if the narration is to be understood as mostly objective—as it has been read for two
centuries by pretty much all its readers before myself—you get the overt story—correct answer #1. But… if
you read Emma against the grain, as I
am the first to do, as if the narration is to be understood as mostly subjective, seeing Highbury as Emma sees
it, and therefore not accurately in many ways, then you get the shadow story. Two parallel fictional
universes in one novel. Same characters, but very different story.
And
here’s where I make my metaphorical leap. In such an anamorphic interpretation,
we can in effect split Jane Austen into the two Harriet Smiths of Emma, and the reader into the two Emmas,
all as I wrote about in my first two posts in this current thread. So, if we
the reader take Austen’s Emma at face
value, and see the overt story, then the Austen who wrote that story is the undesigning,
sincere presenter of objective truth most Janeites believe her to have been---
very like the sincere Harriet. But if we the reader put on our skeptical
spectacles, and read against the grain, with suspicion that Austen is playing
the same sort of trick she played with Mr. Elton’s charade, then Jane Austen
becomes the authorial counterpart of the manipulative, designing Harriet Smith
of the shadow story.
Now, I
know it is shocking to even imagine Harriet Smith as a self-portrait of Jane
Austen, but as I think about it, it is a very elegant bookend to the other
alter ego of Jane Austen whom I have long seen in Emma, which I’ve written about many times going back a decade
---Miss Bates. A key part of what still makes me see Miss Bates as an
autobiographical surrogate for Jane Austen, is that so much of the torrent of
words that Miss Bates unleashes whenever she is around Emma, turns out to be
meaningful, when we really listen and do not tune her out, as Emma always does.
So to
me it makes perfect sense to see the scheming Harriet of the shadow story and
the intelligent Miss Bates of the shadow story function as two key aspects of
one protean genius of an author, Jane Austen.
And finally,
this seemingly incongruous pairing of Harriet and Miss Bates also just happens
to close a 30-year-old Austen scholarly circle. It was the following, oft-cited
1985 Persuasions article by Edith
Lank… http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number7/lank.html …that was the first to float the wild
idea that Harriet Smith’s biological mother is actually Miss Bates. Lank relied
in significant part on Miss Bates’s nickname being “Hetty”, which in that era
could have been short for….”Harriet”, as the linchpin of her argument:
“…in
170 years’ study of [Emma], no one
has ever caught the clue, mischievously left in plain sight by Jane Austen, to
the identity of Harriet Smith’s mother. Perhaps modern readers miss it because
they forget the conventions governing the naming of daughters in Jane Austen’s
world. The first girl was properly named for the mother; thus Jane’s
older sister bore the name of Cassandra, and their cousin Jane Cooper was named
for her mother, Mrs. Austen’s sister Jane Leigh.
As
Jane Austen’s novels move away from the early burlesques, we find the
convention more and more strictly observed. Miss Frances Ward becomes the
mother of Fanny Price, and Miss Maria Ward’s first daughter is Maria
Bertram. Lady Elizabeth Elliot, dead before Persuasion opens,
has given her own name to her oldest daughter, and Jane Bates has left Jane
Fairfax. Isabella Woodhouse’s oldest daughter is Bella, and poor Miss
Taylor that was, referred to as Anne or Anna, names her infant, Anna Weston.
Lady
Susan follows the rule, for her daughter Frederica bears the middle name of
Susanna. Even an illegitimate child carries her mother’s name, witness
Colonel Brandon’s lost love, his cousin Eliza Williams, whose daughter Eliza is
eventually seduced and abandoned by Willoughby.”
So how
marvelously fitting that this naming clue would so closely dovetail with the
parallel puzzle-like structure I outlined at the start of this post. It only
adds to my own certainty that none of this is coincidence, or imaginism on my
own part – this is indeed the masterful handiwork of Jane Austen.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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