(c) Arnie Perlstein 2010
The question has been raised in Janeites and Austen-L as to whether JA's ribald sense of humor would have been accessible to the ordinary reader of her day.
On the subject of the sense of humor of JA, and of her readers, I give you, as Exhibit "A", the following paragraph from George Henry Lewes's famous 1859 essay about Jane Austen:
"We have known very remarkable people who cared little for [JA's] pictures of every-day life; and indeed it may be anticipated that those who have little sense of humor, or whose passionate and insurgent activities demand in art a reflection of their own emotions and struggles, will find little pleasure in such homely comedies. Currer Bell may be taken as a type of these. SHE WAS UTTERLY WITHOUT A SENSE OF HUMOR, and was by nature fervid and impetuous. In a letter published in her memoirs she writes,—"Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. . . . I had not read /Pride and Prejudice/ till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her elegant ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses." The critical reader will not fail to remark the almost contemptuous indifference to the art of truthful portrait-painting which this passage indicates; and he will understand, perhaps, how the writer of such a passage was herself incapable of drawing more than characteristics, even in her most successful efforts."
For those few of you who don't know, Currer Bell was the pen name of Charlotte Bronte, and George Henry Lewes was the significant other of George Eliot. So Lewes probably rates as the most interestingly situated Englishman of the 19th century in terms of his (very different) connections to three of the greatest female authors of the 19th century.
Generally speaking, I believe Lewes was spot-on in his diagnosis of a case of lack of full appreciation for JA's writing as being due, at least in part, to an utter lack of sense of humor. However, it's my personal opinion that Charlotte Bronte's sense of humor was too subtle and wicked for the earnest, straightforward Lewes to detect it, just as JA's ribald humor is too subtle and wicked for many of her readers to see it, or even believe it could be there. .
And as Exhibit "B" in regard to Bronte's sense of humor, I give you the very same passage that Lewes pointed to as evidence of Bronte's humorlessness:
"....a carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers..."
I would suggest to you that Charlotte Bronte chose those words VERY carefully, and that the gardens she refer to are the devil-infested, ha-ha'ed, fenced and gated garden of Eden at Sotherton, and the beehive kitchen garden of General Tilney, and the delicate flowers Bronte refers to include the flowers that the delicate Fanny suffers heat-stroke in the gathering thereof, and also the erotically supercharged hyacinth and rose of Henry Tilney's purple prosings.
So the last ha-ha seems to me to belong to Currer Bell aka Charlotte Bronte, and what a fitting tribute that oh-so-casual "garden" and "flowers" formulation was, a shadow tip of the hat by a great mistress of overt Romanticism to THE great mistress of shadow story Romanticism.
But, unlike JA's put-on of the toady James Stanier Clarke, my enjoyment in this joke does not include laughter at Lewes's expense, because it was he who, after all, stood tall and proud in defense of Jane Austen as the Queen of Literature, in 1859, when virtually the rest of literary England still believed JA to be the Princess of Ivory Inches. And anyway, I don't think Bronte was laughing at Lewes either, so much as that Bronte was not going to tell Lewes about the shadows Bronte had seen in Austen's writing, if he could not see them himself. He hadn't earned the truth from her.
Cheers, ARNIE
P.S.: As a reminder to the serious literary scholar that you have to go to original sources whenever possible, one thing I find astounding is that while I have read various articles and book chapters where Bronte's famous reference to JA's "carefully-fenced, highly-cultivated garden" has been quoted or paraphrased, I can't recall ANY of those articles or chapters also alerting me to Lewes's claim that Bronte was "utterly without a sense of humor". There is a kind of over-scrupulousness in a lot of academic writing, where a kind of Bowdlerization seems the norm, as if it were unseemly for literary scholars to talk about Lewes taking a pointed potshot like that at Bronte. Such overscrupulousness impedes the path to insight and truth.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Emma's Secret Satisfaction
Ch. 52, Emma:
"She soon resolved, equally as a duty and a pleasure, to employ half an hour of this holiday of spirits in calling on Miss Fairfax. She ought to go -- and she was longing to see her; the resemblance of their present situations increasing every other motive of good will. It would be a _secret_ satisfaction; but the consciousness of a similarity of prospect would certainly add to the interest with which she should attend to any thing Jane might communicate."
I never consciously registered the exquisite (and, to me, obviously completely intentional, on JA's part) ambiguity and depth of meaning in this innocuous little passage before, and I suspect that I am not alone in having failed to give this passage its due, so I hope that the following will be of interest to many of you, and I am curious to hear if anyone sees any other wrinkles I have failed to detect.
BUT PLEASE NOTE--I give you the following solemn vow--everything I say in this message is in relation to the OVERT story of Emma--no shadow story in this analysis today. ;)
I begin by posing the question which brings out the ambiguity I now perceive: What does "similarity of prospect" mean to Emma in relation to Jane? Is it merely that both she and Jane are engaged, and so Emma sees that as experience both she and Jane share? Or is there a further wrinkle in Emma's mind, i.e., not only that they are both engaged, but that now, as a result of Jane's engagement to a wealthy heir of a great estate, they are now, for the first time in their lives, equal in social status and wealth as well? I.e., is Emma feeling genuine camaraderie with Jane as women in love, or is this just another example of Emma's narcissistic snobbery? The former appears a benign judgment on Emma, the latter an uncharitable one.
Or, is it possible that BOTH apply? I.e., are we meant to infer that Emma consciously sees the similarity as merely being engaged, but unconsciously sees the similarity as both being of high status? You decide after you read the following, and tell me what you think.
"BOTH ENGAGED" INTERPRETATION:
The "both engaged" interpretation of Emma's feelings and thoughts is, on its face, plausible, but, as I will now argue, when you examine it more closely, it is NOT a very flattering one to Emma. First, right off the bat, the camaraderie is undermined, because this is to be a SECRET satisfaction for Emma, i.e., her own little private joke, one she is pointedly enjoying NOT letting Jane in on. It sounds to me like passive aggression--Jane kept her engagement secret from Emma all those months, so now Emma can have the satisfaction of a little karmic, and catty, revenge.
It's a private joke, of course, because, at that moment in time (although the narrator, with her typical discretion, fails to remind the reader) Jane does not know Emma is engaged--so if we look at this scene from Jane's point of view, at that precise moment, what is her likely opinion about the status of Emma's romantic affections, after observing Frank flirting with Emma all those months? Of course, it's that Emma still has a "thing" for Frank, and so Emma must, as the Westons fear, be broken-hearted at the news that Frank is engaged to Jane. That is exactly what the Westons feared.
And so surely Jane, at this first occasion when she is speaking with Emma after Jane's engagement has been revealed to Emma, is concerned that Emma might be quite upset at Jane. Jane alludes to this obliquely when she finally grabs a moment alone with Emma (away from the hovering Mrs. Elton, that is), but then Emma, equally obliquely, assures Jane there are no hard feelings. Does Jane read Emma correctly at that point, or are Emma's comments perplexing to Jane, the way Emma's comments "stagger" Mr. Knightley ten chapters earlier? We have no idea, because we are in Emma's head, not Jane's. But I'd say Emma's behavior demonstrates there definitely ARE some hard feelings, because (as much as Emma would not like to admit it), it must be apparent to Emma that Frank preferred Jane to Emma, and Emma surely must feel about that the same way she felt about the invitation from the Coles--she thought she didn't care, till she was put in doubt of it, and then she cared....A LOT!
But I must go on. Even if Emma perceives herself and Jane to be similarly situated as engaged women, they are nonetheless still DISsimilar in their knowledge of each other's romantic status. A flipflop has occurred, just like in Midsummer Night's Dream, but no "heart's ease" was required to cause this. It is simply that it is now Emma, and not Jane, who is (for the duration of 3 chapters) SECRETLY engaged, just as Jane was secretly engaged for 47 long chapters. Emma learns of Jane's secret engagement in Chapter 46, and Emma becomes secretly engaged to Knightley in Chapter 49, so the flipflop of circumstances is rapid.
And it's not just that they have each been, in sequence, secretly engaged---there's ANOTHER striking parallel, because-----sound familiar?------Emma and Knightley are keeping their engagement secret for EXACTLY the same reason that Jane and Frank did, i.e., the perceived necessity of concealment of the engagement from an older "tyrant" who would never consent to the marriage!
There is a complex dance going on here, then, where first it is Jane's turn to deceive Emma in this complicated way, and then it is Emma's turn to return the favor.
But all this leads to a THIRD, further parallel, also never flagged explicitly by the ever-coy narrator, which ALSO does not reflect well on Emma, to wit: in the aftermath of the public revelation of Jane and Frank's engagement, we hear all sorts of judgmental comments about their duplicity, the unfairness to others, especially to Emma, who appeared to love Frank. And yet, Emma, exactly like Jane, ALSO deceives a woman who appears to love EMMA's fiance, i.e., Harriet! Now it's Emma's turn to deceive Harriet, by not telling Harriet about Emma's secret engagement to Knightley, just as Jane deceived Emma.
What goes through Emma's head about Harriet? Read Chapter 50 carefully--it is there that we, the readers, are privy to Emma's thought process in the immediate aftermath of Knightley's proposal to her--and look at what Emma does--she avoids a face to face meeting with Harriet, and writes Harriet a letter instead--does the letter reveal the engagement to Harriet? I think the narrator leaves that ambiguous too: the letter will "communicate all that need be told", whatever that means!
It makes Emma sad to write the letter, so that could mean that Emma DOES give Harriet the bad news in that letter. On the other hand, it would also be quite natural for Emma to be feeling more than a little insecure about Knightley, after she has been shellshocked by the emotional rollercoaster ride she has just been on--hearing of Jane and Frank's engagement, then almost immediately hearing that Harriet loves Knightley, then almost immediately hearing that Knightley loves her (Emma), all in a very short time. So, Emma might plausibly worry that if she tells Harriet about the engagement, it is possible that Harriet, in her sudden disturbing assertiveness, might seize that moment to act like Lucy Steele or Mrs. Clay and throw herself at Knightley, and possibly prevail in inducing him to switch horses (so to speak) from Emma to Harriet?
After all, Harriet was very emphatic and very detailed in her explanation in Ch. 47 about all the reasons why she felt Knightley was interested in her. Upon such a line of reasoning, sending Harriet off to London would have the very desirable effect of removing Harriet from alarming proximity to Knightley!
So I see that as yet another deliberate ambiguity, and nothing i can find in the remainder of the novel removes that ambiguity--so it is very possible that Emma leaves Harriet hanging about Knightley until Robert Martin seizes the moment in London. And if Emma does that, note that Emma gets off scotfree from aspersions on HER character after she and Knightley announce their engagement. Why? How does Emma escape the judgments of the Highbury gossips on her and Knightley's character which are rendered on Frank and Jane? Because Emma makes very sure that nobody but Emma ever has all the information! SHE never tells anybody that Harriet had her sights on Knightley, and, as far as we know, when Emma and Knightley DO put the word out that they are engaged, there is nothing in the text to suggest that they felt it necessary to mention the detail that there was ever a secret engagement! So there is no one else in a position to put two and two together!
But there is that other interpretation of "similarity of prospect" still to consider.
"BOTH RICH AND HIGH-STATUS" INTERPRETATION
I will not say too much in terms of this interpretation, beyond the obvious, which is that Emma comes off even more unsavorily if we view her sense of "similarity of prospect" as arising from Emma's snobbery. Standing alone, it is already unpleasant, to consider how Emma spends the entire novel avoiding being friendly to Jane, beyond her own nosy and jealous attempt to find out some dirty on Jane to bring her down a notch, suddenly warms up to Jane and the FIRST thing she thinks is, now Jane is no longer low-class, so now I can deign to be her friend.
But it's trebly bad, when we consider the role of Harriet in this equation. I.e., it makes Emma's abandonment of her friendship with Harriet (and as much as she sugar coats it in her own mind, repeatedly, that is what she does) even more blameful, because now Emma can rationalize that abandonment in the most expedient way, i.e., now that Jane will be a real lady, like myself, Emma can replace Harriet (who by the way, made the mistake of being interested in the same man Emma has now suddenly decided she loves), because Jane's no longer beneath Emma, and also because Emma's no longer interested in Frank, so Jane is no longer felt as a rival.
And finally, wen Harriet miraculously has her "stain" bleached out at the end of the novel, and winds up with Robert Martin, then Emma's feeble conscience is entirely extinguished.
Cheers, ARNIE
P.S.: Even if not for all of the above, this passage would STILL be worth the price of close attention, for one of the hundreds of little poetic phrases which are everywhere in Emma--"holiday of spirits". I think Sheila Kaye-Smith paid that line its sincerest flattery by imitating it with great style and graciousness, as follows:
"I read Jane Austen for a holiday--a 'holiday of spirits'--and her main enchantment (for me) is the world, the life, she offers me--like enough to my own to be real, unlike enough to be stimulating--rather than the people she invites me to meet."
P.P.S. (added upon rereading of the above)
"So, Emma might plausibly worry that if she tells Harriet about the engagement, it is possible that Harriet, in her sudden disturbing assertiveness, might seize that moment to act like Lucy Steele or Mrs. Clay and throw herself at Knightley, and possibly prevail in inducing him to switch horses (so to speak) from Emma to Harriet? After all, Harriet was very emphatic and very detailed in her explanation in Ch. 47 about all the reasons why she felt Knightley was interested in her. Upon such a line of reasoning, sending Harriet off to London would have the very desirable effect of removing Harriet from alarming proximity to Knightley!"
The unconscious works in mysterious ways. When I was first typing the above section of my message just sent, I at first wrote "Charlotte Lucas" as an example of a single woman taking the action that Emma feared Harriet might take, to try to lure a man away from the woman he really loved. But then Charlotte did not seem to be a very good example of what Emma may have feared from Harriet, even if she was luring Mr. Collins away from Mary Bennet, because we know she was a good wife to Collins, and did not take advantage of him--that's when Lucy Steele and Penelope Clay came to mind instead as predominantly self-interested fortune-hunters.
But then as I just reread my message, I realized why Charlotte had come to my mind in the first place, and why she was actually the BEST example of all of what Emma feared from Harriet.
To wit, I recalled that in my message written only last week about Mr. Collins and Harris Bigg-Withers, I had pointed out that Charlotte had pulled off two brilliant stratagems in order to land, and then "secure" Mr. Collins. First, Charlotte put herself in his path right after Lizzy had rejected his addresses, and second (and relevant to the "secret satisfaction" passage in Emma), Charlotte then consolidated her fragile victory, by making Collins promise to immediately leave Longbourn WITHOUT telling the Bennets that he was engaged to Charlotte, so that he would not be subject to any sort of pressure from Mrs. Bennet to revoke his engagement to Charlotte. (which all actually does remind me of Lucy Steele, who probably swore Edward to secrecy after they got engaged, knowing it would give her "command of the board", so to speak)
So I am suggesting that Emma rationalizes her desire to get Harriet far away from Knightley (to make sure he does not change his mind about Emma!) by telling herself that Harriet needed a change of scenery, etc etc. Whereas Charlotte, clear-sighted self-aware pragmatist that she is, surely was fully conscious of her own motivations, and would, if asked (by a person who could keep a secret) have freely acknowledged her own stratagem---after all, it was only a perfect illustration of Charlotte's credo of courtship as expressed to Lizzy about the need for strategic action by Jane in order to land Bingley:
"When she is secure of him, there will be leisure for falling in love as much as she chuses."
Indeed Charlotte does not rest until she is secure of Collins, and it is that same resolution and fortitude which Emma, unconsciously, fears from Harriet vis a vis Knightley.
Which is why I am now convinced that Emma does NOT, in the letter she writes to Harriet, inform her little friend of her engagement to Knightley. The narration ""communicate all that need be told" now sounds like just one MORE of Emma's rationalizations--not only does Emma not need to see Harriet in person, Harriet also does not "need to be told" about the engagement either---at least, not just yet!!!
Cheers, ARNIE
"She soon resolved, equally as a duty and a pleasure, to employ half an hour of this holiday of spirits in calling on Miss Fairfax. She ought to go -- and she was longing to see her; the resemblance of their present situations increasing every other motive of good will. It would be a _secret_ satisfaction; but the consciousness of a similarity of prospect would certainly add to the interest with which she should attend to any thing Jane might communicate."
I never consciously registered the exquisite (and, to me, obviously completely intentional, on JA's part) ambiguity and depth of meaning in this innocuous little passage before, and I suspect that I am not alone in having failed to give this passage its due, so I hope that the following will be of interest to many of you, and I am curious to hear if anyone sees any other wrinkles I have failed to detect.
BUT PLEASE NOTE--I give you the following solemn vow--everything I say in this message is in relation to the OVERT story of Emma--no shadow story in this analysis today. ;)
I begin by posing the question which brings out the ambiguity I now perceive: What does "similarity of prospect" mean to Emma in relation to Jane? Is it merely that both she and Jane are engaged, and so Emma sees that as experience both she and Jane share? Or is there a further wrinkle in Emma's mind, i.e., not only that they are both engaged, but that now, as a result of Jane's engagement to a wealthy heir of a great estate, they are now, for the first time in their lives, equal in social status and wealth as well? I.e., is Emma feeling genuine camaraderie with Jane as women in love, or is this just another example of Emma's narcissistic snobbery? The former appears a benign judgment on Emma, the latter an uncharitable one.
Or, is it possible that BOTH apply? I.e., are we meant to infer that Emma consciously sees the similarity as merely being engaged, but unconsciously sees the similarity as both being of high status? You decide after you read the following, and tell me what you think.
"BOTH ENGAGED" INTERPRETATION:
The "both engaged" interpretation of Emma's feelings and thoughts is, on its face, plausible, but, as I will now argue, when you examine it more closely, it is NOT a very flattering one to Emma. First, right off the bat, the camaraderie is undermined, because this is to be a SECRET satisfaction for Emma, i.e., her own little private joke, one she is pointedly enjoying NOT letting Jane in on. It sounds to me like passive aggression--Jane kept her engagement secret from Emma all those months, so now Emma can have the satisfaction of a little karmic, and catty, revenge.
It's a private joke, of course, because, at that moment in time (although the narrator, with her typical discretion, fails to remind the reader) Jane does not know Emma is engaged--so if we look at this scene from Jane's point of view, at that precise moment, what is her likely opinion about the status of Emma's romantic affections, after observing Frank flirting with Emma all those months? Of course, it's that Emma still has a "thing" for Frank, and so Emma must, as the Westons fear, be broken-hearted at the news that Frank is engaged to Jane. That is exactly what the Westons feared.
And so surely Jane, at this first occasion when she is speaking with Emma after Jane's engagement has been revealed to Emma, is concerned that Emma might be quite upset at Jane. Jane alludes to this obliquely when she finally grabs a moment alone with Emma (away from the hovering Mrs. Elton, that is), but then Emma, equally obliquely, assures Jane there are no hard feelings. Does Jane read Emma correctly at that point, or are Emma's comments perplexing to Jane, the way Emma's comments "stagger" Mr. Knightley ten chapters earlier? We have no idea, because we are in Emma's head, not Jane's. But I'd say Emma's behavior demonstrates there definitely ARE some hard feelings, because (as much as Emma would not like to admit it), it must be apparent to Emma that Frank preferred Jane to Emma, and Emma surely must feel about that the same way she felt about the invitation from the Coles--she thought she didn't care, till she was put in doubt of it, and then she cared....A LOT!
But I must go on. Even if Emma perceives herself and Jane to be similarly situated as engaged women, they are nonetheless still DISsimilar in their knowledge of each other's romantic status. A flipflop has occurred, just like in Midsummer Night's Dream, but no "heart's ease" was required to cause this. It is simply that it is now Emma, and not Jane, who is (for the duration of 3 chapters) SECRETLY engaged, just as Jane was secretly engaged for 47 long chapters. Emma learns of Jane's secret engagement in Chapter 46, and Emma becomes secretly engaged to Knightley in Chapter 49, so the flipflop of circumstances is rapid.
And it's not just that they have each been, in sequence, secretly engaged---there's ANOTHER striking parallel, because-----sound familiar?------Emma and Knightley are keeping their engagement secret for EXACTLY the same reason that Jane and Frank did, i.e., the perceived necessity of concealment of the engagement from an older "tyrant" who would never consent to the marriage!
There is a complex dance going on here, then, where first it is Jane's turn to deceive Emma in this complicated way, and then it is Emma's turn to return the favor.
But all this leads to a THIRD, further parallel, also never flagged explicitly by the ever-coy narrator, which ALSO does not reflect well on Emma, to wit: in the aftermath of the public revelation of Jane and Frank's engagement, we hear all sorts of judgmental comments about their duplicity, the unfairness to others, especially to Emma, who appeared to love Frank. And yet, Emma, exactly like Jane, ALSO deceives a woman who appears to love EMMA's fiance, i.e., Harriet! Now it's Emma's turn to deceive Harriet, by not telling Harriet about Emma's secret engagement to Knightley, just as Jane deceived Emma.
What goes through Emma's head about Harriet? Read Chapter 50 carefully--it is there that we, the readers, are privy to Emma's thought process in the immediate aftermath of Knightley's proposal to her--and look at what Emma does--she avoids a face to face meeting with Harriet, and writes Harriet a letter instead--does the letter reveal the engagement to Harriet? I think the narrator leaves that ambiguous too: the letter will "communicate all that need be told", whatever that means!
It makes Emma sad to write the letter, so that could mean that Emma DOES give Harriet the bad news in that letter. On the other hand, it would also be quite natural for Emma to be feeling more than a little insecure about Knightley, after she has been shellshocked by the emotional rollercoaster ride she has just been on--hearing of Jane and Frank's engagement, then almost immediately hearing that Harriet loves Knightley, then almost immediately hearing that Knightley loves her (Emma), all in a very short time. So, Emma might plausibly worry that if she tells Harriet about the engagement, it is possible that Harriet, in her sudden disturbing assertiveness, might seize that moment to act like Lucy Steele or Mrs. Clay and throw herself at Knightley, and possibly prevail in inducing him to switch horses (so to speak) from Emma to Harriet?
After all, Harriet was very emphatic and very detailed in her explanation in Ch. 47 about all the reasons why she felt Knightley was interested in her. Upon such a line of reasoning, sending Harriet off to London would have the very desirable effect of removing Harriet from alarming proximity to Knightley!
So I see that as yet another deliberate ambiguity, and nothing i can find in the remainder of the novel removes that ambiguity--so it is very possible that Emma leaves Harriet hanging about Knightley until Robert Martin seizes the moment in London. And if Emma does that, note that Emma gets off scotfree from aspersions on HER character after she and Knightley announce their engagement. Why? How does Emma escape the judgments of the Highbury gossips on her and Knightley's character which are rendered on Frank and Jane? Because Emma makes very sure that nobody but Emma ever has all the information! SHE never tells anybody that Harriet had her sights on Knightley, and, as far as we know, when Emma and Knightley DO put the word out that they are engaged, there is nothing in the text to suggest that they felt it necessary to mention the detail that there was ever a secret engagement! So there is no one else in a position to put two and two together!
But there is that other interpretation of "similarity of prospect" still to consider.
"BOTH RICH AND HIGH-STATUS" INTERPRETATION
I will not say too much in terms of this interpretation, beyond the obvious, which is that Emma comes off even more unsavorily if we view her sense of "similarity of prospect" as arising from Emma's snobbery. Standing alone, it is already unpleasant, to consider how Emma spends the entire novel avoiding being friendly to Jane, beyond her own nosy and jealous attempt to find out some dirty on Jane to bring her down a notch, suddenly warms up to Jane and the FIRST thing she thinks is, now Jane is no longer low-class, so now I can deign to be her friend.
But it's trebly bad, when we consider the role of Harriet in this equation. I.e., it makes Emma's abandonment of her friendship with Harriet (and as much as she sugar coats it in her own mind, repeatedly, that is what she does) even more blameful, because now Emma can rationalize that abandonment in the most expedient way, i.e., now that Jane will be a real lady, like myself, Emma can replace Harriet (who by the way, made the mistake of being interested in the same man Emma has now suddenly decided she loves), because Jane's no longer beneath Emma, and also because Emma's no longer interested in Frank, so Jane is no longer felt as a rival.
And finally, wen Harriet miraculously has her "stain" bleached out at the end of the novel, and winds up with Robert Martin, then Emma's feeble conscience is entirely extinguished.
Cheers, ARNIE
P.S.: Even if not for all of the above, this passage would STILL be worth the price of close attention, for one of the hundreds of little poetic phrases which are everywhere in Emma--"holiday of spirits". I think Sheila Kaye-Smith paid that line its sincerest flattery by imitating it with great style and graciousness, as follows:
"I read Jane Austen for a holiday--a 'holiday of spirits'--and her main enchantment (for me) is the world, the life, she offers me--like enough to my own to be real, unlike enough to be stimulating--rather than the people she invites me to meet."
P.P.S. (added upon rereading of the above)
"So, Emma might plausibly worry that if she tells Harriet about the engagement, it is possible that Harriet, in her sudden disturbing assertiveness, might seize that moment to act like Lucy Steele or Mrs. Clay and throw herself at Knightley, and possibly prevail in inducing him to switch horses (so to speak) from Emma to Harriet? After all, Harriet was very emphatic and very detailed in her explanation in Ch. 47 about all the reasons why she felt Knightley was interested in her. Upon such a line of reasoning, sending Harriet off to London would have the very desirable effect of removing Harriet from alarming proximity to Knightley!"
The unconscious works in mysterious ways. When I was first typing the above section of my message just sent, I at first wrote "Charlotte Lucas" as an example of a single woman taking the action that Emma feared Harriet might take, to try to lure a man away from the woman he really loved. But then Charlotte did not seem to be a very good example of what Emma may have feared from Harriet, even if she was luring Mr. Collins away from Mary Bennet, because we know she was a good wife to Collins, and did not take advantage of him--that's when Lucy Steele and Penelope Clay came to mind instead as predominantly self-interested fortune-hunters.
But then as I just reread my message, I realized why Charlotte had come to my mind in the first place, and why she was actually the BEST example of all of what Emma feared from Harriet.
To wit, I recalled that in my message written only last week about Mr. Collins and Harris Bigg-Withers, I had pointed out that Charlotte had pulled off two brilliant stratagems in order to land, and then "secure" Mr. Collins. First, Charlotte put herself in his path right after Lizzy had rejected his addresses, and second (and relevant to the "secret satisfaction" passage in Emma), Charlotte then consolidated her fragile victory, by making Collins promise to immediately leave Longbourn WITHOUT telling the Bennets that he was engaged to Charlotte, so that he would not be subject to any sort of pressure from Mrs. Bennet to revoke his engagement to Charlotte. (which all actually does remind me of Lucy Steele, who probably swore Edward to secrecy after they got engaged, knowing it would give her "command of the board", so to speak)
So I am suggesting that Emma rationalizes her desire to get Harriet far away from Knightley (to make sure he does not change his mind about Emma!) by telling herself that Harriet needed a change of scenery, etc etc. Whereas Charlotte, clear-sighted self-aware pragmatist that she is, surely was fully conscious of her own motivations, and would, if asked (by a person who could keep a secret) have freely acknowledged her own stratagem---after all, it was only a perfect illustration of Charlotte's credo of courtship as expressed to Lizzy about the need for strategic action by Jane in order to land Bingley:
"When she is secure of him, there will be leisure for falling in love as much as she chuses."
Indeed Charlotte does not rest until she is secure of Collins, and it is that same resolution and fortitude which Emma, unconsciously, fears from Harriet vis a vis Knightley.
Which is why I am now convinced that Emma does NOT, in the letter she writes to Harriet, inform her little friend of her engagement to Knightley. The narration ""communicate all that need be told" now sounds like just one MORE of Emma's rationalizations--not only does Emma not need to see Harriet in person, Harriet also does not "need to be told" about the engagement either---at least, not just yet!!!
Cheers, ARNIE
Monday, March 15, 2010
Fw: JASNA - NY Metro Region Event - May Regional Meeting Invitation
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2010 3:40 PM
Subject: JASNA - NY Metro Region Event - May Regional Meeting Invitation
JASNA - NY Metro Region May Regional Meeting
Registration is now Open for the Spring JASNA-NY Regional Meeting
Saturday, May 1st at 2:00 p.m.
Come hear our guest speaker, Arnie Perlstein, talk about "The Shadow Story of Emma: Jane Austen, the Secret Feminist"
For more information and registration:
Go to www.jasnany.org and click on this event.
If you have any problem accessing the registration form, please email us at jasnany@yahoo.com and we will send it to you as an attachment. Hope to see you there.
Sincerely,
Nili Olay & Jerry Vetowich
JASNA - NY Metro Region
Subject: JASNA - NY Metro Region Event - May Regional Meeting Invitation
JASNA - NY Metro Region May Regional Meeting
Registration is now Open for the Spring JASNA-NY Regional Meeting
Saturday, May 1st at 2:00 p.m.
Come hear our guest speaker, Arnie Perlstein, talk about "The Shadow Story of Emma: Jane Austen, the Secret Feminist"
For more information and registration:
Go to www.jasnany.org and click on this event.
If you have any problem accessing the registration form, please email us at jasnany@yahoo.com
Sincerely,
Nili Olay & Jerry Vetowich
JASNA - NY Metro Region
Monday, March 8, 2010
Sometimes strange rumours point to the truth
"There was a strange rumour in Highbury of all the little Perrys being seen with a slice of Mrs. Weston's wedding-cake in their hands: but Mr. Woodhouse would never believe it."
I guessed back in December, 2008 WHICH CHARACTER(S) IN THE NOVEL give(s) the Perry children all the wedding cake, but it was only an hour ago that I chanced to discover that my guess was not only correct, but also very significant for understanding the shadow story of the novel.
The answer is beautiful, because it is hiding in plain sight, and yet it subtly ties together many strands of the shadow story. If anyone does guess the correct answer, together with giving some reasonably satisfactory explanation for same, I promise I will verify it. Please note that I am deliberately NOT revealing at this point whether there is only one donor, or more than one.
However, if no correct, well-justified answer is given, I WILL nonetheless reveal the identity of the secret benefactor(s) when I give my talk about the shadow story of Emma to the JASNA regional chapter in NYC in May.
It was Anielka's claim that David Garrick is the METAPHORICAL donor of the wedding cake, which she posted to the groups a few months ago, which first led me to guess the identity of the donor(s). However, her answer was only one "door", among several, that lead to the answer I have found, and now have verified by another "door" to that answer, which is highly probative. As interesting as it was to know that JA had Garrick in the back of her mind when she wrote about that strange rumour, I believe it will be more interesting to most Janeites, to know who JA had in the FRONT of her mind. All the same, thanks to Anielka for the jog to find what I have found.
"There was a strange rumour in Highbury of all the little Perrys being seen with a slice of Mrs. Weston's wedding-cake in their hands: but Mr. Woodhouse would never believe it."
On the surface, it seems like an utterly trivial, silly, random detail, thrown in by Jane Austen for no special reason. except maybe to make us smile about Mr. Woodhouse's food obsessions. And yet, as I will show, it goes to the heart of the shadow story of the novel.
Cheers, ARNIE
P.S. Speaking of cake, I am strangely reminded of the punch line of the very funny t-shirt my wife bought many years ago, on the subject of the communication gap between male and female, which I posted in these groups about 16 months ago:
Two women talking in the bathroom (in two frames):
Frame 1, entitled "What Men Think Women Talk About"
First woman: "My boyfriend is the best lover in the whole world"
Second woman: "No, MY boyfriend is the best lover in the whole world."
Frame 2, entitled "What Women Really Talk About"
First woman: "Do you think sex is better than cake?"
Second woman: "What kind of cake?"
I guessed back in December, 2008 WHICH CHARACTER(S) IN THE NOVEL give(s) the Perry children all the wedding cake, but it was only an hour ago that I chanced to discover that my guess was not only correct, but also very significant for understanding the shadow story of the novel.
The answer is beautiful, because it is hiding in plain sight, and yet it subtly ties together many strands of the shadow story. If anyone does guess the correct answer, together with giving some reasonably satisfactory explanation for same, I promise I will verify it. Please note that I am deliberately NOT revealing at this point whether there is only one donor, or more than one.
However, if no correct, well-justified answer is given, I WILL nonetheless reveal the identity of the secret benefactor(s) when I give my talk about the shadow story of Emma to the JASNA regional chapter in NYC in May.
It was Anielka's claim that David Garrick is the METAPHORICAL donor of the wedding cake, which she posted to the groups a few months ago, which first led me to guess the identity of the donor(s). However, her answer was only one "door", among several, that lead to the answer I have found, and now have verified by another "door" to that answer, which is highly probative. As interesting as it was to know that JA had Garrick in the back of her mind when she wrote about that strange rumour, I believe it will be more interesting to most Janeites, to know who JA had in the FRONT of her mind. All the same, thanks to Anielka for the jog to find what I have found.
"There was a strange rumour in Highbury of all the little Perrys being seen with a slice of Mrs. Weston's wedding-cake in their hands: but Mr. Woodhouse would never believe it."
On the surface, it seems like an utterly trivial, silly, random detail, thrown in by Jane Austen for no special reason. except maybe to make us smile about Mr. Woodhouse's food obsessions. And yet, as I will show, it goes to the heart of the shadow story of the novel.
Cheers, ARNIE
P.S. Speaking of cake, I am strangely reminded of the punch line of the very funny t-shirt my wife bought many years ago, on the subject of the communication gap between male and female, which I posted in these groups about 16 months ago:
Two women talking in the bathroom (in two frames):
Frame 1, entitled "What Men Think Women Talk About"
First woman: "My boyfriend is the best lover in the whole world"
Second woman: "No, MY boyfriend is the best lover in the whole world."
Frame 2, entitled "What Women Really Talk About"
First woman: "Do you think sex is better than cake?"
Second woman: "What kind of cake?"
Friday, March 5, 2010
A Brief History of "dieing" and "fainting" in JA's Fiction
Apropos all the discussion last week regarding the dye-ing of Letter 57 (not to be confused with The Crying of Lot 49), I invite you to consider the following brief (and, to many of you, highly prejudiced) history of "dieing" and "fainting" in JA's fiction, which, in my opinion, bolsters, in a variety of ways, the sexual interpretation of that paragraph in Letter 57:
FAINTING IN THE JUVENILIA:
First consider the following from the very early juvenilia scrap, "A Beautiful Description of the Different Effects of Sensibility on Different Minds":
"In these situations we were this morning surprised by receiving a visit from Dr. Dowkins; "I am come to see Melissa," said he. "How is She?" "Very weak indeed," said the fainting Melissa -- "Very weak," replied the punning Doctor, "aye indeed it is more than a very /week/ since you have taken to your bed -- How is your appetite?" "Bad, very bad," said Julia. "That /is/ very bad" -- replied he; "Are her spirits good, Madam?" "So poorly, Sir, that we are obliged to strengthen her with cordials every Minute." -- "Well then she receives /Spirits/ from your being with her. Does she sleep?" "Scarcely ever." -- "And Ever Scarcely, I suppose, when she does. Poor thing! DOES SHE THINK OF DIEING?" "She has not strength to think at all." "Nay, then she cannot think to have Strength." "
I find it interesting that Dr. Dowkins is referred to as "the PUNNING Doctor"--and I think the hidden point is that the reader might wish to discern all the puns, not only the three obvious ones involving word reversals, but also the one that does not--the one about "dieing"
Second, consider the following from "Frederic and Elfrida":
"This answer distressed her too much for her delicate Constitution. She accordingly fainted & was in such a hurry to have a succession of fainting fits, that she had scarcely patience enough to recover from one before she fell into another."
It is difficult to escape the inference that "fainting" is a pun which is a "cousin" of the pun of "dieing" in the previous example, both of them pointing toward the kind of "dieing" or "fainting" which, as this passage humorously depicts, a person might wish to experience again and again and again.
But while it is interesting to take note of such precocious punning by the young teenaged Jane Austen, in stories which are completely absurdist, what I find of even greater interest are two examples of how she referred to "dying" and "fainting" in the realistic context of the novels, which actually provide windows into the shadows of those novels, and, in the case of Fanny in MP, not funny at all.
FAINTING IN EMMA:
First, in Emma, all the usages of "faint" or its variants pertain to the meaning of the word as "barely discernible" EXCEPT the following two passages, both of which are associated with Harriet, and both of which are striking, particularly the second, which keeps spinning the sexual punning out during three successive additional sentences.
{Harriet breathlessly speaking] "....who should come in, but Elizabeth Martin and her brother! Dear Miss Woodhouse! only think. I thought I should have fainted. I did not know what to do...."
[After the "gypsies" episode] The iron gates and the front-door were not twenty yards asunder; -- they were all three soon in the hall, and Harriet immediately sinking into a chair fainted away. A young lady who faints, must be recovered; questions must be answered, and surprises be explained. Such events are very interesting, but the suspense of them cannot last long. A few minutes made Emma acquainted with the whole.
Indeed, as to the last word of that last sentence, which just happens to be the third word of the third line of the short charade of Emma:
My first doth affliction denote,
Which my second is destin'd to feel
And my whole is the best antidote
That affliction to soften and heal.
And also indeed, as to the last sentence of that same racy vignette that Jill H-S quoted in her introduction:
"...and not only rescued....the poor man, who for many years had actually dyed for her whole............family." (......... added by me)
DYING AND FAINTING IN MP:
And next, consider the following two wicked puns by the ever-resourceful Mary Crawford, which, I think, require no further explanation, in the context set by all of the above comments so far:
"I have three very particular friends who have been all DYING for him in their turn; and the pains which they, their mothers (very clever women), as well as my dear aunt and myself, have taken to reason, coax, or trick him into marrying, is inconceivable!"
Telling as that passage is, the following is far more significant, because of the segue from the other women Henry keeps on a string, to Fanny herself:
"By the bye, Flora Ross was DYING for Henry the first winter she came out. But were I to attempt to tell you of all the women whom I have known to be in love with him, I should never have done. It is you, only you, insensible Fanny, who can think of him with anything like indifference. But are you so insensible as you profess yourself? No, no, I see you are not.” There was, indeed, so deep a blush over Fanny’s face at that moment as might warrant strong suspicion in a predisposed mind.
And what is really remarkable, I think, is that it turns out that Fanny's blushing lack of indifference toward (i.e., an involuntary sort of "dying" for) Henry is directly connected to Fanny's "fainting"!:
In about a quarter of an hour her uncle returned; she was almost ready to faint at the sight of him.......She was nearly fainting: all her former habitual dread of her uncle was returning, and with it compassion for him and for almost every one of the party on the development before him, with solicitude on Edmund's account indescribable.......Having introduced him, however, and being all reseated, the terrors that occurred of what this visit might lead to were overpowering, and she fancied herself on the point of fainting away.
These are all narrations describing Fanny's reactions to being confronted in sexually charged situations involving her uncle (twice) and then Henry Crawford. Normally we would not associate Fanny with a heroine of sensibility, and yet here we have her three times, none of them in the same chapter, each time thinking she is going to faint because of an interaction with a sexually intrusive powerful man.
My sense of what JA is about with this, is to suggest that Fanny struggles to restrain her physical reactions to men who are forcing a sexual vibe in her direction, which, in her mind and spirit, she most emphatically, on every level, does NOT want to give in to. And of course the more disturbing of the two is Uncle Sir Thomas, who infamously does an inventory of Fanny's body, triggering Edmund's unbelievably grotesque rationalization, maybe the most egregious one in all the novels:
"“Your uncle thinks you very pretty, dear Fanny— and that is the long and the short of the matter. Anybody but myself would have made something more of it, and anybody but you would resent that you had not been thought very pretty before; but the truth is, that your uncle never did admire you till now—and now he does. Your complexion is so improved!—and you have gained so much countenance!—and your figure—nay, Fanny, do not turn away about it—it is but an uncle. If you cannot bear an uncle’s admiration, what is to become of you? You must really begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at. You must try not to mind growing up into a pretty woman.”
Why she marries this clown is a mystery to many.
Cheers, ARNIE
FAINTING IN THE JUVENILIA:
First consider the following from the very early juvenilia scrap, "A Beautiful Description of the Different Effects of Sensibility on Different Minds":
"In these situations we were this morning surprised by receiving a visit from Dr. Dowkins; "I am come to see Melissa," said he. "How is She?" "Very weak indeed," said the fainting Melissa -- "Very weak," replied the punning Doctor, "aye indeed it is more than a very /week/ since you have taken to your bed -- How is your appetite?" "Bad, very bad," said Julia. "That /is/ very bad" -- replied he; "Are her spirits good, Madam?" "So poorly, Sir, that we are obliged to strengthen her with cordials every Minute." -- "Well then she receives /Spirits/ from your being with her. Does she sleep?" "Scarcely ever." -- "And Ever Scarcely, I suppose, when she does. Poor thing! DOES SHE THINK OF DIEING?" "She has not strength to think at all." "Nay, then she cannot think to have Strength." "
I find it interesting that Dr. Dowkins is referred to as "the PUNNING Doctor"--and I think the hidden point is that the reader might wish to discern all the puns, not only the three obvious ones involving word reversals, but also the one that does not--the one about "dieing"
Second, consider the following from "Frederic and Elfrida":
"This answer distressed her too much for her delicate Constitution. She accordingly fainted & was in such a hurry to have a succession of fainting fits, that she had scarcely patience enough to recover from one before she fell into another."
It is difficult to escape the inference that "fainting" is a pun which is a "cousin" of the pun of "dieing" in the previous example, both of them pointing toward the kind of "dieing" or "fainting" which, as this passage humorously depicts, a person might wish to experience again and again and again.
But while it is interesting to take note of such precocious punning by the young teenaged Jane Austen, in stories which are completely absurdist, what I find of even greater interest are two examples of how she referred to "dying" and "fainting" in the realistic context of the novels, which actually provide windows into the shadows of those novels, and, in the case of Fanny in MP, not funny at all.
FAINTING IN EMMA:
First, in Emma, all the usages of "faint" or its variants pertain to the meaning of the word as "barely discernible" EXCEPT the following two passages, both of which are associated with Harriet, and both of which are striking, particularly the second, which keeps spinning the sexual punning out during three successive additional sentences.
{Harriet breathlessly speaking] "....who should come in, but Elizabeth Martin and her brother! Dear Miss Woodhouse! only think. I thought I should have fainted. I did not know what to do...."
[After the "gypsies" episode] The iron gates and the front-door were not twenty yards asunder; -- they were all three soon in the hall, and Harriet immediately sinking into a chair fainted away. A young lady who faints, must be recovered; questions must be answered, and surprises be explained. Such events are very interesting, but the suspense of them cannot last long. A few minutes made Emma acquainted with the whole.
Indeed, as to the last word of that last sentence, which just happens to be the third word of the third line of the short charade of Emma:
My first doth affliction denote,
Which my second is destin'd to feel
And my whole is the best antidote
That affliction to soften and heal.
And also indeed, as to the last sentence of that same racy vignette that Jill H-S quoted in her introduction:
"...and not only rescued....the poor man, who for many years had actually dyed for her whole............family." (......... added by me)
DYING AND FAINTING IN MP:
And next, consider the following two wicked puns by the ever-resourceful Mary Crawford, which, I think, require no further explanation, in the context set by all of the above comments so far:
"I have three very particular friends who have been all DYING for him in their turn; and the pains which they, their mothers (very clever women), as well as my dear aunt and myself, have taken to reason, coax, or trick him into marrying, is inconceivable!"
Telling as that passage is, the following is far more significant, because of the segue from the other women Henry keeps on a string, to Fanny herself:
"By the bye, Flora Ross was DYING for Henry the first winter she came out. But were I to attempt to tell you of all the women whom I have known to be in love with him, I should never have done. It is you, only you, insensible Fanny, who can think of him with anything like indifference. But are you so insensible as you profess yourself? No, no, I see you are not.” There was, indeed, so deep a blush over Fanny’s face at that moment as might warrant strong suspicion in a predisposed mind.
And what is really remarkable, I think, is that it turns out that Fanny's blushing lack of indifference toward (i.e., an involuntary sort of "dying" for) Henry is directly connected to Fanny's "fainting"!:
In about a quarter of an hour her uncle returned; she was almost ready to faint at the sight of him.......She was nearly fainting: all her former habitual dread of her uncle was returning, and with it compassion for him and for almost every one of the party on the development before him, with solicitude on Edmund's account indescribable.......Having introduced him, however, and being all reseated, the terrors that occurred of what this visit might lead to were overpowering, and she fancied herself on the point of fainting away.
These are all narrations describing Fanny's reactions to being confronted in sexually charged situations involving her uncle (twice) and then Henry Crawford. Normally we would not associate Fanny with a heroine of sensibility, and yet here we have her three times, none of them in the same chapter, each time thinking she is going to faint because of an interaction with a sexually intrusive powerful man.
My sense of what JA is about with this, is to suggest that Fanny struggles to restrain her physical reactions to men who are forcing a sexual vibe in her direction, which, in her mind and spirit, she most emphatically, on every level, does NOT want to give in to. And of course the more disturbing of the two is Uncle Sir Thomas, who infamously does an inventory of Fanny's body, triggering Edmund's unbelievably grotesque rationalization, maybe the most egregious one in all the novels:
"“Your uncle thinks you very pretty, dear Fanny— and that is the long and the short of the matter. Anybody but myself would have made something more of it, and anybody but you would resent that you had not been thought very pretty before; but the truth is, that your uncle never did admire you till now—and now he does. Your complexion is so improved!—and you have gained so much countenance!—and your figure—nay, Fanny, do not turn away about it—it is but an uncle. If you cannot bear an uncle’s admiration, what is to become of you? You must really begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at. You must try not to mind growing up into a pretty woman.”
Why she marries this clown is a mystery to many.
Cheers, ARNIE
Thursday, March 4, 2010
A Perfect Analogue of JA's literary puzzles [and MASSIVE SPOILER as to today's (Thursday's) NY Times crossword puzzle]
One of the most common reactions I have received from Janeites to whom I have revealed one or more of my discoveries vis a vis shadow stories is that it was somehow beneath Jane Austen, as an author of serious literature, to fill her novels with silly or trivial puzzles for the reader to solve, and, what's more, puzzles which she does not even identify as puzzles to her readers, so that you have to first realize there is a puzzle, before you can go about solving it. And even if such puzzles are there in the novels, some others respond, surely I am not serious in suggesting that the answers to these puzzles could in any way enhance the reader's understanding, emotional experience of, or enjoyment of, JA's novels.
I have responded first by pointing out that if this sort of puzzlishness is beneath Jane Austen, it must also be beneath the Yahwist (author of the "seeds" from which the rest of the Bible grew), and also of the likes of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, James, Joyce, and many many other universally esteemed authors, as to each of whom there is SUBSTANTIAL literary critical scholarship published over a very long period of time, which identifies, and attempts to explain, the presence in such great literature of puzzles which somehow seem out of place.
I know this, because my research on Jane Austen's shadow stories has led me to ALL those other authors, and therefore I have come to expect, as inevitable, as to any author to whom I see a connection with JA, there must be some recognized puzzlishness going on with that author, puzzlishness which is (or at least seems to be) entirely unrelated to Jane Austen.
And that does not include the long list of modern writers like Borges, Eco, who have made this sort of riddling puzzlishness very overt in their fictions.
And I have, in response to skeptical reactions, also put forward several types of arguments to explain WHY an author like JA might have embedded secret puzzles in her novels, arguments which I will not repeat now. I am 100% convinced that JA had several powerful, indeed compelling reasons, for all of this, and I will be explaining all of that in print. I have another fish to fry today.
But first I will include a tip of the hat here first to my good friend Colleen Sheehan, whose work I praised in one of my messages yesterday; and second to Anielka, who is the only other member of these groups besides myself who has engaged in a serious AND successful way with specific puzzles and riddles embedded in JA's writings. While Anielka allows several more degrees of freedom than I do in the kind of wordplay which, for her, constitutes a valid decoding of a JA puzzle, she has nonetheless made some remarkable discoveries (each of which I have praised very shortly after she has presented them to these groups). In particular, first I, but then also Anielka, each on our separate path, have both followed fruitfully in Colleen Sheehan's trailblazing footsteps in engaging with the hidden meanings of the second charade ("courtship", "Prince of Whales" and other secret answers) in Chapter 9 of Emma.
This is all introduction, however, to a particularly apt analogy to the way JA played games with her readers, which was just dropt into my lap by a fairy this morning, in the form of the Thursday crossword puzzle in the NY Times. This puzzle was edited, as all NY Times puzzles since around 1992 have been edited, by the famous puzzlemaster, Will Shortz, who I believe continues to appear weekly on Weekend Edition on NPR.
This particular Thursday puzzle was constructed by David J. Kahn, and I am now going to explain the "punch line" of this puzzle, which will constitute a MASSIVE SPOILER for anyone reading along here is someone who actually does the NY Times puzzle. Therefore, this is the moment for any such puzzle solver to STOP reading this message until you have done the puzzle (and by the way, for those of you who would like to do the puzzle, you either have to buy today's print NY Times, or else subscribe (as my wife and I do) to the online NY Times service here:
http://www.nytimes.com/premiumproducts/crosswords/index.html?URI=http://select.nytimes.com/premium/xword/puzzles.html&OQ=_rQ3D1Q26ocidQ3D1Q26incampQ3DxwordsQ3Asection_front&OP=638c266fQ2F4Q7EQ5E,4Q26kQ3Am3kkbQ514o3Q5E5ph54Q2FQ7Ek3Q264ohccVQ5EmiQ27b5V
Anyway, for those who are prepared to read spoilers for today's puzzle, I will now explain the relevance of same for understanding JA's literary puzzles. Today's NY Times puzzle is a "theme" puzzle, as many of the harder puzzles are, which means that there is a theme which helps the reader get the answers to certain designated clues (in this particular puzzle, there are 123 clues in total, and six of them are covered by the theme), over and above the language of those designated clues themselves. An extra "lifeline", if you will.
The theme of this puzzle is given in clue 14-down, and the clue for 14-down reads as follows: "Answer to each of the six starred clues, literally".
It turns out that the answer to 14-down is "mixed metaphor", but....the answers to the six starred clues, when I solved all six of them, were not mixed metaphors at all, not even one of them. A simple example of a mixed metaphor, for those who may be unclear about what it means, is ""Can't you hear that? Are you blind?" The modality of hearing has been mixed with the modality of sight.
In today's puzzle, in contrast, there were answers like "Top Maher" to the starred clue "Be funnier than comedian Bill?"; and "Rome path" as the answer to the starred clue "Via Veneto?". Even though I had finished the puzzle quickly (it was otherwise not a particularly difficult Thursday puzzle), without needing an assist from the theme, it bothered me that I could not figure out where the mixed metaphors were in those answers to the six starred clues. Something was rotten in the state of this puzzle, and I wanted to know what it was!
That was when I called my father, because he and I have long been "crossword puzzle buddies", where we talk to each other about the hard puzzles we both do, and I relentlessly tease him about taking much longer to do the puzzles than it takes me. He knows my teasing is all in fun, and conceals my admiration for his abilities, because I am 57 and he is 91, and it's amazing that he even does any crossword puzzles at all, let alone the most difficult ones in the American style (which, as puzzle buffs among you will know, are very different from English cryptic crossword puzzles, which I, for one, find EXTREMELY difficult, and do not enjoy even attempting them).
Anyway, I called him, and he, too, had completed the puzzle, but he also was deeply puzzled by the absence of any apparent mixed metaphors in those six answers. However, this was the moment when he and I diverged in our reaction to our shared puzzlement, in a way that goes to the heart of why I am telling this little vignette in a Jane Austen discussion venue. His first reaction was that there must be some mistake in puzzle construction by Mssrs. Kahn and Shortz. He was like Darcy initially trying to squirm away from Lizzy's cross-examination with the lame excuse of some congenital disability for ungentlemanly behavior at the Meryton assembly.
Whereas I, like Darcy AFTER Lizzy calls him out on his lame excuse, and he 'fesses up, had as my first reaction that the error must be MINE, not the puzzle creators; and further, that my error must be in some assumption I was acting on, which was erroneous, which was blinding me to what I was sure would turn out to be a Homer Simpson "Doh!" moment, when I'd realize that the trick had been hiding in plain sight all along.
I reacted this way without having to have a Lizzy Bennet to goad me, because I recalled, and had long since taken to heart, that every so often, Will Shortz & Company was going to play a game like this, by embedding an added twist in a puzzle, WITHOUT EXPLICITLY telling the solver, but instead winking it at very slyly, and letting the solver's puzzlement over some apparent error be the motor to lead the solver, sooner or later, to seek out the hidden puzzle that will show the apparent error to actually be a very clever final twist.
And the analogy to reading Jane Austen's novels may at this point perhaps leap out at some sharp elves reading this, because that is EXACTLY how I explain why I (and Colleen Sheehan and Anielka) are the ones who have solved JA's literary puzzles, whereas many other extremely intelligent Janeites, with equally extensive knowledge of JA's fiction as ours, do not solve those puzzles, or even realize that there ARE puzzles there to solve. To spot, and then solve, JA's puzzles, you have to be perpetually suspecting JA of a puzzle (thanks once again, Mary Crawford!), EVERY time you come across something in her novels which somehow clangs awkwardly, or seems not to fit with the context in some jarring way.
But back to today's NY Times Thursday puzzle. The REALLY sharp elves out there will have already been suspicious enough of ME to take a second look at the two answers to starred clues which I gave you, above, with such apparent casualness. If you have, you could have, judging by those two answers alone, figured out the mixed metaphor that was in each of them.....LITERALLY.
But for everyone else, I will now make it a whole lot easier to figure that out, by giving you, below, ALL SIX of the answers to the starred clues, one atop the next, which is exactly the procedure I myself started to go through as I tried to figure it out, when I realized the "trick" while I was writing the third answer.
other map
Rome path
Top Maher
Map hater
home part
more phat
Do you see the "mixed metaphors"? I deliberately placed the answers one atop the next, so that certain structural parallelism between these six answers, so utterly unrelated in content, will be more prominent, visually .
So......do you now get a subliminal sense of some other, even more powerful parallelism between these six answers?
Such as that they each consist of a total of eight letters?
And those letters are not entirely random, are they? ;)
Are you perhaps at this moment reminded of the following?
My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings,
Lords of the earth! their luxury and ease.
Another view of man, my second brings,
Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!
But, ah! united, what reverse we have!
Man's boasted power and freedom, all are flown;
Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave,
And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.
Remember what Colleen Sheehan told us about this charade --each stanza is an acrostic anagram, where the first letter of each line gives us "mlab" and then "bmla", which are both anagrams of "lamb".
Now everyone still reading along must surely realize that the above answers to the six starred clues are all ANAGRAMS of each other! Each consists of the same 8 letters, but in different orders entirely!
Very clever of Mssrs. Shortz and Kahn, right?
But...one of you with a good memory may think to ask--yes, that's very clever indeed, but still, where's the mixed metaphor in each of them? And what do Shortz and Kahn mean by that last word "literally"?
And (if I may be permitted one frivolous intentional mixed metaphor myself) it is those questions which inject the icing on the cake of this ultraclever puzzle, which is that each of those six words are ALSO anagrams of the word "METAPHOR", which ALSO contains those same eight letters!
And that, my friends, is the "punch line" I was leading up to in my deciding to present this little tale to groups of Janeites--because that last step is a perfect analogue for JA's shadow stories. The "theme" clue led us down a garden path of looking for mixed metaphors as we ordinarily use that term, BUT.... playing fair with the puzzle solver, it ALSO contained a CODED instruction to look for the word "metaphor" LITERALLY (or concretely) in each of the answers to the six starred clues. THAT is the "shadow story" of this NY Times puzzle!
But, clever as this NY Times puzzle is, as I have now explained it, it should also be apparent that JA's puzzles, which lead into the shadows of six of the greatest works of fiction ever written, are a gazillion times more significant, and meaningful, than mere word games which do not lead anywhere beyond the page where that puzzle is printed. Why? Because JA's puzzles vastly deepen and expand the scope and significance of the METAPHORS which are the nuts and bolts of her fiction.
And so, I end this message clangingly echoing Obe Wan Kenobi (or, for the well-heeled New Zealanders amongst you, One Kiwi Nabob), and saying, to those of you brave enough to begin on the journey into JA's shadows stories alongside me, "May the METAphors be with you". ;)
Cheers,
Arnie
sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com
P.S.: Just as my father has never, during my entire life, missed any opportunity to kvell, to friends, family and strangers alike, about my achievements, whether they be my SAT or LSAT score, or my TV game show or Spelling Bee triumphs, I will myself NOT now miss the opportunity to kvell about my ninety-one year old father's far more remarkable and ongoing achievements in being able to complete the most difficult American-style crossword puzzles, both the 3 weekly hard NY Times puzzles, and also Stanley Newman's weekly "Saturday Stumper", putting him, I think, in a league of his own among nonagenarians.
So I now proclaim across the ether: WELL DONE, DAD!!!!
I have responded first by pointing out that if this sort of puzzlishness is beneath Jane Austen, it must also be beneath the Yahwist (author of the "seeds" from which the rest of the Bible grew), and also of the likes of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, James, Joyce, and many many other universally esteemed authors, as to each of whom there is SUBSTANTIAL literary critical scholarship published over a very long period of time, which identifies, and attempts to explain, the presence in such great literature of puzzles which somehow seem out of place.
I know this, because my research on Jane Austen's shadow stories has led me to ALL those other authors, and therefore I have come to expect, as inevitable, as to any author to whom I see a connection with JA, there must be some recognized puzzlishness going on with that author, puzzlishness which is (or at least seems to be) entirely unrelated to Jane Austen.
And that does not include the long list of modern writers like Borges, Eco, who have made this sort of riddling puzzlishness very overt in their fictions.
And I have, in response to skeptical reactions, also put forward several types of arguments to explain WHY an author like JA might have embedded secret puzzles in her novels, arguments which I will not repeat now. I am 100% convinced that JA had several powerful, indeed compelling reasons, for all of this, and I will be explaining all of that in print. I have another fish to fry today.
But first I will include a tip of the hat here first to my good friend Colleen Sheehan, whose work I praised in one of my messages yesterday; and second to Anielka, who is the only other member of these groups besides myself who has engaged in a serious AND successful way with specific puzzles and riddles embedded in JA's writings. While Anielka allows several more degrees of freedom than I do in the kind of wordplay which, for her, constitutes a valid decoding of a JA puzzle, she has nonetheless made some remarkable discoveries (each of which I have praised very shortly after she has presented them to these groups). In particular, first I, but then also Anielka, each on our separate path, have both followed fruitfully in Colleen Sheehan's trailblazing footsteps in engaging with the hidden meanings of the second charade ("courtship", "Prince of Whales" and other secret answers) in Chapter 9 of Emma.
This is all introduction, however, to a particularly apt analogy to the way JA played games with her readers, which was just dropt into my lap by a fairy this morning, in the form of the Thursday crossword puzzle in the NY Times. This puzzle was edited, as all NY Times puzzles since around 1992 have been edited, by the famous puzzlemaster, Will Shortz, who I believe continues to appear weekly on Weekend Edition on NPR.
This particular Thursday puzzle was constructed by David J. Kahn, and I am now going to explain the "punch line" of this puzzle, which will constitute a MASSIVE SPOILER for anyone reading along here is someone who actually does the NY Times puzzle. Therefore, this is the moment for any such puzzle solver to STOP reading this message until you have done the puzzle (and by the way, for those of you who would like to do the puzzle, you either have to buy today's print NY Times, or else subscribe (as my wife and I do) to the online NY Times service here:
http://www.nytimes.com/premiumproducts/crosswords/index.html?URI=http://select.nytimes.com/premium/xword/puzzles.html&OQ=_rQ3D1Q26ocidQ3D1Q26incampQ3DxwordsQ3Asection_front&OP=638c266fQ2F4Q7EQ5E,4Q26kQ3Am3kkbQ514o3Q5E5ph54Q2FQ7Ek3Q264ohccVQ5EmiQ27b5V
Anyway, for those who are prepared to read spoilers for today's puzzle, I will now explain the relevance of same for understanding JA's literary puzzles. Today's NY Times puzzle is a "theme" puzzle, as many of the harder puzzles are, which means that there is a theme which helps the reader get the answers to certain designated clues (in this particular puzzle, there are 123 clues in total, and six of them are covered by the theme), over and above the language of those designated clues themselves. An extra "lifeline", if you will.
The theme of this puzzle is given in clue 14-down, and the clue for 14-down reads as follows: "Answer to each of the six starred clues, literally".
It turns out that the answer to 14-down is "mixed metaphor", but....the answers to the six starred clues, when I solved all six of them, were not mixed metaphors at all, not even one of them. A simple example of a mixed metaphor, for those who may be unclear about what it means, is ""Can't you hear that? Are you blind?" The modality of hearing has been mixed with the modality of sight.
In today's puzzle, in contrast, there were answers like "Top Maher" to the starred clue "Be funnier than comedian Bill?"; and "Rome path" as the answer to the starred clue "Via Veneto?". Even though I had finished the puzzle quickly (it was otherwise not a particularly difficult Thursday puzzle), without needing an assist from the theme, it bothered me that I could not figure out where the mixed metaphors were in those answers to the six starred clues. Something was rotten in the state of this puzzle, and I wanted to know what it was!
That was when I called my father, because he and I have long been "crossword puzzle buddies", where we talk to each other about the hard puzzles we both do, and I relentlessly tease him about taking much longer to do the puzzles than it takes me. He knows my teasing is all in fun, and conceals my admiration for his abilities, because I am 57 and he is 91, and it's amazing that he even does any crossword puzzles at all, let alone the most difficult ones in the American style (which, as puzzle buffs among you will know, are very different from English cryptic crossword puzzles, which I, for one, find EXTREMELY difficult, and do not enjoy even attempting them).
Anyway, I called him, and he, too, had completed the puzzle, but he also was deeply puzzled by the absence of any apparent mixed metaphors in those six answers. However, this was the moment when he and I diverged in our reaction to our shared puzzlement, in a way that goes to the heart of why I am telling this little vignette in a Jane Austen discussion venue. His first reaction was that there must be some mistake in puzzle construction by Mssrs. Kahn and Shortz. He was like Darcy initially trying to squirm away from Lizzy's cross-examination with the lame excuse of some congenital disability for ungentlemanly behavior at the Meryton assembly.
Whereas I, like Darcy AFTER Lizzy calls him out on his lame excuse, and he 'fesses up, had as my first reaction that the error must be MINE, not the puzzle creators; and further, that my error must be in some assumption I was acting on, which was erroneous, which was blinding me to what I was sure would turn out to be a Homer Simpson "Doh!" moment, when I'd realize that the trick had been hiding in plain sight all along.
I reacted this way without having to have a Lizzy Bennet to goad me, because I recalled, and had long since taken to heart, that every so often, Will Shortz & Company was going to play a game like this, by embedding an added twist in a puzzle, WITHOUT EXPLICITLY telling the solver, but instead winking it at very slyly, and letting the solver's puzzlement over some apparent error be the motor to lead the solver, sooner or later, to seek out the hidden puzzle that will show the apparent error to actually be a very clever final twist.
And the analogy to reading Jane Austen's novels may at this point perhaps leap out at some sharp elves reading this, because that is EXACTLY how I explain why I (and Colleen Sheehan and Anielka) are the ones who have solved JA's literary puzzles, whereas many other extremely intelligent Janeites, with equally extensive knowledge of JA's fiction as ours, do not solve those puzzles, or even realize that there ARE puzzles there to solve. To spot, and then solve, JA's puzzles, you have to be perpetually suspecting JA of a puzzle (thanks once again, Mary Crawford!), EVERY time you come across something in her novels which somehow clangs awkwardly, or seems not to fit with the context in some jarring way.
But back to today's NY Times Thursday puzzle. The REALLY sharp elves out there will have already been suspicious enough of ME to take a second look at the two answers to starred clues which I gave you, above, with such apparent casualness. If you have, you could have, judging by those two answers alone, figured out the mixed metaphor that was in each of them.....LITERALLY.
But for everyone else, I will now make it a whole lot easier to figure that out, by giving you, below, ALL SIX of the answers to the starred clues, one atop the next, which is exactly the procedure I myself started to go through as I tried to figure it out, when I realized the "trick" while I was writing the third answer.
other map
Rome path
Top Maher
Map hater
home part
more phat
Do you see the "mixed metaphors"? I deliberately placed the answers one atop the next, so that certain structural parallelism between these six answers, so utterly unrelated in content, will be more prominent, visually .
So......do you now get a subliminal sense of some other, even more powerful parallelism between these six answers?
Such as that they each consist of a total of eight letters?
And those letters are not entirely random, are they? ;)
Are you perhaps at this moment reminded of the following?
My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings,
Lords of the earth! their luxury and ease.
Another view of man, my second brings,
Behold him there, the monarch of the seas!
But, ah! united, what reverse we have!
Man's boasted power and freedom, all are flown;
Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave,
And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.
Remember what Colleen Sheehan told us about this charade --each stanza is an acrostic anagram, where the first letter of each line gives us "mlab" and then "bmla", which are both anagrams of "lamb".
Now everyone still reading along must surely realize that the above answers to the six starred clues are all ANAGRAMS of each other! Each consists of the same 8 letters, but in different orders entirely!
Very clever of Mssrs. Shortz and Kahn, right?
But...one of you with a good memory may think to ask--yes, that's very clever indeed, but still, where's the mixed metaphor in each of them? And what do Shortz and Kahn mean by that last word "literally"?
And (if I may be permitted one frivolous intentional mixed metaphor myself) it is those questions which inject the icing on the cake of this ultraclever puzzle, which is that each of those six words are ALSO anagrams of the word "METAPHOR", which ALSO contains those same eight letters!
And that, my friends, is the "punch line" I was leading up to in my deciding to present this little tale to groups of Janeites--because that last step is a perfect analogue for JA's shadow stories. The "theme" clue led us down a garden path of looking for mixed metaphors as we ordinarily use that term, BUT.... playing fair with the puzzle solver, it ALSO contained a CODED instruction to look for the word "metaphor" LITERALLY (or concretely) in each of the answers to the six starred clues. THAT is the "shadow story" of this NY Times puzzle!
But, clever as this NY Times puzzle is, as I have now explained it, it should also be apparent that JA's puzzles, which lead into the shadows of six of the greatest works of fiction ever written, are a gazillion times more significant, and meaningful, than mere word games which do not lead anywhere beyond the page where that puzzle is printed. Why? Because JA's puzzles vastly deepen and expand the scope and significance of the METAPHORS which are the nuts and bolts of her fiction.
And so, I end this message clangingly echoing Obe Wan Kenobi (or, for the well-heeled New Zealanders amongst you, One Kiwi Nabob), and saying, to those of you brave enough to begin on the journey into JA's shadows stories alongside me, "May the METAphors be with you". ;)
Cheers,
Arnie
sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com
P.S.: Just as my father has never, during my entire life, missed any opportunity to kvell, to friends, family and strangers alike, about my achievements, whether they be my SAT or LSAT score, or my TV game show or Spelling Bee triumphs, I will myself NOT now miss the opportunity to kvell about my ninety-one year old father's far more remarkable and ongoing achievements in being able to complete the most difficult American-style crossword puzzles, both the 3 weekly hard NY Times puzzles, and also Stanley Newman's weekly "Saturday Stumper", putting him, I think, in a league of his own among nonagenarians.
So I now proclaim across the ether: WELL DONE, DAD!!!!
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
The Real Thief
(c) Arnold Perlstein 2010
I have on dozens of occasions taken every opportunity to tout Colleen Sheehan’s tour de force in discovering the secret “Prince of Whales” solution to the second charade in Chapter 9 of Emma (Emma’s answer for which being “courtship”), as she detailed her discovery in the following 2006 Persuasions Online tandem articles:
http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol27no1/sheehan.htm
What I have cited only occasionally is another Persuasions article that Colleen published in the 2000 print version of Persuasions, a reference to which is shown at the following URL, but not the text of the article itself:
http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/printed/pers22.html
As you can discern, the title of Colleen’s earlier article was “The Riddles of Emma”, and in it, among other discoveries, she gives the rationale for her discovery of a second, secret answer to the FIRST charade in Chapter 9 of Emma (the one to which the standard answer, although, curiously, never actually given in the novel, is “woe” + “man” è “woman”).
Colleen claims that the secret second answer to that first charade is “heartfiel”, and she goes through a wonderful chain of inferences to reach that outcome, as she weaves in the Shakespearean subtext of Emma which Jocelyn Harris first brilliantly wrote about in 1986 in her pioneering Art of Memory book. Among Colleen’s observations is the following:
“Just as an answer to the first charade is "heartfiel" or the heart's ease, "heart's-ease" is also the name of the hypnotic flower in Shakespeare's play Another name for this magical flower is "love-in-idleness."
In my mind, up till today, I have always ranked Colleen’s achievement in decoding the “Prince of Whales” solution to be a quantum level more amazing than her “heartfiel” solution---that was, until an hour ago, when I was reviewing my last message titled “The Ingenuity of Man….and Jane Austen” to see if I made any blunders.
Instead, my memory was jogged back by something I had written in my message to something related which Colleen wrote in her 2000 article, and which, as I recall, she had also mentioned to me, with justified pride, during one of our many delightful telephone brainstorming sessions during 2005 when she made her “Prince of Whales” discovery.
Here’s what I recalled from Colleen’s article:
“If we are willing to play along with Austen, and continue the game of anagrams played in Volume Three, applying it to the charade we have unlocked, we discover the core of the danger lurking at Hartfield. The anagram of "Heartfiel" is "Real Thief."
Colleen then went on to give an ingenious and witty rationale for suggesting that JA was depicting Emma’s imagination as the “real thief” :
“Emma's imagination, fanned and fueled by an intemperate and fiery spiritedness, made her vain, unjust, and incapable of forming genuine friendships or a true or lasting love. More than any of Austen's other heroes or heroines, Emma was in need of a degree of humbling which would temper her vanity and transform it into proper pride. Ultimately, this is accomplished in Volume Three, chapter seven of the novel, at Box Hill, a location seven miles from Highbury where, excluding the obstreperous Emma and Frank, a party of seven silent people (we are twice told) spent the afternoon picknicking. Box Hill, the author reveals, is a location within shouting distance of Dorking on the one side and Mickleham on the other (369). Ironically under the cooler shades of this hill, (4) where Emma's vanity receives its ultimate and conclusive blow or boxing, is still today nestled a little village by the name of "West Humble." (5)
Even though I did not find this part of Colleen’s argument as convincing as the others, I found it so clever and witty that I gave Colleen the benefit of the doubt, because the JA I know was indeed a lover of clever wit of exactly that kind.
But it was earlier this afternoon, as I was rereading my message, which is all about Knightley as the “thief” who “steals” Emma, when it shot like an arrow through my brain, and lit up Colleen’s “real thief” discovery in bright neon lights—of course! JA is telling us, with that first charade’s secret answer, “heartfiel”, that Knightley is the “REAL thief”!!!
Cheers, ARNIE
P.S.: Another tidbit from Colleen’s article might just be relevant to my discussion yesterday of Henry Crawford’s (and Lovelace’s) sacrilegious quotation of the Biblical Proverb about the “bread of idleness”. I have a hunch that Shakespeare and JA (and who knows, maybe Richardson as well, since he knew his Shakespeare pretty well, too) each was thinking, in part, of that Proverb when they were writing Midsummer Night’s Dream and Emma, respectively.
I have on dozens of occasions taken every opportunity to tout Colleen Sheehan’s tour de force in discovering the secret “Prince of Whales” solution to the second charade in Chapter 9 of Emma (Emma’s answer for which being “courtship”), as she detailed her discovery in the following 2006 Persuasions Online tandem articles:
http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol27no1/sheehan.htm
What I have cited only occasionally is another Persuasions article that Colleen published in the 2000 print version of Persuasions, a reference to which is shown at the following URL, but not the text of the article itself:
http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/printed/pers22.html
As you can discern, the title of Colleen’s earlier article was “The Riddles of Emma”, and in it, among other discoveries, she gives the rationale for her discovery of a second, secret answer to the FIRST charade in Chapter 9 of Emma (the one to which the standard answer, although, curiously, never actually given in the novel, is “woe” + “man” è “woman”).
Colleen claims that the secret second answer to that first charade is “heartfiel”, and she goes through a wonderful chain of inferences to reach that outcome, as she weaves in the Shakespearean subtext of Emma which Jocelyn Harris first brilliantly wrote about in 1986 in her pioneering Art of Memory book. Among Colleen’s observations is the following:
“Just as an answer to the first charade is "heartfiel" or the heart's ease, "heart's-ease" is also the name of the hypnotic flower in Shakespeare's play Another name for this magical flower is "love-in-idleness."
In my mind, up till today, I have always ranked Colleen’s achievement in decoding the “Prince of Whales” solution to be a quantum level more amazing than her “heartfiel” solution---that was, until an hour ago, when I was reviewing my last message titled “The Ingenuity of Man….and Jane Austen” to see if I made any blunders.
Instead, my memory was jogged back by something I had written in my message to something related which Colleen wrote in her 2000 article, and which, as I recall, she had also mentioned to me, with justified pride, during one of our many delightful telephone brainstorming sessions during 2005 when she made her “Prince of Whales” discovery.
Here’s what I recalled from Colleen’s article:
“If we are willing to play along with Austen, and continue the game of anagrams played in Volume Three, applying it to the charade we have unlocked, we discover the core of the danger lurking at Hartfield. The anagram of "Heartfiel" is "Real Thief."
Colleen then went on to give an ingenious and witty rationale for suggesting that JA was depicting Emma’s imagination as the “real thief” :
“Emma's imagination, fanned and fueled by an intemperate and fiery spiritedness, made her vain, unjust, and incapable of forming genuine friendships or a true or lasting love. More than any of Austen's other heroes or heroines, Emma was in need of a degree of humbling which would temper her vanity and transform it into proper pride. Ultimately, this is accomplished in Volume Three, chapter seven of the novel, at Box Hill, a location seven miles from Highbury where, excluding the obstreperous Emma and Frank, a party of seven silent people (we are twice told) spent the afternoon picknicking. Box Hill, the author reveals, is a location within shouting distance of Dorking on the one side and Mickleham on the other (369). Ironically under the cooler shades of this hill, (4) where Emma's vanity receives its ultimate and conclusive blow or boxing, is still today nestled a little village by the name of "West Humble." (5)
Even though I did not find this part of Colleen’s argument as convincing as the others, I found it so clever and witty that I gave Colleen the benefit of the doubt, because the JA I know was indeed a lover of clever wit of exactly that kind.
But it was earlier this afternoon, as I was rereading my message, which is all about Knightley as the “thief” who “steals” Emma, when it shot like an arrow through my brain, and lit up Colleen’s “real thief” discovery in bright neon lights—of course! JA is telling us, with that first charade’s secret answer, “heartfiel”, that Knightley is the “REAL thief”!!!
Cheers, ARNIE
P.S.: Another tidbit from Colleen’s article might just be relevant to my discussion yesterday of Henry Crawford’s (and Lovelace’s) sacrilegious quotation of the Biblical Proverb about the “bread of idleness”. I have a hunch that Shakespeare and JA (and who knows, maybe Richardson as well, since he knew his Shakespeare pretty well, too) each was thinking, in part, of that Proverb when they were writing Midsummer Night’s Dream and Emma, respectively.
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