For the first time in hundreds of posts here, I am going to make a political comment, and perhaps it is fitting, because I have been claiming in so many of my posts here that Jane Austen really was, covertly, a radical social critic, and exposer of the hypocrisy of the powerful, and that is exactly what I wish to do now. As with my comments about Jane Austen, I believe there is something important needing to be said about the recent tragedy in Tucson, and my son Ethan just said it to me in a phone conversation this morning. To wit:
The core question about this assassination attempt is whether Loughner's actions are to be understood as those of an unpredictably insane lone wolf, and therefore not the responsibility of Palin, Limbaugh, and Beck, or as the predictable result of the public hate rhetoric of the Far Right.
Ethan pointed out to me the analogy to water boiling, and that comment reminded me of the following passage from Gregory Bateson's timeless masterpiece of logical brilliance, Mind and Nature, in which he writes the following at page 43:
"...there is a deep gulf between statements about an identified individual and statements about a class. Such statements are of a DIFFERENT LOGICAL TYPE, and prediction from one to the other is always unsure. The statement "The liquid is boiling" is of different logical type from the statement "That molecule will be the first to go."
Let's rephrase that to fit Loughner's actions:
"The statement 'Far Right hate rhetoric is inflaming crazy people to take violent actions" is of different logical type from the statement "Loughner will be the one to kill a Democratic congresswoman today".
So Ethan's and my answer is clear--even if it was unpredictable that Loughner (one molecule among millions) would snap and do what he did on Saturday, it was, on another logical level, a CERTAINTY that SOME molecule somewhere in the US would go sometime soon, giving that the heat from the insane rhetoric of Palin, Limbaugh, and Beck had raised the pot of our society to a boiling point.
So, we need to continue to hold every Far Right Republican's feet to that fire, and make them either turn down the heat, or be held accountable for the inevitable boiling--and get some very scorched toes!
And I urge you all to read Mind and Nature, as I did many years ago--and thank god some of it stuck in my brain-- so as to be better prepared to answer these crucial questions in a useful way.
Cheers, ARNIE
P.S.: In my chat with Ethan, I also pointed out a related point, which is that there was a grotesque irony, one that Jane Austen would have noticed and smiled grimly at, in the apologists for Palin, Limbaugh, and Beck claiming that we cannot more closely regulate who is allowed to legally purchase assault weapons in this country, because how can we know who is likely to snap, and who is not?
The grotesque irony is that the political rhetoric of the Far Right is itself so crazy, so psychotic, even if is being spoken cold-bloodedly, even calmly, by the likes of Palin, Limbaugh and Beck, that it is truly impossible to notice how crazy Loughner is, because he sounds JUST LIKE those three public figures!
And Ethan then suggested I listen to Jon Stewart's Daily Show monologue from last night, in which he said exactly the same thing.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
The Paradoxes of Jane Austen
Christy Somer responded to my previous post about Jane Austen's Letter 5, and I responded to her response as follows:
[Christy] "Now I wonder if Cassandra did not purposefully pick letters out by their connections to the books. I think every letter so far, has bits we have seen in her stories."
Or maybe _all_ her letters had these connections, because JA loved to seed her letters with covert references to her fictions in process? That's a equally possible scenario.
[Christy] "Yes, Arnie, this did feel like a caricature of some predatory nature scene....the lions having their fill, and the lesser predators being left the scraps."
Thanks for that acknowledgment, Christy---it seems very clear to me, because the imagery is so incongruous, so hyperbolic, so loaded. I never saw it before only because I never read Letter 5 really closely before.
What I find most noteworthy is that I am (as far as I can tell online) the _first_ person to spot that connection and make that claim in print!
As usual, I do _not_ claim that this indicates that I had to have some sort of extraordinary perspicuity in order to see this, not at all. Rather I claim it indicates that JA's letters have _never_ received the close reading they deserve, because it never dawned on most readers thereof that these letters were actually highly composed, for all their apparent randomness and triviality. There should have been a dozen biographers taking note of the telltale connection-by-proximity between the jibe at brother Edward, and the jungle caricature in words, if only to speculate on it as a possibility.
I have seen this same exact thing a thousand times during the past 6 years.
[Christy] "She does seem to have loved paradox...wherever she could find or construct it."
And thanks for that as well. I think it was her inner philosopher, always seeking a moment to express her delight in the great questions of human existence and experience, especially epistemology---how we know what we know.
It is no surprise that the young philosopher who coined these paradoxes was also the creator of the young philosopher _of exactly the same age_ who opined:
"We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing."
Cheers, ARNIE
[Christy] "Now I wonder if Cassandra did not purposefully pick letters out by their connections to the books. I think every letter so far, has bits we have seen in her stories."
Or maybe _all_ her letters had these connections, because JA loved to seed her letters with covert references to her fictions in process? That's a equally possible scenario.
[Christy] "Yes, Arnie, this did feel like a caricature of some predatory nature scene....the lions having their fill, and the lesser predators being left the scraps."
Thanks for that acknowledgment, Christy---it seems very clear to me, because the imagery is so incongruous, so hyperbolic, so loaded. I never saw it before only because I never read Letter 5 really closely before.
What I find most noteworthy is that I am (as far as I can tell online) the _first_ person to spot that connection and make that claim in print!
As usual, I do _not_ claim that this indicates that I had to have some sort of extraordinary perspicuity in order to see this, not at all. Rather I claim it indicates that JA's letters have _never_ received the close reading they deserve, because it never dawned on most readers thereof that these letters were actually highly composed, for all their apparent randomness and triviality. There should have been a dozen biographers taking note of the telltale connection-by-proximity between the jibe at brother Edward, and the jungle caricature in words, if only to speculate on it as a possibility.
I have seen this same exact thing a thousand times during the past 6 years.
[Christy] "She does seem to have loved paradox...wherever she could find or construct it."
And thanks for that as well. I think it was her inner philosopher, always seeking a moment to express her delight in the great questions of human existence and experience, especially epistemology---how we know what we know.
It is no surprise that the young philosopher who coined these paradoxes was also the creator of the young philosopher _of exactly the same age_ who opined:
"We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing."
Cheers, ARNIE
Jane Austen's veiled satire in Letter 5 to her sister dated Sept. 5, 1796
Christy Somer just posted about Letter 5 dated 9/5/96 in Janeites and Austen L, and here are my comments on that letter:
As usual, there are lots of ironies, including two from the first two sentences:
“I shall be extremely anxious to hear the Event of your Ball, & shall hope to receive so long & minute an account of every particular that I shall be tired of reading it. Let me know how many besides their fourteen Selves & Mr & Mrs Wright, Michael will contrive to place about their Coach, and how many of the Gentlemen, Musicians & Waiters, he will have persuaded to come in their Shooting Jackets.”
I wonder sometimes whether the young adult JA was capable of writing a sentence in a letter to her sister that did _not_ contain some mock or absurdist hyperbole! The reference to shooting jackets reminds me of thefamous comments about Tom Lefroy’s white coat in Letters 1 and 2, and are strong evidence, I claim, that JA was horsing around in those earlier references to male attire, just as much as in this Letter 5.
Then JA segues to a comment which may or may not be kidding:
“I hope John Lovett's accident will not prevent his attending the Ball, as you will otherwise be obliged to dance with Mr. Tincton the whole Evening.”
I wonder if Mr. Tincton actually existed, as Le Faye draws a complete blank on him, and we know that JA was capable of referring to entirely fictitious characters in her letters. If he did exist, then it sounds as if he was a kind of Mr. Collins.
But I am pretty sure the following comment is not a joke at all, despite its frivolous sounding tone:
“…which of the Marys will carry the day with my Brother James.”
Was there a competition among local single women for the hand in marriage of the recently (18 months earlier) widowed James Austen? Of course this question was of even more special interest to JA and CEA than normal, because they and their mother had been taking care of four year old Anna Austen ever since the death of James’s first wife. So James remarrying would have enormous consequences for Jane and Cassandra.
As Christy indicates, Le Faye cites Chapman to claim that there were two Marys, of course Mary Lloyd (who would in fact marry James Austen within only 4 months after Letter 5) and one Mary Harrison, who, according to Le Faye’s Bio Index, was the daughter of the vicar of Croydon, and sister of the vicar of Overton. Mary Harrison did not let the grass grow under her feet after James married Mary Lloyd, she married in September 1797, and JA makes some joking comments in Letter 28 four years later about Mary Harrison’s being pregnant.
But back to Letter 5:
“We were at a Ball on Saturday I assure you. We dined at Goodnestone & in the Evening danced two Country Dances and the Boulangeries…..and Miss Finch played the Boulangeries”
That may sound quite innocent, but Le Faye’s footnote suggests otherwise. She cites Tomalin for the notion that “the name of the dance [actually the Boulangeres] originates in the mildly improper French popular song _La Boulangere a des ecus” . I just checked online and found the following link for the lyrics of that song:
http://www.momes.net/comptines/metiers/la-boulangere.html
As Le Faye drily puts it, “the baker’s wife acquired her money by means less creditable than the sale of bread.”
I find that very intriguing in light of a similar sexual pun deployed by Shakespeare in _Hamlet_ vis a vis Ophelia’s singing a ribald song about the baker’s _daughter_, a pun that my research suggests to me was on JA’s mind when she was writing about the baking of apples in _Emma_.
It is also intriguing to me because of what JA writes immediately after these references to the dancing of the Boulangeres:
“On reading over the last three or four Lines, I am aware of my having expressed myself in so doubtful a manner that if I did not tell you to the contrary, You might imagine it was Lady Bridges who made Henry dance with her, at the same time that she was playing-which if not impossible must appear a very improbable Event to you.-But it was Eliz: who danced-.”
We all know that dance is a metaphor that JA deployed extensively in her novels for courtship and marriage, and, I would suggest, she also deployed it for courtship’s most intimate physical expression, i.e., sex. So while superficially JA writes of being “doubtful” (i.e., ambiguous) in regard to who danced with whom, I claim JA was being slily, highly and absurdly improper in suggesting a more intimate “dance” being demanded by Lady Bridges from Henry Austen. Much in the same vein as the risqué humor I attributed to JA last week vis a vis another older woman, Mrs. Knight.
Then we have a few trivial paragraphs, following by another noteworthy satirical passage:
“Farmer Clarinbould died this morning, & I fancy Edward means to get some of his Farm if he can cheat Sir Brook enough in the agrement.”
Christy notes the jibe at Edward, but it is important to note also that this is the first of nearly _twenty_ passages scattered through all of JA’s letters, in which she takes a direct potshot at brother Edward Austen Knight, usually depicting him as a kind of John Dashwood or General Tilney.
And I think JA not-so-subtly reinforces the notion of a certain economic rapacity in her brother-turned-country squire toward a poor neighbor with the following seemingly unrelated comment, which is actually, I claim, very much related:
“We have just got some venison from Godmersham, which the two Mr. Harveys are to _devour_ to-morrow; and on friday or Saturday the Goodnestone people are to finish their _Scraps._”
Indeed, rural England in that era of rapid enclosure did seem like a kind of jungle, in which the King of Beasts took the lion’s share, and left the scraps to the poor scavengers scurrying around in his wake.
And next we have the following passage which must leap off the page to the eye of every serious Janeite:
“Mr. Richard Harvey is going to be married; but as it is a great secret, & only known to half the Neighbourhood, you must not mention it. The Lady's name is Musgrove.-I am in great Distress. “
In this letter written 20 years before JA wrote _Persuasion_, isn’t it interesting that we have a man named Richard planning to marry a woman named Musgrove? The end of this little vignette occurs in Letter 6, so stay tuned!;)
And finally, JA finishes this short letter with a flurry of jokes and ironies:
“I cannot determine whether I shall give Richis half a guinea or only five Shillings when I go away. Counsel me, amiable Miss Austen, and tell me which will be the most.”
Is JA seriously asking CEA for advice on how much to tip a servant? Wikipedia tells me that a guinea was supposed to be worth 20 shillings, so that is a pretty wide range, like asking whether to tip a restaurant waiter today 5% or 20%. I think she is just horsing around, and knows exactly how much to tip.
“Little Edward was breeched yesterday for good & all, and was whipped, into the Bargain.”
It is impossible to know whether JA is making this up or not, but my guess is that JA _was_ responding to some sort of severe punishment that was administered in her presence to the 27 month old Edward Austen, which JA found upsetting.
And then we have this magnificent little Zen double-koan:
“Pray remember me to Everybody who does not enquire after me. Those who do, remember me without bidding.... “
This is sophisticated humor riffing on Greek philosophical paradox, especially the second sentence.
And then she concludes with the following return to yet another explicit allusion to Burney’s _Camilla_, which really must have been a hot topic for the Austen sisters at that moment in time.
“Give my Love to Mary Harrison, & tell her I wish whenever she is attached to a young Man, some respectable Dr. Marchmont may keep them apart for five Volumes.”
Behind the literary joke, it does sound as though this is a direct allusion back to the earlier comment about James Austen picking a Mary to marry (ha ha), and that it is a suggestion that perhaps someone wishing to promote Mary Lloyd’s case with James in some way did throw a monkey wrench or two in the gears of Mary Harrison’s campaign to land James as a husband.
Cheers, ARNIE
As usual, there are lots of ironies, including two from the first two sentences:
“I shall be extremely anxious to hear the Event of your Ball, & shall hope to receive so long & minute an account of every particular that I shall be tired of reading it. Let me know how many besides their fourteen Selves & Mr & Mrs Wright, Michael will contrive to place about their Coach, and how many of the Gentlemen, Musicians & Waiters, he will have persuaded to come in their Shooting Jackets.”
I wonder sometimes whether the young adult JA was capable of writing a sentence in a letter to her sister that did _not_ contain some mock or absurdist hyperbole! The reference to shooting jackets reminds me of thefamous comments about Tom Lefroy’s white coat in Letters 1 and 2, and are strong evidence, I claim, that JA was horsing around in those earlier references to male attire, just as much as in this Letter 5.
Then JA segues to a comment which may or may not be kidding:
“I hope John Lovett's accident will not prevent his attending the Ball, as you will otherwise be obliged to dance with Mr. Tincton the whole Evening.”
I wonder if Mr. Tincton actually existed, as Le Faye draws a complete blank on him, and we know that JA was capable of referring to entirely fictitious characters in her letters. If he did exist, then it sounds as if he was a kind of Mr. Collins.
But I am pretty sure the following comment is not a joke at all, despite its frivolous sounding tone:
“…which of the Marys will carry the day with my Brother James.”
Was there a competition among local single women for the hand in marriage of the recently (18 months earlier) widowed James Austen? Of course this question was of even more special interest to JA and CEA than normal, because they and their mother had been taking care of four year old Anna Austen ever since the death of James’s first wife. So James remarrying would have enormous consequences for Jane and Cassandra.
As Christy indicates, Le Faye cites Chapman to claim that there were two Marys, of course Mary Lloyd (who would in fact marry James Austen within only 4 months after Letter 5) and one Mary Harrison, who, according to Le Faye’s Bio Index, was the daughter of the vicar of Croydon, and sister of the vicar of Overton. Mary Harrison did not let the grass grow under her feet after James married Mary Lloyd, she married in September 1797, and JA makes some joking comments in Letter 28 four years later about Mary Harrison’s being pregnant.
But back to Letter 5:
“We were at a Ball on Saturday I assure you. We dined at Goodnestone & in the Evening danced two Country Dances and the Boulangeries…..and Miss Finch played the Boulangeries”
That may sound quite innocent, but Le Faye’s footnote suggests otherwise. She cites Tomalin for the notion that “the name of the dance [actually the Boulangeres] originates in the mildly improper French popular song _La Boulangere a des ecus” . I just checked online and found the following link for the lyrics of that song:
http://www.momes.net/comptines/metiers/la-boulangere.html
As Le Faye drily puts it, “the baker’s wife acquired her money by means less creditable than the sale of bread.”
I find that very intriguing in light of a similar sexual pun deployed by Shakespeare in _Hamlet_ vis a vis Ophelia’s singing a ribald song about the baker’s _daughter_, a pun that my research suggests to me was on JA’s mind when she was writing about the baking of apples in _Emma_.
It is also intriguing to me because of what JA writes immediately after these references to the dancing of the Boulangeres:
“On reading over the last three or four Lines, I am aware of my having expressed myself in so doubtful a manner that if I did not tell you to the contrary, You might imagine it was Lady Bridges who made Henry dance with her, at the same time that she was playing-which if not impossible must appear a very improbable Event to you.-But it was Eliz: who danced-.”
We all know that dance is a metaphor that JA deployed extensively in her novels for courtship and marriage, and, I would suggest, she also deployed it for courtship’s most intimate physical expression, i.e., sex. So while superficially JA writes of being “doubtful” (i.e., ambiguous) in regard to who danced with whom, I claim JA was being slily, highly and absurdly improper in suggesting a more intimate “dance” being demanded by Lady Bridges from Henry Austen. Much in the same vein as the risqué humor I attributed to JA last week vis a vis another older woman, Mrs. Knight.
Then we have a few trivial paragraphs, following by another noteworthy satirical passage:
“Farmer Clarinbould died this morning, & I fancy Edward means to get some of his Farm if he can cheat Sir Brook enough in the agrement.”
Christy notes the jibe at Edward, but it is important to note also that this is the first of nearly _twenty_ passages scattered through all of JA’s letters, in which she takes a direct potshot at brother Edward Austen Knight, usually depicting him as a kind of John Dashwood or General Tilney.
And I think JA not-so-subtly reinforces the notion of a certain economic rapacity in her brother-turned-country squire toward a poor neighbor with the following seemingly unrelated comment, which is actually, I claim, very much related:
“We have just got some venison from Godmersham, which the two Mr. Harveys are to _devour_ to-morrow; and on friday or Saturday the Goodnestone people are to finish their _Scraps._”
Indeed, rural England in that era of rapid enclosure did seem like a kind of jungle, in which the King of Beasts took the lion’s share, and left the scraps to the poor scavengers scurrying around in his wake.
And next we have the following passage which must leap off the page to the eye of every serious Janeite:
“Mr. Richard Harvey is going to be married; but as it is a great secret, & only known to half the Neighbourhood, you must not mention it. The Lady's name is Musgrove.-I am in great Distress. “
In this letter written 20 years before JA wrote _Persuasion_, isn’t it interesting that we have a man named Richard planning to marry a woman named Musgrove? The end of this little vignette occurs in Letter 6, so stay tuned!;)
And finally, JA finishes this short letter with a flurry of jokes and ironies:
“I cannot determine whether I shall give Richis half a guinea or only five Shillings when I go away. Counsel me, amiable Miss Austen, and tell me which will be the most.”
Is JA seriously asking CEA for advice on how much to tip a servant? Wikipedia tells me that a guinea was supposed to be worth 20 shillings, so that is a pretty wide range, like asking whether to tip a restaurant waiter today 5% or 20%. I think she is just horsing around, and knows exactly how much to tip.
“Little Edward was breeched yesterday for good & all, and was whipped, into the Bargain.”
It is impossible to know whether JA is making this up or not, but my guess is that JA _was_ responding to some sort of severe punishment that was administered in her presence to the 27 month old Edward Austen, which JA found upsetting.
And then we have this magnificent little Zen double-koan:
“Pray remember me to Everybody who does not enquire after me. Those who do, remember me without bidding.... “
This is sophisticated humor riffing on Greek philosophical paradox, especially the second sentence.
And then she concludes with the following return to yet another explicit allusion to Burney’s _Camilla_, which really must have been a hot topic for the Austen sisters at that moment in time.
“Give my Love to Mary Harrison, & tell her I wish whenever she is attached to a young Man, some respectable Dr. Marchmont may keep them apart for five Volumes.”
Behind the literary joke, it does sound as though this is a direct allusion back to the earlier comment about James Austen picking a Mary to marry (ha ha), and that it is a suggestion that perhaps someone wishing to promote Mary Lloyd’s case with James in some way did throw a monkey wrench or two in the gears of Mary Harrison’s campaign to land James as a husband.
Cheers, ARNIE
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Fanny Price and Jane Austen: Portsmouth/Mansfield Park & Southampton/Chawton Cottage
By a trail of serendipity (remarkable even for my research trajectory of the past 6 years when I have benefited countless times from being alert to unexpected connections across the breadth of the matrix of discoveries I have amassed), I have just connected some important dots today between Mansfield Park and Jane Austen’s real life.
The trail started with my following up on my learning for the first time a few weeks ago about Vladimir Nabokov as having emulated Mark Twain in pretending to diss Jane Austen’s fiction in a letter to a close Janeite friend:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/12/jane-austen-mark-twain-and-vladimir.html
That post attracted the attention of the main Nabokov listserv online, which I quickly joined, and the responses I received there led me to delve more deeply into Nabokov’s enigmatic relationship with JA’s writing.
Today, as part of that followup, I was rereading the long chapter that Nabokov (in his literary critic mode) wrote about Mansfield Park, and noted that Nabokov argues that the date of the Mansfield ball being Thursday December 22, it must be 1808. I quickly checked Ellen Moody’s calendar, and saw that she agreed, and that both Ellen and Nabokov seemed to be in agreement with the consensus of earlier chronologers of the novel.
That’s when serendipity really kicked in. I had just yesterday been reviewing recent posts in Janeites in my email inbox, which I had not focused during the past week, as I had been away on a short trip, and so Ellen Moody’s chronologies for JA’s brothers, posted earlier this week, were very fresh in my mind.
Electricity leapt from one synapse to another in my brain and a new connection was made as I recalled that in real life in December 1808, JA had just started writing in her letters to CEA about their prospective relocation from Southampton to Chawton Cottage, which would take place in the Spring of 1809. And then I recalled my realization from several months ago that Fanny Price’s liberating return to Mansfield Park from her travails in the “desert” of Portsmouth corresponded more or less to the time period of Passover/Easter, 1809.
And finally, I thought about my recent comments, agreed to by Ellen, and echoing comments by at least some other commentators in the past, that the move to Chawton was a crucial watershed in JA’s writing career, and how well that fits with this covert allusion.
And that’s why I claim that JA was being very autobiographical in her covertly aligning the dates of her real life relocation to Chawton House, with the dates of Fanny Price’s fictional relocation back to Mansfield Park.
Without going too deeply into fleshing out all the details of this correspondence between real life and fiction, suffice to say that I see in the graphic descriptions of the squalor of the Price household in Portsmouth a confirmation that JA’s time in Southampton was a very dreary, even despairing, time in her life, feeling trapped in a place she did not want to be, with no reasonable hope of escape—and then, the poignant irony of the sudden death of Elizabeth Knight in October 1808, followed very quickly by the decision by Edward Austen Knight to relocate his sisters and mother to Chawton Cottage.
However, I would like to think that the creepy Mr. Price is _not_ a veiled depiction of Frank Austen, despite their apparent shared predilection for flogging, and also despite the irony that Frank Austen and his first wife would wind up (several years after JA’s death) having ten children, just as the Prices did.
But I do believe that it is _not_ a coincidence that Frank’s second child (and first son), born in July 1809, after JA et al had completed the move to Chawton Cottage, was named “Francis-William”, a name which manages to virtually combine the Christian names of Fanny Price and her favorite (elder) brother, William.
Also, in light of my good friend Linda Walker’s article (which I linked to a few weeks ago, but will do so again now as well) in the most recent Persuasions Online speculating that JA might well have died in 1817 from a rekindling of the typhus infection which nearly killed her at age 7...
http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol31no1/walker.html
...it also occurred to me for the first time today that JA having to spend nearly 4 years in Southampton from 1805-09 could perhaps have been a source of ongoing PTSD for JA, as she lived in proximity to the house where she almost died as a little girl, and, if Linda is correct, the disease which ultimately did take her life 34 years later!
There is much more to this linkage, but you get the general drift.
Cheers, ARNIE
The trail started with my following up on my learning for the first time a few weeks ago about Vladimir Nabokov as having emulated Mark Twain in pretending to diss Jane Austen’s fiction in a letter to a close Janeite friend:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/12/jane-austen-mark-twain-and-vladimir.html
That post attracted the attention of the main Nabokov listserv online, which I quickly joined, and the responses I received there led me to delve more deeply into Nabokov’s enigmatic relationship with JA’s writing.
Today, as part of that followup, I was rereading the long chapter that Nabokov (in his literary critic mode) wrote about Mansfield Park, and noted that Nabokov argues that the date of the Mansfield ball being Thursday December 22, it must be 1808. I quickly checked Ellen Moody’s calendar, and saw that she agreed, and that both Ellen and Nabokov seemed to be in agreement with the consensus of earlier chronologers of the novel.
That’s when serendipity really kicked in. I had just yesterday been reviewing recent posts in Janeites in my email inbox, which I had not focused during the past week, as I had been away on a short trip, and so Ellen Moody’s chronologies for JA’s brothers, posted earlier this week, were very fresh in my mind.
Electricity leapt from one synapse to another in my brain and a new connection was made as I recalled that in real life in December 1808, JA had just started writing in her letters to CEA about their prospective relocation from Southampton to Chawton Cottage, which would take place in the Spring of 1809. And then I recalled my realization from several months ago that Fanny Price’s liberating return to Mansfield Park from her travails in the “desert” of Portsmouth corresponded more or less to the time period of Passover/Easter, 1809.
And finally, I thought about my recent comments, agreed to by Ellen, and echoing comments by at least some other commentators in the past, that the move to Chawton was a crucial watershed in JA’s writing career, and how well that fits with this covert allusion.
And that’s why I claim that JA was being very autobiographical in her covertly aligning the dates of her real life relocation to Chawton House, with the dates of Fanny Price’s fictional relocation back to Mansfield Park.
Without going too deeply into fleshing out all the details of this correspondence between real life and fiction, suffice to say that I see in the graphic descriptions of the squalor of the Price household in Portsmouth a confirmation that JA’s time in Southampton was a very dreary, even despairing, time in her life, feeling trapped in a place she did not want to be, with no reasonable hope of escape—and then, the poignant irony of the sudden death of Elizabeth Knight in October 1808, followed very quickly by the decision by Edward Austen Knight to relocate his sisters and mother to Chawton Cottage.
However, I would like to think that the creepy Mr. Price is _not_ a veiled depiction of Frank Austen, despite their apparent shared predilection for flogging, and also despite the irony that Frank Austen and his first wife would wind up (several years after JA’s death) having ten children, just as the Prices did.
But I do believe that it is _not_ a coincidence that Frank’s second child (and first son), born in July 1809, after JA et al had completed the move to Chawton Cottage, was named “Francis-William”, a name which manages to virtually combine the Christian names of Fanny Price and her favorite (elder) brother, William.
Also, in light of my good friend Linda Walker’s article (which I linked to a few weeks ago, but will do so again now as well) in the most recent Persuasions Online speculating that JA might well have died in 1817 from a rekindling of the typhus infection which nearly killed her at age 7...
http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol31no1/walker.html
...it also occurred to me for the first time today that JA having to spend nearly 4 years in Southampton from 1805-09 could perhaps have been a source of ongoing PTSD for JA, as she lived in proximity to the house where she almost died as a little girl, and, if Linda is correct, the disease which ultimately did take her life 34 years later!
There is much more to this linkage, but you get the general drift.
Cheers, ARNIE
Friday, January 7, 2011
Witty Ticcy Jane
In Janeites earlier this week, discussing Letter #4 among Jane Austen's surviving letters, which is short but packed with puns and ironies, I repeated an old claim of mine, to wit, that Jane Austen had a kind of a "tic" for punning and wordplay, which prompted a very interesting (and, for me, fruitful) response from Victoria Lansburgh, which I responded to as follows in a series of three posts which I've consolidated, below:
[Victoria] "It appears that Arnie has now turned JA into "Witty Ticcy Jane," modelled on the character "Witty Ticcy Ray," a man with severe Tourette's syndrome whom Oliver Sacks wrote about in his book, _The Man Who Mistook His Wife for His Hat_."
Victoria, I was not actually suggesting that Jane had Tourette's Syndrome, but was using the word "tic" metaphorically to describe JA as the kind of person who puns compulsively. I am such a person, and I have known other such people, and I don't believe any of us have Tourette's. ;)
I see Jane Austen as having learned to sublimate this natural tendency, and, in writing her novels, to channel it through her incredible genius, making it the servant, rather than the master, of her literary vision. But in her letters, she did not exercise that sort of self-discipline, and often just let it rip, hence the succession of little ironies in these early letters.
I love all of Oliver Sacks's books, as I suspect you do, too, as you so readily heard and correctly identified the echo of the interface of creativity and neurology in my post of sacks's vivid portrait of Ray the weekend jazz drummer.
But, on further reflection, I want to thank you for helping me connect some important dots in my mind for the first time. Let me explain.
As i have expressed before, I have for several years been of the opinion that Miss Bates is in several important ways a self-portrait by Jane Austen, for example in the following blogpost from nearly a year ago:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/01/jane-austen-and-miss-bates-great.html
I have also been of the opinion for quite a while that, as I wrote in my previous post, Jane was a great ticcer of puns, ironies, and jokes.
However I don't believe I ever previously put those two pieces together, and realized how nicely they resonate each with the other.
My sense is that Jane Austen (like Samuel Johnson) struggled all her life with this same sort of tendency, but look at how gender made a huge difference. Johnson had a "special license" which was granted to him by virtue of being a man, to give vent to many of his verbal impulses, and to be celebrated for it. Whereas Jane Austen as a woman was under perpetual restraint in that regard.
It's no surprise to me, therefore that, as I wrote last month, Jane Austen created her great risqué ticcer Mary Crawford, who simply cannot resist a salacious pun, and put in her mouth a pun that indirectly but unmistakably alludes to Samuel Johnson's famous inadvertent "bottom" double entendre.
And I claim that the character if Miss Bates is in many ways the pinnacle of JA's literary artistic achievement, this woman who would seem to all Emmas to be merely an irritating motormouth to be ignored, but who upon closer examination would be seen as a deep complex character pouring out a flood of amazing poetry and commentary of an extraordinary and rare kind.
Cheers,
Arnie
[Victoria] "It appears that Arnie has now turned JA into "Witty Ticcy Jane," modelled on the character "Witty Ticcy Ray," a man with severe Tourette's syndrome whom Oliver Sacks wrote about in his book, _The Man Who Mistook His Wife for His Hat_."
Victoria, I was not actually suggesting that Jane had Tourette's Syndrome, but was using the word "tic" metaphorically to describe JA as the kind of person who puns compulsively. I am such a person, and I have known other such people, and I don't believe any of us have Tourette's. ;)
I see Jane Austen as having learned to sublimate this natural tendency, and, in writing her novels, to channel it through her incredible genius, making it the servant, rather than the master, of her literary vision. But in her letters, she did not exercise that sort of self-discipline, and often just let it rip, hence the succession of little ironies in these early letters.
I love all of Oliver Sacks's books, as I suspect you do, too, as you so readily heard and correctly identified the echo of the interface of creativity and neurology in my post of sacks's vivid portrait of Ray the weekend jazz drummer.
But, on further reflection, I want to thank you for helping me connect some important dots in my mind for the first time. Let me explain.
As i have expressed before, I have for several years been of the opinion that Miss Bates is in several important ways a self-portrait by Jane Austen, for example in the following blogpost from nearly a year ago:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/01/jane-austen-and-miss-bates-great.html
I have also been of the opinion for quite a while that, as I wrote in my previous post, Jane was a great ticcer of puns, ironies, and jokes.
However I don't believe I ever previously put those two pieces together, and realized how nicely they resonate each with the other.
My sense is that Jane Austen (like Samuel Johnson) struggled all her life with this same sort of tendency, but look at how gender made a huge difference. Johnson had a "special license" which was granted to him by virtue of being a man, to give vent to many of his verbal impulses, and to be celebrated for it. Whereas Jane Austen as a woman was under perpetual restraint in that regard.
It's no surprise to me, therefore that, as I wrote last month, Jane Austen created her great risqué ticcer Mary Crawford, who simply cannot resist a salacious pun, and put in her mouth a pun that indirectly but unmistakably alludes to Samuel Johnson's famous inadvertent "bottom" double entendre.
And I claim that the character if Miss Bates is in many ways the pinnacle of JA's literary artistic achievement, this woman who would seem to all Emmas to be merely an irritating motormouth to be ignored, but who upon closer examination would be seen as a deep complex character pouring out a flood of amazing poetry and commentary of an extraordinary and rare kind.
Cheers,
Arnie
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Jane Austen's excellent satire on the relationship between history and fiction
In Austen L and Janeites, Diana Birchall made some interesting comments on Jane Austen's Letter #4 and its apparent dearth of reference to current events in the wider world, and I responded thusly:
[Diana] "She'd rather talk of dresses in her letters *to Cassandra*! Very few letters to her brothers survive but there's no talk of dresses in them....I can't make much of an argument for her being interested in politics, though. We might say she lived at a time when it wasn't accepted for women to talk politics, but London aristocratic ladies certainly did, and in fact one of the few "political" mentions in the novels is Mary Crawford writing to Fanny and saying, "You have politics..." (so she need not tell them). Mary Crawford is a London lady, of course."
Diana, even without any of the subtextual discoveries I've made in regard to JA's strong interest in politics from a young age until the very end of her life, it suffices to merely collect the _existing_ scholarship on this subject (which is now voluminous, performed as it has been by well in excess of 50 different Austen scholars over the past 4 decades, with new stuff coming out every year) to conclusively demonstrate how interested JA was in politics over her entire writing career. The in-jokes about English history in The History of England _alone_ are sufficient to show how widely read Jane Austen was in history at age 17. My own personal sense is that JA was most fascinated by the exercise of power by human beings over other human beings, both on the micro and the macro level. Games people play, if you will.
And on the point of female literacy, I am certain that JA was in strong agreement with Mr. Darcy _and_ Mary Wollstonecraft about the benefits to young women from reading deeply on a wide range of subjects, not merely in fiction.
"I don't take Catherine Morland's "from politics it was an easy step to silence" as evidence, because Catherine is seventeen and ignorant"
Ah, Catherine knows much more than you realize--she just lacks confidence in her own knowledge and abilities, a lack of confidence which, alas, Henry, Mr. Passive Aggressive, persistently mocks and aggravates in a very ungentlemanly way---although _he_ thinks he is being (in Mrs. Elton's words) a "thorough humourist".
But the author who could write the following conversation (in Ch. 14 of NA), subtly disguised as an illustration of Catherine's ignorance, was one who knew _both_ history and fiction very well:
[Catherine] “That is, I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?”
[Eleanor] “Yes, I am fond of history.”
[Catherine] “I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs — the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books.”
“Historians, you think,” said Miss Tilney, “are not happy in their flights of fancy. They display imagination without raising interest. I am fond of history — and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under one’s own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such. If a speech be well drawn up, I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made — and probably with much greater, if the production of Mr. Hume or Mr. Robertson, than if the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola, or Alfred the Great.”
[Catherine] “You are fond of history! And so are Mr. Allen and my father; and I have two brothers who do not dislike it. So many instances within my small circle of friends is remarkable! At this rate, I shall not pity the writers of history any longer. If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate; and though I know it is all very right and necessary, I have often wondered at the person’s courage that could sit down on purpose to do it.”
“That little boys and girls should be tormented,” said Henry, “is what no one at all acquainted with human nature in a civilized state can deny; but in behalf of our most distinguished historians, I must observe that they might well be offended at being supposed to have no higher aim, and that by their method and style, they are perfectly well qualified to torment readers of the most advanced reason and mature time of life. I use the verb ‘to torment,’ as I observed to be your own method, instead of ‘to instruct,’ supposing them to be now admitted as synonymous.”
[Catherine] “You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that ‘to torment’ and ‘to instruct’ might sometimes be used as synonymous words.”
[Henry] “Very probably. But historians are not accountable for the difficulty of learning to read; and even you yourself, who do not altogether seem particularly friendly to very severe, very intense application, may perhaps be brought to acknowledge that it is very well worth–while to be tormented for two or three years of one’s life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. Consider — if reading had not been taught, Mrs. Radcliffe would have written in vain — or perhaps might not have written at all.”
Catherine assented — and a very warm panegyric from her on that lady’s merits closed the subject. END OF EXCERPT FROM NA
"...though Henry Tilney does *try* to introduce the subject, which shows he doesn't think it improper to discuss politics with ladies."
Diana, I'd say instead that Henry feels threatened by Catherine's native intelligence and her unnerving tendency to notice the nakedness of the Emperor.
What Henry _ought_ to have replied, as he did elsewhere in NA to one of Catherine's inadvertent bon mots, was "An excellent satire on the relationship between history and fiction!"--but he was not generous enough to do that. And of course the person who deserves full credit for that satire is JA herself---an author cannot create a naif like Catherine who knows much more than she realizes she knows, and a man who feels threatened by her intuitive wisdom, unless that author knows that "much more" and then some!
And JA's main complaint with historical and contemporary political writing, as voiced by Catherine, was not that it was uninteresting, but--as Catherine expresses it at Beechen Cliff--that it was so severely gender biased, i.e., that it ignored or distorted the role of, and impact upon, women, of world and national events. Her novels are, in a very significant way, a corrective of that ignoring and distorting. Her novels are fictionalized forms of feminist social history, which tell us more today about life as it was actually lived _by women_ two centuries ago than any male-written nonfiction book of the day can tell us now.
That's why the very astute Annabella Milbanke, mother of the computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, wrote the following about Pride and Prejudice in 1813:
"I have finished the Novel called Pride and Prejudice, which I think a very superior work. It depends not on any of the common resources of novel writers, no drownings, no conflagrations, nor runaway horses, nor lap-dogs and parrots, nor chambermaids and MILLINERS, nor rencontres and disguises. I really think it is the _most probable_ fiction I have ever read..."
I bet Milbanke loved Northanger Abbey, too, after it was published, with its explicit and exquisite satire on the subject of the probable. NA in fact teems with sophisticated but covert satires on many issues that were the subject of intellectual discussion among the likes of Hume, Locke, Smith, et al--discussion which JA herself clearly had read, understood....and then critiqued in her veiled way.
"However, Jane Austen's own reading gives another clue. Her fulsome adoration for such books as Captain Pasley's on military policy or Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade does not sound like the reading matter of one who is as frivolous as you imply."
And these are only the tip of a very large iceberg of books that JA read, even if we limit our tally to the Letters themselves. JA read copiously, fiction and nonfiction, on dozens of subjects, and do you doubt that she also talked and corresponded about the world with all of her highly educated and widely traveled brothers as well?
"Her letters do show what she thinks what would interest and amuse her sister, that's all. "
I'd say that much more often it was that these letters were passed around wherever CEA happened to be, and it was "impolitic" (ha ha) to let a lot of people know how widely knowledgeable and widely read JA really was. Once again, NA is our touchstone:
"A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."
_That_ is the most important reason why JA's letters to CEA so often seem to be much ado about very little. E.g., I doubt that JA could have moved among the Godmersham set so freely, making "field observations" of the behavior "in the wild" of her wealthy dinner companions, had they all been aware of who she really was as a person!
But then think about JA's letting her hair down and writing to Martha Lloyd what JA really thinks about the Prince Regent, and you get a rare surviving glimpse of what JA would have written about in all of her letters, if she had not wished to conceal the full extent of her knowledge from those who could not be trusted with that information.
Cheers, ARNIE
[Diana] "She'd rather talk of dresses in her letters *to Cassandra*! Very few letters to her brothers survive but there's no talk of dresses in them....I can't make much of an argument for her being interested in politics, though. We might say she lived at a time when it wasn't accepted for women to talk politics, but London aristocratic ladies certainly did, and in fact one of the few "political" mentions in the novels is Mary Crawford writing to Fanny and saying, "You have politics..." (so she need not tell them). Mary Crawford is a London lady, of course."
Diana, even without any of the subtextual discoveries I've made in regard to JA's strong interest in politics from a young age until the very end of her life, it suffices to merely collect the _existing_ scholarship on this subject (which is now voluminous, performed as it has been by well in excess of 50 different Austen scholars over the past 4 decades, with new stuff coming out every year) to conclusively demonstrate how interested JA was in politics over her entire writing career. The in-jokes about English history in The History of England _alone_ are sufficient to show how widely read Jane Austen was in history at age 17. My own personal sense is that JA was most fascinated by the exercise of power by human beings over other human beings, both on the micro and the macro level. Games people play, if you will.
And on the point of female literacy, I am certain that JA was in strong agreement with Mr. Darcy _and_ Mary Wollstonecraft about the benefits to young women from reading deeply on a wide range of subjects, not merely in fiction.
"I don't take Catherine Morland's "from politics it was an easy step to silence" as evidence, because Catherine is seventeen and ignorant"
Ah, Catherine knows much more than you realize--she just lacks confidence in her own knowledge and abilities, a lack of confidence which, alas, Henry, Mr. Passive Aggressive, persistently mocks and aggravates in a very ungentlemanly way---although _he_ thinks he is being (in Mrs. Elton's words) a "thorough humourist".
But the author who could write the following conversation (in Ch. 14 of NA), subtly disguised as an illustration of Catherine's ignorance, was one who knew _both_ history and fiction very well:
[Catherine] “That is, I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?”
[Eleanor] “Yes, I am fond of history.”
[Catherine] “I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The speeches that are put into the heroes’ mouths, their thoughts and designs — the chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in other books.”
“Historians, you think,” said Miss Tilney, “are not happy in their flights of fancy. They display imagination without raising interest. I am fond of history — and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under one’s own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such. If a speech be well drawn up, I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made — and probably with much greater, if the production of Mr. Hume or Mr. Robertson, than if the genuine words of Caractacus, Agricola, or Alfred the Great.”
[Catherine] “You are fond of history! And so are Mr. Allen and my father; and I have two brothers who do not dislike it. So many instances within my small circle of friends is remarkable! At this rate, I shall not pity the writers of history any longer. If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate; and though I know it is all very right and necessary, I have often wondered at the person’s courage that could sit down on purpose to do it.”
“That little boys and girls should be tormented,” said Henry, “is what no one at all acquainted with human nature in a civilized state can deny; but in behalf of our most distinguished historians, I must observe that they might well be offended at being supposed to have no higher aim, and that by their method and style, they are perfectly well qualified to torment readers of the most advanced reason and mature time of life. I use the verb ‘to torment,’ as I observed to be your own method, instead of ‘to instruct,’ supposing them to be now admitted as synonymous.”
[Catherine] “You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that ‘to torment’ and ‘to instruct’ might sometimes be used as synonymous words.”
[Henry] “Very probably. But historians are not accountable for the difficulty of learning to read; and even you yourself, who do not altogether seem particularly friendly to very severe, very intense application, may perhaps be brought to acknowledge that it is very well worth–while to be tormented for two or three years of one’s life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it. Consider — if reading had not been taught, Mrs. Radcliffe would have written in vain — or perhaps might not have written at all.”
Catherine assented — and a very warm panegyric from her on that lady’s merits closed the subject. END OF EXCERPT FROM NA
"...though Henry Tilney does *try* to introduce the subject, which shows he doesn't think it improper to discuss politics with ladies."
Diana, I'd say instead that Henry feels threatened by Catherine's native intelligence and her unnerving tendency to notice the nakedness of the Emperor.
What Henry _ought_ to have replied, as he did elsewhere in NA to one of Catherine's inadvertent bon mots, was "An excellent satire on the relationship between history and fiction!"--but he was not generous enough to do that. And of course the person who deserves full credit for that satire is JA herself---an author cannot create a naif like Catherine who knows much more than she realizes she knows, and a man who feels threatened by her intuitive wisdom, unless that author knows that "much more" and then some!
And JA's main complaint with historical and contemporary political writing, as voiced by Catherine, was not that it was uninteresting, but--as Catherine expresses it at Beechen Cliff--that it was so severely gender biased, i.e., that it ignored or distorted the role of, and impact upon, women, of world and national events. Her novels are, in a very significant way, a corrective of that ignoring and distorting. Her novels are fictionalized forms of feminist social history, which tell us more today about life as it was actually lived _by women_ two centuries ago than any male-written nonfiction book of the day can tell us now.
That's why the very astute Annabella Milbanke, mother of the computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, wrote the following about Pride and Prejudice in 1813:
"I have finished the Novel called Pride and Prejudice, which I think a very superior work. It depends not on any of the common resources of novel writers, no drownings, no conflagrations, nor runaway horses, nor lap-dogs and parrots, nor chambermaids and MILLINERS, nor rencontres and disguises. I really think it is the _most probable_ fiction I have ever read..."
I bet Milbanke loved Northanger Abbey, too, after it was published, with its explicit and exquisite satire on the subject of the probable. NA in fact teems with sophisticated but covert satires on many issues that were the subject of intellectual discussion among the likes of Hume, Locke, Smith, et al--discussion which JA herself clearly had read, understood....and then critiqued in her veiled way.
"However, Jane Austen's own reading gives another clue. Her fulsome adoration for such books as Captain Pasley's on military policy or Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade does not sound like the reading matter of one who is as frivolous as you imply."
And these are only the tip of a very large iceberg of books that JA read, even if we limit our tally to the Letters themselves. JA read copiously, fiction and nonfiction, on dozens of subjects, and do you doubt that she also talked and corresponded about the world with all of her highly educated and widely traveled brothers as well?
"Her letters do show what she thinks what would interest and amuse her sister, that's all. "
I'd say that much more often it was that these letters were passed around wherever CEA happened to be, and it was "impolitic" (ha ha) to let a lot of people know how widely knowledgeable and widely read JA really was. Once again, NA is our touchstone:
"A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."
_That_ is the most important reason why JA's letters to CEA so often seem to be much ado about very little. E.g., I doubt that JA could have moved among the Godmersham set so freely, making "field observations" of the behavior "in the wild" of her wealthy dinner companions, had they all been aware of who she really was as a person!
But then think about JA's letting her hair down and writing to Martha Lloyd what JA really thinks about the Prince Regent, and you get a rare surviving glimpse of what JA would have written about in all of her letters, if she had not wished to conceal the full extent of her knowledge from those who could not be trusted with that information.
Cheers, ARNIE
Monday, January 3, 2011
To Die of Laughter: The School for Jane Austen's Scandalous Wit
In Janeites and Austen L, we have reached Jane Austen’s Letter #4 in our marathon group read of all of her surviving letters. Nancy Mayer noted that "Jane says that she could die of laughter at her sister's letter "as they used to say at school” and I responded as follows.
What I find very interesting about this description by Jane of her reaction to Cassandra’s letter responding to Jane's Letter #3 (with its breathless hyperbole about "Dissipation and Vice" in the big city) is that the one character in all of Jane's novels who uses that expression is......Lydia Bennet, who uses it not once but twice in a short passage from Chapter 39 of Pride & Prejudice, describing some the fun she and Kitty have had during Lizzy's sojourn at Hunsford:
"I was ready to die of laughter."
That might at first seem like an insignificant coincidence, until you carefully read the beginning of Chapter 39 of Pride &Prejudice and see the context of Lydia's hyperbolic ejaculation, which I will comment on in brackets as it goes:
"It was the second week in May, in which the three young ladies.....
[That would be Lizzy, Jane, and Maria Lucas]
...set out together from Gracechurch Street for the town of -- -- , in Hertfordshire;....
[Jane Bennet has just spent a great deal of time in the midst of London with its Dissipation and Vice]
....and, as they drew near the appointed inn where Mr. Bennet's carriage was to meet them, they quickly perceived, in token of the coachman's punctuality, both Kitty and Lydia looking out of a dining-room upstairs. These two girls had been above an hour in the place, _happily employed in visiting an opposite milliner_.....
[This is very much apropos of my recent claims regarding the significance of the real life Mrs. Hester Cole _the milliner_ of Covent Garden where the young Phila Austen was a hard working girl, vis a vis the fictional Mrs. Coles of _Fanny Hill_ and _Emma_]
.....watching the sentinel on guard, and _dressing a salad and cucumber_.
[And I suggest that this cucumber is the Freudian offspring of the breathlessly described cucumber of Laura's Letter the 13th in Love and Freindship, and also one of the ancestors of Oscar Wilde's famous cucumber sandwiches in _The Importance of Being Earnest_]
After welcoming their sisters, they triumphantly displayed a table set out with _such cold meat as an inn larder usually affords_, exclaiming, "Is not this nice? is not this an agreeable surprise?"
[Indeed, from the point of view of a girl like Lydia, "such cold meat" is nice and a very agreeable surprise]
"And we mean to treat you all," added Lydia; "but you must lend us the money, for we have just spent ours at the shop out there."
[Lizzy missed an opportunity here to tell Lydia that she did not approve of Lydia's manner of procuring "such cold meat". Then let's skip ahead a quarter page...]
_"How nicely we are crammed in!"_ cried Lydia.
[Lydia is a veritable fount of Freudian imagery.]
"I am glad I bought my bonnet, if it is only for the fun of having another bandbox! Well, now let us be quite comfortable and snug, and talk and laugh all the way home......Lord! how I should like to be married before any of you! and then _I would chaperon you about to all the balls. Dear me!_ we had such _a good piece of fun_ the other day at Colonel Forster's. Kitty and me were to spend the day there, and Mrs. Forster promised to have _a little dance_ in the evening (by the bye, Mrs. Forster and me _are /such/ friends!_); and so she asked the two Harringtons to come, but Harriet was ill, and _so Pen was forced to come by herself_; and then, what do you think we did? We dressed up Chamberlayne in woman's clothes on purpose to pass for a lady -- only think what fun! Not a soul knew of it, but Colonel and Mrs. Forster, and Kitty and me, except my aunt, for we were forced to borrow one of her gowns; and you cannot imagine how well he looked! When Denny, and Wickham, and Pratt, and two or three more of the men came in, they did not know him in the least. _Lord! how I laughed! and so did Mrs. Forster. I thought I should have died._ And /that/ made the men suspect something, and then they soon found out what was the matter."
[And there is the _first_ such usage of that image of dying laughing, in the context of a series of sexual puns on flirting, balls, dancing, and cross dressing fun with soldiers....so when Lydia talk about dying laughing, I find it impossible _not_ to make the association to the metaphorical "death" of sexual consummation]
With such kind of histories of their parties and good jokes, did Lydia, assisted by Kitty's hints and additions, endeavour to amuse her companions all the way to Longbourn. Elizabeth listened as little as she could......and Lydia, in a voice rather louder than any other person's, was enumerating the various pleasures of the morning to anybody who would hear her.
"Oh! Mary," said she, "I wish you had gone with us, for _we had such fun_! As we went along, Kitty and me _drew up all the blinds_, and _pretended there was nobody in the coach_; and _I should have gone so all the way_, if Kitty had not been sick; and when we got to the George, I do think we behaved very handsomely, for we treated the other three with _the nicest cold luncheon in the world_, and if you would have gone we would have treated you too. And then, _when we came away, it was such fun!_ I thought we never should have got into the coach. _I was ready to die of laughter._ And then we were so merry all the way home! we talked and _laughed so loud, that anybody might have heard us ten miles off!_"
[And that little speech is also a veritable cornucopia of sexual puns, which frame the _second_ reference by Lydia to dying of laughter]
To this Mary very gravely replied, "Far be it from me, my dear sister, to depreciate _such pleasures._ They would doubtless be congenial with the generality of female minds. But I confess they would have no charms for /me/ -- I should infinitely prefer a book."
[A remark by Mary which takes on ironic significance in light of the veiled allusion to a book--_Fanny Hill_!]
But of this answer Lydia heard not a word. She seldom listened to anybody for more than half a minute, and never attended to Mary at all.
[And I see this exchange between Mary and Lydia as purely Freudian satire--we have the "Id", i.e., Lydia, having a conversation with the "Superego", i.e., Mary--and of course the Id never attends at all to the Superego!]
So, I suggest that the above contextualizing gives the reader of Jane's use of that expression in Letter #4 a whole different sense of its meaning than at first might appear, and of the qualifying clause "as they used to say at school"--I suggest further that JA is winkingly alluding to Sheridan's _The School for Scandal_ , and also to _The Critic_ (with Tilburina's famous word salad alluded to by JA in that same Letter the 13th in _Love and Freindship_) , and also _The Rivals_ (which has its own sexually charged Lydia).
Now, whether Cassandra had actually engaged in some sort of repartee in this general vein in her letter which prompted Jane to applaud Cassandra's comic genius, and then respond in kind, or whether Jane was ribbing her strait-laced sister for responding to Jane's jokes the way Mary Bennet responds to Lydia, I do not hazard a guess.
Cheers, ARNIE
What I find very interesting about this description by Jane of her reaction to Cassandra’s letter responding to Jane's Letter #3 (with its breathless hyperbole about "Dissipation and Vice" in the big city) is that the one character in all of Jane's novels who uses that expression is......Lydia Bennet, who uses it not once but twice in a short passage from Chapter 39 of Pride & Prejudice, describing some the fun she and Kitty have had during Lizzy's sojourn at Hunsford:
"I was ready to die of laughter."
That might at first seem like an insignificant coincidence, until you carefully read the beginning of Chapter 39 of Pride &Prejudice and see the context of Lydia's hyperbolic ejaculation, which I will comment on in brackets as it goes:
"It was the second week in May, in which the three young ladies.....
[That would be Lizzy, Jane, and Maria Lucas]
...set out together from Gracechurch Street for the town of -- -- , in Hertfordshire;....
[Jane Bennet has just spent a great deal of time in the midst of London with its Dissipation and Vice]
....and, as they drew near the appointed inn where Mr. Bennet's carriage was to meet them, they quickly perceived, in token of the coachman's punctuality, both Kitty and Lydia looking out of a dining-room upstairs. These two girls had been above an hour in the place, _happily employed in visiting an opposite milliner_.....
[This is very much apropos of my recent claims regarding the significance of the real life Mrs. Hester Cole _the milliner_ of Covent Garden where the young Phila Austen was a hard working girl, vis a vis the fictional Mrs. Coles of _Fanny Hill_ and _Emma_]
.....watching the sentinel on guard, and _dressing a salad and cucumber_.
[And I suggest that this cucumber is the Freudian offspring of the breathlessly described cucumber of Laura's Letter the 13th in Love and Freindship, and also one of the ancestors of Oscar Wilde's famous cucumber sandwiches in _The Importance of Being Earnest_]
After welcoming their sisters, they triumphantly displayed a table set out with _such cold meat as an inn larder usually affords_, exclaiming, "Is not this nice? is not this an agreeable surprise?"
[Indeed, from the point of view of a girl like Lydia, "such cold meat" is nice and a very agreeable surprise]
"And we mean to treat you all," added Lydia; "but you must lend us the money, for we have just spent ours at the shop out there."
[Lizzy missed an opportunity here to tell Lydia that she did not approve of Lydia's manner of procuring "such cold meat". Then let's skip ahead a quarter page...]
_"How nicely we are crammed in!"_ cried Lydia.
[Lydia is a veritable fount of Freudian imagery.]
"I am glad I bought my bonnet, if it is only for the fun of having another bandbox! Well, now let us be quite comfortable and snug, and talk and laugh all the way home......Lord! how I should like to be married before any of you! and then _I would chaperon you about to all the balls. Dear me!_ we had such _a good piece of fun_ the other day at Colonel Forster's. Kitty and me were to spend the day there, and Mrs. Forster promised to have _a little dance_ in the evening (by the bye, Mrs. Forster and me _are /such/ friends!_); and so she asked the two Harringtons to come, but Harriet was ill, and _so Pen was forced to come by herself_; and then, what do you think we did? We dressed up Chamberlayne in woman's clothes on purpose to pass for a lady -- only think what fun! Not a soul knew of it, but Colonel and Mrs. Forster, and Kitty and me, except my aunt, for we were forced to borrow one of her gowns; and you cannot imagine how well he looked! When Denny, and Wickham, and Pratt, and two or three more of the men came in, they did not know him in the least. _Lord! how I laughed! and so did Mrs. Forster. I thought I should have died._ And /that/ made the men suspect something, and then they soon found out what was the matter."
[And there is the _first_ such usage of that image of dying laughing, in the context of a series of sexual puns on flirting, balls, dancing, and cross dressing fun with soldiers....so when Lydia talk about dying laughing, I find it impossible _not_ to make the association to the metaphorical "death" of sexual consummation]
With such kind of histories of their parties and good jokes, did Lydia, assisted by Kitty's hints and additions, endeavour to amuse her companions all the way to Longbourn. Elizabeth listened as little as she could......and Lydia, in a voice rather louder than any other person's, was enumerating the various pleasures of the morning to anybody who would hear her.
"Oh! Mary," said she, "I wish you had gone with us, for _we had such fun_! As we went along, Kitty and me _drew up all the blinds_, and _pretended there was nobody in the coach_; and _I should have gone so all the way_, if Kitty had not been sick; and when we got to the George, I do think we behaved very handsomely, for we treated the other three with _the nicest cold luncheon in the world_, and if you would have gone we would have treated you too. And then, _when we came away, it was such fun!_ I thought we never should have got into the coach. _I was ready to die of laughter._ And then we were so merry all the way home! we talked and _laughed so loud, that anybody might have heard us ten miles off!_"
[And that little speech is also a veritable cornucopia of sexual puns, which frame the _second_ reference by Lydia to dying of laughter]
To this Mary very gravely replied, "Far be it from me, my dear sister, to depreciate _such pleasures._ They would doubtless be congenial with the generality of female minds. But I confess they would have no charms for /me/ -- I should infinitely prefer a book."
[A remark by Mary which takes on ironic significance in light of the veiled allusion to a book--_Fanny Hill_!]
But of this answer Lydia heard not a word. She seldom listened to anybody for more than half a minute, and never attended to Mary at all.
[And I see this exchange between Mary and Lydia as purely Freudian satire--we have the "Id", i.e., Lydia, having a conversation with the "Superego", i.e., Mary--and of course the Id never attends at all to the Superego!]
So, I suggest that the above contextualizing gives the reader of Jane's use of that expression in Letter #4 a whole different sense of its meaning than at first might appear, and of the qualifying clause "as they used to say at school"--I suggest further that JA is winkingly alluding to Sheridan's _The School for Scandal_ , and also to _The Critic_ (with Tilburina's famous word salad alluded to by JA in that same Letter the 13th in _Love and Freindship_) , and also _The Rivals_ (which has its own sexually charged Lydia).
Now, whether Cassandra had actually engaged in some sort of repartee in this general vein in her letter which prompted Jane to applaud Cassandra's comic genius, and then respond in kind, or whether Jane was ribbing her strait-laced sister for responding to Jane's jokes the way Mary Bennet responds to Lydia, I do not hazard a guess.
Cheers, ARNIE
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