This post is an instance of the extraordinary convergence of four seemingly unrelated streams of investigation by me relating to Jane Austen’s wordplay and shadow stories. It is 2,941 words in length, so it is not for the faint of heart, but it takes this long to “land the plane”, and I hope you will indulge me this one time in a super-long post.
I will unpack my argument piece by piece, and if you are interested in my literary sleuthing (and if not, why in the world would you be reading this in the first place!) and are patient, and carry on through it all, I believe you will be very happy with the payoff by the end of the process. As there is a lot to digest, you might even want to reread this post a second time, as I believe that will give you the best chance to get a taste of the wonder and delight I experience on a daily basis as I do my research, and “fetch thee jewels from the deep”, so to speak. ;)
SECOND CHARADE IN CHAPTER 9 OF AUSTEN’S EMMA
I begin by repeating something I have mentioned dozens of times in this blog, i.e., the wordplay in the second charade that appears in Chapter 9 of Emma. As I always do when mentioning same, to orient the reader as what I am talking about, I do not reinvent the wheel, but instead direct you to the following link, for the 2007 article written by my brilliant friend Colleen Sheehan, in which she disclosed to the world her momentous discovery of a second secret answer to that charade:
http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol27no1/sheehan.htm
(there is another link near the end of the above article that leads to a second article by Sheehan in which she discloses the second secret answer to Austen’s charade)
I was subsequently able to extend Sheehan’s brilliant discovery, by focusing on the significance of one of the striking aspects of Austen’s wordplay in that charade, which was that, as Sheehan pointed out, it is a double anagrammed acrostic, i.e,. the letters L, A, M , B appear in different jumbled orders at the beginning of the four lines of each of the charade’s two stanzas. Sheehan take as the significance of that acrostic, when unjumbled, as pointing to Charles Lamb aka “Elia”, whose contemporary writings pointed directly to the second secret answer of that charade, the “Prince of WHALES”.
In the talks I have been in the process of giving about the shadow story of Emma during 2010-2011 to a half dozen JASNA chapters, I point out that while Sheehan is 100% correct in that analysis, there is a second and equally huge significance of that double acrostic, which is that it points to the shadow story of the novel, focused on the characters of Frank Churchill and Mrs. Elton; i.e., that there is a shocking connection between the acrostic which Mrs. Elton refers to, and that same second charade itself, which the narration does not explicitly reveal.
And I will in my book also point out how Austen is in part looking backward to Milton, and some other great writers who wove thematic acrostics into some of their most famous poetry and prose.
But perhaps the most significant example that I assert was on Austen’s radar screen is the so called “Titania acrostic” from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was discovered about 60 years ago by a British cryptic crosswords maven, in a very famous speech by the Queen of the Fairies:
TITANIA:
Out of this wood do not desire to go:
Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no.
I am a spirit of no common rate;
The summer still doth tend upon my state;
And I do love thee: therefore, go with me;
I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee,
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep,
I..e, the first letters (except in the fifth line, where it is the first two letters) spell “O Titania”!
Note that, as I suggested earlier, the image of fetching jewels from the deep is itself a wonderful metaphor for the act of diving into the depths of the poetry of these very lines and retrieving the jewels, i.e., the hidden acrostic. This is no coincidence, it was Shakespeare’s winking confirmation to the reader, the “x” that “marks the spot”, so to speak, to search for the acrostic right there in that very speech.
And you are probably not aware that, based on entirely independent means of analysis, the Austen subtextual pioneer who I have praised many times in the past as well, Jocelyn Harris, in 1986 brilliantly demonstrated that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a major subtextual allusive source for the romantic snafus of Emma itself.
Just a coincidence with the Titania acrostic? I think not! Clearly, Jane Austen was demonstrating in a host of ways that she knew all about it, 130 years before the discovery was announced publicly.
So I suggest that at the very least the above suffices to establish that hidden acrostics were a big deal for Jane Austen qua fiction writer. I have argued repeatedly that all of her wordgames in Emma are very consciously placed there by JA not only to give clues to secret answers about the real world, or about the progression of the shadow story of the novel, but most of all as a symbol for the novel itself—i.e., she is implicitly likening Emma to a charade, to an acrostic, and telling the reader, yes, there are hidden meanings here for you to search out.
But the very cleverness of these word puzzles also raises a big question, which I have been asked hundreds of times by skeptics—why would Jane Austen go to the trouble of constructing an elaborate word puzzle like this, if it was going to be so hard to detect that it would take 190 years for someone like Colleen Sheehan to discover it?
My full answer is very complicated and beyond the scope of this blog post, but I will give one part of it, which is that I think Jane Austen, genius that she was, simply overestimated her readers’s ability to decode it. I think she wrote that puzzle for the benefit of the kinds of proactive, literarily suspicious, playful readers who would pick up on, and then work hard to decode, the hundreds of clues in Emma to its shadow story (which I am the first to discover and describe).
It turned out that if anyone figured out the answers in her day, they did not publish their discovery. And then she suddenly died, and once time had passed, it required the Internet, and the contemporary explosion in interest in Jane Austen, for conditions to be ripe again for discovery.
And part of why I am so sure of this is that history repeated itself 134 years later, when Vladimir Nabokov walked in Jane Austen’s literary footsteps—as I will describe in the next section.
HIDDEN ACROSTIC IN NABOKOV’S SHORT STORY “THE VANE SISTERS”
As a direct result of my post about Nabokov and Austen a few weeks ago (which I provide another link for, below) being flagged in the Nabokov listserv, I was fortunate to be alerted by Prof. Stephen Blackwell that I should take a close look at the short story by Nabokov entitled “The Vane Sisters” which was published about 60 years ago in a literary magazine. I hereby give my sincere thanks to Prof. Blackwell’s for that tip, because the story is everything he suggested it was, and more, as I shall explain below.
The most famous feature of that story is known today to many serious Nabokovians, i.e., that Nabokov embedded a hidden acrostic in the following final lines of the story:
“I could isolate, consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies-every recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed yellowly blurred, illusive, lost.”
Can you see the acrostic yourself? I will present it a few lines below, but I heartily encourage you to resist the urge to scroll down, and give it a shot at solving it yourself first.
………
………
………
……...
Here it is:
“Icicles by Cynthia, meter from me, Sybil.”
That solution does not appear anywhere in the story, but it turns out that once you know it, and you reread the story, you can see that Nabokov has been obliquely hinting at this acrostic during the entire story, seeding it with at least a half dozen inobtrusive, winking “bread crumbs” , the final one being the sly reference to “inept acrostics” in the very paragraph that contains that acrostic (just like Titania’s “jewels” line pointing to the acrostic buried in that same speech), which collectively would lead the suspicious reader to search for and find an acrostic somewhere in the story—and what better place for it than the last paragraph of the story itself!
And what I have just described, above, in regard to Nabokov’s hidden acrostic, is precisely the experience of the reader who, as I have done the past 6 years, seeks to excavate and understand the shadow stories of Austen’s novels. Until you have the epiphany that there is something there to be excavated, the textual clues are not consciously registered as such, but I claim that they are, for many readers, subconsciously tickled and registered subliminally.
I have coined the term “Trojan Horse Moment” to describe this infiltration of an idea into the mind of the reader, where at some mysterious moment it may suddenly bubble to the surface and be recognized consciously.
And that also leads us back to the question about what Austen was thinking when she buried her acrostic in that charade in Emma—did she expect anyone to see it? Because exactly the same question comes up with Nabokov—did he expect anyone to see it?
Fortunately, with Nabokov, we are fortunate to have correspondence (also famous to knowledgeable Nabokovians) from him to Katharine A. White, the editor of The New Yorker, the magazine he had submitted the story to in early 1951, but which refused to publish the story. This correspondence tells us that Nabokov most definitely did expect readers to see it!
Listen to the relevant portions of Nabokov’s reply to that rejection, which fairly drips with wounded and angry pride (my comments are in brackets):
“I am sorry the New Yorker rejected my story. It has already been sent elsewhere, so that I feel free to discuss certain points without being suspected of trying to persuade the New Yorker to reconsider their decision
[So basically, Nabokov is informing White of what she missed, purely for the satisfaction of telling her off, without giving her a second chance to change her mind—and it did wind up being published in The Hudson Review, which is where I found it online] .
First of all, I do not understand what you mean by ‘overwhelming style’, ‘light story’, and ‘elaboration’. All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter….For me, ‘style’ _is_ matter.
I feel that the New Yorker has not understood ‘The Vane Sisters” at all.
[Ouch!]
Let me explain a few things: the whole point of the story is that my French professor, a somewhat obtuse scholar and a rather callous observer of the superficial planes of life, unwittingly passes (in the first pages) through the enchanting, and touching ‘aura’ of dead Cynthia, whom he continues to see…
…At the end of the story, he seeks her spirit in vulgar table-rapping phenomena, in acrostics and then he sees a vague dream (permeated by the broken son of their last meeting), and now comes the last paragraph which, if read straight, should convey that vague and sunny rebuke, but which for a more attentive reader contains the additional delight of a solved acrostic…”
[Nabokov then walked through every single word of the acrostic, as if White was a doofus who could not “get it” unless he leads her by the nose, word by word. Then he explains what this means, thematically, and he gets back to the point I started with, which is Nabokov’s expectations of being understood]
“You may argue that reading downwards, or upwards, or diagonally, is not what an editor can be expected to do; but by means of various allusions to trick-reading, I have arranged matters so that the reader almost automatically slips into this discovery, especially because of the abrupt change in style.
[I love that he expects the reader to automatically slip into this discovery, he is relying on precisely the same techniques that Jane Austen did!]
Most of the stories I am contemplating (and some I have written in the past…) will be composed on these lines, according to this system wherein a second (main) story is woven into.” END OF
QUOTATION FROM NABOKOV’S LETTER
[And there you have Nabokov very explicitly revealing that he had reached a stage in his career by 1951 that he was going to be writing double stories, apparently of the same kind as I have described in this blog about Jane Austen’s shadow stories. And actually, in Nabokov’s long chapter about Mansfield Park, which he wrote more or less around the same time he wrote that letter to White, he uses a term for the story that everyone can access easily which I actually prefer to my own term for it. I’ve been calling it the ‘overt story”, but he came up with the much more elegant “revealed story”. Therefore, henceforth, I intend to use his term, in his honor. ]
Now, you may also ask, did Nabokov have any idea about Austen’s hidden acrostic? My suspicion is that even if he did not guess the secret second answer [“Prince of Whales”] to Austen’s charade, he did know that Austen was up to major wordplay tricks in her novels.
And you may also ask, did Nabokov, like Austen, present this acrostic as a symbol for embedding shadow stories in his novels, the way Austen did? And did he realize that Austen did this?
That is a huge subject that I will also address in my book, but for now, I think it’s clear from what he wrote to White that he certainly intended the symbolism to apply to his own writing, and he probably also saw the same symbolism in Austen’s writing. That is precisely why he lavished such evident love on his famous long essay about Austen’s Mansfield Park. But, like Austen, he was not going to make it easy on his readers to know how he loved Austen’s writing, so he left that as a kind of “hidden code” in both his fictional and literary critical writings.
In that context, my earlier posts about Nabokov’s playing a complex game in his comments to his friend Edmund Wilson…
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/12/jane-austen-mark-twain-and-vladimir.html
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/12/jane-austen-mark-twain-and-vladimir_31.html
…find unexpected validation in the hidden acrostic game that Nabokov played in “The Vane Sisters”.
And last but not least, I find it highly significant that “The Vane Sisters” has as its two title characters two sisters. Nabokov was well aware that Jane Austen was one of two sisters, and that Jane’s sister was named Cassandra. So is it just a coincidence that one of Nabokov’s ghostly sisters is named Sibyl, which Wikipedia’s entry about “The Vane Sisters” tells us the significance of….:
“The very name of Sybil hints at the trick of the final paragraph, as the word acrostic was first applied to the prophecies of the Erythreaean Sibyl, which were written on leaves and arranged so that the initial letters of the leaves always formed a word.”
And is it just a coincidence that the mythological Sibyl shares one crucial characteristic with the mythological Cassandra, tragic daughter of Priam, which is the ability to foretell the future!
Was this name game, combined with the acrostic, a hidden homage to Jane Austen? And was Nabokov perhaps thinking of Mr. Woodhouse who so worriedly said to Emma:
“"Ah! my dear, I wish you would not make matches and foretell things, for whatever you say always comes to pass.”
I say, yes, yes, yes!
I could go on and on, but I think the essential point is clear for purposes of this post.
So, was I correct in foretelling that you would find this post interesting? If so, let me hear from you, either in this blog, by email, or by public response in one of the groups where I have posted a link to this post.
Cheers, ARNIE
P.S. I did not forget that my subject line foretold one more literary connection, and here it is:
SIGNIFICANT “ACROSTICKY” WORDPLAY IN THE GHOST WRITER
There is very analogous wordplay which plays a climactic role in the 2010 Oscar contending film The Ghost Writer, directed by Roman Polanski in a very faithful adaptation of the 2007 novel The Ghost by Robert Harris, the solution to which is very complex and which I will be unveiling in my forthcoming book about Jane Austen’s shadow stories. Suffice for now to say that my research makes it clear to me that Harris (possibly with Polanski’s knowing participation) has added another rich layer to this historical chain of thematic acrostics, and that Austen’s complex acrostic game in Emma is part of the mix they cooked up. Stay tuned for more on this topic in this blog around Oscars time.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Why would I lie about a thing like that?
This post is another that grows out of the discussion of Jane Austen's Letter #5 from September 1796, written by her to her sister Cassandra when Jane was not quite 21, on an extended visit to the home of their brother Edward Austen (later to add the surname "Knight") in Kent. Ellen Moody was surprised at my claim that Jane might have fabricated the incident reported by Jane in which their very young nephew Edward, Jr. was apparently punished severely.
[Ellen] "Arnie, why would Austen lie about such a thing?"
Before I respond substantively, I cannot resist posting the following link to a film I saw over 30 years ago that I loved:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081753/
In the film, the character played by Treat Williams, who had the widest smile in cinematic history, would make up all sorts of fantastic scenarios about things that had supposedly happened, and when people would look at him quizzically and then finally ask him if what he was saying was _really_ true, he would smile very very broadly and ask "Why would I lie about a thing like that?"
See the film, it is very sweet. And it's also relevant to my answer to you, Ellen. Because if there ever was an apparently rhetorical question that was really a serious question, it was that one. What he was saying was, "Think about it, what possible covert meaning might there be that I wish to convey in an indirect way, leaving it to you, my listener, to figure it out?"
My sense is that JA was a lot like the Treat Williams character, she would make up stories as vehicles for the _indirect_ expression of feelings about and attitudes toward people and events of personal interest. She was, at the deepest level of her being, a story-teller, who instinctively translated the stuff of daily life into little fables, and obviously CEA would have been 100% aware of this orientation in her wildly creative sister, and probably was her best audience, even if (as I have speculated) it was not CEA's "thing" to do this herself.
I think this is a very powerful tool for inducing a listener/reader to cease to be passive, but to become an active participation in the creation of meaning. By struggling to figure out why a writer would make up a story, it forces the reader to engage with whatever moral and psychological issues are involved. It is really the Socratic method, when you think about, and it is a much more powerful tool for teaching and persuasion than simply stating one's opinions.
But note, I said that I have no idea if it was an actual event or not--it could have been actual but much less severe, or it could have been a fable.
"If you don't believe this comment, what makes you believe her story about Edward."
Do you believe the story about Edward? I think it could very well _also_ be a complete fantasy! She was spending extended time around Edward and his young family and so Edward was front and center on JA's radar screen, as she observed the behavior of the young paterfamilias, and I think she already had a clear picture of Edward as a John Dashwood in training. And, in my opinion, already at 21, JA was a radical feminist and critic of wealth, very attuned to hypocrisies in regard to same.
And think of how JA exposes John Dashwood's hypocrisy in S&S---his shallow moral sense, his vulnerability to suggestion and influence by a rapacious wife--JA's narrator _never_ explicitly indicts John D, instead she _shows_ us all of this in subtle satirical ways.
So I have no doubt that JA saw Edward as a man with very unpleasant tendencies in this direction, or else JA would not keep returning to this theme over and over again in her letters over many years (just wait till you read, e.g., the beginning of Letter 6!!!), but....as to whether Edward actually sought to make a financial killing in the aftermath of the death of a Farmer Clarinbould? My guess would be, "No"--instead, I can rather imagine JA lurking about, and overhearing Elizabeth Knight quietly making some Fanny Dashwood-like insinuations to Edward, and hearing Edward make some mealy-mouthed response.
JA's stock in trade in her letters, and also at times in her novels, was hyperbole, theater of the absurd. In real life, nothing happens like what we read in Chapter 2 of S&S or see in the early scene in _King Lear_ which it is based on. But that is great art, to dramatize a certain human characteristic, in this case, hypocritical rationalizing greed, and to mock it, to burn an indelible image into the reader's mind of a quintessential instance of same. When we see or think about hypocritical greed, the association to those two works of art is automatic. That is why Mark Twain, e.g., picked up on those two scenes and presented _his_ version of same, also covertly, in his fiction.
" Whipping is a strong word. I wondered if the boy had done something to irritate his father -- or mother."
Again, I think it is very likely that JA was simply riffing on the double meaning of the word "breeching" which I have already pointed out. The words "in the bargain" are a "tell" that this is hyperbolic absurdity, just as we see a hundred examples of it in JA's juvenilia.
"Nancy it's that each time anyone says anything in the least critical of whatever you have this immediate impulse to counter it as if to prove resolutely no matter what that the world is a good place basically."
Yes, that is what Nancy does, I share your opinion.
[Ellen] "Well one silence that leaps out at me and continues (I noticed) in the next letter: not one, not one mention of Elizabeth. She is the reigning woman in the house Jane is staying at. We hear of Edward, and there are remarks (playful mostly) about the mother, Lady Bridges (again these same jokes about marriage). I do guess Austen may be following Brer Rabbit's advice in the famous fable: if you can't say something good, don't say anything at all. These letters to Cassandra could be read by others and it could get back to Elizabeth."
But as I have just illustrated in my repeated references to Chapter 2 of S&S, JA is only being _covert_ in her references to Elizabeth Austen (not yet Knight), _not_ silent.
Another line from S&S comes to mind, which I think had an extra covert function, in addition to talking about Marianne's relationship with Willoughby:
"It was every day implied, but never professedly declared."
In my firm opinion, that _also_ describes John and Fanny Dashwood as covert representations of Edward and Elizabeth Austen.
The Clarinbould "episode" in Letter 5 was a "rough draft" of one "chapter" in that "story".
Cheers, ARNIE
[Ellen] "Arnie, why would Austen lie about such a thing?"
Before I respond substantively, I cannot resist posting the following link to a film I saw over 30 years ago that I loved:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081753/
In the film, the character played by Treat Williams, who had the widest smile in cinematic history, would make up all sorts of fantastic scenarios about things that had supposedly happened, and when people would look at him quizzically and then finally ask him if what he was saying was _really_ true, he would smile very very broadly and ask "Why would I lie about a thing like that?"
See the film, it is very sweet. And it's also relevant to my answer to you, Ellen. Because if there ever was an apparently rhetorical question that was really a serious question, it was that one. What he was saying was, "Think about it, what possible covert meaning might there be that I wish to convey in an indirect way, leaving it to you, my listener, to figure it out?"
My sense is that JA was a lot like the Treat Williams character, she would make up stories as vehicles for the _indirect_ expression of feelings about and attitudes toward people and events of personal interest. She was, at the deepest level of her being, a story-teller, who instinctively translated the stuff of daily life into little fables, and obviously CEA would have been 100% aware of this orientation in her wildly creative sister, and probably was her best audience, even if (as I have speculated) it was not CEA's "thing" to do this herself.
I think this is a very powerful tool for inducing a listener/reader to cease to be passive, but to become an active participation in the creation of meaning. By struggling to figure out why a writer would make up a story, it forces the reader to engage with whatever moral and psychological issues are involved. It is really the Socratic method, when you think about, and it is a much more powerful tool for teaching and persuasion than simply stating one's opinions.
But note, I said that I have no idea if it was an actual event or not--it could have been actual but much less severe, or it could have been a fable.
"If you don't believe this comment, what makes you believe her story about Edward."
Do you believe the story about Edward? I think it could very well _also_ be a complete fantasy! She was spending extended time around Edward and his young family and so Edward was front and center on JA's radar screen, as she observed the behavior of the young paterfamilias, and I think she already had a clear picture of Edward as a John Dashwood in training. And, in my opinion, already at 21, JA was a radical feminist and critic of wealth, very attuned to hypocrisies in regard to same.
And think of how JA exposes John Dashwood's hypocrisy in S&S---his shallow moral sense, his vulnerability to suggestion and influence by a rapacious wife--JA's narrator _never_ explicitly indicts John D, instead she _shows_ us all of this in subtle satirical ways.
So I have no doubt that JA saw Edward as a man with very unpleasant tendencies in this direction, or else JA would not keep returning to this theme over and over again in her letters over many years (just wait till you read, e.g., the beginning of Letter 6!!!), but....as to whether Edward actually sought to make a financial killing in the aftermath of the death of a Farmer Clarinbould? My guess would be, "No"--instead, I can rather imagine JA lurking about, and overhearing Elizabeth Knight quietly making some Fanny Dashwood-like insinuations to Edward, and hearing Edward make some mealy-mouthed response.
JA's stock in trade in her letters, and also at times in her novels, was hyperbole, theater of the absurd. In real life, nothing happens like what we read in Chapter 2 of S&S or see in the early scene in _King Lear_ which it is based on. But that is great art, to dramatize a certain human characteristic, in this case, hypocritical rationalizing greed, and to mock it, to burn an indelible image into the reader's mind of a quintessential instance of same. When we see or think about hypocritical greed, the association to those two works of art is automatic. That is why Mark Twain, e.g., picked up on those two scenes and presented _his_ version of same, also covertly, in his fiction.
" Whipping is a strong word. I wondered if the boy had done something to irritate his father -- or mother."
Again, I think it is very likely that JA was simply riffing on the double meaning of the word "breeching" which I have already pointed out. The words "in the bargain" are a "tell" that this is hyperbolic absurdity, just as we see a hundred examples of it in JA's juvenilia.
"Nancy it's that each time anyone says anything in the least critical of whatever you have this immediate impulse to counter it as if to prove resolutely no matter what that the world is a good place basically."
Yes, that is what Nancy does, I share your opinion.
[Ellen] "Well one silence that leaps out at me and continues (I noticed) in the next letter: not one, not one mention of Elizabeth. She is the reigning woman in the house Jane is staying at. We hear of Edward, and there are remarks (playful mostly) about the mother, Lady Bridges (again these same jokes about marriage). I do guess Austen may be following Brer Rabbit's advice in the famous fable: if you can't say something good, don't say anything at all. These letters to Cassandra could be read by others and it could get back to Elizabeth."
But as I have just illustrated in my repeated references to Chapter 2 of S&S, JA is only being _covert_ in her references to Elizabeth Austen (not yet Knight), _not_ silent.
Another line from S&S comes to mind, which I think had an extra covert function, in addition to talking about Marianne's relationship with Willoughby:
"It was every day implied, but never professedly declared."
In my firm opinion, that _also_ describes John and Fanny Dashwood as covert representations of Edward and Elizabeth Austen.
The Clarinbould "episode" in Letter 5 was a "rough draft" of one "chapter" in that "story".
Cheers, ARNIE
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Obviously a sadistic and necrophiliac lunatic....and a psychopathic flesh-eating robot
The following is the followup about my earlier comment about Lord Portsmouth, aka the Earl of Portsmouth (family surname Wallop), after Nancy Mayer replied as follows:
[Nancy] "Arnie, please send me the reference to Lord Portsmouth being whipped on being breeched. I haven't come across that."
Well, I was just going by the testimony in the huge case involving Lord Portsmouth and his ill-fated marriage to Hanson's daughter.
And (as Alanis sang) you oughta know, Nancy, because the Hanson-Hanson daughter-Lord Portsmouth triad is one which _you_ correctly perceived as being similar to the Mrs. Clay-Sir Walter-Mr. Shepherd triad. In 2005, you were the first one to turn me on to that lurid real life parallel to Persuasion, which suggests to me that if Sir Walter had married Mrs.
Clay, it would not have turned out for him as second marriage did for Mr. Weston. ;)
For example, here is testimony from the trial that occurred not long after JA's death:
/Sir Richard Birnie./—Some years ago I lived near Fairlawn; I had a cottage there, and have it still. I was a mere salutation-acquaintance of Lord Portsmouth's. In August, 1819, Lord Portsmouth came to me on a Sunday afternoon, much agitated, and rather abruptly asked for a
warrant, he said, " against my wife." I asked him why he wanted a warrant; and he said, that Lady Portsmouth had flogged him with a whip, while her two sisters held his hands. There were weals and /marks /on his cheek and neck ; they were evidently recent...."
One day I will convince you that this is not an accidental resemblance, but that JA was well aware of the "shadow story" details of Lord Portsmouth's marriage--as to which these S&M shenanigans were apparently going on from 1815 onward---and JA chose to reflect them in the shadows of Persuasion, along with other Byroniana (as you know, of course, Hanson was Byron's lawyer, too).
Then Nancy responded further, as follows, prompting my further response:
[Nancy] "Arnie, I asked for the reference to Lord Portsmouth because I didn't have any reference in that information to a boy being whipped on being breeched. Boys were whipped, caned, switched, and birched. Lady Portsmouth did mistreat her husband. Doctors later decided that his state of development was somewhat around that of a 10 year old boy. However, this reference has nothing to do with boys being whipped when
breeched."
Nancy, I was drawing a (half) joking parallel between the real or invented tale of little Edward receiving serious insult to his posterior, and the real life S&M routine Chez Wallop, I was _not_ suggesting that such real life antics also included abuse of young boys.
But, as you so accurately described, that may as well have been the case, since Lord Portsmouth, who was 46 when he married Hanson's daughter, was nonetheless in essence the moral and psychological equivalent of a 10 year old boy--and a very disturbed one at that.
The Bio Index entry for Lord Portsmouth in the 1995/2003 edition of the letters contains Ms. Le Faye's uncharacteristically Gothic description of that monstrously disturbed matrix:
"...The Earl's lawyer and trustee Mr. John Hanson then cynically married off his daughter Mary-Anne to his ward [Lord P], who by now was obviously a sadistic and necrophiliac lunatic....[she] maltreated the wretched Earl-perhaps unwittingly with poetic justice--just as he had mistreated his servants and animals in previous years..."
Ouch!
Seriously....what a Vortex of Dissipation that was--who was worst, the cynical Hanson, the crazy Earl, or the sadistic daughter/wife of the two of them?
I only quibble with Le Faye's use of the word "perhaps". I'd wager that Mary-Anne Hanson Wallop, via her father, had been very well aware, for years, of the Earl's penchant for naughtiness. When the Earl's wife (the "Lady Elliot" of this sordid real life melodrama) died, and the Earl became vulnerable to predation, Hanson did not waste a second, I am sure, to bring his daughter over to the Earl's digs for an intimate tete-a-tete or two. So surely the poetic justice administered by Mary-Anne Hanson Wallop must have been entirely intentional, indeed entirely savored. Think about it, if she was the kind of pervert who got her jollies doing very bad things to her mentally disabled husband, surely it was a piquant spicy enhancement of that experience if there were an added element of being the administerer of poetic justice as well!
So I'd say Sir Walter owed Fate (or perhaps a secret Santa or two) a great big thank you for keeping him out of Mrs. Clay's evil clutches--and I hope he got himself a new lawyer, too!
;)
Cheers, ARNIE
P.S How often does one get a valid opportunity to use a subject line like the above in connection with a discussion of Jane Austen? I was reminded as I read Le Faye's purple prose of that great line from _Notting Hill_ when Hugh Grant, clinging by a thread to his inadvertent
impersonation of a writer for the magazine Horse and Hound, asks the movie actor he is interviewing why he did not identify with the character he was playing, to which the lead replied by tactfully explained that he did not "because he is playing a psychopathic
flesh-eating robot".
[Nancy] "Arnie, please send me the reference to Lord Portsmouth being whipped on being breeched. I haven't come across that."
Well, I was just going by the testimony in the huge case involving Lord Portsmouth and his ill-fated marriage to Hanson's daughter.
And (as Alanis sang) you oughta know, Nancy, because the Hanson-Hanson daughter-Lord Portsmouth triad is one which _you_ correctly perceived as being similar to the Mrs. Clay-Sir Walter-Mr. Shepherd triad. In 2005, you were the first one to turn me on to that lurid real life parallel to Persuasion, which suggests to me that if Sir Walter had married Mrs.
Clay, it would not have turned out for him as second marriage did for Mr. Weston. ;)
For example, here is testimony from the trial that occurred not long after JA's death:
/Sir Richard Birnie./—Some years ago I lived near Fairlawn; I had a cottage there, and have it still. I was a mere salutation-acquaintance of Lord Portsmouth's. In August, 1819, Lord Portsmouth came to me on a Sunday afternoon, much agitated, and rather abruptly asked for a
warrant, he said, " against my wife." I asked him why he wanted a warrant; and he said, that Lady Portsmouth had flogged him with a whip, while her two sisters held his hands. There were weals and /marks /on his cheek and neck ; they were evidently recent...."
One day I will convince you that this is not an accidental resemblance, but that JA was well aware of the "shadow story" details of Lord Portsmouth's marriage--as to which these S&M shenanigans were apparently going on from 1815 onward---and JA chose to reflect them in the shadows of Persuasion, along with other Byroniana (as you know, of course, Hanson was Byron's lawyer, too).
Then Nancy responded further, as follows, prompting my further response:
[Nancy] "Arnie, I asked for the reference to Lord Portsmouth because I didn't have any reference in that information to a boy being whipped on being breeched. Boys were whipped, caned, switched, and birched. Lady Portsmouth did mistreat her husband. Doctors later decided that his state of development was somewhat around that of a 10 year old boy. However, this reference has nothing to do with boys being whipped when
breeched."
Nancy, I was drawing a (half) joking parallel between the real or invented tale of little Edward receiving serious insult to his posterior, and the real life S&M routine Chez Wallop, I was _not_ suggesting that such real life antics also included abuse of young boys.
But, as you so accurately described, that may as well have been the case, since Lord Portsmouth, who was 46 when he married Hanson's daughter, was nonetheless in essence the moral and psychological equivalent of a 10 year old boy--and a very disturbed one at that.
The Bio Index entry for Lord Portsmouth in the 1995/2003 edition of the letters contains Ms. Le Faye's uncharacteristically Gothic description of that monstrously disturbed matrix:
"...The Earl's lawyer and trustee Mr. John Hanson then cynically married off his daughter Mary-Anne to his ward [Lord P], who by now was obviously a sadistic and necrophiliac lunatic....[she] maltreated the wretched Earl-perhaps unwittingly with poetic justice--just as he had mistreated his servants and animals in previous years..."
Ouch!
Seriously....what a Vortex of Dissipation that was--who was worst, the cynical Hanson, the crazy Earl, or the sadistic daughter/wife of the two of them?
I only quibble with Le Faye's use of the word "perhaps". I'd wager that Mary-Anne Hanson Wallop, via her father, had been very well aware, for years, of the Earl's penchant for naughtiness. When the Earl's wife (the "Lady Elliot" of this sordid real life melodrama) died, and the Earl became vulnerable to predation, Hanson did not waste a second, I am sure, to bring his daughter over to the Earl's digs for an intimate tete-a-tete or two. So surely the poetic justice administered by Mary-Anne Hanson Wallop must have been entirely intentional, indeed entirely savored. Think about it, if she was the kind of pervert who got her jollies doing very bad things to her mentally disabled husband, surely it was a piquant spicy enhancement of that experience if there were an added element of being the administerer of poetic justice as well!
So I'd say Sir Walter owed Fate (or perhaps a secret Santa or two) a great big thank you for keeping him out of Mrs. Clay's evil clutches--and I hope he got himself a new lawyer, too!
;)
Cheers, ARNIE
P.S How often does one get a valid opportunity to use a subject line like the above in connection with a discussion of Jane Austen? I was reminded as I read Le Faye's purple prose of that great line from _Notting Hill_ when Hugh Grant, clinging by a thread to his inadvertent
impersonation of a writer for the magazine Horse and Hound, asks the movie actor he is interviewing why he did not identify with the character he was playing, to which the lead replied by tactfully explained that he did not "because he is playing a psychopathic
flesh-eating robot".
Cassandra's puns and allusions
This post was prompted by Diana Birchall's response to my earlier comment about Cassandra not being happy with Jane's ticcing punning satirical barbs directed at family members:
[Diana] "Why do you think CEA did not enjoy punning, Arnie? It was a punning family. Nearly every member of it makes puns in the doggerel they left behind, and Mrs. Austen was known for her "sprack wit." A couple of CEA's charades survive (in the book of poems and riddles by Austen family members), which at least show that she did participate in these playful activities, and didn't sit apart, forbiddingly poker-faced."
Diana, I did not mean to portray CEA as a dour stick in the mud-rather, I imagine CEA as seeing JA as being "too much of a good thing" when it came to wit and satire. Like Mrs. Weston who begs Emma not to divert her with unkind satire on Miss Bates, or Jane who begs Lizzy not to tease so much.
And I would suggest that the starting point for discussing CEA's attitude toward JA, must be CEA's letter to Fanny written right after JA's death, which is the one and only extended bit of writing by CEA that survives (I am 99% sure I am correct in that statement?).
"I have lost a treasure, such a sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed…..I loved her only too well, not better than she deserved, but I am conscious that my affection for her made me sometimes unjust to & negligent of others, & I can acknowledge, more than as a general principle, the justice of the hand that struck the blow."
Now why in the world would CEA write something so jarring as those final words, as if JA's death were somehow a just punishment imposed by God for sins committed by JA during life, sins which CEA somehow aided and abetted? And why would CEA allude so openly to _Othello_ in this way (an allusion Jocelyn Harris noted, without further comment, in _A Revolution Beyond Expression_ published a few years ago), as if CEA were Othello and Jane were Desdemona?
There is something very very disturbing in this, and the only possible mitigation I can come up with for these awful pronouncements is that CEA had become temporarily unhinged by grief over JA's death, and in her Othello-like madness, said crazy things.
But I believe the most plausible inference for what CEA means by "sometimes unjust to & negligent of others" is that CEA must have turned a blind eye and deaf ear for a very long time when JA mocked and sometimes raged at their mother and their brothers for various and sundry injustices, and CEA would have especially been alluding to JA's barbs directed against Fanny's own father, Edward Austen Knight (and also, perhaps, prior to 1808, against Edward's wife Elizabeth).
My sense is that part of what CEA was doing in that letter was playing the role she had played for a long time vis a vis Fanny Knight---reflecting CEA's subordinate status as spinster sister/aunt, she was currying favor with the rich niece who one day might be the one distributing favors and largesse to the rest of the Austen family.
And note that CEA in that long letter to Fanny never says a word about Anna Austen Lefroy, the other senior niece, even as she recites the grieving of the Austen family. I think that is a veiled reflection of Fanny's longstanding jealousy of the special attention that JA devoted to Anna, particularly in regard to Anna's writing career.
So, CEA's letter shows that she too knew her way very well around the English language, and was ready to weave a complex literary allusion into daily life as JA ever was.
Cheers,
ARNIE
[Diana] "Why do you think CEA did not enjoy punning, Arnie? It was a punning family. Nearly every member of it makes puns in the doggerel they left behind, and Mrs. Austen was known for her "sprack wit." A couple of CEA's charades survive (in the book of poems and riddles by Austen family members), which at least show that she did participate in these playful activities, and didn't sit apart, forbiddingly poker-faced."
Diana, I did not mean to portray CEA as a dour stick in the mud-rather, I imagine CEA as seeing JA as being "too much of a good thing" when it came to wit and satire. Like Mrs. Weston who begs Emma not to divert her with unkind satire on Miss Bates, or Jane who begs Lizzy not to tease so much.
And I would suggest that the starting point for discussing CEA's attitude toward JA, must be CEA's letter to Fanny written right after JA's death, which is the one and only extended bit of writing by CEA that survives (I am 99% sure I am correct in that statement?).
"I have lost a treasure, such a sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed…..I loved her only too well, not better than she deserved, but I am conscious that my affection for her made me sometimes unjust to & negligent of others, & I can acknowledge, more than as a general principle, the justice of the hand that struck the blow."
Now why in the world would CEA write something so jarring as those final words, as if JA's death were somehow a just punishment imposed by God for sins committed by JA during life, sins which CEA somehow aided and abetted? And why would CEA allude so openly to _Othello_ in this way (an allusion Jocelyn Harris noted, without further comment, in _A Revolution Beyond Expression_ published a few years ago), as if CEA were Othello and Jane were Desdemona?
There is something very very disturbing in this, and the only possible mitigation I can come up with for these awful pronouncements is that CEA had become temporarily unhinged by grief over JA's death, and in her Othello-like madness, said crazy things.
But I believe the most plausible inference for what CEA means by "sometimes unjust to & negligent of others" is that CEA must have turned a blind eye and deaf ear for a very long time when JA mocked and sometimes raged at their mother and their brothers for various and sundry injustices, and CEA would have especially been alluding to JA's barbs directed against Fanny's own father, Edward Austen Knight (and also, perhaps, prior to 1808, against Edward's wife Elizabeth).
My sense is that part of what CEA was doing in that letter was playing the role she had played for a long time vis a vis Fanny Knight---reflecting CEA's subordinate status as spinster sister/aunt, she was currying favor with the rich niece who one day might be the one distributing favors and largesse to the rest of the Austen family.
And note that CEA in that long letter to Fanny never says a word about Anna Austen Lefroy, the other senior niece, even as she recites the grieving of the Austen family. I think that is a veiled reflection of Fanny's longstanding jealousy of the special attention that JA devoted to Anna, particularly in regard to Anna's writing career.
So, CEA's letter shows that she too knew her way very well around the English language, and was ready to weave a complex literary allusion into daily life as JA ever was.
Cheers,
ARNIE
Breechin' and whippin' and Wishin' and Hopin' and Wadham Knatchbull's Breeches
And this is the last of my little triptych inspired by Jane Austen's Letter 5 dated September 1796:
[Nancy Mayer] "Ellen, breeching -- putting a boy into his breeches instead of a shirt coat or gown ---did not ritually include a whipping."
I believe it was not unheard of Chez Wallop aka Lord Portsmouth. ;)
But, in a more serious vein....I remain completely agnostic as to whether or not young Edward Knight was _actually_ chastised physically or not, upon this momentous rite of passage in being potty trained. In my opinion, it might entirely be a fabrication; it could be a hyperbolic expansion of a less severe event which actually happened; or it could be a fairly accurate reworking of a cruel event. With JA, all three are possible, I believe, depending on her mood while writing. I think she felt free to report or invent, and I think she counted on CEA to be able to discern the difference, based on the rich unspoken knowledge of the
people involved that they shared and so JA did not need to spell it all out.
I checked to see if JA ever used any form of the word "breech" again in her letters, and I found one-- a strange passage in Letter 89 dated 9/23-24/13 in which JA wrote to CEA from Godmersham:
"The Mr. Ks [Knatchbull] came a little before dinner on Monday, & Edward went to the Church with the two Seniors--but there is no Inscription yet drawn up. They are very goodnatured you know & civil and all that--but are not particularly superfine; however, they ate their dinner & drank their Tea & went away, leaving their lovely Wadham in our arms--& I wish you had seen Fanny & me running backwards & forwards with his Breeches from the little chintz to the White room before we went to bed, in the greatest of frights lest he should come upon us before we had done it all--There had been a mistake in the Housemaids Preparations & _they_ were gone to bed.--He seems a very harmless sort of young Man--nothing to like or dislike in him;--goes out shooting or hunting with the two others all the morning--& plays at whist & makes queer faces in the evening."
What I gather is as follows, but I would love to hear other interpretations:
The two elderly Knatchbulls, both brothers of Mrs. Knight who had recently died (hence the reference to there being "no Inscription yet drawn up", presumably for the monument) went off to Church with Edward Austen Knight, leaving the 19 year old Wadham Knatchbull [son of the
younger of the two Knatchbull "Seniors", who was, by the way, a merchant who did business on _Gracechurch Street_ (!!!) ] with JA and the 20 year old Fanny.
But what in the world does JA mean by this vignette about Wadham Knatchbull's Breeches? What exactly were the preparations that the Godmersham maids erred in doing, which JA and Fanny had to correct? Or is it all another wild fantasy? If this were an event taking place today, would this be involving the young man's boxer underwear? There is something strangely satirical about all of this, and part of it is fed by JA describing Wadham being left in the arms of JA and Fanny, as if he were a two year old!
And finally, what's also interesting is that Fanny Knight, seven years later, married the rich powerful cousin of Wadham Knatchbull.
And to conclude, I also just had an off-the-wall association to the Sixties hit sung by Dusty Springfield (which, to my surprise, was apparently written by Burt Bacharach):
Wishin' and hopin' and thinkin' and prayin' Plannin' and dreaming each night of his charms That won't get you into his arms
So if you're lookin' to find love you can share All you gotta do is Hold him and kiss him and love him And show him that you care
Show him that you care just for him And do the things he likes to do Wear your hair just for him, 'cause You won't get him Thinkin' and a-prayin' Wishin' and a-hopin'
So, here's a fun game--whose theme song is this in JA's novels? I'd say it's Charlotte Lucas's, with Lucy Steele singing backup! Anyone have any other suggestions?
And....maybe it's not such an off-the-wall association after all, if there is anything to my suspicion that JA has been sent to Rowling to keep her away from Tom Lefroy or some other love interest back in Steventon. In that event, JA might indeed have been "wishin' and hopin'
'plannin' and dreaming!
I welcome replies to any or all of the above!
Cheers, ARNIE
[Nancy Mayer] "Ellen, breeching -- putting a boy into his breeches instead of a shirt coat or gown ---did not ritually include a whipping."
I believe it was not unheard of Chez Wallop aka Lord Portsmouth. ;)
But, in a more serious vein....I remain completely agnostic as to whether or not young Edward Knight was _actually_ chastised physically or not, upon this momentous rite of passage in being potty trained. In my opinion, it might entirely be a fabrication; it could be a hyperbolic expansion of a less severe event which actually happened; or it could be a fairly accurate reworking of a cruel event. With JA, all three are possible, I believe, depending on her mood while writing. I think she felt free to report or invent, and I think she counted on CEA to be able to discern the difference, based on the rich unspoken knowledge of the
people involved that they shared and so JA did not need to spell it all out.
I checked to see if JA ever used any form of the word "breech" again in her letters, and I found one-- a strange passage in Letter 89 dated 9/23-24/13 in which JA wrote to CEA from Godmersham:
"The Mr. Ks [Knatchbull] came a little before dinner on Monday, & Edward went to the Church with the two Seniors--but there is no Inscription yet drawn up. They are very goodnatured you know & civil and all that--but are not particularly superfine; however, they ate their dinner & drank their Tea & went away, leaving their lovely Wadham in our arms--& I wish you had seen Fanny & me running backwards & forwards with his Breeches from the little chintz to the White room before we went to bed, in the greatest of frights lest he should come upon us before we had done it all--There had been a mistake in the Housemaids Preparations & _they_ were gone to bed.--He seems a very harmless sort of young Man--nothing to like or dislike in him;--goes out shooting or hunting with the two others all the morning--& plays at whist & makes queer faces in the evening."
What I gather is as follows, but I would love to hear other interpretations:
The two elderly Knatchbulls, both brothers of Mrs. Knight who had recently died (hence the reference to there being "no Inscription yet drawn up", presumably for the monument) went off to Church with Edward Austen Knight, leaving the 19 year old Wadham Knatchbull [son of the
younger of the two Knatchbull "Seniors", who was, by the way, a merchant who did business on _Gracechurch Street_ (!!!) ] with JA and the 20 year old Fanny.
But what in the world does JA mean by this vignette about Wadham Knatchbull's Breeches? What exactly were the preparations that the Godmersham maids erred in doing, which JA and Fanny had to correct? Or is it all another wild fantasy? If this were an event taking place today, would this be involving the young man's boxer underwear? There is something strangely satirical about all of this, and part of it is fed by JA describing Wadham being left in the arms of JA and Fanny, as if he were a two year old!
And finally, what's also interesting is that Fanny Knight, seven years later, married the rich powerful cousin of Wadham Knatchbull.
And to conclude, I also just had an off-the-wall association to the Sixties hit sung by Dusty Springfield (which, to my surprise, was apparently written by Burt Bacharach):
Wishin' and hopin' and thinkin' and prayin' Plannin' and dreaming each night of his charms That won't get you into his arms
So if you're lookin' to find love you can share All you gotta do is Hold him and kiss him and love him And show him that you care
Show him that you care just for him And do the things he likes to do Wear your hair just for him, 'cause You won't get him Thinkin' and a-prayin' Wishin' and a-hopin'
So, here's a fun game--whose theme song is this in JA's novels? I'd say it's Charlotte Lucas's, with Lucy Steele singing backup! Anyone have any other suggestions?
And....maybe it's not such an off-the-wall association after all, if there is anything to my suspicion that JA has been sent to Rowling to keep her away from Tom Lefroy or some other love interest back in Steventon. In that event, JA might indeed have been "wishin' and hopin'
'plannin' and dreaming!
I welcome replies to any or all of the above!
Cheers, ARNIE
Jane Austen's "Charadic" Prose
Responding to bits and pieces from Christy and Nancy scattered over their many messages yesterday relative to Jane Austen's Letter 5 dated September 1796
First Christy:
"And since we all, each of us, have such unique mixtures of this, that, and the other ever-attaching to our personally interpretive and observatory places -and those places, filled with remnants borne from ones own personalized and historical baggage- agreements on the letters, sometimes, or often, may be "few and far between". Yet, I also suppose that within all of the "in-betweenities", interesting speculations and suggestions will continue.~~~~:-) "
Indeed, the dialectic of forceful but polite opposition is most fruitful for all of us, that butting up against opposed ideas inevitably sharpens thinking, even if none of us reverses our positions.
"Perhaps, there may be more of these redundantly compounded puns in the letters...and if that was done intentionally, is it worth exploring for this type of paradoxical perversity?"
I always am on the alert for them, I agree that they are always very interesting, mini-charades, if you will, awaiting solution. And that leads me to say something that should have been obvious all along but I never quite articulated before---every Janeite knows that the Austen family loved charades, and if you think about what a charade is, it is a puzzle that begs a clever solution. It is the most logical thing in the world that the "charadic" habit would, after a while, become extremely addictive, and would spill over into ordinary speech and letter-writing.
I bet, e.g., that Will Shortz makes a lot of puns in his ordinary talking and email writing, for exactly that reason. And I know that i do it much more myself, now that I have devoted myself so intensely to analyzing wordplay.
"Though I can see that this kind of punning-in-reverse, might render the more straightforward ones much less interesting and very predictable."
An astute observation, my first reaction is that variety is the spice of life, and that JA would have recognized, like a skilled standup comedian of today, that what matters is comic _rhythm_--you set up the more complex jokes with simpler jokes, and then cycle through again and again.
"Presenting possible puns, while, also, negating, yet affirming them by some later, more redundant unravelling....Again, perhaps this suggestion may just be a little too odd, too off, and too Zen.......even for a Jane Austen~~~:-) "
Christy, I do declare, I think you are beginning to get hooked on looking at these puns--watch out, it only gets worse over time! ;)
Now all the rest are Nancy:
"I think you are really reaching for a pun to say she was punning the word breeching."
I don't think it's a coincidence that the gerund breeching had, as an established secondary meaning, whipping, which just happens to be the other gerund JA chooses.
"If she is forever punning, that means that Cassandra had to have the same sensitivity for puns so that she'll recognize each and everyone."
Yes, certainly so. And why not? I think CEA may not have enjoyed punning, but she was very smart and understood them, and she also knew this was who her sister was, and that the tic was inextricably linked to JA's gift for words in general, so even if CEA did wish for JA to tone it down, she tolerated it, because JA so obviously loved her sister, and vice versa, and they shared everything in their lives. You live with your loved one's quirks, and perhaps you even learn to enjoy them, too, over time.
"Frankly, I think that such punning would be tiring and tiresome."
Sure, anyone married or otherwise closely related to a punster will say that sometimes it gets very tiresome. But, again, it was who JA was when she was comfortable. But I bet she kept a tight lid on her punning when out in public, especially at Godmersham--it would have interfered with her "field research in the wild" if the "beasts" she was studying so carefully were aware that they were being "stalked" for literary satirical purposes. So it was not a tic in a Tourettic sense of involuntary cursing, it was a faucet which JA either chose to open, or to keep shut.
"Why can't it just be a plain statement of fact: the boy got breeched and got a birching?"
Because, again, it fits with the 1,000 other puns that JA wrote, and because it is a way JA had of expressing a complex web of feeling in relatively few words--a compression of meaning, verging on poetry. In other words, great writing.
"Babies weren't generally whipped-- birched-- or otherwise punished harshly except by abusers. However, once a boy put on his breeches he became subject to a boy's punishment which was far too often a whipping. This was probably more accurately called a switching or a birching."
But again, the 1795 Dictionary makes it clear that breeching was a word used to refer to corporal punishment.
"Switching was when a flexible switch of a tree or bush was used on the legs. Birching used a flexible cane of birch wood. It is very likely that JA did not approve of whipping so young a child. "
I think we can all agree on that one, which is why it is very possible that the boy really never was punished at all, it was just JA's wordplay in service of venting some strong feelings about other events of the moment, as I have suggested.
Cheers, ARNIE
First Christy:
"And since we all, each of us, have such unique mixtures of this, that, and the other ever-attaching to our personally interpretive and observatory places -and those places, filled with remnants borne from ones own personalized and historical baggage- agreements on the letters, sometimes, or often, may be "few and far between". Yet, I also suppose that within all of the "in-betweenities", interesting speculations and suggestions will continue.~~~~:-) "
Indeed, the dialectic of forceful but polite opposition is most fruitful for all of us, that butting up against opposed ideas inevitably sharpens thinking, even if none of us reverses our positions.
"Perhaps, there may be more of these redundantly compounded puns in the letters...and if that was done intentionally, is it worth exploring for this type of paradoxical perversity?"
I always am on the alert for them, I agree that they are always very interesting, mini-charades, if you will, awaiting solution. And that leads me to say something that should have been obvious all along but I never quite articulated before---every Janeite knows that the Austen family loved charades, and if you think about what a charade is, it is a puzzle that begs a clever solution. It is the most logical thing in the world that the "charadic" habit would, after a while, become extremely addictive, and would spill over into ordinary speech and letter-writing.
I bet, e.g., that Will Shortz makes a lot of puns in his ordinary talking and email writing, for exactly that reason. And I know that i do it much more myself, now that I have devoted myself so intensely to analyzing wordplay.
"Though I can see that this kind of punning-in-reverse, might render the more straightforward ones much less interesting and very predictable."
An astute observation, my first reaction is that variety is the spice of life, and that JA would have recognized, like a skilled standup comedian of today, that what matters is comic _rhythm_--you set up the more complex jokes with simpler jokes, and then cycle through again and again.
"Presenting possible puns, while, also, negating, yet affirming them by some later, more redundant unravelling....Again, perhaps this suggestion may just be a little too odd, too off, and too Zen.......even for a Jane Austen~~~:-) "
Christy, I do declare, I think you are beginning to get hooked on looking at these puns--watch out, it only gets worse over time! ;)
Now all the rest are Nancy:
"I think you are really reaching for a pun to say she was punning the word breeching."
I don't think it's a coincidence that the gerund breeching had, as an established secondary meaning, whipping, which just happens to be the other gerund JA chooses.
"If she is forever punning, that means that Cassandra had to have the same sensitivity for puns so that she'll recognize each and everyone."
Yes, certainly so. And why not? I think CEA may not have enjoyed punning, but she was very smart and understood them, and she also knew this was who her sister was, and that the tic was inextricably linked to JA's gift for words in general, so even if CEA did wish for JA to tone it down, she tolerated it, because JA so obviously loved her sister, and vice versa, and they shared everything in their lives. You live with your loved one's quirks, and perhaps you even learn to enjoy them, too, over time.
"Frankly, I think that such punning would be tiring and tiresome."
Sure, anyone married or otherwise closely related to a punster will say that sometimes it gets very tiresome. But, again, it was who JA was when she was comfortable. But I bet she kept a tight lid on her punning when out in public, especially at Godmersham--it would have interfered with her "field research in the wild" if the "beasts" she was studying so carefully were aware that they were being "stalked" for literary satirical purposes. So it was not a tic in a Tourettic sense of involuntary cursing, it was a faucet which JA either chose to open, or to keep shut.
"Why can't it just be a plain statement of fact: the boy got breeched and got a birching?"
Because, again, it fits with the 1,000 other puns that JA wrote, and because it is a way JA had of expressing a complex web of feeling in relatively few words--a compression of meaning, verging on poetry. In other words, great writing.
"Babies weren't generally whipped-- birched-- or otherwise punished harshly except by abusers. However, once a boy put on his breeches he became subject to a boy's punishment which was far too often a whipping. This was probably more accurately called a switching or a birching."
But again, the 1795 Dictionary makes it clear that breeching was a word used to refer to corporal punishment.
"Switching was when a flexible switch of a tree or bush was used on the legs. Birching used a flexible cane of birch wood. It is very likely that JA did not approve of whipping so young a child. "
I think we can all agree on that one, which is why it is very possible that the boy really never was punished at all, it was just JA's wordplay in service of venting some strong feelings about other events of the moment, as I have suggested.
Cheers, ARNIE
Breeching and Thwarting and Up a Tree in Letter 5
The following is the first of three posts I wrote yesterday and early today in Janeites and Austen L in reaction to various excerpts from Jane Austen's Letter #5 dated September 1796. These three posts are illustrative of the nuances and depths that are there to be plumbed in the surviving letters of Jane Austen, which can greatly enrich our understanding not merely of her personality and life history, but also of her fiction itself.
[Ellen Moody]: "She also feels for little Edward: "breeched yesterday for good & all, and was whipped into the bargain." In this line she doesn't like the humiliating rituals people subject one another too, and he was whipped on top of it"
[Nancy Mayer]: "Never heard that breeching was humiliating for the boy. On the contrary, it was usually a moment of pride for the boy for it marked the time he was taken out of gowns and put into breeches. No doubt the boy misbehaved sometime during the day. Kids do get over excited and misbehave....If little Edward was only 2 he was rather young to be put into breeches. The problem is that the boys who had been wearing dresses had to learn how to deal with buttons in order to use the chamber pot. Today, children of two are often still in diapers or at least in those special underpants which take into consideration that toddlers often cannot read their own bodies."
Ladies, I believe neither of you has noticed the pun that JA (the inveterate punster) was playing with here--the verb "breeching" had two meanings in those days, as per the following page from a 1795 dictionary I just found in Google Books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=8DNAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PT140&dq=breeching&hl=en&ei=xrEtTd6iBIO88gaC6KyNCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
"Breeched: Put into breeches, furnished with a breech, _whipped_"
It is impossible to say for sure what really happened to toddler Edward, but I doubt he was potty trained and then whipped in short order. I think this is part and parcel with the Clarinbould jab at Edward _qua_ John Dashwood, and the complaints about being stuck at Rowling. In general, JA is chafing at the bit to get out of Dodge, so to speak, and she is venting a little steam with jabs of this kind. So, in a way, she is projecting her _own_ sense of powerless humiliation onto little Edward, with a verbal image that is the exact reverse of having your cake and eating it too--here what she writes is the equivalent of "having _no_ cake, and forced to eat sand into the bargain." I.e., JA is being treated like a disobedient, barely toilet-trained toddler!
And in that same vein, I would like to add a connection of dots I made yesterday. I had been really struck by JA's focus on Burney's _Camilla_ during the writing of these Rowling letters, especially given the two explicit allusions to _Camilla_ in _Northanger Abbey_, which, as _Susan_, was written by 1798. And the aspect of _Camilla_ which seems to have been of particular interest to JA was the idea of being trapped or thwarted, as apparently is what happens to Camilla a lot in that novel, and is exactly what John Thorpe does to Catherine when he will not let her get out of his fast-moving carriage--being literally stuck up a tree as a result of a practical joke by a foolish brother--hmmm...that really does sound like JA being trapped at Rowling.
And the allusion to Dr. Marchmont in Letter 5 is, as JA makes explicit, about meddling interference in young love, separating a young woman from the young man she loves. In that regard, Ellen, I think you have it backwards--it is Mary Harrison whom JA casts as a real life Camilla, _not_ Mary Lloyd!
But regardless of which Mary is the real-life Camilla, it should be leaping out at every Janeite by this point that Dr. Marchmont, the older well-intentioned meddling mentor, who causes Edgar Mandlebert to wait five _long_ volumes to finally come around to marrying Camilla, is a cross-gender model for Lady Russell causing Anne Elliot to wait seven (or is it eight?) long years to marry Wentworth!
Which makes me ask, did Jon Spence take note of this little tidbit in his book advocating for JA carrying a torch for Tom Lefroy? I don't recall.
But I do recall that these Rowling letters are being written less than eight months after "the Steventon firtations", and right after the (possible) encounter at Cork Street. So I claim it is very plausible to imagine that JA has been more or less told that she must go to Rowling, and then--what a surprise--she finds that she, like Sterne's starling, is trapped and can't get out!
A generation later, this is exactly what was done to the teenaged Anna Austen after she got involved in a relationship deemed undesirable by her parents with an older man named Dummer--she was sent to "Siberia" for a while, right?
At least it's a plausible possibility.
And what adds force to that notion is that JA apparently was _very_ focused on the character of Dr. Marchmont in 1796. That is what I discovered last night by a little digging and connecting of previously unconnected dots----John Wiltshire, in his _Recreating Jane Austen_, notes that JA, in her own personal copy of _Camilla_ (which is at the Bodleian), wrote something very interesting in the back of it:
"‘Since this work went to the press, a circumstance of some assistance to the happiness of Camilla has taken place, namely that _Dr. Marchmont has since died_”
!!!!
When you put that comment together with the comment on Marchmont at the end of Letter 5, probably written more or less contemporaneously (I suspect that JA had some time on her hands at Rowling and had her copy of _Camilla_ with her, fresh off the presses in 1796), we hear a great deal of anger, as the happiness of _Jane_ seems to require "some assistance", but it is not forthcoming! In her head, JA administers the death penalty to Dr. Marchmont to solve the problem. But that is just fantasy. In real life, she has no power at all, and she is stuck, up a tree, at Rowling---period.
Cheers,
Arnie
[Ellen Moody]: "She also feels for little Edward: "breeched yesterday for good & all, and was whipped into the bargain." In this line she doesn't like the humiliating rituals people subject one another too, and he was whipped on top of it"
[Nancy Mayer]: "Never heard that breeching was humiliating for the boy. On the contrary, it was usually a moment of pride for the boy for it marked the time he was taken out of gowns and put into breeches. No doubt the boy misbehaved sometime during the day. Kids do get over excited and misbehave....If little Edward was only 2 he was rather young to be put into breeches. The problem is that the boys who had been wearing dresses had to learn how to deal with buttons in order to use the chamber pot. Today, children of two are often still in diapers or at least in those special underpants which take into consideration that toddlers often cannot read their own bodies."
Ladies, I believe neither of you has noticed the pun that JA (the inveterate punster) was playing with here--the verb "breeching" had two meanings in those days, as per the following page from a 1795 dictionary I just found in Google Books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=8DNAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PT140&dq=breeching&hl=en&ei=xrEtTd6iBIO88gaC6KyNCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
"Breeched: Put into breeches, furnished with a breech, _whipped_"
It is impossible to say for sure what really happened to toddler Edward, but I doubt he was potty trained and then whipped in short order. I think this is part and parcel with the Clarinbould jab at Edward _qua_ John Dashwood, and the complaints about being stuck at Rowling. In general, JA is chafing at the bit to get out of Dodge, so to speak, and she is venting a little steam with jabs of this kind. So, in a way, she is projecting her _own_ sense of powerless humiliation onto little Edward, with a verbal image that is the exact reverse of having your cake and eating it too--here what she writes is the equivalent of "having _no_ cake, and forced to eat sand into the bargain." I.e., JA is being treated like a disobedient, barely toilet-trained toddler!
And in that same vein, I would like to add a connection of dots I made yesterday. I had been really struck by JA's focus on Burney's _Camilla_ during the writing of these Rowling letters, especially given the two explicit allusions to _Camilla_ in _Northanger Abbey_, which, as _Susan_, was written by 1798. And the aspect of _Camilla_ which seems to have been of particular interest to JA was the idea of being trapped or thwarted, as apparently is what happens to Camilla a lot in that novel, and is exactly what John Thorpe does to Catherine when he will not let her get out of his fast-moving carriage--being literally stuck up a tree as a result of a practical joke by a foolish brother--hmmm...that really does sound like JA being trapped at Rowling.
And the allusion to Dr. Marchmont in Letter 5 is, as JA makes explicit, about meddling interference in young love, separating a young woman from the young man she loves. In that regard, Ellen, I think you have it backwards--it is Mary Harrison whom JA casts as a real life Camilla, _not_ Mary Lloyd!
But regardless of which Mary is the real-life Camilla, it should be leaping out at every Janeite by this point that Dr. Marchmont, the older well-intentioned meddling mentor, who causes Edgar Mandlebert to wait five _long_ volumes to finally come around to marrying Camilla, is a cross-gender model for Lady Russell causing Anne Elliot to wait seven (or is it eight?) long years to marry Wentworth!
Which makes me ask, did Jon Spence take note of this little tidbit in his book advocating for JA carrying a torch for Tom Lefroy? I don't recall.
But I do recall that these Rowling letters are being written less than eight months after "the Steventon firtations", and right after the (possible) encounter at Cork Street. So I claim it is very plausible to imagine that JA has been more or less told that she must go to Rowling, and then--what a surprise--she finds that she, like Sterne's starling, is trapped and can't get out!
A generation later, this is exactly what was done to the teenaged Anna Austen after she got involved in a relationship deemed undesirable by her parents with an older man named Dummer--she was sent to "Siberia" for a while, right?
At least it's a plausible possibility.
And what adds force to that notion is that JA apparently was _very_ focused on the character of Dr. Marchmont in 1796. That is what I discovered last night by a little digging and connecting of previously unconnected dots----John Wiltshire, in his _Recreating Jane Austen_, notes that JA, in her own personal copy of _Camilla_ (which is at the Bodleian), wrote something very interesting in the back of it:
"‘Since this work went to the press, a circumstance of some assistance to the happiness of Camilla has taken place, namely that _Dr. Marchmont has since died_”
!!!!
When you put that comment together with the comment on Marchmont at the end of Letter 5, probably written more or less contemporaneously (I suspect that JA had some time on her hands at Rowling and had her copy of _Camilla_ with her, fresh off the presses in 1796), we hear a great deal of anger, as the happiness of _Jane_ seems to require "some assistance", but it is not forthcoming! In her head, JA administers the death penalty to Dr. Marchmont to solve the problem. But that is just fantasy. In real life, she has no power at all, and she is stuck, up a tree, at Rowling---period.
Cheers,
Arnie
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