Diane Reynolds's return to the rhetorical fray in Janeites and Austen L has helped to spur discussion of Jane Austen's letters even further, and one of her several comments prompts me to elaborate as follows on the anamorphism of Jane Austen's novels, meaning, that there are two parallel fictional universes in each novel, the revealed (or overt) story, and the shadow story.
[Diane] "The genius of Jane Austen is that she lends herself to both readings. Her novels remind me of the Psych 101 picture, that, depending on how you look at it, is a young, beautiful woman or an old hag."
That is a famous modern example, Diane, which, as you suggest, had its roots in psychological testing (I think that one is from the Rorschach test), and, as I will argue below, it has partial applicability to Austen's novels.
The other good example, which is always given in the visual arts, is the famous Holbein painting The Ambassadors, where, when viewed face-on, you see a blurry image in one corner of the painting, but which, when viewed from one particular vantage point off to the far side, is then seen to be a skull. And there have been many less famous paintings over centuries which follow the same concept. There is one, of one of the English kings, in the National Portrait Gallery in London, where they direct the viewer to the one point of view where you can see the covert image. That was great fun to experience in person.
I claim that many of Shakespeare's plays are anamorphic in this same way, and Shakespeare explicitly invoked this idea of anamorphism in the famous speech about perspectives by the character Bushy in Richard II.
Norman Rabkin is one of the minority of Shakespeare scholars who have written about Shakespeare's anamorphism, and his favorite example is the so-called Henriad, which begins with Richard II and ends with Henry V, as to which Rabkin drew the analogy to the famous rabbit/duck figure-ground image. You can either read these plays as depicting the maturation of Henry as a noble patriot, or the maturation of Henry as a Machiavellian monster. Rabkin argued, and I agree, that this duality was entirely intentional on Shakespeare's part.
If my first book about Jane Austen is successful, my second book will be about the anamorphism of Shakespeare in general, and Hamlet in particular--Hamlet is, to me, Shakespeare's Emma---the most perfect embodiment of his anamorphic artistry.
And finally, getting back to Jane Austen---- I speak about the anamorphism of her novels in all my talks, naturally--in Portland, where my topic was Mrs. Tilney's mysterious fever as postpartum puerperal fever, I pointed to the discussion among Henry, Eleanor and Catherine atop Beechen Cliff, looking out on the city of Bath. Read it, you will see Jane Austen's ultra-sly version of the Bushy speech from Richard II, in the discussion of perspective.
And in a hundred other places in her novels, Jane Austen winked to the reader about her anamorphism. She knew exactly what she was doing, and her hand is as sure in Northanger Abbey as it was in Emma, evidencing (to me) that all the first three novels, despite having been originally written before the age of 25, were extensively revised by her after she was 35, i.e., after she had figured out how to create anamorphic novels with a sure hand.
My most important point, however, is that Jane Austen's shadow stories are completely independent of the revealed (or overt) story--they each use the same characters, but in the shadow story, the events which matter most are the very events which seem trivial or "filler" in the revealed (or overt) story. The revealed stories are pretty much from the primary heroine's perspective, the shadow stories are pretty much from the shadow heroine's perspective.
So the Ambassadors is a good example for illustrating the importance of point of view in seeing the two versions of Austen's stories--but the young woman/hag image is also a good example for illustrating the importance of paying extra attention to particular details in seeing the two versions.
And these two examples work together. The image of Willoughby as stalking Marianne in the first part of the novel popped into my head spontaneously in July 2002, but then I instinctively used that altered perspective or point of view in order to help me spot the textual clues which, in hindsight, were what led me to that spontaneous idea in the first place, but where not consciously visible without that altered assumption about Willoughby.
So in the revealed story, Willoughby is not stalking Marianne, but in the shadow story, Willoughby is stalking her--parallel fictional universes.
I also meant to add one more point about the idea of an unreliable narrator, because Austen's narration is at the center of her creation of anamorphism. Most people assume that an unreliable narrator means that you don't know whether to believe what the narrator says or not, and it would seem to generate chaos, if you have to decide on reliability at every point in the story.
However, that is absolutely not the case, and the reason is that Austen's narrator is meant to be taken in one of two completely different ways--like a fork in the road that begins on Page 1 of each novel. If you _consistently_ read the novel with trust that the narrator is a straight shooter who tells you all you need to know, and don't vary that approach throughout your entire reading, then you get the revealed (or overt) story.
But....if you _consistently_ read with trust that the narrator is a serpentine trickster who who makes you think you've been told all you need to know, but also winks about the part that has been concealed in plain sight, and you don't vary that approach throughout your entire reading, then you get the shadow story.
The word "consistently" is the key--you see the shadow story when you rely upon the narrator's _un_reliability, i.e., if you assume, for purposes of viewing JA's complex word "painting", the narrator's unreliability--a "reliable unreliability" if you will.
Just as you are not going to see the skull in The Ambassadors if you keep moving around here and there, you have to plant yourself firmly in one spot and view the entire painting from that skewed perspective.
What I have found is that many Janeites have glimpsed one piece of the shadow story of each novel and tried to integrate that piece into the revealed story. The most well known example is Edith Lank's article in Persuasions 20 years ago when she claimed that Miss Bates is actually Harriet Smith's mother, but there have been many others.
My most important discovery was realizing that you can't do that, without creating a monstrous elephant, which has a monkey's ears or a crab's claws. You should strive to either see a 100% elephant or a 100% kangaroo, and don't mix up the two!
Cheers, ARNIE
Thursday, January 20, 2011
I am a Jane-o-holic
Diane Reynolds joined the conversation in Janeites and Austen-L for the first time in a long while, with some very interesting comments about Letter #6 and its resonance to the writing style of Jane Austen's novels, to which I responded thusly:
[Diane] "As early as 20, JA has mastered the art of savage wit and shows an amazing control, starting the letter with a sentence that sets the tone for everything to follow by juxtaposing being "very gay" with "Mr. Claringbould's funeral" without a stopping for a breath. She was
already a master of irony. I see this a huge continuity between this and the novels. She is laughing her way through this letter while at the same time communicating a certain despair and knowing Cassandra will pick up on all the nuances."
In this, you and I have been in total agreement for a very long time, Diane, glad to have you back in the mix.
"My strong hunch is that JA is parodying a vacuous upper class voice in these letters. This is not her voice, but the voice of the village chorus, just as the narrative voice in her novels, I argue, is not a reliable narrative voice but the deliberately misleading din of the village chorus, a compendium of inaccurate gossip and half-fabricated chatter meant to deceive the reader."
What I've been saying for 6 years is that the voice, in the novels, is completely ambiguous--if read as a reasonably objective, forthcoming narrator, you get the revealed (or overt) story; if read as you just described, and/or as being filtered through the subjective consciousness of the heroine, then you get the shadow story. The rest, as they say, is commentary, and I have spent the last 6 years commenting. ;)
"Heaven help me, I've tried so hard, but I can't shake the JA bug. It's like shooting up opium, I imagine, only better. :)"
Repeat after me---My name is Diane and I am a Janeoholic. That's the first step--and then the next _eleven_ steps are to keep reading the next 11 letters with us! After that, you're on your own! ;
I have been a hopeless addict since 2000---it took me 5 years from the moment I entered the scene of dissipation and vice when my wife, a secret Janeite, tricked me into taking my first drink, when we went to see S&S in the movie theater in 1995-6. And then I found out about this group, and Nancy, a hardened ruthless dealer, and I was headed down the serpentine garden path toward self-immolation.
(Can you hand me the pipe, please, it's my turn for a smoke....)
And now a quick word relating DianA's felicitous choice of quotation for her own gracious acknowledgment to Ellen and myself---a quotation which happens to be extremely relevant to DianE's comments about ironic narration:
"With such a confederacy against her -- with a knowledge so intimate of his goodness -- with a conviction of his fond attachment to herself, which at last, though long after it was observable to everybody else, burst on her -- what could she do? "
Of course this is the narration a few paragraphs before the very end of S&S, describing Marianne's relenting and consenting to marry Brandon. I suggest that this sentence is amenable to two diametrically opposed readings--the usual reading, of course, is that the word "confederacy" is being used with perfumed irony, to suggest the friendliest and most well-meaning band of true friends of Marianne, guiding her to make the wisest decision in marriage (and my veiled allusion to the end of _Emma_ is entirely intentional).
However, the ironic reading is (ironically!) to take the words "such a confederacy against her...what could she do?" _literally_, as if there really _had_ been a group of other characters in the novel working covertly toward this ending from Day One----which leads to a very different reading of the novel, one that would be pleasing to those more-than-a-few Janeites who---Alan Rickman and David Morrissey notwithstanding---simply _cannot_ abide Marianne's decision to marry Brandon.
Ah, sweet addiction! ;)
Cheers,
Arnie
[Diane] "As early as 20, JA has mastered the art of savage wit and shows an amazing control, starting the letter with a sentence that sets the tone for everything to follow by juxtaposing being "very gay" with "Mr. Claringbould's funeral" without a stopping for a breath. She was
already a master of irony. I see this a huge continuity between this and the novels. She is laughing her way through this letter while at the same time communicating a certain despair and knowing Cassandra will pick up on all the nuances."
In this, you and I have been in total agreement for a very long time, Diane, glad to have you back in the mix.
"My strong hunch is that JA is parodying a vacuous upper class voice in these letters. This is not her voice, but the voice of the village chorus, just as the narrative voice in her novels, I argue, is not a reliable narrative voice but the deliberately misleading din of the village chorus, a compendium of inaccurate gossip and half-fabricated chatter meant to deceive the reader."
What I've been saying for 6 years is that the voice, in the novels, is completely ambiguous--if read as a reasonably objective, forthcoming narrator, you get the revealed (or overt) story; if read as you just described, and/or as being filtered through the subjective consciousness of the heroine, then you get the shadow story. The rest, as they say, is commentary, and I have spent the last 6 years commenting. ;)
"Heaven help me, I've tried so hard, but I can't shake the JA bug. It's like shooting up opium, I imagine, only better. :)"
Repeat after me---My name is Diane and I am a Janeoholic. That's the first step--and then the next _eleven_ steps are to keep reading the next 11 letters with us! After that, you're on your own! ;
I have been a hopeless addict since 2000---it took me 5 years from the moment I entered the scene of dissipation and vice when my wife, a secret Janeite, tricked me into taking my first drink, when we went to see S&S in the movie theater in 1995-6. And then I found out about this group, and Nancy, a hardened ruthless dealer, and I was headed down the serpentine garden path toward self-immolation.
(Can you hand me the pipe, please, it's my turn for a smoke....)
And now a quick word relating DianA's felicitous choice of quotation for her own gracious acknowledgment to Ellen and myself---a quotation which happens to be extremely relevant to DianE's comments about ironic narration:
"With such a confederacy against her -- with a knowledge so intimate of his goodness -- with a conviction of his fond attachment to herself, which at last, though long after it was observable to everybody else, burst on her -- what could she do? "
Of course this is the narration a few paragraphs before the very end of S&S, describing Marianne's relenting and consenting to marry Brandon. I suggest that this sentence is amenable to two diametrically opposed readings--the usual reading, of course, is that the word "confederacy" is being used with perfumed irony, to suggest the friendliest and most well-meaning band of true friends of Marianne, guiding her to make the wisest decision in marriage (and my veiled allusion to the end of _Emma_ is entirely intentional).
However, the ironic reading is (ironically!) to take the words "such a confederacy against her...what could she do?" _literally_, as if there really _had_ been a group of other characters in the novel working covertly toward this ending from Day One----which leads to a very different reading of the novel, one that would be pleasing to those more-than-a-few Janeites who---Alan Rickman and David Morrissey notwithstanding---simply _cannot_ abide Marianne's decision to marry Brandon.
Ah, sweet addiction! ;)
Cheers,
Arnie
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Getting to the Bottom of Jane Austen's Black Hole of England..and the sexual innuendo in the "woman" charade in _Emma_
[Ellen] "Arnie, if you are genuinely interested in the question of widow-burning and attitudes towards women in India v Britain, I'll try to find the articles I have someone on my computer. They are directed to a slightly later period because it's later the English got involved directly. Two books which have much information are Nancy Paxton's Writing Under the Raj_ and Pat Barr, the Memsahibs. These two focus on women -- and also on British women of the type Austen's aunt represents. Paxton's book has in fact a book by an author Austen read, Syney Owensen. The one usually cited is The Wild Irish Girl, but she also wrote the very interesting _Missionary_."
Ellen, whatever you can find conveniently, I would be interested in knowing about, yes, thanks; even if I don't have the time for an in-depth study of same, I would like at least to know something more about them--whatever Jane Austen might have known is my primary focus, so I would be particularly interested in knowing more about those books by Owensen--I'd also be curious to know whence came the notion that JA read Owensen?
[Ellen] "Yes, Arnie, we agree here: the perspective in the letter and books is anti-macho male but the accent in the letter and the novels too is more that these people can think of nothing better to do with themselves."
I think it's _both_: a lighter satire of men wasting time, for sure, but also a deeper satire of male privilege, the common denominator behind so much about JA's world that she wanted to be different.
[Nancy] "Like all those who glue themselves to TV sets to watch sports."
It's so funny you mentioned that, Nancy, because I just realized only yesterday that whatever chance I had of inducing a lot of _men_ to attend my Austenmania event down here in Fort Lauderdale this coming Sunday from 1 to 4 pm EST.....
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/09/austenmania-is-coming-to-miami-dade-and.html
...was reduced significantly by the scheduling of the NFC Championship game between the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers at 3 pm EST on Sunday!
But...the bright side, I suppose, is that there will likely be a lot of "football widows" that afternoon looking for something to do while their husbands watch the football games (there is also the AFC Championship game at 6:30 pm EST), and so, with the publicity I have been able to secure for the event, there might be even more married women showing up for my event than otherwise might have occurred! And they can then go back and tell their husbands what they missed! ;)
[Ellen] "If you were trying to suggest that anal intercourse is punned on in Austen's words, I don't think so. The two uses of "hole" are natural (it was a black hole, the man's name is Holwell) and there is nothing uncomfortable (my pun is intended) in the lines to suggest anything sexual of that nature."
Ellen, I don't know what I wrote that prompted you to write that, as I did not recall presenting my thoughts on the sexual innuendo in the phrase "black hole". However...I must have written something to give you that impression, and you are entirely correct that it was indeed on my mind right from the first moment I focused on that reference to the Black Hole of Calcutta. However, it was not "sodomy" that I was thinking of but, following JA's lead in her references to one wife for two husbands, _heterosexual_ intercourse.
It is not just in the Sharade on James the First in JA' History of England, with its clear gay subtext, that JA deploys the sexual pun on the word "whole". That word also makes a crucial appearance in the first charade (the one JA took from a popular riddle book, where the official answer, "woman", is implied but never actually stated) in Chapter 9 of Emma:
"My first doth affliction denote,
Which my second is destin'd to feel
And my whole is the best antidote
That affliction to soften and heal. "
At my presentation in Oxford in July 2007, I pointed out that this charade not only has a second secret answer, "heartfiel", which was first discovered by Colleen Sheehan and described in her article in the 2000 issue of Persuasions....
http://www59.homepage.villanova.edu/colleen.sheehan/emma.html
....but this charade also has a _third_ sexual solution, which dispenses entirely with the normal charadic combining of syllables to form a new word, but instead is based on the _meaning_ of each line. The first line refers to the "affliction" suffered by men when they are sexually aroused (i.e., tumescence), which a certain part of the male anatomy (which I don't think I need to name explicitly) "is destin'd to feel", as to which a certain part of a _woman's_ anatomy (represented by the homonym of the word "whole") is most definitely "the best antidote that affliction to soften and heal".
Again, this charade was not written by JA herself (I believe I know who was the author, himself a famous man---but that is a topic for my book), but in my opinion she included it precisely because JA was aware of the hidden answers, and how they relate to the sexual undercurrents of true love coursing beneath the surface of _Emma_ .
She understood, in a very profound way, that this seemingly trivial little charade was actually a mini-masterpiece of covert self-reference, since the official answer to that charade is "woman"; the secondary answer is "heartfiel", which is the magical potion Puck sprinkles on Titania to make her fall in passionate love with Bottom; and the tertiary answer is that the entire charade itself is a description of the act of heterosexual intercourse, which, paradoxically, is what Titania wishes to engage in with "Bottom"!
As JA wrote the Sharade on James the First while still a teenager, and wrote _Emma_ in her thirties, I think it is a safe assumption that when she was 21, she was also perfectly capable of deploying the sexual pun on "whole" in a sexually charged sentence in a letter to her sister (who, after all, was the illustrator of JA's History of England!)
Cheers, ARNIE
Ellen, whatever you can find conveniently, I would be interested in knowing about, yes, thanks; even if I don't have the time for an in-depth study of same, I would like at least to know something more about them--whatever Jane Austen might have known is my primary focus, so I would be particularly interested in knowing more about those books by Owensen--I'd also be curious to know whence came the notion that JA read Owensen?
[Ellen] "Yes, Arnie, we agree here: the perspective in the letter and books is anti-macho male but the accent in the letter and the novels too is more that these people can think of nothing better to do with themselves."
I think it's _both_: a lighter satire of men wasting time, for sure, but also a deeper satire of male privilege, the common denominator behind so much about JA's world that she wanted to be different.
[Nancy] "Like all those who glue themselves to TV sets to watch sports."
It's so funny you mentioned that, Nancy, because I just realized only yesterday that whatever chance I had of inducing a lot of _men_ to attend my Austenmania event down here in Fort Lauderdale this coming Sunday from 1 to 4 pm EST.....
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/09/austenmania-is-coming-to-miami-dade-and.html
...was reduced significantly by the scheduling of the NFC Championship game between the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers at 3 pm EST on Sunday!
But...the bright side, I suppose, is that there will likely be a lot of "football widows" that afternoon looking for something to do while their husbands watch the football games (there is also the AFC Championship game at 6:30 pm EST), and so, with the publicity I have been able to secure for the event, there might be even more married women showing up for my event than otherwise might have occurred! And they can then go back and tell their husbands what they missed! ;)
[Ellen] "If you were trying to suggest that anal intercourse is punned on in Austen's words, I don't think so. The two uses of "hole" are natural (it was a black hole, the man's name is Holwell) and there is nothing uncomfortable (my pun is intended) in the lines to suggest anything sexual of that nature."
Ellen, I don't know what I wrote that prompted you to write that, as I did not recall presenting my thoughts on the sexual innuendo in the phrase "black hole". However...I must have written something to give you that impression, and you are entirely correct that it was indeed on my mind right from the first moment I focused on that reference to the Black Hole of Calcutta. However, it was not "sodomy" that I was thinking of but, following JA's lead in her references to one wife for two husbands, _heterosexual_ intercourse.
It is not just in the Sharade on James the First in JA' History of England, with its clear gay subtext, that JA deploys the sexual pun on the word "whole". That word also makes a crucial appearance in the first charade (the one JA took from a popular riddle book, where the official answer, "woman", is implied but never actually stated) in Chapter 9 of Emma:
"My first doth affliction denote,
Which my second is destin'd to feel
And my whole is the best antidote
That affliction to soften and heal. "
At my presentation in Oxford in July 2007, I pointed out that this charade not only has a second secret answer, "heartfiel", which was first discovered by Colleen Sheehan and described in her article in the 2000 issue of Persuasions....
http://www59.homepage.villanova.edu/colleen.sheehan/emma.html
....but this charade also has a _third_ sexual solution, which dispenses entirely with the normal charadic combining of syllables to form a new word, but instead is based on the _meaning_ of each line. The first line refers to the "affliction" suffered by men when they are sexually aroused (i.e., tumescence), which a certain part of the male anatomy (which I don't think I need to name explicitly) "is destin'd to feel", as to which a certain part of a _woman's_ anatomy (represented by the homonym of the word "whole") is most definitely "the best antidote that affliction to soften and heal".
Again, this charade was not written by JA herself (I believe I know who was the author, himself a famous man---but that is a topic for my book), but in my opinion she included it precisely because JA was aware of the hidden answers, and how they relate to the sexual undercurrents of true love coursing beneath the surface of _Emma_ .
She understood, in a very profound way, that this seemingly trivial little charade was actually a mini-masterpiece of covert self-reference, since the official answer to that charade is "woman"; the secondary answer is "heartfiel", which is the magical potion Puck sprinkles on Titania to make her fall in passionate love with Bottom; and the tertiary answer is that the entire charade itself is a description of the act of heterosexual intercourse, which, paradoxically, is what Titania wishes to engage in with "Bottom"!
As JA wrote the Sharade on James the First while still a teenager, and wrote _Emma_ in her thirties, I think it is a safe assumption that when she was 21, she was also perfectly capable of deploying the sexual pun on "whole" in a sexually charged sentence in a letter to her sister (who, after all, was the illustrator of JA's History of England!)
Cheers, ARNIE
Amiable Young Men!
Letter #6 has proved to be the richest source yet for discussion in Janeites and Austen-L of veiled allusions to all sorts of matters in her world.
Here is the passage in Letter #6 which provoked an interesting exchange today:
"Edward and Fly went out yesterday very early in a couple of shooting jackets, and came home like a couple of bad shots, for they killed nothing at all. They are out again to-day, and are not yet returned. Delightful sport! They are just come home, Edward with his two brace, Frank with his two and a half. What amiable young men!"
[Diana Birchall] "I'm interested that people seem to see this comment as being sarcastic, against her bird-murdering brothers."
I love the sound of that incongruous rhyme of "bird-murdering", nicely done, Diana!
[Diana] "But I read it differently. I don't think it ever entered into Jane Austen's head to be against bird killing; it was too much a part of country life, and she ate those birds and knew where they came from. Nobody thought shooting birds was a bad thing then - that's a much later invention."
I agree with Ellen [Moody] on this one, with a caveat. Yes, of course Diana is correct that hunting for food was a normal part of rural life back then, and it would have been hypocrisy for anyone other than a vegetarian (which JA was not) to suggest that killing the birds to provide the meat was per se immoral or even worthy of ridicule.
However....I do believe that JA also was inclined to mock men who got their macho kicks shooting birds, and then boasting about how many, etc., especially if the men who sought vainglory in this way otherwise had no useful career and spent a good deal of their time doing not very much of use to society--besides shooting birds, they went to balls, played cards or gambled, and went on outings of pleasure. Someone like Frank Churchill or Willoughby, e.g.
In short, I think JA saw the killing of birds as a necessary evil, one that it was unsavory and immoral to enjoy too much.
[Diana] "In her books she paints most attractive and natural pictures of hunting (Charles Musgrove is certainly an amiable young man)"
Well, there I strongly disagree. While Charles Musgrove is not a villain, he's no hero either, not by a long shot. I think JA saw Charles Musgrove as a self-absorbed idler, who, whether or not he had native intelligence, had never developed much of it by reading or other study, and therefore had not much going on between his ears---he was a time-waster, and a guy Anne Elliot never gave a serious thought to as a potential husband. He thinks Mary is a pain in the butt, but he's no prize as a husband either--they deserve each other!
And as for the ironic use of the word "amiable" by JA, remember what Mr. Knightley says: "No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English."
[Diana] "and I think she literally did think Edward and Frank were out having a good time and*were* "amiable young men.""
And I think JA, in addition to her frequent and persistent ridiculing of brother Edward, also had lots of negative opinions about James Austen, too, and his hunting obsession would have been one of them. As for Frank, though, I suspect JA did not begrudge her elder sailor brother the sport, as she knew it was a rare experience for him, and that he would soon be out at sea for long stretches when there would not be much fun at all, and sometimes danger.
Ellen is also perceptive in noting the subtle difference between the words "shooting" and "killing". In 2011 America, as we all know far too well from the recent tragic events in Tucson, _both_ of those words have an ugly connotation because they almost never are used in public discourse as referring to sustenance hunting in the wild, and are almost always associated with human beings shooting, and often killing, other human beings. However, in JA's time, the reverse was true, people were not shooting each other right and left, and "shooting" was therefore very much of a euphemism, and JA pointedly eschews that euphemism in Letter #6.
[Ellen] "...a dislike of hunting as cruel can be found in poems of the 1680s, Margaret Cavendish's Hunting the Hare is just a famous instance."
Now, that is a very interesting reference by Ellen, of which I had not previously been aware. I just read some of the verses of Cavendish's poem, in particular the following which relates to what I've been saying about the hunting episode in Letter #6:
"Men, hooping loud, such acclamations make, As if the Devil they did prisoner take, When they do but a shiftless creature kill; To hunt there needs no valiant solder's skill."
Per Katie Whitaker's bio of the same name, "Mad Madge" also wrote "A Dialogue of Birds": "Walking in the fields and woods, Margaret listened as sparrow, magpie, finches, linnet, partridge, woodcock, quail, peewit, snipe, swallow, and parrot each told of mankind's particular cruelties to their kind--hunting them with dogs and hawks, wasting their flesh in gluttonous feasting, shooting them for eating a little fruit, [etc.]"
That's precisely what I am talking about, the way many men went about hunting was not "kosher", and I use that term in the Jewish sense, that it was often not done in the most scrupulously moral way possible.
And I think this is actually a very important, even crucial, point in understanding JA's moral perspective, it is all of a piece with JA's critique of the many ways in which privileged men (but also privileged women) wasted their potential, and patted themselves on the back for doing not much of any good in the world. She also hated the exploitation and abuse of the weaker by the stronger. I don't think JA really found such men or women at all charming or amiable!
And it's no accident that Gay's fable "The Hare and Many Friends" appears twice in her novels.
JA was acutely sensitive to animals as metaphorical stand-ins for the weakest of humans, in particular, women, who were "hunted" for sport by the likes of Henry Crawford, just for the pleasure of making a hole in their hearts, or Willoughby (another of JA's hunters). The same men doing the hunting in the same way, with different "prey". And of course JA also decried the status of English wives as breeding animals.
Cheers, ARNIE
Here is the passage in Letter #6 which provoked an interesting exchange today:
"Edward and Fly went out yesterday very early in a couple of shooting jackets, and came home like a couple of bad shots, for they killed nothing at all. They are out again to-day, and are not yet returned. Delightful sport! They are just come home, Edward with his two brace, Frank with his two and a half. What amiable young men!"
[Diana Birchall] "I'm interested that people seem to see this comment as being sarcastic, against her bird-murdering brothers."
I love the sound of that incongruous rhyme of "bird-murdering", nicely done, Diana!
[Diana] "But I read it differently. I don't think it ever entered into Jane Austen's head to be against bird killing; it was too much a part of country life, and she ate those birds and knew where they came from. Nobody thought shooting birds was a bad thing then - that's a much later invention."
I agree with Ellen [Moody] on this one, with a caveat. Yes, of course Diana is correct that hunting for food was a normal part of rural life back then, and it would have been hypocrisy for anyone other than a vegetarian (which JA was not) to suggest that killing the birds to provide the meat was per se immoral or even worthy of ridicule.
However....I do believe that JA also was inclined to mock men who got their macho kicks shooting birds, and then boasting about how many, etc., especially if the men who sought vainglory in this way otherwise had no useful career and spent a good deal of their time doing not very much of use to society--besides shooting birds, they went to balls, played cards or gambled, and went on outings of pleasure. Someone like Frank Churchill or Willoughby, e.g.
In short, I think JA saw the killing of birds as a necessary evil, one that it was unsavory and immoral to enjoy too much.
[Diana] "In her books she paints most attractive and natural pictures of hunting (Charles Musgrove is certainly an amiable young man)"
Well, there I strongly disagree. While Charles Musgrove is not a villain, he's no hero either, not by a long shot. I think JA saw Charles Musgrove as a self-absorbed idler, who, whether or not he had native intelligence, had never developed much of it by reading or other study, and therefore had not much going on between his ears---he was a time-waster, and a guy Anne Elliot never gave a serious thought to as a potential husband. He thinks Mary is a pain in the butt, but he's no prize as a husband either--they deserve each other!
And as for the ironic use of the word "amiable" by JA, remember what Mr. Knightley says: "No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English."
[Diana] "and I think she literally did think Edward and Frank were out having a good time and*were* "amiable young men.""
And I think JA, in addition to her frequent and persistent ridiculing of brother Edward, also had lots of negative opinions about James Austen, too, and his hunting obsession would have been one of them. As for Frank, though, I suspect JA did not begrudge her elder sailor brother the sport, as she knew it was a rare experience for him, and that he would soon be out at sea for long stretches when there would not be much fun at all, and sometimes danger.
Ellen is also perceptive in noting the subtle difference between the words "shooting" and "killing". In 2011 America, as we all know far too well from the recent tragic events in Tucson, _both_ of those words have an ugly connotation because they almost never are used in public discourse as referring to sustenance hunting in the wild, and are almost always associated with human beings shooting, and often killing, other human beings. However, in JA's time, the reverse was true, people were not shooting each other right and left, and "shooting" was therefore very much of a euphemism, and JA pointedly eschews that euphemism in Letter #6.
[Ellen] "...a dislike of hunting as cruel can be found in poems of the 1680s, Margaret Cavendish's Hunting the Hare is just a famous instance."
Now, that is a very interesting reference by Ellen, of which I had not previously been aware. I just read some of the verses of Cavendish's poem, in particular the following which relates to what I've been saying about the hunting episode in Letter #6:
"Men, hooping loud, such acclamations make, As if the Devil they did prisoner take, When they do but a shiftless creature kill; To hunt there needs no valiant solder's skill."
Per Katie Whitaker's bio of the same name, "Mad Madge" also wrote "A Dialogue of Birds": "Walking in the fields and woods, Margaret listened as sparrow, magpie, finches, linnet, partridge, woodcock, quail, peewit, snipe, swallow, and parrot each told of mankind's particular cruelties to their kind--hunting them with dogs and hawks, wasting their flesh in gluttonous feasting, shooting them for eating a little fruit, [etc.]"
That's precisely what I am talking about, the way many men went about hunting was not "kosher", and I use that term in the Jewish sense, that it was often not done in the most scrupulously moral way possible.
And I think this is actually a very important, even crucial, point in understanding JA's moral perspective, it is all of a piece with JA's critique of the many ways in which privileged men (but also privileged women) wasted their potential, and patted themselves on the back for doing not much of any good in the world. She also hated the exploitation and abuse of the weaker by the stronger. I don't think JA really found such men or women at all charming or amiable!
And it's no accident that Gay's fable "The Hare and Many Friends" appears twice in her novels.
JA was acutely sensitive to animals as metaphorical stand-ins for the weakest of humans, in particular, women, who were "hunted" for sport by the likes of Henry Crawford, just for the pleasure of making a hole in their hearts, or Willoughby (another of JA's hunters). The same men doing the hunting in the same way, with different "prey". And of course JA also decried the status of English wives as breeding animals.
Cheers, ARNIE
Jane Austen's Black Hole of England...and Two English Husbands for one English Wife
Ellen's new blog entry also contains a very interesting reaction to my posting yesterday of that excerpt from Holwell's description of Indian wives throwing themselves on their deceased husbands' funeral pyres:
[Ellen] "It should be said that the description of the widow eager to be burnt to death in the article by the Royal Society is a common description of women at the time and since -- ultimately from the families who stood to gain her property by her death. There is much literature which argues these are falsifying (of course texts which say they are perfectly accurate). When the British went about to stamp out widow-burning, there arose a whole literature on this. I did a project on Paul Scott's /Raj Quartet/ and through my reading in post-colonialist texts nowadays and 19th century travel literature (among this is Anthony Trollope) I've only time just to vouch for it, and can if anyone likes on another day offer names of books/articles. I've also read an article about 19th century norms for widows comparing widowhood in the west with widow-burning: of course the latter is horrendous and the former merely repressive but there are a few thematic parallels. There was remarriage within families; women were very much regarded as secondary creatures (as today in some countries in Africa women suffer very badly by a lack of valuing them)."
I am very glad to see that my connecting the dots between JA's Letter #6 and Holwell's widow-burning account taps into an even deeper vein of contemporary resonance between India and England than I had realized. All that Ellen alludes to in her above comments fits with what I believe was JA's own fierce outrage toward the many horrors which English wives endured, and, given her great interest in the wider world, how those English horrors were sadly echoed in distant lands like India.
I also was pleased to see that Ellen was reminded of another Indian connection of JA and her family:
"Austen is on-record in /Catherine, or The Bower/ (through irony) deploring the selling of oneself to British husbands in India -- that was the case with her aunt, her father's sister, Philadelphia, who went to India and married Tysoe Saul Hancock and left him when Hastings and his wife sailed to the UK -- never to return. My guess is Austen had sympathy for her aunt and (though never broached on paper) she might have had understanding for Philadelphia having had Eliza by Hastings.
I was pleased, because last night, before reading Ellen's blog, I was probing on the Web to find even more in JA's suggestive invocation of the Black Hole of Calcutta in Letter #6, and I found material that reminded me of two matters which I already knew, but had not connected to Letter #6, to wit:
#1: In 1759, i.e., three years after Holwell's Black Hole nightmare, Tysoe and Philadelphia Hancock moved to Fort William in Calcutta, where they become friends with Warren Hastings, who of course became Governor General not merely of Bengal, but of all of British India.
So the Black Hole of Calcutta would have been a place Phila Hancock would have had a unique connection to, and therefore JA would have been led to read Holwell's account by what she had heard from her aunt and perhaps also her cousin Eliza on that very subject!
#2: The ongoing debate about whether Eliza Hancock de Feuillide Austen was really Warren Hastings's illegitimate daughter sired on Phila Hancock.
And this is the mother lode, I think, where that sentence in Letter #6 was pointing in the most subtle way----could JA's mocking fantasy of one _English_ woman being "married to", i.e., having an ongoing intimate relationship with, _two English_ men be the deepest meaning of JA's comment in Letter #6? How rich an irony, to start with England, bounce over to India, and then bounce again to England in India, in the veiled triangle of Phila, Warren, and Tysoe!
And to turn this triangle into a rectangle, it is well known among Janeites that Warren Hastings's first wife was Mary Buchanan, a widow of an officer. What is not well known is that Mary's officer husband had died _in the Black Hole of Calcutta_, he was one of those who were trampled!
From the following website...
http://www.indianetzone.com/37/warren_hastings_first_governor_general_bengal.htm
...I learnt the following:
From what I can gather (and perhaps Diana can refine this info), "Mary Buchanan gave birth to two children [sired by Hastings], one of whom died in infancy at Murshidabad and another was sent to England. Mrs.Buchanan died on 11th July, 1759 and the second son also died before his father`s [i.e., Hastings's] return to England. After the death of [Hastings's] sons and wife, he indulged himself in literary society and was acquainted with Samuel Johnson and Lord Mansfield."
And, I might add, with Phila Hancock, who arrived in Calcutta more or less at the same time as Hastings was widowed.
So the Austen family connections to the Black Hole of Calcutta grow more and more dense!
Cheers, ARNIE
[Ellen] "It should be said that the description of the widow eager to be burnt to death in the article by the Royal Society is a common description of women at the time and since -- ultimately from the families who stood to gain her property by her death. There is much literature which argues these are falsifying (of course texts which say they are perfectly accurate). When the British went about to stamp out widow-burning, there arose a whole literature on this. I did a project on Paul Scott's /Raj Quartet/ and through my reading in post-colonialist texts nowadays and 19th century travel literature (among this is Anthony Trollope) I've only time just to vouch for it, and can if anyone likes on another day offer names of books/articles. I've also read an article about 19th century norms for widows comparing widowhood in the west with widow-burning: of course the latter is horrendous and the former merely repressive but there are a few thematic parallels. There was remarriage within families; women were very much regarded as secondary creatures (as today in some countries in Africa women suffer very badly by a lack of valuing them)."
I am very glad to see that my connecting the dots between JA's Letter #6 and Holwell's widow-burning account taps into an even deeper vein of contemporary resonance between India and England than I had realized. All that Ellen alludes to in her above comments fits with what I believe was JA's own fierce outrage toward the many horrors which English wives endured, and, given her great interest in the wider world, how those English horrors were sadly echoed in distant lands like India.
I also was pleased to see that Ellen was reminded of another Indian connection of JA and her family:
"Austen is on-record in /Catherine, or The Bower/ (through irony) deploring the selling of oneself to British husbands in India -- that was the case with her aunt, her father's sister, Philadelphia, who went to India and married Tysoe Saul Hancock and left him when Hastings and his wife sailed to the UK -- never to return. My guess is Austen had sympathy for her aunt and (though never broached on paper) she might have had understanding for Philadelphia having had Eliza by Hastings.
I was pleased, because last night, before reading Ellen's blog, I was probing on the Web to find even more in JA's suggestive invocation of the Black Hole of Calcutta in Letter #6, and I found material that reminded me of two matters which I already knew, but had not connected to Letter #6, to wit:
#1: In 1759, i.e., three years after Holwell's Black Hole nightmare, Tysoe and Philadelphia Hancock moved to Fort William in Calcutta, where they become friends with Warren Hastings, who of course became Governor General not merely of Bengal, but of all of British India.
So the Black Hole of Calcutta would have been a place Phila Hancock would have had a unique connection to, and therefore JA would have been led to read Holwell's account by what she had heard from her aunt and perhaps also her cousin Eliza on that very subject!
#2: The ongoing debate about whether Eliza Hancock de Feuillide Austen was really Warren Hastings's illegitimate daughter sired on Phila Hancock.
And this is the mother lode, I think, where that sentence in Letter #6 was pointing in the most subtle way----could JA's mocking fantasy of one _English_ woman being "married to", i.e., having an ongoing intimate relationship with, _two English_ men be the deepest meaning of JA's comment in Letter #6? How rich an irony, to start with England, bounce over to India, and then bounce again to England in India, in the veiled triangle of Phila, Warren, and Tysoe!
And to turn this triangle into a rectangle, it is well known among Janeites that Warren Hastings's first wife was Mary Buchanan, a widow of an officer. What is not well known is that Mary's officer husband had died _in the Black Hole of Calcutta_, he was one of those who were trampled!
From the following website...
http://www.indianetzone.com/37/warren_hastings_first_governor_general_bengal.htm
...I learnt the following:
From what I can gather (and perhaps Diana can refine this info), "Mary Buchanan gave birth to two children [sired by Hastings], one of whom died in infancy at Murshidabad and another was sent to England. Mrs.Buchanan died on 11th July, 1759 and the second son also died before his father`s [i.e., Hastings's] return to England. After the death of [Hastings's] sons and wife, he indulged himself in literary society and was acquainted with Samuel Johnson and Lord Mansfield."
And, I might add, with Phila Hancock, who arrived in Calcutta more or less at the same time as Hastings was widowed.
So the Austen family connections to the Black Hole of Calcutta grow more and more dense!
Cheers, ARNIE
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Jane Austen's Black Hole of England
The continuing discussion of Jane Austen's Letter #6 dated September 1796 in Janeites and Austen-L turned at one point to the following passage in that letter:
"Mr Children's two Sons are going to be married, John & George-. They are to have one wife between them, a Miss Holwell, who belongs to the Black Hole at Calcutta."
This passage has never been discussed more than in passing by any Austen's biographer, as far as I can tell, except for Deirdre Le Faye, who in her edition of the Letters, pointed out the important factoid that Miss Holwell, part of the social circle of her brother Edward Austen and his wife Elizabeth at Rowling in Kent, was the granddaughter of a famous person from 18th Century history, John Zephaniah Holwell, who in 1756 lived through a horrible day and night in the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta and survived to write about it, his account having become famous throughout England by Jane Austen's time.
At first, I myself did not make more of this short passage, other than to have a good time myself riffing on the names of the two prospective husbands of Miss Holwell:
"The shadow story of that comment is that Mr. Children's two Sons were not only polygamous, they were also gay, and so, after they got married to their two (not one, as JA thought) "wives", they performed as a musical group at local assemblies, under the stage name "the Quadrille", but sometimes were also affectionately known by their Christian names:
John, Paul, George & Ringo."
After Christy Somer pointed out the correspondence between "Holwell" and "Hole", I observed that Jane Austen had noticed this coincidental pun, and had not been able to resist making some sort of joke out of it, in this case the sharing of one wife by two brothers.
However, as soon as I sent the above message about Holwell and the Black Hole of Calcutta, I realized that there might be more to this than a silly trivial pun, so I went back to Google Books on a hunch, following up on my sense that Jane Austen's seemingly absurd reference to two men sharing one wife was in some way pointing toward, and connected to, the culturally alien world of the Asian subcontinent where Holwell and his men endured their Black Hole horror.
And sure enough, I found something extraordinary in the published account written by that very same John Zephaniah Holwell years after his return to England, in which he not only told the horrible tale of what happened to him and his 146 men in the Black Hole of Calcutta (graphic detailed descriptions which sounded like the horrors experienced by Jews being shipped in cattle cars to Auschwitz--which is why 80% of the English prisoners died overnight), but he also brought to bear his considerable learning about the culture and religion of India, in lengthy descriptions and analyses of same.
And that was when I saw with delight that my hunch was spot-on, as I will now explain.
First here again is the relevant excerpt from Jane Austen's Letter #6:
"Mr Children's two Sons are going to be married, John & George-. THEY ARE TO HAVE BUT ONE WIFE BETWEEN THEM, a Miss Holwell, who belongs to the Black Hole at Calcutta."
And now here is the passage that Holwell wrote, as part of a lengthy description of the curious custom, after the death of a Brahmin husband, of his wife (or if he had more than one wife, all of them) fiercely competing for the honor and sanctification of being allowed to be burned alive in her husband's funeral pyre (or "pile" as Holwell calls it). This was one particularly extraordinary instance of a very determined wife:
"At five of the clock on the morning of the 4th of February, 1742-3, died Rhaant Chund Pundit of the Mahahrattor tribe aged twenty-eight years; his widow (FOR HE HAD BUT ONE WIFE) aged between seventeen and eighteen, as soon as he expired, disdaining to wait the term allowed her
for reflection, immediately declared to the Bramins and witnesses present her resolution to burn ; as the family was of no small consideration, all the merchants of Cossimbuzaar, and her relations, left no arguments unessayed to dissuade her from it—Lady Russell, with the tenderest humanity, sent her several messages to the same purpose;—the infant state of her children (two girls and a boy, the eldest not four years of age) and the terrors and pain of the death me sought, were painted to her in the strongest and most lively colouring—she was deaf to all,—she gratefully thanked Lady Russell, and sent her word she had now nothing to live for, but recommended her children to her protection.—When the torments of burning were urged in terrorem to her, she with a resolved and calm countenance, put her finger into the fire, and held it there a considerable time, time, she then with one hand put fire in the palm of the other, sprinkled incense oil it, and fumigated the Bramins. The consideration of her children left destitute of a parent was again urged to her.—She replied, be that made them, would take care of them. She was at last given to understands she should not be permitted to burn; this for a short space seemed to give her deep affliction, but soon recollecting herself, she told them, death was in her power, and that if she 'was not allowed to burn, according to the principles of her calling she would starve herself.—Her friends, finding her thus peremptory and resolved, were obliged at last to assent. "
So now we see Austen's absurdism having a rational foundation--she has read Holwell's account, and her attention was naturally drawn, exactly as I would have expected, to the description by an Englishman of the self-destructive behavior of Indian women.
Jane Austen has cast the Children sons as if they were Indian princes, who would invert the Indian polygamous custom by sharing a wife, who would then endure the English version of the Black Hole of Calcutta, which was the gauntlet of serial childbirth and death that was the fate of so many English wives.
As I have mentioned in this blog several times before, my presentation at the JASNA Annual General Meeting in Portland a few months ago was all about the fundamental theme of Northanger Abbey, which was the English version of that Indian conjugal horror---i.e., English wives accepting the role of perpetually pregnant breeding animal, each time risking death in childbirth or its aftermath, an epidemic in Jane Austen's time--a custom that perhaps the Indians would have found equally as bizarre, incomprehensible, and barbaric as the English would have found the self-immolating lust of the Indian wife.
And that is, I assert, what was on JA's mind when she wrote that seemingly off the wall sentence, it is seen to have all the power and compression of thought of poetry.
And finally, when i posted the above comments in Janeites and Austen L, I completely forgot to point out the sharpest point of JA's acidulous satire, in her veiled allusion to John Zephaniah Holwell's above captioned account of India.
To wit: it is that JA cast _Holwell's own granddaughter_ in the role of one of the Indian wives who chooses to die on her husband's funeral pyre. I sense that Austen resented Holwell's blithe tolerance for exotic Indian customs such as this, as he advises his English readers not to be too quick to judge such practices as barbaric, and he expresses a kind of detached admiration as he describes how many Indian wives at first were eager to die in their husband's funeral pyre, only to experience "fire remorse" at the last minute--but it was too late, the rules of that twisted game were that once a wife chose to burn, she was not allowed to change her mind at the last minute. And I think that JA also read Holwell's account of his and his men's horrible suffering while confined in the Black Hole of Calcutta, and thought, "Men! If they only knew the pain of childbirth, they would find out how courageous their wives really were!"
So all in all, that little sentence, seeming a silly absurd throwaway, is actually a marvel of poetic compression, as it points to a world of female suffering, Indian and English wives united in their victimhood as being a good wife means valuing your own survival at a pin's worth.
Also, I just found a 1945 medical book entitled _Control of Pain in Childbirth, Anesthesia, Analgesia, Amnesia_ in which the authors pick up on the very metaphor I think JA was pointing to:
"The pain of child-bearing has always been woman's heritage. The Black Hole of Calcutta was no more horrible in the history of mankind than have been the abuses of womankind in her hour of travail. The forgotten woman in the history of civilization has been the woman enduring the
most unjust of all human sufferings--the travail of childbirth...."
And Jim Morrison thought he was only channeling Lord Byron when he wrote "And our love become a funeral pyre" in his biggest hit, Light My Fire---he had no idea that he was also inadvertently echoing JA, who saw marriage and childbirth as a super-slow-motion funeral pyre, in which English wives found themselves doomed to roast slowly over two decades, or death in childbirth, whichever came first.
So, for all of the above reasons, I chose "Jane's Black Hole of England" as the title of this post, because even before she reached the age of 21, I can see that Jane Austen was already a very strong critic of procreation within the framework of the traditional English marriage, and the horrors that the English wife was excepted to grin and bear (so to speak).
And if Jane Austen could have spent a few minutes in the 20th century long enough to learn something about modern physics, she would surely have woven into that sentence an additional metaphor connected to the concept of the black hole, with its overpowering gravity that allows nothing, even light, to escape from it. That was how she saw English marriage, a black hole which an English woman entered, never to again escape except through death, unless she was one of the lucky ones who lived past menopause with her health intact.
Cheers, ARNIE
"Mr Children's two Sons are going to be married, John & George-. They are to have one wife between them, a Miss Holwell, who belongs to the Black Hole at Calcutta."
This passage has never been discussed more than in passing by any Austen's biographer, as far as I can tell, except for Deirdre Le Faye, who in her edition of the Letters, pointed out the important factoid that Miss Holwell, part of the social circle of her brother Edward Austen and his wife Elizabeth at Rowling in Kent, was the granddaughter of a famous person from 18th Century history, John Zephaniah Holwell, who in 1756 lived through a horrible day and night in the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta and survived to write about it, his account having become famous throughout England by Jane Austen's time.
At first, I myself did not make more of this short passage, other than to have a good time myself riffing on the names of the two prospective husbands of Miss Holwell:
"The shadow story of that comment is that Mr. Children's two Sons were not only polygamous, they were also gay, and so, after they got married to their two (not one, as JA thought) "wives", they performed as a musical group at local assemblies, under the stage name "the Quadrille", but sometimes were also affectionately known by their Christian names:
John, Paul, George & Ringo."
After Christy Somer pointed out the correspondence between "Holwell" and "Hole", I observed that Jane Austen had noticed this coincidental pun, and had not been able to resist making some sort of joke out of it, in this case the sharing of one wife by two brothers.
However, as soon as I sent the above message about Holwell and the Black Hole of Calcutta, I realized that there might be more to this than a silly trivial pun, so I went back to Google Books on a hunch, following up on my sense that Jane Austen's seemingly absurd reference to two men sharing one wife was in some way pointing toward, and connected to, the culturally alien world of the Asian subcontinent where Holwell and his men endured their Black Hole horror.
And sure enough, I found something extraordinary in the published account written by that very same John Zephaniah Holwell years after his return to England, in which he not only told the horrible tale of what happened to him and his 146 men in the Black Hole of Calcutta (graphic detailed descriptions which sounded like the horrors experienced by Jews being shipped in cattle cars to Auschwitz--which is why 80% of the English prisoners died overnight), but he also brought to bear his considerable learning about the culture and religion of India, in lengthy descriptions and analyses of same.
And that was when I saw with delight that my hunch was spot-on, as I will now explain.
First here again is the relevant excerpt from Jane Austen's Letter #6:
"Mr Children's two Sons are going to be married, John & George-. THEY ARE TO HAVE BUT ONE WIFE BETWEEN THEM, a Miss Holwell, who belongs to the Black Hole at Calcutta."
And now here is the passage that Holwell wrote, as part of a lengthy description of the curious custom, after the death of a Brahmin husband, of his wife (or if he had more than one wife, all of them) fiercely competing for the honor and sanctification of being allowed to be burned alive in her husband's funeral pyre (or "pile" as Holwell calls it). This was one particularly extraordinary instance of a very determined wife:
"At five of the clock on the morning of the 4th of February, 1742-3, died Rhaant Chund Pundit of the Mahahrattor tribe aged twenty-eight years; his widow (FOR HE HAD BUT ONE WIFE) aged between seventeen and eighteen, as soon as he expired, disdaining to wait the term allowed her
for reflection, immediately declared to the Bramins and witnesses present her resolution to burn ; as the family was of no small consideration, all the merchants of Cossimbuzaar, and her relations, left no arguments unessayed to dissuade her from it—Lady Russell, with the tenderest humanity, sent her several messages to the same purpose;—the infant state of her children (two girls and a boy, the eldest not four years of age) and the terrors and pain of the death me sought, were painted to her in the strongest and most lively colouring—she was deaf to all,—she gratefully thanked Lady Russell, and sent her word she had now nothing to live for, but recommended her children to her protection.—When the torments of burning were urged in terrorem to her, she with a resolved and calm countenance, put her finger into the fire, and held it there a considerable time, time, she then with one hand put fire in the palm of the other, sprinkled incense oil it, and fumigated the Bramins. The consideration of her children left destitute of a parent was again urged to her.—She replied, be that made them, would take care of them. She was at last given to understands she should not be permitted to burn; this for a short space seemed to give her deep affliction, but soon recollecting herself, she told them, death was in her power, and that if she 'was not allowed to burn, according to the principles of her calling she would starve herself.—Her friends, finding her thus peremptory and resolved, were obliged at last to assent. "
So now we see Austen's absurdism having a rational foundation--she has read Holwell's account, and her attention was naturally drawn, exactly as I would have expected, to the description by an Englishman of the self-destructive behavior of Indian women.
Jane Austen has cast the Children sons as if they were Indian princes, who would invert the Indian polygamous custom by sharing a wife, who would then endure the English version of the Black Hole of Calcutta, which was the gauntlet of serial childbirth and death that was the fate of so many English wives.
As I have mentioned in this blog several times before, my presentation at the JASNA Annual General Meeting in Portland a few months ago was all about the fundamental theme of Northanger Abbey, which was the English version of that Indian conjugal horror---i.e., English wives accepting the role of perpetually pregnant breeding animal, each time risking death in childbirth or its aftermath, an epidemic in Jane Austen's time--a custom that perhaps the Indians would have found equally as bizarre, incomprehensible, and barbaric as the English would have found the self-immolating lust of the Indian wife.
And that is, I assert, what was on JA's mind when she wrote that seemingly off the wall sentence, it is seen to have all the power and compression of thought of poetry.
And finally, when i posted the above comments in Janeites and Austen L, I completely forgot to point out the sharpest point of JA's acidulous satire, in her veiled allusion to John Zephaniah Holwell's above captioned account of India.
To wit: it is that JA cast _Holwell's own granddaughter_ in the role of one of the Indian wives who chooses to die on her husband's funeral pyre. I sense that Austen resented Holwell's blithe tolerance for exotic Indian customs such as this, as he advises his English readers not to be too quick to judge such practices as barbaric, and he expresses a kind of detached admiration as he describes how many Indian wives at first were eager to die in their husband's funeral pyre, only to experience "fire remorse" at the last minute--but it was too late, the rules of that twisted game were that once a wife chose to burn, she was not allowed to change her mind at the last minute. And I think that JA also read Holwell's account of his and his men's horrible suffering while confined in the Black Hole of Calcutta, and thought, "Men! If they only knew the pain of childbirth, they would find out how courageous their wives really were!"
So all in all, that little sentence, seeming a silly absurd throwaway, is actually a marvel of poetic compression, as it points to a world of female suffering, Indian and English wives united in their victimhood as being a good wife means valuing your own survival at a pin's worth.
Also, I just found a 1945 medical book entitled _Control of Pain in Childbirth, Anesthesia, Analgesia, Amnesia_ in which the authors pick up on the very metaphor I think JA was pointing to:
"The pain of child-bearing has always been woman's heritage. The Black Hole of Calcutta was no more horrible in the history of mankind than have been the abuses of womankind in her hour of travail. The forgotten woman in the history of civilization has been the woman enduring the
most unjust of all human sufferings--the travail of childbirth...."
And Jim Morrison thought he was only channeling Lord Byron when he wrote "And our love become a funeral pyre" in his biggest hit, Light My Fire---he had no idea that he was also inadvertently echoing JA, who saw marriage and childbirth as a super-slow-motion funeral pyre, in which English wives found themselves doomed to roast slowly over two decades, or death in childbirth, whichever came first.
So, for all of the above reasons, I chose "Jane's Black Hole of England" as the title of this post, because even before she reached the age of 21, I can see that Jane Austen was already a very strong critic of procreation within the framework of the traditional English marriage, and the horrors that the English wife was excepted to grin and bear (so to speak).
And if Jane Austen could have spent a few minutes in the 20th century long enough to learn something about modern physics, she would surely have woven into that sentence an additional metaphor connected to the concept of the black hole, with its overpowering gravity that allows nothing, even light, to escape from it. That was how she saw English marriage, a black hole which an English woman entered, never to again escape except through death, unless she was one of the lucky ones who lived past menopause with her health intact.
Cheers, ARNIE
Saturday, January 15, 2011
O Ahnold---Hasta la vista, Titania!
Apropos my blog post yesterday about related acrostics in Emma, Midsummer Night's Dream and Nabokov's "The Vane Sisters", I did a little Googling to see who else has indulged in a little acrostical fun over the years, and I just found a veru unlikely author of same--the Gubernator, who apparently had some "acrostical awareness"--this is a public letter that Ahnold apparently sent 13 months ago:
To the Members of the California State Assembly:
I am returning Assembly Bill 1176 without my signature.
For some time now I have lamented the fact that................ major issues are overlooked while many
unnecessary bills come to me for consideration................. Water reform, prison reform, and health
care are major issues my Administration has brought to the table, but the Legislature just
kicks the can down the alley.
Yet another legislative year has come and gone without the major reforms Californians
overwhelmingly deserve. In light of this, and after careful consideration, I believe it is
unnecessary to sign this measure at this time.
Sincerely,
Arnold Schwarzenegger
I hope I do not need to explain further.
Cheers, ARNIE
To the Members of the California State Assembly:
I am returning Assembly Bill 1176 without my signature.
For some time now I have lamented the fact that................ major issues are overlooked while many
unnecessary bills come to me for consideration................. Water reform, prison reform, and health
care are major issues my Administration has brought to the table, but the Legislature just
kicks the can down the alley.
Yet another legislative year has come and gone without the major reforms Californians
overwhelmingly deserve. In light of this, and after careful consideration, I believe it is
unnecessary to sign this measure at this time.
Sincerely,
Arnold Schwarzenegger
I hope I do not need to explain further.
Cheers, ARNIE
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