James Stanier Clarke & the Stepford Wives Mrs. Morland & Mrs. Heywood

Earlier this morning, Anielka Briggs wrote the following in Austen-L:

"The fictional Austen mother who holds the record for the most children is Mrs. Heywood in "Sanditon". She has fourteen children.  "They had a very pretty property; enough, had their family been of reasonable limits, to have allowed them a very gentlemanlike share of luxuries and change; enough for them to have indulged in a new carriage and better roads, an occasional month at Tunbridge Wells, and symptoms of the gout and a winter at Bath, But the maintenance, education and fitting out of fourteen children demanded a very quiet, settled, careful course of life, and obliged them to be stationary and healthy at Willingden."
 Austen even jokes that a family of fourteen is not of "reasonable limits" . Not only does Mrs. Heywood have fourteen children but she and her family are so remarkably healthy that they never need a doctor as Austen pointedly remarks on in the text. In fact Charlotte Heywood, she of the thirteen siblings, takes a rather dim view of the childless, Parker sisters imagined ill-health. This is again contrasted against Lady Denham who, also childless and aged 70 is as fit as a fiddle and a range of teenage girls (apparently childless but who knows!!) who are compelled to take sea baths and take patent medicines other than asses' milk."  END QUOTE
I replied as follows:


Yes, Mrs. Heywood is a twin sister, so to speak, of Mrs. Morland, in that both bear a Biblical number of children without the slightest ill effect to themselves. Given JA's known (from her letters) predilection to decry every instance of serial pregnancy she knows of, and in particular to express dismay at the chronic health issues of pregnant English wives of her acquaintance, a wary reader might just suspect JA of a satire, i.e., of meaning precisely the opposite of what at first appears to be a celebration of serial pregnancy.

I.e., I suggest that the Heywood "litter" is like the Morland "litter" in that both of them are JA's satirical Regency Era version of the Stepford Wives----depicting the fantastical but totally imaginary perception of the typical English gentleman as he looked at his wife's life. Whereas, to the more sober eye, this appears instead as an absurdly idealized version of real life, in that a wife who lived as a breeding cow for two decades rarely came out the other end in robust health.

If you think I'm exaggerating, just attend Dr. Cheryl Kinney's talk about health care for women in JA's time (Cheryl is not only an extraordinarily gifted and brilliant public speaker, she is also a practicing OBGYN with a passion for medical history) and you will realize just how rare that sort of pristine maternal health would have been, given all the medical dangers that wives faced in that era. Serial motherhood in JA's time was often a house of horrors, medically speaking.

And so, given this striking parallel between Mrs. Morland and Mrs. Heywood, it's obviously no accident (as in the "accident" that Mr. Parker suffers to his ankle) that both of these rustic mothers of a multitude also share with each other the curious parallel that they both cheerful send an elder daughter from among their respective broods as a companion with a childless couple on an adventure to a watering hole (Bath and Sanditon) where their wide-eyed but clear-headed daughter witnesses all manner of exotic, mysterious human behavior in the wild far from home. How sad to realize that Sanditon, had it been completed, would very likely have been as funny, and as serious, as Northanger Abbey (which by the way was, as we all know, still unpublished at the time JA was writing Sanditon).

And just as I claim we ought to stand Mrs. Morland and Mrs. Heywood on their heads in order to see them as JA really saw them, I assert that exactly the same thing is true of the Parker sisters and their "imagined ill health"--after all, to the extent that the smartest Parker sister is a veiled self portrait of JA herself--and I assert that she is---was it really "imagined ill-health" that caused JA to fall deathly ill in the late Winter of 1817, never having the strength thereafter to carry forward on the writing of Sanditon? I think it was very real ill-health indeed!


And by the way, Anielka, given your own repeatedly expressed strong interest in the personal life of Jane Austen's favorite real-life Mr. Collins, i.e., James Stanier Clarke, I am pretty sure it will interest you to note the following description in a memoir about JSC's younger brother Edward:

"Mr. Clarke left three sons and one daughter, the youngest of the family. Of these, Edward Daniel, the subject of these memoirs, was the second. He was born, as we before stated, at the vicarage-house of WILLINGDON, in SUSSEX, in the short interval which elapsed between his fathers return from Minorca, and the removal of his family to the rectory at Buxted. His elder brother, Dr. James Stanier, who is well known to the literary world by his various publications, was born at Minorca: he has had the honour to be domestic chaplain to his present Majesty, both before and since his accession to the throne, and is now a canon of Windsor, and rector of Tillington in Sussex. The younger, George, was born at WILLINGDON: he was a captain in the navy, and after many years of distinguished service, was unhappily drowned in the Thames, on a party of pleasure, in 1804. His sister Anne, married to Captain Parkinson of the navy, and now living at Ramsgate, was born after the settlement of the family at Buxted."

According to Google Maps, Willingdon is about two miles inland NW of Eastbourne, and while I know I am not the first to point out that the real life Willingdon where the Clarke brothers grew up was in some way a source for JA's fictional Willingden where the Heywoods lived, I am pretty sure I am the first to point out that the vicar of the real life Willingden during JA's childhood was the father of James Stanier Clarke.

Just a coincidence? Surely not, when we look at the chronology.

First, in late March, 1816 James Stanier Clarke suggests to her that JA write a novel extolling the wonders of the "august house of Cobourg".

Second, JA completes the writing of Persuasion a few months later, and not long afterwards, she begins a new novel, Sanditon, in which the action begins in James Stanier Clarke's childhood village.

Third, JA writes her famous "Plan of a Novel" in which we read the following initial paragraph:

SCENE to be in the Country, Heroine the Daughter of a Clergyman, one who after having lived much in the World had retired from it and settled in a Curacy, with a very small fortune of his own. -- He, the most excellent Man that can be imagined, perfect in Character, Temper, and Manners -- without the smallest drawback or peculiarity to prevent his being the most delightful companion to his Daughter from one year's end to the other. -- Heroine a faultless Character herself, -- perfectly good, with much tenderness and sentiment, and not the least Wit -- very highly accomplished, understanding modern Languages and (generally speaking) everything that the most accomplished young Women learn but particularly excelling in Music -- her favourite pursuit -- and playing equally well on the PianoForte and Harp -- and singing in the first stile. Her Person quite beautiful - dark eyes and plump cheeks. -- Book to open with the description of Father and Daughter -- who are to converse in long speeches, elegant Language -- and a tone of high serious sentiment. -- The Father to be induced, at his Daughter's earnest request, to relate to her the past events of his Life. This Narrative will reach through the greatest part of the first volume -- as besides all the circumstances of his attachment to her Mother and their Marriage, it will comprehend his going to sea as Chaplain to a distinguished naval character about the Court, his going afterwards to Court himself, which introduced him to a great variety of Characters and involved him in many interesting situations, concluding with his opinions on the Benefits to result from Tithes being done away, and his having buried his own Mother (Heroine's lamented Grandmother) in consequence of the High Priest of the Parish in which she died refusing to pay her Remains the respect due to them. The Father to be of a very literary turn, an Enthusiast in Literature, nobody’s Enemy but his own-- at the same time most zealous in discharge of his Pastoral Duties, the model of an exemplary Parish Priest. -- The heroine's friendship to be sought after by a young woman in the same Neighbourhood, of Talents and Shrewdness, with light eyes and a fair skin, but having a considerable degree of Wit, Heroine shall shrink from the acquaintance.


I am not the first to see the obvious repeated lampooning of Clarke in the above paragraph. However, this lampooning takes on startling new significance when we think about it in light of Sanditon's initial scenes being set in Clarke's home village--what it suggests to me is that perhaps the "novel" for which JA has created this delightfully zany "plan" is none other than Sanditon, the very first novel she began after writing this "Plan of a novel"! Among other things, it makes me realize that there must have been another Mr. Collins-like clergyman in the back of JA's mind as she contemplated Volume 2 of Sanditon, a character who would have had all the deliciously foolish traits of James Stanier Clarke himself.


And finally, is it also a coincidence that there is a confusion between two Willingden's in Sanditon? Does this confusion have anything to do with James Stanier Clarke having been rector of TILLINGTON also in Sussex, which is located only a few miles away from Willingdon? And, as I briefly browsed in the Google Map for Sussex, I noticed also a village named "Lillington" not far from those other two. Given JA's love of wordplay, I cannot help but think that she noticed all these confusingly similar village names in close proximity during a visit to Sussex sometime in her life, or perhaps on a map of Sussex that she studied before beginning to write Sanditon, and she chose to immortalize this confusion in her inimitably droll way, in the lengthy discussion of Mr. Parker's finding himself laid up in the wrong Willingden.

Cheers, ARNIE @JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The Date of First Composition of Elinor & Marianne

As a followup to my recent post about Jane Austen

tracking the six-month time frame of the transition

of her own real life exile from Steventon to Bath 

from November, 1800 to May, 1801, in the six month

time frame of the transition of Marianne Dashwood's

 fictional exile from Norland to Barton Cottage.... 

 http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/04/half-years-residence-in-her-family.html ...

I have had an interesting off-shoot discussion with 

one of the commenters at my blog (who goes by the

 moniker "Lit-Lass") about the timing of the composition

 of Sense & Sensibility, which I thought was worth its

own blog post.  

Lit-Lass wrote: "According to my notes from Tomalin's

 bio and Joan K. Ray's timeline [JA] wrote [Elinor &

 Marianne] in 1795 and Cassandra remembered it read

 to the family by '76. Of course she did a great deal of 

revising later. ] 

I then replied as follows: "...our discussion here has led

 me to an intriguing new hypothesis, i.e., that perhaps

 Cassandra was being less than honest when she reported

 those dates of earliest writing of E&M---we have

 independent third party verification of early drafts

 of P&P and Northanger Abbey (Susan, but we only

 have Cassandra's word for the early version of E&M. 

And why would Cassandra want the world to think 

that S&S was first written in the 1790's? Because then

 nobody would think that the "Massacre of Steventon"

 in 1800-1801 was being depicted!"  

Am I correct in my recollection that Cassandra's 

recollection, long after JA's death, is the only basis

 for the pre-1800 composition of S&S in epistolary

 form under title "Elinor & Marianne"?  

When you think about it, if JA really did write Elinor

 & Marianne in 1796, why didn't Revd. Austen submit

 it, along with P&P, for publication in 1798? Why was 

Elinor & Marianne kept on the shelf, never mentioned

 in any of JA's many surviving letters from 1796-1800?

 Why are there so many echoes of P&P and NA in JA's

 1796-1799 letters, but no echoes of S&S that I can recall

 in those same early surviving letters? There's something

 fishy about it all, and realizing how closely the events of 

1800-1801 are tracked in the first Volume of S&S makes

 me wonder if CEA was being a politician when she

"recollected" Elinor & Marianne's early composition, 

as a way of deflecting attention by James Austen's children

 to the disturbing innuendo of the first volume of S&S vis

 a vis James &Mary Austen.  

Cheers, ARNIE 

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The "Wood House" that carries Emma and Pinocchio to Storybrooke

It's been nearly 2 1/2 months since some amazing Internet serendipity first prompted me to take an interest in the ABC show Once Upon A Time (OUAT), because of the mysterious character name "August Wayne Booth" appearing, in slightly different form, in a blog post of mine about Jane Austen's greatest novel, _Emma_:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/02/august-wayne-booth-in-once-upon-time.html

Since February 20, I have faithfully watched every one of the episodes of OUAT, and have seen, especially during the past few weeks, a ratcheting up of the role of August Wayne Booth, as we have finally learned that he is (apparently) Pinocchio from the Fairy World, trying to convince Emma Swan to believe that the Fairy World exists.

But I will confess that I've been surprised that the many hints I discerned in the episodes from the first half of the season, that, to my eyes, pointed to Jane Austen's novels, most of all _Emma_....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/02/more-clues-that-once-upon-time-is-sly.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/03/august-wayne-booths-answers-in-literary.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/02/george-augustus-frederick-prince-of.html

....have not been carried further forward in the last half dozen episodes, especially the
two most recent episodes which have been August-intensive, with ONE intriguing exception:

It occurred to me as I watched the last episode, in which we learn that Gepetto is the craftsman who constructed, from the magic tree,  the "spaceship" that carried baby Emma, along with Pinocchio, to the forest outside  Storybrooke 28 years ago, that we could describe the container which carries Emma and Pinocchio as a "wood house".  Is this an intentional wink at Emma Woodhouse on the part of the writers of OUAT? I believe it is!

But I expect more to come, because the central parallel to Austen remains as strong as ever, i.e., everything that happens in Austen's _Emma_ is filtered through the eyes of the clueless heroine, Emma Woodhouse, and therefore what SHE believes she sees is what most readers of the novel believe is real, even though, when the novel is read against the grain, as I am the first to do, we find an alternative reality of which Emma does not have any conscious awareness. But...that alternative reality is just at the edge of Emma Woodhouse's consciousness, she keeps seeing pieces of it but she is so set in her worldview that she is blinded even to what is in front of her nose. 

And isn't Emma Swan so much like Emma Woodhouse in this one crucial way? What does August Wayne Booth have to do to convince her to believe? That is the central question of OUAT at this moment. And I remain firm in my expectation that somehow, some way, in the final episode of this first season coming up, there will be SOMETHING that points more definitively to Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse, and connects her to Emma Swan.

We shall see next Sunday!

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

" half a year's residence in her family afforded": The Six-Month Massacre of Steventon

In Austen L & Janeites, Anielka Briggs wrote: "All film versions of Sense and Sensibility lead one to believe that Fanny Dashwood and her irritating demeanour ejected the first Mrs. Dashwood from Norland very swiftly. And yet the text is very clear that the second Mrs. Dashwood lived in her son-in-law's home for at least six months..... "Mrs. Dashwood began shortly to give over every hope of the kind, and to be convinced, from the general drift of his discourse, that his assistance extended no farther than their maintenance for six months at Norland. " It seems almost reasonable that after six months Fanny Dashwood should begin to grow anxious to dispense of the other Mrs. Dashwood....... "

I responded as follows:

Let's see......Le Faye's Chronology entry on p. 249 reads as follows:

"late November-early December [1800]: Steventon: Revd and Mrs GA suddenly decide to leave the rectory and retire to Bath; when JA and Martha arrive from Ibthorpe Mrs. GA greets them with the decision; JA is said to have been much upset by it...."

This dating by Le Faye seems pretty solid, because Letter 28 posted December 1, 1800 contains not a hint of any proposed move from Steventon, and yet, by Letter 29, dated January 5, 1801, it is clear that the move to Bath has been in the works for a pretty long while.

OK......so then we have Letters 29 through 36 (spanning the time period from January 5, 1801 through May 13, 1801) which all provide ample evidence of what I have previously referred to as "the Massacre of Steventon", during which James and Mary Austen do their very best imitations of John and Fanny Dashwood:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/03/dear-morland-poor-little-harry-jas.html

And we know from Letter 35 that Jane Austen left Steventon for Bath during the first week of May, 1801, which means that the time span from the moment JA first learns of the move to Bath, until she finds herself living in Bath, is between just over _five_ months.

Hmm......Yes, Anielka, surely by May, 1801, after an eternity lasting nearly six months (it would be very much the exaggerating mindset of a grasping, greedy usurper to refer to a time period of five months and four days as "nearly six months") that would try anyone's patience, Mary Austen was indeed quite anxious to have her tiresome in-laws gone from Steventon already. After all, who knew what sort of horrid, malicious rumors these overstaying-their-welcome ingrate in-laws might spread about Mary's attempts to feather her new nest properly, if they continued to be so inconveniently impolite as to remain physically present in Steventon to bear accurate witness to the details of the Massacre, such as the following passage in Letter 36 dated May 13, 1801:

"....James I dare say has been over to Ibthrop by this time to enquire particularly after Mrs. Lloyd's health, & forestall whatever intelligence of the sale I might attempt to give.-Sixty-one guineas & a half for the three cows gives one some support under the blow of only Eleven Guineas for the Tables. Eight for my Pianoforte, is about what I really expected to get; I am more anxious to know the amount of my books, especially as they are said to have sold well."


So you say, "almost reasonable"? I think JA's Letters 29-36, as well as Chapter 2 of S&S, tell us pretty clearly what JA thought and felt about the Massacre of Steventon---a massacre based firmly on the following principle enunciated by JA in Letter 37 dated May 22, 1801:

"The whole World is in a conspiracy to enrich one part of our family at the expence of another.”

And it is quite interesting to read the characterization of all of the above that was written 70 years later by the real-life model for Fanny Dashwood's "poor little Harry":

"The loss of their first home is generally a great grief to young persons of strong feeling and lively imagination; and Jane was exceedingly unhappy when she was told that her father, now seventy years of age, had determined to resign his duties to his eldest son, who was to be his successor in the Rectory of Steventon, and to remove with his wife and daughters to Bath. Jane had been absent from home when this resolution was taken; and, as her father was always rapid both in forming his resolutions and in acting on them, she had little time to reconcile herself to the change."

Tell me, was Jane Austen prescient or not, when she put the following words in Fanny and John Dashwood's mouths in Chapter 2 of S&S:

"....why was he to ruin himself, and their poor little Harry, by giving away all his money to his half sisters?....Consider...that when the money is once parted with, it never can return. Your sisters will marry, and it will be gone for ever. If, indeed, it could be restored to our poor little boy—"

"Why, to be sure," said her husband, very gravely, "that would make great difference. THE TIME MAY COME when Harry will regret that so large a sum was parted with. If he should have a numerous family, for instance, it would be a very convenient addition."


That time _did_ come for the elderly James Edward Austen Leigh when he wrote the above passage in the Memoir, and tried to whitewash over JA's obvious bitter resentment against James & Mary (i.e., against his own parents!) by reframing JA's unhappiness as a response to her father's overhasty decision making predilections, and utterly omitting any reference to James or Mary in that regard!

And I finish by repeating for the umpteenth time that just because there were women like Mary Austen who were clever enough to find ways to unofficially twist the knobs of power, does not negate the sexist status quo that put the eldest son of the Austen family, James, in a position of absolute power vis a vis his sisters in the first place. Fanny Dashwood, Mrs. Ferrars, Mrs. Churchill, Lucy Steele, Charlotte Lucas, and Mrs. Clay, to name the most obvious examples from JA's fiction, represent one species of distortion in _female_ personality that was triggered by the mostly gender-based institutional inequalities of JA's world, just as, e.g., the Wickhams, WIlloughbys, Crawfords, et al represent another such distortion on the male side.

JA was a master psychologist, and recognized that "the system" was at the root of so much amoral or reckless behavior of all kinds in her society, on the part of both males and females. Had there been true gender equality in the society, JA is suggesting, there would have been much more truly Christian behavior by one part of the world toward the other.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

"Two Curs Worrying Over A Bone": Another Austen-Shakespeare Allusive Matrix

In Austen-L, Anielka Briggs wrote the following this morning: 

  "   "the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone" ------ Apparently two curs quarrelling over a bone was a metaphor for two-party politics where a third individual or party stole "the bone" whilst the curs were distracted: "When two curs are snarling at each other, and quarrelling for a bone, a third very frequently, watching his opportunity, whips it up and runs away. This observation has often been metaphorically applied to politics" Joseph Moser "Prospectus of a Canine Dictionary" as reviewed in The European Magazine of 1802 Note that Austen uses the comparatively unusual word "cur" rather than dog. I don't think Austen ever uses this word on any other occasion. The juxtaposition of "two curs", and the very specific word "quarrelling" over a bone makes me think that this particular little detail from "Emma" must have been derived from a reading of The European Magazine.  " END QUOTE

Anielka, I agree that it is likely, for the reasons you state, that JA was struck by that passage you found in The European Magazine and decided to weave it into the shadows of _Emma_. Certainly, it puts an interesting spin on the following laughing confession by Frank Churchill at the very end of _Emma_....

"Oh! no—what an impudent DOG I was!—How could I dare—"

....especially if we think about all the male wooers of Emma as "curs" quarreling over the "bones"--i.e., their female targets, Harriet, Emma, Miss Hawkins, & Jane. And, as you and I both are well aware, there is a rich political subtext in _Emma_, whereby “courtship”, in both the romantic and the political senses, is seamlessly braided together, most of all in the person of the Prince Regent (aka Frank Churchill).

But I think you’ve only unearthed a “rib” there, and I suggest that we can find the “skull” sought by those "two curs quarreling" in Emma's snapshot of Highbury, if we take Henry Crawford, and not Joseph Moser, as our guide, and realize that beneath that contemporary political subtext, there is a fossil treasure trove courtesy of Shakespeare! As evidence thereof, look at these three seemingly unrelated passages written by the Bard which ALL pertain to “two curs”, which I dug up this morning!:

AS YOU LIKE IT, 1.3:  (Rosalind has caught the love bug for Orlando from watching him play "David" in a wrestling match over the "Goliath" Charles, and she doesn't want to talk about it!)
CELIA: Why, cousin! why, Rosalind! Cupid have mercy! Not a word?
ROSALIND: Not one to THROW AT A DOG.
CELIA: No, thy words are too precious to be cast away upon CURS;  throw some of them at me; come, lame me with reasons.

TITUS ANDRONICUS, 2.3: (The clueless, bumbling Quintus & Martius, sons of Titus Andronicus, literally fall into Aaron's trap and wind up framed for the murder of Bassianus, whose “bones” they inadvertently “dig up”)
SATURNINUS: [To Titus]  TWO of thy whelps, fell CURS of bloody kind, Have here bereft my brother of his life. Sirs, drag them from the pit unto the prison: There let them bide until we have devised Some never heard-of torturing pain for them.

TROILUS & CRESSIDA, 1.3:  (the Greek leaders debate their response to Hector's challenge to individual combat; Ulysses craftily suggests a sham lottery so that Ajax, and not Achilles, will fight Hector, and the pride of both Hector and Achilles will thereby be tamed)
ULYSSES: Give pardon to my speech: Therefore 'tis meet Achilles meet not Hector. Let us, like merchants, show our foulest wares, And think, perchance, they'll sell; if not, The lustre of the better yet to show, Shall show the better. Do not consent That ever Hector and Achilles meet; For both our honour and our shame in this Are DOGG'D with TWO strange followers.
NESTOR: I see them not with my old eyes: what are they?
ULYSSES:  What glory our Achilles shares from Hector, Were he not proud, we all should share with him: But he already is too insolent; And we were better parch in Afric sun  Than in the pride and salt scorn of his eyes, Should he 'scape Hector fair: if he were foil'd, Why then, we did our main opinion crush In taint of our best man. No, make a lottery; And, by device, let blockish Ajax draw The sort to fight with Hector: among ourselves Give him allowance for the better man; For that will physic the great Myrmidon Who broils in loud applause, and make him fall His crest that prouder than blue Iris bends. If the dull brainless Ajax come safe off, We'll dress him up in voices: if he fail, Yet go we under our opinion still That we have better men. But, hit or miss, Our project's life this shape of sense assumes: Ajax employ'd plucks down Achilles' plumes.
NESTOR: Ulysses, Now I begin to relish thy advice; And I will give a taste of it forthwith To Agamemnon: go we to him straight. TWO CURS shall tame each other: pride alone Must tarre the MASTIFFS on, as 'twere their BONE.

As my opening gambits in analyzing all of the above:

First, I point out that the above quoted passage in 1.3 of  _As You Like It_ dovetails nicely with Jane Austen’s veiled allusion to that play’s title, as Mrs. Elton discusses with Knightley the proposed outing to Donwell Abbey, which, along with Box Hill, collectively function very much like the “Forest of Arden”, i.e., the greenworld where “courtship” reigns supreme, in _Emma_:

"That's quite unnecessary; I see Jane every day:—but AS YOU LIKE. IT is to be a morning scheme, you know, Knightley; quite a simple thing….”

Second, I find it quite striking that the passages in As You Like It (a romantic comedy) and in Troilus & Cressida (a sour problem play), while otherwise seeming to be utterly unrelated to each other, BOTH involve the imagery of bones being thrown to curs being used in close proximity to individual combat between two men. That cannot be coincidental. 

Third, a veiled allusion to Troilus & Cressida in _Emma_ would dovetail even more nicely with the complex allusion to that same troubling play in _Mansfield Park_ which I have written about on several occasions, most recently here:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/03/mansfield-park-theatricals-troilus.html

So, what did Shakespeare mean by these varied metaphorical curs quarreling over bones? And, equally important, what did Jane Austen understand Shakespeare to mean by this? I need to give both of those questions a lot more thought and study, but I already know she understood a great deal, and hinted at her own deep understanding with the following famous line which ends that quoted Highbury snapshot:

“…A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer. “

Indeed, JA wrote these veiled allusions to Shakespeare for the sharp elf with “a mind lively and at ease” who “can see nothing”---in Shakespeare’s plays and JA’s novels, that is---“that does not answer”—to a deeper meaning in both instances! So for now, thanks to sharp elf Anielka for prompting me to focus on this passage today and to excavate these Austenian-Shakespearean “bones”.

Cheers, ARNIE    @JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Gender Bias Today & In Jane Austen's Lifetime

In another online venue, a good friend just posted the following link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2134146/Too-ugly-TV-No-Im-brainy-men-fear-clever-women.html#comments

I urge you all to read it. It is a brilliant, outspoken rebuttal by the English classical scholar Mary Beard to an obnoxious, sexist review of her most recent documentary about the ancient world, a review in which the misogynist male critic, A.A. Gill, focused inordinately on Prof. Beard's physical appearance---specifically, her obvious and principled refusal to conform to prevailing norms for female public presentation, implicitly insisting on her right to keep to a natural look which does not hide her age or other non-conforming features,  and to be judged solely on the merits of her performance as a scholar and public speaker. But, to her full credit, Prof. Beard at the same time being herself respectful of women who do choose to conform as Prof. Beard does not. In other words, Prof. Beard rips this jerk apart in very blunt terms, and one cannot help but cheer, because he so thoroughly deserves it.

I also took a look at Gill's Wikipedia page, and everything there is consistent with what Mary Beard wrote about him.

And I also found this article from yesterday written in support of Beard's polemic:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/25/aa-gill-jibes-mary-beard

So what does this have to do with Jane Austen? I think, a great deal. I mention it here because I thought of Jane Austen immediately as I read Beard's comments about how some men respond with hostility and fear when in the presence of intelligent, outspoken women. It is not hard to find even intelligent creative men like Henry James and EM Forster, let alone pretenders like Naipaul, to find examples of how threatening JA's writing can be to men.

And Beard's example made me reflect again on the perpetual fascination amongst nearly all Janeites wondering what Jane Austen actually looked like, and how she presented herself to the world. My impression is that she did conform to prevailing norms for female presentation, but of course this did not in the slightest degree interfere with her ability to express herself creatively exactly as she wished to do.

And I thought again how it would have been suicidal for Jane Austen to respond to the AA Gills of her world (of which there must have been a staggering number) the same open direct way that Mary Beard did, because, imperfect as the present still is in terms of gender bias, it is obviously a good deal better than it was two centuries ago in Jane Austen's England.  A woman today can safely speak her mind, and defend herself directly against misogyny, whereas JA's strategy of covert sarcasm and mockery of male sexism was the only safe option for JA to express her strong feminist views.

But most of all, I see in the character of Mary Bennett a prototype of Mary Beard, a modern "Bluestocking". A woman who values intellectual achievement and who does not worry about most of the norms of superficial female public presentation and beauty, which these days passes for "accomplishment" in the minds of many MCPs.

The key to understanding JA's attitude toward Mary is to realize that the narration about Mary is entirely filtered through the mind of Elizabeth Bennet, and that Lizzy, with her many gifts, does not understand, or appreciate, her younger (and much better self-educated) sister Mary. And because of Lizzy's prejudice against Mary, the reader also is infected with Lizzy's prejudice.  And I remain utterly convinced that this was all entirely intentional on JA's part, as both Lizzy and Mary represent sides of JA's own Protean personality.

And I have also noted that Miss Bates is another self portrait of JA, in which JA plays with the stereotype of the verbose and foolish spinster (who actually knows what is going on better than anyone else in Highbury).

And JA goes even further toward the edge, when she makes Mrs. Bennet such a figure of fun and derision for her husband, a sadistic jerk, and draws the reader into Mr. Bennet's point of view by making him so witty. It takes some effort to pull back and say, as many Janeites have eventually said, that Mrs. Bennet is the one who is dealing with hard, cold reality that threatens to leave the Bennet women high and dry if Mr. Bennet dies, while Mr. Bennet fiddles heedlessly in his library.

JA was a teacher, and she recognized that one effective strategy for awakening readers to their own prejudices was to first draw them into feeling those prejudices, and only then to provide a small splash of literary cold water, to make the reader perhaps regret their initial enjoyment of laughing at others unfairly.

And the best example of this in all of JA's writing that I have found, which I mentioned last year, is the scene when Elizabeth experiences a bit of karma, as she induces her father to step in to stop Mary from singing and playing, only to witness Mr. Bennet subject Mary to total humiliation. At which point we read:

"Mary, though pretending not to hear [Mr. Bennet's thinly veiled insult], was somewhat disconcerted; and Elizabeth, sorry for her, and sorry for her father's speech, was afraid her anxiety had done no good."

A small but significant awakening of conscience in Elizabeth vis a vis Mary, realizing that Mary had been sacrificed on the altar of Lizzy's attempt to make her family look better to Darcy and the Bingleys.

Cheers, ARNIE
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