It is always a pleasure for me when one of JA's wicked little jokes
first makes a full impression on me, and I just had that experience an
hour ago (which gives me hope that I will still be having them ten years
from now!), as I was rereading a passage in Chapter 49 of P&P. Of course
that started me brawling down a turnpike of literary sleuthing that
yielded some interesting and surprising results, for those of you who
enjoy my sleuthing. Here, then, without further ado, is the
beginning---the passage in Chapter 49 of P&P when Wickham's debts are
discussed by Lizzy, Jane and Mr. Bennet:
"That is very true," said Elizabeth; "though it had not occurred to me
before. [Wickham's] debts to be discharged, and something still to
remain! Oh! it must be my uncle's doings! Generous, good man, I am
afraid he has distressed himself. A small sum could not do all this."
"No," said her father; "Wickham's a fool if he takes her with a farthing
less than ten thousand pounds. I should be sorry to THINK SO ILL of him,
in the very beginning of our relationship." END QUOTE
What I don't recall previously noticing is the exquisite paradox that
fuels Mr. Bennet's absurdist bon mot---i.e., he sarcastically pretends
that he would think ill of Wickham _not_ for being the irresponsible
libertine who eloped with Lydia and then did not marry her, but instead
for extracting insufficient blackmail money to induce him to marry Lydia!
Did you notice it before? If not, stop and savor it, as I just have.
This is wicked, wicked absurdist humor at its blackest, and might seem
yet another example of Mr Bennet's grossly inappropriate sense of humor,
if it weren't mitigated by the fact that Mr. Bennet indulges in this
little bit of impromptu standup comedy only _after_ the worst crisis for
the Bennet family seems to have been averted. I.e., gallows humor is
perhaps at its funniest (and sunniest) immediately _after_ the gallows
have already been averted by a last second reprieve! It also reminds me
of Mr. Bennet's famous joke at the beginning of P&P, when he tricks his
wife and daughters into thinking he has no intention of visiting the
newly arrived Mr. Bingley, knowing full well he has already secured a
promised visit to Longbourn from that most eligible bachelor--not
particularly nice, but not particularly cruel either.
And by the way, I just checked and it appears that Andrew Davies failed
to include Mr. Bennet's bon mot in his 1995 adaptation, which is partly
why, I must admit, I never noticed it in the novel text! Failure to read
JA word by word always has its cost in missed reading pleasures.
Anyway, after I was done with my appreciative chuckle at Mr. Bennet's
(and therefore JA's) witty joke, I was curious to know how often JA used
the phrase "think so ill of" or some variant on same, in her writing. It
sounded vaguely familiar, but was it because it was a phrase she
frequently used? Turns out, just the opposite--it is only used _once_ in
her letters, and a tiny total of _five_ times in all of her novels
combined---- and _three_ of them appear in P&P--and what's more, all
three in P&P are about Mr. Wickham's behavior vis a vis Lydia! That very
narrow focus of usage suggests some intentional significance for JA
greater than just a random witty joke by Mr. Bennet, which further
analysis should point to. And it does. Read on.
It turns out that Mr. Bennet's joke in Chapter 49 is an echo (apparently
coincidental, unless he has been eavesdropping on private conversations
or reading private letters) of two earlier usages in reference to the
way Jane Bennet sees Wickham:
Chapter 46, where Jane writes to Lizzy about the elopement:
[Jane] "....My father and mother believe the worst, but I CANNOT THINK
SO ILL of [Wickham]...."
AND
Chapter 47, as the suspense as to the outcome is at its nervous peak
among the Bennets and Mrs. Gardiner:
"But you see that JANE," said her aunt, "DOES NOT THINK SO ILL of
Wickham as to believe him capable of the attempt."
[Lizzy] "Of whom does JANE EVER THINK ILL? And who is there, whatever
might be their former conduct, that she would believe capable of such an
attempt, till it were proved against them? But Jane knows, as well as I
do, what Wickham really is. We both know that he has been profligate in
every sense of the word; that he has neither integrity nor honour; that
he is as FALSE and deceitful as he is INSINUATING." END QUOTE
And....my finding this interesting Jane Bennet--Wickham concentration of
this phrase "think so ill" in P&P prompted me to take my sleuthing a
step further and Google the phrase "think so ill", just to see what
might come up from other published writings besides JA's, and something
_very_ interesting did. Could it be that Mr. Bennet (and therefore JA)
might have happened to somehow read the following passage in a private
letter written in September 1796 (but apparently not published in a book
until 1908) by the famous Lady Sarah Napier (nee Lennox) to her frequent
correspondent, Lady Susan O'Brien, about the then 34-year old Prince of
Whales?:
"I see by the papers the Prince of Wales has taken Mr. Sturt's house. If
he is to be your neighbour I warn you not to let yourself be deceived by
FALSE rumours to THINK SO ILL OF HIM as the world does, for you will,
when timeproduces truth, regret such a PREJUDICE. Like all other men he
has his faults, but his perfections outballance them: I know what I say,
& you love justice,so don't be led away by PREJUDICE. "
If somehow Mr. Bennet _could_ have been aware of the above passage in
Lady Sarah's letter, that would suggest that the very sly and literate
patriarch of Longbourn was not only carelessly tossing off one of his
sophisticated witty epigrams, but was also very seriously but covertly
equating Mr. Wickham to the First Libertine of England----the Prince of
Whales! Other than for their strong difference in avoirdupois, when you
think about it there are many striking similarities between the real
life Prince and JA's fictional libertine, in so many different ways
(including being forced into a marriage, being endlessly in debt, being
extremely charming, feeling like they never got what they deserved at a
young enough age, siring illegitimate children, gambling into extreme
debt, etc etc etc), and also the reference to evaluation of the
reliability of rumors which create _prejudice_ about the character of a
person--which is after all the central crisis of judgment confronting
Lizzy during over half the novel!---it really makes me wonder how the
turn of phrase came to be so similar between that letter (written only a
few years before JA wrote First Impressions) and JA's novel. What could
it mean if it is not coincidental?
Could JA, e.g., by the time she was finalizing P&P in late 1812, when
S&S was already the buzz of the literati in London, have found a way to
be in communication with the real life Lady Susan O'Brien--she who had
in 1796 (or only a year prior to JA's beginning work on First
Impressions) been warned by her friend Lady Sarah not to believe nasty
rumors about the Prince? Might Lady Sarah have written that warning to
her friend because Lady O'Brien had previously expressed negative
judgments to Lady Sarah about the Prince, who would soon be Lady Susan's
neighbour?
And if JA did somehow get in touch with Lady Susan O'Brien, would JA
have shared with her that she was writing a character (Wickham) who was
very similar to--indeed, _modeled_ _upon_---the Prince as a young man?
And in return, could Lady Susan have confided in JA about Lady Sarah's
Jane Bennet-like Pollyannish views about the Prince?
Why? Because perhaps JA had also told her that Lady Sarah _herself_ was
_also_ a denizen of the allusive subtext of P&P!
Sound crazy? Well, here's what I found in my old files about Lady Sarah
Napier. As a young woman, she was wooed by King George III (i.e., the
father of the Prince of Whales), and her first husband, Charles Bunbury,
ignored her so much that she had numerous affairs and illegitimate
children before she settled down at age 36 in 1781 with an impoverished
officer (!!) named Napier. But the best part is the following vignette
about Lady Sarah and her most famous suitor of all:
WIKIPEDIA: "When she was presented at court again at 15, George III was
taken with her, and her family developed an ambition that she would be
the next queen. Largely for this reason, the young king was discouraged
from selecting her as a wife. Lady Sarah had also developed feelings for
Lord Newbattle, grandson of William Kerr, 3rd Marquess of Lothian.
Although her family were able to convince her to break with Newbattle,
the royal match was scotched by the King's advisors, particularly John
Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, who feared losing his royal influence to Henry
Fox, 1st Baron Holland, Lady Sarah's brother-in-law. Lord Bute
prevailed, and Lady Sarah was asked by King George III to be one of the
ten bridesmaids at his wedding to Duchess Sophia Charlotte of
Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Lady Sarah confided to a friend, "Luckily for me,
I did not love him, and only liked him". "
This was a story famous throughout England, and in it, the young Lady
Sarah sounds distinctly Jane Bennet-ish in having been wooed at 15 by a
most eligible bachelor--the immediately preceding Prince of Wales!--but
ultimately being left out in the cold due to the scheming of a meddling,
powerful man--Lord Bute---wholly unconnected to her, looking out for his
own selfish interests. Hmm....
And that last part of the quotation perhaps was also winked at by JA,
not in P&P but in S&S:
"I do not attempt to deny," said [Elinor], "that I think very highly of
him—that I greatly esteem, that I like him." Marianne here burst forth
with indignation—"Esteem him! Like him! Cold-hearted Elinor! Oh! worse
than cold-hearted! Ashamed of being otherwise. Use those words again,
and I will leave the room this moment." END QUOTE
And....last but not least, in 1815, two years after P&P was published,
Lady Sarah's niece (also nee Sarah Lennox) eloped with Peregrine
Maitland, who just happened to be the first cousin of the new bride Anna
Austen Lefroy on Anna's mother's side! I wonder whether that elopement
arose out of the blue, or if it might have already been in its early
stages two years earlier when JA was finishing P&P?
All found and connected together because of my being curious about the
phrase "think ill of".......
//
Cheers, ARNIE
sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
P.S.: If you were wondering.....here are the only other two usages
(besides the above three in P&P) of thinking "so ill" of someone in all
six novels, and they are each very interesting:
MP, Chapter 44: "Tom had gone from London with a party of young men to
Newmarket, where a neglected fall and a good deal of drinking had
brought on a fever; and when the party broke up, being unable to move,
had been left by himself at the house of one of these young men to the
comforts of sickness and solitude, and the attendance only of servants.
Instead of being soon well enough to follow his friends, as he had then
hoped, his disorder increased considerably, and it was not long before
HE THOUGHT SO ILL OF HIMSELF as to be as ready as his physician to have
a letter despatched to Mansfield."
If I am not mistaken, this is a very sly and very clever double entendre
on JA's part---Tom has after all just fallen seriously ill in a
_medical_ sense, yet JA chose to use the same phrase to describe his
illness as she had just used not once but _three_ times in P&P (her
immediately preceding published novel) with the meaning of thinking ill
in a _judgmental_ sense. Why would she do this? Why did she not write
"he thought himself so ill" if that was what she meant? I think JA meant
by this deliberate ambiguity to raise a subliminal cloud of doubt
surrounding the bona fides of Tom's physical illness--Tom Bertram, the
producer (in all senses of that word) of the Mansfield Theatricals, the
lover of the theatre--perhaps his "illness" was his greatest performance
of all, because uncredited and undetected!
AND
Emma, Chapter 23: "Her own father's perfect exemption from any thought
of the kind, the entire deficiency in him of all such sort of
penetration or suspicion, was a most comfortable circumstance. Happily
he was not farther from approving matrimony than from foreseeing it.
Though always objecting to every marriage that was arranged, he never
suffered beforehand from the apprehension of any; it seemed as if he
could not THINK SO ILL of any two persons' understanding as to suppose
they meant to marry till it were proved against them."
In this passage, Emma is beginning to enjoy Frank's romantic flirtations
a great deal more than she realizes, and so she starts imagining that
the Westons are already hoping she and Frank will get married, and then
of course Emma's thoughts inevitably turn to her father, the arch-enemy
of matrimony. In his somewhat skewed moral universe, in a strange way
reminiscent of Mr. Bennet's sarcastic paradox, Mr. Woodhouse stands
entirely alone in the world in thinking ill of those who would marry!
Or, is this another authorial deception on JA's part? Are those among
JA's readers who are aware (as you all are now who have read through
this entire post of mine, for which I thank you!) of the common usage of
the phrase "think so ill" between two such different fathers as Mr.
Bennet and Mr. Woodhouse, meant to question whether Mr. Woodhouse
himself is entirely sincere in his opposition to the married state?
Maybe he, like Tom Bertram, is putting on a show?
P.P.S.: And finally, the last leg of my trip down the Sleuthing
Turnpike---if you were wondering why I included Mrs. Knight in my
Subject Line, it is because JA, in her single solitary usage of "think
ill of" someone in all of her surviving letters, chose to indulge in
what is perhaps the most sarcastic, subversive, indecent sexual innuendo
in all of her letters, in writing about the then 47- year old adoptive
mother of her brother, Edward, the kindly Mrs. Knight, in Letter 32
dated January, 1801:
"I cannot THINK SO ILL of her however, in spite of your INSINUATIONS, as
to suspect her of having lain-in -- I do not think she would be betrayed
beyond an accident at the utmost."
The echoes of this scandalous passage (Bowdlerized by Lord Brabourne in
his 1886 edition of JA's Letters) in the text of P&P, finalized 12 years
later, are deafening.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Jane Bennet sings Les Miz and Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head
Two of my most favorite domains of interpretation of JA's writing
happily converge in this post:
1. her frequent, but mostly veiled, allusions to the Bible, Anglican liturgy & theology, and sermons and prayers related thereto; and
2. her frequent exploitation of the ambiguity of words in order to reflect the ambiguity of human experience.
And my topic for today, which combines both of those strands in a particularly interesting way, is the word "miserable" and its variants (such as “misery”), as they appear in JA's writings. The "punch line" at the end of this post is worth the wait, I promise you!
This topic became salient to me as I continued to read along VERY slowly in the last volume of P&P, trawling for textual subtleties which might have eluded me during previous faster and/or fragmented rereads. Yesterday it was the phrase “thinking so ill” that caught my eye, and today I came to another abrupt halt at the following paragraph in Chapter 49, which contains the word "miserable" which I have put in all caps (and hence the first part of my playful Subject Line):
"If [Mr. Bennet] were ever able to learn what Wickham's debts have been," said Elizabeth, "and how much is settled on his side on our sister, we shall exactly know what Mr. Gardiner has done for them, because Wickham has not sixpence of his own. The kindness of my uncle and aunt can never be requited. Their taking her home, and affording her their personal protection and countenance, is such a sacrifice to her advantage as years of gratitude cannot enough acknowledge. By this time she is actually with them! If such goodness does not make her MISERABLE now, she will never deserve to be happy! What a meeting for her, when she first sees my aunt!"
I was caught up short because I could not make sense of Lizzy's speculations about Lydia’s becoming extremely distressed or unhappy (the definition of "miserable" in modern English). Why would Lydia’s being the beneficiary of the goodness of the Gardiners in keeping her at their home during the banns prior to Lydia's wedding to Wickham make Lydia very unhappy, such that Lydia would thereby deserve to be happy? Yes, we know that Lydia, by her own report after the fact, was “miserable” about being confined in virtual house arrest at the Gardiner’s London home---but Lydia’s unrepentant misery clearly was not the sense of “miserable” Lizzy had in mind—quite the opposite, it was a misery that rendered her most UNdeserving of happiness.
And that anomaly was my clue to realize that there had to be some alternative meaning of the word "miserable" in Lizzy’s mind, which _would_ make sense in the above context. Examination of the context provided by the entirety of Lizzy's speech, and further reflection on Lydia’s having not a repentant bone in her body, led me to suss it out, i.e., “miserable” must, in Lizzy's mind, have meant something like _repentant_ or _penitent_---the exact opposite of what Lydia was actually feeling!
And that’s what Lizzy meant---if observing the goodness, and willingness to sacrifice, on the part of the Gardiners, was not enough to shame Lydia into an epiphany as to the error of her reckless, sinful ways, and to repent for them, then Lydia would _never_ be worthy of happiness in marriage to Wickham.
It was clear by this point that I had wandered into the realm of Christian theology, and then the phrase "miserable sinner" popped into my head. Some quick Googling confirmed to me that this was indeed a phrase that would have been on the lips of many practicing English Christians during JA’s lifetime, as in the phrase repeated a dozen times in the Litany in the Book of Common Prayer....
"O God the [various laudatory adjectives]: have mercy upon us MISERABLE SINNERS"
And the following passage is also representative of recommended prayers from JA’s lifetime in connection with confession of sins:
"Look on me with the eyes of mercy, O God, and blot out all my sins; forgive me what is past, and through the bowels of thy infinite goodness, secure me by thy most efficacious grace, against all my wonted failings for the time to come. O how slothful and careless have I hitherto been! I have deferred my REPENTANCE, rejected thy helps, contemned thy visits, been deaf to thy calls; and now, Lord, what shall I do? and what course shall I take? It truly grieves me from the bottom of my heart that ever I have offended thee; but do thou vouchsafe to have mercy on me. Sovereign Lord of my life, behold thou seest there is nothing good in me, nor health in my soul: I am MISERABLE and blind; and without thee, O God, I can do nothing."
So, perhaps surprisingly to some, the irreverent Lizzy Bennet, for all that she modestly claimed not to be a great reader, was channeling some of her own religious learning, standing in moral judgment on her wild little sister Lydia!
Of course the next question I had was, how is the word “miserable” used in the _rest_ of JA’s writings? To lay out all the textual evidence I gathered today in this regard would mean a _very_ long post, but it will suffice to summarize that evidence as follows:
ONE: Lizzy’s rumination about Lydia is the _only_ usage I found in all of JA’s writings which only makes sense with the religious meaning of “repentant”; whereas
TWO: There are about two dozen usages of“miserable” and “misery” scattered through all the novels (but with the greatest concentration, not coincidentally, in the theologically-drenched Mansfield Park) which use that word _only_ in the modern non-theological sense; but, most interestingly,
THREE: In about a dozen instances, there is ambiguity, i.e., the word “miserable” can plausibly be read to have either the modern meaning _or_ the religious meaning!
So, for example, coming back to P&P, look at the following little bit of narration in the _first_ volume of P&P describing Mrs. Bennet's feelings about Jane's illness while being nursed at Netherfield:
"Had she found Jane in any apparent danger, Mrs. Bennet would have been very MISERABLE; but being satisfied on seeing her that her illness was not alarming, she had no wish of her recovering immediately, as her restoration to health would probably remove her from Netherfield."
I would wager that pretty much all Janeites read this passage to mean that Mrs. Bennet, like any worried mother, would have been very upset and distressed had she found Jane very sick at Netherfield. However, it deepens our sense of Mrs. Bennet’s character, and takes her out of the realm of cliché or caricature, if we _also_ think about her feeling _repentant_ about having coerced Jane into an exposed ride to Netherfield in the pouring rain, thereby (as Mr. Bennet so accurately observes) nearly costing her eldest daughter her life, in pursuit of a rich husband!
If we take that latter meaning, Mrs. Bennet’s ordinary maternal distress would be increased exponentially, to refer to her strong feelings of remorse if Jane was dying because Jane had obeyed her mother’s insistent demands to expose herself to a serious health risk!
And there are, as I said, about a dozen such passages, in total, scattered through all of JA’s novels, which, similarly, take on surprising additional significance, when the religious sense of “miserable” as “repentant” is plugged into the text, as an additional layer of description of the experience of the “miserable” character.
In conclusion, it makes perfect sense that the ultra-literate daughter of an ultra-literate country clergyman, Revd. Austen, whose library at Steventon perhaps rivaled the fictional library of Mr. Bennet at Longbourn, would be just the author to play with this ambiguity between the secular and religious meanings of a common word, “miserable”.
And by the way, if you were wondering, there are also a handful of usages of that word in JA’s _letters_, and one of them, it turns out, is startlingly and significantly altered in meaning by that same ambiguity. To wit: Letter 59, 10/14-15/08 to CEA, written upon the tragic occasion of the death in childbirth of Elizabeth Austen Knight, reads, in part, as follows:
“…& poor Edward restless in MISERY**going from one room to the other…perhaps not seldom upstairs to see all that remains of his Elizabeth—Dearest Fanny must now look upon herself as his prime source of comfort, his dearest friend…”
Surely all Janeites who’ve read that passage about Edward’s “misery” have interpreted that misery as describing the predictable grief of any husband upon the sudden death, in agony, of any prematurely deceased wife. But I believe, based on the ambiguous usages of “miserable” and “misery” in JA’s novels, that JA, in October 1808, intended it to also include that added layer of “repentance”. I.e., JA’s moral judgment was that Edward’s expected grief ought to have been magnified by his knowledge that Elizabeth had died because _he_ had made her pregnant for the dozenth time during her all-too-short life! This interpretation is especially likely in light of JA’s well documented hobby horse about women dying in childbirth which I have written about countless times, and which, I’ve asserted for over three years now, is the core theme of the shadow story of Northanger Abbey and its ghostly heroine, Mrs. Tilney.
And so, in a very real sense, Edward Austen was the “Mrs. Bennet” of this real life horror story, having been the reckless instigator of his wife’s premature death, and Elizabeth was the victimized “Jane”! And, as I write this, it gives me a shiver to connect the dots from this textual interpretation to another longstanding interpretation, whereby a woman getting caught in the rain was a Freudian metaphor (entirely intentional on JA’s part) for a woman getting pregnant! So, this ambiguity of the word “misery” supports the claim I made to the SW California branch of JASNA last December, which is that Jane Bennet’s “illness” was caused by “rain” which dropped from a man, not from the sky--and hence the second part of my cryptic Subject Line!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
1. her frequent, but mostly veiled, allusions to the Bible, Anglican liturgy & theology, and sermons and prayers related thereto; and
2. her frequent exploitation of the ambiguity of words in order to reflect the ambiguity of human experience.
And my topic for today, which combines both of those strands in a particularly interesting way, is the word "miserable" and its variants (such as “misery”), as they appear in JA's writings. The "punch line" at the end of this post is worth the wait, I promise you!
This topic became salient to me as I continued to read along VERY slowly in the last volume of P&P, trawling for textual subtleties which might have eluded me during previous faster and/or fragmented rereads. Yesterday it was the phrase “thinking so ill” that caught my eye, and today I came to another abrupt halt at the following paragraph in Chapter 49, which contains the word "miserable" which I have put in all caps (and hence the first part of my playful Subject Line):
"If [Mr. Bennet] were ever able to learn what Wickham's debts have been," said Elizabeth, "and how much is settled on his side on our sister, we shall exactly know what Mr. Gardiner has done for them, because Wickham has not sixpence of his own. The kindness of my uncle and aunt can never be requited. Their taking her home, and affording her their personal protection and countenance, is such a sacrifice to her advantage as years of gratitude cannot enough acknowledge. By this time she is actually with them! If such goodness does not make her MISERABLE now, she will never deserve to be happy! What a meeting for her, when she first sees my aunt!"
I was caught up short because I could not make sense of Lizzy's speculations about Lydia’s becoming extremely distressed or unhappy (the definition of "miserable" in modern English). Why would Lydia’s being the beneficiary of the goodness of the Gardiners in keeping her at their home during the banns prior to Lydia's wedding to Wickham make Lydia very unhappy, such that Lydia would thereby deserve to be happy? Yes, we know that Lydia, by her own report after the fact, was “miserable” about being confined in virtual house arrest at the Gardiner’s London home---but Lydia’s unrepentant misery clearly was not the sense of “miserable” Lizzy had in mind—quite the opposite, it was a misery that rendered her most UNdeserving of happiness.
And that anomaly was my clue to realize that there had to be some alternative meaning of the word "miserable" in Lizzy’s mind, which _would_ make sense in the above context. Examination of the context provided by the entirety of Lizzy's speech, and further reflection on Lydia’s having not a repentant bone in her body, led me to suss it out, i.e., “miserable” must, in Lizzy's mind, have meant something like _repentant_ or _penitent_---the exact opposite of what Lydia was actually feeling!
And that’s what Lizzy meant---if observing the goodness, and willingness to sacrifice, on the part of the Gardiners, was not enough to shame Lydia into an epiphany as to the error of her reckless, sinful ways, and to repent for them, then Lydia would _never_ be worthy of happiness in marriage to Wickham.
It was clear by this point that I had wandered into the realm of Christian theology, and then the phrase "miserable sinner" popped into my head. Some quick Googling confirmed to me that this was indeed a phrase that would have been on the lips of many practicing English Christians during JA’s lifetime, as in the phrase repeated a dozen times in the Litany in the Book of Common Prayer....
"O God the [various laudatory adjectives]: have mercy upon us MISERABLE SINNERS"
And the following passage is also representative of recommended prayers from JA’s lifetime in connection with confession of sins:
"Look on me with the eyes of mercy, O God, and blot out all my sins; forgive me what is past, and through the bowels of thy infinite goodness, secure me by thy most efficacious grace, against all my wonted failings for the time to come. O how slothful and careless have I hitherto been! I have deferred my REPENTANCE, rejected thy helps, contemned thy visits, been deaf to thy calls; and now, Lord, what shall I do? and what course shall I take? It truly grieves me from the bottom of my heart that ever I have offended thee; but do thou vouchsafe to have mercy on me. Sovereign Lord of my life, behold thou seest there is nothing good in me, nor health in my soul: I am MISERABLE and blind; and without thee, O God, I can do nothing."
So, perhaps surprisingly to some, the irreverent Lizzy Bennet, for all that she modestly claimed not to be a great reader, was channeling some of her own religious learning, standing in moral judgment on her wild little sister Lydia!
Of course the next question I had was, how is the word “miserable” used in the _rest_ of JA’s writings? To lay out all the textual evidence I gathered today in this regard would mean a _very_ long post, but it will suffice to summarize that evidence as follows:
ONE: Lizzy’s rumination about Lydia is the _only_ usage I found in all of JA’s writings which only makes sense with the religious meaning of “repentant”; whereas
TWO: There are about two dozen usages of“miserable” and “misery” scattered through all the novels (but with the greatest concentration, not coincidentally, in the theologically-drenched Mansfield Park) which use that word _only_ in the modern non-theological sense; but, most interestingly,
THREE: In about a dozen instances, there is ambiguity, i.e., the word “miserable” can plausibly be read to have either the modern meaning _or_ the religious meaning!
So, for example, coming back to P&P, look at the following little bit of narration in the _first_ volume of P&P describing Mrs. Bennet's feelings about Jane's illness while being nursed at Netherfield:
"Had she found Jane in any apparent danger, Mrs. Bennet would have been very MISERABLE; but being satisfied on seeing her that her illness was not alarming, she had no wish of her recovering immediately, as her restoration to health would probably remove her from Netherfield."
I would wager that pretty much all Janeites read this passage to mean that Mrs. Bennet, like any worried mother, would have been very upset and distressed had she found Jane very sick at Netherfield. However, it deepens our sense of Mrs. Bennet’s character, and takes her out of the realm of cliché or caricature, if we _also_ think about her feeling _repentant_ about having coerced Jane into an exposed ride to Netherfield in the pouring rain, thereby (as Mr. Bennet so accurately observes) nearly costing her eldest daughter her life, in pursuit of a rich husband!
If we take that latter meaning, Mrs. Bennet’s ordinary maternal distress would be increased exponentially, to refer to her strong feelings of remorse if Jane was dying because Jane had obeyed her mother’s insistent demands to expose herself to a serious health risk!
And there are, as I said, about a dozen such passages, in total, scattered through all of JA’s novels, which, similarly, take on surprising additional significance, when the religious sense of “miserable” as “repentant” is plugged into the text, as an additional layer of description of the experience of the “miserable” character.
In conclusion, it makes perfect sense that the ultra-literate daughter of an ultra-literate country clergyman, Revd. Austen, whose library at Steventon perhaps rivaled the fictional library of Mr. Bennet at Longbourn, would be just the author to play with this ambiguity between the secular and religious meanings of a common word, “miserable”.
And by the way, if you were wondering, there are also a handful of usages of that word in JA’s _letters_, and one of them, it turns out, is startlingly and significantly altered in meaning by that same ambiguity. To wit: Letter 59, 10/14-15/08 to CEA, written upon the tragic occasion of the death in childbirth of Elizabeth Austen Knight, reads, in part, as follows:
“…& poor Edward restless in MISERY**going from one room to the other…perhaps not seldom upstairs to see all that remains of his Elizabeth—Dearest Fanny must now look upon herself as his prime source of comfort, his dearest friend…”
Surely all Janeites who’ve read that passage about Edward’s “misery” have interpreted that misery as describing the predictable grief of any husband upon the sudden death, in agony, of any prematurely deceased wife. But I believe, based on the ambiguous usages of “miserable” and “misery” in JA’s novels, that JA, in October 1808, intended it to also include that added layer of “repentance”. I.e., JA’s moral judgment was that Edward’s expected grief ought to have been magnified by his knowledge that Elizabeth had died because _he_ had made her pregnant for the dozenth time during her all-too-short life! This interpretation is especially likely in light of JA’s well documented hobby horse about women dying in childbirth which I have written about countless times, and which, I’ve asserted for over three years now, is the core theme of the shadow story of Northanger Abbey and its ghostly heroine, Mrs. Tilney.
And so, in a very real sense, Edward Austen was the “Mrs. Bennet” of this real life horror story, having been the reckless instigator of his wife’s premature death, and Elizabeth was the victimized “Jane”! And, as I write this, it gives me a shiver to connect the dots from this textual interpretation to another longstanding interpretation, whereby a woman getting caught in the rain was a Freudian metaphor (entirely intentional on JA’s part) for a woman getting pregnant! So, this ambiguity of the word “misery” supports the claim I made to the SW California branch of JASNA last December, which is that Jane Bennet’s “illness” was caused by “rain” which dropped from a man, not from the sky--and hence the second part of my cryptic Subject Line!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
When Kathleen Met Joe (a while after Nora met Jane and a LONG while after Darcy met Lizzy)
Is there anyone living today who knows Jane Austen's stories well who
was not shocked and saddened to wake up to the news of Nora Ephron's
death this morning? I would guess, very few Janeites, if any.
I found out about NE's death this morning when I woke up, even before I heard or read any news, because a good Janeite friend had emailed me the following and I always read my emails first:
http://www.showbiz411.com/2012/06/26/nora-ephron-left-clues-about-dying-in-her-final-book
She assumed I already had heard the sad news, so It took me about 5 seconds to realize why she had sent the article to me today---but, as I read it, I was not at all surprised to learn that Nora Ephron had left all these many clues to her mortal illness hidden in her 2010 publication---and the reason I was not surprised is the same reason why I was not at all surprised to then see "Pride and Prejudice" in the list of things Nora Ephron would miss.
Like all other Janeites who've seen You've Got Mail, one of my many favorite scenes in the film (and there truly is no need for a spoilers alert, as I am pretty sure that pretty much everyone reading this post has already seen You've Got Mail...probably has seen it at least six times!) is when Kathleen arrives for her fateful first meeting (and planned mutual in the flesh viewing) with her longtime email friend.
Of course, the email friend who shows up is actually Joe Fox, in real life her mortal corporate enemy, and when he realizes who she is while she has no clue who _he_ is, he does little credit to his character by deciding to have some unwholesome totally one-sided fun at her expense, by concealing his true identity. As he lingers around, revealing (to the viewer) a sadistic streak, he ribs her about the copy of Pride & Prejudice which she has brought along as part of her "costume", and which, it is clear, he has read in advance of their rencontre. And as he's a smart guy, perhaps he even realizes that he bears an unsettling resemblance to Darcy, and so he proceeds to take a few potshots at Darcy, just to really aggravate her, while he is enjoying her increasing discomfort waiting for her "friend" who has (apparently) not shown up. As I said, pretty sadistic, with a strong dose thrown in of enjoyment at exercising power over another person who does not like to be controlled. _Definitely_ not gentlemanly.
Now to my point in sketching that scene---I would imagine that most people (including most Janeites) who have seen the film do not give much thought, if any, as to whether Nora Ephron may have had some covert meaning in mind when she chose Pride & Prejudice, as opposed to some other romantic novel, as the book that Kathleen brings to the restaurant (and of course the gag about P&P is returned to once--or twice?---later in the film as well). If this authorial choice on Ephron's part is given consideration, I would imagine that the analysis that follows is usually limited to taking note of the obvious parallels between Darcy and Lizzy in P&P, and Joe and Kathleen in YGM--the sometimes hot sparks that fly, accompanied by a plethora of witty, barbed repartee, between the rich powerful egotistical young man and the feisty, sensitive young woman, before true love is eventually recognized by both at the end of the story, to great romantic effect. As the literary jargon would put it, it's a _trope_ (God, I hate that word, and what it stands for!) that NE has wheeled out, and not worth more consideration than that.
Well, I saw You've Got Mail in the movie theater when it came out in 1998, but it was only in 2006, several years after I began my own quest to unravel the mysteries of Jane Austen's shadow stories, and I noted the thread in the Janeites group which mentioned P&P as a source for You've Got Mail, that it began to dawn on me that Nora Ephron might have had a literary trick or three of her own up her sleeve as well, beyond the obvious, in putting P&P in Kathleen's hands in that restaurant.
At that time in 2006, I added the following interesting quoted comments by Ephron to that thread, and they are worth repeating now:
[Ephron] "For many years I had a problem with Emma, as compared to, say, Pride and Prejudice. I loved P and P, and I loved its practically perfect heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. Emma, on the other hand, has a much more problematic heroine: Emma Woodhouse is bossy, controlling, obstinate, pigheaded, and manipulative. In short, she is horribly like me at my worst. Getting older has mellowed me in many ways, and now that I like to delude myself that I'm not as much like Emma Woodhouse as I used to be, I've grown to love the book. Still, Pride and Prejudice is probably my favorite book ever, ever, ever. "
That last sentence, with its almost Shakespearean repetition of "ever, ever, ever", came as no surprise. And so it stood with me until a _month_ ago when, after what seemed like the 5th time in as many months that I was flipping channels on the treadmill TV at the gym and You've Got Mail popped up on the screen again, and I watched 40-50 minutes of it _again_. As the final third of the film came on the screen, this time I watched the romantic climax for the first time in a while, and I was struck _again_ by a troubling thought that had been nibbling at my brain for at least a decade, which is, "After the film credits stop rolling and Kathleen has time to think about the fact that Joe had intentionally concealed from her his true identity as her email friend from that fateful meeting in the restaurant until he came strolling up (sans wet shirt) with his dog along Riverside Drive, will she truly forgive him for this months-long continuous, elaborate deception? And if she will, _should_ she?"
I am still on the fence in terms of my own answers to those questions, and that these questions are put into play at all is a crucial clue to the sly brilliance (not Austen level genius, but I am sure Ephron herself would have been the first to place JA above her in the literary pantheon) of You've Got Mail, which is that I believe the allusion to P&P is actually _central_ to a deeper appreciation of Nora Ephron's screenwriting excellence in the construction of You've Got Mail, and that allusion goes to the heart of those troubling questions beneath the light bright and sparkling ending of You've Got Mail.
A full explanation of what I mean is beyond the scope of this post--I plan on including same in my book, as I believe that Ephron actually glimpsed not insignificantly into the heart of what I call the "shadow story" of Pride & Prejudice---but suffice to say that the parallels I see between Lizzy and Darcy, on the one hand, and Kathleen and Joe, on the other, run very deep, and some of them are hiding in plain sight, but, to my mind, have never been fully articulated in print (and I've looked for it).
I will briefly touch on two as illustrations of a much deeper pattern:
First, as was pointed out by Jane George in Janeites back in 2003, there is an interesting parallelism between the _original _ epistolarity of First Impressions (of course, JA's first version of P&P) and the virtual epistolarity of Kathleen's and Joe's long correspondence. But, that is only the most superficial layer of the parallelism--what makes it much more interesting is that in both P&P and in You've Got Mail, it is "mail" that the heroine receives from the hero that utterly changes her perception of him to, in the end, a very positive one.
In P&P, of course, it is the letter that Darcy writes and then hand delivers to Lizzy which rocks her world, and reverses her longstanding negative opinion of him--Ephron very cleverly alters the periphery of that structure while preserving its essence---it is not one piece of "mail" written by Joe which alters Kathleen's opinion of Joe, but many, and over a period of time which continues right up till the final scene.
And so in both stories, we see that a woman's opinion of a man, based on her face to face conversations with him, and observations of his behavior in the flesh, is subject to alteration by words written by that man and read by that woman. Is this a good thing? Most readers and viewers would say, in this case, yes. But it's something to think about, I suggest, that both Austen and Ephron meant for at least some folks to reflect on.
And here is my second example of covert allusion to P&P in You've Got Mail---before meeting Joe in person, Kathleen is at the center of a vibrant female community, with both an older woman and a younger woman, who create a uniquely female space where the business of selling books is humanized, and which strikes such a deep chord in the neighborhood (composed of more than 4 and 20 families) that the closing of the story takes on an almost tragic feeling. And what do we see at the end, the vague promise that somehow that female wisdom and aura will be incorporated (ha ha) into the corporate structure of the megastore that has supplanted Kathleen's store. Is this a good thing? Again, I suggest that Ephron has picked up on something deeper in P&P, something beyond the happy ending, that is troubling, and that I touched upon a few years ago here in discussing the ending of P&P:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/03/men-shant-come-and-part-us-i-am.html
Had one of Kathleen's co-workers said to her, "The men shan't come between us", or words to that effect in 1998-speak, what would she have replied? What should she have replied?
Yes, perhaps Kathleen has found true love with Joe, but these most romantic of stories are also great enough to raise questions about the costs of romance, and also... (and here I also would like to think that Nora Ephron would find my comments intriguing--but I fear I will never know for sure)..whether true love _really_ is as true as it seems, even when it appears to have passed through a rigorous vetting process of a "merry war"?
So, RIP Nora Ephron, and thank you for being the closest thing Hollywood has seen to Jane Austen during my own lifetime.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
P.S.: And I am sure Ephron, if she saw Friends With Benefits, was well aware of, and enjoyed, the covert allusion to When Harry Met Sally in FWB that I wrote about here:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/08/veiled-allusions-in-friends-with.html
I found out about NE's death this morning when I woke up, even before I heard or read any news, because a good Janeite friend had emailed me the following and I always read my emails first:
http://www.showbiz411.com/2012/06/26/nora-ephron-left-clues-about-dying-in-her-final-book
She assumed I already had heard the sad news, so It took me about 5 seconds to realize why she had sent the article to me today---but, as I read it, I was not at all surprised to learn that Nora Ephron had left all these many clues to her mortal illness hidden in her 2010 publication---and the reason I was not surprised is the same reason why I was not at all surprised to then see "Pride and Prejudice" in the list of things Nora Ephron would miss.
Like all other Janeites who've seen You've Got Mail, one of my many favorite scenes in the film (and there truly is no need for a spoilers alert, as I am pretty sure that pretty much everyone reading this post has already seen You've Got Mail...probably has seen it at least six times!) is when Kathleen arrives for her fateful first meeting (and planned mutual in the flesh viewing) with her longtime email friend.
Of course, the email friend who shows up is actually Joe Fox, in real life her mortal corporate enemy, and when he realizes who she is while she has no clue who _he_ is, he does little credit to his character by deciding to have some unwholesome totally one-sided fun at her expense, by concealing his true identity. As he lingers around, revealing (to the viewer) a sadistic streak, he ribs her about the copy of Pride & Prejudice which she has brought along as part of her "costume", and which, it is clear, he has read in advance of their rencontre. And as he's a smart guy, perhaps he even realizes that he bears an unsettling resemblance to Darcy, and so he proceeds to take a few potshots at Darcy, just to really aggravate her, while he is enjoying her increasing discomfort waiting for her "friend" who has (apparently) not shown up. As I said, pretty sadistic, with a strong dose thrown in of enjoyment at exercising power over another person who does not like to be controlled. _Definitely_ not gentlemanly.
Now to my point in sketching that scene---I would imagine that most people (including most Janeites) who have seen the film do not give much thought, if any, as to whether Nora Ephron may have had some covert meaning in mind when she chose Pride & Prejudice, as opposed to some other romantic novel, as the book that Kathleen brings to the restaurant (and of course the gag about P&P is returned to once--or twice?---later in the film as well). If this authorial choice on Ephron's part is given consideration, I would imagine that the analysis that follows is usually limited to taking note of the obvious parallels between Darcy and Lizzy in P&P, and Joe and Kathleen in YGM--the sometimes hot sparks that fly, accompanied by a plethora of witty, barbed repartee, between the rich powerful egotistical young man and the feisty, sensitive young woman, before true love is eventually recognized by both at the end of the story, to great romantic effect. As the literary jargon would put it, it's a _trope_ (God, I hate that word, and what it stands for!) that NE has wheeled out, and not worth more consideration than that.
Well, I saw You've Got Mail in the movie theater when it came out in 1998, but it was only in 2006, several years after I began my own quest to unravel the mysteries of Jane Austen's shadow stories, and I noted the thread in the Janeites group which mentioned P&P as a source for You've Got Mail, that it began to dawn on me that Nora Ephron might have had a literary trick or three of her own up her sleeve as well, beyond the obvious, in putting P&P in Kathleen's hands in that restaurant.
At that time in 2006, I added the following interesting quoted comments by Ephron to that thread, and they are worth repeating now:
[Ephron] "For many years I had a problem with Emma, as compared to, say, Pride and Prejudice. I loved P and P, and I loved its practically perfect heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. Emma, on the other hand, has a much more problematic heroine: Emma Woodhouse is bossy, controlling, obstinate, pigheaded, and manipulative. In short, she is horribly like me at my worst. Getting older has mellowed me in many ways, and now that I like to delude myself that I'm not as much like Emma Woodhouse as I used to be, I've grown to love the book. Still, Pride and Prejudice is probably my favorite book ever, ever, ever. "
That last sentence, with its almost Shakespearean repetition of "ever, ever, ever", came as no surprise. And so it stood with me until a _month_ ago when, after what seemed like the 5th time in as many months that I was flipping channels on the treadmill TV at the gym and You've Got Mail popped up on the screen again, and I watched 40-50 minutes of it _again_. As the final third of the film came on the screen, this time I watched the romantic climax for the first time in a while, and I was struck _again_ by a troubling thought that had been nibbling at my brain for at least a decade, which is, "After the film credits stop rolling and Kathleen has time to think about the fact that Joe had intentionally concealed from her his true identity as her email friend from that fateful meeting in the restaurant until he came strolling up (sans wet shirt) with his dog along Riverside Drive, will she truly forgive him for this months-long continuous, elaborate deception? And if she will, _should_ she?"
I am still on the fence in terms of my own answers to those questions, and that these questions are put into play at all is a crucial clue to the sly brilliance (not Austen level genius, but I am sure Ephron herself would have been the first to place JA above her in the literary pantheon) of You've Got Mail, which is that I believe the allusion to P&P is actually _central_ to a deeper appreciation of Nora Ephron's screenwriting excellence in the construction of You've Got Mail, and that allusion goes to the heart of those troubling questions beneath the light bright and sparkling ending of You've Got Mail.
A full explanation of what I mean is beyond the scope of this post--I plan on including same in my book, as I believe that Ephron actually glimpsed not insignificantly into the heart of what I call the "shadow story" of Pride & Prejudice---but suffice to say that the parallels I see between Lizzy and Darcy, on the one hand, and Kathleen and Joe, on the other, run very deep, and some of them are hiding in plain sight, but, to my mind, have never been fully articulated in print (and I've looked for it).
I will briefly touch on two as illustrations of a much deeper pattern:
First, as was pointed out by Jane George in Janeites back in 2003, there is an interesting parallelism between the _original _ epistolarity of First Impressions (of course, JA's first version of P&P) and the virtual epistolarity of Kathleen's and Joe's long correspondence. But, that is only the most superficial layer of the parallelism--what makes it much more interesting is that in both P&P and in You've Got Mail, it is "mail" that the heroine receives from the hero that utterly changes her perception of him to, in the end, a very positive one.
In P&P, of course, it is the letter that Darcy writes and then hand delivers to Lizzy which rocks her world, and reverses her longstanding negative opinion of him--Ephron very cleverly alters the periphery of that structure while preserving its essence---it is not one piece of "mail" written by Joe which alters Kathleen's opinion of Joe, but many, and over a period of time which continues right up till the final scene.
And so in both stories, we see that a woman's opinion of a man, based on her face to face conversations with him, and observations of his behavior in the flesh, is subject to alteration by words written by that man and read by that woman. Is this a good thing? Most readers and viewers would say, in this case, yes. But it's something to think about, I suggest, that both Austen and Ephron meant for at least some folks to reflect on.
And here is my second example of covert allusion to P&P in You've Got Mail---before meeting Joe in person, Kathleen is at the center of a vibrant female community, with both an older woman and a younger woman, who create a uniquely female space where the business of selling books is humanized, and which strikes such a deep chord in the neighborhood (composed of more than 4 and 20 families) that the closing of the story takes on an almost tragic feeling. And what do we see at the end, the vague promise that somehow that female wisdom and aura will be incorporated (ha ha) into the corporate structure of the megastore that has supplanted Kathleen's store. Is this a good thing? Again, I suggest that Ephron has picked up on something deeper in P&P, something beyond the happy ending, that is troubling, and that I touched upon a few years ago here in discussing the ending of P&P:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/03/men-shant-come-and-part-us-i-am.html
Had one of Kathleen's co-workers said to her, "The men shan't come between us", or words to that effect in 1998-speak, what would she have replied? What should she have replied?
Yes, perhaps Kathleen has found true love with Joe, but these most romantic of stories are also great enough to raise questions about the costs of romance, and also... (and here I also would like to think that Nora Ephron would find my comments intriguing--but I fear I will never know for sure)..whether true love _really_ is as true as it seems, even when it appears to have passed through a rigorous vetting process of a "merry war"?
So, RIP Nora Ephron, and thank you for being the closest thing Hollywood has seen to Jane Austen during my own lifetime.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
P.S.: And I am sure Ephron, if she saw Friends With Benefits, was well aware of, and enjoyed, the covert allusion to When Harry Met Sally in FWB that I wrote about here:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/08/veiled-allusions-in-friends-with.html
Friday, June 22, 2012
Many LeBron and Obama Haters Are Peas in a Rotten Pod
OK, transparency dictates that I reveal upfront that I (together with everyone among my nearest kinfolk) am a rabid Miami Heat basketball fan. I was a season ticket holder during the Shaq-Wade years, and I had the privilege of attending several games during the epic 2006 road to the championship.
Having said that, it will surprise no one that I am in sports fan nirvana right now, basking in the glow of the championship the Heat just won over Oklahoma City last night, carried on the Atlas-like shoulders of LeBron James.
And it's the personal stories that make me just as happy as the victory on the court-and most of all, it's the redemption and vindication of LeBron James, as he finally (I thought) got several 900-pound gorillas off his back all at once, as his superhuman athletic performance on the court was matched by the maturity, class, honesty and sincerity shown by LeBron in his postgame comments. This included his acknowledgment that last season he played angry and strayed away from the fundamentals, playing like he had to prove everybody wrong; that he had let his teammates and fans down. I was thrilled to hear his unambiguous and wonderful admission about his reaction to his own inexplicably inferior (by his standards) play in the Finals against Dallas, i.e., that he was humbled, and didn't do it in the right way. And he also made it clear that if he had it to over, he would not turn "the Decision" into "the Circus".
As I watched LeBron say these words, and many more during the past few weeks, my admiration for LeBron the basketball superstar was eclipsed by my admiration for LeBron the maturing young man who (after all) is still only 27 years old, practically the same age as 2 of my sons!
I was, simply, proud of him for growing up, admitting his errors (which, after all, were never anything remotely close in intensity to the REAL and often ugly misdeeds of so many other sports figures--all LeBron had been guilty of was being very narcissistic and having very poor judgment in public self-presentation) and being brave enough to show his repentance to the world.
But in the midst of all this joy, there was also alloy, as Jane Austen might have put it. What caught my eye and ear today, as I surfed ESPN and sports webpages, and disturbed me a lot, and made me want to write about here in my blog, was the report of polls (apparently taken AFTER last night's Heat victory over OKC) which indicated that about 70% of nationwide respondents did NOT feel happy for LeBron James now that he had finally won.
For just a second, I could not believe my eyes and ears. After all, the sports commentators were ALL unanimous in their praise for LeBron's personal behavior during this championship run, and especially last night and today in the intense media glare. He had fessed up very authentically and directly, and so I thought, hey, all but the most dieheard haters would have, at least, to give the devil his due, and acknowledge that LeBron had admitted his faults, and had done a pretty good job of beginning a new path and trying to not repeat them. They might not like the prospect of his winning more championships, but at least he would not be Jack the Ripper in their eyes.
But I quickly confirmed that ESPN was not leading me astray, when I read articles like the following:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/47892143
And THAT's what leads me to my punch line, which is that i felt more than a slight shiver as I realized that I had seen this picture before---I immediately recalled the one genuinely ugly aspect of the public reaction to LeBron's leaving Cleveland for Miami two years ago--the disgusting public responses by the (white) owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Dan Gilbert, with his (to my mind blatant, albeit cluelessly unself-aware) racist take on LeBron's departure--it really did seem like Gilbert was not merely upset at LeBron's making his departure from Cleveland something of a media circus, but that Gilbert really saw LeBron as a very highly paid "slave", who had the audacity to leave the "plantation" of the owner who had taken SUCH good care of him....
And THAT led me to connect the dots still further from the hostile public reaction to LeBron's leaving Cleveland, and even still, apparently today, the unforgiving persistence in that hostility among most fans, to the endlessly persistent hostility toward perhaps the only black man in America with an even HIGHER public visibility than LeBron at this moment--Barack Obama. I was unpleasantly reminded of the vile racist vitriol that has followed him every step of the way during his rise to, and then service in, the Presidency. Again, it's more than just political disagreement, there is (as Richard Pryor so tellingly told it like it was) that EXTRA layer, which is white racism, especially toward black men.
I wish it wasn't so, but that 70% LeBron Hatred strikes me as having a disturbingly similar origin as the persistent Obama Hatred. In both cases, these are "uppity" black men who achieve extraordinary fame and success in the wider society--at a time when so many Americans--black, white and all others--are suffering economically. And they are both also given zero tolerance for even the hint of wrongdoing, whether real, trivial or totally fabricated.
In short, I believe that if it had been Kevin Love (arguably the best WHITE American basketball player in the NBA right now) who had bolted from the Minnesota Timberwolves and said he was "taking his talents to South Beach", and had then won his first ring last night, and had said all the things LeBron said, that 70% would never have been higher than 30% in the first place, and would be in the single digits today.
So I conclude by saying....
Cheers (to LeBron and to Obama),
Arnie
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
P.S.: Now if Roger Federer can only win Wimbledon and thereby become #1 in the world again.......
Having said that, it will surprise no one that I am in sports fan nirvana right now, basking in the glow of the championship the Heat just won over Oklahoma City last night, carried on the Atlas-like shoulders of LeBron James.
And it's the personal stories that make me just as happy as the victory on the court-and most of all, it's the redemption and vindication of LeBron James, as he finally (I thought) got several 900-pound gorillas off his back all at once, as his superhuman athletic performance on the court was matched by the maturity, class, honesty and sincerity shown by LeBron in his postgame comments. This included his acknowledgment that last season he played angry and strayed away from the fundamentals, playing like he had to prove everybody wrong; that he had let his teammates and fans down. I was thrilled to hear his unambiguous and wonderful admission about his reaction to his own inexplicably inferior (by his standards) play in the Finals against Dallas, i.e., that he was humbled, and didn't do it in the right way. And he also made it clear that if he had it to over, he would not turn "the Decision" into "the Circus".
As I watched LeBron say these words, and many more during the past few weeks, my admiration for LeBron the basketball superstar was eclipsed by my admiration for LeBron the maturing young man who (after all) is still only 27 years old, practically the same age as 2 of my sons!
I was, simply, proud of him for growing up, admitting his errors (which, after all, were never anything remotely close in intensity to the REAL and often ugly misdeeds of so many other sports figures--all LeBron had been guilty of was being very narcissistic and having very poor judgment in public self-presentation) and being brave enough to show his repentance to the world.
But in the midst of all this joy, there was also alloy, as Jane Austen might have put it. What caught my eye and ear today, as I surfed ESPN and sports webpages, and disturbed me a lot, and made me want to write about here in my blog, was the report of polls (apparently taken AFTER last night's Heat victory over OKC) which indicated that about 70% of nationwide respondents did NOT feel happy for LeBron James now that he had finally won.
For just a second, I could not believe my eyes and ears. After all, the sports commentators were ALL unanimous in their praise for LeBron's personal behavior during this championship run, and especially last night and today in the intense media glare. He had fessed up very authentically and directly, and so I thought, hey, all but the most dieheard haters would have, at least, to give the devil his due, and acknowledge that LeBron had admitted his faults, and had done a pretty good job of beginning a new path and trying to not repeat them. They might not like the prospect of his winning more championships, but at least he would not be Jack the Ripper in their eyes.
But I quickly confirmed that ESPN was not leading me astray, when I read articles like the following:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/47892143
And THAT's what leads me to my punch line, which is that i felt more than a slight shiver as I realized that I had seen this picture before---I immediately recalled the one genuinely ugly aspect of the public reaction to LeBron's leaving Cleveland for Miami two years ago--the disgusting public responses by the (white) owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Dan Gilbert, with his (to my mind blatant, albeit cluelessly unself-aware) racist take on LeBron's departure--it really did seem like Gilbert was not merely upset at LeBron's making his departure from Cleveland something of a media circus, but that Gilbert really saw LeBron as a very highly paid "slave", who had the audacity to leave the "plantation" of the owner who had taken SUCH good care of him....
And THAT led me to connect the dots still further from the hostile public reaction to LeBron's leaving Cleveland, and even still, apparently today, the unforgiving persistence in that hostility among most fans, to the endlessly persistent hostility toward perhaps the only black man in America with an even HIGHER public visibility than LeBron at this moment--Barack Obama. I was unpleasantly reminded of the vile racist vitriol that has followed him every step of the way during his rise to, and then service in, the Presidency. Again, it's more than just political disagreement, there is (as Richard Pryor so tellingly told it like it was) that EXTRA layer, which is white racism, especially toward black men.
I wish it wasn't so, but that 70% LeBron Hatred strikes me as having a disturbingly similar origin as the persistent Obama Hatred. In both cases, these are "uppity" black men who achieve extraordinary fame and success in the wider society--at a time when so many Americans--black, white and all others--are suffering economically. And they are both also given zero tolerance for even the hint of wrongdoing, whether real, trivial or totally fabricated.
In short, I believe that if it had been Kevin Love (arguably the best WHITE American basketball player in the NBA right now) who had bolted from the Minnesota Timberwolves and said he was "taking his talents to South Beach", and had then won his first ring last night, and had said all the things LeBron said, that 70% would never have been higher than 30% in the first place, and would be in the single digits today.
So I conclude by saying....
Cheers (to LeBron and to Obama),
Arnie
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
P.S.: Now if Roger Federer can only win Wimbledon and thereby become #1 in the world again.......
"...principally by Tom...": Tom Bertram Closet Embroiderer
In Chapter 16, Fanny retreats to her "nest" and angsts over whether to yield to the pressure to participate in the amateur theatricals, and we then read the following:
"It would be so horrible to her to act that she was inclined to suspect the truth and purity of her own scruples; and as she looked around her, the claims of her cousins to being obliged were strengthened by the sight of present upon present that she had received from them. The table between the windows was covered with work-boxes and netting-boxes which had been
given her at different times, principally by Tom; and she grew bewildered as to the amount of the debt which all these kind remembrances produced."
What caught my eye this time around were the words "principally by Tom"--why in the world would Tom (as opposed to Maria or Julia) be the principal donor of numerous gifts (so many that they cover the table) to Fanny, presumably over a period of time, of _female_ things like work-boxes and netting-boxes?
Before sending this post, I checked the Janeites and Austen L group archives, and see that 2 years ago, the sharp-eyed Diane Reynolds posed that very same question:
"...and the work and netting boxes, mostly from Tom (what does that mean?), on her table."
Now, some will immediately claim that making Tom the donor of these boxes was authorial expediency on JA's part, since the theatricals are Tom's inspiration and darling project, so JA had to find some way of making Fanny feel obligated specifically to Tom.
But I categorically reject all such diminishments of JA's authorial integrity, suggesting that she would be so slovenly in her work product (particularly in regard to items used for embroidery and sewing, crafts which depend on minute attention to small details!), and so I am led to ask, Why Tom in particular? What might JA have been trying to bring out about him in this subliminal way?
And one explanation that immediately comes to mind is that Tom (however secretly) might himself have been using those netting boxes and work boxes, because he enjoyed exercising his creativity in these traditionally female ways!
And then, when he grew up and perhaps put these hobbies behind him, what was he to do with these boxes? Sure he could have tossed them, but perhaps he felt a sentimental attachment to them, and preferred to give them to an appreciative donee, which I am sure Fanny was, every time he gave her one. And also, Fanny would be a discreet donee, one who would not blab all over the place about who gave the gifts to her, especially if Tom asked her not to tell, taking the role of a giver of charity who did not wish to draw
attention to his charity.
Which of course relates right back to my previous speculations as to Tom's gender orientation, such as:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/06/studying-myself-to-death.html
So, as usual, attention to JA's minute details, the ones that seem to be throwaways, leads straight to significant subtextual meaning!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Mr. Price's Cordial Hug and....Mr. Woodhouse's Unsullied Cordiality!
Nancy: "Of course fanny wasn't a teetotaller. That wasn't even much
considerd except among the Quakers. Everyone drank wine. Children of an
age to eat at the table when no guests were expected, had their wine
diluted. It was gradually made with less water until they had adult
glasses of wine."
All the same, I don't think I am the only Janeite who would be surprised to know that Fanny drank regularly, even diluted wine. The more I reflect on it, the more I think it is a classic, characteristic JA irony, with some sophisticated anticipation of Freud thrown in, to depict Fanny's visceral disgust at her father's drunken aroma in such a subversive way---it would indeed make perfect psychological sense for Fanny to repress away any resonance between her father's crude drinking and her own genteel drinking, especially the resonance based on a very real commonality between them- we can readily infer that Mr. Price's drinking to excess is fueled in part by his lifelong lower class status, and his resentful anger toward rich powerful people far above him in status, like Sir Thomas; and I can certainly imagine that part of what might have given Fanny a strong taste for alcoholic beverages would be her own (totally justified) sense of having been abused and treated like a second class citizen at Mansfield Park for the previous decade.
In short, Fanny has such a strong negative reaction to her parents in part because she unconsciously realizes that she has not climbed so far above them as she might have thought, she is still second class in the eyes of the elite snobs, and so _both_ she and her father take some comfort in alcoholic to drown the very real sorrows they both feel.
Nancy: "A cordiale was not so much a stiff drink as a medicinal draught/ She wanted a composer. A slightly sedative potion."
Was "composer" a term of art in JA's era, to describe a slightly sedative potion? If it was, then that would explain a _LOT_ about the following three passages about Mr. Woodhouse in _Emma_ which heretofore had been totally invisible:
Chapter 1: The wedding over, and the bride-people gone, her father and herself were left to dine together, with no prospect of a third to cheer a long evening. Her father COMPOSED HIMSELF TO SLEEP AFTER DINNER, AS USUAL, and she had then only to sit and think of what she had lost.
Chapter 11: The beginning, however, of every visit displayed none but the properest feelings, and this being of necessity so short might be hoped to pass away in UNSULLIED CORDIALITY. They had not been long seated and COMPOSED when Mr. Woodhouse, with a melancholy shake of the head and a sigh, called his daughter's attention to the sad change at Hartfield since she had been there last. "Ah, my dear," said he, "poor Miss Taylor—It is a grievous business."
Chapter 25: Then turning to Mrs. Weston, with a look of gentle reproach—"Ah! Miss Taylor, if you had not married, you would have staid at home with me." "Well, sir," cried Mr. Weston, "as I took Miss Taylor away, it is incumbent on me to supply her place, if I can; and I will step to Mrs. Goddard in a moment, if you wish it." But the idea of any thing to be done in a /moment/, was INCREASING, not lessening, MR. WOODHOUSE'S AGITATION. THE LADIES KNEW BETTER HOW TO ALLAY IT. Mr. Weston must be quiet, and EVERY THING DELIBERATELY ARRANGED. WITH THIS TREATMENT, MR. WOODHOUSE WAS SOON COMPOSED ENOUGH for talking as usual. "He should be happy to see Mrs. Goddard. He had a great regard for Mrs. Goddard; and Emma should write a line, and invite her. James could take the note. But first of all, there must be an answer written to Mrs. Cole."
I hope my all-caps on certain key phrases makes clear the subversive interpretation that I was led to make by your giving me that unexpected meaning of the word "composer".
The passage in Chapter 1 seems to suggest that Mr. Woodhouse's standard bedtime operating procedure was to take a massive sleeping "composer"!
The passage in Chapter 11 suggests to me that Emma may have slipped her father a "cordial" in order to "compose" him, in preparation for a dangerous bit of verbal combat with his irascible son in law John K--and I just love the pun in "unsullied cordiality", which I see as a "twin" of the pun on Mr. Price's "cordial hug". In this passage, "cordiality" clearly refers _both_ to the desired politeness of the encounter, and also to the medicinal means of achieving that politeness!
Best of the three, the passage in Chapter 25 is a mini-epic in itself, describing the covert medicinal operation conducted by "the ladies' in order to drug Mr. Woodhouse out of his agitation over the prospect of the Coles's dinner party. I.e., the better way to allay Mr. Woodhouse's agitation was to deliberately arrange to administer to Mr. Woodhouse the treatment of a strong cordial, as a result of which he would indeed have soon become "composed" enough for talking as usual!
So, Nancy, as often has been the case, in your rebutting one of my claims, you've actually opened a second door wide open for me, that actually reinforces my original claim--and for this, I thank you once more!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
All the same, I don't think I am the only Janeite who would be surprised to know that Fanny drank regularly, even diluted wine. The more I reflect on it, the more I think it is a classic, characteristic JA irony, with some sophisticated anticipation of Freud thrown in, to depict Fanny's visceral disgust at her father's drunken aroma in such a subversive way---it would indeed make perfect psychological sense for Fanny to repress away any resonance between her father's crude drinking and her own genteel drinking, especially the resonance based on a very real commonality between them- we can readily infer that Mr. Price's drinking to excess is fueled in part by his lifelong lower class status, and his resentful anger toward rich powerful people far above him in status, like Sir Thomas; and I can certainly imagine that part of what might have given Fanny a strong taste for alcoholic beverages would be her own (totally justified) sense of having been abused and treated like a second class citizen at Mansfield Park for the previous decade.
In short, Fanny has such a strong negative reaction to her parents in part because she unconsciously realizes that she has not climbed so far above them as she might have thought, she is still second class in the eyes of the elite snobs, and so _both_ she and her father take some comfort in alcoholic to drown the very real sorrows they both feel.
Nancy: "A cordiale was not so much a stiff drink as a medicinal draught/ She wanted a composer. A slightly sedative potion."
Was "composer" a term of art in JA's era, to describe a slightly sedative potion? If it was, then that would explain a _LOT_ about the following three passages about Mr. Woodhouse in _Emma_ which heretofore had been totally invisible:
Chapter 1: The wedding over, and the bride-people gone, her father and herself were left to dine together, with no prospect of a third to cheer a long evening. Her father COMPOSED HIMSELF TO SLEEP AFTER DINNER, AS USUAL, and she had then only to sit and think of what she had lost.
Chapter 11: The beginning, however, of every visit displayed none but the properest feelings, and this being of necessity so short might be hoped to pass away in UNSULLIED CORDIALITY. They had not been long seated and COMPOSED when Mr. Woodhouse, with a melancholy shake of the head and a sigh, called his daughter's attention to the sad change at Hartfield since she had been there last. "Ah, my dear," said he, "poor Miss Taylor—It is a grievous business."
Chapter 25: Then turning to Mrs. Weston, with a look of gentle reproach—"Ah! Miss Taylor, if you had not married, you would have staid at home with me." "Well, sir," cried Mr. Weston, "as I took Miss Taylor away, it is incumbent on me to supply her place, if I can; and I will step to Mrs. Goddard in a moment, if you wish it." But the idea of any thing to be done in a /moment/, was INCREASING, not lessening, MR. WOODHOUSE'S AGITATION. THE LADIES KNEW BETTER HOW TO ALLAY IT. Mr. Weston must be quiet, and EVERY THING DELIBERATELY ARRANGED. WITH THIS TREATMENT, MR. WOODHOUSE WAS SOON COMPOSED ENOUGH for talking as usual. "He should be happy to see Mrs. Goddard. He had a great regard for Mrs. Goddard; and Emma should write a line, and invite her. James could take the note. But first of all, there must be an answer written to Mrs. Cole."
I hope my all-caps on certain key phrases makes clear the subversive interpretation that I was led to make by your giving me that unexpected meaning of the word "composer".
The passage in Chapter 1 seems to suggest that Mr. Woodhouse's standard bedtime operating procedure was to take a massive sleeping "composer"!
The passage in Chapter 11 suggests to me that Emma may have slipped her father a "cordial" in order to "compose" him, in preparation for a dangerous bit of verbal combat with his irascible son in law John K--and I just love the pun in "unsullied cordiality", which I see as a "twin" of the pun on Mr. Price's "cordial hug". In this passage, "cordiality" clearly refers _both_ to the desired politeness of the encounter, and also to the medicinal means of achieving that politeness!
Best of the three, the passage in Chapter 25 is a mini-epic in itself, describing the covert medicinal operation conducted by "the ladies' in order to drug Mr. Woodhouse out of his agitation over the prospect of the Coles's dinner party. I.e., the better way to allay Mr. Woodhouse's agitation was to deliberately arrange to administer to Mr. Woodhouse the treatment of a strong cordial, as a result of which he would indeed have soon become "composed" enough for talking as usual!
So, Nancy, as often has been the case, in your rebutting one of my claims, you've actually opened a second door wide open for me, that actually reinforces my original claim--and for this, I thank you once more!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
Mr. Price's cordial hug
I don't know about the rest of you, but I never previously gave any
thought to Fanny Price's drinking _any_ sort of alcoholic drink (did
Rozema show Fanny as drinking at any point in her 1999 adaptation?), but
I stumbled upon a passage today---having found something else in it
which I won't complicate matters by describing here and now----that
caused me to delve into this topic of Fanny and alcoholic beverages for
the first time.
The passage is in Chapter 46, not far from the end of the novel, and comes right after Fanny reads Edmund's eagerly awaited letter. Fanny is still exiled in Portsmouth, and after Edmund first reports the bad news that Maria and Henry have still not yet been located, and further that Julia has also eloped with Yates, he then abruptly changes course 180 degrees and reports that Sir Thomas has authorized Fanny's return to Mansfield Park, accompanied by Susan.
Here is Fanny's reaction:
"Never had Fanny more wanted a cordial. Never had she felt such a one as this letter contained. To-morrow! to leave Portsmouth to-morrow! She was, she felt she was, in the greatest danger of being exquisitely happy, while so many were miserable. The evil which brought such good to her! She dreaded lest she should learn to be insensible of it. "
Never had Fanny more wanted a cordial? This passage is startling (at least to me) and almost sounds like a cliche, the modern version would be something like "Never had Fanny more wanted a stiff drink"! But what then _really_ caught my eye were the words "Never" and "more". Why? Because, when you pause and think about them, they imply that this is far from the first time in her still young life that Fanny has wanted a cordial. It appears, in fact, that Fanny has _often_ wanted a cordial, going back quite some time in order to justify the word "Never", presumably to settle her nerves after some nerve-wracking experience or other.
When you think about it, who _wouldn't_ be driven to consume copious amounts of alcohol by the lethal cocktail of Sir Thomas and Aunt Norris???
And that fruitful line of inquiry led me to quickly scan through the text of MP, looking for any _other_ hints lurking there about Fanny's drinking, to see if I might find some other tantalizing references to Fanny's relationship with alcohol, and it turned out that Chapter 7 was the mother lode:
"...if Edmund were not there to mix the wine and water for [Fanny], would rather go without it than not...."
The above describes Fanny's pouting internal monologue, as she struggles with her jealous feelings toward Mary and Edmund and their "spirited" horseback riding adventures. And again, as in the Chapter 46 passage, JA is subtly careful to hint at an ongoing family tradition of Edmund mixing wine and water for Fanny to consume, presumably every day or close to it. But.. I for one was relieved by Fanny's drinking diluted wine, because, even tiny as she is, she is probably not getting drunk from it.
But then, later in that same Chapter 7, after the infamous Fanny-swelters-while-stooping-among-the-roses episode, Fanny imbibes some wine, and no mention is made of whether Edmund dilutes it or not--my guess is that he does _not_ :
"Edmund said no more to either lady; but going quietly to another table, on which the supper-tray yet remained, brought a glass of Madeira to Fanny, and obliged her to drink the greater part. She wished to be able to decline it; but the tears, which a variety of feelings created, made it easier to swallow than to speak."
And perhaps there are other passages in MP in a similar vein which I have not as yet figured out how to sleuth out, but I think it's now crystal clear that JA means for us to know that Fanny, for all her prim and proper ways, is _not_ a teetotaller. Why JA would choose to subtly underscore this aspect of Fanny is a question I will leave for another time, but of course anyone who wants to take a stab at it responding to me now would be most welcome!
Regardless, I did find one _other_ passage in MP which, even though it does not report any drinking of alocoholic beverages by Fanny, nontheless, upon close examination, seems to be an integral part of this particular matrix of covert subtext in Mansfield Park.
This passage, which appears in Chapter 38, describes Fanny's first reunion with her father in Portsmouth after a decade away:
"With an acknowledgment that he had quite forgot her, Mr. Price now received his daughter; and having given her a cordial hug, and observed that she was grown into a woman, and he supposed would be wanting a husband soon, seemed very much inclined to forget her again. Fanny shrunk back to her seat, with feelings sadly pained by his language and his smell of spirits; and he talked on only to his son, and only of the Thrush, though William, warmly interested as he was in that subject, more than once tried to make his father think of Fanny, and her long absence and long journey."
Is it just a coincidence with the Chapter 46 passage I quoted at the start of this message which reports Fanny's need for a "cordial", that the hug which Mr. Price gives Fanny is described as "cordial"? Sure it can mean "cordial" in the sense of "polite", but, given that we hear in the very next sentence about Mr. Price's "smell of spirits", I think it's safe to say that JA was having a little darkly ironic fun here, punning on "cordial" so as to convey, subliminally, that Fanny would have been most repulsed by her father's smell of spirits at the moment of that unavoidable hug. A hug which reeked of cordials! And perhaps part of Fanny's feeling of disgust has some strong whiff of Freudian repression about it, as she knows that she herself is not averse to imbibing liquor!
So, I hope you'll agree with me that Mr. Price's cordial hug, which might at first have seemed uninteresting, turned out to be a "bread crumb" (or should I say a "shot", as in a shot of liquor?) was worth considering!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
The passage is in Chapter 46, not far from the end of the novel, and comes right after Fanny reads Edmund's eagerly awaited letter. Fanny is still exiled in Portsmouth, and after Edmund first reports the bad news that Maria and Henry have still not yet been located, and further that Julia has also eloped with Yates, he then abruptly changes course 180 degrees and reports that Sir Thomas has authorized Fanny's return to Mansfield Park, accompanied by Susan.
Here is Fanny's reaction:
"Never had Fanny more wanted a cordial. Never had she felt such a one as this letter contained. To-morrow! to leave Portsmouth to-morrow! She was, she felt she was, in the greatest danger of being exquisitely happy, while so many were miserable. The evil which brought such good to her! She dreaded lest she should learn to be insensible of it. "
Never had Fanny more wanted a cordial? This passage is startling (at least to me) and almost sounds like a cliche, the modern version would be something like "Never had Fanny more wanted a stiff drink"! But what then _really_ caught my eye were the words "Never" and "more". Why? Because, when you pause and think about them, they imply that this is far from the first time in her still young life that Fanny has wanted a cordial. It appears, in fact, that Fanny has _often_ wanted a cordial, going back quite some time in order to justify the word "Never", presumably to settle her nerves after some nerve-wracking experience or other.
When you think about it, who _wouldn't_ be driven to consume copious amounts of alcohol by the lethal cocktail of Sir Thomas and Aunt Norris???
And that fruitful line of inquiry led me to quickly scan through the text of MP, looking for any _other_ hints lurking there about Fanny's drinking, to see if I might find some other tantalizing references to Fanny's relationship with alcohol, and it turned out that Chapter 7 was the mother lode:
"...if Edmund were not there to mix the wine and water for [Fanny], would rather go without it than not...."
The above describes Fanny's pouting internal monologue, as she struggles with her jealous feelings toward Mary and Edmund and their "spirited" horseback riding adventures. And again, as in the Chapter 46 passage, JA is subtly careful to hint at an ongoing family tradition of Edmund mixing wine and water for Fanny to consume, presumably every day or close to it. But.. I for one was relieved by Fanny's drinking diluted wine, because, even tiny as she is, she is probably not getting drunk from it.
But then, later in that same Chapter 7, after the infamous Fanny-swelters-while-stooping-among-the-roses episode, Fanny imbibes some wine, and no mention is made of whether Edmund dilutes it or not--my guess is that he does _not_ :
"Edmund said no more to either lady; but going quietly to another table, on which the supper-tray yet remained, brought a glass of Madeira to Fanny, and obliged her to drink the greater part. She wished to be able to decline it; but the tears, which a variety of feelings created, made it easier to swallow than to speak."
And perhaps there are other passages in MP in a similar vein which I have not as yet figured out how to sleuth out, but I think it's now crystal clear that JA means for us to know that Fanny, for all her prim and proper ways, is _not_ a teetotaller. Why JA would choose to subtly underscore this aspect of Fanny is a question I will leave for another time, but of course anyone who wants to take a stab at it responding to me now would be most welcome!
Regardless, I did find one _other_ passage in MP which, even though it does not report any drinking of alocoholic beverages by Fanny, nontheless, upon close examination, seems to be an integral part of this particular matrix of covert subtext in Mansfield Park.
This passage, which appears in Chapter 38, describes Fanny's first reunion with her father in Portsmouth after a decade away:
"With an acknowledgment that he had quite forgot her, Mr. Price now received his daughter; and having given her a cordial hug, and observed that she was grown into a woman, and he supposed would be wanting a husband soon, seemed very much inclined to forget her again. Fanny shrunk back to her seat, with feelings sadly pained by his language and his smell of spirits; and he talked on only to his son, and only of the Thrush, though William, warmly interested as he was in that subject, more than once tried to make his father think of Fanny, and her long absence and long journey."
Is it just a coincidence with the Chapter 46 passage I quoted at the start of this message which reports Fanny's need for a "cordial", that the hug which Mr. Price gives Fanny is described as "cordial"? Sure it can mean "cordial" in the sense of "polite", but, given that we hear in the very next sentence about Mr. Price's "smell of spirits", I think it's safe to say that JA was having a little darkly ironic fun here, punning on "cordial" so as to convey, subliminally, that Fanny would have been most repulsed by her father's smell of spirits at the moment of that unavoidable hug. A hug which reeked of cordials! And perhaps part of Fanny's feeling of disgust has some strong whiff of Freudian repression about it, as she knows that she herself is not averse to imbibing liquor!
So, I hope you'll agree with me that Mr. Price's cordial hug, which might at first have seemed uninteresting, turned out to be a "bread crumb" (or should I say a "shot", as in a shot of liquor?) was worth considering!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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