By now, every Janeite has heard about the sale at auction of Jane
Austen's turquoise ring for over $236,000 (U.S.).
In honor of that fresh testament to the relentless escalation of
Austenmania to even further dizzying heights, I am pulling out of my own
box of "most precious treasures" a rare sleuthing jewel that I've
recently salvaged from the deep, which (first hint!) has an indirect
connection to Jane Austen's turquoise ring!
But, to make it more fun, I will present a quiz about it first, and then
give the answer if no one gets it within a few days.
Here it is, it's very simple---not long ago, Anielka brought forward the
keen observation that a turquoise ring plays a small but salient role in
the action of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (TMOV), when Jessica
steals her father's turquoise ring and (by the report of Tubal) sells it
in exchange for a monkey, the news of which throws her father Shylock
into a rage.
And at the time, I responded as follows in Austen L (and, more recently
in my blog):
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/07/turquoise-rings-of-jane-austen-shylock.html
In that blog post, I suggested a startling connection between Shylock's
deathly rage against Jessica and Mr. Collins's deathly condolences.
But..there is another short passage---and I really mean short---it
consists of less than thirty lines---in The Merchant of Venice, to which
Jane Austen has, I claim, covertly alluded via not one, not two, but
_three_ different characters from three _different_ Austen novels!
Can you find this short passage in The Merchant of Venice?
Before anyone says that you are not good at spotting hidden allusions,
take encouragement----my considered opinion is that, in this instance,
_any_ knowledgeable Janeite who reads through the text of Shakespeare's
play slowly and carefully has more than a fighting chance of spotting
these three Austenian allusions, because of their coming up bang, bang,
bang, in rapid fire sequence in Shakespeare's text, and because the
connection to the three Austen characters is salient, not obscure.
I.e., when you spot the passage, you will know exactly what I mean,
it's really hiding in plain sight, a truly bravura game of allusion
played by Jane Austen.
So, good luck, and I will await any answers.....
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
Thursday, July 12, 2012
The Turquoise Rings of Jane Austen & Shylock (and the allusion to Shylock hidden in plain sight in Pride & Prejudice)
A few weeks ago, Anielka Briggs wrote the following in Janeites & Austen-L about JA's turquoise ring (the one that just sold at auction for an astronomical amount): "Interestingly Austen is singularly restrained in the mention or description of jewellery, unlike Shakespeare who adorns his characters quite specifically with pearls, opals and rubies and even the occasional turquoise ring (Merchant of Venice)...If a turquoise ring held any significance in the long eighteenth century it was much more likely to be remembered as the ring Jessica exchanges for a monkey." I replied as follows: Excellent sleuthing, Anielka! I can vouch from prior research that The Merchant of Venice (TMOV) was most definitely on Jane Austen's radar screen, but I never realized that a real life turquoise ring (or at least a turquoise-colored ring) belonging to JA might be yet another link to The Merchant of Venice--one which, upon examination, leads to a remarkable allusion to Shakespeare's Shylock hidden in plain sight in Pride & Prejudice! But first--thinking of JA's wearing a turquoise ring makes me wonder whether JA enjoyed thinking of herself as a real life Jessica, a transgressive daughter. That JA's ring might in some way be associated with Leah's ring from TMOV is particularly intriguing to me because JA made a strong veiled allusion to Shakespeare's Jessica (after she has snuck away from her father's house) in one of JA's Emma-era letters when she describes to CEA some witty sophisticated wordplay on "every sort of wickedness" with the clever apothecary Haden. And further consideration led me to realize there was a Pride & Prejudice connection to TMOV, mediated by Fanny Burney and her novel, Cecilia. See my previous blog post in which I wrote about Burney herself as a real life Jessica (in the eyes of Daddy Crisp, at least), and Cecilia (of course already previously well-recognized as an allusive source for P&P) as alluding to TMOV: http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/12/jewish-subtext-of-burneys-cecilia-as.html But now I can add yet another layer to the allusion to Jessica in P&P. And I bet I can make you see it, too, without even telling you what it is: First, look at the disturbing passage in III.1 of TMOV right before Tubal reports to Shylock about the turquoise ring: Shylock. How now, Tubal! what news from Genoa? hast thou found my daughter? Tubal. I often came where I did hear of her, but cannot find her. Shylock. Why, there, there, there, there! a diamond gone, cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfort! The curse never fell upon our nation till now; I never felt it till now: two thousand ducats in that; and other precious, precious jewels. I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear! would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin! No news of them? Why, so: and I know not what's spent in the search: why, thou loss upon loss! the thief gone with so much, and so much to find the thief; and no satisfaction, no revenge: nor no in luck stirring but what lights on my shoulders; no sighs but of my breathing; no tears but of my shedding. Doesn't Shylock's shocking wish for his transgressive daughter's death remind every Janeite of an equally disturbing passage in P&P? a passage (to give a hint), in which a moralistic male character passes harsh punitive moral judgment on a young woman who has run away from her father's house? Of course, I am talking about the following infamous letter written by Mr. Collins about Lydia eloping with Wickham: "I feel myself called upon, by our relationship, and my situation in life, to condole with you on the grievous affliction you are now suffering under, of which we were yesterday informed by a letter from Hertfordshire. Be assured, my dear sir, that Mrs. Collins and myself sincerely sympathise with you and all your respectable family, in your present distress, which must be of the bitterest kind, because proceeding from a cause which no time can remove. No arguments shall be wanting on my part that can alleviate so severe a misfortune—or that may comfort you, under a circumstance that must be of all others the most afflicting to a parent's mind...... [And here's the "tell"] ...The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison of this. [!!!] And it is the more to be lamented, because there is reason to suppose as my dear Charlotte informs me, that this licentiousness of behaviour in your daughter has proceeded from a faulty degree of indulgence; though, at the same time, for the consolation of yourself and Mrs. Bennet, I am inclined to think that her own disposition must be naturally bad, or she could not be guilty of such an enormity, at so early an age. Howsoever that may be, you are grievously to be pitied...." Isn't it wonderful (and thought provoking) to think outside the box in this way, to think of Mr. Collins as having a strong scent of Shylock hidden in him? Just as TMOV challenges us to think about the nature of Christian forgiveness, so too does JA, when we later hear Mr. Bennet revisit the topic _after_ Lydia's elopement has been "sanitized": "...Mr. Collins moreover adds, 'I am truly rejoiced that my cousin Lydia's sad business has been so well hushed up, and am only concerned that their living together before the marriage took place should be so generally known. I must not, however, neglect the duties of my station, or refrain from declaring my amazement at hearing that you received the young couple into your house as soon as they were married. It was an encouragement of vice; and had I been the rector of Longbourn, I should very strenuously have opposed it. You ought certainly to forgive them, as a Christian, but never to admit them in your sight, or allow their names to be mentioned in your hearing.' That is his notion of Christian forgiveness!..." Indeed, Mr. Bennet! Cheers, ARNIE @JaneAustenCode on Twitter
Sunday, July 8, 2012
P.S. re Jane Bennet sings Les Miz and Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head
In Janeites, Nancy Mayer just wrote "Some very good sleuthing about word definitions" in
reference to my immediately preceding post a short while ago under the above Subject Line:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/07/jane-bennet-sings-les-miz-and-raindrops.html
Nancy, thank you very much! It happens that I was about to post a brief followup to that post, to bring forward one additional and (I think) very compelling and validating bit of textual evidence.
To set the stage properly, for those who do not wish to refer back to that previous post, I will repeat only the last portion here:
"And by the way, if you were wondering, there are also a handful of usages of that word [misery/miserable] 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!"
A few moments ago, after rereading my previous post to make sure I caught any errors that might have escaped my notice while writing it, it occurred to me to do additional word searches which it had not occurred to me to do sooner----within JA's novels, I searched for any passages containing both "restless" and "misery"; then both "restless" and "miserable"; then both "restlessly" and "miserable". It turned out that the third was the lucky charm, because I was taken to the following passage in Chapter 12 of Northanger Abbey, which, because I found the above quoted passage in Letter 59 about brother Edward near the end of my earlier sleuthing, I had not realized that both such passages contained variants of those two search terms:
"On the beginning of the fifth [act of the play], however, the sudden view of Mr. Henry Tilney and his father, joining a party in the opposite box, recalled her to anxiety and distress. The stage could no longer excite genuine merriment—no longer keep her whole attention. Every other look upon an average was directed towards the opposite box; and, for the space of two entire scenes, did she thus watch Henry Tilney, without being once able to catch his eye. No longer could he be suspected of indifference for a play; his notice was never withdrawn from the stage during two whole scenes. At length, however, he did look towards her, and he bowed—but such a bow! No smile, no continued observance attended it; his eyes were immediately returned to their former direction. Catherine was RESTLESSLY MISERABLE; she could almost have run round to the box in which he sat and FORCED HIM TO HEAR HER EXPLANATION. Feelings rather natural than heroic possessed her; instead of considering her own dignity injured by this ready condemnation—instead of proudly resolving, in conscious innocence, to show her resentment towards him who could harbour a doubt of it, to leave to him all the trouble of seeking an explanation, and to enlighten him on the past only by avoiding his sight, or flirting with somebody else—she took to herself all the shame of misconduct, or at least of its appearance, and was only eager for an opportunity of explaining its cause."
So, here we have a usage of "restlessly miserable" in NA which, like "poor Edward restless in misery", is plausibly interpretable as referring to misery as repentance! However, whereas in Letter 59, the repentance is tragic, arising out of a death that occurred only because of the recklessness of the penitent, in NA the repentance is _comic_, arising out of trivial apparent “misconduct” on Catherine's behalf, which Catherine wished to explain to the Tilneys--and that trivial misconduct was that she missed their appointment the previous day because Thorpe had (basically) kidnapped her! Catherine felt guilty even though she knew she wasn’t culpable, because she was so desperate to be back in Henry's good graces, which of course she does achieve, once they speak and she melts his heart with her artless goodness and affection.
But even though the one usage from real life is tragic, and the one from fiction is comic, what does it tell us that JA used that virtually identical pairing of words---“restlessly miserable” in NA and”restless in misery” in Letter 59? I say that it's NO coincidence at all that this comic passage occurs in NA, which, as I stated at the end of my previous post, was _the_ epicenter of JA’s death in childbirth theme, which of course is exactly what JA is suggesting Edward ought to feel "miserable" (i.e., repentant) about!
Since I know I am not psychic, and I had no conscious awareness whatsoever of this parallelism until the search engine showed it to me, I find this to be rather extraordinary validation of my interpretation of JA's _intentional_ exploitation of the ambiguity of "miserable" and "misery", in particular my explosive claim that JA was making a strong, but veiled, moral condemnation of brother Edward, blaming him for the death-in-childbirth of his wife Elizabeth!
And....as I revealed in my presentation at the JASNA AGM in October 2009 in Portland, the unnamed play that Henry and Catherine are watching, which so rivets Henry's attention, is _another_ story in which a "ghost" haunts the protagonist----Hamlet!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/07/jane-bennet-sings-les-miz-and-raindrops.html
Nancy, thank you very much! It happens that I was about to post a brief followup to that post, to bring forward one additional and (I think) very compelling and validating bit of textual evidence.
To set the stage properly, for those who do not wish to refer back to that previous post, I will repeat only the last portion here:
"And by the way, if you were wondering, there are also a handful of usages of that word [misery/miserable] 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!"
A few moments ago, after rereading my previous post to make sure I caught any errors that might have escaped my notice while writing it, it occurred to me to do additional word searches which it had not occurred to me to do sooner----within JA's novels, I searched for any passages containing both "restless" and "misery"; then both "restless" and "miserable"; then both "restlessly" and "miserable". It turned out that the third was the lucky charm, because I was taken to the following passage in Chapter 12 of Northanger Abbey, which, because I found the above quoted passage in Letter 59 about brother Edward near the end of my earlier sleuthing, I had not realized that both such passages contained variants of those two search terms:
"On the beginning of the fifth [act of the play], however, the sudden view of Mr. Henry Tilney and his father, joining a party in the opposite box, recalled her to anxiety and distress. The stage could no longer excite genuine merriment—no longer keep her whole attention. Every other look upon an average was directed towards the opposite box; and, for the space of two entire scenes, did she thus watch Henry Tilney, without being once able to catch his eye. No longer could he be suspected of indifference for a play; his notice was never withdrawn from the stage during two whole scenes. At length, however, he did look towards her, and he bowed—but such a bow! No smile, no continued observance attended it; his eyes were immediately returned to their former direction. Catherine was RESTLESSLY MISERABLE; she could almost have run round to the box in which he sat and FORCED HIM TO HEAR HER EXPLANATION. Feelings rather natural than heroic possessed her; instead of considering her own dignity injured by this ready condemnation—instead of proudly resolving, in conscious innocence, to show her resentment towards him who could harbour a doubt of it, to leave to him all the trouble of seeking an explanation, and to enlighten him on the past only by avoiding his sight, or flirting with somebody else—she took to herself all the shame of misconduct, or at least of its appearance, and was only eager for an opportunity of explaining its cause."
So, here we have a usage of "restlessly miserable" in NA which, like "poor Edward restless in misery", is plausibly interpretable as referring to misery as repentance! However, whereas in Letter 59, the repentance is tragic, arising out of a death that occurred only because of the recklessness of the penitent, in NA the repentance is _comic_, arising out of trivial apparent “misconduct” on Catherine's behalf, which Catherine wished to explain to the Tilneys--and that trivial misconduct was that she missed their appointment the previous day because Thorpe had (basically) kidnapped her! Catherine felt guilty even though she knew she wasn’t culpable, because she was so desperate to be back in Henry's good graces, which of course she does achieve, once they speak and she melts his heart with her artless goodness and affection.
But even though the one usage from real life is tragic, and the one from fiction is comic, what does it tell us that JA used that virtually identical pairing of words---“restlessly miserable” in NA and”restless in misery” in Letter 59? I say that it's NO coincidence at all that this comic passage occurs in NA, which, as I stated at the end of my previous post, was _the_ epicenter of JA’s death in childbirth theme, which of course is exactly what JA is suggesting Edward ought to feel "miserable" (i.e., repentant) about!
Since I know I am not psychic, and I had no conscious awareness whatsoever of this parallelism until the search engine showed it to me, I find this to be rather extraordinary validation of my interpretation of JA's _intentional_ exploitation of the ambiguity of "miserable" and "misery", in particular my explosive claim that JA was making a strong, but veiled, moral condemnation of brother Edward, blaming him for the death-in-childbirth of his wife Elizabeth!
And....as I revealed in my presentation at the JASNA AGM in October 2009 in Portland, the unnamed play that Henry and Catherine are watching, which so rivets Henry's attention, is _another_ story in which a "ghost" haunts the protagonist----Hamlet!
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
THINKING SO ILL of Wickham..... the Prince of Whales.....and even Mrs. Knight!
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.
"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.
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.......
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