The Subtle Spect-Ocular Subtext of Jane Austen’s Letter 123 (to Her 10-Year Niece Caroline Austen)

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much of anything significant going on in the first sentence of the very short Letter 123 from Jane Austen to her 10-year old niece, Caroline (of course, the much younger of brother James’s two daughters): 

"I have not yet felt quite equal to taking up your Manuscript, but think I shall soon, & I hope my detaining it so long will be no inconvenience.-

But upon closer examination of the context, subtle subtexts emerge from between the lines. And these subtexts have significant implications which, amazingly enough, relate to a very significant theme in Persuasion, which I’ve hinted at in my Subject Line, and which I’ve written about previously.  Let me explain.

Diana Birchall wrote the following in Janeites & Austen L: “Jane Austen writes from Henry's house at Hans Place, to James's younger daughter Caroline, age ten….Henry is still severely ill, though just beginning to be considered out of the gravest danger.”

Reading the first part of Letter 123, my first thought was to wonder, in the midst of all the family angst over Henry’s life-threatening illness, about the toll Henry’s suddenly dangerous illness has taken, to little fanfare, on Jane Austen herself, over the preceding few weeks! In particular, I find the following discreetly worded lines…

 “I have not YET FELT QUITE EQUAL to taking up your Manuscript…”

…highly suggestive. JA seems to be reporting, albeit in code graspable only by adult eyes at Chawton like sister Cassandra's, that JA is feeling more than a little overwhelmed emotionally and logistically by the stressful demands of caretaking for Henry. And wouldn’t that be just typical of the way the Austen family operated? When it was a brother who was ill or in trouble, Mrs. Austen and everyone else was on full alert, the family troops were mobilized, and frequent concerned bulletins were sent in every direction until the crisis eased.

But it’s been a persistent theme of JA’s letters, to say nothing of her novels, that female illness, worries, and concerns—especially those of unmarried younger females like JA--- rarely receive anything remotely resembling that sort of mobilized and proactive response---the quintessential example of this being JA, during her final illness, having to sit on three chairs placed together to simulate a sofa, so that her mother could have the actual sofa.

So I read this line as JA’s faint cry for help, or at least recognition, of what she was going through at that time. Here she is awaiting publication of Emma, her crowning literary achievement, and yet, as we will shortly read in Letter 124, that publication is on hold while JA tends to Henry.

But that’s all only the half of it. Upon further consideration of the full context, it occurred to me that, under that emotional stress, JA may well have even taken physically ill herself. The word “yet” is very pregnant, it suggests that in the previous letter to Chawton re Henry’s dangerous illness, as to the subject matter of which Caroline would have been informed to some appropriate extent, JA had also reported some symptoms of physical illness from which JA needed to recover, somehow, while tending to Henry’s recovery.  

And if I’m correctly reading JA between the lines, and JA is recovering from physical illness in some way as she writes Letter 123, my further inference would be that the malady was very likely a “weakness” in her eyes.

Why? You’ll recall that JA did write about that eye weakness explicitly in a few of her letters, and, I argued in a recent series of seven posts in late August and early September of this year, beginning here…..

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-wild-idea-about-weakness-in-eyes-of.html

…and ending here…..

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/09/i-yield-upon-great-persuasion-if-i-was.html

….that JA also wrote about her vision impairment indirectly but pervasively in Persuasion, the very same novel which JA had already begun writing as she wrote Letter 123, by covertly depicting Anne Elliot as having a serious “weakness” in her eyes!

But back to Letter 123 and JA’s eye weakness. Isn’t it a truism that each of us has particular areas of medical vulnerability, the “weak links” in our bodies which tend to betray us when our immune system is lowered? And I think JA’s weak link was her vision, and this would also fit perfectly with the duty which JA was delicately apologizing for to Caroline for failure to perform—reading Caroline’s manuscript!

And this also dovetails perfectly with one other biographical detail. It now seems likely to me that JA’s communications (by letter, and also no doubt in person) to 10-year old niece Caroline about JA’s persistent eye “weakness” left quite a profound and lasting deposit in Caroline’s memory banks. Why? Because it was Caroline Austen herself, who wrote the following words more than a half century later in her memoir about JA, My Aunt Jane Austen:

“She found a resource sometimes in that simple game [cup and ball] when she suffered from weak eyes and could not work or read for long together"

This is pretty much the only detail that Caroline reports about her aunt’s health in that brief Memoir, so it speaks to the strong impression that was made on Caroline about JA’s eyes, an impression which first became particularly strong during those few weeks in October, 1815.

So, in conclusion, upon such examination, informed by a grasp of JA’s subtextual code, we can see that what might have appeared at first to be a little white lie, told by a considerate aunt to a sensitive 10 year old niece to excuse a negligent failure to inspect that niece’s first literary efforts, was actually a deep glimpse into, and further validation of, the subtextual code which permeated all of JA’s writings, both imaginary & novelistic and realistic & epistolary.

We need no longer be blind to the Jane Austen Code.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

“I saw Satan dancing with delight, the day….Jane Austen created her diabolical masterpiece, LUCY FERrars!”

Two weeks ago, I posted about Janine Barchas’s plenary address to the JASNA Annual General Meeting in Minneapolis, providing my extension of Barchas’s fantastic discoveries, which she described in loving detail in her new book Matters of Fact in Jane Austen about Jane Austen’s clustered historical allusions to the famous Wentworths/Watsons/Darcys of Yorkshire:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/10/jane-austens-veiled-allusions-to-her.html

Today I am back with my extension of another one of Barchas’s excellent finds, her work (which actually dates back to an article she published in 2009) excavating the thinly veiled allusion in S&S to Sir Francis Dashwood’s “Hellfire-Club”.

Specifically, I start from Barchas’s brilliant analysis (at p. 200 of her book) of the sacrilege of Fanny Dashwood’s tearing down walnut trees at Norland:

“…Fanny’s felling emblematically recalls Dashwood’s diabolism. Levelling a whole grove of ‘old walnut trees’ constituted an assault upon the sacred, as John Evelyn urged in An Historical Account of the Sacredness and Use of Standing Groves. …With West Wycombe Park and its history of black masses as the novel’s primary touchstone, Fanny Dashwood’s arboreal sacrilege neatly echoes the doings of her moral twin and namesake, Francis Dashwood… For, example, NOT ONLY DOES FANNY PLAY SATAN (and Sir Francis) when her garden plan, metaphorically, attacks Christ, but later, and with the requisite number of denials from her betrayer, MARIANNE RISES FROM THE THIRD DAY of her near-fatal illness, while in the netherworld below stairs, the fork-tongued Willoughby speaks to Elinor of "the devil" in one breath and "God" in the next (359–60). In such scenes, Austen may draw upon the known history of the Hell-Fire Club's mock-Catholic ceremonies, infusing Sense and Sensibility with a heightened religious quality..."

In 2009, I quoted from the latter part of the above passage (from Barchas’s earlier article) in a post about the “Crown of Thorns” hidden answer to the Second Charade in Chapter 9 of Emma….

http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0909a&L=austen-l&T=0&F=&S=&P=3879

…and in that post, I pointed to how perfectly Barchas’s claims about the Hellfire-Club allusion in S&S dovetail with my claims about Lucy Ferrars’ married name as “Lucifer”, which I’ve posted out countless times by now, in various ways.

Today, I am ready to add another buttress to my claims about Lucy-Fer by pointing out the extremely sacrilegious, hidden significance of the following passage at the very end of Chapter 24 of S&S:

“The visit of the Miss Steeles at Barton Park was lengthened far beyond what the first invitation implied. Their favour increased; they could not be spared; Sir John would not hear of their going; and in spite of their numerous and long arranged engagements in Exeter, in spite of the absolute necessity of returning to fulfill them immediately, which was in full force at the end of every week, they were prevailed on to stay nearly two months at the park, and to assist in the due celebration of that festival which requires a more than ordinary share of private balls and large dinners to proclaim its importance.”

As my Subject Line suggests, when you think Lucy Steele as Lucifer, what JA is saying here, with her tongue deeply in her cheek, is that the devil was prevailed upon to stick around at Barton Park for an extra two months, especially so as to be able to celebrate Christmas chez Sir John with his merry social circle. Do you see the sexual pun hiding in plain sight? ----“private balls”? I.e., Lucy aka the devil would delight in proclaiming the importance of Christmas, one of the two most sacred Christian holidays, by engaging in orgies during all twelve days of Christmas. Lucy and Nancy were apparently  “featured guest stars” at those revels.

I sincerely question how is it possible for anyone to still suggest, in light of the above, that Jane Austen’s personal brand of Christianity was one of strict adherence to Anglican dogma & propriety.  I have trouble imagining a more sacrilegious passage than the above, which involves a giant blasphemy on Christmas, just as, apparently, Sir Francis Dashwood handled things in real life for many many years. And it’s particularly sacrilegious, because Lucy winds up getting exactly what she wants at the end of the novel—in nowise does Lucy qua Lucifer suffer any adverse consequences or punishment for this blasphemous behavior.

In fact, the Devil actually becomes Elinor’s sister in law!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

If I Were a Rich Girl: Marianne & Elinor Dashwood (& Jane Austen) on Wealth & Happiness] REDUX

In reply to my previous post stating that Marianne's transformation about money, "It of course reflects back with the darkest irony on Fanny Dashwood’s rant about the evils of annuities in Chapter 2.”, Diane Reynolds wrote the following in Janeites & Austen L:

“I am struck anew at JA"s scathing--and broad-- satire. She never missed a beat when it came to money--and this "mutation" on the part of Marianne mirrors her half-brother's "mutation" on giving his mother and sisters a piece of his fortune--when it comes to  money, JA says, we all want it, no matter how we might rationalize otherwise. Marianne moves from:
[Marianne] “…What have wealth or grandeur to do with happiness?"
"Grandeur has but little," said Elinor, "but wealth has much to do with it."
"Elinor, for shame!" said Marianne, "money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it. Beyond a competence, it can afford no real satisfaction, as far as mere self is concerned."
TO....[about ten sentences later}
"I wish," said Margaret, striking out a novel thought [wicked on JA's part!], "that somebody would give us all a large fortune apiece!"
"Oh that they would!" cried Marianne, her eyes sparkling with animation, and her cheeks glowing with the delight of such imaginary happiness.
"We are all unanimous in that wish, I suppose," said Elinor, "in spite of the insufficiency of wealth."
"Oh dear!" cried Margaret, "how happy I should be! I wonder what I should do with it!"
Marianne looked as if she had no doubt on that point."

Exactly, Diane! Thank you for amplifying explicitly what I only implied in passing. Indeed it shows that JA used the word “annuity” as a textual bread crumb to link these two passages separated by eighteen intervening chapters, and prompt sharp readers to think about deeper thematic parallels of this kind.

You made clear how Marianne’s rapid but unconscious mutation, from scorn for money to rhapsody about what she’d do with a lot of it, is the perfect ironic bookend to Fanny Dashwood’s totally calculated Goneril-like gradual leading of husband John by the nose into the darkest depths of rationalized greed. Marianne wants to believe she is the exact opposite of John vis a vis worship of Mammon, and yet JA shows us that Marianne is also vulnerable---and disturbingly quickly---to rationalization in this vein, just like her elder half-brother.

And the two passages are even more tightly intertwined, upon further examination. It’s almost as if JA wanted us to first imagine Marianne overhearing Fanny’s Chapter 2 performance, and thinking that it confirmed her worst opinions about Fanny; and then she also wanted us to imagine the reverse—i.e., to  imagine Fanny overhearing Marianne’s Chapter 20 performance, and Fanny also thinking that it confirmed HER worst opinions about Marianne—i.e., she’d say to John, “You see, there’s a perfect example of what happens when you give some people an annuity”!

Which turns these two passages into a kind of delayed meta-conversation!

Diane also wrote: "One wonders if Marianne really would ever give out an annuity--such as after she marries Brandon? What do we think? "

However, having acknowledged the family resemblance between Marianne and John vis a vis their greed for money, I believe that they are merely “half-siblings” in this regard, as well as in blood. I.e., I think Marianne would, if wealthy, have been a patron of the arts, and I don't think she could have been led by the nose by anyone into giving up such philanthropic notions, either. I think Marianne's own greedy tendencies were half as strong as John’s, and therefore would not be sufficient to permit the destruction of her empathy for those less fortunate, and her generosity of spirit, virtues which her brother was utterly lacking in.

And I still come back to the Austen autobiography hiding in plain sight in both of these “annuity” bookends in S&S. I have previously opined that Jane Austen wrote that masterful expose of Fanny’s malevolent power over husband John in Chapter 2 of S&S as a condemnation of the way her own sister in law, Mary Lloyd Austen, led her own brother, James Austen, by the nose, into ripping off his parents and sisters in a half dozen significant ways, when they moved from Steventon to Bath in early 1801...

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

…and now I see that JA was, in the later S&S annuity passage pointing to her younger self via the character of Marianne Dashwood. JA was examining her own character, and acknowledging in herself a desire for sufficient wealth to be able to enjoy life without the kind of restrictions  (on mobility and freedom, the two rational benefits of having enough money which I think JA yearned for) which actually afflicted her in real life on a daily basis, and stymied her ability to get published for many years.

And…it also now occurs to me, perhaps JA also looked at wealthy friends in her local female network, and fantasized about how lovely it really would be if one of them decided to share a bit of her wealth with JA, with the explicit intention of providing literary sponsorship to JA, so that JA would have the best working conditions for producing her fiction.

And finally, I can also just imagine James Austen, in a moment of conscience in late 1800, suggesting to wife Mary that JA was a very talented writer, who would suffer greatly from the loss of her father’s library upon the move to Bath (as Nancy so rightly suggested last week), and so perhaps it would be the Christian thing to do to help finance a move of the full library to Bath, where JA could have free access to it. Whereupon Mary would then have led him by the nose into a reevaluation of JA’s talent as a writer, and JA need for a large library to work from. To paraphrase Fanny Dashwood:

“She will have few books of her own, and hardly any access to libraries of anyone else. But she is not so well educated anyway, and would barely have use of great literature in writing her small novels about very little of consequence—in which, by the way, James, she is extremely disrespectful, in a sneaky way, toward family and friends to whom she ought to express thanks for tolerating her quirks. So as to you giving her more of your father’s books, it is quite absurd to think of it. They will be much more able to give YOU something, you being the truly gifted writer in the family."

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.: I love the pun on “novel” when we read:  "I wish," said Margaret, striking out a novel thought, "that somebody would give us all a large fortune apiece!"  Indeed, it is a thought expressed in a novel about providing financial patronage to writers of novels!

If I Were a Rich Girl: Marianne & Elinor Dashwood (& Jane Austen) on Wealth & Happiness

In Chapter 17 of S&S, there is a discussion of wealth and its relationship to happiness amongst Marianne, Edward and Elinor which has not, as I recall, ever received much attention amongst Janeites. Here it is:

[Marianne] “…What have wealth or grandeur to do with happiness?"

"Grandeur has but little," said Elinor, "but wealth has much to do with it."

"Elinor, for shame!" said Marianne, "money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it. Beyond a competence, it can afford no real satisfaction, as far as mere self is concerned."

"Perhaps," said Elinor, smiling, "we may come to the same point. YOUR competence and MY wealth are very much alike, I dare say; and without them, as the world goes now, we shall both agree that every kind of external comfort must be wanting. Your ideas are only more noble than mine. Come, what is your competence?"

"About eighteen hundred or two thousand a year; not more than THAT."

Elinor laughed. "TWO thousand a year! ONE is my wealth! I guessed how it would end."

"And yet two thousand a-year is a very moderate income," said Marianne. "A family cannot well be maintained on a smaller. I am sure I am not extravagant in my demands. A proper establishment of servants, a carriage, perhaps two, and hunters, cannot be supported on less."

Elinor smiled again, to hear her sister describing so accurately their future expenses at Combe Magna.

"Hunters!" repeated Edward—"but why must you have hunters? Every body does not hunt."

Marianne coloured as she replied, "But most people do."

"I wish," said Margaret, striking out a novel thought, "that somebody would give us all a large fortune apiece!"

"Oh that they would!" cried Marianne, her eyes sparkling with animation, and her cheeks glowing with the delight of such imaginary happiness.

"We are all unanimous in that wish, I suppose," said Elinor, "in spite of the insufficiency of wealth."

"Oh dear!" cried Margaret, "how happy I should be! I wonder what I should do with it!"

Marianne looked as if she had no doubt on that point.

"I should be puzzled to spend so large a fortune myself," said Mrs. Dashwood, "if my children were all to be rich my help."

"You must begin your improvements on this house," observed Elinor, "and your difficulties will soon vanish."

"What magnificent orders would travel from this family to London," said Edward, "in such an event! What a happy day for booksellers, music-sellers, and print-shops! You, Miss Dashwood, would give a general commission for every new print of merit to be sent you—and as for Marianne, I know her greatness of soul, there would not be music enough in London to content her. And books!—Thomson, Cowper, Scott—she would buy them all over and over again: she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree. Should not you, Marianne? Forgive me, if I am very saucy. But I was willing to shew you that I had not forgot our old disputes."

"I love to be reminded of the past, Edward—whether it be melancholy or gay, I love to recall it—and you will never offend me by talking of former times. You are very right in supposing how my money would be spent—some of it, at least—my loose cash would certainly be employed in improving my collection of music and books."

"And the bulk of your fortune would be laid out in annuities on the authors or their heirs."

"No, Edward, I should have something else to do with it."

"Perhaps, then, you would bestow it as a reward on that person who wrote the ablest defence of your favourite maxim, that no one can ever be in love more than once in their life—your opinion on that point is unchanged, I presume?"

"Undoubtedly. At my time of life opinions are tolerably fixed. It is not likely that I should now see or hear any thing to change them."  END QUOTE

What struck me in particular today in this passage are the following:

ONE: Just as I have in the past claimed that Sholom Aleichem must’ve had Pride & Prejudice  in mind as he wrote his stories about Tevye  the Milkman and his wife and daughters, so too I now believe that he had the above passage in mind when he wrote Tevye’s fantasies which were eventually adapted into “If I were a rich man” in Fiddler.

TWO: I had not previously noticed Edward’s ironical attribution to Marianne of a fantasy to create annuities for the benefit of her favorite authors and composers, if she were a rich girl. It of course  reflects back with the darkest irony on Fanny Dashwood’s rant about the evils of annuities in Chapter 2. It strikes me that this really was something Jane Austen still thought about for herself, even as she finally achieved the long-sought goal of publication in 1811 at age 35. She hardly became rich from that publication, as we all know, and so I think it no coincidence that JA put the following cruel words in Fanny Dashwood’s mouth:

"…if you observe, people always live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid them; and she is very stout and healthy, and hardly forty. An annuity is a very serious business; it comes over and over every year, and there is no getting rid of it.”

Reading Edward’s altruistic fantasy alongside his sister’s avaricious fantasy, as I believe JA meant us to  do, we realize that JA herself, in 1811, was “hardly forty”---but we also know that, tragically, JA did not fulfill Fanny’s dread, as she lived only a year and a half after reaching forty.

I do believe JA in her own views combined the best wisdom of Elinor and Mariannes—JA well  understood, as Elinor  did, that happiness became much more difficult to achieve when one lacked the money to live even a moderately comfortable life—and yet, for an artist, happiness was the freedom to create without having to be consumed with money worries.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter