The Essays by E. M. Forster & Janet Todd in A Truth Universally Acknowledged (2009): Contrasting Fanny Price & Anne Elliot

 I’ve been browsing through the 33 essays in A Truth Universally Acknowledged (2009), and, halfway through, I’ve found surprisingly little to surprise or intrigue me, as they seem to be a lot of well-written but ultimately safe variations on the basic theme of Jane Austen’s extraordinary genius. Although I do of course agree wholeheartedly that JA was an extraordinary genius, these essays provide very little specific textual detail or special insight in evidence therefor, and (much worse, from my perspective) contain barely a whiff of anything controversial. This is mainstream Austen criticism at its most mainstream. And given the roster of heavyweight names included among the article writers, that’s a real disappointment.

I’ve found two exceptions to this boring general rule so far, which I’d like to discuss, both of which have the merit of actually confronting specific verbiage in JA’s fiction in a provocative way, even if I don’t agree, in whole (as with Forster) or in part (as with Todd) with the interpretations—at least they give you something to dig into, and think about a bit more deeply, and I hope you’ll enjoy my reactions:

E. M. Forster’s 1924 essay “Jane Austen: The Six Novels”:  

Forster, right on the heels of calling himself  “slightly imbecile” in his adoration of JA, immediately does an unacknowledged about-face, and exhibits the colossal hubris of asserting that JA erred grammatically in her composition of the “all caps” passage in the following narration in Chapter 33 of MP, describing Fanny’s agitated thoughts after Crawford has been pressuring her to marry him:

“Here was again a want of delicacy and regard for others which had formerly so struck and disgusted her. Here was again a something of the same Mr. Crawford whom she had so reprobated before. How evidently was there a gross want of feeling and humanity where his own pleasure was concerned; and alas! HOW ALWAYS KNOWN NO PRINCIPLE to supply as a duty what the heart was deficient in!"

In 2006 in Janeites, I commented on Forster’s hubris, and I still stand behind every word I wrote then:

Me: “The reader in tune with JA's often poetic renderings of consciousness (there are a large number of such 'poeticizing' phrases in Emma, I have found) will not even break stride upon reading the verbiage in all-caps. That reader sees the poetic parallelism and realizes that the words "always known" stand in place of the single adverb for that concept that the English language somehow lacks, and thus accepts this sentence structure and moves along.
But consider the arrogance of the following commentary, written in 1924 by the famous E.M. Forster, upon looking into, and (in my opinion) overly praising, Chapman's editing of MP. First Forster describes the "typical" Janeite reader: "One reads and rereads, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, one greets her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers. The Jane Austenite possesses none of the brightness he ascribes to his idol. Like all regular churchgoers, he scarcely notices what is being said. For instance, the grammar of the following sentence from Mansfield Park presents no difficulty to him: 'And, alas! how always known no principle to supply as a duty what the heart was deficient in.'

.... Something is amiss in the text; but the loyal adorer will never detect it. He reads and rereads. And this fine new edition has, among its other merits, the great merit of waking the Jane Austenite up....The novels continue to live their own wonderful internal life, but it has been freshened and enriched by contact with the life of facts.....To promote this contact is the chief function of an editor, and Mr. Chapman fulfills it. All his erudition and taste contribute to this end.... And so, to a lesser degree, with the sentence from Mansfield Park. Here we emend "how always known" into "now all was known;" and the sentence not only makes sense but illumines its surroundings. Fanny is meditating on the character of Crawford, and, now that all is known to her, she condemns it."  END QUOTE

Back to me in 2013---boy, did Forster have chutzpah or what?! He not only fails to "get" JA’s Joycean stream of consciousness, he mocks those who accept JA’s depiction of Fanny’s ruminations, and then applauds Chapman's arrogant rewriting thereof into clunking, deadened prose. This is sexist intellectual bowdlerization at its absolute worst.

Janet Todd’s 2009 essay “Why I Like Jane Austen”

I am generally not a great fan of Janet Todd’s analyses of Jane Austen’s fiction, having often found that her undoubtedly acute eye for close textual reading is often clouded by the conservative “spectacles” through which she perceives JA’s fiction. Todd’s conservative spin is often diametrically opposed to my own reading of JA, and also to that of one of my main Austen scholarly inspirations, Jocelyn Harris, particularly in regard to the extent of Austen’s allusiveness.

Todd’s contribution to A Truth Universally Acknowledged is illustrative of both of her close reading talent and her conservative stance. It is the conservative Todd who quietly mocks Rozema’s Mansfield Park, as if the absurdity of depicting Sir Thomas Bertram as “a raping slave owner” and Tom Bertram “the spendthrift son [as] a sensitive child” was so obviously beyond Jane Austen’s actual intentions as not to require any discussion at all in order to dispose of Rozema’s (to my mind, brilliant) interpretation.

However, Todd atones for missing the boat from Antigua, with some sharp close reading, even though I believe she does not see the whole picture, as I’ll explain, below.

Todd focuses on three scenes in JA’s novels which have (in Todd’s view) been ignored by adapting screenwriters, and she is correct in that regard on all three counts. The first two scenes are covered by her in the same paragraph of quotation and analysis:

Todd: “[Anne Elliot] has learned romance with age, an unnatural development, as the novel says—but she has also learned more thoroughly to display some very salutary selfishness. I find this strain of selfishness marks both of Austen’s most virtuous heroines. When contemplating Louisa Musgrove, who is quite possibly near death after her stubborn jumping from the Cobb,

‘Anne wondered whether it ever occurred to [Captain Wentworth] now, to question the justness of his own previous opinion as to the universal felicity and advantage of firmness of character; and whether it might not strike him that, like all other qualities of the mind, it should have its proportions and limits. She thought it could scarcely escape him to feel that a persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness as a very resolute character.’

In other words, at this crucial time, she thought that she herself might show to good advantage beside her injured competitor. [Similarly, i]n the midst of everyone else’s misery over her cousin Maria’s adultery, Fanny Price in MP finds herself moving from utter desolation—in which state she imagines that ‘instant annihilation’ might be best for all her Bertram relatives--to ‘being exquisitely happy’ when she realizes that in the wake of this misery she can return to the family and play the important role of comforter. It’s worth noting that no film or TV adaptation catches these moments, for a look of triumph, unlike a rush of love, from either young woman would be unpalatable; the fleeting thought must stay on the page.”  END QUOTE

I would add to Todd’s above analysis the following comments and caveats:

I cannot find evidence of any Austen scholar, professional or amateur, other than Todd, ever having picked up on Anne Elliot’s private triumph when Louisa falls, so, first of all, kudos to her for that. I believe that this has been missed by everyone else, because most Austen readers get so caught up in Anne’s sense of herself as an unselfish martyr, that they don’t take a step back, as Todd did, and think about the faintly unpleasant aroma rising out of Anne’s reaction.  But Todd doesn’t extrapolate from this brilliant observation all the rich implications that it carries.

What Todd ought to have pointed out, for starters, was that, even though Fanny Price does at first indulge in some distinctly Collins-esque Calvinist fantasies about death as cure for scandal, Fanny, upon getting the summons to return to Mansfield Park, and in striking contrast to Anne Elliot, shows real self-awareness on this point, and spends no small amount of time forcing herself to focus on the misery around her even during her own exquisite happiness:

“She was, she felt she was, in the greatest danger of being exquisitely happy, while so many were miserable. The evil which brought such good to her! She dreaded lest she should learn to be insensible of it. To be going so soon, sent for so kindly, sent for as a comfort, and with leave to take Susan, was altogether such a combination of blessings as set her heart in a glow, and for a time seemed to distance every pain, and make her incapable of suitably sharing the distress even of those whose distress she thought of most. Julia's elopement could affect her comparatively but little; she was amazed and shocked; but it could not occupy her, could not dwell on her mind. She was obliged to call herself to think of it, and acknowledge it to be terrible and grievous, or it was escaping her, in the midst of all the agitating pressing joyful cares attending this summons to herself.”

Note that Fanny keeps forcing herself to keep in mind that all is not joy in Mansfield Park. And the contrast between Anne and Fanny is even more pronounced, because Tom’s condition was stable at that instant, and certainly neither Julia nor Maria was in danger of dying; while Louisa, to the best of Anne’s knowledge and as Todd points out, does appear to all to be in danger of death or permanent injury.

So, while Todd is correct in pointing out the unpalatability for an unsophisticated Austen film audience of virtuous Austen heroines caught in the act of private unvirtuousness, Todd doesn’t take note of the unpalatability even for a sophisticated Austen scholar like herself, of this contrast between her two virtuous heroines, i.e., a closer reading reveals that Fanny’s sin of schadenfreude is venial in this instance, while Anne’s is almost…..deadly! Todd refers to Anne’s reaction as “salutary selfishness”, when it ought properly to be called what it is, which is clueless hypocrisy. Anne doesn’t walk the moral walk that Fanny walks—or put another way, Anne has a good dose of the Elliot pride, which is exactly why she judges her father and sisters so strongly on that very count, because she is in denial of her own Elliot pride!

And I suggest that Jane Austen actually gives a giant textual clue to the alert Janeite who has read all her novels, which subliminally connects the dots between Anne’s selfish wondering in Persuasion and Fanny’s more complicated “being exquisitely happy” in MP. That clue is in Persuasion, when JA writes the following immediately after Anne and Wentworth have finally been united:  “here they returned again into the past, MORE EXQUISITELY HAPPY, PERHAPS, in their re-union, than when it had been first projected…”

By this clue, JA is pulling for the reader to recall Fanny’s “being exquisitely happy”, and then to contrast her relatively self-aware reaction to Anne’s near total self-blindness.

And that contrast actually brings me to Todd’s third interesting textual illustration, when she analyzes (as many Austen scholars have done)  the famous “fat sighings” scene with Mrs. Musgrove on the sopha in Persuasion. Todd quotes the relevant passage and then writes:

“…Political correctness makes sizism unacceptable. As with the moments of triumphant self-assertion in MP and Persuasion, , this episode is absent from the recent films.

On no evidence, critics assert that, if she had lived to revise this last novel, JA would have excised the passage on inelegant grief, for, as with other writers, we have a propensity to claim that what we don’t like in an author was an error, an oversight, or an aberration….[JEAL], presenting his aunt as a decorous Victorian lady author, explained the lapses in Persuasion by the fact that she had not entirely revised the work.”  END QUOTE

Again, I see Todd trying to distance herself from a film audience and Victorian nephew who ignore JA espousing unpleasant views; but, ironically, what Todd (and many other Austen scholars) completely miss is that the ruminations on Mrs. Musgrove’s “fat sighings” are not those of Jane Austen herself, but are from the mind of her hypocritical heroine, Anne Elliot!

It is Anne who is so caught up in her own perpetual emotional suffering over a period of several years that she has no empathy to spare for a mother who continues to suffer in a remarkably parallel way. Again, Anne’s judgmentalism is amplified by her unconscious projection of her own flaws onto another person, so as not to have to see herself clearly.

PLUS…..as I’ve noted before, Mrs. Musgrove is sitting on the sopha in between Anne and Wentworth, and it is the matron’s great bulk which constitutes a visual barrier preventing Anne and Wentworth from even looking at each other—so Anne is just plain irritated by this simple physical fact, in a way that would not have occurred to her in another setting!

In short, Anne’s lack of self awareness on the sopha with Mrs. Musgrove is cut from exactly the same cloth as Anne’s lack of self awareness when she gloats over Louisa Musgrove’s injuries. Todd is correct in pointing out the hypocrisy of filmmakers who cleanse these disturbing undercurrents out of their Austen adaptations. But, ironically, Todd fails to see that she herself is also ignoring deeper ripples of those same undercurrents, which would force her to acknowledge that JA’s portrait of Anne Elliot is not meant to be as flattering as most Janeites, including Todd herself, believe it to be. There’s political correctness, and there’s critical correctness, and Todd is guilty of the latter in this instance.

Conclusion:

I conclude by saying that one reason why I like Jane Austen is that she can have such an effect on bright Janeites like Forster and Todd, as to provoke them both to utterly miss the boat on certain textual points, while at the same time provoking Todd to read against the grain and spot the hidden connection between Anne and Fanny, which in turn has given me rich grist for my own Austen sleuthing mill.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Did Jane Austen “go to Venice”, as Fanny Price “took a trip” into China, and as Mr. Woodhouse “traveled” to St. Mark’s Square? You better believe it!

Laurel Ann: “Wonderful Diana, you never cease to amaze me. This would make a wonderful article for Jane Austen’s World magazine. Very well researched and thoughtful. Jane did go to Venice, as many of the gentility did of her era, through the written word, paintings and illustrations. Armchair traveling like Mr. Woodhouse! I hope to see it”

Diana: “Thank you, Laurel Ann – I love your thought, “Jane Austen did go to Venice,” as an armchair traveler. Indeed she did. Perhaps people entered more vividly into that kind of traveling in those days, than we do nowadays, when travel is so much easier.”

I only noticed this morning that Laurel Ann’s (Austenprose) above-quoted comment on Diana Birchall’s blog post a few weeks ago…..

http://austenauthors.net/jane-austen-and-venice-by-diana-birchall

….entitled “Jane Austen and Venice”, and then Diana’s reply to Laurel Ann’s comment, both take on a whole new (and quite unintended, I am sure) meaning, when those comments are read through the lens of my own blog post six weeks ago…

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/10/sexual-innuendoes-then-and-now-fanny.html

…about Jane Austen’s wickedly sly, double entendre’d homage, in Mansfield Park, to Wycherley’s (in)famous “China”.

As my Subject Line suggests, I would argue that Fanny Price’s “trip into China” is as definitive an example of “armchair travel” in JA’s novels, as is Diana’s reference (which Laurel Ann praised) to Mr. Woodhouse’s “armchair travel”.

Which made me reread Mr. Woodhouse’s “guided tour” (courtesy of Mrs. Weston) of foreign exotica…

“Books of engravings, drawers of medals, cameos, corals, shells, and every other family collection within his cabinets, had been prepared for his old friend, to while away the morning; and the kindness had perfectly answered. Mr. Woodhouse had been exceedingly well amused. Mrs. Weston had been shewing them all to him, and now he would shew them all to Emma;—fortunate in having no other resemblance to a child, than in a total want of taste for what he saw, for he was slow, constant, and methodical. ….Jane had not been gone a quarter of an hour, and they had only accomplished some views of St. Mark’s Place, Venice, when Frank Churchill entered the room.”

…..and then pause and really wonder not only about those “views of St. Mark’s Place” but also about the nature of some of those “engravings”, and in particular about Mr. Woodhouse being “exceedingly well amused” by them. Were these engravings and views merely exotica….or erotica?

Support for the latter interpretation can be found in distinct echoes (entirely intentional, I claim, on Jane Austen’s part) of two earlier scenes in Emma and one in Mansfield Park, to boot:

ONE: Mr. Woodhouse’s desire to immediately “shew them all to Emma” echoes Mr. Woodhouse’s equally strong desire, 32 chapters earlier, to share with Emma (and Harriet) all the words to Garrick’s  Riddle (as Jill Heydt-Stevenson first discovered 14 years ago, showing that it was actually about the horror of men with syphilis having sex with virgins in order, so they thought, to cure them)---a desire which we may be grateful he was unable, due to his faulty memory, to satisfy, as that was one bit of “armchair travel” as to which Emma would most certainly NOT have wished to have the use of her father’s “horse” and “carriage”! Let Mr. Woodhouse find his “cure” by “traveling” somewhere else!

And much better for Emma to “stay home” at Hartfield—and maybe I have stumbled upon a pervasive hidden code for Emma’s oft-noted uniqueness among Austen heroines, in her never having “traveled” away from home? Is this code for Emma’s sexual innocence and inexperience? I think so!

AND

TWO: Frank’s walking into the room at the Abbey, interrupting the “views of St. Mark’s Place”, echoes Emma, Miss Bates & Harriet walking into the room at the Bates residence at the very beginning of Chapter 28, finding Frank and Jane in disarray, as they have clearly also been interrupted while making some sort of “music” together, while Frank was supposed to be fixing that “rivet” on Mrs. Bates’s spectacles! In both scenes, some private activity between a man and a woman has been interrupted, and I infer a similar embarrassment in the latter scene as the narrator tells us about in the earlier one.

AND

THREE: It’s no coincidence, either, that Mary Crawford, of course the Queen of Double Entendre with her “rears and vices” witticism, also brings the reader’s attention, albeit obliquely, to Venice:

"To say the truth," replied Miss Crawford, "I am something like the famous Doge at the court of Lewis XIV; and may declare that I see no wonder in this shrubbery equal to seeing myself in it.”

It has been my interpretation for a while that “this shrubbery” is metaphorical (in this novel pervaded by the sexualized aura of the Garden of Eden), and describes Fanny’s very same “heart” which Henry Crawford so Freudfully wishes to make a hole in. Therefore, Mary is saying to Fanny, in code, even though Fanny does not get it, that Mary would like to see herself having sex with Fanny,  in line with the central thesis of my following blog post from February of this year:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/02/following-clues-to-lesbian-vibe-between.html

Bottom line: I think both Wycherley and Jane Austen (and certainly also Mary Crawford, the Doge and Mary’s uncle) would both have found the unintended double entendre in Diana’s and Laurel Ann’s exchange extremely amusing, in particular Diana’s last sentence: “Perhaps people entered more vividly into that kind of traveling in those days, than we do nowadays, when travel is so much easier.”

It would be a question beyond the reach even of the protagonists of the wonderful new show Masters of Sex to determine whether people in Jane Austen’s era did indeed enter more vividly into “that kind of traveling”, even though such “travel is so much easier” today, with the abundance of “transportation” available via modern technology. I think we’ll never know for sure, but it’s an interesting question to ponder.

What I don’t need to ponder is the question of whether Jane Austen herself, in her real life, did “armchair travel” to places like “China” and “Venice”, as well as the Mansfield Parsonage “shrubbery”?

I know, from all of the above, as well as a thousand other passages in JA’s writing, that the answer is, as Molly Bloom would have repeated many times, simply “Yes”.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Jean Webster & Jane Austen: And Onoto Watanna & Jane Eyre too!

Diana  Birchall wrote: "The review I wrote about Katherine Reay's novel "Dear Mr. Knightley" is here, on the Austenprose blog: 

 http://austenprose.com/2013/11/20/dear-mr-knightley-a-novel-by-katherine-reay-a-review/  

The novel is a retelling of Jean Webster's charming bestseller Daddy-Long-Legs (written in 1912), and reading about Webster got Arnie thinking about similarities with Emma."

Diana, it wasn't reading about Webster that got me thinking in that vein, all it took was for you to reveal Reay's title--Dear Mr. KNIGHTLEY----and that immediately made me wonder whether Reay was hinting--in a very explicit yet veiled way--at some sort of allusion to Emma that she had detected in Daddy Long Legs.

That's why I found and read Daddy Long Legs and immediately verified from numerous textual hints that there was indeed a significant matrix of sly allusion by Webster to Emma----and I can now also verify, from the friendly response I received yesterday from Katherine Reay herself, that she did indeed mean, by her title, to hint at exactly that allusion!

So...major kudos to Katherine Reay for being the first to take note of Jean Webster's veiled allusion, in the very famous and popular Daddy Long Legs, to Austen's Emma—I’ve picked up where Reay left off, and sleuthed out more aspects of that allusion to JA by Webster, including taking note of the Pride & Prejudice allusion in Daddy Long Legs. Daddy Long Legs is just as much Mr. Darcy as he is Mr. Knightley, and, as i wrote previously, I believe Nora Ephron knew about his Darcyishness, too! 


Diana also wrote: "Now, I happen to know quite a lot about Jean Webster because she was my grandmother's best friend. She helped my grandmother (pen name Onoto Watanna, real name Winnifred Eaton) get her 1915 sensational anonymous memoir "Me" published, and Jean Webster wrote the introduction. " 

That is just too amazing and wonderful, how that must add to your pleasure and pride in your grandmother's already significant achievements, to also know that she moved in such influential literary circles, and held her own there! Did your grandmother by any chance leave behind any interesting observations about her best friend's fiction or life?

Diana also wrote: "Jean had some problems with her great-uncle Mark Twain since her father failed as his publisher and there was bad feeling, but she clearly remained close to him..."

Yes, my eyes widened yesterday when Wikipedia alerted me to that close familial and professional relationship between Mark Twain and Jean Webster. It is especially significant to me, because, as you will recall from my many prior posts on the subject, I am certain that Twain was a closet Janeite who merely pretended, in his satirical way, to dislike JA's writing.  So, knowing what I now do about Webster's novel being such a deep homage to Emma and Pride & Prejudice, it REALLY makes me wonder what sort of conversations and/or correspondence Jean Webster may have had with her great-uncle (who was also her "great uncle" in another sense!) about Jane Austen. E.g., did she discuss with him her intention to make this veiled allusion to JA's writing in Daddy Long Legs as she was writing it? Or did she discuss it with him after her great success with Daddy Long Legs?  Was there ever a point at which they found out they were both closet Janeites? 

By the way, it will also of interest to some reading here, I think, that in addition to Webster's covert allusions to Jane Austen's fiction in Daddy Long Legs, there was also an overt allusion to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, which Webster's heroine discusses as follows:

"I sat up half of last night reading “Jane Eyre”. Are you old enough, Daddy, to remember sixty years ago? And if so, did people talk that way? The haughty Lady Blanche says to the footman, ‘Stop your chattering, knave, and do my bidding.”Mr. Rochester talks about the metal welkin when he means the sky; and as for the mad woman who laughs like a hyena and sets fire to bed curtains and tears up wedding veils and bites—it’s a melodrama of the purest, but just the same, you read and read and read. I can’t see how any girl could have written such a book, especially any girl who was brought up in a churchyard. There’s something about those Brontes that fascinates me. Their books, their lives, their spirit. Where did they get it? When I was reading about little Jane’s troubles in the charity school, I got so angry that I had to go out and take a walk..  I understood exactly how she felt… "

I just did some very brief biographical digging and found the following extraordinary, uncanny parallelism between Jane Eyre's fictional life and Jean Webster's real life, as described in the following excerpt from Jane Eyre's American Daughters: From The Wide, Wide World to Anne of Green Gables by John D. Seelye:

“…Jean Webster’s life after 1907 was a post-graduate education in adversity. She fell in love with Glen Ford McKinney, a wealthy sportsman eleven years her senior and the brother of her close friend Ethelyn McKinney, one of the four women with whom she had traveled around the world. The love affair began shortly after Jean’s return but remained a secret for seven years because Glenn was married to Annette (nee Renaud), daughter of a Creole wine merchant in Martinique. Annette was subject to spells of severe depression, which drove the relatively weak willed Glenn to binge drinking…Annette McKinney’s depression bordered on psychosis and she spent much of her married life in and out of sanatoriums…after Annette finally agreed to a divorce, the two lovers were married, on September 7, 1915….

If Jean’s tragic death resembles that of Charlotte Bronte…then her husband’s troubled first marriage to a mentally disturbed woman of Creole birth cannot but remind us of Rochester’s relationship with Bertha.”

This sad parallel between Webster’s real life and Jane Eyre’s fictional life is already remarkable. But what Seelye somehow fails to notice is that Webster chose to reflect that parallelism in Daddy Long Legs (which she wrote in 1912 while in effect waiting for Glenn McKinney to free up to be married to her!), via her heroine’s reflections on Bertha in Jane Eyre, and via the obvious additional parallelism that Webster married her own much older Daddy Long Legs, only to die tragically, in childbirth, a year later!
That really is stranger than fiction!

Diana also wrote: “…my grandmother "Winnie" met [Mark Twain] a number of times, and was at his fabulous 70th birthday party at Delmonico's, attended by literary stars of the day, in 1905. A Harpers Magazine issue was devoted to the party, with photographs of every table, showing Jean and Winnie as well as all the other distinguished guests, who comprise a fascinating New York Who's Who of the day! I wrote two blog posts about it, which tell the whole glittering story (with pictures of the tables at which Jean and Winnie sat). In particular, I had enormous fun researching who some of the party guests were! http://lightbrightandsparkling.blogspot.com/2010/05/party-for-mark-twain.html http://lightbrightandsparkling.blogspot.com/2010/06/mark-twains-party-part-2 .html “

Fantastic stuff, Diana, what a trip! In the category of bizarre coincidence, one of the anecdotes you mentioned was the following:

“Turning my attention to the others at her table, I was amazed and charmed to notice that she was sitting right next to Gelett Burgess.  He was the author of Goops and How to Be Them, then still a fairly new book (1900) as well as the immortal verse:

I never saw a purple cow

I never hope to see one;

But I can tell you, anyhow,

I'd rather see than be one!”

The bizarre coincidence, for me, is that I attended Williams College in Massachusetts, and, guess what, the school mascot is…..a Purple Cow!

Now I know how Williams came to adopt a Purple Cow as its mascot, a fact which I quickly verified here:

http://archives.williams.edu/williamshistory/groups/purple-cow-mascot.php

“In 1907, the Purple Cow humor magazine went to press for the first time with a plethora of student authored pieces and clever cow graphics.  The name for the campus publication was the winner among many suggested.   The editorial staff, of course, gave credit for its whimsical title to Frank G. Burgess and his jingle was included on the cover of the first issue.”  

By the way, Burgess attended MIT, not Williams! So I will pass this on to my Williams friends (whom I just re-uned with in Georgia two weeks ago!), who will get a kick out of it!

Diana also wrote: “Arnie is right in saying Jean had "a witty, subtle, erudite, and multi-layered sense of humor." I can't speak to the ideas he has about her referencing Emma, but it is certain that she was extremely highly educated in the literary sense, and would have had all the knowledge and ability to make such allusions - though I'm not offering any opinion on whether she did or not!”

Just you wait, Diana, more evidence to support Katherine Reay and myself re the allusions to JA in Daddy Long Legs will arise in the coming months! ;)

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Emma, Daddy Long Legs, Dear Mr. Knightley, The Ephrons, & The Web of Allusion That Unites Them All

The following is the beginning of a wonderful blog post written by Diana Birchall yesterday:

“Does anyone remember Daddy-Long-Legs, the enchanting 1955 movie in which Fred Astaire is the benevolent, mysterious, rich sponsor who sends the exquisite young French girl Leslie Caron, to college? It was a favorite musical of my childhood, along with a string of other Caron and Audrey Hepburn films. Daddy-Long-Legs actually started life, however, as long ago as 1912, as a bright, effervescent, epistolary novel by Jean Webster. It enjoyed a huge success as a Broadway play and was filmed several times, including a Japanese anime version. Now new author Katherine Reay, instead of penning yet another in a lengthy backlist of Jane Austen updates, has cleverly chosen to write a modern retelling of Daddy-Long-Legs. Her Dear Mr. Knightley has a thoughtful literary setting, with enough Austen and Bronte references to provide intellectual mind candy for the reading woman. She also bestows an unusually satisfying romance upon her heroine, and succeeds in creating a portrait of a young writer that is so poignantly fresh and full of growing pains and uncertainties, that you question why she ever needed to lean on somebody else’s old classic at all. In Jean Webster’s original version, the heroine, Jerusha Abbot, was fifteen and still working in the orphan asylum where she was raised, when her rich benefactor sends her to a posh college. In her version, Katherine Reay advances her orphan’s age to twenty-three, and this constitutes my main problem with the novel, and the reason I wish she’d left the Daddy-Long-Legs template behind her. Samantha Moore has already graduated from college and failed in her first job, when she is offered a full tuition grant to the master’s program of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, by a wealthy philanthropist. The only stipulation is that she write him personal progress letters, which he will not answer. His assistant suggests she address him as “Mr. George Knightley,” in tribute to Samantha’s own love for Jane Austen and Emma….” END QUOTE

Diana, thanks for alerting me to the above literary/film history, of which I had been entirely unaware till this morning. As soon as I read your post, I smelled a web of veiled allusion, but even I could not have anticipated  how rich a web it is! So, as you’ll see by the end of this post, you’ve done  it again!

I would like to suggest to you that Katherine Reay had a very very good reason for her modern retelling of Webster’s classic from a century ago, and for her connecting Webster’s epistolary novel to Jane Austen’s Emma. I.e., from a very pleasant several hours I have just spent pretty much reading most of Webster’s novel (it is a super-fast read), and then reading up on Jean Webster’s career, I have arrived at the following inferences which I consider noteworthy:

ONE: In her novel, Jean Webster, very clearly and strikingly, but covertly, was alluding, in a dozen different ways, to Austen’s Emma, and, in a handful of other ways, to Austen’s Pride & Prejudice as well! So, I infer that Katherine Reay, writing in 2013, recognized those veiled allusions to Austen, and showed her awareness thereof by making the connection of Daddy-Long-Legs to Emma open and explicit in her own novel title, Dear Mr. Knightley.

TWO: The screenplay of the famous 1950’s film version of Daddy-Long-Legs was written by Nora Ephron’s parents, and I am not the first to notice that, in You’ve Got Mail, Joe Fox conceals his true identity from Kathleen Kelly during a lengthy correspondence, just as “Master Pervie” Pendleton (sounds like Pemberley) conceals his true identity from Judy in Daddy-Long-Legs. From all of those data points, I therefore infer that the late Nora Ephron paid a veiled, yet in hindsight obvious, homage to Webster’s novel, and to her parents’ famous adaptation thereof, in You’ve Got Mail.

THREE: I have previously demonstrated…

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/07/when-kathleen-mourned-her-mother-nora.html

…that, in addition to You’ve Got Mail’s obvious  homage to Pride& Prejudice, Nora Ephron’s screenplay cleverly but covertly also alluded to Much Ado About Nothing (prior to writing Daddy-Long-Legs, Jean Webster wrote a group of short stories entitled Much Ado About  Peter).  

So when I put all of those connections together, I also further infer that Nora Ephron was showing that she herself was aware of the connections of Daddy Long-Legs to both Pride & Prejudice and Emma.

Now, I could go into great textual detail to back up my above three inferences about Webster’s veiled allusions to Jane Austen, and their literary lineage, but I will let one textual example (among many) suffice for now—it is my personal favorite from Daddy Long Legs, a short passage from one of Judy’s letters to “Mr. Smith”, which functions as a kind of mini-Rosetta Stone for decoding the sly allusion to Emma in Daddy-Long-Legs:

 “Good-by, Daddy. I must call on Harriet Martin now, and, having discussed the chemical situation, casually drop a few thoughts on the subject of our next president.”

What a witty, subtle, erudite, and multi-layered sense of humor Jean Webster must have had, to have sounded all of the following echoes of Emma in that one sentence:

ONE: Webster named her heroine (a young girl, like Austen’s Harriet Smith, of unknown parentage at a girls’ boarding school, who benefits from the generosity of an anonymous man of means who prefers to be known to her as “Mr. Smith”) Jerusha or Judy Abbott, who in the above sentence in one of her letters to “Mr. Smith” refers in passing to a classmate whose name, Harriet Martin, just happens to be Harriet Smith’s married name in Emma.

TWO: By giving her heroine the surname ‘Abbott’, Webster thereby winks at the following words spoken by Harriet Smith to Emma about two of her fellow parlour-boarders who just happen to be named “Abbot”:  “The two Abbots and I ran into the front room and peeped through the blind when we heard he was going by, and Miss Nash came and scolded us away, and staid to look through herself…”

So…if we view Daddy Long Legs through the lens of Emma, we see that Judy Abbott shares a lot with Harriet Smith, but of course she also shares a lot Emma Woodhouse. And similarly, Jervie Pendleton/Mr. Smith shares a lot with Mr. Knightley, but also shares a lot with Harriet Smith’s never-named biological father.

What could Jean Webster have intended by this blurring of allusive lines between Austen’s hero and heroine, on the one hand, and two of her less beloved characters?

The tame interpretation is to focus on Judy and Jervie as Emma and Mr. Knightley, but the disturbing interpretation is to see Judy and Jervie as Harriet and Knightley, and to go one step further and ask whether Webster is suggesting that Knightley is actually Harriet’s biological father. That last turn of the allusive screw would put a creepily incestuous Electraesque overlay on Harriet’s already creepily (re the age-discrepancy) aiming for Knghtley as a husband. Or, just as disturbing, Webster might be suggesting that Emma is herself a foundling, and (horrors) Knightley’s own daughter!

I of course lean toward the disturbing interpretations, not just because this fits so well with so many disturbing overtones I have collected from all of Austen’s shadows, but in particular because Jean Webster was actually, historically factually, exactly the sort of radical feminist that I have often asserted  Jane Austen was!

Read Webster’s Wikipedia page to get an idea of what I mean:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Webster

Webster was all about empowering women in a variety of ways, both legal and literary, and that’s who I see JA as having been, a century earlier.

And I was particularly struck by the factoid that Webster’s mother was Mark Twain’s niece, and her father was Twain’s business manager and publisher of many of his books! 

Given that I believe Mark Twain was a secret Janeite of mammoth proportions…

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/04/mark-twain-emulates-jane-austen-again.html

….it wouldn’t have surprised me to find out that somehow Twain was in personal contact with Jean Webster and helped foster her interest in the subversive side of Jane Austen’s fiction. And look what I just found via Google:

“Webster's great-uncle Mark Twain praised her first efforts: "I read most of Jean Webster's book today; and the most of what I read greatly pleased me" 

I will end on that note, with a promise to revisit this  topic as I delve more deeply into this matrix of literary allusion.  But already I can say that there is now no question in my mind that Webster in writing Daddy Long Legs was paying JA the sincerest of homages, because it, exactly like Emma, can be read either as very romantic or very creepy. And finally, bravo again to the late Nora Ephron, as the above analysis  makes it clear that You’ve Got Mail was even more complex in its allusive depths than I had previously determined, as it now clearly enfolds Jean Webster’s feminist fiction.

Now, how much of the above was on Katherine Reay’s mind as she wrote her recent, critically acclaimed debut novel? I  will reach out to her shortly to find out!

In the interim, Diana, now you know why I thanked you at the start of this post for once again turning me on to something remarkable having to do with Jane Austen’s shadows!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter