Reconfirmation Bias Among Conservative Literary Scholars: Jane Austen’s Hidden Special Victims Unit

The Flat Earth Society came to my mind yesterday after reading Michael Chwe’s recent NY Times Op/Ed piece …..

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/opinion/sunday/scientific-pride-and prejudice.html?hp&rref=opinion

…entitled “Scientific Pride and Prejudice”, in which Chwe concisely and clearly addressed the issue of  “confirmation bias” in science and literary criticism.  Let me explain how I made that strange association.

First, here are the excerpts from his piece that particularly caught my eye:

“A major root of the crisis is selective use of data. Scientists, eager to make striking new claims, focus only on evidence that supports their preconceptions. Psychologists call this “confirmation bias”: We seek out information that confirms what we already believe. “We each begin probably with a little bias,” as Jane Austen writes in Persuasion,  “and upon that bias build every circumstance in favor of it.” Despite the popular belief that anything goes in literary criticism, the field has real standards of scholarly validity.

…In literary criticism, the question of how one’s arguments are influenced by one’s prejudgments has been a central methodological issue for decades. Sometimes prejudgments are hard to resist.

… We all bring different preconceptions to our inquiries, whether about Austen or the electron, and these preconceptions can spur as well as blind us. Perhaps because of its self-awareness about what Austen would call the “whims and caprices” of human reasoning, the field of psychology has been most aggressive in dealing with doubts about the validity of its research…the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman suggests that “to deal effectively with the doubts you should acknowledge their existence and confront them straight on, because a posture of defiant denial is self-defeating.” Everyone, including natural scientists, social scientists and humanists, could use a little more self-awareness. Understanding science as fundamentally a human process might be necessary to save science itself. “  END QUOTE

I wish to add a very simple but absolutely crucial gloss to Chwe’s otherwise unimpeachable thesis---one which Chwe would, I am very confident, be in hearty agreement with.  When he writes “Scientists, eager to MAKE striking new claims, focus only on evidence that supports their preconceptions,”, I would add  the following corollary:  “And those, whether other scientists or lay people, eager to REJECT striking new claims, ALSO focus only on evidence that supports their preconceptions.”

I.e., it is not only the scientists (like the biologists Chwe mentioned who very publicly and embarrassingly got it wrong about discovering a new life form a few years ago) and the literary critics (like Chwe himself, with his Austenian game theory claims, who was recently attacked for same by Deresiewicz) who must be on guard against confirmation bias, it’s equally incumbent upon those status-quo defenders who, as Thomas Kuhn so eloquently asserted in his brilliant and hugely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, hold on to debunked theories, such that new, better theories only achieve wide acceptance from the next generation of scientists.

Here’s a perfect example of this conservative bias: as I pointed out the other day as I supported Chwe in rebutting Deresiewicz’s (unfounded) claims that Chwe’s game theory analyses of Austen were “intellectually bankrupt”, Deresiewicz unwittingly revealed a glaring example of his own (if you will) REconfirmation bias when he baldly asserted, based on nothing other than his own preconceptions about JA’s writing, that “Austen was a novelist. She didn’t write textbooks, she had no use for concepts, and she wasn’t interested in making arguments. If she had a research program, as Chwe insists, it was into the techniques of fiction and the possibilities of the English language….” Talk about begging a big question!

If you agree with what Deresiewicz claims there, then I suggest to you that you may share his misguided preconception about what being a novelist meant to Jane Austen, a preconception which, I suggest, is deeply at odds with the actual evidence everywhere in her writing. That textual evidence shows that she was extremely interested in concepts, in making veiled arguments about every aspect of human life, and indeed was a lifelong & perpetual “studier of character”, i.e., psychologist, and observer/analyst of human nature and behavior.

But Deresiewicz did not invent his preconception, he absorbed it from pretty much everything he has read or heard from other Austen scholars, in much the same way that (as per Henry Crawford) English folk supposedly learn(ed) Shakespeare:

“But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately."

Now, in the realm of Austen studies, it is clear to me how so intelligent and learned a critic as Deresiewicz clearly is, could yet feel so confident in making such a huge assumption, and then not even bother to support it with evidence. It is because, I infer, he was articulating the Standard Model of Austen criticism. It needs no explanation, because it is what “everyone” already believes. Somehow, that weight of  cumulative opinion is supposed  to suffice  by itself.

But that’s the key point—Jane Austen, in writing that passage, anticipated (indeed, invited) that sort of reaction to her writing! Think about it---do you really think that Henry Crawford was speaking for Jane Austen personally, and that she believed that any ordinary Englishman of any brain would just fall into the flow of Shakespeare’s meaning immediately, intimate with that meaning by instinct?

Upon examination, I suggest, this is nonsense! Even a brilliant man like Henry Crawford, with both an excellent formal education and also obvious native intellectual of the highest order, would have had to study Shakespeare very carefully indeed over a long period of time, to achieve the level of intimacy with Shakespeare which he so obviously had achieved. Is Shakespeare so simple to understand?  Of course not! There are infinite depths in Shakespeare that a lifetime of study is not sufficient to fully grasp.

And Jane Austen, of course, knew this very well, because my research has conclusively established that she had herself, when she wrote Henry’s speech, studied Shakespeare very closely over her entire writing career spanning nearly 3 decades, and had recreated (in both senses of that word) Shakespeare in her own personal style and in a novelistic medium with unparalleled success.

And here’s the best part. JA was self-confident enough in her own writing, and in her own understanding of the likes of Shakespeare, that she  could afford to wink at patronizing, condescending reactions to her writing in this way—it’s not just in that passage that JA parodies the kind of dismissive interpretation of her as a writer of “mere novels”, writing for a supposedly undiscriminating unintellectual female readership. What she’s really saying, on a meta level, using the charismatic Henry Crawford as her ventriloquist’s dummy, is that any reader who believes they can absorb HER meaning by instinct, without any conscious effort and study, is going to wind up with exactly the wrong opinion about Shakespeare, and about her writing as well!

If there is any characteristic that unites JA with Henry Crawford, and with Lizzy Bennet during the first half of P&P, it is what Darcy so succinctly expressed:

"I shall not say you are mistaken," he replied, "because you could not really believe me to entertain any design of alarming you; and I have had the pleasure of your acquaintance long enough to know that you find great enjoyment in occasionally professing opinions which in fact are not your own."

Elizabeth laughed heartily at this picture of herself…”

And I assert, with a high degree of confidence, that a significant portion of the basis of the widespread mistaken preconceptions that still widely prevail about Jane Austen, are based on a widespread fundamental failure to recognize that JA, via Darcy, was describing Jane Austen herself, both as to the opinions that her novels seem to express on her behalf, and also as to the opinions her letters seem to express as well. In a nutshell, Darcy was describing Elizabeth’s ironical inclinations, and in so do, he points backwards to his own creator, Jane Austen, for whom irony was the heart and soul of every word she wrote.  

Now, that sets the stage for me to return to Chwe’s op/ed piece, and to my claim that reconfirmation bias is at least as big a risk for those who preserve the status quo in science and literary criticism, as confirmation bias is for those who would demolish it. If  anything, the longer  an opinion is held, the harder it will be to change. So old wrong  ideas will be much harder to give up than new wrong  ideas!

Just think about the once widespread certainty that the sun revolves around the earth, that infectious diseases are caused by demons, that life on earth did not evolve, and a thousand other once-widely held “certainties”, both ancient and modern, which have, sooner or later, been discarded by educated people as a result of scientific evidence to the contrary.

It’s easy to reconstruct the kinds of preconceptions that people must have once held, in order to so tenaciously cling to such wrong ideas. Reconfirmation bias is the intellectual equivalent of digging in one’s heels. And so it just seems to be easier to spot confirmation bias in reformers than in conservative thinkers. But we’re all of us, reformers and conservatives, human beings subject to that same sort of potential prejudice and preconception.

Which brings me at long last to my punch line--- my central claim, which I have kept busy for nearly a decade researching, is that Jane Austen’s novels are all double stories, as to which the concealed “shadow stories” are reflective of an author who was a radical free-thinking feminist who was a fierce critic of all patriarchal aspects of her society. Obviously, this view is currently espoused only by a small number of Janeites who’ve become familiar with my theories, and have found them convincing based on the diffuse format I have presented them in to date.

So, from my (admittedly mostly solitary) side of the telescope, the universal belief that JA’s novels are not double stories is comparable to the once universal belief that the world is flat. I claim that each Austen novel is a “house” which consists of not one, but two stories (all puns intended).

But I also fully recognize that the burden of proof I will carry in order to achieve wide acceptance of my claims will be very heavy. Hence the decade I’ve spent patiently peeling away successive layers of JA’s literary onions, compressing my conceptual framework tighter and tighter together. And a key portion of my argument, I have also long recognized, will be to demonstrate the reconfirmation bias that I see everywhere in contemporary Austen literary criticism.

Chwe wrote about the grave danger of “focus only on evidence that supports their preconceptions”. I will therefore leave you with perhaps the best example I know of reconfirmation bias among Janeites who do not believe JA was a radical critic of her patriarchal society, or that she expressed the sharpest part of her critique  sub rosa, just beneath the light bright and sparkling surface of her novels.

In 1999, i.e., 14 years ago, Jill Heydt-Stevenson presented unassailable evidence, expressed in clear terms, that Garricks’s Riddle, which Mr. Woodhouse struggles to recall in Chapter 9 of Emma, is, when read in full (i.e., including, crucially, the much dicier stanzas he can NOT recall) the expression of a syphilitic man’s depraved urge to cure his venereal disease by having sex with a “frozen maid”, i.e., a virgin girl.

Now, this was 14 years ago, so it dates back to the beginning of Internet discourse about Jane Austen. Since 2005, when I first read JHS’s claims about Mr. Woodhouse’s hidden meaning, I’ve written about it  many times in Austen L, in Janeites, and in my blog. And her work has been cited, albeit always in passing, in many subsequent books and articles.

But how many of you who reading this today, who have a firmly held opinion about JA’s authorial intentions being very different from those I’ve ascribed to her, above, have ever really tried to come to terms with WHY JA would insert such a disgusting, horrifying subtext as this in one of her novels, and what’s more, to do it in such a subliminal way?

This is a theme that we’d expect to see instead in the long running Special Victims Unit TV series starring Mariska Hargitay, not in Emma, and especially not in a scene that, superficially, as we fondly observe and listen to Emma, her father, Harriet and Mr. Elton  seems to be nothing other than a masterful comedy of romantic errors.

Garrick’s Riddle in Emma is evidence that supports my otherwise seemingly preposterous conception of Jane Austen. Before rejecting my admittedly radical new interpretation of its significance out of hand, and before suggesting that I have been guilty of confirmation bias, have you focused enough on this evidence to properly assess its implications for your theory of Jane Austen?  Have you paid attention to JA’s near universal deployment of irony in her writing?

Specifically, have you considered whether this evidence might, combined with hundreds of other disturbing cruxes and ambiguities scattered throughout JA’s novels, support my claim that there are actually two versions of each of these novels, one of them much darker than previously understood in Austen novels?  

And if you haven’t considered, and are not prompted by this post to do so now, then how exactly does that differ from what I’ve dubbed reconfirmation bias?

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Henry Crawford’s Doubly Prince of Whales-like Riot of Gratifications

Diane’s Reynolds' response to my last post: “Henry Crawford's riot of gratifications certainly comes across as much worse in the context of the Prince Regent. Does the Clarke bio say how Clarke responded to the incident with the donkey?”

From what I have in my (ever growing) files on Clarke (I returned Viveash’s book to the library years ago), I have no idea what sources Chris Viveash relied on (newspapers, letters, memoirs?) as the basis for his averring the following about the Petworth donkey fracas and its immediate aftermath:

“In the darkness of his bedchamber, they pushed him roughly into his bed, causing James to scream out as he touched the hairy flank of a live donkey, which had been trussed, dressed in female attire and THRUST between the sheets. A near RIOT ensued as the whole of the company crowded into the room to witness James’s distress. It took hours for the excitement to die down, and James felt hot  and humiliated by this unprovoked prank. 

In the morning, he tried to put a brave face on it, at breakfast, but guests giggle and sneered with the remembrance of it all. The Prince Regent and the Duke of Clarence patronizingly told him he was a dashed good sport, but James was most uneasy.” END QUOTE

Somehow I suspect that the second quoted paragraph was more Viveash’s imaginative re-creation than hard factual reporting. But be that as it may, as I  just reread that passage  now, in the aftermath of my insight about Henry Crawford at Mansfield Park as the Prince Regent at Petworth, I see something new and even more intriguing—yet another veiled allusion by Jane Austen to Shakespeare!

But first, let me add one more nugget pertaining to Clarke as Malvolio. If it weren’t for the fact that Viveash’s approach to Clarke is indistinguishable from that of a 19^th century Victorian gentleman scholar who writes in hushed, respectful tones about a mediocre man of letters as if his achievements in life were worthy of remembrance other than as the butt of JA’s satire, I would almost wonder about Viveash using the word “thrust”. Why? Consider the famous lines from the fake letter to Malvolio:

'If this fall into thy hand, revolve. In my stars I am above thee; but be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness THRUST upon 'em. Thy Fates open their hands; let thy blood and spirit embrace them; and, to inure thyself to what thou art like to be, cast thy humble slough and appear fresh.”

Is it possible that Viveash drew his account from a gleeful newspaper story reporting the incident in Shakespearean terms, which might’ve also been read independently by Jane Austen herself? After all, in the most grotesque sense possible, a donkey, which after all is not a small beast, being pushed at Clarke, would certainly fit the literal, concrete description of “greatness thrust upon” Clarke—and that would be just the sort of demented metaphorical twisting of serious culture that would have appealed to jaded, degenerate perverts like the Prince and his “posse”!  “Hey, fellows, let’s thrust some greatness on good old Clarke tonight. After all, he had the temerity to suggest to Egremont just the other day that perhaps things get a little too loud at 3 am at Petworth? Let’s show him what a REAL riot is like!” Or something like that.

And that brings me to that other veiled Shakespearean allusion in the passage about Henry Crawford’s “riot”.  Not only did Viveash use that word to describe the reaction of the Prince Regent and his cronies right after Clarke’s donkey-encounter, now I am also certain that the word “riot” was chosen by JA to describe Henry Crawford’s enthusiasm for amateur theatricals because of the following, which I just found in The Critical Companion to Jane Austen: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work by William Baker (2008) at p. 178, as Baker discusses Henry Crawford’s enthusiasm for amateur theatricals at Mansfield Park:

“The use of ‘riot’ here suggests wildness and that Henry is an experienced man of the world. As Shakespeare’s Prince Hal says in the third scene of the fourth act of Henry IV Part 2, “his headstrong RIOT hath no curb…When means and lavish manners meet together” (lines 62-64).”

Now, isn’t that REALLY interesting, that Shakespeare chose to use the word “riot” to describe the wild behavior of the Prince of Wales 4 centuries earlier than the Petworth Frolicks initiated by the Prince Regent aka the Prince of W(h)ales?

And guess what, it wasn’t just that passage that Baker quoted.  Turns out that Shakespeare uses  the word “riot” to describe Prince Hal’s wild phase no less than FOUR times!:

Henry IV, Part I, Act 1 Scene 1:

HENRY IV (Of course the father of Prince Hal)

Yea, there thou makest me sad and makest me sin
In envy that my Lord Northumberland
Should be the father to so blest a son,
A son who is the theme of honour's tongue;
Amongst a grove, the very straightest plant;
Who is sweet Fortune's minion and her pride:
Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him,
See RIOT and dishonour stain the brow
Of my young Harry. O that it could be proved
That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And call'd mine Percy, his Plantagenet!

Henry IV, Part 2, Act 4 Scene 4

HENRY IV (the same speech flagged by Baker)

Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds;
And he, the noble image of my youth,
Is overspread with them; therefore my grief
Stretches itself beyond the hour of death.
The blood weeps from my heart when I do shape,
In forms imaginary, th'unguided days
And rotten times that you shall look upon
When I am sleeping with my ancestors.
For when his headstrong RIOT hath no curb,
When rage and hot blood are his counsellors
When means and lavish manners meet together,
O, with what wings shall his affections fly
Towards fronting peril and oppos'd decay!

Henry IV, Part 2, Act  4 Scene 5

HENRY IV  (to Prince Hal)

…

Now, neighbour confines, purge you of your scum.
Have you a ruffian that will swear, drink, dance,
Revel the night, rob, murder, and commit
The oldest sins the newest kind of ways?
Be happy, he will trouble you no more.
England shall double gild his treble guilt;
England shall give him office, honour, might;
For the fifth Harry from curb'd license plucks
The muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog
Shall flesh his tooth on every innocent.
O my poor kingdom, sick with civil blows!
When that my care could not withhold thy RIOTS,
What wilt thou do when RIOT is thy care?
O, thou wilt be a wilderness again.
Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants!

Henry IV  Act 5, Scene 5:

Henry V (the former Prince Hal, after ascending to the throne, dismissing Falstaff from his life)

Presume not that I am the thing I was,
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my RIOTS.
Till then I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,

Henry V  Act 1, Scene 1:

Archbishop of Canterbury (re Henry V)

Which is a wonder how his grace should glean it,
Since his addiction was to courses vain,
His companies unletter'd, rude and shallow,
His hours fill'd up with RIOTS, banquets, sports, 95
And never noted in him any study,
Any retirement, any sequestration
From open haunts and popularity.

And now I also connect the dots to the Gads Hill prank that Prince Hal & Co. play on poor Falstaff, by setting him with a fake  robbery so that he will exaggerate later about the small army of criminals  who set upon him. Again, a Prince humiliating  an underling publicly.

Diane also wrote: “And what Auden poem are you referring to--Musee de Beaux Arts”

No, the passage I quoted in my last post:

You could not shock her more than she shocks me,
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle class
Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass,’
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The Riot of the Prince Regent's Gratifications: The Low Plot of High Born Boys

In response to my last post re James Stanier Clarke as a real life Malvolio…

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/01/emma-twelfth-night-jane-austens-letters.html

…which itself was a followup to my post last week about Clarke as various fools from Shakespeare’s plays, and how Jane Austen alluded to them in Emma….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/01/mr-knightleys-spiked-spruce-beer.html

… Diane Reynolds, in Janeites & Austen-L, was generous enough to take the time to read both of those posts all the way through, and here are some of her insightful comments, and my further replies to same.

Diane: "I  was very glad you included the scene from Clarke's biography,  where as a joke he is forced to drink too much and then led to bed where  a live donkey has been placed, all trussed up. Again overtones of A Midsummer's Night Dream (not to mention cruel to the donkey). This casting of Clarke as Bottom does point to him as seen as getting above himself. It also shows graphically, behind the polite words we usually get about the Prince Regent's court as bawdy, how very out of control and cruel it was. As you point out, this episode with Clarke and his disoriented, frightened reaction, was widely publicized, apparently in a way that ridiculed him rather than attacked the PR. No wonder JA despises the PR and balked at dedicating her novel to such a complete callous asshole. What a jerk the man was."

Yes, as I suggested in my earlier post about Knightley's spiked spruce beer receipt, the Shakespeare-savvy Prince (recall that when he was young, he styled himself Florizel to Mary Robinson's Perdita from The Winter's Tale) not only obtained a "command performance" from Clarke at Petworth not only as Bottom, but also as Christopher Sly from the Induction frame story in The Taming of the Shrew.  Had this occurred in  2014, the Prince would surely have taped it all on his IPhone, and put  it up on YouTube before the night was over.

Callous asshole does seem the right description--it was something out of  The Sopranos. No wonder JA wrote to Martha Lloyd that she HATED the Prince Regent. He didn't just treat his wife abominably, he spread the suffering around, and I would not be surprised to learn of other examples of where unfortunate underlings of his were made to suffer public humiliation when for whatever reason the impulse seized the Prince.

Which suddenly makes me connect the dots between Clarke's involuntary Petworth Frolicks (the title of the Cruikshank caricature) and the following speech by Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park:

"...Henry Crawford, to whom, in all the riot of his gratifications it was yet an untasted pleasure, was quite alive at the idea. "I really believe," said he, "I could be fool enough at this moment to undertake any character that ever was written, from Shylock or Richard III down to the singing hero of a farce in his scarlet coat and cocked hat. I feel as if I could be anything or everything; as if I could rant and storm, or sigh or cut capers, in any tragedy or comedy in the English language.

Let us be doing something. Be it only half a play, an act, a scene; what should prevent us? Not these countenances, I am sure," looking towards the Miss Bertrams; "and for a theatre, what signifies a theatre? We shall be only amusing ourselves. Any room in this house might suffice."  "

JA published Mansfield Park in 1814--the incident at Petworth occurred in October 1813. Don't you see, Henry Crawford in this moment is the Prince Regent himself, always in search of " an untasted pleasure" "in all the riot of his gratifications"! But it wasn't just any room at  Petworth that sufficed that fateful night, it was the bedroom Clarke  slept in at Petworth!

And yet somehow it is still mainstream Austen scholarship that JA was flattered in a modest way that the Prince wanted her to dedicate Emma to him?  What other evidence would it take to prove it, if this doesn't?

Diane:  "However, given that JA was a compassionate person who disliked the Miss Bates of the world ridiculed by those above them, would this episode with the donkey have made JA more sympathetic towards Clarke, rather than less? I think that there is a strong sense that she doesn't quite know how to deal with him--deal with him she must, but I wonder if she's simply keeping him at a distance. Is she not sending him the same disingenuous boiler plate she sends to the Countess of Morley? At first I was taking it seriously, but now I wonder if her over-the-top worries about Emma's reception are a deliberate overplaying of her hand. "

I agree with you that Clarke was not a true villain in JA's eyes, but he was most definitely a clown and a fool in her estimation, and therefore worthy of sharp satire. It's clear to me that she felt a strong contempt for him, precisely because he WAS such a hypocrite, such a toady, so willing to go beyond all bounds of self respect, in order to please the Big Boss.  Hypocrisy in a toady was a moral "felony" in JA's eyes,  albeit a felony in the third degree---whereas the Prince's wrongful actions, given his enormous power, were all felonies of the first degree.

I forgot to reemphasize one point that epitomizes Clarke's impossibly deep lack of integrity and self respect. Did you notice that he actually mentions Petworth in Letter 132(A) to JA?:

"On Monday I go to Lord Egremonts at Petworth - where your Praises have long been sounded as they ought to be."

Think about how abject Clarke's self loathing must have been, for him to go out of his way to boast to JA about his access to the very same place where, only 2 years earlier, he had suffered what had to have been the worst humiliation of his life, in front of the entire English nation yet! Did he think that JA lived in a cave and had not read or heard about that incident?

Whatever sympathy she felt for Clarke was, I think, overpowered by her contempt for his obsequious willingness to do his master's bidding, his staggering blindness to how he appeared to others.

As for her overplaying her hand, I don't agree. I'd say that Twelfth Night shows what it means to really overplay one's satirical hand. Look at what Maria & Co do to Malvolio in Twelfth Night--They don't just yuck it up by observing him make a fool of himself in courting his boss the Countess Olivia.  They waste no time and proceed to ratchet up from leaving the fake letter for him to find, about five levels, to where they falsely imprison him in the dark, and try their best to make him believe he is insane. To the point where Olivia, at the end of the play, when she becomes aware of what the pranksters have all done to Malvolio, expresses real dismay.

And of course Malvolio curses them roundly. But Clarke never said to the Prince anything resembling "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you." And I think JA thought that somehow, he ought not to have continued to fawn on the Prince as he did, both before and after that dreadful experience.

But, in contrast to what happens to Malvolio in Twelfth Night, JA clearly stopped at the first stage---her joke on Clarke was a private joke, of which he was, as far as we can know, never even aware---he can hardly suffer today from the world's realizing in the 21st century the full extent of JA's joke at his expense-just as Mr. Collins never knows that Mr. Bennet has been getting his jollies letting him make a fool of himself.

That's what takes what JA did out of the realm of true cruelty, for me. She knew she had stumbled upon a real life man who made Mr. Collins look like an amateur, because whereas Collins only got next to Lady Catherine, Clarke had succeeded in getting himself close to the most powerful person in England. So he became the King of the Toadies, if you will.

She simply could not resist the challenge of constructing the matrix of satire that I have now fleshed out. For those who had eyes to read the Jane Austen Code, this was her message, saying, being powerless does not mean you have to surrender all self-respect.

Diane: "As for Clarke, the letter he sends to Austen, which I take as sincere, also does have the fawning quality of a professional courtier. He may be one these people who can only understand people as above him or below him, never as equal humans. That would irritate Austen ... I have to think more about this. My tendency would be to think her feelings about him are not black and white, and that while she might well doublespeak to him, perhaps mirroring back a bit of his fawning in her own over-the-top self-effacement, I don't think that she would mimic the PR's cruelty."

As I suggested above, her joke was a private joke, I don't see any sign that she felt the need to let any of the targets of her often savage satire know that they had been "shot".  It reminds me of the line from Steve Winwood's great Traffic song, The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys:

But today you just read that the man was shot dead

By a gun that didn't make any noise

But it wasn't the bullet that laid him to rest was

The low spark of high-heeled boys

Jane Austen's satirical guns did not make any noise (except to the "dogs", i.e., the sharp elves, who could hear the "frequency" her satirical messages were transmitted on).

Diane: "Twelfth Night, a night of carnival, as well as Midsummer's Night, another night of carnival, both provide a good context for understanding Emma, which with JA's sleight of hand, is both completely realistic and yet can be read completely upside down as a fantasy in which women do reign supreme, especially if Miss Bates is pulling all the strings. Your contextualizing of the lines from the courtship riddle about woman reigning supreme as a commentary on the Twelfth/Midsummer's Night theme of the novel works quite well. "

Thank ye!

Diane: "Now, as for Mr. Elton. I do--and have in the past-- wondered that John Knightley slips into the carriage with Mr. Woodhouse, leaving Mr. Elton and Emma alone together. I am sure he does this on purpose--but to what purpose? It is possible he has encouraged Mr. E to get drunk on spruce beer, and he certainly has quickly figured out that Mr. E is interested in Emma, not Harriet. But might he contrive this carriage encounter out of mercy--to get the proposal over with and hence put Mr. E out of his misery, as Emma has made it clear she is not in the least interested in Mr. E? That would make sense to me. "

The primary purpose, in my opinion, was Step One in George Knightley's very systematic campaign which he first articulated, in part, to Mrs. Weston:

"She always declares she will never marry, which, of course, means just nothing at all. But I have no idea that she has yet ever seen a man she cared for. It would not be a bad thing for her to be very much in love with a proper object. I should like to see Emma in love, and in some doubt of a return; it would do her good. But there is nobody hereabouts to attach her; and she goes so seldom from home."

The part Mr. K did NOT make explicit to Mrs. Weston, however, was that his own covert (and very deceitful) goal was to make Emma marry HIM! In order to do that, she had to be broken down, step by step, so that her (healthy, self-protective) independent streak would gradually be dismantled, brick by brick. And in the end she would been melted down helpless in a puddle on the ground, only too grateful, in her fear and panic at getting abandoned by everyone she knew at Highbury alone with her father,  to have herself scooped up and rescued by the a white Knight(ley)---ALL puns intended!

And so Knightley seized on the fortuitous opportunity presented by Emma's obsession with matchmaking Harriet with Elton, when Knightley knew perfectly well that Elton had his eye on Emma all along.

The Christmas dinner carriage ride was Step One--to scare the living c-p out of Emma, and take her down a few pegs in the process. And it worked.

The Final Step, as i bet you've now already anticipated, was Harriet's calmly telling Emma that SHE (Harriet) was going to marry Knightley.  That's when Emma melted into that puddle.

And that's when Knightley acquired his " cash cow" .

Remember the Auden poem......

Cheers, ARNIE

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