The “Unfounded News” with which Mrs. Smith cons Anne Elliot: Nurse Rooke the imaginary & false rumor monger of Persuasion

In response to my claim that in Persuasion, Nurse Rooke was an imaginary friend invented by Mrs. Smith as a "reliable" source for supposedly damning information about Cousin Elliot's dreadful behavior as a husband during his marriage, one respondent  seemed to recall that Nurse Rooke opens the door to Anne and is even described by the narrator. 

I replied as follows: 

I must tell you that you do not recall correctly, the truth is slightly different, but that "slightly" is actually enormous, it is sufficient to change everything you (think you) know about Nurse Rooke! Let me explain.

Jane Austen, through the words of her clever manipulator Mrs. Smith, has led all her readers down the garden path of  (in Anne Elliot’s words) “unfounded news” about Nurse Rooke for nearly two centuries, but now I am here to show a different path, one which avoids that pitfall, and shows that Nurse Rooke is not who Mrs. Smith says she is.

First, here is the exact quotation from Chapter 21 for that scene, right after Mrs. Smith surprises Anne by telling her that she was expecting Anne to marry Cousin Elliot:

[Anne] "Do tell me how it first came into your head."

"It first came into my head," replied Mrs Smith, "upon finding how much you were together, and feeling it to be the most probable thing in the world to be wished for by everybody belonging to either of you; and you may depend upon it that all your acquaintance have disposed of you in the same way. But I never heard it spoken of till two days ago."

"And has it indeed been spoken of?"

"Did you observe the woman who opened the door to you when you called yesterday?"

"No. Was not it Mrs Speed, as usual, or the maid? I observed no one in particular."

"It was my friend Mrs Rooke; Nurse Rooke; who, by-the-bye, had a great curiosity to see you, and was delighted to be in the way to let you in. She came away from Marlborough Buildings only on Sunday; and she it was who told me you were to marry Mr Elliot. She had had it from Mrs Wallis herself, which did not seem bad authority. She sat an hour with me on Monday evening, and gave me the whole history." "The whole history," repeated Anne, laughing. "She could not make a very long history, I think, of one such little article of unfounded news."

Mrs Smith said nothing.     END QUOTE

Did you notice that Anne initially believes that she was let in by either Mrs. Speed (a servant, or perhaps an agent of the slumlord who owns Westgate Buildings?) or Mrs. Smith's maid? When Mrs. Smith asks if Anne observed the woman who opened the door to Anne the day before, Anne replies, "I observed no one in particular".

Think about Anne’s reply. Jane Austen goes out of her way as an author to let us know that Mrs. Smith talks Anne into believing that it was Nurse Rooke who let her in. It is beyond Anne’s imagination that Mrs. Smith might have some motivation to deceive Anne about who let her in. But then note that this intelligence is the immediate prelude to Mrs. Smith launching into a rhapsody of praise for Nurse Rooke as a really great person. And, in turn, that rhapsody functions, in terms of the arc of the main story line, as an unassailable character reference for Nurse Rooke as a reliable reporter of the rumor supposedly floating around Bath that Anne was going to marry Cousin Elliot:

"[Nurse Rooke] it was who told me you were to marry Mr Elliot. She had had it from Mrs Wallis herself, which did not seem bad authority. She sat an hour with me on Monday evening, and gave me the whole history." "The whole history," repeated Anne, laughing. "She could not make a very long history, I think, of one such little article of unfounded news."

My interpretation of Nurse Rooke as a phantom gives the above passage a whole layer of previously unnoticed irony---Anne laughs, cocky in her skepticism about gossip about "unfounded news", and yet, in the very same moment, Mrs. Smith, like any good con artist, has been distracting Anne from noticing that Anne’s been taken in by Mrs. Smith, hook line and sinker (on dry land), with the whopper that the nonexistent Nurse Rooke has heard this supposed rumor about Cousin Elliot marrying Anne-talk about "unfounded news"!

So...this question of Nurse Rooke's actual existence couldn't be more important, this is not just narratorial window dressing. And, as I noted in my first post about Nurse Rooke, this would be one of several instances in Persuasion in which I claim Anne Elliot, with her serious vision problems, has been misled about the identity of someone, either by self-deception fueled by desperate longing for Captain Wentworth, or by (as in this case) deception intentionally perpetrated on her by people close to her whom she trusts.

You can readily imagine, then, my delight that my new insight about Nurse Rooke as imaginary converges and dovetails so perfectly with my earlier insight about Anne as vision-impaired. What’s more, Mrs. Smith knows Anne does not see clearly, and also knows that Anne is in complete denial about those serious vision problems. Which makes Anne a perfect mark for a major con by Mrs. Smith.

And there’s more! I am sure you are also aware that perhaps the greatest controversy among readers of Persuasion has to do with Mrs. Smith's motivations and reliability in her report about Cousin Elliot’s supposedly dark past. Many readers are unsatisfied by Mrs. Smith’s sudden about-face, which troubles even Anne, even though it doesn’t ultimately cause her to disbelieve her old friend.

I believe that knowing Nurse Rooke to be a figment of Mrs. Smith’s fertile Machiavellian imagination, invented so as to convince Anne that Cousin Elliot is a very bad egg indeed, will be viewed by most Janeites as a welcome route to a more satisfying understanding of Mrs. Smith. More than any other plot element in any Jane Austen novel, these problems associated with Mrs.Smith have been attributed by Janeites to Jane Austen having been too ill to finish Persuasion properly. I now see Mrs. Smith not as a poorly finished failure of authorial control, but as a virtuosic bit of authorial legerdemain, disguised as a narratorial gaffe. Jane Austen and her garden paths…..no wonder, again, that she hides the name of  Satan inside Mrs. Smith’s description of Nurse Rooke!

And I conclude by pointing out something that perhaps occurred to some of you when you read my claim that Mrs.Smith reports a phantom rumor to Anne, which winds up, seemingly by accident, contributing materially toward bringing the hero and heroine together romantically. Does this remind you of anything you’ve read about another Austen novel in which a rumor which mystifies the heroine winds up bringing her together with the hero?

Of course I am referring to the rumor about Lizzy and Darcy being engaged in P&P! And, as first discovered by Kim Damstra in 1998, and rediscovered independently by me in 2004, it is Charlotte Luc-as (as in Luc-ifer) who sneakily spreads that false rumor, with exactly the same intent as Mrs. Smith’s, in ALL respects!

And, by the way, did you notice the name of one of  the women whom Anne Elliot names as the person who opened the door to her the day before? It's Mrs. SPEED---as in Speed, the shifty, Machiavellian servant who plays both sides of the game in the scheming among the suitors Valentine and Proteus in Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona?


Wheels  within wheels within wheels!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter   


Added at 12:20 pm EST on 2/6/14:
 
Diane Reynolds wrote in response: "A rook is also a cheat or a fraud."

Diane, you took the words outta my mouth. ;)

Nancy Mayer wrote: "Are you claiming that what [Mrs. Smith] said about Elliot was lies and that he didn't refuse to help her and didn't help lead her husband astray? I do think it says that Wentworth was able to help her receive some of her money."

Nancy, here's exactly what it says in that regard in the penultimate chapter of the entire novel:

"[Mrs. Smith's] recent good offices by Anne had been enough in themselves, and their marriage, instead of depriving her of one friend, secured her two. She was their earliest visitor in their settled life; and Captain Wentworth, by putting her in the way of recovering her husband's property in the West Indies, by writing for her, acting for her, and seeing her through all the petty difficulties of the case with the activity and exertion of a fearless man and a determined friend, fully requited the services which she had rendered, or ever meant to render, to his wife."

There's not a word THERE about Cousin Elliot having in any way been culpable or negligent in failing to assist Mrs. Smith. My personal reading there is that this is the cover story told to Anne (who seems to have an infinite capacity for being duped!) by Wentworth and Mrs. Smith, to explain how Mrs. Smith suddenly comes into a lot of money. Whereas the money Mrs. Smith actually receives is a kind of marital brokerage commission-and the "services which she had rendered" were, precisely, causing Anne to write Cousin Elliot off entirely, which greased the skids for Wentworth to slide in.

Ironically, Mrs. Smith really didn't earn that commission, because, again, nobody but Anne knows that she has been loving Wentworth all along! She looks to the world as if she needs to be convinced to take Wentworth. After all, she turned him down eight years earlier! But that's how it is with brokers-- when they have an "exclusive listing", they get their commission regardless of whether they really contributed to the "sale"!!!

Irony, irony, irony....

And there are other benefits to Mrs. Smith of a nonmonetary nature which I will leave for another time....think about it......

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Kitty’s sarcastic cough about Mrs. Bennet’s imaginary friend, Mrs. Long

After I hit the “Send” button on my post about Mr. Perry and Nurse Rooke, it occurred to me that I had not previously thought to actually Google “Jane Austen” AND “imaginary friend” to see what might pop up.

When I did, besides my own post of five minutes earlier, there was one other very interesting hit:

Celebrating P&P by Susannah Fullerton (2013) with the following wonderful discussion at ppg. 80-81:

“Rather like Mrs Gamp's imaginary friend Mrs Harris in Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, Mrs Long is a barometer for Mrs Bennet's feelings. Mrs Long never actually appears or speaks within the novel, but, as a woman with nieces to be married off, she is both rival and fellow-sufferer  to Mrs. Bennet. It is Mrs. Long who gives the first news of Mr. Bingley’s arrival in the neighbourhood. When Elizabeth suggests that Mrs. Long could introduce them all to Bingley (since it appears that Mr. Bennet will not), Mrs. Bennet crossly replies: “I  do not believe Mrs. Long will do any such thing. She has two nieces of her own. She is a selfish, hypocritical woman, and I have no opinion of her.” Later, however, when Jane is sure of Mr. Bingley, Mrs. Long becomes ‘as good a creature as ever lived—and her nieces are very pretty behaved girls, and not at all handsome: I like them prodigiously.”

I applaud Susannah’s insight—even though she could not imagine Jane Austen as having actually intended Mrs. Long to be an imaginary friend of Mrs. Bennet, her analysis fits perfectly with my claim that JA did exactly that sort of audacious authorial legerdemain. And look at how perfectly it fits with my seeing Mrs. Bennet’s personified nerves! Mrs. Bennet thus seems a primordial Mr. Woodhouse, who is prone to hypochondria, and who pops Mrs. Long out of her huswife every time she has psychic need of either a convenient villain, or a convenient angel, exactly as Mr. Woodhouse does with Mr. Perry, and exactly as Mrs. Smith does with Nurse Rooke.

And….now I see an even better explanation for why Kitty Bennet coughs sarcastically in Chapter 1. It’s not merely, as was my last interpretation, that she is tired of hearing her parents go through the motions of their unpleasant squabbling—it’s that Kitty is saying, via her coughing, that Mrs. Long does not actually exist!

And now, savor the exquisite hidden humor of the following exchange in Chapter 5, when you think about Mrs. Long as not being real:

“…Mrs. Long told me last night that he sat close to her for half-an-hour without once opening his lips."

"Are you quite sure, ma'am?—is not there a little mistake?" said Jane. "I certainly saw Mr. Darcy speaking to her."

"Aye—because she asked him at last how he liked Netherfield, and he could not help answering her; but she said he seemed quite angry at being spoke to."

"Miss Bingley told me," said Jane, "that he never speaks much, unless among his intimate acquaintances. With them he is remarkably agreeable."

"I do not believe a word of it, my dear. If he had been so very agreeable, he would have talked to Mrs. Long. But I can guess how it was; everybody says that he is eat up with pride, and I dare say he had heard somehow that Mrs. Long does not keep a carriage, and had come to the ball in a hack chaise."

"I do not mind his not talking to Mrs. Long," said Miss Lucas, "but I wish he had danced with Eliza."

After Chapter 5, we don’t hear about Mrs. Long again till Chapters 49 & 50! And when we do, again, it is Mrs. Bennet who is our informant. So, again, kudos to Susannah Fullerton for adding a third imaginary friend to JA’s roster!

And re the reference to Dickens’s Sairie Gamp, with her imaginary friend Mrs. Harris, I had first become aware of that colorful character in 2008 via Google. But…in contrast to Jane Austen’s incredibly subtle depiction of imaginary friends, as I’ve described, as to whom Jane Austen’s authorial tact would never permit her to be so heavy-handed as to be in any way explicit about it, look at what Dickens wrote not that long after Mrs. Harris is first mentioned by Sairie:

“At this point she was fain to stop for breath, and advantage may be taken of the circumstance to state, that a fearful mystery surrounded this lady of the name of HARRIS, whom no one in the circle of Mrs. Gamp's acquaintance had ever seen, neither did any human being know her place of residence, though Mrs. Gamp appeared on her own showing to be in constant communication with her. There were conflicting rumors on the subject ; but the prevalent opinion was that she was a phantom of Mrs. Gamp's brain—as Messrs. Doe and Roe are fictions of the law—created for the express purpose of holding visionary dialogues with her on all manner of subjects, and invariably winding up with a compliment to the excellence of her nature.”

It’s embarrassingly heavy-handed, treating readers like simpletons who might miss the trick. That’s why, after becoming so familiar with Jane Austen’s novels, I can never think of Dickens as being in her  league—whether it was a lack of nerve, or tact, or taste, Dickens was clearly not writing for the sharp elves who have the ingenuity to figure out if a character is imaginary or not. Whereas Jane Austen’s integrity and tact was impeccable in every word she wrote, and her imaginary friends hide in plain sight, where they belong.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The “Little People” who are (yet aren’t) there in Jane Austen’s Novels: Nurse Rooke, Mr Perry… and Mrs. Bennet’s Nerves!

In 2010, the ever fertile mind of  Diana Birchall (whose playlet about JA meeting Lord Byron I look forward to reading soon) produced a witty little poem in honor/satire (25%/75%?) of the  kinds of dark, often sexually-tinged, radical feminist, shadow story interpretations of Jane Austen’s novels that I’ve been generating since 2002.

Diana called her poem “The Little Man Who Wasn’t There”, and one of the stanzas read as follows:

Persuasion's surely nightmare free
Autumnal, full of elegy.
Except the veneries of Nurse Rooke.
I hastily shut up the book.

Of course, Diana’s clever conceit was that some of the interpretations I make about “veneries” (sexual activities) are “not there” in the texts of Jane Austen’s novels, but exist only in MY imagination.

Well….apropos Nurse Rooke’s “veneries”, I’ve got something to tell you all, that is, ironically, neither venereal nor nightmarish, so much as it is fantastical---and, I think, also pretty fantastic. Something extraordinary became very clear to me just two days ago:

THERE ARE IMAGINARY FRIENDS IN JANE AUSTEN’S NOVELS!

By ‘imaginary friends’ of course I refer to characters who are imaginary within the fictional “reality” of the novels. And my Subject Line tells you that Nurse Rooke and Mr. Perry are the “figments” I am talking about.

Yes, I know this one is WAY outside-the-box, even for me…and yet, paradoxically, I claim that it’s also pretty obvious, IF (a giant “ if”) you allow yourself to take a very specific but offcenter point of view (as with Holbein’s famous anamorphic painting The Ambassadors). That’s when the “imaginariness” of these two characters comes into crystal clear focus, and you realize that this alternative perspective is in place from the moment these characters are first mentioned in their respective novels.

The tale of my literary epiphany does not start with Nurse Rooke--it starts in Highbury with the mysterious Mr. Perry. I had actually first glimpsed this possibility in May 2008, when I suspected that Mr. Perry might be Mr. Woodhouse’s imaginary friend.

MR. PERRY

I tried different angles of attack, but my preliminary sleuthing was inconclusive, so I put it aside, then just forgot about it, and moved on to other sleuthing leads. But  when I rediscovered it on Sunday, this time I was able to land the plane, because I realized one crucially significant new fact. I could not recall Mr. Perry ever actually speaking in real time in the novel! Nor, similarly, did I recall the narrator (when not reporting Emma’s subjective thoughts and perceptions) ever speaking about Mr. Perry at all!

Was my memory accurate? Did he really only exist in the novel through the indirect reports of characters other than Emma? Did he really never speak to Emma, or appear in person to Emma?

When I searched the entire novel later that day,  moving through each of the many scenes in which Mr. Perry is mentioned, I confirmed my hunch—indeed the reader never “hears” Mr. Perry speaking--instead, we hear tons of his speech being quoted by other characters—mostly Mr. Woodhouse, but also Miss Bates and Frank. There’s only one single scene in the entire novel, actually, where there’s even a question on this crucial point—in Chapter 45, when the narrator reports that Mr. Perry visits Hartfield, and that Mr. Perry talks about Jane’s condition---and we hear that Emma listens to what Mr. Perry has said—but  the key question Jane Austen (deliberately and diabolically) leaves uncertain, is the identity of the speaker to whom Emma listens—is it Mr. Perry who speaks to Emma about Jane, or is it Emma’s father (who after all, has been the reporter of almost every other word spoken by Mr. Perry) to whom she listens? It’s totally ambiguous.

I have since then gathered a variety of additional textual evidence to support this interpretation, but it would take several more pages to lay it out properly, so, for now, I will leave the presentation of same for the future.  Except I do want to mention in passing that one of the tales told by Scheherazade (whom Anne Elliot thinks about) is about a spirit or fairy, the Persian word for which is “PERI”!

But now I want to move on to….

Nurse Rooke, the other Austenian imaginary friend!

It was when I tried to think of another important Austen character besides Mr. Perry who never speaks, and is never seen by the heroine, that I thought immediately of Nurse Rooke—and imagine my excitement that another novel-wide search revealed her to also be a character who is referred to glowingly by a sick (or hypochondriac) character whom the heroine is very close to.

But here it is completely different. Mrs. Smith is no Mr. Woodhouse-she’s no demented hypochondriac who hallucinates an imaginary medical advisor who confirms all of his worst fears about his health. Instead, Mrs. Smith is a calculating manipulator who invents Nurse Rooke deliberately, so as to be able to present to the gullible Anne Elliot a “reliable” source for false information that assassinates the character of Cousin Elliot, with the successful goal of inducing Anne Elliot into not considering him as a suitor.

And here’s where two Persuasion shadow story streams unite—you may recall that five months ago, I wrote a series of posts in which I claimed that Anne Elliot had very poor vision, and one of the ways this was  taken advantage of, was when sister Mary Musgrove convinces Anne that it is Cousin Elliot down in the street outside the White Hart Inn, even though it is not.

Well, I realized on Monday that Nurse Rooke pulls the same trick on Anne, but even more audaciously. She convinces Anne, based on nothing at all, that the woman who let Anne into Mrs. Smith’s lodgings at Westgate Building was Nurse Rooke!

And actually, there is a parallel in Emma to this sort of deceit as to Mr. Perry. While Mr. Woodhouse actually believes Mr. Perry is real, Miss Bates, Frank and the rest of the Highbury folk who mention Mr. Perry are not similarly hallucinatory—no, they simply refer to Mr. Perry as a kind of shared joke, the way adults speak about Santa Claus in front of small children—but in this case, the roles of gullible small child are played by the demented Mr. Woodhouse and the cluelessly naïve Emma!

And…Nurse Rooke as an imaginary friend also fits uncannily well with a third shadow motif in Persuasion. Five months ago, Anielka pointed out the name of the devil hidden in the following passage describing Nurse Rooke:

"It was my friend Mrs Rooke; Nurse Rooke; who, by-the-bye, had a great curiosity to see you, and was delighted to be in the way to let you in. She came away from Marlborough Buildings only on Sunday; and she it was who told me you were to marry Mr Elliot. She had had it from Mrs Wallis herself, which did not seem bad authority. She SAT AN hour with me on Monday evening, and gave me the whole history." "The whole history," repeated Anne, laughing. "She could not make a very long history, I think, of one such little article of unfounded news."

MRS. SMITH SAID NOTHING.”

For the answer to Anielka’s question about why Jane Austen might hide the devil’s name in this passage, just think about Mr. Perry the Peri (spirit), and then consider what Hamlet says after he (thinks he) sees the ghost of his dead father:

“The spirit that I have seen May be a devil; and The Devil hath power t’assume a pleasing shape!”

So….here we have Jane Austen with a “sat an”-ic wink at Nurse Rooke as a spirit to whom Mrs. Smith has given a pleasing shape, and has convinced poor Anne that Nurse Rooke is a real person!

And now we come finally to… Mrs. Bennet’s Nerves!

As I was sussing out all the textual references to Mr. Perry and Nurse Rooke as imaginary friends, another imaginary character in Jane Austen was tickling my memory—but who was it? It was something about old friends in one of the novels I was remembering, but as I ran through characters in my mind, I just could not think of which one it was. What other character associated with disease and medicine was there? And then it hit me! - JA had in 1813 made her first foray into this realm, and had laid a textual template for the verbiage she would later use to establish the mirages known as Mr. Perry and Nurse Rooke, when she wrote the following passages in P&P:

Ch. 1: "Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion for MY POOR NERVES."

"You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. THEY ARE MY OLD FRIENDS. I have heard you mention them with consideration these last twenty years at least."

Ch. 2: "Don't keep coughing so, Kitty, for Heaven's sake! Have a little compassion on MY NERVES. You tear them to pieces."

Ch. 20: "Pray do, my dear Miss Lucas," she added in a melancholy tone, "for NOBODY is on my side, NOBODY takes part with me. I am cruelly used, NOBODY feels for MY POOR NERVES."

Now you can see the progression of this motif through three novels. JA, via Mr. Bennet’s immortal witticism, makes explicit what is later left implicit re Mr. Perry and Nurse Rooke. Mrs. Bennet’s nerves are imaginary “friends” of Mr. Bennet, they are feelings personified. But in her final two completed novels, JA took a giant leap, and managed to hide in plain sight the actual personification of her characters’s feelings!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.: If you want to read some firstrate litcrit by an Austen scholar who does well to pick up on the strong similarities between Mr. Perry and Nurse Rooke, but who is not quite able to get outside the box far enough to make that similarity meaningful, read  Jane Austen and the Body: 'The Picture of Health  by John Wiltshire at ppg. 110 et seq. Wiltshire was so close, and so sharp in his intuition, that his entire discussion about Mr. Perry and Nurse Rooke functions as an excellent gloss on my claim of their being phantoms closely related to each other!

P.P.S: Look at how Jane Austen uses the word “nobody” in her novels, and think about how that might fit with my claims.

P.P.S.: And finally, of course, there’s also Shakespeare looming in the background in all of this, as I will one day soon explain.