Mary WOLLSTONECRAwForD’s palpable verbal hits on Edmund BURKEtram (who had skewered Richard PRICE): Jane Austen’s Political Name Game in Mansfield Park

[be sure to read the PPS which I added at 5:10 PST and which gives credit to another Austen scholar's 1999 flagging of several aspects of the Name Game described in this post]

One month ago…

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/10/mary-bennet-mary-crawford-as-mary.html

…I made a prima facie and original case for Mary Crawford as Jane Austen’s thinly veiled, favorable representation of the real life Mary Wollstonecraft. I based my case largely on the complex allusion to Milton’s Satan that Wollstonecraft wove into her 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman. I argued  that Jane Austen deliberately amplified Wollstonecraft’s allusion, deploying Henry and Mary Crawford as a two-headed “Satan” who collectively and intentionally stir up great unrest and even revolt among the “angels” living under Sir Thomas’s godly tyranny in that ersatz Eden called Mansfield Park.

Yesterday, as my Subject Line hints, I connected an additional dot, and in this post I will carry my case for Mary Crawford as Mary WOLLSTONECRAFT forward a quantum leap, in part by showing how Jane Austen added Edmund Burke (and Richard Price) to the rich allusive stew bubbling just beneath the surface of Mansfield Park.

My little epiphany was prompted by an unrelated Google search, which led me to a passage in Wollstonecraft’s 1790 publication, the one that catapulted her to public notoriety, A Vindication of the Rights of Men. And that passage caught my eye because of its striking resonance to some of Mary Crawford’s irreverent comments which so scandalize Fanny. Let’s see if you sense that resonance as well. First here, is Mary Wollstonecraft (I have not edited down, because I want you to really taste the full flavor of her rhetoric):

“You must have known that a man of merit cannot rise in the church, the army, or navy, unless he has some interest in a borough; and that even a paltry exciseman's place can only be secured by electioneering interest. I will go further, and assert that few Bishops, though there have been learned and good Bishops, have gained the mitre without submitting to a servility of dependence that degrades the man.—All these circumstances you must have known, yet you talk of virtue and liberty, as the vulgar talk of the letter of the law; and the polite of propriety. It is true that these ceremonial observances produce decorum; the sepulchres are white washed, and do not offend the squeamish eyes of high rank; but virtue is out of the question when you only worship a shadow, and worship it to secure your property.

Man has been termed, with strict propriety, a microcosm, a little world in himself.—He is so;— yet must, however, be reckoned an ephemera, or, to adopt your figure of rhetoric, a summer's fly. The perpetuation of property in our families is one of the privileges you most warmly contend for; but it would not be very difficult to prove that the mind must have a very limited range that thus confines its benevolence to such a narrow circle, which, with great propriety, may be included in the sordid calculations of blind self-love.

A brutal attachment to children has appeared most conspicuous in parents who have treated them like slaves, and demanded due homage for all the property they transferred to them, during their lives. It has led them to force their children to break the most sacred ties; to do violence to a natural impulse, and run into LEGAL PROSTITUTION to increase wealth or shun poverty; and, still worse, the dread of a parental malediction has made many weak characters violate truth in the face of Heaven; and, to avoid a father's angry curse, the most sacred promises have been broken. It appears to be a natural suggestion of reason, that a man should be freed from implicit obedience to parents and private punishments, when he is of an age to be subject to the jurisdiction of the laws of his country; and that the barbarous cruelty of allowing parents to imprison their children, to prevent their contaminating their noble blood by following the dictates of nature when they chose to marry, or for any misdemeanor that does not come under the cognizance of public justice, is one of the most arbitrary violations of liberty.

Who can recount all the unnatural crimes which the laudable, interesting desire of perpetuating a name has produced? The younger children have been SACRIFICED to the eldest son; sent into exile, or confined in convents, that they might not encroach on what was called, with shameful falsehood, the family estate. Will Mr. Burke call this parental affection reasonable or virtuous? —No; it is the spurious offspring of over-weening, mistaken pride—and not that first source of civilization, natural parental affection, that makes no difference between child and child, but what reason justifies by pointing out superior merit.

Another pernicious consequence which arises from this artificial affection is, the insuperable bar which it puts in the way of early marriages. It would be difficult to determine whether the minds or bodies of our youth are most injured by this impediment. Our young men become selfish coxcombs, and gallantry with modest women, and intrigues with those of another description weaken both mind and body, before either has arrived at maturity. The character of a master of a family, a husband, and a father, forms the citizen imperceptibly, by producing a sober manliness of thought, and orderly behaviour but; from the lax morals and depraved affections of the libertine, what results?—a finical, man of taste, who is only anxious to secure his own private GRATIFICATIONS, and to maintain his rank in society. 

The same system has an equally pernicious effect on female morals.—Girls are sacrificed to family convenience, or else marry to settle themselves in a superior rank, and coquet without restraint with the fine gentleman whom I have already described. And to such lengths has this vanity, this desire of shining, carried them, that it is not now necessary to guard girls against imprudent love matches; for if some widows did not now and then fall in love, Love and Hymen would seldom meet, unless at a country church.

I do not intend to be sarcastically paradoxical when I say, that women of fashion take husbands that they may have it in their power to coquet, the grand business of genteel life, with a number of admirers, and thus flutter the spring of life away, without laying up any store for the winter of age, or being of any use to society. Affection in the marriage state can only be founded on respect— and are these weak beings respectable? Children are neglected for lovers, and we express surprise that adulteries are so common! A woman never forgets to adorn herself to make an impression on the senses of the other sex, and to extort the homage which it is gallant to pay, and yet we wonder that they have such confined understandings.

Have ye not heard that we cannot serve two masters; an immoderate desire to please contracts the faculties, and immerses, to borrow the idea of a great philosopher, the soul in matter, till it is unable to mount on the wing of contemplation.”  END QUOTE

In essence, Wollstonecraft tears down the false, hypocritical façade which masks the corruption and evil that undergirds the social structure of the English patriarchy.

And now here are some of the passages in Mansfield Park which, I believe will now be obvious, are nothing less than Jane Austen’s elegant, subtle crystallization of Wollstonecraft’s impassioned didacticizing into Mary Crawford’s playful, sparkling, witty, and yet equally profound and thought-provoking, aphoristic style.

Chapter 9:

[Mrs Rushworth]: “…It is a handsome chapel, and was formerly in constant use both morning and evening. Prayers were always read in it by the domestic chaplain, within the memory of many; but the late Mr. Rushworth left it off."

"Every generation has its improvements," said Miss Crawford, with a smile, to Edmund.

…"It is a pity," cried Fanny, "that the custom should have been discontinued. It was a valuable part of former times. There is something in a chapel and chaplain so much in character with a great house, with one's ideas of what such a household should be! A whole family assembling regularly for the purpose of prayer is fine!"

"Very fine indeed," said Miss Crawford, laughing. "It must do the heads of the family a great deal of good to force all the poor housemaids and footmen to leave business and pleasure, and say their prayers here twice a day, while they are inventing excuses themselves for staying away."

"That is hardly Fanny's idea of a family assembling," said Edmund. "If the master and mistress do not attend themselves, there must be more harm than good in the custom."

"At any rate, it is safer to leave people to their own devices on such subjects. Everybody likes to go their own way—to chuse their own time and manner of devotion. The obligation of attendance, the formality, the restraint, the length of time—altogether it is a formidable thing, and what nobody likes; and if the good people who used to kneel and gape in that gallery could have foreseen that the time would ever come when men and women might lie another ten minutes in bed, when they woke with a headache, without danger of reprobation, because chapel was missed, they would have jumped with joy and envy. Cannot you imagine with what unwilling feelings the former belles of the house of Rushworth did many a time repair to this chapel? The young Mrs. Eleanors and Mrs. Bridgets—starched up into seeming piety, but with heads full of something very different—especially if the poor chaplain were not worth looking at—and, in those days, I fancy parsons were very inferior even to what they are now."

For a few moments she was unanswered. Fanny coloured and looked at Edmund, but felt too angry for speech; and he needed a little recollection before he could say, "Your lively mind can hardly be serious even on serious subjects. You have given us an amusing sketch, and human nature cannot say it was not so. We must all feel at times the difficulty of fixing our thoughts as we could wish; but if you are supposing it a frequent thing, that is to say, a weakness grown into a habit from neglect, what could be expected from the private devotions of such persons? Do you think the minds which are suffered, which are indulged in wanderings in a chapel, would be more collected in a closet?"

"Yes, very likely. They would have two chances at least in their favour. There would be less to distract the attention from without, and it would not be tried so long."

"The mind which does not struggle against itself under one circumstance, would find objects to distract it in the other, I believe; and the influence of the place and of example may often rouse better feelings than are begun with. The greater length of the service, however, I admit to be sometimes too hard a stretch upon the mind. One wishes it were not so; but I have not yet left Oxford long enough to forget what chapel prayers are."

…

"If Edmund were but in orders!" cried Julia, and running to where he stood with Miss Crawford and Fanny: "My dear Edmund, if you were but in orders now, you might perform the ceremony directly. How unlucky that you are not ordained; Mr. Rushworth and Maria are quite ready."

Miss Crawford's countenance, as Julia spoke, might have amused a disinterested observer. She looked almost aghast under the new idea she was receiving. Fanny pitied her. "How distressed she will be at what she said just now," passed across her mind.

"Ordained!" said Miss Crawford; "what, are you to be a clergyman?"

"Yes; I shall take orders soon after my father's return—probably at Christmas."

Miss Crawford, rallying her spirits, and recovering her complexion, replied only, "If I had known this before, I would have spoken of the cloth with more respect," and turned the subject.

Chapter 11:

[Mary] "Your father's return will be a very interesting event."

[Edmund] "It will, indeed, after such an absence; an absence not only long, but including so many dangers."

“It will be the forerunner also of other interesting events: your sister’s marriage, and your taking orders.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t be affronted,” said she, laughing, “but it does put me in mind of some of the old heathen heroes, who, after performing great exploits in a foreign land, offered SACRIFICES to the gods on their safe return.”   END QUOTES

I think it clear, without further unpacking, why reading Wollstonecraft and Austen one after the other is sufficient to significantly bolster my case for Mary Crawford as Mary Wollstonecraft. But, there was one point troubling me—who exactly was the “You” whom Mary Wollstonecraft was addressing so angrily in her 1790 Vindication? Until yesterday, never having studied Wollstonecraft’s writings systematically, I had been completely unaware of one significant fact regarding A Vindication of the Rights of Man. And it is a fact hidden in plain sight in the subtitle of that screed, which gives the answer to the question of the identity of Wollstonecraft’s addressee:

“…in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, occasioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France”

So, Wollstonecraft did not write her breakout publication out of the clear blue sky, she wrote it as a stinging, passionate rebuttal to the very famous Reflections of Edmund Burke on the French Revolution early in 1790, which were, I further learned, themselves a rebuttal to Richard Price’s A Discourse on the Love of our Country. So the ball was thrown, as it were, from Price to Burke toWollstonecraft in pretty short order in that fateful year 1790.

I retired last night mulling that tidbit over, and when I awoke this morning, my subconscious had done its work, and I flashed on the extraordinary wordplay Jane Austen has engaged in with her character names—she had not only transformed MARY WollstoneCRAFT into MARY CRAwForD, she had also changed EDMUND BURke into EDMUND BERtram, and Richard PRICE into Fanny PRICE.

Richard Price was the famous, outspoken political reformer/radical who viewed the French Revolution as a fulfillment of prophecy and was savagely attacked for his outspoken views, in caricatures such as this one, with Burke as a conflation of both Hamlet and the Ghost of his dead father King Hamlet, “Smelling out a Rat”:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Price#mediaviewer/File:Smelling_out_a_rat.jpg

And I have gone on long enough to stop here. I will leave for a followup post an unpacking of the many implications of the above epiphany, but any Janeite who knows MP well can already use what I’ve written to seek out those implications yourselves in the interim.

What I will conclude with is my own observation that it’s easy for me to imagine the peals of laughter that Jane Austen must have let out while writing the above-quoted dialog in Mansfield Park. Her dramatization of several debates on various social issues which occur throughout Mansfield Park are nothing less than parodies of the very high profile, controversial, and significant debates in the real public life of Great Britain, which were carried on by real life participants whose names are all three parodied by JA! It’s  roman a clef wedded to satire and theatre, AS IF Richard Price, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft were all three actually sitting in a salon together, sipping tea and engaging in civil, careful conversation  face to face, rather than engaging in their actual vitriolic, public, asynchronous, written debate as they did in that fateful 1790. In that year, JA was 14, and, it should be evident, observing the wider world with her extraordinary deep insight. It’s easy to see how she was inspired by such observations to write her own parodic History of England not long afterwards. Now I suggest we can see the link between that youthful parody, and the mature genius-level parody in MP.

So much for the obstinate and/or cluleless blindness of any Austen scholar still maintaining, with a straight face, that Jane Austen was not engaged with the Big Picture of politics, social ferment, and revolution in the Europe she observed as a teenager and young woman during the tumultuous 1790s, or that she ceased to care about all of that during her mature Chawton years!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode onTwitter

P.S.: For those who want a bit more background and don’t want to be troubled to go to Wikipedia, here is my culling of relevant facts about Burke’s Reflections, to give an idea of what Wollstonecraft was responding to so angrily:

 “In the Reflections, Burke argued that the French Revolution would end…he was contemptuous and afraid of the Enlightenment…saying that society should be handled like a living organism, that people and society are limitlessly complicated…A dominant theme in Reflections is that the French were not upholding the rights accorded to all men, like the American revolutionaries that he supported…As a Whig, he expressly repudiated the belief in divinely appointed monarchic authority and the idea that a people have no right to depose an oppressive government; however, he advocated central roles for private property, tradition, and "prejudice" (i.e., adherence to values regardless of their rational basis) to give citizens a stake in their nation's social order. He argued for gradual, constitutional reform, not revolution (in every case except the most qualified case), emphasizing that a political doctrine founded upon abstractions such as liberty and the rights of man could be easily abused to justify tyranny. He saw inherited rights… as firm and concrete providing continuity (like tradition, "prejudice", inheritable private property), by contrast enforcement of 'speculative' abstract rights might waver and be subject to change based on currents of politics. Instead, he called for the constitutional enactment of specific, concrete rights and liberties as protection against governmental oppression. In the phrase, "[prejudice] renders a man's virtue his habit", he defends people's cherished, but untaught, irrational prejudices (the greater it behooved them, the more they cherished it). Because a person's moral estimation is limited, people are better off drawing from the "general bank and capital of nations and of ages" than from their own intellects. He predicted that the Revolution's concomitant disorder would make the army "mutinous and full of faction", and then a "popular general", commanding the soldiery's allegiance, would become "master of your assembly, the master of your whole republic"…Napoleon fulfilled this prophecy…two years after Burke's death….Reflections was read widely when it was published in 1790…[and] drew a swift response, first with Vindication, and then with Rights of Man (1791) by Thomas Paine. Nonetheless, Burke's work became popular with reactionaries such as King George III.”  

PPS: 
I was just following up to my post after I wrote it, by looking through the Janeites archives, and found that back in 2011 I had posted in this general subject area, and then Anielka Briggs brought forward the following excerpt from a post of hers from 1999, for which I give her credit now re spotting a great deal of JA's name game in Mansfield Park:

[Anielka Briggs in another online venue in 1999] ""I just found your excellent posting about Mary Wollstencraft versus Jane Austen and I wondered, am I the only person on earth to get the joke? Do you yourself see it? Or is it just coincidence that you see them as so very different?...Look at the coincidences, Mary had a drunken and physically abusive father of ordinary means whose  grandparents were rich but whose family were downwardly mobile. She fell into the company of the minister Richard Price and other leading figures of the day who helped crystallise her (already strong) ideas. She also had an obsessive relationship with a woman called Fanny Blood which she (apparently) wrote about in a book called /Mary: A Fiction/ where the characters were called Mary and Ann. Now where have we heard that story and those names? I can assure you that Price is not in any of the other genealogical pedigrees that Jane used. (And what about Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine?) It's staring us right in the face. She takes Mary Wollstencraft's own desire to "Persuade" and cleverly works it into her last two books." END QUOTE 

 

So, based on the above, what I bring to the mix that is fresh is the further realization as to the 1790 public debate among Price, Burke and then Wollstonecraft, which gives meaning and context to the name game that Anielka first spotted in 1999.

The Many Echoes of Othello in Jane Austen's Novels

Diane Reynolds broached a very intriguing new topic today in Janeites & Austen L:

“I have just recently returned from seeing a staging of Verdi's Otello. I was struck watching the Verdi version, with how much this (Otello/Othello) is a middle-aged story, filled with middle-aged fears, anxieties and preoccupations. While a focus is often on Othello/Otello's fears and insecurities about having a young wife (a set of anxieties only a middle-aged spouse could have), we can also see Iago as a middle-aged man who perhaps feels he can't bounce back from the blow of being passed over for a promotion at a crucial moment in his career. A younger person might not take it in stride--there's always a tomorrow when you are young--but Iago might have considered it the end of everything when the younger Cassio is promoted over him. So, now I am wondering if there is a parallel theme anywhere in Austen of people acting out of the particular fears and anxieties that arise from middle age? Her novels seem to me to be more youth focused, and she herself was just entering middle age when she died, though we can, of course, argue, that middle age started earlier then and that she and Cassandra aggressively adopted middle age early on. We can certainly see it in Sir Thomas's recognition that marriage offers like the one Fanny has from Henry C are not in endless supply….”

Diane, I have two different responses to your highly pregnant suggestion.  I find your spin on middle aged angst over being passed by as being present in both Othello and in JA's novels to be both very original and very interesting. You are going to love my responses, I hope!

First, you are certainly correct that we must peer into the shadows to find those echoes in JA's fiction (and I am also glad to read Ellen so aptly using my terminology of reading against the grain). The character who leaped out at me in regard to middle-aged angster is Mrs. Norris! Seeing her as Iago is very very fruitful to contemplate. Mrs. Norris, exactly like Iago, has come in second in the race to garner Sir Thomas as husband. Her much more physically attractive, but seemingly much less intelligent, sister is the "Cassio" who got the "promotion" that Mrs. Norris clearly desired and believed she deserved. We can imagine that Miss Maria Ward was all flattery and deference toward the young suitor Sir  Thomas, whereas the younger version of Mrs. Norris perhaps was more assertive in a way that threatened Sir Thomas? In short, if any words describe both Mrs. Norris and Iago, they are bitterness, envy, and manipulativeness.

Of course, in Othello, we know how Iago feels, because Iago is the focal consciousness of the play. In fact, it is really HIS play, because he, like Richard III, is the villain who confides in the audience every step of the way. In Mansfield Park, even though Fanny is the primary focal consciousness, JA nonetheless gives us many opportunities to observe how Mrs. Norris has subtly wormed herself into a position of power and influence at Mansfield Park. Most of all, the extended tete a tete between her and Sir Thomas very early in the novel reveals with stark clarity how Mrs. Norris is going to continue to work on the clueless Sir Thomas in an Iagoish way until the penultimate chapter, flattering him, seeming to defer to him, even as she constantly manipulates him into all sorts of unfortunate decisions at Mansfield Park which mostly make Fanny’s life miserable. 

And when I did some brief Googling, I was glad to find that Ellen Moody, in 2003, came pretty close to recognizing Mrs. Norris as a latter day Iago, when she wrote the following insightful comments:

"...some of the most telling scenes [in MP], telling in the sense of offering the moral of the book which is an argument on behalf of the powerless, the vulnerable who are also good and worthy, are those in which Mrs Norris gets after Fanny and attempts to shatter her utterly.  Why? I've never liked Coleridge's word "motiveless" with malignity, because Mrs Norris does have some motives or at least we are given enough to invent some. I prefer gratuitous. It also means "motiveless" but it goes beyond that for it comes from the Latin /gratuitus/ meaning spontaneous and freely given. Some people simply enjoy hurting others; it is spontaneous, freely given, not earned (by Fanny for example, or Charlotte Lucas, or the Maria of the /Juvenilia/). My speculative guess is that some version of this scene of the ball and the snub, the mortifying display on the part of those one is connected to, the ejection, and the details of the carriage, the dress which is resented, the rain, the vicious grating voice exposing the victim to all happened to Austen to someone she held dear. Equally importantly, Austen saw in this pattern the essence of what Shakespeare's Iago also represented: in the words which come out of Sir Thomas's consciousness: "an hourly evil" in many of our daily lives about which we can do nothing, for many people are this way or don't mind it at all when it's not directed at them."  END QUOTE FROM ELLEN’S 2003 BLOG

Indeed, one other telling parallel between Mrs. Norris and Iago is the intensity of their malignant actions in hugely disproportionate comparison to the apparent cause of the resentment.

And your post is very timely for me, Diane, because I will be reprising my JASNA Montreal AGM talk of last month (about the hidden Shakespeare in Mansfield Park) in 3 weeks, when I will address the Portland Oregon JASNA chapter of which I am now very happy to be a member. In my talk, I will now be able to add “Mrs. Norris as Iago” (with due credit to Ellen for her early insight) to the long list of veiled Shakespearean allusions in JA's most Shakespearean novel (which, by the way, does name Othello among the list of plays considered and rejected by the group at Mansfield Park before Tom chooses and pushes through  Lovers Vows!  

And that's only the beginning of the Othello hidden in JA's novels--because, as with so many of Shakespeare's plays, JA knew them all so well that she repeatedly alluded to many of them in several of her novels as well.  The first Austen scholar I know of, who suggested that JA alluded to Othello in her novels, was Gene Ruoff, WAY WAY back in the late Stone Age of modern Austen criticism, in  1984:

http://jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number6/ruoff.htm

The article is worth reading in its not-too-long entirety, and I certify it to be jargon-free. Ruoff rightly focuses on the strongest echo, which is Wentworth's boasting about the "dear old Asp" to Louisa who eats it all up, which is exactly like the recounting, in Othello, of how Othello boasted about HIS military exploits to Desdemona, who ate it all up, fell in love with him, and married him.

But on a more pervasive level, Ruoff rightly focuses on the theme of jealousy, which defines Othello, of course, and is also a major factor in Wentworth's arc during the novel. Fortunately, he does not murder Anne as a result of his jealousy of Cousin Elliot's seemingly imminent success in courting Anne, but maybe that's because others (like Admiral Croft and his wife) intervene offstage to avert that tragedy, and we get the happy ending instead.  ;)

I will also mention in passing that more than 2 decades after Ruoff,  Jocelyn Harris, in her excellent book  A Revolution Beyond Expression (2006), added insights into the Winter's Tale allusion in Persuasion, which also of course centered on the crazy jealousy of a husband.

The rest of this post will be my own ruminations sparked by my reflecting on other Austenesque aspects of Othello's being misled by Iago into misinterpreting supposed clues of Desdemona's infidelity, it's no coincidence that one of the literary quotations that Catherine Morland studies as a teenager is:

"Trifles light as air,

"Are, to the jealous, confirmation strong,

"As proofs of Holy Writ."

Once you recognize the veiled Othello allusion in Persuasion, the word "trifle" turns out to be part of the lexicon of the Jane Austen Code, as illustrated in the following textual examples:

"But neither Charles Hayter's feelings, nor anybody's feelings, could interest [Anne], till she had a little better arranged her own. She was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of being so nervous, so overcome by SUCH A TRIFLE; but so it was, and it required a long application of solitude and reflection to recover her."  

This occurs in Chapter 10, only ONE chapter after Wentworth's Othello-ish  boasting to Louisa. Anne, for obvious reasons, is feeling extremely jealous of Wentworth at this moment, and so she does not yet dare to believe that Wentworth's taking the child off her back is  "confirmation strong" of Wentworth's still loving herself and not Louisa.  And…my subversive take here is that JA DOES mean us to question whether Anne is indeed reading too much into Wentworth’s apparent rescue

And here, much later:

"The rain was A MERE TRIFLE, and Anne was most sincere in preferring a walk with Mr Elliot. But the rain was also A MERE TRIFLE to Mrs Clay; she would hardly allow it even to drop at all, and her boots were so thick! much thicker than Miss Anne's;"

Of course, with Mrs. Clay, all "mere trifles" are actually "confirmation strong" of HER scheming and manipulation.

And, not surprisingly at this point, there seem to be several coded usages of the word “trifle” in NA itself, of which I now bring forward the two which seem to me most closely, but covertly, tied to the quotation from Othello about trifles which provide confirmation:

First, in Chapter 19, after Isabella has started flirting with Captain Tilney, we read Catherine the detective analyzing the evidence as to its significance and drawing a conclusion therefrom:

“A few days passed away, and Catherine, though not allowing herself to suspect her friend, could not help watching her closely. The result of her observations was not agreeable. Isabella seemed an altered creature. When she saw her, indeed, surrounded only by their immediate friends in Edgar's Buildings or Pulteney Street, her change of manners was SO TRIFLING that, had it gone no farther, it might have passed unnoticed. A something of languid indifference, or of that boasted absence of mind which Catherine had never heard of before, would occasionally come across her; but had nothing worse appeared, that might only have spread a new grace and inspired a warmer interest. But when Catherine saw her in public, admitting Captain Tilney's attentions as readily as they were offered, and allowing him almost an equal share with James in her notice and smiles, THE ALTERATION BECAME TOO POSITIVE TO BE PASSED OVER. What could be meant by such unsteady conduct, what her friend could be at, was beyond her comprehension. Isabella could not be aware of the pain she was inflicting; but it was a degree of wilful thoughtlessness which Catherine could not but resent. James was the sufferer…”

Second, in Chapter 22, we read this extremely famous passage with new Othello-informed eyes:

“…Instantaneously, with the consciousness of existence, returned her recollection of the manuscript; and springing from the bed in the very moment of the maid's going away, she eagerly collected every scattered sheet which had burst from the roll on its falling to the ground, and flew back to enjoy the luxury of their perusal on her pillow. She now plainly saw that she must not expect a manuscript of equal length with the generality of what she had shuddered over in books, for the roll, seeming to consist entirely of small disjointed sheets, was altogether but of trifling size, and much less than she had supposed it to be at first.

Her greedy eye glanced rapidly over a page. She started at its import. Could it be possible, or did not her senses play her false? An inventory of linen, in coarse and modern characters, seemed all that was before her! If the evidence of sight might be trusted, she held a washing-bill in her hand. She seized another sheet, and saw the same articles with little variation; a third, a fourth, and a fifth presented nothing new. Shirts, stockings, cravats, and waistcoats faced her in each. Two others, penned by the same hand, marked an expenditure scarcely more interesting, in letters, hair-powder, shoe-string, and breeches-ball. And the larger sheet, which had enclosed the rest, seemed by its first cramp line, "To poultice chestnut mare"—a farrier's bill! Such was the collection of papers (left perhaps, as she could then suppose, by the negligence of a servant in the place whence she had taken them) which had filled her with expectation and alarm, and robbed her of half her night's rest! She felt humbled to the dust. Could not the adventure of the chest have taught her wisdom? A corner of it, catching her eye as she lay, seemed to rise up in judgment against her. Nothing could now be clearer than the absurdity of her recent fancies. To suppose that a manuscript of many generations back could have remained undiscovered in a room such as that, so modern, so habitable!—Or that she should be the first to possess the skill of unlocking a cabinet, the key of which was open to all!

How could she have so imposed on herself? Heaven forbid that Henry Tilney should ever know her folly! And it was in a great measure his own doing, for had not the cabinet appeared so exactly to agree with his description of her adventures, she should never have felt the smallest curiosity about it. This was the only comfort that occurred. Impatient to get rid of those hateful evidences of her folly, those detestable papers then scattered over the bed, she rose directly, and folding them up as nearly as possible in the same shape as before, returned them to the same spot within the cabinet, with a very hearty wish that no untoward accident might ever bring them forward again, to disgrace her even with herself.

Why the locks should have been so difficult to open, however, was still something remarkable, for she could now manage them with perfect ease. In this there was surely something mysterious, and she indulged in the flattering suggestion for half a minute, till the possibility of the door's having been at first unlocked, and of being herself its fastener, darted into her head, and cost her another blush.”

The superficial meaning is that Catherine ignored the lesson of the quotation from Othello (which, by the way, is spoken by Othello, as he tells the audience how he will achieve his greatest and most evil achievement via the tell-tale handkerchief), because she allowed her imagination to run wild and concoct a deep hidden meaning in the papers she gathered in the darkness.

But….in the shadow story, as I have posted in the past, these laundry lists, seemingly trivial, are actually evidence of the shadowy game that Eleanor Tilney has played with the young man who will suddenly in the end of the novel pop up as her husband—these are his laundry bills!

And, on the metafictional level, the “papers” are the plays of Shakespeare himself, compiled in 1623 in the form of the First Folio, which constitute, in Catherine’s own thought words, a “manuscript of many generations back”, and the detective is the reader of Northanger Abbey  who penetrates to the realization that no single word in any of JA’s novels is a “trifle”—they only appear to be, to those who read too passively.

And all of the above is only the beginning, because all of Shakespeare’s plays are everywhere in JA's fiction, they collectively constitute the constitution that permeates and inspires her equally unique and immeasurable genius.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The Amazingly Biblical and Tevye-esque Eclat of Mr. Bennet’s Veiled Proverbs

For nearly twenty years now, even since I first watched P&P2, I have believed that Sholem Aleichem was very slyly alluding to the Bennet family in P&P, when he conceived of the family of Tevye the Milkman, his wife Golda, and his numerous daughters, each with her own very different character and suitor, three of whom he marries off.  

I first posted about this in Janeites in 2001 after another listmember threw out that same idea, and most of my focus was on the many parallels between the respective wives, daughters, and suitors in Meryton and Anatevka.  

And even though this resonance, particularly with respect to Mrs. Bennet and Golda, was enhanced in the translation of Sholem Aleichem’s original stories from page to play, and then to film--of course Fiddler on the Roof— it’s clear to me that the Bennets were already firmly in the mind of the author sometimes referred to as the Yiddish Mark Twain a century ago. So, I would suggest, he could even more readily fit  the moniker “the Yiddish Jane Austen”.

However, it was only today that I realized there was another rich vein of covert allusion by Sholem Aleichem to Jane Austen hiding in plain sight, which focuses on parallels between Mr. Bennet and Tevye themselves, and not merely on parallels between their wives and daughters----specifically their shared love of book study, in particular the Bible, and their shared fondness for expressing that love aphoristically and humorously.

Of course everyone knows that Tevye practically never stops paraphrasing the Bible--interpreted by him according to his own unique, off-center homespun theology— it’s his hilarious yet poignant trademark, his go-to way of coming to terms with the often absurd and even tragic conditions of his existence in the quintessential Jewish shtetl, Anatevka, symbol of the soon to be vanished world of Eastern European Jewry from which my own ancestors came, under the thumb of the cruelly anti-semitic Czar. And what does Teye dream of, besides going to Jerusalem? He dreams of having the free time to study the Torah.

But what I only realized last night, by chance, was that Mr. Bennet, in his own quintessentially English way, and reflecting a level of formal education and polish which Tevye lacks, nonetheless does very much the same things, and feels the same way, that Tevye does! His home library is his sanctuary, his “synagogue”, surrounded by his beloved holy books—and if we dig a bit beneath the surface, we realize that one of those beloved holy books must have been the Bible, just as with Tevye!

Mr. B, after all, is the speaker of some of the most memorable epigrams and bon mots in the entire Austen canon—his only serious rival in that department being Mary Crawford—and so, ironically, it is he whom his daughter Lizzy inadvertently describes when she delivers one of her famous barbs to Darcy:

“"…I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a PROVERB."

Did you catch that giant wink by JA to the Book of Proverbs? JA, the sly daughter of an Anglican clergyman, gives Mr. Bennet’s wry humor a distinctly Biblical twist, focuses EIGHT TIMES on a single word that has both Biblical (and Shakespearean) resonance:    FOOL.   And that is our giant clue that zeroes in on one particular chapter in the Book of Proverbs, as you will shortly see.

But first consider Mr. Bennet’s eight references to fools and folly:

In Chapter 7, he calls Lydia and Kitty “two of the silliest girls in the country” and the reiterates to his wife  “I must so far differ from you s to think our two youngest daughters uncommonly foolish.”

In Chapter 13, he describes Mr. Collins to Lizzy as follows: “I have great hopes of finding him quite the reverse. There is a mixture of servility and self-importance in his letter, which promises well. I am impatient to see him." and then when Mr. Collins follows him into his library, he complains that he is “prepared to meet with folly and conceit in every other room of the house, [but] he was used to be free from them there.”

In Chapter 23, he pronounced his agreeable experience “to discover that Charlotte Lucas, whom he had been used to think tolerably sensible, was as foolish as his wife, and more foolish than his daughter!” in marrying Mr. Collins.

In Chapter 42, he found consolation for his folly in mismanaging Lydia and his finances but he also “to his wife he was very little otherwise indebted, than as her ignorance and folly had contributed to his amusement.”

In Chapter 49, he pronounces "Wickham's a fool if he takes her with a farthing less than ten thousand pounds. I should be sorry to think so ill of him, in the very beginning of our relationship."

In Chapter 53, once more in mock-petulant mode, he utters: "No, no. You forced me into visiting [Bingley] last year, and promised, if I went to see him, he should marry one of my daughters. But it ended in nothing, and I will not be sent on a fool's errand again." But he does go, and then we learn that “Bingley was punctual to his appointment; and he and Mr. Bennet spent the morning together, as had been agreed on. The latter was much more agreeable than his companion expected. There was nothing of presumption or folly in Bingley that could provoke his ridicule, or disgust him into silence; and he was more communicative, and less eccentric, than the other had ever seen him.

In Chapter 57, finally, in describing Mr. Collins’s second letter to him, he reports: “The rest of his letter is only about his dear Charlotte's situation, and his expectation of a young olive-branch. But, Lizzy, you look as if you did not enjoy it. You are not going to be missish, I hope, and pretend to be affronted at an idle report. For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?"

And then, after Lizzy responds: "Yes—that is what makes it amusing. Had they fixed on any other man it would have been nothing; but his perfect indifference, and your pointed dislike, make it so delightfully absurd! Much as I abominate writing, I would not give up Mr. Collins's correspondence for any consideration. Nay, when I read a letter of his, I cannot help giving him the preference even over Wickham, much as I value the impudence and hypocrisy of my son-in-law.

So the portrait is indelibly painted from one end of P&P to the other of a husband/father/scholar who believes it is human nature, and one of life’s most piquant pleasures, as he so aptly sums it up, “to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn.” In short, fools and folly, especially in family, are the fodder that famously feed Mr. Bennet’s fetish. (So there, Mrs. Jennings, some wordplay on the letter F).

But now think about Mr. Bennet as you consider the following, being verses 1-12 and 18-19 in Proverbs 26, the subtitle might well have been “Fools & Folly”:

1 As snow in summer, and as rain in harvest, so honour is not seemly for a FOOL.

2 As the bird by wandering, as the swallow by flying, so the curse causeless shall not come.

3 A whip for the horse, a bridle for the ass, and a rod for the FOOL's back.

4 ANSWER NOT A FOOL ACCORDING TO HIS FOLLY, LEST THAT ALSO BE LIKE UNTO HIM.

5 ANSWER A FOOL ACCORDING TO HIS FOLLY, LEST HE BE WISE IN HIS OWN CONCEIT.

6 He that sendeth a message by the hand of a FOOL cutteth off the feet, and drinketh damage.

7  The legs of the lame are not equal: so is a parable in the mouth of FOOLS.

8 As he that bindeth a stone in a sling, so is he that giveth honour to a FOOL.

9 As a thorn goeth up into the hand of a drunkard, so is a parable in the mouths of FOOLS.

10 The great God that formed all things both rewardeth the FOOL, and rewardeth transgressors.

11 As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a FOOL returneth to his FOLLY. 

12 Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is MORE HOPE OF A FOOL THAN OF HIM.

…

18 As a mad man who casteth firebrands, arrows, and death,

19 So is THE MAN THAT DECEIVETH HIS NEIGHBOUR, AND SAITH, AM I NOT IN SPORT? 

What first caught my eye, and suggested this post to me, were verses 4&5, and then, upon reading through the entire chapter, also verse 19.  Don’t the first two uncannily seem to address Mr. Bennet’s M.O. as a satirist? He takes special delight in deceiving Mr. Collins, by answering his foolishness with a straight face, pretending to be impressed, and never letting Mr. Collins in on the covert joke at his expense. And Mr. Bennet is less careful when he repeatedly puts his foolish wife on, answering her folly by leading her on, before zinging her.  

And then throw Verse 19 into the mix, and now JA’s veiled allusion becomes extremely obvious, as Mr. Bennet’s most famous aphorism, in Chapter 57, “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?"  pings several keywords in that Verse.  

Now, the interesting question is, does that repeated practice make Mr. Bennet a fool of a different kind, as Verse 4 suggests? Should he have been honest with his guest, as Verses 5 and 19 advise? I think the answer is complicated, and that, to me, is Jane Austen’s agenda in covertly alluding to those verses. She wants those of her readers who hear the echo of Proverbs 26 to examine and reflect on this question, and come to some reasoned opinion, recognizing that there is no simple proverbial wisdom to guide us in life, but shades of grey that require nuanced thinking.

What is your answer about Mr. Bennet? Is HE a fool?

And what do you think about the comparison between Mr. Bennet and Tevye? Who is a wiser man?

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

P.S.: Actually, I realized as I was composing this post, that I also heard a distinct echo of Verse 6 in Charlotte Lucas’s covertly & deliberately planting the false rumor of Lizzy and Darcy being engaged in her foolish husband’s ears. Charlotte does this, according to Kim Damstra in 1999, and then myself in 2004, so that Mr. Collins will predictably turn the rumor into fact when he immediately informs Lady Catherine, who will then predictably descend on Lizzy at Longbourn, all resulting in the boomerang net effect of bringing Darcy and Lizzy together.

I see this hidden pattern as JA’s playfully perverse special exception to the rule of Verse 6, because sometimes fools are the very best messengers, when one is a “Lucifer” like Charlotte, who cannot risk taking direct action, but who figures out a way to turn fools into inadvertent puppets.