The Two Harriet Smiths: Pamela & Shamela

The past few days there has been a hot debate in Janeites and Austen-L revisiting my claims from long ago that Harriet can be read as a Machiavellian character, as to which the following is a sampler:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/harriets-extremely-odd-behaviour-and.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/06/harriet-smiths-provision-for-evening-of.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/08/harriet-smiths-lack-of-education-hasnt.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-ready-wit-of-harriet-smith-andone.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/10/ps-re-harriet-smith-as-papagena-turned.html

 

The recent debate prompts me to put it in proper context, and to avoid the confusion that inevitably arises when the discussants claim that "the real Harriet Smith" did this or that.

The core premise of my shadow story theory that I first clearly articulated 10 years ago is that there are two independent, coherent, parallel fictional universes in each Jane Austen novel -and so there is a Harriet Smith who is naive like Richardson's Pamela and a Harriet Smith who is Machiavellian like Fielding's Shamela. Jane Austen deliberately wrote Harriet's character so that she could be read in two completely opposing ways. And the same is true of many of Austen's major characters in all of her novels.







So, I claim that there is not merely one real Harriet Smith, there are TWO!


And Jane Austen being a creator of puzzles and mysteries who played fair with her readers, she left many clues to this double anamorphic structure in her writing, but the most important one is the two-stanza charade in Emma, with its one "official" answer (courtship), and its numerous additional answers (Prince of Whales per Sheehan, Leviathan per Anielka, Crown of Thorns per me, and others).

It is Jane Austen's central symbol of this anamorphism, and truly is her "Rosetta Stone". I.e., each novel is a complex charade which has one official "answer" and (at least) one other "answer", depending on whether you read with the grain (reading the narration as mostly objective) or against The grain (reading the narration as mostly subjective, filtered through the clueless eyes of the heroine).

Getting back to Harriet Smith, I am of the party who believe that Shamela was not Fielding's original invention, but rather was Fielding's discovery of Richardson's own sly deliberate anamorphism.

And, in turn, Richardson and Fielding appear to me to have been inspired by Shakespeare's widespread use of anamorphism in many of his plays. And Shakespeare, in turn, learned this from Chaucer and the Greeks, in a great chain/tradition of covert literary emulation.

And finally Jane Austen, like Mozart in music, learned from all who came before her, but she then took this anamorphism to a level of genius and perfection never equalled before or since.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

More re Swift's Modest Proposal in Jane Austen's Emma (AND ALSO in Jane Austen's Juveniila, per Emily Auerbach!)

Diane Reynolds, my partner in crime on this latest thread about the veiled allusion to Swift's Modest Proposal in Jane Austen's Emma, wrote the following response to my earlier post:

"Yes, the thin broth--I meant to mention that in my last post--what a thing to send the child out to get, thought he argument will be that it's medicinal ... but probably what the family needs to stay healthy is good food."

Indeed on all points, Diane!

Diane also wrote: "On Swift and on this food theme, and I know I've posted on this before--as it connects to Lamb as well--Lamb's essay on roast pig, which decries the cruelty of killing suckling pigs for the pleasure of overly refined palates (shades of Mr. Woodhouse) is understood to be, in part, a response--or influenced by--A Modest Proposal--and here, in Austen, we have that hind quarter of "the small and delicate" porker that Emma sends to the Bates--naturally, Mr W only wants to send a tiny portion of it (!)--I have searched for some evidence that Lamb published some early version of the roast pig essay before 1820 in vain though I imagine he must have--but I can't find it. Or perhaps he caught JA's Swiftian allusions in Emma--but did he read Emma? In any case, we have the acrostic about lamb, the small and delicate porker, all these food withholding issues and poverty... not an accident. "

No question there is no coincidence or accident here--my personal sense is that JA and Charles Lamb were secretly in contact with each other no later than 1815, possibly a few years earlier--Lamb would have been one of the London literati tuned into JA's first three published novels, beginning in 1811, but especially after P&P was published in January 1813. And we know for a fact that JA was aware of Lamb's 1812 "Triumph of the Whale" doggerel poem about the Prince of WHALES by the time JA wrote the "courtship" charade in Emma, because the charade and the surrounding dialog between Emma and Harriet so clearly alludes to Lamb's poem (also to Cruikshank's caricature, which I found, and which I have used as my blog masthead all along)--and I believe she knew Lamb first from reading his and his sister's 1809 Tales of Shakespeare.  Recall also JA's famous paragraph in her 1812 letter to Martha Lloyd in which JA baldly stated that she hated the Prince Regent.

So what makes the most sense to me from all that "smoke" is that the two of them found each other (especially while JA was in London, it would have been pretty easy to connect, via Henry Austen's many social contacts) and then decided to act as co-conspirators in a worthy cabal to use their talents as writers to satirize the Prince Regent in a variety of ways.


By the way, re the Swift allusion in Emma, I revisited my last hastily written post last night (the writing of which, on my IPhone, helped me pass the time during the 3 hour power outage we experienced here in Portland due to high winds!), and I have now done better justice to my realization that Jane Fairfax's concealed pregnancy is right there alongside Emma's "charity" to the poor sick family near the Vicarage, at the center of the veiled allusion to Swift's "Modest Proposal":  http://tinyurl.com/ognuoxh
Now finally Jane Fairfax's numerous connections to all things Irish (supposed suitors, fashions, melodies, mails, & car parties) are revealed to have a unified, deeper significance--they are all meant to associate Jane and her concealed pregnancy (which of course involves an "inconvenient" baby) with Swift's Modest Proposal about "inconvenient" Irish babies.

And....I did some more digging, and found that the sharp-eyed Emily Auerbach has the following very interesting discussion at p. 57 of her 2005 Searching for Jane Austen (which I've quoted from with approval on several occasions) which is spot-on,  I believe, in spotting Jane Austen's affinity for Swift's Modest Proposal even in JA's early Juvenilia, and also connects the thematic dots to Emma, although Auerbach did not grasp the wild audacity of the mature JA to bring the essence of Swift’s savage satire right there into plain sight all over the place in Emma:

"Irony allows Austen to expose the discrepancy between what people say and what they mean, what they proscribe for others and what they practice themselves, what they pretend and what they know to be true...LIke modern real estate ads that call a small dump a 'cozy abode', Austen cites in ' A Tale' an advertisement for a cottage that is 'ready furnished except two rooms & a Closet.' The catch? It turns out the house only has two rooms and a closet!
Could Austen's irony have a political bite to it? Does she imply that the upper classes pose as benevolent while engaging in cruelty to those beneath them on the social ladder? Austen opens one sketch with the startling sentence, 'Sir George and Lady Harcourt were superintending the Labours of their Haymakers, rewarding the industry of some by smiles of approbation, and punishing the idleness of others, by a cudgel' (Henry and Eliza). In "A Fragment written to inculcate the practise of Virtue' (which Chapman notes was 'erased in MS'), Austen takes an understated stab at the heartlessness of the fortunate toward the unfortunate:
'We all know that many are unfortunate in their progress through the world, but we do not know all that are so. To seek them out to study their wants, & to leave them unsupplied is the duty, and ought to be the Business of Man. But few have time, fewer still have inclination, and no one has either the one or the other for such employments. Who amidst those that perspire away their Evenings in crouded assemblies can have leisure to bestow a thought on such as sweat under the fatigue of their daily Labour. ' 
THIS READS MORE LIKE JONATHAN SWIFT THAN JANE AUSTEN. Members of the leisure class lack the time and inclination to concern themselves with tired, perspiring laborers, so they leave their needs 'unsupplied'. LIKE THE NARRATOR OF SWIFT'S "MODEST PROPOSAL" who pretends to approve of boiling the children of poor people for food, the narrator of Austen's fragment labels it the 'duty' and 'business' of the upper class to IGNORE the plight of workers. Did Austen abandon this fragment-erase it, in fact-because it was moving in a more radical direction than she felt comfortable pursuing, OR DID AN AUSTEN RELATIVE LATER ERASE IT? Whichever is the case, it remains fascinating that Austen wrote it at all.
In 'A Collection of Letters", the haughy Lady Greville tells Maria, 'It is not my way to find fault with people because they are poor, for I always think that they are more to be despised & pitied than blamed for it.' This foreshadows Lady Catherine de Bourgh of P&P, whose approach to the poor is to sally forth into the village 'to scold them into harmony and plenty.' ...In another juvenile sketch included in "A Collection of Letters", the materialistic Henrietta boasts with no awareness of her ridiculousness, " I AM very Charitable every now and then' ...THIS ANTICIPATES EMMA WOODHOUSE, WHO FOLLOWS "a charitable visit...to a poor sick family' by forgetting all about them within minutes, distracted by her own matchmaking plans."  END QUOTE FROM AUERBACH

This is astonishingly strong proof of something I have been saying all along-i.e., that the radical over the top social satire of the Juvenilia was not abandoned by the mature Austen—instead the mature genius Jane Austen found ways of hiding in plain sight that exact same message---shouting out the many ways that the Emperor  —or at least the King and the rest of the ruling elite of Great Britain—had no clothes on, morally speaking.

JA was inspired by Swift's Modest Proposal at age 13, and was still inspired by same 20 years later when she wrote Emma-she just dusted off those identical plot twists and characters, and resurrected them in their full glory. Emma Woodhouse is that very same Henrietta!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter 

“Every thing they could command…was disTASTEful”: Jane Fairfax’s Irish-inflected hunger for thoroughly wholesome baked apples points to Swift’s wholesome tasty Irish babies

Last night, I was thinking some more about the veiled allusion to Swift's "a modest proposal" in Emma which I posted about twice yesterday….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/12/poor-starving-miss-bates-poor-married.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/12/she-is-very-much-to-taste-of-every-body.html

…and this time I focused on the macabre essence of Swift's satire, which was the "kindly meant" advice to Irish parents to eat their babies who were a “burden” they could not otherwise carry.

Thinking about babies who were a burden a parent could not handle took me straight to the heart of the shadow story of Emma, as to which I have maintained for the past decade that Jane Fairfax is the shadow heroine, not Emma, and Jane’s “burden” is Jane’s unborn child and the pregnancy she conceals while searching for a solution to her longterm problem—what to do with the baby after she’s born?!

In the end, Jane’s desperate returns to Highbury to conceal her unwed pregnancy is successful, as she winds up giving her baby Anna to Mrs. Weston. But it became clear to me last night that Jane Austen, with her own sharply macabre sense of humor, went out of her way to repeatedly but subliminally point to Swift’s “Modest Proposal” specifically vis a vis Jane Fairfax.

I.e., Jane Fairfax has a comparable "problem" to that of Swift’s “poor” Irish parents, and Jane Austen makes sure we are constantly reminded that Jane may feel forced by the exigencies of her situation, especially the malicious meddling of Mrs. Elton, to in effect “eat” (i.e., abort)  her baby!

Let’s start with a quick tally of all of Jane Fairfax’s Irish connections, which clearly have some coded meaning, since Jane F. is unique among Austen characters for her multiple, varied, and seemingly random associations with Ireland and the Irish:

First re the suitor Emma imagines Jane is involved with is the Irishman, Mr. Dixon, who is engaged to Jane’s “sister”, Miss Campbell, we hear all about Ireland from the informative Miss Bates:

Ch. 20: GOING TO IRELAND, DUBLIN, BALY-CRAIG

"…The case is, you see, that the Campbells are GOING TO IRELAND. Mrs. Dixon has persuaded her father and mother to come over and see her directly. They had not intended to go over till the summer, but she is so impatient to see them again—for till she married, last October, she was never away from them so much as a week, which must make it very strange to be in different kingdoms, I was going to say, but however different countries, and so she wrote a very urgent letter to her mother—or her father, I declare I do not know which it was, but we shall see presently in Jane's letter—wrote in Mr. Dixon's name as well as her own, to press their coming over directly, and they would give them the meeting in DUBLIN, and take them back to their country seat, BALY-CRAIG, a beautiful place, I fancy. Jane has heard a great deal of its beauty; from Mr. Dixon, I mean—I do not know that she ever heard about it from any body else; but it was very natural, you know, that he should like to speak of his own place while he was paying his addresses—and as Jane used to be very often walking out with them—for Colonel and Mrs. Campbell were very particular about their daughter's not walking out often with only Mr. Dixon, for which I do not at all blame them; of course she heard every thing he might be telling Miss Campbell about his own home in Ireland; and I think she wrote us word that he had shewn them some drawings of the place, views that he had taken himself. He is a most amiable, charming young man, I believe. Jane was quite longing TO GO TO IRELAND, from his account of things."

At this moment, an ingenious and animating suspicion entering Emma's brain with regard to Jane Fairfax, this charming Mr. Dixon, and the NOT GOING TO IRELAND…”

Colonel and Mrs. Campbell."

…"But, in spite of all her friends' urgency, and her own wish of SEEING IRELAND, Miss Fairfax prefers devoting the time to you and Mrs. Bates?"

…"Jane caught a bad cold, poor thing! so long ago as the 7th of November, (as I am going to read to you,) and has never been well since. A long time, is not it, for a cold to hang upon her? She never mentioned it before, because she would not alarm us. Just like her! so considerate!—But however, she is so far from well, that her kind friends the Campbells think she had better come home, and try an air that always agrees with her; and they have no doubt that three or four months at Highbury will entirely cure her—and it is certainly a great deal better that she should come here, than GO TO IRELAND, if she is unwell. Nobody could nurse her, as we should do."

"Yes—entirely her own doing, entirely her own choice; and Colonel and Mrs. Campbell think she does quite right, just what they should recommend; and indeed they particularly wish her to try her native air, as she has not been quite so well as usual lately."

…With regard to her not accompanying them TO IRELAND, her account to her aunt contained nothing but truth, though THERE MIGHT BE SOME TRUTHS NOT TOLD. It was her own choice to give the time of their absence to Highbury; to spend, perhaps, her last months of perfect liberty with those kind relations to whom she was so very dear: and the Campbells, whatever might be their motive or MOTIVES, WHETHER SINGLE, OR DOUBLE, OR TREBLE, gave the arrangement their ready sanction, and said, that they depended more on a few months spent in her native air, for the recovery of her health, than on any thing else. Certain it was that she was to come; and that Highbury, instead of welcoming that perfect novelty which had been so long promised it—Mr. Frank Churchill—must put up for the present with Jane Fairfax, who could bring only the freshness of a two years' absence.

It is no accident that the above passage includes the broadly hinting language I’ve put in all caps about truths not told, and treble motives.

And next we have two passages where Frank Churchill, who, I have long maintained, first realizes that Jane is pregnant as he stares at her, twice invokes Jane’s Irish connections in coded reference to Jane’s pregnancy, a code Emma is clueless about:

Ch. 26: AN IRISH FASHION

He started. "Thank you for rousing me," he replied. "I believe I have been very rude; but really Miss Fairfax has done her hair in so odd a way—so very odd a way—that I cannot keep my eyes from her. I never saw any thing so outree!—Those curls!—This must be a fancy of her own. I see nobody else looking like her!—I must go and ask her whether it is AN IRISH FASHION. Shall I?—Yes, I will—I declare I will—and you shall see how she takes it;—whether she colours."

Ch. 28: A NEW SET OF IRISH MELODIES

"What felicity it is to hear a tune again which has made one happy!—If I mistake not that was danced at Weymouth."

She looked up at him for a moment, coloured deeply, and played something else. He took some music from a chair near the pianoforte, and turning to Emma, said,

"Here is something quite new to me. Do you know it?—Cramer.—And here are A NEW SET OF IRISH MELODIES. That, from such a quarter, one might expect. This was all sent with the instrument. Very thoughtful of Colonel Campbell, was not it?—He knew Miss Fairfax could have no music here. I honour that part of the attention particularly; it shews it to have been so thoroughly from the heart. Nothing hastily done; nothing incomplete. True affection only could have prompted it."

Emma wished he would be less pointed, yet could not help being amused; and when on glancing her eye towards Jane Fairfax she caught the remains of a smile, when she saw that with all the deep blush of consciousness, there had been a smile of secret delight, she had less scruple in the amusement, and much less compunction with respect to her.—This amiable, upright, perfect Jane Fairfax was apparently cherishing very reprehensible feelings.

In the next two passages, Emma has no idea as to what Jane’s blush really means, but that doesn’t stop Emma from picking up on Frank’s ironic Irish digs. And then Miss Bates  chimes in again.

It seems half of Highbury is speaking in an Irish code that Emma does not understand the full meaning of:

Ch. 34: THE IRISH MAILS

Jane's solicitude about fetching her own letters had not escaped Emma. She had heard and seen it all; and felt some curiosity to know whether the wet walk of this morning had produced any. She suspected that it had; that it would not have been so resolutely encountered but in full expectation of hearing from some one very dear, and that it had not been in vain. She thought there was an air of greater happiness than usual—a glow both of complexion and spirits.

She could have made an inquiry or two, as to the expedition and the expense of THE IRISH MAILS;—it was at her tongue's end—but she abstained. She was quite determined not to utter a word that should hurt Jane Fairfax's feelings; and they followed the other ladies out of the room, arm in arm, with an appearance of good-will highly becoming to the beauty and grace of each.

Ch. 43: THE IRISH CAR PARTY

"Now, ma'am," said Jane to her aunt, "shall we join Mrs. Elton?"

"If you please, my dear. With all my heart. I am quite ready. I was ready to have gone with her, but this will do just as well. We shall soon overtake her. There she is—no, that's somebody else. That's one of the ladies in THE IRISH CAR PARTY, not at all like her.—Well, I declare—"

JANE’S HUNGER FOR BAKED APPLES

So now, after reading the above, and recognizing that Ireland and Jane are connected for a deeper reason not explicitly told but everywhere hinted at, read the following passages with Swift's culinary proposal very specifically in mind, I.e., think about Jane Fairfax as the parent whom "friends" like Mrs. Elton "modestly propose" that Jane “abolish" (i.e. abort):

The first two passages occur in Chapter 27, when Jane Fairfax is about midway through her concealed pregnancy:

First Emma talking with Harriet about Jane’s and Emma’s comparative piano skills, and Harriet refers three times to Emma’s “taste”:

"Those who knew any thing about it, must have felt the difference. The truth is, Harriet, that my playing is just good enough to be praised, but Jane Fairfax's is much beyond it."

"Well, I always shall think that you play quite as well as she does, or that if there is any difference nobody would ever find it out. Mr. Cole said how much TASTE you had; and Mr. Frank Churchill talked a great deal about your TASTE, and that he valued TASTE much more than execution."

& then Miss Bates talking about Jane’s lack of appetite in language that is a direct and indeed virtuosic multiple echoing of Swift’s satiric rhapsodies about the wonderful taste and wholesome nutritional value of Irish babies—just think of the baby as a “baked” apple, as in the still common colloquial expression about “buns in the oven” as a euphemism for gestating embryonic babies in utero:

"Then the baked apples came home, Mrs. Wallis sent them by her boy…we have never known any thing but the greatest attention from them. And it cannot be for the value of our custom now, for what is our consumption of bread, you know? Only three of us -- besides DEAR JANE at present -- and she REALLY EATS NOTHING -- makes SUCH A SHOCKING BREAKFAST, YOU WOULD BE QUITE FRIGHTENED IF YOU SAW IT. I dare not let my mother know HOW LITTLE SHE EATS -- so I say one thing and then I say another, and it passes off. But about the middle of the day SHE GETS HUNGRY, AND THERE IS NOTHING SHE LIKES SO WELL AS THESE BAKED APPLES, AND THEY ARE EXTREMELY WHOLESOME, for I took the opportunity the other day of asking Mr. Perry; I happened to meet him in the street. Not that I had any doubt before -- I HAVE SO OFTEN HEARD MR. WOODHOUSE RECOMMEND A BAKED APPLE. I BELIEVE IT IS THE ONLY WAY THAT MR. WOODHOUSE THINKS THE FRUIT THOROUGHLY WHOLESOME….”

Just let that sink in----Miss Bates, in code, is repeatedly invoking Swift’s “Modest Proposal”!

And, as an unmistakable echo of that passage, the following description of Miss Bates’s comments to Emma occurs at precisely the moment when Jane Fairfax is in labor and therefore obviously receiving no visitors:

Ch.45 

 “…[Emma] submitted, therefore, and only questioned Miss Bates farther as to her niece's appetite and diet, which she longed to be able to assist. On that subject poor Miss Bates was very unhappy, and very communicative; JANE WOULD HARDLY EAT ANY THING: -- MR. PERRY RECOMMENDED NOURISHING FOOD; but every thing they could command (and never had anybody such good neighbours) was DISTASTEFUL."

I mean, really, No wonder the radically absurdist Sixties playwright Joe Orton loved Jane Austen's fiction- she was there 150 years before him!!! Except that in one of his plays, Jane Fairfax would've actually eaten her baby.

Cheers,

Arnie

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter