Unlocking the door to the sexuality of Hannah the Seamstress (or ill-natured jade) of Highbury &Randalls

In Janeites & Austen L, Diane Reynolds responded to my identifiying Hannah, the daughter of James, the head servant at Hartfield, as a covert source for the X-rated answer, “Hancock” (referring to Jane Austen’s aunt Phila Austen Hancock) for a private Austen charade, wrote:

“Here is the passage we have on Hannah, James's daughter. Mr. Woodhouse is speaking to Emma: "when you have had her here to do needlework, I observe she always turns the lock of the door the right way and never bangs it. I am sure she will be an excellent servant; and it will be a great comfort to poor Miss Taylor to have somebody about her that she is used to see. While I don't *think* this has a sexual connotation, it might, and what suggests that to me is The Great Gatsby --since the 70s, people have noted a number of subtextual clues indicating that Nick , Gatsby's narrator, is gay. One is that he gets into an elevator with an effeminate Mr. McKee, a photographer, and the elevator boy says to him, "Get your hand off the lever!," "lever" felt by some to be a stand in for a piece of anatomy ... later Nick ends up in McKee's bed.” END QUOTE FROM DIANE

Diane, that Gatsby line is about as subtle as a sledgehammer—of course it’s a Freudian double entendre! Although I don’t know if I should be suspecting you of a sly pun when you referred to the lever as a “STAND in”. ---especially because, in my posts yesterday about the Hancock/patriot charade, I claim that the line “My whole STANDS HIGH in lists of fame” was meant by JA to be phallic!

Diane also wrote: “Here we have two things--if Arnie is right about being a seamstress as a euphemism for prostitution, we have Hannah coming in to do "needlework," and we have her knowing how to turn the lock of the door the right way and never banging it. This could be a sexual allusion “

Yes, bravo, Diane, I didn’t think of that, but I was blind---of course you are spot-on! It is referring to sex, and I connect it to passages in THREE other Austen novels which I have long thought to also be sexual, as you will now see.

The first is a passage I quoted in my recent presentation at the JASNA AGM about the hidden Shakespeare in MP). It describes how Lady Bertram managed to find some sort of pleasure to get her through the night during the long months of separation from her (evidently) virile, handsome husband in Antigua:

“By not one of the circle was he listened to with such unbroken, unalloyed enjoyment as by his wife, who was really extremely happy to see him, and WHOSE FEELINGS WERE SO WARMED by his sudden arrival as to place her NEARER AGITATION than she had been for the last twenty years. She had been ALMOST FLUTTERED for a few minutes, and still remained so SENSIBLY ANIMATED as to put away her work, move Pug from her side, and give all her attention and all the rest of her sofa to her husband. She had no anxieties for anybody to cloud HER PLEASURE…..

It could not be clearer that Lady Bertram is at the moment of Sir Thomas’s surprising return experiencing exactly the same sort of sexual “flutter” that David Lodge famously (and accurately) detected as Anne Elliot’s orgasm when Wentworth takes Anne’s nephew off her back:

“Her SENSATIONS on the discovery made her PERFECTLY SPEECHLESS. She could not even thank him. She could only hang over little Charles, with MOST DISORDERED FEELINGS. His kindness in stepping forward to her relief, the manner, the silence in which it had passed, the little particulars of the circumstance, with the conviction soon FORCED ON HER by the noise he was studiously making with the child, that he meant to avoid hearing her thanks, and rather sought to testify that her conversation was the last of his wants, produced SUCH A CONFUSION of varying, but VERY PAINFUL AGITATATION, as she COULD NOT RECOVER FROM, till enabled by the entrance of Mary and the Miss Musgroves to make over her little patient to their cares, and leave the room.

Diane also wrote: “But do we have enough accumulation of evidence to make this reading plausible? We never find Hannah waking up in a strange bed ...However, we do have the "come at able" older women, the allusions to venereal disease, illegitimate Harriet ... and in this reading, the comedy that if Hannah is a prostitute, Mr. Woodhouse's assertion that she will be a "great comfort" to Miss Taylor may not be so--and of course this leads to the "sewing" connotation of the name Miss "Tailor." No wonder Mr. Woodhouse might be mourning her loss!”

But back to Lady Bertram for one more round. Here’s the punch line that connects her response to Sir Thomas’s return directly to Hannah’s needlework:

…her own time had been irreproachably spent during his absence: she had done a great deal of carpet-work, and made many yards of fringe….

Indeed, it probably took a LOT of “carpet-work” to produce “many yards of fringe”, and that’s what it took for Lady Bertram, like Odysseus’s Penelope, to survive the long Sir Thomas Drought, sexually speaking! And similarly, re Hannah and Miss Taylor (tailor), I take an even more subversive interpretation. I.e., Miss Taylor and Hannah were living in the same home (Hartfield) for a number of years until Mrs. Weston left for Randalls. So when Mrs. Weston leaves, and then Hannah joins her there, she is actually REjoining her there! And I’d say that Jane Austen is suggesting nothing less than that Miss Taylor and Hannah were doing more than sewing together at Hartfield for the past several years, since Hannah came to sexual maturity, and that Hannah has been sent along to Randalls so that she and her former de facto mistress can continue to “sew” beautiful designs together!

And I don’t want to forget one other wonderful catch in your post, when you noted re Hannah’s “knowing how to turn the lock of the door the right way and never banging it. This could be a sexual allusion “ – for strong corroborative evidence that this is sexual, I give you the following passages in NA referring to “locks” on “doors” which several scholars, including myself, have identified as part of elaborate sexual subtext of Catherine’s sexual awakening at the Abbey:

"How fearfully will you examine the furniture of your apartment!... Dorothy, meanwhile, no less struck by your appearance, gazes on you in great agitation, and drops a few unintelligible hints. To RAISE YOUR SPIRITS, moreover, she gives you reason to suppose that the part of the abbey you inhabit is undoubtedly haunted, and informs you that YOU WILL NOT HAVE A SINGLE DOMESTIC WITHIN CALL. With this parting cordial she curtsies off—you listen to the sound of her receding footsteps as long as the last echo can reach you—and when, with fainting spirits, YOU ATTEMPT TO FASTEN YOUR DOOR, you discover, with increased alarm, that IT HAS NO LOCK."

“Scarcely, however, had she convicted her fancy of error, when the noise of SOMETHING MOVING CLOSE TO HER DOOR MADE HER START; it seemed as if SOMEONE WAS TOUCHING THE VERY DOORWAY—and in another moment A SLIGHT MOTION OF THE LOCK proved that SOME HAND MUST BE ON IT. SHE TREMBLED a little at the idea of anyone's approaching so cautiously; but resolving NOT TO BE AGAIN OVERCOME by trivial appearances of alarm, or misled by A RAISED IMAGINATION, she stepped quietly forward, and OPENED THE DOOR. Eleanor, and only Eleanor, stood there.”

And now the mother of all sexual innuendoes in JA’s novels:

Again, therefore, she applied herself to THE KEY, and after moving it in every possible way for some instants with the determined celerity of hope's last effort, THE DOOR SUDDENLY YIELDED TO HER HAND: her heart leaped with exultation at such a victory, and having thrown open EACH FOLDING DOOR, the second being secured only by bolts of less wonderful construction than THE LOCK, though in that her eye could not discern anything unusual, a DOUBLE RANGE OF SMALL DRAWERS appeared in view, with some larger drawers above and below them; and IN THE CENTRE, a small door, closed also with a lock and key, secured in all probability A SMALL A CAVITY OF IMPORTANCE.

Catherine's HEART BEAT QUICK, but her courage did not fail her. With a cheek flushed by hope, and an eye straining with curiosity, HER FINGERS GRASPED THE HANDLE of a drawer and drew it forth.

[I’m tired of ALL CAPPING, but you get the picture by now]

It was entirely empty. With less alarm and greater eagerness she seized a second, a third, a fourth; each was equally empty. Not one was left unsearched, and in not one was anything found. Well read in the art of concealing a treasure, the possibility of false linings to the drawers did not escape her, and she felt round each with anxious acuteness in vain. The place in the middle alone remained now unexplored; and though she had "never from the first had the smallest idea of finding anything in any part of the cabinet, and was not in the least disappointed at her ill success thus far, it would be foolish not to examine it thoroughly while she was about it." It was some time however before she could unfasten the door, the same difficulty occurring in the management of this inner lock as of the outer; but at length it did open; and not vain, as hitherto, was her search; her quick eyes directly fell on a roll of paper pushed back into the further part of the cavity, apparently for concealment, and her feelings at that moment were indescribable. Her heart fluttered, her knees trembled, and her cheeks grew pale. She seized, with an unsteady hand, the precious manuscript, for half a glance sufficed to ascertain written characters; and while she acknowledged with awful sensations this striking exemplification of what Henry had foretold, resolved instantly to peruse every line before she attempted to rest.

There must be twenty sexual puns and innuendoes in that one passage!

So, you see, Hannah and her abilities to open doors without banging does not occur in an Austen sexual innuendo vacuum—it was part of a consistent pattern throughout all of Jane Austen’s writings.

Before I close, let me reemphasize one last hugely important point about your wonderful catch about Jane Austen’s hints about Hannah’s sexual activities at Hartfield and Randalls. I’ve claimed that when “Han”, short for “Hannah”, is plugged into that Austen charade as the first syllable  (the housemaid who is an ill-natured jade), and then plug in the very crude sexual word for the second syllable for the “lever” that “stands high in lists of fame”, we wind up with “Hancock” as the X-rated answer, and I say that is indeed a reference to the teenaged Phila Austen working for Mrs. Cole the “milliner” in Covent Garden”.

It’s ALL tied together in an intricate bow, with not a single thread out of place, by the great literary seamstress, Jane Austen.

(And that’s not even getting into Jane Fairfax as Marina, the brothel-jumping heroine of Shakespeare’s Pericles, the allusion that Diana dismissed so peremptorily without real consideration of all the details of that allusion.)

The bottom line is that the Myth of Jane Austen is the real barrier—the 900-pound gorilla--that stands in the way of otherwise quite clever Janeites grasping all these sexual innuendoes. If all this authorial legerdemain had been detected in a novel by, say, Nabokov, the mainstream scholars would be lining up unanimously to acclaim his subtle achievements—but because it’s Jane Austen, it just cannot be possible, so that, even in the face of extraordinarily probative evidence, there is a flat refusal to embrace what is there.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The remarkable wordplay that Jane Austen embedded in Emma to point to her “patriot/Hancock” charade

In my posts yesterday, I claimed, in part, that Jane Austen was thinking of, and alluding to, her own unpublished charade ….

 I with a Housemaid once was curst,
Whose name when shortened makes my first;
She an ill natured Jade was reckoned,
And in the house oft raised my second,
My whole stands high in lists of fame,
Exalting e’en great Chatham’s name.

…when she wrote Emma. I further claimed that she coded two winks at that charade into the text of Emma, by choosing Christian names for the two female servants in the novel---Miss Bates’s maid PATTY and the Randalls maid HANNAH---as a dual tip of the hat to the two alternative answers for the first syllable of the answer to the above charade, derived as follows:

“Patty” shortened is “Pat” which combines with “riot” to give “patriot” (the official G-rated answer)

“Hannah” shortened is “Han” which combines with “cock” to give “Hancock”  (the unofficial X-rated answer)

I then wondered why JA did not find a way to work more of this charade into Emma besides the names of the two maids.  I.e., if JA lavished such care on this charade, by tweaking the version she had found in a riddle book to add the X-rated answer without disturbing the G-rated answer, why didn’t she do more, the way she did with all the layers of meaning she wove into the “courtship” charade that did make it into Emma? 

Yesterday. I threw up my hands and gave my best guess, which was that she may have feared that the charade’s reference to “an ill natured jade” was a little too suggestive of sexual meanings, especially when coupled with the sexually-charged words “raised” and “stands” (which is surely why the 1922 first publication of this charade by Mary Augusta Austen-Leigh sanitized it by turning “Housemaid”  into “footboy” and “ill-natured jade’ into “an unruly rogue”).

But today, I awoke with a fresh idea, and went back to the text of Emma and found that Jane Austen did indeed allude to this charade (both the G-rated and the X-rated answers) in THREE different passages in Emma, over and above those two maids’ names.

I will post those three passages on Sunday, but in the interim I wanted to give those of you who would like to try your hand at a bit of literary sleuthing a big hint, so that perhaps you can find one or more of those three passages yourself.

My big hint is simply that you should go here to a searchable online text of Emma….

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/158/158-h/158-h.htm

….and then search in the text (using the CTRL-7 macro on PC’s, I don’t know what you use on Macs) for passages where unusual keywords in the charade, or its two answers (i.e., ill-natured, raised, stands, cock, fame, patriot), or variants of those words, might appear in a cluster in Emma, sufficiently unusual so as to be extremely unlikely to have occurred by chance.

So, give it a go, and come back and let me know if you see any of those three passages in Emma. In all events, I will reveal those passages on Sunday, and then explain why this was not just frivolous wordplay on JA’s part, but was integrally connected to the most important themes in Emma.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Jane Austen's 6 novels are all ambiguous figure-ground double stories (i.e., they all have 2 parallel fictional universes)

A recent post by my good friend Diana Birchall in Janeites and Austen-L responding with rational and amicable disagreement to my suggestion yesterday that the Coles might be the proprietors of a brothel conducted in the downstairs portion of the house in which the Bates women occupy the upstairs drawing-room apartment, led me to respond as follows:

Diana,

My recent posts, and your reply to me (for which I thank you, as usual, for your compliment of rational opposition), show that even though we both have enjoyed many instances where we have an excellent meeting of the minds about JA’s writing (where there are many points of correspondence between our respective ways of reading Jane Austen), there is, and always has been, one fundamental difference which leads from time to time to huge variance between us in interpretation. At the risk of repetition from past posts of mine, I beg your indulgence to summarize exactly what I mean by that, as I believe it is extremely relevant to our disagreement about the mysterious occupant(s), if any, of the downstairs of the Bates house.

My fundamental premise is that each Austen novel, but above all Emma, is told from (pretty much) the exclusive point of view of the heroine for a crucial reason—which is that, by means of her infinitely clever narrative technique, I have found that Jane Austen became increasingly expert in telling two completely different stories using the identical words for each—just like the proverbial figure ground image: http://changingminds.org/images/gestalt_figure_ground.jpg    Is it two faces looking at each other, or a candle-stick holder? It’s both, depending on the observer’s point of view. Both are plausible, and therefore neither is exclusively correct. The image itself never alters, only our perception of it. And it’s still pretty mysterious how our brains can switch back and forth between the two images, both with and without our conscious control.

The same applies, I claim, with JA’s novels. On the one hand, if we read the narrative as mostly objective, and therefore both accurate and complete as presenting “all we need to know” in order to comprehend the story told, then we get the novels as they have been pretty universally read for 2 centuries—what I call the “overt stories”. And it is the understatement of the millennium to state that each of JA’s six completed overt stories are miraculous works of sublime genius.

But… if we read the narrative as mostly subjective ( and therefore extremely incomplete in terms of presenting the story from the heroine’s often fallible point of view), then we get the novels as they have never been coherently read for 2 centuries prior to my discoveries of the past decade. Many other readers before me have seen pieces of the proverbial elephant in Austen’s novels, but I am the first to assert that each novel contains a second entire “elephant” we need to work very hard. over a long period of time, in order to glimpse it in its full splendor.glory—and you know I call that the “shadow story”.

And one last crucial aspect to this—the reading of JA’s narrative as fundamentally objective is the opposite of real-life experience of the real world, whereas the reading of her narrative as subjective is an exact replication of real life experience of the real world. I.e., in real life, none of us has an omniscient narrator perched on our shoulder reliably telling us what is “really” happening in our lives—we each must struggle to overcome our own often flawed individual judgments, to make the best sense we can of what happens, particularly in terms of understanding both our own personalities and actions, and also those of other people. Our real lives are a perpetual struggle to discern what is happening in the shadows around (and inside) us, and to not be prone to either faulty “first impressions” or to hard-wired prejudices.

It was over 10 years ago that I had my final major epiphany about those six coherent shadow stories. And it was Emma which gave me this flash of insight, because when I began to look at the novel through the lens of Frank as possible murderer of his aunt in order to end his “servitude” to her, I was shocked to find that the entire novel (and not just Frank’s character and actions) lit up for me like a Christmas tree of offstage shadowy threads, with a thousand textual hints about all of the characters, all suggesting something beyond the apparent surface meaning. All the holes (like the curious lack of mention of anyone in the downstairs at the Bates residence) are, to me, wormholes, which lead somewhere. And most of all, we have the oracle of Emma, Miss Bates, whose torrent of words sounds to Emma (and most readers) like trivial drivel to be ignored, or at most, enjoyed as comedy, but who actually is constantly speaking in code about what is happening in the shadows, especially the most serious matters unknown to Emma.

So as I read your last post, your approach to the question of why we don’t hear anything about the downstairs at the Bates house seems completely different from mine. You ask good questions, your sharp eye picks up many important leads, you are logical, and you in effect walk up to a number of wormholes. But in every instance you seem to stop at the edge, you do not jump into the holes to investigate where they lead, you stand at the edge and peer in a short way, and comment on what you see from the edge, but then stop, as if there could not possibly be anything of interest way down below worth looking for.

Whereas I have been identifying those wormholes for 12 ½ years and have developed an increasingly sophisticated technique and theoretical analytical structure, for systematically searching through them to get to the treasure that lies at the end of each of them.

With that introduction, I now want to briefly mention something major I realized about Mr. & Mrs. Cole yesterday, which relates to one thing you wrote:

“…So I conclude that it is not a social snobbishness (since Austen does show "lower" people in the book), but that the business people are actually not there. Perhaps they are rising people like the Coles, and have moved to a better house, though they still rent the drawing room floor of the old house (which decidedly needs improvements) to the Bateses…”

In the course of my posts the past two days, I shifted from my initial suggestion that the local magnate Mr. Knightley might be landlord to the Bateses, and proprietor of the brothel in the downstairs section, to thinking it might instead be Mr. Cole—an idea which, I soon learned from my files, had actually occurred to me 7 years ago, in passing, only to be promptly forgotten. And so I realized in a flash this time around that the Coles were indeed meant by JA to be recognized as the owners of the brothel that I believe was located on the ground floor of the Bates house. Here’s my brief chain of inference.

The key step in that process was for me to take seriously the extraordinary fact that Jane Austen gave them the surname “Cole”, which, as I have repeatedly demonstrated, is the surname of both the relatively benevolent madam in Fanny Hill, and also is the name of the “milliner” who employed Phila Austen in Covent Garden in London (at that time, known as a red light, as well as theatrical, district) at the same time as Cleland was writing Fanny Hill. How much more powerful is that allusion by JA if the Coles were themselves the owners and managers of a brothel—it is then no longer random, but extremely thematic!

So yesterday I quickly collected every word in Emma that pertains to the Coles (not that much overall), and at a future point will bring forward a thorough analysis of the many textual hints I see in those passages which fit perfectly with reading the Coles as brothel-owners. But for today, I will bring only one passage--one which, ironically, you yourself actually mentioned:

“…that the business people are actually not there. Perhaps they are rising people like the Coles, and have moved to a better house, though they still rent the drawing room floor…”

Here’s the full passage:

“The Coles had been settled some years in Highbury, and were very good sort of people—friendly, liberal, and unpretending; but, on the other hand, they were of low origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel. On their first coming into the country, they had lived in proportion to their income, quietly, keeping little company, and that little unexpensively; but the last year or two had brought them a considerable increase of means—the house in town had yielded greater profits, and fortune in general had smiled on them.

With their wealth, their views increased; their want of a larger house, their inclination for more company. They added to their house, to their number of servants, to their expenses of every sort; and by this time were, in fortune and style of living, second only to the family at Hartfield.”

I.e., the possibility you didn’t entertain, Diana—if you will, the “wormhole” you did not enter----is that it might be the Coles themselves who did live, as recently as a year or two earlier, in that very house that is occupied by the Bateses, but then the Coles moved out to their present much bigger home! Nothing we read anywhere else in the novel tells us that the Bateses have lived where they are living for a very long period of time, we all just tend to assume it, because we don’t hear otherwise.

And…there are other hints in the novel that something occurred, also about two years earlier, which resulted in Mr. Woodhouse not having been at Donwell Abbey for two years, and something else that Emma did not do, that Mr. Knightley does not want Mrs. Weston to remind him of. It is not overly fanciful to take these hints, and wonder whether there might be some common linkage among these seemingly unconnected details—some “big bang” in the common lives of the small band of friends and family circling around Hartfield which occurred a year or two earlier, and we (like modern day literary  cosmologists) can only see the aftermath of that explosion, and must extrapolate back in time to figure out what happened before.

And finally, I am not just pulling this out of my hat without any substance behind my specific guess re a brothel---it is because Jane Austen’s notoriously cryptic narrator actually raises this possibility when she tells us that “the HOUSE in town had yielded greater profits”.

Note that she doesn’t refer to a “shop”, “factory”, “business’, or “trade” in town (i.e., London) owned by Mr. Cole, but to a “house”.  Now, what sort of “house” in a city would “yield profits”? Was it an ordinary house rented out to a residential tenant, which, due to a recent spike in the real estate rental market in 1813, commanded a greater rental income? Plausible, I grant you—and I would not be surprised, given JA’s meticulous attention to detail, if Nancy or someone else were to dig up evidence that such a spike did actually occur in residential rents in London during the Regency Era.

But…it could also plausibly one of the very few sorts of “houses” which were providing profits to their owners way beyond mere rentals---i.e., a house of ill repute (or, as Polonius calls it in Hamlet, a “house of sale”)—and that is at least as plausible as an ordinary real estate rental.

And, it would also make perfect sense in that latter scenario that when the Coles outgrew their old Highbury digs, they would turn it to the same business that was already making their fortune in London – the sex trade. I could go on at length about all the other textual hints in this direction, but I will leave that for another post. I’ve given enough, I think, to make my point clear.

  

So……two faces (rental) or candlestick holder (brothel)? Or both?  I say, “BOTH!”  ;)

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The Hancock/Patriot Charade & Shakespearean Brothel subtexts in Emma: Part Two

In followup to my posts of the past several days, in particular my response two hours ago to Diane Reynolds, I am now back at my desk and able to easily search my old files, and I wish to add the following additional substantiating nuggets to the claims I’ve previously presented:

First, as I recalled, Jane Austen did indeed find the source for (what I claim is) her “Patriot/Hancock” charade in the very same book that also contained

(1) a version of Garrick’s Riddle (recalled by Mr. Woodhouse),

(2) the “woman” charade (previously given to Emma and Harriet by Mr. Elton), and

(3) as I explained in my posts last week about Margaret Doody, a different “courtship” charade from the one that JA wrote herself that appears in Chapter 9 of Emma.

Here’s what I wrote in my files 5 ½ years ago about that private charade:

“In both the 1791 and the 1810 editions of Enigmas, Charades, Transpositions, And Queries, I found the following earlier version of this charade:

I with a housemaid once was curst,

Whose name, when shorten’d, FORMS my first;

She, an ill-natured jade was reckon’d,

And in MY house oft BRED my second;

My THIRD’S A NAME ALL HEARTS REVERE,

THO’ FEW WHO BOAST IT NOW, ARE FOUND SINCERE.

The answer is given as “pat-riot” or “patriot”, but the clueing for that second syllable is pretty unsatisfying to me, and, I suspect, was very unsatisfying to the young sharp-witted Jane Austen as well.

Now, compare that inferior charade to the handwritten text of the much improved Austen version thereof:

 “I with a Housemaid once was curst,
Whose name when shortened MAKES my first;
She an ill natured Jade was reckoned,
And in THE house oft RAISED my second,
My WHOLE STANDS HIGHT IN LISTS OF FAME,
EXALTING E’EN GREAT CHATHAM’S NAME.”

Obviously, the words in all caps are the ones that Jane Austen changed. Note first that (just as she did when she tinkered with the “woman” charade, and also with the 1816 Byron poem about Napoleon that I wrote about several years ago), JA made changes which create the second hidden answer, “Hancock”, where it did not exist in the original.

Also note that while the original began with suggestions of bawdiness, those hints are not expressed in the punch lines, which are utterly chaste. Whereas, in JA’s version, the sexual innuendoes of the first two clues are heightened (“raised”  and “stands” are both phallic, whereas “bred” is not).  It could not be clearer that JA had the full intent to tweak the original to make it very sexual.

And…it also just occurred to me now as I was looking at JA’s charade, that there appears to be an acrostic that was not there in the original 1791 version, but which JA’s changing “Tho’” to “Exalting” brought into existence, as you can see here:

 “I with a Housemaid once was curst,
Whose name when shortened MAKES my first;

S    he an ill natured Jade was reckoned,
A   nd in THE house oft RAISED my second,
M   y WHOLE STANDS HIGHT IN LISTS OF FAME,
E    XALTING E’EN GREAT CHATHAM’S NAME.”

What makes this being intentional more likely, I think, is that “same” rhymes with “fame” and “name”, words which end the last two lines containing the acrostic! It’s pretty cool that the vertical acrostic therefore rhymes with the horizontal rhymes

Now, whether that acrostic “same” means more than that, I can’t say—is it a suggestion that both answers to the charade, “patriot” and “Hancock” are the SAME? In one sense they are—John Hancock was indeed considered (by Americans, at least) a patriot. Anyone got any other suggestions?

In any event, perhaps all of this finely wrought subtext will make some of you wonder why JA did not find a way to work this charade into Emma as well.  I.e., if she lavished such care on it, just as she did on all the nuances of the “courtship” charade that did make it into Emma, why let it go to waste, when it so clearly was connected thematically to Emma?

I obviously can’t answer with any certainty, but my best guess is that she feared that the reference to “an ill natured jade” was a little too suggestive of sexual meanings, when coupled with “ raised” and “stands”, plus (as I wrote earlier) the secret answer did point directly to her own aunt’s married surname. Such that if anyone in her family had guessed the answer, it might be hard to predict their reaction.

And I think JA did not want to take ANY chances that Emma would not get published-it was clearly the culmination of everything she had been doing as a writer for more than 25 years. Better to leave that one in the family vault, as a private joke. The “Prince of Whales” was sufficiently well disguised, such that even a reader familiar with Lamb’s “Triumph of the Whale” or Cruikshank’s caricature on the same theme would have difficulty detecting the dangerously subversive hidden answer.

And finally I did mention Shakespeare’s Pericles in my earlier posts, so I will conclude with quotations from four passages in Shakespeare’s plays, one of which is instantly recognizable, the first three of which contains wordplay relating to brothels, and the last of which reinforces my claim that Jane Fairfax is Jane Austen’s version of Marina, daughter of Pericles, who escapes the brothel to which she is sold by means of her singing and moral persuasiveness:

Hamlet, 1.1:

POLONIUS

'I saw him enter such a HOUSE OF SALE,'
Videlicet, a BROTHEL, or so forth….

[Recall Jane Fairfax’s famous comment about the sale of human flesh/intellect]

Hamlet, 3.1:

HAMLET: Get thee to a NUNNERY: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?

[Note the comically ridiculous explanations given to Emma about Jane’s future plans when Miss Campbell marries Mr. Dixon:

“With the fortitude of a devoted novitiate, she had resolved at one-and-twenty to complete the sacrifice, and retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever.”

This is all bubba meises---the reality is that, like Dionyza and Cleon in Pericles, the last thing the Campbells want is for the beautiful and accomplished Jane Fairfax to be a constant tempting reminder to Mr. Dixon of whom he might have married instead!

But my point is that JA also intended by this passage to echo Hamlet’s bitter rejection of Ophelia after (so I believe) he learns that she is pregnant by…..someone else at Elsinore—he’s saying in effect, you are a whore, so go to a whorehouse where you belong—and that is more or less what I believe Jane Fairfax has to contend with behind the scenes throughout the 9-month chronology of Emma]

Much Ado, 1.1

BENEDICK : With anger, with sickness, or with hunger, my lord, not with love: prove that ever I lose more blood with love than I will get again with drinking, pick out mine eyes with a ballad-maker's pen and hang me up at the door of a BROTHEL-HOUSE for THE SIGN OF BLIND CUPID.

[Garrick’s Riddle makes much of Cupid, quenching of flames, etc etc]

Pericles 5.0 (i.e., Prologue)

GOWER:

Marina thus the BROTHEL 'scapes, and chances
Into an honest house, our story says.
SHE SINGS LIKE ONE IMMORTAL, and she dances
As goddess-like to HER ADMIRED LAYS;
Deep clerks she dumbs; and with her needle composes
Nature's own shape, of bud, bird, branch, or berry,
That even her art sisters the natural roses;
Her inkle, silk, twin with the rubied cherry:
That PUPILS LACKS SHE NONE of noble race,
Who pour their bounty on her; and HER GAIN  
SHE GIVES THE CURSED BAWD…

Note that last part about how Marina’s “gain she gives the cursed bawd”. It is my interpretation that Miss Bates only gets room & some limited board as her compensation for acting as madam of the brothel downstairs, and that is why she still depends on charity from Mr. Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley to get by. It’s classic exploitation by sexual exploiters to keep their victims alive, but utterly dependent on them, indefinitely. I’d say Mr. & Mrs. Cole are not nice people, and so how poignant when Miss Bates and Jane attend the grand fete chez Cole in Chapter 38

Cheers, ARNIE

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