The
bottom line of my radical new interpretation 2 years ago, as I presented my final
textual evidence, was as follows:
"My
fingers," said Elizabeth, "do not move over this instrument in the
masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or
rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always
supposed it to be my own fault—because I will not take the trouble of
practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other
woman's of superior execution."
As I have previously suggested, Darcy hears that as an over-the-top sexual
come-on, requiring only that the literate Darcy hear “instrument” according to
Cleland’s euphemistic use of that word in Fanny
Hill—and otherwise Lizzy’s fingers literally do all the walking, so to speak. At this point, Darcy is no longer
puzzled at Lizzy’s seeming deep ambivalence about him. He flashes on the notion
that Lizzy is intentionally engaging in very audacious sexual repartee, and is
strongly implying to him that she is not going to explicitly tell him how much
she desires him sexually, so she is taking the next best step, and
intentionally hinting at it repeatedly.
And that’s what he means by “we
neither perform to strangers”---i.e., he smiles
because he gives her exactly what he believes she wants to hear, a coded
acknowledgment that he “gets” her coded sexual messages! Their mutual coded
exchange of sexual messages is for their mutual ears only, and is not intended
to be understood by anyone else present, most of all the nosy matchmaking
wannabe “stranger “ Lady Catherine, seated a dozen feet away.
And, final inspired touch, “No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you can
think anything wanting” is a coded version of
“I, Darcy, by virtue of having finally taken all your hints, have now
been admitted to the privilege of really
hearing what your coded innuendoes are
saying to me, and now I know that I no longer
think anything wanting in terms of the sexual partner I want—you!
The only problem is—Darcy’s wrong! Lizzy is not
consciously leading him on, she is only “leaking” her intense attraction to him, which she is
working overtime to repress.
Sound vaguely familiar? It should! This is a reiteration of what we read more
than a dozen chapters earlier, when Mr. Collins proposed to Lizzy, and he misinterpreted
her negative response as a kind of conduct-book implication of acceptance. Some
Austen scholars have previously noted veiled parodic parallels between Darcy
and Collins as suitors—but this one tops them all!
And Darcy’s overconfident misinterpretation of Lizzy’s verbal repartee is one very
important reason why Darcy is so astonished when Lizzy rejects his first
proposal in Chapter 34. Yes, he’s also shocked in part simply because he is an
arrogant jerk who just assumes that women will swoon for him—that’s his bad. But it’s also partly because
Lizzy has been giving him so many unconscious come-ons, culminating in that
Chapter 31 exchange, which cumulatively and reasonably lead him to believe she
really wants him to make his move, and soon---and
that’s her bad, even if she did it unconsciously
and without intent to cause him pain---her actual words spoken to him when she rejects
his proposal, are spoken by her without understanding half of their full
import.” END QUOTE FROM MY 1/25/13 POST
If
the above (together with all the many, less subtextual interpretations of Darcy’s
memorable aphorism that have been made over the last few decades by other Austen
scholars) were all there was to find in “we neither perform to strangers”, that
(as with the Passover recitation of the plagues) would be enough…to establish Jane Austen as a writer of unbelievably subtle skill
and genius.
However,
that is actually only the beginning, as I will now use this same textual example
to demonstrate how tightly and complexly interwoven all the threads of this superficially
“light bright and sparkling” novel really
are. It turns out that if we follow the words “perform” and “stranger”, they
lead us to the growing realization that, hidden in plain textual sight, Darcy’s
aphorism turns out to be the hub of a wheel of intricate meaning and wordplay
that runs from the beginning of the novel to the end!
For
the remainder of this post, then, let me take you for one turn round the wheel
that is Pride & Prejudice, and at
each point along the circumference I will show you another interesting spoke on
the wheel of wordplay.
Chapter 3: Before we know
anything about him, Bingley is the man in question when we read that after the
Meryton Assembly, Mr. Bennet "had rather hoped that his wife's views on
the STRANGER would be disappointed; but he soon found out that he had a
different story to hear.". This means that he perversely had rather hoped
Bingley would be completely uninterested in any of the Bennet girls, even
though Mr. Bennet had previously performed
his duties to his daughters by visiting Bingley secretly.
Chapter 6: Lizzy tells Charlotte "You are a very STRANGE creature by
way of a friend!—always wanting me to play and sing before anybody and
everybody!". I.e., Elizabeth calls Charlotte a "strange"
(meaning, not very good) friend, for having put Elizabeth on the spot,
compelling her to perform to the strangers who’ve just come to Meryton!
Chapter 10: " Mrs. Hurst sang with her sister, and while they were thus
employed, Elizabeth could not help observing, as she turned over some
music-books that lay on the instrument, how frequently Mr. Darcy's eyes were
fixed on her. She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of
admiration to so great a man; and yet that he should look at her because he
disliked her, was still more STRANGE. ". Here we have a foreshadowing of
the famous Ch. 31 scene at Rosings, in that Lizzy feels like she is onstage with
Darcy as the audience, even though she is only in proximity to the piano,
leafing through music books, while the Bingley sisters perform.
Chapter 13: Mr. Collins is teasingly identified by Mr. Bennet as a stranger (leading
his wife to mistakenly infer that he is again talking about Bingley, who you
recall was the “stranger” in Chapter 3!). Then Mr. Bennet in effect performs to
the new stranger, Mr. Collins, by pretending to admire Collins's flattery
technique, while all the same (shades of the scheming, almost cruel tricksters
in Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night) actually amusing himself
(and Lizzy) by giving Mr. Collins the cues he requires in order to parade his own
absurdity, as the narrator tells us Mr. Bennet hoped for. And Mr. Collins unwittingly
adds an echo, by speaking about his eagerness to “perform” his duties as a
cleric in Hunsford to the strangers who will become his congregants.
Chapter 15: This time it’s Wickham who is identified as a handsome
stranger when Lizzy first sees him and has no idea who he is--and it does not
take long before Wickham charms Lizzy. He performs to her, whom he barely knows
and therefore is still a stranger to her, the role of aggrieved victim, as
Lizzy eventually realizes (see Chapter 36, below).
Chapter
18: Mary Bennet pushes forward to perform for strangers, as well as friends and
family, at the Netherfield ball, but gets shot down by her father so
humiliatingly that even Elizabeth is chagrined.
In this same Chapter 18, that’s when the faithfulness of Elizabeth’s “performance”
in drawing the “portrait” of Darcy’s character is debated by the two of them,
and he then famously fears that her “performance” would reflect no credit on
either. Clearly Darcy wittily alludes to this repartee when they next spar at
Rosings in Chapter 31.
And
then Collins once again, as in Chapter 13, unwittingly chimes in by performing his
self-styled “duty” to perform his flattery dance for Darcy this time around.
Chapter
20: Mr. Bennet performs his greatest zinger at his wife, and again, the word “stranger”
creeps in as he issues Lizzy his fateful faux-edict:
“From
this day you must be a STRANGER to one of your parents. Your mother will never
see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again
if you do."
Chapter
29: Lady Catherine finds it “very strange” that Eliza and her sisters were not
taught to perform on the pianoforte.
Chapter
31: The hub of the wheel, as explained above, and nearly exactly halfway
through the novel.
Chapter
36 is the passage I mentioned earlier in my discussion of Chapter 15, when
Eliza reflects in hindsight on how Wickham gave her way Too Much Information
too soon:
“She
was now struck with the impropriety of such communications to a STRANGER, and
wondered it had escaped her before.”
Chapter
43: In many ways, this is the most interesting, as it quirkily echoes Mr.
Bennet’s Chapter 20 edict to Eliza, in that, as she now strolls around
Pemberley, she suddenly repeatedly thinks of herself as a “stranger” there in a kind of strange land. And, an
added echo, she sees his family portraits, which reminds us of her repartee
with Darcy in Chapter 18 about her “performance” in taking his “portrait”. This
subliminal wordplay reminds us that now her “performance” gives him all the
credit he wants, and then some!
Chapter
49: Uncle Gardiner announces that if Mr. Bennet “performs” the modest famous
payment obligations agreed upon with Wickham, then the very strange marriage of
Lydia and Wickham will occur.
Chapter
51: It is Eliza who this time refers to Darcy as a stranger to the Bennet family
who has mysteriously performed astonishing actions on its behalf:
"You may readily comprehend…what
my curiosity must be to know how a person unconnected with any of us, and
(comparatively speaking) a STRANGER to our family, should have been amongst you
at such a time….."
Chapter 52: Then, when Eliza tells Wickham
about Lady Catherine, she returns to the same meaning of “strange” that she
applied to Charlotte way back in Chapter 6:
"And what did [Lady Catherine]
say?"
"That you were gone into the
army, and she was afraid had—not turned out well. At such a distance as that,
you know, things are STRANGELY misrepresented."
"Certainly," he replied,
biting his lips. Elizabeth hoped she had silenced him…..”
Chapter 57: And finally, we have
Elizabeth reacting to her father’s wit (recalling his performance with Collins
back in Chapter 13, we one more time get that word “strange”:
“For what do we live, but to make
sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?"
"Oh!" cried Elizabeth,
"I am excessively diverted. But it is so STRANGE!"
Now,
why is it that mainstream Austen scholarship contains so little of the kind of textual analysis that I have just laid out
for you, above? I claim that it’s because even the best Austen scholars have
grossly underestimated the intricacy and subtlety of her literary genius. It’s
as if musicologists had been writing analysis of the masterworks of Bach,
Beethoven, Mozart, et al, for two centuries, and yet none of them realized they
ought to include in their analysis the most basic musical level of specific notes,
themes and motifs, and to show how they are varied in a multitude of ways which
provides both unity and infinite variety.
In
Jane Austen, there has been far too little analysis of the words and phrases in
her novels, and how she varies them throughout each novel—indeed, between novels
as well!—to achieve higher level effects.
And
that brings me to perhaps is the final richest irony hidden inside Darcy’s
epigram. We may fairly say that Jane Austen the writer took the greatest
delight in “performing” to the “strangers” who would read her novels! And how
poignant yet thrilling it is to realize that more readers are reading Jane
Austen today than the sum total of all her readers from publication through,
say, 1980—and we may expect that number to keep growing worldwide at a steady
pace for many decades to come.
But
that authorial “performance” which inspires such fanatical devotion among so
many of us Janeites is anything but simple—on one level, she is entertaining
us; on another, enlightening us; on still another, moving us emotionally. And,
unlike Eliza, JA must have practiced her “performance” a great deal, especially
during the 15 years between her initial writing of First Impressions, and the final production of Pride & Prejudice. When you’re a great genius, autodidacticism
is the route to mastery—she didn’t need a “governess” to teach her how to
write, as Lady Catherine might have suggested had she thought novel writing a
proper accomplishment of a young lady---Jane Austen learned from the only role
model on her level who had something to teach her that she could not figure out
herself—Shakespeare.
But
on the deepest level, I assert that in constructing all her novels as double
stories, she in effect “performs” in the same sense that Mr. Bennet “performs”
to Mr. Collins---she baits and seduces us into reading her novels one way,
while hoping that one day, upon rereading, we will realize that we’ve been had
by her disingenuous performance as a writer-and that’s when we really see her
shadow stories (or rather hear the polyphony of the combination of her overt
and shadow stories) for the amazing creations that they are.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
