Eavesdropping in the Netherfield Shrubbery: much noting of Pride & Prejudice’s Much Ado subtext

In 2013, I first made the case that in Chapter 10 of Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen gives us broad hints that Elizabeth has actually eavesdropped on Miss Bingley’s teasing of Darcy in the Netherfield shrubbery: http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/08/we-have-caught-her-madam-what-fire-is.html

I.e., right after Caroline conjures up for Darcy the specter of Eliza’s and the Philipses’ portraits hanging on the wall at Pemberley alongside eminent Darcys, Caroline is not just being paranoid when she finds herself “in some confusion, lest they had been overheard”—it turns out that Jane Austen wants us to realize that she and Darcy have been overheard by Eliza!

How was (and still am) I so sure of this? Because:

It makes Eliza’s playful allusion to Gilpin’s famous three or four cows in a picturesque country meadow…..

“Then taking the disengaged arm of Mr. Darcy, she left Elizabeth to walk by herself. The path just admitted three. Mr. Darcy felt their rudeness, and immediately said:

"This walk is not wide enough for our party. We had better go into the avenue."

But Elizabeth, who had not the least inclination to remain with them, laughingly answered:

"No, no; stay where you are. You are CHARMINGLY GROUPED, and APPEAR TO UNCOMMON ADVANTAGE. The PICTURESQUE would be spoilt by admitting a fourth. Good-bye."

… much more interesting and meaningful. Why? Because then, instead of its being a random, showoffy allusion that comes out of nowhere into Lizzy’s mind, it can be seen as Eliza’s very specific, coded, riposte to Caroline’s satirical portrait-gallery scenario. I.e., Eliza slyly hints that she had indeed overheard Caroline talking trash about Lizzy and the Philips’s portraits, and Lizzy quick-wittily and aptly uses that specific overhearing, and her prior knowledge of Gilpin (showing us that Lizzy is a great reader after all, at least about art theory), to further tease Darcy about same.

In case this is not entirely clear: since Caroline’s satire was about portraits (a form of pictorial art), Lizzy channels Gilpin--of course the major authority on the picturesque in JA’s lifetime---and says, in effect, that she would not wish to “spoil” (or, to use Lady Catherine’s harsher term, “pollute”) the “picturesque” walls of Pemberley, by adding thereto her own “blowsy” portrait and that of her common aunt and uncle, which would occur were she to marry Darcy! Now, how much cleverer that makes Lizzy’s joke? A great deal!

But that’s only half of why I’m certain JA intended all of this--here’s the other half of my rationale:

If Lizzy has indeed overheard Caroline and Darcy from behind shrubbery, then this works as a strong and significant allusive echo of the two famous shrubbery eavesdropping scenes in Much Ado About Nothing, when first Benedick, and then Beatrice, are conned into believing they’re eavesdropping on the two groups of tricksters---who then “reveal” to these two gulls how much they each are (supposedly) only pretending to hate each other. And you know how that all turns out—the gulling is totally successful—and in the end, Benedick stops Beatrice’s mouth with a kiss, and the wedding bells ring for them.

Now, doesn’t this elaborate Shakespearean subtext attest to the greatness and erudition of Jane Austen, that she could come up with such a scene so light bright and sparkling on the surface, and yet so pregnant with meaning hidden beneath---and then to hide that meaning in plain sight for 2 centuries without its being detected, and yet, when it is explained, as above, it seems obvious?

Well, I’ m writing today to tell you that the above is actually only the first layer of a complex onion of allusion in P&P, that points back both to Much Ado, and also to another famous work of Europoean literature earlier than Shakespeare, one which Shakespeare himself alluded to covertly in Much Ado! Sounds absurd, I know, but if you read along with me during this series of posts, I will slowly and methodically peel back those layers, one  by one, and reveal more and more of  Austenian wonders, a true layer cake of spectacular literary allusion.

But for the rest of this post today, I want to confine myself to talking some more about the dance of wit between Darcy and Elizabeth during the first half of the novel, by identifying a continuation of the subtextual dialog between them that begins with the shrubbery passage in Chapter 10, but then continues in Chapter 11! Here’s how it goes.

Recall that Darcy, in Chapter 11 (i.e., right after the above shrubbery repartee), recounts to Lizzy and Caroline in the Netherfield salon, with excellent comic timing and cadence, the two reasons why he opted out of taking a turn about the room with them, as Caroline had teasingly invited him to do:

“…you are conscious that your figures APPEAR TO THE GREATEST ADVANTAGE in walking; if the first, I would be completely in your way, and if the second, I can admire you much better as I sit by the fire."

Did it ever occur to any of you that this was not a random bit of wit on Darcy’s part, but that it was actually Darcy’s witty response to Lizzy’s Gilpinesque witticism? Consider the parallels--we have Darcy opting out of being included in an indoors walking party, just as Lizzy has just opted out of being included in an outdoors walking party; we have Darcy picking up on Lizzy’s faux-rationale for not participating, based on the aesthetics of appearance and perspective; and in that regard, we have the close echoing of specific verbiage about “appearing to” “advantage” common to both passages, which  makes the connection completely obvious.

Once again, we have Jane Austen writing for the sharp elves, not heavy-handedly telling the reader that this is happening, just beneath the surface of the action, but showing it in a number of ways to the reader who is paying close attention and who does not underestimate JA’s skill, erudition, and trickiness.

So now we see how JA builds a chain of shadows. If we recognize this echo of Chapter 10, it tells us that it is Darcy intentionally counterthrusting in code in response to Elizabeth’s prior thrust of wit, also in code. But if we don’t recognize that Lizzy was teasing him right before, we don’t realize that he’s responding, rather than just initiating.

And if you step back and consider all of the above, isn’t this the quintessence of one of the meanings Darcy surely had in mind at Rosings when he smiled at Lizzy and said that neither of them performed to strangers? He’s saying, in effect, we’ve been speaking to each other in code for quite a while now, and don’t we seem to understand each perfectly? Except of course, as I have argued for several years now, Darcy takes this inference too far, and his believing that Lizzy has been making sexual innuendoes directed at him is a major reason why he is so shocked when she turns down his first proposal at Hunsford. But it’s all of a piece, and to miss out on this coded repartee is to lose the spiciest part of it!

To the best of my knowledge, after diligent search, the above sequential gems of subtle subtext has never previously been noticed by any Austen scholar.

And that’s just the beginning. In my next post, I will show how this coded repartee in Chapters 10 and 11, brilliant as it is, is only a warmup for the crowning touches (regarding the visual aesthetics and beauty), which are still to come much later in the novel. As you’ll see, they come to a climax when the action of the novel finally does reach Pemberley, because that is when Caroline’s satirical “prophecy” is fulfilled in topsy-turvy ironic fashion. I.e., when Lizzy gazes up at Darcy’s portrait on the wall and imagines to herself that she might have been mistress of Pemberley, she is also imagining that her own portrait might indeed have hung on its hallowed walls, and that her being there alongside Darcy and his family would have been truly “picturesque after all, she aches with regret.

But before I close today, I want to take one last, large step further outside the interpretive box, deep into the intellectual shrubbery, if you will, and suggest to you that JA decisively echoed those eavesdropping scenes in Much Ado About Nothing for one more very important reason—i.e., in order to give us a giant and shocking clue about Caroline Bingley! But what?

I say that by drawing an implicit parallel between Caroline being overheard in the Netherfield shrubbery and the tricksters intentionally allowing themselves to be overheard in Leonato’s gardens, JA not only winks to the alert reader that Eliza has overheard every word Caroline said, setting up the coded repartee I’ve described, but also that Caroline—like Shakespeare’s tricksters---deliberately allows herself to be overheard by Elizabeth!

Now, why in the world would Caroline do this??? After all, isn’t it “obvious” that she wants to marry Darcy, and therefore she repeatedly disses Eliza to him out of pure jealousy? Well, while I acknowledge that this is of course the most plausible and obvious interpretation of Caroline’s motivations, there is another plausible interpretation, within which we can see Caroline as merely playing a role, a part in a scheme of deception of which Elizabeth is completely unaware, for the purpose not of separating Lizzy from Darcy, but of provoking them to fall in love, by using reverse-psychology tactics very similar to those employed by Prospero in The Tempest. Lost in Austen suggests that Caroline is a lesbian—what if that is not just fanfic fantasy, but subtext intended by JA herself? That would fit with a Caroline Bingley who wanted to wind up living close to the woman she is attracted to---Jane Bingley?

Jane Austen would have found numerous models in Shakespeare, in addition to the Much Ado tricksters, for characters who pretend to be hostile, when they’re really not. You’ll recall that in Tempest the audience is eventually shown that Prospero has merely pretended to angrily disapprove of Miranda’s brave new world of romantic love with Ferdinand, precisely so as to provoke a boomerang effect:

PROSPERO:

If I have too austerely punish'd you,
Your compensation makes amends, for I
Have given you here a third of mine own life,
Or that for which I live; who once again
I tender to thy hand: all thy vexations
Were but my trials of thy love and thou
Hast strangely stood the test here, afore Heaven,
I ratify this my rich gift. O Ferdinand,
Do not smile at me that I boast her off,
For thou shalt find she will outstrip all praise
And make it halt behind her.

And The Tempest and P&P have been connected before now. As I’ve written previously, this reverse-psychology interpretation fits perfectly with the interpretation by Aldous Huxley (of course, the author of Brave New World) of P&P in Huxley’s screenplay for the 1940 P&P1, when he depicts Lady Catherine as a covert matchmaker for Darcy & Elizabeth, deploying that same sort of reverse-psychology tactics as Prospero when she descends on Longbourn in Chapter 56.

And there I will stop for today, but give you assurance that in my coming posts I will show not only how Jane Austen was inspired by Much Ado (and that earlier literary work I haven’t yet named), but how she studied and penetrated to the subtext of those works as well, better than any scholar of her era, and in some ways better than those earlier works have ever been penetrated!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Ben Affleck, in a tight place, deserves both our praise and our censure

Everyone paying any attention of late to the news cycle knows about the recent Wikileaks revelation that Ben Affleck took an embarrassing and surprising wrong turn, when he convinced Henry Louis Gates to omit mention of Affleck’s slave-owning ancestor in an interview on Gates’s “Finding Your Roots” PBS series. In particular, Affleck’s omission took on the darker shade of hypocrisy, when viewed through the lens of his unconcealed pride (vividly expressed onscreen) in his Revolutionary War patriot ancestry.  

So I, like most of Affleck’s many fans, was very glad, but not at all surprised (because it really was his only good option), to see Good Will Hunting’s best buddy step up quickly and do the right thing, and  fess up to his all-too-human proneness to moral equivocation.

The reason for my post, however, is not to sit in judgment on Ben Affleck, but to point out something Affleck wrote in his apology, below, that should catch the eye of every true Janeite, especially in this context of the embarrassing exposure of hypocrisy. See if you spot it in the following paragraph (with the help of the big hint in my Subject Line):

[Affleck] “I regret my initial thoughts that the issue of slavery not be included in the story. We deserve neither credit nor blame for our ancestors and the degree of interest in this story suggests that we are, as a nation, still grappling with the terrible legacy of slavery. It is an examination well worth continuing. I am glad that my story, however indirectly, will contribute to that discussion. While I don’t like that the guy is an ancestor, I am happy that aspect of our country’s history is being talked about.”

Breathes there a Janeite with memory so impaired that (s)he fails to hear the unmistakable echo of the following memorable exchange in the Netherfield salon?:

"Miss Eliza Bennet," said Miss Bingley, "despises cards. She is a great reader, and has no pleasure in anything else."

"I deserve neither such praise nor such censure," cried Elizabeth; "I am not a great reader, and I have pleasure in many things."

Off the bat, I’d have put my money on Ben Affleck being familiar enough with the above passage from Pride & Prejudice to have had it consciously in mind, and to have sought the comfort of Austenesque epigrammatism, when he composed the climactic paragraph of his delicate mea culpa. But it took me all of 15 minutes of online searching to confirm that there are not one but three important women in his life who would each seem to have played a pivotal role in leading him to lean on Jane Austen, because (as Kipling so deftly put it) “there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place.”

First, it was only last year that his co-star in the acclaimed film Gone Girl was Rosamund Pike, who, as  all Janeites also of course know, played Jane Bennet in the 2005 Joe Wright P&P.

Second, I quickly also learned from IMDB (since I have not yet seen Gone Girl) that the film contains a scene in which their two lead characters Nick and Amy have sex in a bookstore, sex kindled by a literary scavenger hunt that Amy leads Nick on, which leads to…Pride & Prejudice! Here’s the scene:

Nick is wearing a backpack, holding an Amy-blue CLUE as he makes his way; Amy follows, all grins.

AMY (voiceover) And compromise.. .and more work. Abandon all hope, ye who enter.

Nick is going past Z, past T, past O, past H.

AMY (voiceover): Well it’s not true. Not for me and Nick. With us, two years—it’s just good.

NICK I’m not crazy: “When young Amy’s hope did wane, she wandered here in search of Jane.”

Austen right?

They arrive at the A’s.

NICK: “You were an alienated teen. . . and only Elizabeth Bennet understood you.”

He pulls out Pride and Prejudice. A BLUE ENVELOPE inside. She kisses him. He reads the next

clue.

NICK: You naughty minx.

She kisses him again, deeply. Looks around. Stacks are empty.

AMY: Technically we’re supposed to fuck at the next stop.   

NICK: In keeping with tradition.

She’s already undoing his belt. Hand inside his jeans.

AMY: We’ve never fucked in a bookstore.

NICK: God bless Jane Austen.

Now, that would be enough, I think, to establish Ben Affleck’s (whom we  already knew to be a very smart and well-read fellow) likely having read Pride & Prejudice, and therefore to have had Elizabeth Bennet’s famous bon mot about praise and censure in mind when he composed his version of same.

But that’s only the beginning. Later in the film, wer read the following in the so-called “Cool Girl” monologue for Amy that the author Gillian Flynn included both in her novel and (in shortened form) in her own screenplay for same as well:

AMY: “I waited patiently - years - for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we'd say, Yeah, he's a Cool Guy.”

But that’s still not all. In the final paragraph of Nick’s first person narration in the novel, we read these edgy ruminations:

“It had to be me who put her there [in prison]. It was my responsibility. Just as Amy took the credit for making me my best self, I had to take the blame for bringing the madness to bloom in Amy. “

Wow! And now for the icing on the Gillian Flynn cake. Last year, she gave the following answer to the question “Who’s your favorite author?” in an interview:

“I could never name a single author, but whenever I want to be inspired (and perhaps a bit daunted), I read Joyce Carol Oates, Dennis Lehane, Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore, Martin Amis, and of course Jane Austen.”

Of course Jane Austen indeed!

But here’s another flavor of icing on the cake. I wondered whether Jennifer Garner might have been yet another female Austenesque voice whispering in husband Ben’s ear, leading him to savor the pleasure of the best sort of book. And would you believe that the following was the lead paragraph in a 2009 article about her?:

“Jennifer Garner's three-year-old daughter reads Jane Austen novels.

The 'Invention of Lying' actress is keen for her children - Violet and eight-month-old Seraphina, her kids with husband Ben Affleck - to have a broad range of interests, and is already encouraging Violet to read classic literature. Lynda Obst, who produced new movie 'The Invention of Lying', revealed: "Most of the time that I did spend with her when it was off-set, Violet was cooking with her, or reading Jane Austen, or doing one of these remarkable things that Violet tends to do.”

So, I think it very safe to say that while Ben Affleck still deserves our censure for his genealogical faux pas, he certainly deserves our praise both for excellent damage control, and also particularly good taste in the choice of an author to lean on in a tight place!

And....this post would not be complete without one serendipitous coincidence, so I invite you to consider the irony of Ben Affleck's attempt to conceal his slave-owner ancestor, in light of my recent posts about the slavery subtext of Pride & Prejudice!:

  http://tinyurl.com/oqh8e9k Topsy-Turvy Elizabeth Bennet as the Bewitching Slave Girl of Pride & Prejudice

 Uncle Tom’s Cabin & Darcy’s Wet Blouse: From Stowe-mania to Austenmania, the whitewash repeats itself

http://tinyurl.com/mpvo745 

Cheers,

ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Jane Austen's garden of punny, low delights

If I somehow found myself at Box Hill, and Frank Churchill limited everyone present to only two puns moderately clever, as quintessential examples of Jane Austen's enormous love of quibbles (Samuel Johnson's word for "puns"), I believe I would bring forward the following two examples, one from her letters and one from her novels:

First, there is the pun I discovered nearly a decade ago in Jane Austen's Letter 57 dated 10/9/1808, written by Jane to sister Cassandra. She casually drops it in, in the midst of a discussion of the repair and dyeing of gowns, and it is about a man who may not have ever existed in reality, but only in Jane Austen's satirical imagination:

"As for Mr. Floor, he is at present rather low in our estimation..."

If you don't get the joke at first, think about it--------eventually you will realize why it is funny that Mr. Floor is "low" in any way, shape, or form.   ;)

And it tells you everything you need to know about Deirdre Le Faye and her extreme tone-deafness to Jane Austen's irony and punning that her annotation for Mr. Floor is (I kid you not):

"Tradesman in Southampton, perhaps a dyer"

Had Le Faye been monitoring activity in Janeites and Austen-L, she might have amended her annotation for her 2012 Fourth Edition.....or, as she said to me at Chawton House in 2009, she still might have maintained that "she didn't believe a word of it!"


And now, for an equally groanworthy pun, which Jane Austen wickedly and audaciously hid in plain sight at one of the most dramatic moments in her most famous novel, the instant when Mr. Darcy appears out of nowhere at Pemberley:

"…[Elizabeth] had instinctively turned away; but stopping on his approach, received his compliments with an embarrassment impossible to be overcome. Had his first appearance, or his resemblance to the picture they had just been examining, been insufficient to assure the other two that they now saw Mr. Darcy, the gardener's expression of surprise, on beholding his master, must immediately have told it."

To recognize the clever pun, you have to remember that at the instant we read about "THE GARDENER'S expression of surprise",  "the other two" unnamed persons who see Mr. Darcy in addition to Elizabeth and the Pemberley gardener, two persons whom pretty much all readers of the novel would imagine are equally surprised to see Mr. Darcy, are none other than........THE GARDINERS!   I.e., how remarkably clever of Jane Austen to find a way to echo the Gardiners's presumed surprise in a phrase referring to the gardener's surprise!

Except.....there's just one final twist.  I referred to "pretty much all readers of the novel", because I am the first among what I imagine is still a very tiny group of readers of P&P from 1813 to the present who has ever believed that the Gardiners are actually NOT in the slightest bit surprised to see Mr. Darcy at that instant! I.e., it has been my interpretation of P&P for the past decade that this dramatic moment in Chapter 43 is actually the culmination of a complex scheme hatched only eight chapters earlier, right after Elizabeth turns down his proposal, by none other than Mr. Darcy himself. This moment is the first real climax (among several) in a "play" written and directed by  Mr. Darcy for the benefit of an audience of one--Elizabeth Bennet--a performance starring not only Darcy and the Gardiners, but also the gardEner and the best performer of them all, Mrs. Reynolds,----a grande dame who successfully delivers the cock-and-bull story to Elizabeth about what a great guy Darcy has always been, and what a rogue Wickham has always been!

So, Jane Austen's cleverness is thus in effect doubled, in that the subliminal echo of the Gardiner's presumed surprise is actually a false echo!


And, in conclusion, I believe Frank and Emma would have found these two examples more than moderately clever, but I will just have to be content to be unable to see the expression of surprise on the faces of those of you reading this post who are unfamiliar with my take on the shadow story of P&P, as to which I've just given you a special sampling, above!

But you are all most heartily welcome and invited to browse in my blog for more bits and pieces of same....



Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter