“…I had not known you a month…" “Never, since reading Jane's second letter…” Lizzy’s TWIN suitors

I want to return the favor to Diane Reynolds that she gave me this morning with her rich  response to my post about Elizabeth Bennet’s unconsciously blaming Darcy for Wickham’s deserting her. Specifically, I will pick up on one of Diane’s comments, and show how it yokes together, in ironic fashion, two passages a dozen chapters apart in Pride & Prejudice.

Diane wrote: “She may have thought the day before how wonderful to be mistress of Pemberley, but it is really not until Wickham is off the market that she really, truly entertains the idea. And she understands the situation in all its irony: what makes it possible that she could change her feelings towards Darcy ([Wickham's] elopement) is what exactly will make (she thinks) the marriage with Darcy impossible (the disgrace of the elopement): she "sighed at the perverseness of those feelings which would NOW have promoted it continuance [the relationship with Darcy], and would formerly have rejoiced in its termination." The NOW is NOW--after Wickham is gone to her.

Austen then goes on to tell us that Wickham is the first love and Darcy the consolation prize: "her partiality for Wickham and  ... its ill success" will now lead Lizzie "to seek the other less interesting mode of attachment" based on "gratitude and esteem."  In other words, NOW Lizzie is willing to settle.”

END QUOTE FROM DIANE’S POST

Diane, your above comment zeroes in on how strongly JA signals that Elizabeth has never stopped (unconsciously?) holding onto hope that Wickham will come back to her, especially after she is knocked out by the one-two punch of Jane’s two letters which she reads one right after the other. Now, take a closer look at this bit of narration of Lizzy’s thoughts that you quoted:

“Never, since reading Jane's second letter, had she entertained a hope of Wickham's meaning to marry her. No one but Jane, she thought, could flatter herself with such an expectation. Surprise was the least of her feelings on this development.”

It’s clear that you’ve recognized the negative implication of that first sentence. I.e., Lizzy’s marks the milestone of reading of Jane’s second letter as the tombstone for her doomed hope that Wickham might propose to her. This tells us that Lizzy must have held on to that expectation right up till that moment!

And it makes sense that Lizzy would not have given up hope, since she observe her learning from Lydia in Chapter 39 that Wickham’s courtship of Miss King has failed:

“…Well, but now for my news; it is about dear Wickham; too good for the waiter, is it not? There is no danger of Wickham's marrying Mary King. There's for you! She is gone down to her uncle at Liverpool: gone to stay. Wickham is safe."

"And Mary King is safe!" added Elizabeth; "safe from a connection imprudent as to fortune."

"She is a great fool for going away, if she liked him."

"But I hope there is no strong attachment on either side," said Jane.

"I am sure there is not on his. I will answer for it, he never cared three straws about her—who could about such a nasty little freckled thing?"

Elizabeth was shocked to think that, however incapable of such coarseness of expression herself, the coarseness of the sentiment was little other than her own breast had harboured and fancied liberal! “

In other words, Elizabeth can only admit to herself that she has been thinking the same uncharitable thoughts about Miss King that Lydia speaks aloud, and for the same reasons---jealousy and envy!

But that’s all warmup for the amazing connection of that passage to another, more famous one, in P&P, a connection I’ve already flagged in my Subject Line. I.e., those rueful words spoken to herself by Lizzy in Chapter 46, mourning the death of hope of Wickham’s marrying her, constitute Jane Austen’s Mozartean counterpoint to, and echo of, the milestone-marking words spoken by Lizzy to Darcy in Chapter 34, while rejecting his proposal, and in effect sentencing his hopes to a shockingly unexpected demise:

“…I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry."

“I had not known you a month….” and “Never, since reading Jane’s second letter…”  The parallelism between the two is breathtaking. Each of these expressions of Lizzy’s perceptions of her two primary suitors unconsciously reveal the opposite of what they seem to say on the surface. Lizzy’s kiss-off to Darcy reveals that she has been unconsciously considering marriage to him since knowing him less than a month. And then Lizzy’s reflections on Wickham reveal that she was still unconsciously considering marriage to him until she read Jane’s second letter. These two passages are a matched pair of bookends --  and how typical of Jane Austen to show great authorial restraint in resisting inserting the heavy handed textual prompts that lesser authors routinely insert, fearing that the dull elves among their readers will miss the parallel.

And that’s all I’ve got for now on that point, Diane, but before I close, I also want to add a late modification of my first response to your final comment about Lizzy settling for her second choice, Darcy:

“This is MP is reverse. This is what could have happened to Fanny had she received the letter that Edmund had married Mary." 

The assumption you make, which is indeed the one most Janeites would make, is that Edmund is Fanny’s first choice, and only Edmund’s marrying Mary would have induced her to marry Henry Crawford. I take a different view. I think this is the courtship climax of MP not in reverse, but in disguise! By this I mean, that just as Wickham’s character is assassinated by Darcy (and his minions) in the last volume of P&P, so too is Henry’s character assassinated in the last volume of MP! And, even though Fanny has indeed been strongly attached to Edmund since puberty, I’ve previously written about the strong romantic attraction that Henry exerts over Fanny, once he puts his mind to making a hole in her heart. I believe that in the aftermath of that dazzlingly romantic stroll on the pier at Portsmouth, Fanny’s heart has been successfully pierced, and Fanny is holding on to her old feelings for Edmund by a fraying thread.

So, in both P&P and MP, then, I see Lizzy and Fanny as both being deeply in denial as to the intensity of their feelings for the “rakes” who court them.

And don’t even get me talking about similar patterns of romantic denouement vis a vis Willoughby, Frank, and cousin Elliot---all birds of that same feather---but that’s a topic for another post!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode onTwitter

Why Elizabeth takes an eager interest in Wickham's concerns even after he has just deserted her for Miss King

Yesterday evening, while surfing for interesting Austen material in Twitter, I was struck by a thunderbolt, in the form of the following Tweet by Bethany Villarreal aka  @BetaniAnne, posted nearly a week ago:

“Honestly confused why Lizzy was so offended Darcy "hurt" Wickham after the latter picked another girl #prideandprejudice #notyourboyfriend”

As I read this, I quickly realized that I could not answer it off the top of my head. Indeed, it was a real head scratcher, once you really thought about it. Why would Lizzy get so worked up about Darcy’s having done Wickham wrong, when Wickham had himself just done Lizzy very wrong, by deserting her, without so much as a Dear Lizzy letter, in favor of his mercenary pursuit of the new heiress the freckly Miss King.

Jane Austen’s coy narrator did not give us any hints as to why Lizzy would hurl an accusation at Darcy about Wickham, but, with a few minutes thought, I was able to come up with two tentative explanations for what was going on inside Lizzy’s head:

THEORY ONE: Lizzy was such an evolved human being, that even though Wickham had just dropped her like a hot potato, an action which would destroy any sympathy for him in the heart of a woman so scorned, Lizzy nonetheless was able to keep separate in her heart her sadness at his bad action towards her from the sympathy she felt for him for the harm she believed he had suffered at Darcy’s hands.

THEORY TWO: Lizzy was so angry at Darcy that she just threw the kitchen sink at him, and that included his previously reported crimes against Wickham. But inside, Lizzy no longer felt sympathy for Wickham, but Darcy was not worthy of knowing that little fact. And further, since she figured that Darcy could easily have heard about Wickham’s interest in Lizzy while in Meryton, but that Darcy didn’t know that Wickham had deserted Lizzy (because he and the Bingleys had already left Meryton before that occurred, and so why would he even care), she thought that she could really jab the jealousy needle in --- i.e., let Darcy believe that she was still interested in Wickham, and, indeed, preferred Wickham to Darcy. Let Darcy twist in the wind, thinking that Lizzy preferred Wickham to Darcy-that would be sweet revenge indeed!

Of the two theories, the second had greater appeal for me, as I just didn’t think Lizzy was that good of an actress, so as to be able to sound so genuinely aggrieved at Darcy having done Wickham wrong, if it was not true. But I then realized, it was not necessary to guess. Everything I know about Jane Austen’s writing M.O., especially in P&P, which she had revised a number of times over 15 years, told me that she must have already anticipated this question—indeed, that she had written the novel so as to provoke some sharp elves to ask that very question that Bethan Villarreal had Tweeted---and therefore, she must have played fair, and given us the answer somewhere in the text of the novel—indeed, exactly where we’d expect to find it. So I went back to the very spot where it should have been, in Chapter 34, during the first proposal scene……….and I found it immediately!!!!

See if you can find it. If you can’t, don’t worry, I give my answer below, right after the quoted passage, which (as will be obvious) begins right after Lizzy confronts Darcy with his having convinced Bingley to abandon Jane. But don’t give up with trying hard, you may surprise yourself by finding the answer on your own, armed with my assurance to you that the clues are there, like low hanging textual fruit:

With assumed tranquility he then replied: "I have no wish of denying that I did everything in my power to separate my friend from your sister, or that I rejoice in my success. Towards him I have been kinder than towards myself."

Elizabeth disdained the appearance of noticing this civil reflection, but its meaning did not escape, nor was it likely to conciliate her.

"But it is not merely this affair," she continued, "on which my dislike is founded. Long before it had taken place my opinion of you was decided. Your character was unfolded in the recital which I received many months ago from Mr. Wickham. On this subject, what can you have to say? In what imaginary act of friendship can you here defend yourself? or under what misrepresentation can you here impose upon others?"

"You take an eager interest in that gentleman's concerns," said Darcy, in a less tranquil tone, and with a heightened colour.

"Who that knows what his misfortunes have been, can help feeling an interest in him?"

"His misfortunes!" repeated Darcy contemptuously; "yes, his misfortunes have been great indeed."

"And of your infliction," cried Elizabeth with energy. "You have reduced him to his present state of poverty—comparative poverty. You have withheld the advantages which you must know to have been designed for him. You have deprived the best years of his life of that independence which was no less his due than his desert. You have done all this! and yet you can treat the mention of his misfortune with contempt and ridicule."

Darcy then lashes out at Lizzy, prompting her to level him with her final verbal counterpunch:

"From the very beginning—from the first moment, I may almost say—of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry."

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And my answer to the question of why Lizzy (in Darcy’s words) takes such an eager interest in Wickham’s concerns is neither of the two theories I presented, above, but a third one, one that may shock you at first. It is that Lizzy, right after voicing her conscious blaming of Darcy for his having blasted Jane’s prospects with Bingley, immediately follows up by unconsciously blaming Darcy for having in effect blasted Lizzy’s prospects with Wickham!!!!

Sounds crazy? Well, read again what Lizzy says to Darcy---she focuses repeated on the financial damage that she believes Darcy has unjustly inflicted on Wickham. And why would that subject be of particular interest to Lizzy of all people?

Well, just think back only a few chapters, going back only a few weeks, to Chapter 27, to the very moment when Lizzy and her Aunt Gardiner discuss Wickham’s having jilted her only a very short time before:

Mrs. Gardiner then rallied her niece on Wickham's desertion, and complimented her on bearing it so well.

"But my dear Elizabeth," she added, "what sort of girl is Miss King? I should be sorry to think our friend mercenary."

"Pray, my dear aunt, what is the difference in matrimonial affairs, between the mercenary and the prudent motive? Where does discretion end, and avarice begin? Last Christmas you were afraid of his marrying me, because it would be imprudent; and now, because he is trying to get a girl with only ten thousand pounds, you want to find out that he is mercenary."

"If you will only tell me what sort of girl Miss King is, I shall know what to think."

"She is a very good kind of girl, I believe. I know no harm of her."

"But he paid her not the smallest attention till her grandfather's death made her mistress of this fortune."

"No—why should he? If it were not allowable for him to gain my affections because I had no money, what occasion could there be for making love to a girl whom he did not care about, and who was equally poor?"

"But there seems an indelicacy in directing his attentions towards her so soon after this event."

"A man in distressed circumstances has not time for all those elegant decorums which other people may observe. If she does not object to it, why should we?"

"Her not objecting does not justify him. It only shows her being deficient in something herself—sense or feeling."

"Well," cried Elizabeth, "have it as you choose. He shall be mercenary, and she shall be foolish."

"No, Lizzy, that is what I do not choose. I should be sorry, you know, to think ill of a young man who has lived so long in Derbyshire."

"Oh! if that is all, I have a very poor opinion of young men who live in Derbyshire; and their intimate friends who live in Hertfordshire are not much better. I am sick of them all. Thank Heaven! I am going to-morrow where I shall find a man who has not one agreeable quality, who has neither manner nor sense to recommend him. Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing, after all."

"Take care, Lizzy; that speech savours strongly of disappointment."

Despite Lizzy’s bravado about her supposedly understanding why Wickham has acted mercenarily in switching his wooing from Lizzy to Miss King, all sharp readers must agree with Aunt Gardiner that Lizzy’s sarcasm does indeed savour very strongly of bitter disappointment. And a key element in that disappointment, I now see, is that Lizzy believes that Wickham would have stuck with her, and would not have switched horses to the newly-enriched Miss King at the last minute, had Wickham received his due financial entitlement from the Darcy family, as had been long expected from Wickham’s second “father”, the elder Mr. Darcy.

And who is to blame for Wickham lacking financial solidity, as far as Lizzy knows? Of course, it’s Mr. Darcy! And we actually get one other big hint, right in between these two quoted scenes, where we can discern, with 20:20 hindsight, that this topic was actually fermenting in Lizzy’s mind right before  Darcy proposes to her. Check out this portion of her tete a tete with Colonel Fitzwilliam in Chapter 31:

"[Darcy] likes to have his own way very well," replied Colonel Fitzwilliam. "But so we all do. It is only that he has better means of having it than many others, because he is rich, and many others are poor. I speak feelingly. A younger son, you know, must be inured to self-denial and dependence."

"In my opinion, the younger son of an earl can know very little of either. Now seriously, what have you ever known of self-denial and dependence? When have you been prevented by want of money from going wherever you chose, or procuring anything you had a fancy for?"

"These are home questions—and perhaps I cannot say that I have experienced many hardships of that nature. But in matters of greater weight, I may suffer from want of money. Younger sons cannot marry where they like."

"Unless where they like women of fortune, which I think they very often do."

"Our habits of expense make us too dependent, and there are not many in my rank of life who can afford to marry without some attention to money."

"Is this," thought Elizabeth, "meant for me?" and she coloured at the idea; but, recovering herself, said in a lively tone, "And pray, what is the usual price of an earl's younger son? Unless the elder brother is very sickly, I suppose you would not ask above fifty thousand pounds."

He answered her in the same style, and the subject dropped.

We now can see that this conversation is a way station on the way to Lizzy accusing Darcy of having denied Wickham his financial due. What the narrator is not telling us, but the context of the conversation strongly implies, is that when Lizzy blushes as she wonders whether Fitzwilliam is telling her that even he, the second son of an earl, cannot afford to propose to her, she is thinking back to Wickham’s jilting her as well, and beginning to see a pattern. Darcy can do what he likes, because he’s rich, but other, less well-heeled men, cannot.

So it’s only a very small step from there to Chapter 34, when Lizzy explodes her pent-up anger on this topic all over Darcy. The master of Pemberley seems to her to be a very perverse sort of matchbreaker, who specializes in blasting the marital prospects of the two most eligible and worthy Bennet sisters!

And so, in the end of the novel, how trebly ironic it is, in light of all of the above, that the way Darcy wins Lizzy over is by taking extraordinary steps to make the match between Lydia and Wickham!

Such is the unfathomable genius of Jane Austen to hide this crucial interlocking plot structure and subtle psychological motivation in plain sight during one of the most dramatic scenes in the history of fictional courtship, and yet it has not (to the best of my knowledge) ever been sussed out before now.

And finally, how ironic it is that I only solved this particular puzzle with a big assist from Twitter, which made me aware of Ms. Villarreal’s brilliant question!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

AND NOW, BELOW, MY FURTHER COMMENTS ON THE AMAZING RESPONSE I RECEIVED TO THE ABOVE POST FROM MY GOOD FRIEND DIANE REYNOLDS OVERNIGHT: 

 Diane responded to my post as follows:
"I agree that Elizabeth is angry at Darcy not only for interfering with Jane and Bingley, but also for, as she understands it, for denying Wickham the income that would have made it possible for him to marry her. That's actually an excellent catch and completely consistent with Austen's irony: characters feel outrage ostensibly on the behalf of others that they really feel for themselves. Yes, of course Lizzie is furious that Darcy's arrogance has messed up her match with Wickham. Of course, she's furious when he proposes--HE's not the one she wants. And yes, her feelings are very mixed, because, like her mother, whether she admits or not, she is a girl with her eye on the bouncing ball of money--which the quote you supply about prudence only underscores. She understands Wickham going after the money. She's defending him to her aunt: she's in love with him."

Thank you, Diane, for your extraordinary reply. As I will briefly confirm through the remainder of this post, it is clear that you and I have a perfect meeting of the minds as to what I wrote. You've amplified and extended my insight in a half dozen significant ways, all in your usual elegantly, modestly, and insightfully written and reasoned style that I always enjoy so much.

I particularly liked the following extraordinary textual sleuthing on your part, showing how the passages in Chapter 46 continue the thread that I described from the passages I quoted in those three earlier chapters:
"And Austen TELLS us this plainly. The wicked irony extends to the passage where Elizabeth is at the inn near Pemberley in chapter 46. She receives the letter that Wickham has eloped with Lydia, and it is not until this point that she gives up hope of Wickham. She may have thought the day
before how wonderful to be mistress of Pemberley, but it is really not until Wickham is off the market that she really, truly entertains the idea. And she understands the situation in all its irony: what makes it possible that she could change her feelings towards Darcy ([Wickham's] elopement) is what exactly will make (she thinks) the marriage with Darcy impossible (the disgrace of the elopement): she "sighed at the perverseness of those feelings which would NOW have promoted it continuance [the relationship with Darcy], and would formerly have rejoiced in its termination." The NOW is NOW--after Wickham is gone to her."

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!

And when you wrote....
"Austen then goes on to tell us that Wickham is the first love and Darcy the consolation prize: "her partiality for Wickham and  ... its ill success" will now lead Lizzie "to seek the other less interesting mode of attachment" based on "gratitude and esteem."  In other words, NOW Lizzie is willing to settle. This is MP is reverse. This is what could have happened to Fanny had she received the letter that Edmund had married Mary."
...I can only stand and cheer at your showing how JA played with the same themes from novel to novel--theme and variation, constructed by the greatest novelistic "composer" we've ever had.

And you were on a hot streak this morning, Diane, when you then wrote:
"With this in mind, we can also read the typical Austenian ambiguity in the pronoun "her' as Lizzie ruminates on her suddenly quite changed situation: "Never, since reading Jane's second letter, had she entertained a hope of Wickham meaning to marry her." We take this her to mean Lydia, but it could
well mean Lizzie: After the second letter, she thinks, all my lingering hopes that somehow Wickham might marry me are gone." 
And as you are well aware, that is yet another perfect example of the deliberate pronomial ambiguities we find all over the place in P&P, that she so aptly (but mischievously) referred to in her "dull elves" quote in her Jan. 1813 letter to Casssandra as "errors"-- AS IF!!!.

And you saved perhaps your best for last:  "At this point the irony is complete: Lizzie does end up marrying just like Charlotte, for pragmatic reasons, and can't even see that her father's astonishment at her revelation of this mirrors her own astonishment when Charlotte tells her about Collins."

Bravo, Diane!  All of which are the telltale winks and nods that JA left in her novel texts, to confirm to readers like you and me that we are getting the largescale irony and doubleness.

"It's all wonderful and wonderful how we tend to miss it."

That is an extreme understatement! It's the greatest miracle in the history of literature, that she pulled off this stunt a hundred times throughout all of her novels, and yet it's only two centuries later that they are coming to light!

Cheers, ARNIE

“A strange business this in America…”: Obama’s amazingly graceful (and Austenian) eulogy

What a short strange trip the last ten days have been in America. Facebook and Twitter have been flooded with blue-state blue-sky renewed optimism, as insightful commentators have been quick to observe, including this brilliant piece by Michael Cohen which succinctly touches all the important bases:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/28/ten-days-that-made-america-a-better-place

I start from where Cohen leaves off---as my Subject Line suggests, I will add my own literary gloss on Obama’s eulogy delivered in Charleston on Friday... http://tinyurl.com/nfef7h3  ...the amazing grace of which I hope and believe will be long remembered, in part because of the verbal virtuosity of his sermon. As @RoofBeamReader put it: "I've taught rhetoric for years & have heard many beautiful speeches from all ages & places. President Obama's eulogy today was transcendent."

Given my Austen obsession, I was repeatedly struck, as I listened to the President, by the remarkably Austenian deployment of irony and implication in the President’s eulogy, and so I immediately went to a transcript to try to identify what it was that reminded me so much of Jane Austen’s writing genius. And I think I found it—see what you think.

Jane Austen, in her euphoria upon the successful publication of Pride & Prejudice in January, 1813, famously wrote the following about her “darling child” to her sister about a supposed flaw in her writing detected by some of the novel’s first readers:   "There are a few Typical errors – & a “said he” or a “said she” would sometimes make the Dialogue more immediately clear – but “I do not write for such dull Elves” “As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.”

I’ve frequently observed that this was a massively ironic MOCK self-deprecation on her part. What Austen was saying, in her topsy-turvy irony, was that she expected her best readers to be sharp elves, who would understand that her frequent ambiguities in pronoun usage in P&P were not errors at all, but instead intentionally designed, so as to create pervasive ambiguity of reference. In this way, along with a number of other literary techniques I collectively call “The Jane Austen Code”, I’ve argued that she allowed for a flexible, alert reader to discern two entirely alternative fictional realities in the same novel—so Austen could write novels which appear conservative on the surface, but are radically subversive beneath.

Well, in his eulogy, I see Barack Obama doing his own version of that---if you read through the transcript of his eulogy here….

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/26/us-usa-shooting-south-carolina-obama-eul-idUSKBN0P62M920150626

…pay close attention to how skillfully he moves back and forth in his references to “we” and “us”. That will be the thrust of my analysis today.

When he says, “No wonder one of his senate colleagues remembered Senator Pinckney as "the most gentle of the 46 of US -- the best of the 46 of US." “, he refers to the elected representatives of South Carolina.  But then note how the reference shift when Pres. Obama says, “As OUR brothers and sisters in the AME church know, WE don't make those distinctions. ‘OUR calling, ’Clem once said, ‘is not just within the walls of the congregation, but...the life and community in which OUR congregation resides.’ He embodied the idea that our Christian faith demands deeds and not just words…”

Now, “our” and  “we” literally refers to the congregation at AME, and yet, the President knows very well that he’s speaking not just to the live audience packed into the church, but also to tens or even hundreds of millions of people worldwide who will eventually watch it during the weeks and months that follow, because of the huge buzz that he knows he’s going to create with this eulogy. So “our” and “we” also refers to all of US in America, and all around the world, anyone who pays attention to what happens here.

And so when he then says, “…that to put OUR faith in action is more than individual salvation, it's about OUR collective salvation; that to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and house the homeless is not just a call for isolated charity but the imperative of a just society….”, it is now “us”, all of us in our large and diverse society, he is now speaking for.

And that’s precisely when Obama shifts to the second person pronoun, as he speaks about the martyred Revd. Pinckney. “What a good man. Sometimes I think that's the best thing to hope for when YOU'RE eulogized -- after all the words and recitations and resumes are read, to just say someone was a good man.” Subtly, now the President is speaking out of two sides of his mouth, and both sides are producing good righteous words. He is describing the good man who was murdered, but he’s also implicitly prompting everyone listening who has a heart and a soul to imagine the moment in the future when we each will OURSELVES be eulogized, and to wonder whether we will also be called a “good” man or woman. 

And then the President zeroes in on his listeners once again: “YOU don't have to be of high station to be a good man….What a life Clementa Pinckney lived. What an example HE set. What a model for HIS faith. And then to lose HIM at 41…” The example set by Clementa Pinckney in life, is, in death, amplified a millionfold by the bully pulpit at which only an American president with the ear of the world can stand.

It happens, by the way, that the world also lost Jane Austen at 41, nearly two centuries ago—a woman who, in writing of six novels filled with characters of startling psychological and emotional reality, set an example the world is still following, as those novels have now been read by tens of millions of readers in every country of the world. So that, physical death need not be the end of a good person’s good example, it may actually be only the beginning of it.

And so when the President then says, “To the families of the fallen, the nation shares in YOUR grief. OUR pain cuts that much deeper because it happened in a church. The church is and always has been the center of African-American life -- (applause) -- a place to call OUR own in a too often hostile world, a sanctuary from so many hardships. “, he now his rhetorical cake, and eats it, too. When he goes on to describe the numerous vital roles that the African-American church has played in the survival of black people through centuries of unspeakable horror at the hands of their white countrymen, he doesn’t say “you” to the white Americans listening—especially those who have defended flying the Confederate flag on statehouses---he says, “our nation”. He challenges them to try to reconcile this irreconcilable contradiction.

At no point does Obama ever mention the role of the white church in the South, and yet, as so often the case in Austen’s writing, something can be so strongly implied that it need not ever be made explicit. In fact, the meaning—the challenge--takes on extra weight because it is never stated. No defensiveness is provoked by the word “you”, and yet, it is there in the shadow of every word spoken.

This unspoken contrast reminds all of us of the Far Right’s constant attempts to impose the ideology of their perversely anti-Christian “Christianity” on all of the rest of us. Most of all, Obama makes us think on our own about the centuries’ long tradition of the white Christian churches justifying the unspeakable horrors of slavery—not just justifying it, but (via the treating of the Confederate flag as if it were a holy relic, like the Shroud of Turin)  celebrating it.

And now listen to the President deliver his subtle punch line via his pronouns:

“WE may not have earned it, this grace, with our rancor and complacency, and short-sightedness and fear of each other -- but WE got it all the same. He gave it to US anyway. He's once more given US grace. But it is up to US now to make the most of it, to receive it with gratitude, and to prove OURSELVES worthy of this gift.

For too long, WE were blind to the pain that the Confederate flag stirred in too many of OUR citizens. It's true, a flag did not cause these murders. But as people from all walks of life, Republicans and Democrats, now acknowledge -- including Governor Haley, whose recent eloquence on the subject is worthy of praise -- as WE all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride. For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation. WE see that NOW.”

The truth is that all black Americans (except maybe Clarence Thomas) have never been blind to that pain, nor have many white Americans—but the President is addressing the better part of those of “us” who have been blind, but who self-identify as “good people”. His inclusive “us” gives them a door to walk through —with Governor Haley as a subtly ironic example of the blind being politically maneuvered into into leading the other blind folk out of blindness--- and that, we hope, will lead to a collective doing good.

I could go on, but I hope that the above sampler will encourage you to go through the President’s speech on your own with this in mind. Test his rhetoric, and I promise you, you will emerge with an even greater respect for his skill in delivering so perfectly the message that our country so desperately needs to hear.

What I’d like to do in the remainder of this post, is to draw one more parallel between the eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, and Jane Austen’s most overtly religious novel, Mansfield Park, published in 1814.

For those not familiar with Jane Austen’s writing, my Subject Line is derived from the following words spoken by the soul-deadened but subversive heir to a slavery fortune, Tom Bertram, in Mansfield Park, to the self-satisfied, gluttonous clergyman Dr. Grant:    "A strange business this in America, Dr. Grant! What is your opinion? I always come to you to know what I am to think of public matters."

Austen scholars have long debated whether this dialog, published in 1814, was meant to refer to the War of 1812, or to the recent banning of the slave trade supplying that terrible human cargo to the English Caribbean colonies, or to some other large-scale event. Whatever she meant, we certainly know what the President was talking about on Friday. But I find an uncanny parallelism between the way President Obama quietly and subtly exposed the hypocrisies and banal evil of the residue of white racism in the United States two centuries after those words were written by Jane Austen, and the way that she quietly but powerfully dissected and shredded the hypocrisy of the English colonial slavery system.  Sir Thomas Bertram, the patriarch of the novel, is never overtly called a hypocrite, a moral monster, or a greedy sexually abusive oppressive father and slaveowner-and yet I and many other Janeites, including Patricia Rozema, writer and director of the controversial 1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park, read between the lines, and see Jane Austen condemning Sir Thomas.

As a woman writing novels in the super-sexist England she lived her whole life in, Jane Austen rode a knife’s edge of subtle irony, so she couldn’t just say what she meant. And in a way, sadly, so does President Obama, even today in 2015. Indeed, he has since the day he rose into public fame over a decade ago, and still as the first black man (because in America, biracial is still “black” for many) sitting in the Oval Office of the till-then universally aptly named White House, he has had to live with the impossible Catch 22 of saying enough about race to try to make things better, while facing the constant threat of being accused of playing “the race card” every time he does speak forcefully. So, if he plays a subtle rhetorical games “we”, “us”, and “you”, it is perfectly understandable that he has to do so.

I will conclude by invoking a final example of Austenian genius, the debate between the earnest, pious Fanny Price and the worldly-wise Mary Crawford on the subject of sermonizing and its effect on those speaking and hearing it.  

Fanny argues that “[a] man—a sensible man like Dr. Grant, cannot be in the habit of teaching others their duty every week, cannot go to church twice every Sunday, and preach such very good sermons in so good a manner as he does, without being the better for it himself. It must make him think; and I have no doubt that he oftener endeavours to restrain himself than he would if he had been anything but a clergyman."

To which Mary wittily and tellingly replies, "We cannot prove to the contrary, to be sure; but I wish you a better fate, Miss Price, than to be the wife of a man whose amiableness depends upon his own sermons; for though he may preach himself into a good-humour every Sunday, it will be bad enough to have him quarrelling about green geese from Monday morning till Saturday night."

At which point Edmund (whom Fanny secretly loves, but who is strongly attracted to Mary) avoids directly rebutting Mary, but instead takes a page out of Jesus’s “Render unto Caesar” playbook, and also makes Fanny’s heart leap, with this touching and brilliant bit of wit:

"I think the man who could often quarrel with Fanny," said Edmund affectionately, "must be beyond the reach of any sermons."

Fanny turned farther into the window…”

I think that the American who could often quarrel with President Obama about the stirring message he delivered to all of us on Friday must also be beyond the reach of any sermons…..but I hope there are more of US in the U.S. who are not beyond the reach of the amazingly graceful amazing grace of President Obama’s eulogy to Clementa Pinckney. R.I.P.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter