Answer to my latest quiz: "fingering" Darcy & Lovelace as darkly Machiavellian "twins"

Cutting right to the chase: I expected that the two correct answers to my quiz (Clarissa by Richardson & Pride & Prejudice by Austen) would occur to anyone familiar with 18^th-19^th century English novels. I’ll quickly run through all the parallels between Clarissa and P&P except the two most extraordinary ones, which I save for last, and which, I assure you, justify the “unbecoming conjunction” in my Subject Line:

ONE: It was published more than two hundred years ago:  Clarissa (1748) & Pride & Prejudice (1813)

TWO: In its original form, it was epistolary:  Clarissa was originally epistolary, and remained so. P&P was originally First Impressions, an epistolary manuscript no longer in existence.

THREE: It is universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest novels ever written, along with several other novels written by the same author.   Obviously the case with both of these novels.

FOUR: Its author is widely considered to have been a highly influential literary innovator, who has cast a very long shadow over the history of the novel, and who has provided grist for the mill of hundreds of scholarly articles, books, and dissertations: Again, obviously….

FIVE: In the first half of the novel, the heroine is nearly forced by her family to marry an odious, repulsive man, but she is fortunate to avoid that fate: Clarissa is pushed by her entire family to marry Mr. Solmes, whereupon she allows Lovelace to take her away. Elizabeth is pushed by her mother to marry Mr. Collins, but her father lets her off the hook.

SIX: The novel’s plot includes at least one attempted sexual seduction by a hardened rake.

Clarissa & Lovelace  AND Georgiana & Wickham.

NINE: The heroine is referred to in various ways as having bewitched a leading male character: Words like “witch”, “bewitched”, “arts and allurements” and “enchantment” are used to derogatorily describe both Clarissa and Elizabeth, as temptresses for Lovelace and Darcy, respectively.

TEN: The heroine is the favorite of a male ancestor, whose partiality for her is resented within the family:

Clarissa’s grandfather dotes on her, which infuriates her siblings, AND Elizabeth’s father dotes on her, which irritates her mother.

ELEVEN: There is a war of words between the man and the woman for a goodly portion of the novel:

Again, obviously….

As to the above, so far, to paraphrase Horatio, there needed no independent scholar come from the weirdness of Portland, Oregon, to inform the literary world that one of the principal allusive sources for Jane Austen’s fiction was the fiction of Samuel Richardson. That’s very old news. However, what has only been a minority report up till now has been the counterintuitive connection between the tragedy of Clarissa and the light, bright, and sparkling comedy of Pride & Prejudice.

Here are two “Blooming” scholarly formulations of the sort of broad, subconscious, not-very-surprising influence which mainstream Austen scholarship has perceived in that regard prior to the present:

Donald A. Bloom, “The Romantic Power of the Witty Heroine” 1994: “…Darcy is a very imposing figure, not only rich and well born, tall and good looking, but highly intelligent and well educated. Even if he is no seducer of the Lovelace sort, nor even a Rochester, she must regard him as a dangerous and intimidating figure. ….Thus, the contest between Elizabeth and Darcy, unlike the usual battle of the sexes plot, begins with her genuine dislike of him….When they are thrown together at Bingley’s house by Jane’s illness, we find that they are not bickering like Beatrice and Benedick, but simply working and thinking at cross purposes, like a comic Lovelace and Clarissa. Darcy has no idea how suspicious Elizabeth is of his arrogant aloofness, while she has no idea how intrigued he is becoming by her ‘fine eyes’…”

Harold Bloom’s intro to Elizabeth Bennet (2009):  “…Austen is the daughter of Richardson….Her inwardness is an ironic revision of Richardson’s extraordinary conversion of English Protestant sensibility into the figure of Clarissa Harlowe, and her own moral and spiritual concerns fuse in the crucial need of her heroines to sustain their individual integrities, a need so intense that it compels them to fall into those errors about life that are necessary for life…In this too they follow, though in a comic register, the pattern of their tragic precursor, the magnificent but sublimely flawed Clarissa Harlowe.

…Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse….are Clarissa Harlowe’s direct descendants….But they belong to the secular age; Clarissa Harlowe is poised upon the threshold that leads from the Protestant religion to a purely secular sainthood.….Doubtless, Austen’s religious ideas were as profound as Samuel Richardson’s were shallow, but Emma and Clarissa are Protestant novels without being in any way religious….What is tragedy in Clarissa becomes serious or moral comedy in P&P and Emma…There is also a transcendent strength to Elizabeth’s will that raises her above that cosmos, in a mode that returns us to Clarissa Harlowe’s transcendence of her society, of Lovelace, and even of everything in herself that is not the will to a self esteem that has also made an accurate estimate of every other will to pride it ever has encountered.…[Eliza’s] wit is Mr. Bennet’s, refined and elaborated, but her will, and her pride in her will, returns us to Clarissa’s Puritan passion to maintain the power of the self to confer esteem, and to accept esteem only in response to its bestowal…”

And that’s pretty much where things stood re connections between Clarissa and Pride & Prejudice till two days ago, as I was reading along in Terry Eagleton’s How to Read Literature, and my gaze was arrested by the following statement:   “In Richardson's Clarissa, we are told that the sexually voracious Lovelace, who is also a great scribbler of letters, ‘has always a pen in his fingers when he retires’. Richardson is surely aware of the double meaning.”

I instantly recognized the parallel between Eagleton’s catch in Clarissa and the witty sexual innuendo that I and a handful of other Janeite scholars have previously noted in the following passage in Chapter 10 of P&P (I’ll explain the ALL CAPS words very shortly):

“…Mr. Darcy was WRITING, and Miss Bingley, seated near him, was watching the progress of his letter and repeatedly calling off his attention by messages to his sister. Mr. Hurst and Mr. Bingley were at piquet, and Mrs. Hurst was observing their game.

Elizabeth took up some needlework, and was sufficiently amused in attending to what passed between Darcy and HIS COMPANION. The perpetual commendations of the lady, either on his HANDWRITING, or on the EVENNESS of his lines, or on the length of his letter, with the perfect unconcern with which her praises were received, formed a curious dialogue, and was exactly in union with her opinion of each.

"How DELIGHTED Miss Darcy will be to receive such a letter!"

He made no answer.

"You WRITE uncommonly FAST."

"You are mistaken. I write rather slowly."

"How many LETTERS you must have occasion to write in the course of a year! Letters of business, too! How odious I should think them!"

"It is fortunate, then, that they fall to my lot instead of yours."

"Pray tell your sister that I long to see her."

"I have already told her so once, by your desire."

"I am afraid you do not like your PEN. Let me mend it for you. I mend PENS remarkably well."

"Thank you—but I always mend my own."

"How can you contrive to WRITE so EVEN?"

He was silent.

"Tell your sister I am DELIGHTED to hear of her improvement on the harp; and pray let her know that I am quite in raptures with her beautiful little design for a table, and I think it infinitely superior to Miss Grantley's."

"Will you give me leave to defer your raptures till I write again? At present I have not room to do them justice."

"Oh! it is of no consequence. I shall see her in January. But do you always write such charming long letters to her, Mr. Darcy?"

"They are generally long; but whether always charming it is not for me to determine."

"It is a rule with me, that a person who can write a long LETTER with ease, cannot write ill."

"That will not do for a compliment to Darcy, Caroline," cried her brother, "because he does not write with ease. He studies too much for words of four syllables. Do not you, Darcy?"

"My style of WRITING is very different from yours."

"Oh!" cried Miss Bingley, "Charles WRITES in the most careless way imaginable. He leaves out half his words, and blots the rest."

"My IDEAS FLOW so RAPIDLY that I have not time to express them—by which means my LETTERS sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents."

"Your humility, Mr. Bingley," said Elizabeth, "must disarm reproof."

So, imagine my astonished delight when, a moment later, Google brought me to the full quotation that Eagleton had noticed and flagged in Clarissa, in a letter written by BFF Anna Howe to Clarissa about Lovelace, and I read the following:

“[Lovelace] DELIGHTS in WRITING. Whether at Lord M.'s, or at Lady Betty's, or Lady Sarah's, he has always a PEN in his FINGERS when he retires. One of HIS COMPANIONS (confirming his love of WRITING) has told [Mrs. Fortescue], that his thoughts FLOW RAPIDLY to his PEN: And you and I, my dear, have observed, on more occasions than one, that though he WRITES EVEN a fine HAND, he is one of the readiest and quickest of writers.”

I believe my reason for the ALL CAPS words in that P&P passage---about Darcy and Bingley writing letters, and their contrasting handwriting styles---will now be crystal clear. I.e., they’re the very same words which appear in the above, very short passage in Clarissa describing Lovelace’s handwriting style! And the payoff is that both passages, it should also be obvious (and as I described in Parameter SEVEN) are laden with clever sexual innuendo centered on the phallic symbol of a “pen” (use your imagination to decode the rest of the ALL CAPS imagery).

And that would have been more than enough to upend mainstream scholarly interpretations of JA’s writing as not having conscious sexual content. But that’s only the half of it. My Parameter EIGHT… [There is a scene when the taking of pains or trouble to attain mastery of a skill by a man who has always had things his way in life is explicitly discussed, in verbiage that also is laden with clever and suggestive sexual innuendo]…just happens to also apply BOTH to THE VERY NEXT PARAGRAPH in Anna Howe’s letter to Clarissa…

“[Lovelace] must indeed have had early a very docile genius; since a person of his pleasurable turn and active spirit, could never have submitted TO TAKE LONG OR GREAT PAINS in attaining the qualifications he is MASTER of; qualifications so seldom attained by youth of quality and fortune; by such especially of those of either, who, like him, have never known what it was to be controuled.”

…AND ALSO to the repartee between Darcy and Eliza at Rosings in Chapter 31 of P&P, that I have previously identified as sexual repartee:

"Shall we ask your cousin the reason of this?" said Elizabeth, still addressing Colonel Fitzwilliam. "Shall we ask him why a man of sense and education, and who has lived in the world, is ill qualified to recommend himself to strangers?"

"I can answer your question," said Fitzwilliam, "without applying to him. It is because HE WILL NOT GIVE HIMSELF THE TROUBLE."

"I certainly have not the talent which some people possess," said Darcy, "of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done."

"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."

Darcy smiled and said, "You are perfectly right. You have employed your time much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you can think anything wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers."

I suggest you now take whatever time you need to reread the above quoted passages from Clarissa and P&P a few times, taking special note of the ALL CAPS words. If you invest that short amount of time, you will see why I believe this is a true smoking gun, in terms of proving beyond any reasonable doubt that the sexualized parallels between Richardson’s tragedy and Austen’s comedy are entirely the result of conscious artistry on Jane Austen’s part.

Just think about fingers holding flowing ink-filled pens, and fingers rapidly flying over a responsive set of black and white keys, and how readily that imagery translates into sexual repartee of the most brilliant and sparkling sophistication.  And as if that weren’t enough, speaking of fingers, add into the mix one other passage from Clarissa in a letter from Lovelace to his bro, Belford, that I am now certain was also grokked by Jane Austen:

“I long to know what Miss Howe wrote to her friend, in order to induce her to marry the despicable plotter: the man whose friendship is no credit to any body! the wicked, wicked man. Thou hadst the two letters in thy hand. Had they been in mine, THE SEAL WOULD HAVE YIELDED TO THE TOUCH OF MY WARM FINGER, [perhaps without the help of the post-office bullet] AND THE FOLDS, AS OTHER PLICATIONS HAVE DONE, OPENED OF THEMSELVES TO OBLIGE MY CURIOSITY. A wicked omission, Jack, not contrive to send them down to me, by man and horse!...”

The outrageous sexual imagery in that passage has been noted a half dozen times since James H. Maddox first spotted it in 1982, but I am the first to realize that Jane Austen was already there by 1813 (and probably much earlier), recognizing Richardson’s sly sexual innuendo, and paying it the sincerest homage, by extending it in those two virtuosic passages in P&P! And, for that matter, we also can now see a surprising source for all the suggestive “lock”, “key”, “folds” imagery in the nighttime scenes at the Abbey when Catherine Morland awakens to her own sexuality.

And finally, I cannot imagine a more dramatic confirmation, based on the above, that Jane Austen chose to hide in plain sight an allusion in the character of the supposedly morally upstanding, scrupulously honest Mr. Darcy in P&P to the debauched, Machiavellian character of Lovelace in Clarissa—and as icing on the cake, to flag those two consecutive sexualized passages in Clarissa and reinvent them in two separate sexualized passages in P&P!

Now, as to what this all means beyond the above, it will have to suffice for today that I claim this is yet another dark “shade” of Mr. Darcy to add to the twenty I’ve recently collected here….

http://tinyurl.com/kmbl9yq

…from posts of mine during the past few years .

This is Jane Austen alerting the sharp elves reading P&P who knew Clarissa well (as she obviously did) that the shadow Darcy is a very dark figure indeed, and much much more like the Protean Lovelace (to borrow Jocelyn Harris’s descriptor) than has ever been dreamt of in the philosophy of conservative and mainstream Austen scholars. Put another way, this is Jane Austen whispering to generations of readers so taken with the sophisticated romance of the overt story of P&P, that they have never been able to “adjust their ideas” to also allow for the possibility of a sophisticated dark cautionary tale about the danger of romantic thinking coexisting right alongside the romance, each in its own parallel fictional universe.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Yet another quiz about a very famous novel by a very famous author

OK, I am thinking about a novel which fits all of the following parameters:

ONE: It was published more than two hundred years ago.

TWO: In its original form, it was epistolary.

THREE: It is universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest novels ever written, along with several other novels written by the same author.

FOUR: Its author is widely considered to have been a highly influential literary innovator, who has cast a very long shadow over the history of the novel, and who has provided grist for the mill of hundreds of scholarly articles, books, and dissertations.

FIVE: In the first half of the novel, the heroine is nearly forced by her family to marry an odious, repulsive man, but she is fortunate to avoid that fate.

SIX: The novel’s plot includes at least one attempted sexual seduction by a hardened rake.

SEVEN: There is a scene relatively early in the novel when the speed and evenness of a man’s hand writing of letters, and the rapidity of flow of ideas to a man’s pen, are both explicitly discussed, in verbiage that is laden with clever and suggestive sexual innuendo.

EIGHT: There is a scene when the taking of pains or trouble to attain mastery of a skill by a man who has always had things his way in life is explicitly discussed, in verbiage that also is laden with clever and suggestive sexual innuendo.

NINE: The heroine is referred to in various ways as having bewitched a leading male character.

TEN: The heroine is the favorite of a male ancestor, whose partiality for her is resented within the family.

ELEVEN: There is a war of words between the man and the woman for a goodly portion of the novel.

What is the title of the novel, and who is the author?

As seems to have mysteriously been the case in my previous literary quizzes, there may just turn out to be two novels which meet all the listed criteria--Good luck in discovering both!

I will give my answer tomorrow evening PST, along with the remarkable textual evidence for Items SEVEN and EIGHT, which confirm that these eleven parallels are not coincidental.  ;)

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Damon & Defenestration: the 12 year old Jane Austen’s shocking, savvy Biblical & classical allusions

Earlier today, I posted a link to an article about Enchantments (a new modernized film version of Emma with a Wiccan lesbian twist, which I’m eager to see), which prompted me to search for Jane Austen’ usages of the word “enchantment” in her writing. I was curious as to whether JA, arch punster, might’ve used “enchant” punningly, too, so as to covertly allude to the dreadfully serious subject of “witches” (i.e., powerful women) burnt at the stake in early modern times. I already knew this to be a subject in which Jane took an eager interest—from Joan La Pucelle (in Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 1), to poor English women subjected to witch trials, to Maria de Medici’s “particular friend” Eleanor de Galigai.

It was only after noticing, two months ago, the veiled allusion in P&P to the Bard’s brash, spirit-conjuring Joan, that I also grasped for the first time the deep emotion hidden just beneath the surface of the 16 year old Jane’s “casual” take on Joan in Jane’s History of England:   “It was in [Henry VI’s] reign that Joan of Arc lived & made such a row among the English. They should not have burnt her — but they did.”

But they did---three words carrying three tons of anger (so much for the nonsense about Jane the English patriot mistrusting everything French—her allegiance was to her fellow women). And I had also noticed that Shakespeare made much of Joan’s “enchantment”: she is tagged with this witchy pun twice in Henry VI, Part 1, both of them tellingly focused on the power Joan exerts through words:

King Charles (of France): Speak, Pucelle, and ENCHANT him with thy words.

York: Fell banning hag, ENCHANTRESS, hold thy tongue!

It’s so easy to see how Jane Austen, among the most powerful female wielders of words in history, would identify with Shakespeare’s Joan, who was so famously and fatally “condemned” by men. So I had high expectations of finding the mature published author Jane using “enchantment” similarly; but, to my disappointment, I found only three usages in her published novels---one in NA, two in Emma---and not a one of the three was punny.  A swing and a big miss.

Little did I suspect that vindication of my hunch was in the on-deck circle. The next search in my queue was, as always, in her Juvenilia (separate search engine), and there I found a handful. And all of them were also insignificant….except the one that turned out to be the mother lode—and in the most unlikely place---in “Frederic & Elfrida” (“F&E” for short), written by Jane Austen when she was ONLY TWELVE YEARS OLD! In other words, the very earliest surviving writing of JA!

Specifically, I am talking about the passage in “Chapter the Second” of F&E, where we read about the welcome of the young hero & heroine into the home of their new neighbors, the Fitzroys: 

“On being shewn into an elegant dressing room, ornamented with festoons of artificial flowers, they were struck with the engaging Exterior & beautifull outside of Jezalinda the eldest of the young Ladies; but e'er they had been many minutes seated, the Wit & Charms which shone resplendant in the conversation of the amiable Rebecca, ENCHANTED them so much that they all with one accord jumped up & exclaimed. Lovely & too charming Fair one, notwithstanding your forbidding squint, your greasy tresses & your swelling back, which are more frightfull than imagination can paint or pen describe, I cannot refrain from expressing my raptures, at the engaging Qualities of your Mind, which so amply atone for the HORROR, with which your first appearance must ever inspire the unwary visitor."

"Your sentiments so nobly expressed on the different excellencies of Indian & English Muslins, & the judicious preference you give the former, have excited in me an admiration of which I can alone give an adequate idea, by assuring you it is nearly equal to what I feel for myself."

Then making a profound Curtesy to the amiable & abashed Rebecca, they left the room & hurried home.

From this period, the intimacy between the Families of Fitzroy, Drummond, and Falknor, daily encreased till at length it grew to such a pitch, that they did not scruple to kick one another out of the window on the slightest provocation…”

I hope it is obvious that what confirms the punning meaning of “enchantment” as referring to witches is…..practically everything in that passage! (but I’ll spell it all out anyway). We have an unusually  detailed  description of “the amiable Rebecca”, the new girlfriend who “ENCHANTED” them, was “too CHARMING”, had a “forbidding SQUINT”, “GREASY tresses”, and a “SWELLING back”, all of which are “FRIGHTFULL” and inspire “HORROR” in “the unwary visitor”.  In a half dozen ways, that passage screams a caricature of a “witch”—like the portrait of Queen Elizabeth that Cassandra drew for Jane’s History four years later---without ever having to write the word “witch” itself!

And that would have been enough----but I soon discovered that those vivid descriptors were only the periphera of the allusion to witchcraft that the extraordinary genius12 year old Jane Austen hid behind that short passage. And my next clue that led me to that further discovery turned out to be the name of Rebecca’s elder sister-----Jezalinda. Did it catch your eye too?

At first, I thought I was reminded of the name of one of those witches from Wicked, but Google promptly disabused me of that suspicion: they were Elphaba, Glinda, and Nessarose—not a Jezalinda in sight. But then I thought—might Jane have had the Biblical JEZebel in mind? That sounded promising, as I knew enough about Kings to know that Jezebel was an arch villainess in the eyes of the Israelite priestly writers, because she had in some way led her husband, Ahab, King of Israel, down the road to corruption—sorta like a witch, right?

I was ready to go to the Bible to find out more about Jezebel, but first I took a quick segue to Google, and searched “Jezebel Austen Jezalinda”, thinking that perhaps some Austen scholar had already seen the Jezebel connection to Jezalinda, and had beaten me to the punch. And a few hits did pop up. Margaret Doody, in her new book Jane Austen’s Names, wrote:

“ ‘Jezalinda’ is pure invention, in affectionate mockery of Mrs. Smith’s ‘Ethelinde’ combined with ‘Jessica’ and ‘Jezebel’”, and then Doody cited Peter Sabor.  

I then saw that Peter Sabor had previously written pretty much the same thing a few years earlier:  

“Jezalinda: a nonce name, combining the biblical Jezebel with ‘Ethelinde’, the name of the eponymous heroine of Charlotte Smith’s novel…”

But no others worth noting. Sure, there had been several prior scholarly notings of the name “Jezalinda”--by Mudrick, Castellanos, Small, Lynch, and Poplawski, among others— but each was only in passing. No Austen scholar had apparently ever thought of Jezebel as a name chosen by JA for a reason besides Sabor and Doody. So it seemed like virgin scholarly acreage waiting to be tilled.

So my next stop was the Bible, to quickly get up to speed on the story of Jezebel, and see if anything popped out at me that might somehow connect to that “witchy” passage about Jezalinda and Rebecca. Are you ready for a lightning quick tour of Jezebel in the Bible?:

1 Kings 16:31 Ahab marries princess Jezebel and worships her father’s god, Baal.

1Kings 18  When Jezebel cuts off the prophets of the Lord, Obadiah takes 100 prophets, and hides them in a cave, and feeds them. Elijah then confronts Ahab, challenges Baal’s prophets (who eat at Jezebel’s table) with God’s, and---no big surprise!-- things go badly for the Baalim.

1 Kings 19: 1-4: And Ahab told Jezebel all that Elijah had done, and withal how he had slain all the prophets with the sword. Then Jezebel sent a messenger unto Elijah, saying, So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of one of them by to morrow about this time. And when he saw that, he arose, and went for his life, and came to Beersheba, which belongeth to Judah, and left his servant there [where God sends angels to feed and encourage Elijah].

1 Kings 21: Jezebel incites Ahab to glom Naboth’s desirable vineyard writes letters and hires two sons of Belial to bear false witness against Naboth for blasphemy, whereupon Naboth is stoned to death and Ahab gets his vineyard. Whereupon, God sends Elijah with his version of a horse’s head in bed:

“Thus saith the Lord, In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood, even thine.”

^“And of JEZEBEL also spake the Lord, saying, The dogs shall eat JEZEBEL by the wall of Jezreel.”

Ahab repents whereupon God shows mercy:

^“Seest thou how Ahab humbleth himself before me? because he humbleth himself before me, I will not bring the evil in his days: but in his son's days will I bring the evil upon his house.”

Then a gap till the right point in the reign of Ahab’s son, Joram:

2 Kings 9: Elisha sends a message to Jehu that he is the future king of Israel, plus:

”And thou shalt smite the house of Ahab thy master, that I may avenge the blood of my servants the prophets, and the blood of all the servants of the Lord, at the hand of Jezebel.”

Jehu eventually heads out to fulfill his destiny. Joram spots him, sends messengers twice to ask if Jehu comes in peace, gets no answer. Then:

21-23: And Joram said, Make ready. And his chariot was made ready. And Joram king of Israel and Ahaziah king of Judah went out, each in his chariot, and they went out against Jehu, and met him in the portion of Naboth the Jezreelite. And it came to pass, when Joram saw Jehu, that he said, Is it peace, Jehu? And he answered, What peace, so long as the whoredoms of THY MOTHER JEZEBEL AND HER WITCHCRAFTS are so many?”

Jehu slaughters Joram in Naboth’s vineyard—Biblical poetic justice.

And all of that was just prelude to the part that Jane Austen must have read with ESPECIALLY eager interest. So I suggest that you do the same, and look for the part that Jane hid in plain sight in F&A:

30-37: And when Jehu was come to Jezreel, JEZEBEL heard of it; and she painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at a window. And as Jehu entered in at the gate, she said, Had Zimri peace, who slew his master? And he lifted up his face to the window, and said, Who is on my side? who? And there looked out to him two or three eunuchs. And he said, THROW HER DOWN. So THEY THREW HER DOWN: and some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses: and he trode her under foot.

³⁴ And when he was come in, he did eat and drink, and said, Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her: for she is a king's daughter. And they went to bury her: but they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands. Wherefore they came again, and told him. And he said, This is the word of the Lord, which he spake by his servant Elijah the Tishbite, saying, In the portion of Jezreel shall dogs eat the flesh of JEZEBEL: And the carcase of JEZEBEL shall be as dung upon the face of the field in the portion of Jezreel; so that they shall not say, This is JEZEBEL.

So NOW you know why the 12 year old Jane Austen wrote “they did not scruple to kick one another out of the window on the slightest provocation”. It wasn’t that she was a silly preteen giving vent to her overactive Gothic imagination. She was confirming to her learned readers that “witch-like” Rebecca (another Hebrew Biblical female name) and her sister Jezalinda were supposed to remind us in some way of the most evil witch of the Bible---Jezebel, who infamously had the unique Biblical status of being thrown out of a window—or, as they said it in JA’s day—defenestrated—hence my Subject Line.

 By the way, as a Christian P.S. to the above Hebrew narrative, we do hear about Jezebel one last time in Revelation 2:20-23:

“Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols. And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not. Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds. And I will kill her children with death; and all the churches shall know that I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works.”

The unrepentant Jezebel we hear about there sounds a LOT like Joan La Pucelle at the end of Henry VI, Part 1, and Eleanor de Galigai, too---all thumbing their female noses at overwhelming male brute force, even in the face of an imminent tortured death. And so I leave off my interpretation there, I am sure those who are interested will want to reflect on all of the above, and come up with your own explanation of the meaning of Jane Austen’s veiled allusion to Jezebel.

But before I close, think about how it comes to be that I am the first Austen scholar to ever take note of any of the above. What it shows you, yet again, I suggest, is the extraordinary passivity and lack of imagination in interpreting Jane Austen’s writing---from her juvenilia to her surviving letters to her published novels----that seems to still be the universal default mode for Austen scholarship, as it has been for two centuries.

What’s most ironic in that, I think, in this particular instance, is that even Peter Leithart (who has made a cottage industry in recent years out of generating exegeses of safe, unthreatening—and, in my view, totally invalid---Christian Biblical allusions in JA’s writing) actually quoted the passage in F&A about intimate friends tossing each other out of windows, without recognizing that this was the 12 year old Jane Austen’s massive wink at the fate of Jezebel in the Bible. How strong is the blindness that arises from the unshakable belief that Jane Austen could not write something like that—it is a blindness which no spectacles, even those of Mrs. Bates, can correct.

And that, my fellow Janeites, is only the Biblical part of the allusions in “Frederic & Elfrida”. Stand by tomorrow for my followup post, in which I will lay out the classical allusions, which are almost as amazing.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter