Marianne’s galloping dream, Queen Mab, Eve of St. Agnes (& Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, & Keats!)

A great satisfaction of the past 2 years of my 14-year AustenQuest has been the accelerating interconnection of different discoveries which I previously had no idea were connected. It’s like the last stage of solving a diabolical crossword puzzle, when the entire pattern becomes clear, and I can’t write fast enough to fill the rest in, after the initial square by square struggle. This post is a great example of this rewarding late-stage process.

Way back on 11/23/10, I posted about one of Jane Austen’s multiple veiled allusions to the religious/folk idea behind the Eve of St. Agnes, in relevant part, as follows:

“Per Wikipedia, “Saint Agnes is the patron saint of young girls; folk custom called for them to practice rituals on Saint Agnes' Eve (20–21 January) with a view to discovering their future husbands.” These rituals include getting into bed naked and dreaming about their future husbands….Marianne Dashwood in London gets her really good night’s sleep on the Eve of St. Agnes, even though Elinor drinks the wine that Mrs. Jennings brought for Marianne—because, you see, Mrs. Jennings wants Marianne to dream about a future husband to REPLACE Willoughby! And that’s why she sounds a LOT like John Thorpe the wooer when she invokes another proverb: “One shoulder of mutton drives down another”, although, when you think about that proverb as a metaphor for “Marianne will find another man to marry”, it’s a pretty darned vulgar turn of phrase-but that’s ol’ Mrs. Jennings for ya!…” END QUOTE

In that post 5 1/2 years ago, I pointed out that Jane Austen had, with Marianne D. (as well as Catherine M. and Fanny P.) repeatedly alluded to both John Gay’s The Wife of Bath and Samuel Foote’s later The Maid of Bath, both of which turn on that same Eve of St. Agnes theme. And I thought that was the full extent of that allusion. 

It was only yesterday that I recognized another clue alluding to the Eve of St. Agnes theme, hidden in plain sight in S&S — and, as you’ll see, below, it’s like the tape on the doors left after the Watergate break-in; i.e., it leads everywhere in a multilayered literary layer cake—-a benign literary “conspiracy” over centuries, involving not only Austen, Gay, and Foote, but also Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton & Keats! 

Before I cut to the chase, let me first give you one more key clue to keep in mind, also courtesy of Wikipedia, about the details of the Eve of St. Agnes ritual:  “[The young virgin] would go to bed without any supper, undress herself so that she was completely naked and lie on her bed with her hands under the pillow and looking up to the heavens and not to look behind. Then the proposed husband would appear in her dream, kiss her, and feast with her.”

So…in my 2010 post, I quoted the passage in Chapter 30 of S&S when Mrs. Jennings, on the Eve of St. Agnes (according to JA’s implicit calendar for S&S), brings the broken-hearted Marianne a bottle of wine to help her sleep; and then (as inferred by the reader aware of the Eve) hopefully to dream about a lover to replace Willoughby in her heart.  

Now, here are the relevant portions of the passage in Chapter 12 of S&S, which I finally “got” the full significance of the other day (pay special attention to the words in ALL CAPS):  

“As Elinor and Marianne were walking together the next morning the latter communicated a piece of news to her sister, which in spite of all that she knew before of Marianne's imprudence and want of thought, surprised her by its extravagant testimony of both. Marianne told her, with the greatest delight, that Willoughby had given her a HORSE, one that he had bred himself on his estate in Somersetshire, and which was exactly calculated to CARRY A WOMAN. Without considering that it was not in her mother's plan to keep any horse, that if she were to alter her resolution in favour of this gift, she must buy another for the servant, and keep a servant to ride it, and after all, build a stable to receive them, she had accepted the present without hesitation, and told her sister of it in raptures.

"He intends to send his groom into Somersetshire immediately for it," she added, "and when it arrives we will ride every day. You shall share its use with me. Imagine to yourself, my dear Elinor, the delight of a GALLOP on some of these downs."

Most unwilling was she to AWAKEN FROM SUCH A DREAM OF FELICITY to comprehend all the unhappy truths which attended the affair; and for some time she refused to submit to them…I have not known him long indeed, but I am much better acquainted with him, than I am with any other creature in the world, except yourself and mama. It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;—it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others. I should hold myself guilty of greater impropriety in accepting a horse from my brother, than from Willoughby. Of John I know very little, though we have lived together for years; but of Willoughby my judgment has long been formed."

…when Willoughby called at the cottage, the same day, Elinor heard her express her disappointment to him in a low voice, on being obliged to forego the acceptance of his present. The reasons for this alteration were at the same time related, and they were such as to make further entreaty on his side impossible. His concern however was very apparent; and after expressing it with earnestness, he added, in the same low voice,—"But, Marianne, the horse is still yours, though YOU CANNOT USE IT NOW. I shall keep it only till you can claim it. When you leave Barton to form your own establishment in a more lasting home, QUEEN MAB SHALL RECEIVE YOU."

This was all overheard by Miss Dashwood; and in the whole of the sentence, in his manner of pronouncing it, and in his addressing her sister by her Christian name alone, she instantly saw an intimacy so decided, a meaning so direct, as marked a perfect agreement between them. From that moment she doubted not of their being engaged to each other; and the belief of it created no other surprise than that she, or any of their friends, should be left by tempers so frank, to discover it by accident.”

A hundred Austen scholars, academic and amateur alike, have noted that Willoughby’s naming the gift horse (ala the Trojan Horse as well) “Queen Mab” was an allusion to Mercurio’s famous speech to Romeo just before he meets Juliet. Here’s the relevant exchange, in which Mercurio spins his Queen Mab fantasy in response to Romeo’s report of having just dreamt a significant dream:

ROMEO I dream'd a dream to-night.

MERCUTIO And so did I.

ROMEO  Well, what was yours?

MERCUTIO That dreamers often lie.

ROMEO In bed asleep, while they do dream things true.

MERCUTIO

O, then, I see QUEEN MAB HATH BEEN WITH YOU.

She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate-stone

On the fore-finger of an alderman,

Drawn with a team of little atomies

Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;

………….

Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut

Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,

Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.

And in this state she gallops night by night

Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;

O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight,

O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees,

O'er ladies ' lips, who straight on kisses dream,

Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,

Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:

………..

This is the hag, WHEN MAIDS LIE ON THEIR BACKS,

That PRESSES THEM AND LEARNS THEM FIRST TO BEAR,

Making them women of good carriage…

It’s a sign of the threadbare thinness of so much existing Austen scholarship that the Queen Mab R&J allusion in S&S has been noted so often, yet in almost all of them, the allusion receives minimal or no explanation of its meaning - as if Jane Austen were a literary poseur who showed off that she had read Shakespeare by an obvious quotation. But there have been a few welcome exceptions.

To start, Anielka Briggs has at various times in the past several years referred to Willoughby’s Queen Mab as referencing several possible subtexts, including Shelley's 1813 [date corrected 12/29/2016] poem of that title. 

A number of years ago, John Dussinger, in his 1990 article “Madness and Lust in the Age of Sensibility”, speculated as follows about Willoughby’s mare as JA’s allusion to Fuseli’s famous 1782 painting “The Nightmare”:

“Other than folklore and traditional religious accounts of dreams, rational explanations in the classical period show little interest in what Fuseli so vividly reveals about the mind—its demonic cravings and humiliations that appear uninvited in the darkness…Medical literature stressed simply the bad effects of sleeping on one’s back; according to Dr. John Bond, in one of the first English works on the nightmare, the condition ‘general seizes people sleeping on their backs…” …In this context, Robert Anthony Bromley ridiculed “The Nightmare” as offering instruction to young people about how to lie in their beds: “Don’t lie on your back, my dear, and no harm will come to you.”…Although both sexes are subject to dreams and nightmares, folk legends tended to emphasize the woman’s susceptibility, as in Mercutio’s speech in R&J…Willoughby, in JA’s S&S, alludes to this legend after the Dashwoods decline his gift….As if associating Queen Mab and the gift horse with Fuseli’s traumatic scene, Elinor quite properly believes that Willoughby’s sexual innuendoes must indicate a secret engagement to her sister. Erasmus Darwin, Fuseli’s friend, included an engraving of The Nightmare  in The Loves of the Plants …and interpreted its significance in doggerel verse…. “ END QUOTE

Then, in her 2006 book Unbecoming Conjunctions, Jill Heydt-Stevenson presented this excellent, detailed analysis:

“Willoughby's desire to give Marianne a horse named Queen Mab provides a prime example of the risks she faces and the careful ways Austen uses Shakespeare to establish Willoughby's motives and complicate the seeming idyll of their short courtship ... The Queen Mab allusion from Romeo and Juliet is well known… In this scene Mercutio chides Romeo for thinking he is in love… and concludes that Queen Mab has visited his sleeping friend. Queen Mab, a mischievous spirit that provides a dream of fulfillment of one's less noble longings… gallops over “ladies's lips, who straight on kisses dream”… So for Mercutio, rather like Willoughby, love has less to do with an intimate connection, a position both Romeo and Maryanne share, that with the immediate fulfillment of "vain fantasy". Stephen Derry cites this allusion to indicate that "Marianne's hopes of future happiness with Willoughby will have all the substances of dreams, and then they will come to nothing". Recalling Mercutio's admission that "dreamers often lie" Derry insists that "dream lovers like Willoughby… can lie."

I agree with Derry that the reference accentuates Willoughby’s deceit but go further in noting the clear parallels established respectively between Willoughby and Mercutio and Romeo and Marianne. Further the allusion implicates Willoughby's baser motives insofar as it insinuates that this midwife to the fairies, this ‘hag’, will teach a class in sex education to Marianne since she is the one who "when maids lie on their backs"... John Dussinger’s idea that Elinor might have "associated Queen Mab and the gift horse with… the traumatic scene [in Fuseli’s The Nightmare]” is tantalizing, but he does not develop the disturbing implications of such an association, only concluding that it leads Elinor "quite properly to believe that Willoughby’s sexual innuendos must indicate a secret engagement to her sister". If such a link could be forged, it would (contrary to Dussinger’s argument) diminish the possibility of an engagement and amplify the potential for seduction and ruin; further, it incriminates Marianne, who as possessor of the animal, plays Queen Mab, delighting in the fantasy of "a gallop on some of these Downs". Marianne metonymically becomes the seductress who incites Willoughby to dream of love as "she gallops night by night through lovers brains". In giving her Queen Mab, Willoughby links Marianne with the seduced Eliza Williams, whom he describes as reproachable for her excess and lack; a woman of "violent passions and weak understanding".

Again, a look at the slang is revealing. The name “Mab" was standard English for a “slattern, a loose moral’d woman” … Unlike Eliza, Marianne declines the "horse", though Willoughby promises her that “Queen Mab will receive you.”

Is this the Queen Mab who, angry that the ladies “breathes with sweetmeats tainted are”, “blisters” their lips? Here one bawdy novelist alludes to a bawdy playwright. As this discloses, Shakespeare's Queen Mab passage is quite vulgar, since sweetmeat referred to the male member and to “a mere girl who is a kept Mistress”. Perhaps since Austen conjoins Marianne with Eliza and the mother who becomes a prostitute she suggests that the Queen Mab who “receives” Marianne would potentially also blister her lips – that is, see that she contracts venereal disease.… Austen’s allusion to the scene from Romeo and Juliet still allows her to foreshadow the novels conclusion, reinforce the ubiquity of such seductions, express how vulnerable Marianne is to fantasies of erotic fulfillment, and establish the danger to Marianne's physical and emotional body. Finally the fact that Shakespeare’s Queen Mab is a miniature… reinforces how in the novel Austen has "draw a team of little atomies" that allow her to enact several roles at once. First she is a kind of Queen Mab herself, fiction’s “midwife”, bringing dreams to life for her characters and playing with cultural fantasies of true love. Her performance as Queen Mab thus undercuts her position as potential didact. Moreover, the high literary allusion which in itself embeds a rich trove of indelicate images) and the low slang surrounding the word Mab intimate that if Austin plays pedagogue here, her lesson plan devolves from the desire to alert her readers to the hazards and dangerous of male seducers rather than to correct feeling. I do not think that Austen concentrates on correcting rather than liberating this anarchic energy.… I want to stress that Austen promulgates an open and liberal (and, so ironic) “conduct book” of female sexuality.” END QUOTE

I do not suggest that any of the above speculations or analyses are wrong, today I bring forward a deeper allusion which readily includes these other earlier interpretations within its wide ambit. Specifically, none of Anielka, Dussinger, nor Heydt-Stevenson was aware of the key that unlocks the primary meaning of Queen Mab in S&S, which is the Eve of St Agnes when single girls literally follow Mercurio’s prescription, and lie on their backs in order to (metaphorically) feast with their future husband. Willoughby’s gift mare is a living breathing symbol of that dream, and so its name is a perfect fit.

And therefore we can now see Mrs Jennings's attempt to nurse Marianne's broken heart via the Eve of St. Agnes Method as the ironic bookend to the earlier Eve of St Agnes-infused romance with Willoughby which turned into romantic nightmare for Marianne.

In a nutshell (or, to channel Mercutio, an atomie), that is the main reason why JA had Willoughby name the gift mare Queen Mab. But that only fulfills half of the discoveries promised by my Subject Line. Aside from the above Austen subtexts, there’s much more allusive ore to be mined, in regard to the Eve of St. Agnes/Queen Mab meme.

It is now obvious to me that it wasn't just Austen (and Gay and Foote) who had embedded the religious/folk significance of the Eve of St.Agnes in their storytelling. For starters, when Mercutio speaks about the maids on their backs, this is, in no small part, Shakespeare's way of confirming that Mercutio has that exact same subtext in mind as he counsels Romeo. I.e., that allusion to the folk/religious tradition is reinforced by the final example Mercutio gives of Queen Mab’s varied subversions. In effect, Mercutio is telling Romeo that he is about to meet a young virgin who has been dreaming about him!

I will leave for another day the unpacking of the significance of the Eve of St. Agnes subtext of Romeo & Juliet, and quickly move on chronologically to the next famous author who has alluded to the Eve of St. Agnes —only a few years after Shakespeare—Ben Jonson. Please now read the following excerpt I found online, in which some modern scholar (I cannot find a name) quoted from Ben Jonson’s 1603 Satyr—-please note the final speech by the Satyr, which explicitly connects the Eve of St. Agnes to Queen Mab vis a vis bringing dreams to virgins seeking a husband or lover:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/tfm/tfm124.htm

“The next poet, in point of time, who employs the Fairies, is worthy, long-slandered, and maligned Ben Jonson. His beautiful entertainment of the Satyr was presented in 1603, to Anne, queen of James I. and prince Henry, at Althorpe, the seat of Lord Spenser, on their way from Edinburgh to London. As the queen and prince entered the park, a Satyr came forth from a "little spinet" or copse, and having gazed the "Queen and the Prince in the face" with admiration, again retired into the thicket; then "there came tripping up the lawn a bevy of Fairies attending on Mab, their queen, who, falling into an artificial ring, began to dance a round while their mistress spake as followeth:"

MAB. 

Hail and welcome, worthiest queen!

Joy had never perfect been,

To the nymphs that haunt this green,

Had they not this evening seen.

Now they print it on the ground

With their feet, in figures round;

Marks that will be ever found

To remember this glad stound.

……

SATYR. 

She can start our Franklin's daughters

In her sleep with shouts and laughters;

And ON SWEET ST. ANNA’S NIGHT

Feed them with a promised sight

Some of HUSBAND, some of LOVERS,

WHICH AN EMPTY DREAM DISCOVERS.

END QUOTE

That scholar also noted: “Whalley was certainly right in proposing to road Agnes. This ceremony is, we believe, still practised in the north of England on St. Agnes' night. See Brand, i. 34.”

But there’s still more. To find out if any other Shakespeare scholars had ever noticed Shakespeare’s allusion to the Eve of St. Agnes, when I Googled "Eve of Saint Agnes" and "Romeo and Juliet", I was shocked to find that the only hits that came up, and there were many, were all pointing to the poem written in 1821 by John Keats entitled (fittingly) “The Eve of Saint Agnes”!

It would take me a great deal of virtual ink to unpack the manifold significances of the Eve of Saint Agnes ritual, and Romeo & Juliet, in Keats’s poem, but I wish to end this long post shortly, so I must move on to the final link in the chain, which is John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In another nutshell: 

It has often been noted by literary scholars that Keats’s poem draws heavily on the dreaming motif in Paradise Lost.  And I have shown last year that Paradise Lost draws heavily on Romeo & Juliet, that extensive borrowing epitomized in the SATAN acrostics in both.

But no one has ever noted that all of the above cited literary works — by Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, Gay, Foote, Austen, and Keats—- are all united by a common grounding in the Eve of St. Agnes religious/folk tradition of virgins sleeping naked on their backs in order to dream about their future husband.

So, when I referred to the literary layer cake of the Eve of Saint Agnes, you can now taste all its rich flavors!

[Added later on May 24]

As I Tweeted a few hours ago about my above post, I came across an interesting blog post here .... https://deborahwallaceauthor.wordpress.com/2016/03/12/the-eve-of-st-agnes/

....which stated the following:

"The second [custom] is Scottish in origin. It states that for a young woman to see her future husband she must leave the house at midnight the night before St Agnes’s feast day, go into a field and scatter grain while reciting the following incantation: ‘Agnes sweet, and Agnes fair, hither, hither, now repair; Bonny Agnes, let me see the lad who is to marry me.’ Her future husband would then appear to her."

Although Marianne and Margaret don't go out in the Devon countryside at midnight, doesn't it sound like JA is winking at the above-described variant on Eve of St. Agnes customs, when Marianne is rescued by Willoughby in the rain during her walk?

It first perfectly with what I realized a few years ago, which is that while Willoughby is indeed stalking Marianne, she already has noticed this, and that is precisely why she puts herself in the position to be rescued by "her future husband"!

Only one small problem from the Eve of St. Agnes angle---I don't believe Marianne is still a virgin when this occurs......

Cheers, 

ARNIE 

@JaneAustenCode onTwitter

Mr. Darcy’s “request” that the (in)dependent Mr. Bennet cannot refuse

I’ve engaged in an offlist exchange of emails with a sharp elf Janeite the past 2 days about my most recent claim, that Kitty Bennet is subliminally depicted as going through childbirth during the time Lydia is in Brighton and London. I’ve again urged her to join these two groups and contribute her excellent insights, and the latest one she wrote me is the following remarkable speculation about Mr. Bennet's possible source of income other than from Longbourn's operations:

"Somewhere in the novel a rather long paragraph was dedicated to the non-existence of economy in the household and that they would indeed have been in trouble if Mr. Bennet didn't 'love his independence' so much.."

I immediately recognized this as brilliant, because "independence" is exactly the sort of ambiguous abstract noun which JA clearly relished punning on in a variety of sophisticated ways. I will now take a preliminary stab at fleshing out her insight here, and hopefully she will show up soon and add more to this thread, and hopefully to many others to come.

First of all here’s the passage she was recalling:

“[Mr B] was seriously concerned that a cause of so little advantage to anyone should be forwarded at the sole expense of his brother-in-law, and he was determined, if possible, to find out the extent of his assistance, and to discharge the obligation as soon as he could. When first Mr. Bennet had married, economy was held to be perfectly useless, for, of course, they were to have a son. The son was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow and younger children would by that means be provided for. Five daughters successively entered the world, but yet the son was to come; and Mrs. Bennet, for many years after Lydia's birth, had been certain that he would. This event had at last been despaired of, but it was then too late to be saving. Mrs. Bennet had no turn for economy, and her husband's love of independence had alone prevented their exceeding their income.”

I hadn’t previously focused on that last curious reference to Mr. Bennet’s “love of independence”, and so first I had to decode its somewhat obscure surface meaning, before addressing the shadowy pun that my correspondent had spotted. After a few minutes, it became clear to me that the idea was that Mr. Bennet hated the idea of owing anything to anyone (like Mr. Gardiner), and that was the only reason why he periodically dragged himself out of his beloved library and forced himself to pay enough attention to keeping Mrs. Bennet’s expensive taste in financial check, so they didn’t incur debt.

So far, so good, JA always got a kick out of forcing readers to stay alert and be ready to parse her deliberate gaps and elisions. But now for the pun — it’s also clear to me that she repeatedly deployed, in both narration and dialog, the now archaic meaning of “independence” as a kind of annuity or source of regular income. To give just three out of a number of examples:

[Emma] : [Mr. Weston] had received a good education, but, on succeeding early in life to a small independence, had become indisposed for any of the more homely pursuits in which his brothers were engaged, and had satisfied an active, cheerful mind and social temper by entering into the militia of his county, then embodied.

"Six years hence! Dear Miss Woodhouse, he would be thirty years old!” "Well, and that is as early as most men can afford to marry, who are not born to an independence. …”

[P&P]: “…You have deprived the best years of his life of that independence which was no less his due than his desert…” 

In short, an independence was akin to a “living”, but it was a legal entitlement to a regular stream of vested payments having nothing to do with clerical services.

So….was JA suggesting, in her usual sly elliptical way, and as my correspondent noted, that Mr. Bennet was receiving a stream of income from a benefactor? I believe JA was doing exactly that, and I again applaud my correspondent for this catch. The use of this word “independence” in relation to Mr. Weston is particularly probative, because 12 years ago I first noted how the following legalistic language from the law of property was a giant clue that he had sold young Frank to the Churchill: 

“Some scruples and some reluctance the widower-father may be supposed to have felt; but as they were overcome BY OTHER CONSIDERATIONS, the child was given up to the care and the wealth of the Churchills, and he had only his own comfort to seek, and his own situation to improve as he could.”

And now I will reveal who my correspondent had in mind as Mr. Bennet’s secret benefactor — none other than the bountiful Mr. Darcy — but trust me, most of you don’t want to know why he’d be paying money to Mr. Bennet all along, so I will leave that for another post!

Anyway, I love the idea of Mr. Darcy (and perhaps, before him, Mr. Darcy Sr?) as having provided crucial backup for the Bennet family finances, because it just happens to dovetail very nicely with a few things I had spotted in P&P a very long time ago, prompted initially by something Kishor Kale mentioned in the Janeites group, about the following comment that Mr. Bennet makes to Lizzy about Darcy when she reaffirms to him that she really does love Darcy:

“…If this be the case, he deserves you. I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy."

Kishor sees this ambiguous figure-ground statement as JA’s inadvertent, unintended suggestion that Mr. Bennet is warning Lizzy that Darcy is the most UNworthy man she could possible have chosen, whereas I believe JA’s ambiguity was completely deliberate….and brilliant! And I’ve believed for a very long while that Mr. Bennet and Mr. Darcy have somehow known each other for a very long time completely outside Lizzy’s awareness. But i never connected that dots to Mr. Bennet’s “love of independence”!

You can see a further hint at this when you read the full context of the above-quoted sentence:

"Lizzy," said her father, "I have given him my consent. He is the kind of man, indeed, to whom I should never dare refuse anything, which he condescended to ask. I now give it to you, if you are resolved on having him. But let me advise you to think better of it. I know your disposition, Lizzy. I know that you could be neither happy nor respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband; unless you looked up to him as a superior. Your lively talents would place you in the greatest danger in an unequal marriage. You could scarcely escape discredit and misery. My child, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life. You know not what you are about."

Elizabeth, still more affected, was earnest and solemn in her reply; and at length, by repeated assurances that Mr. Darcy was really the object of her choice, by explaining the gradual change which her estimation of him had undergone, relating her absolute certainty that his affection was not the work of a day, but had stood the test of many months' suspense, and enumerating with energy all his good qualities, she did conquer her father's incredulity, and reconcile him to the match. 

"Well, my dear," said he, when she ceased speaking, "I have no more to say. If this be the case, he deserves you. I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy."

You really have to wonder about Mr. Bennet’s never daring to refuse Darcy anything that he “condescended to ask”— it drips with euphemistic irony, and is the kind of “polite” statement that could most aptly have been made about Don Corleone, the Godfather! This very famous scene in The Godfather Part I comes specifically to mind:

MICHAEL: We’re all proud of you…   JOHNNY: Thank, Mike. MICHAEL: Sit down, Johnny— I want to talk to you…The Don is proud of you.  JOHNNY: Well I owe it all to him.  MICHAEL: Well, he knows how grateful you are. He wants to ask a favor of you.  JOHNNY: Mike, what can I do? MICHAEL: [Asks for the specific favor, then]  FREDO: Hey, Mike, are you sure about that? Moe loves the business, he never said nothin’ to me about sellin’    MICHAEL: Yeah, well, I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse

And so the idea that Mr. Bennet has been on Darcy’s payroll all along, as a result of Darcy’s having preyed on the financial vulnerability of the Bennet family, and therefore Darcy’s “request” for Mr. Bennet’s consent truly is a proverbial offer he cannot refuse, is very appealing to me.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The little “great” alteration that Lydia notices in the Longbourn sitting room

While I do the overwhelming majority of my literary sleuthing online and on my computer, I still sometimes have occasion to delve into actual tangible books I hold in my hands (I have three whole shelves of books by and about Jane Austen), and yesterday I spent an enjoyable stretch browsing and rereading essays in Donald Gray’s Norton Critical Edition of P&P, for the first time in several years. My first reaction was to salute Gray and the Norton Critical Editions people for including extended excerpts from 4 or 5 essays about P&P which make, at least in part, what I consider to be excellent subversive readings of important aspects of P&P. I’ll write about each of them in the coming week, and today I’ll begin by talking about something remarkable I was prompted to discover after reading something in Nina Auerbach’s 1978 essay “Waiting Together: Pride and Prejudice”.

Auerbach’s major point that resonated most strongly with me is summed up by her here: 

“The acknowledged center of power in the novel is the shadowy Darcy…Elizabeth is overcome by a kind of social vitalism…like the shadowy ‘Duke of dark corners’ in Measure for Measure, he moves behind the scenes and secretly arranges the marriages of the three Bennet girls.” 

Those pithy comments anticipate my full-fledged vision of the Machiavellian Darcy of the shadow story of P&P, and I heartily recommend the rest of her essay to you all. However, today I want to focus on a small snippet of it, in which Auerbach discusses the strange insubstantiality of Longbourn as a place, due to JA’s dearth of physical description thereof in Chapter 51 of P&P:

“When the unregenerate Lydia return[ed] to make everyone miserable as the family’s first bride, and look[ed] ‘eagerly round the room, took notice of some little alteration in it, and observed, with a laugh, that it was a great while since she had been there”, it matters to nobody what the little alteration might be.” END QUOTE FROM AUERBACH ARTICLE

My eyes widened at the tantalizingly vague word “alteration”, which I had identified years ago as one of the many euphemistic words (others include ‘borne’, ‘expectation’, ‘interesting condition’, and ‘swelled’) by which JA subliminally hinted at concealed pregnancies in all her novels. All my experience of JA’s cryptic clueing was telling me that this was a clue to something like that; not, as Auerbach seemed to think, a trivial moving of a sofa from one part of the room to the other that no reader had any reason to care about. I quickly retrieved the full relevant excerpt to try to glean some more clues: 

“Lydia was Lydia still; untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless. She turned from sister to sister, demanding their congratulations; and when at length they all sat down, looked eagerly round the room, took notice of some little alteration in it, and observed, with a laugh, that it was a great while since she had been there.”

That full excerpt showed me that Auerbach had not thought far enough outside the box to grasp that the “little alteration” was not in the furnishings of the room, but in someone — “in it”—i.e. a little alteration in one of Lydia’s sisters! The key to solving this little mystery is to pay close attention to the physical details that Jane Austen actually provides, rather than looking in vain for the physical details she does not. In this case, we are told that Lydia turned from sister to sister (a lot of turning, since she has 4 sisters!), and then JA takes care to repeat the placement of the 4 other sisters within the space of the room, now seated around Lydia. I’m reminded (not coincidentally, I suggest) of Elizabeth’s playful allusion to Gilpin earlier in the novel, in the Netherfield shrubbery, except this time it’s Lydia who is laughing at others, not Eliza: “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."

And here’s the key—I see in Lydia’s laughing observation a giant hint as to what sort of alteration she notices — it is indeed that Lydia is having some uncharitable fun at the expense of one of her sisters, whose physical appearance has altered during Lydia’s months away — altered, that is, by having given birth to a child in the interim!

That hint is that Lydia laughs first and then says that she has been gone “a great while”. Lydia is slyly making the point that one of her sisters had been “great” — with child, that is — when Lydia left around May 10, and was now, over three months later, in late August, no longer “great” with child. But which sister?

At first, not thinking carefully, I thought it was Jane Bennet, since I’ve been saying since 2010 that Jane is secretly pregnant when the action of the novel begins (e.g., it is her morning sickness, not getting caught in the rain, which is the actual “illness” that forces her to spend most of her visit to Netherfield in bed). But I quickly realized, today, that it can’t be Jane to whom Lydia is referring, since the chronology is all wrong. I recalled that I had figured out a while ago that Jane Bennet goes to London to stay with the Gardiners so she can have her illegitimate child under the cloak of the anonymity of the great metropolis, far away from the probing eyes of sister Elizabeth and also the gossip hothouse known as Meryton. But Jane is already back at Longbourn before Lydia leaves for Brighton, so it can’t be Jane who has altered during Lydia’s absence. 

That brought me up short. I hadn’t previously considered the possibility that yet another Bennet sister might be pregnant, but which one? It certainly wasn’t Eliza, and I already knew from prior close readings that there was nothing in the small number of lines spoken by Mary, or in the small amount of narration about her, that in any way hinted in that direction. By process of elimination, that left only Kitty! I decided to investigate that possibility, in deference to Sherlock Holmes’s famous credo:  “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

So I began to think about Kitty Bennet as an (improbable, but possible) unmarried pregnant girl in the shadow story of P&P, and the first thing I recalled, promisingly, was my finding, several years ago, that Kitty has depths unsuspected by Elizabeth, through whose eyes we experience Kitty. I knew that Kitty’s sarcastic coughing at the beginning of the novel, when Mr. and Mrs. Bennet engage in their famous repartee about his contacting Mr. Bingley, showed that Kitty had a sharp mind and wit. 

But were there any textual clues elsewhere in the novel hinting at a much more significant hidden life of Kitty’s—of her being in a family way? 

I quickly collected a number of passages that seem relevant, and will go through them with you, below, in order, except that I will first present the one I found that really knocked my socks off. It’s the following passage in Chapter 42, by the light of which a heretofore “dark corner” of Kitty’s life was shockingly illuminated:

“By the middle of June, Kitty was SO MUCH RECOVERED as to be able to enter Meryton WITHOUT TEARS”

I don’t deny that the context of the above in the overt story is clear— that Kitty took over a month to get over herself regarding not being allowed to go with Lydia to Brighton. Not a big deal. But if we read that quoted sentence against the grain, what pops out at us (so to speak) from the ALL CAPS verbiage is extraordinary, when combined with Lydia’s laughing comment 9 chapters (and over 2 months) later. Everyone knows that the period of time for mothers to recover from childbirth can vary, depending on how easy the delivery is. 

And that’s where JA’s punning mastery comes in — while we overtly read “without tears” to mean that Kitty no long cries tears (rhymes with ‘tiers’), there is also a pun in the word “tears”, which, when pronounced to rhyme with “fares”,  refers to rips, rents, or slits in fabric, paper, or. ….. human flesh! You see now where I’m going with this — one of the events which can occur during delivery which can significantly extend her recovery time is that the mother can suffer unusual injuries (‘tears”), especially in the case of a large newborn being borne by a petite mother.

So, was the above sentence JA’s way of alerting us to look at Kitty as a pregnant mother, who gives birth shortly after Lydia leaves for Brighton? I think so, and now, let’s walk through the other relevant passages I collected from the text of P&P, and I’ll show you the delicate textual palimpsest that JA weaves in this regard.

BEFORE LYDIA LEAVES FOR BRIGHTON

Ch. 39:   …both KITTY and Lydia looking out of a dining-room up stairs. These two girls had been above an hour in the place, happily employed in visiting an opposite milliner, watching the sentinel on guard, and DRESSING A salad and CUCUMBER.

The sexual innuendo of that “cucumber”, involving both Kitty and Lydia, is strongobvious.

“…We dressed up Chamberlayne in woman's clothes on purpose to pass for a lady, only think what fun! Not a soul knew of it, but Colonel and Mrs. Forster, and KITTY and me, except my aunt, for we were forced to borrow one of her gowns; and you cannot imagine how well he looked! When Denny, and Wickham, and Pratt, and two or three more of the men came in, they did not know him in the least. Lord! how I laughed! and so did Mrs. Forster. I thought I should have died. And that made the men suspect something, and then they soon found out what was the matter."

With such kinds of histories of their parties and good jokes, did Lydia, ASSISTED BY KITTY’S HINTS and additions, endeavour to amuse her companions all the way to Longbourn. 

And even more so is the sexual innuendo clear in the above passage—and note that Kitty is associated with sexual activity and hints as well as Lydia.

“…As we went along, Kitty and I drew up the blinds, and pretended there was nobody in the coach; and I should have gone so all the way, IF KITTY HAD NOT BEEN SICK…”

And note that Lydia’s R-rated suggestion of sex play needing to be concealed, is prevented because Kitty is “sick”. This would be within a short time before Kitty would give birth.

Ch. 41: "And my aunt Phillips is sure [sea-bathing] would DO ME A GREAT DEAL OF GOOD," added Kitty.

And so, here again is slipped in a subtly veiled implication that Kitty is not well.

"I cannot see why Mrs. Forster should not ask me as well as Lydia," said she, "Though I am not her particular friend. I have just as much right to be asked as she has, and more too, for I am two years older.”

And we may wonder about Kitty’s not being able to go for a very different reason, i.e. that she is about to give birth!

AFTER LYDIA LEAVES FOR BRIGHTON

The following passages cover the time period that Lydia is away, and look at what we read right before the above-quoted “smoking gun” about Kitty’s recovery from her tears:

Ch. 42: [Lydia’s] letters were always LONG EXPECTED, and always very short…from her correspondence with her sister, there was still less to be learnt—for her letters to Kitty, though rather longer, were much too full of lines under the words to be made public.

In addition to the pun on “long expected”, we may now wonder whether Lydia’s letters to Kitty had to be written in a kind of code to conceal the portions thereof relating to Kitty’s imminent childbirth ordeal.

After the first fortnight or three weeks of her absence, HEALTH, good humour, and cheerfulness began to reappear at Longbourn. Everything wore a happier aspect. The families who had been in town for the winter came back again, and summer finery and summer engagements arose. 

And once again, subtly, the restoration not merely of good humor and cheerfulness, but of health, is slipped into the narrative.

Now we move ahead a bit in time, to when Lydia elopes.

Ch. 46: To Kitty, however, it does not seem SO WHOLLY UNEXPECTED.

Again, that same pun on expectation and childbirth.

Poor Kitty has anger FOR HAVING CONCEALED their ATTACHMENT; but as it was a matter of confidence, one cannot wonder. 

Ch. 47: “…Mary and Kitty, thank Heaven, are QUITE WELL.”

And yet again, it seems Kitty’s health is always under consideration.  

In the dining-room they were soon joined by Mary and Kitty, who had been too busily engaged in their separate apartments to make their appearance before. One came from her books, and THE OTHER [Kitty] WITH HER TOILETTE. The faces of both, however, were tolerably calm; and no change was visible in either, except that the loss of her favourite sister, or the anger which she had herself incurred in this business, had given MORE OF FRETFULNESS THAN USUAL TO THE ACCENTS OF KITTY. “

And yet again, we are subtly directed to think about Kitty’s body, and her complaints. 

“…Kitty then owned, with a very natural triumph on knowing more than the rest of us, that in Lydia's last letter she had prepared her for such a step. She had known, it seems, of their being in love with each other, many weeks."

"Mary and Kitty have been very kind, and would have shared in every fatigue, I am sure; but I did not think it right for either of them. Kitty is SLIGHT AND DELICATE…”

And here we get another clue — Kitty is given a pass by Jane that is not given to Mary, so as to avoid causing Kitty fatigue, because Kitty is slight and delicate, which connects back to her “tears”.

Ch. 48: "This is a parade," he cried, "which does one good; it gives such an elegance to misfortune! Another day I will do the same; I will sit in my library, in my nightcap and powdering gown, and give as much trouble as I can; or, perhaps, I may defer it till Kitty runs away."

"I am not going to run away, papa," said Kitty fretfully. "If I should ever go to Brighton, I would behave better than Lydia."

"You go to Brighton. I would not trust you so near it as Eastbourne for fifty pounds! No, Kitty, I have at last learnt to be cautious, and you will feel the effects of it. No officer is ever to enter into my house again, nor even to pass through the village. Balls will be absolutely prohibited, unless you stand up with one of your sisters. And you are never to stir out of doors till you can prove that you have spent ten minutes of every day in a rational manner."

Kitty, who took all these threats in a serious light, began to cry.

"Well, well," said he, "do not make yourself unhappy. If you are a good girl for the next ten years, I will take you to a review at the end of them.”

The above passage, which appears to be pure comedy, also carries a dark possible implication - could it be that Mr. Bennet’s unwillingness to allow Kitty to go away is a clue to the identity of the father of Kitty’s illegitimate child?—I.e., Mr. Bennet himself? It would certainly fit with the patriarchal incest theme that comes to the fore in the shadow story of Emma, with Mr. Woodhouse as a latter day Antiochus from Shakespeare’s Pericles.

And that last disturbing suggestion is totally consistent all of the following passages in the final chapters of the novel, which have that same common theme— that Kitty is not going to leave Longbourn anytime soon—and it won’t be for a good reason.

Ch. 55: It was an evening of no common delight to them all; the satisfaction of Miss Bennet's mind gave a glow of such sweet animation to her face, as made her look handsomer than ever. Kitty simpered and smiled, and hoped her turn was coming soon. …Mary petitioned for the use of the library at Netherfield; and Kitty begged very hard for a few balls there every winter.

Ch. 59: "It may do very well for the others," replied Mr. Bingley; "but I am sure it will be too much for Kitty. Won't it, Kitty?" Kitty owned that she had rather stay at home. 

So, in honor of Kitty Bennet, it seems fitting if I end with a cough— because, regarding her coughing at the beginning of P&P, was I correct last year that Kitty was just being sarcastic about her parents’ tired old vaudeville routine? Or, behind that comedy, was there a darker timbre to her coughing, perhaps referring to Kitty’s extreme skepticism that her father will EVER let her get away from Longbourn?

That being said, I hope that the following, final reference to Kitty in the novel suggests that Elizabeth and Jane have taken matters into their own hands, in rescuing Kitty from the need for further coughing. 

Ch. 61: Kitty, to her very material advantage, spent the chief of her time with her two elder sisters. In society so superior to what she had generally known, her improvement was great. She was not of so ungovernable a temper as Lydia; and, removed from the influence of Lydia's example, she became, by proper attention and management, less irritable, less ignorant, and less insipid. From the further disadvantage of Lydia's society she was of course carefully kept, and though Mrs. Wickham frequently invited her to come and stay with her, with the promise of balls and young men, her father would never consent to her going.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, & Eliza Bennet’s FIRST “first impressions”

Nancy Mayer wrote:

"Charlotte Smith's life was made miserable due to the wretched man she married. She was quite young, he was a charming scoundrel who lied to everyone. Like Mary Robinson, Charlotte had to sit in Debtors' prison with her children -- I think one was born there-- while her husband spends what little of their funds existed cavorting with his mistress. I can see her or Mary Robinson writing novels that depict men as betrayers and monsters under their fancy coats. The way I understand it, her husband's father rewrote his will to provide for Charlotte and the children but relatives contested it, the lawyers kept the case in court for a decade and took most of the money. Charlotte had reason to distrust everyone. She subscribed to the saying "First kill the lawyers." I think she died just as the case settled or just before it did. Did anyone ever look into what happened to her children?"

Nancy, from that otherwise excellent summary, you left out one crucial fact, vis a vis JA: that Charlotte Smith’s writing was a hugely significant allusive source for JA regarding men behaving badly! Not just to mirror the likes of Wickham, but the shadow Darcy as well. Several years ago, I posted about a powerful example of the latter, drawn from one of Smith’s “ripped from the headlines” dramatizations of real life domestic Gothic horror-----and it reflects very badly indeed on the shadow Darcy. In short, I say that JA’s shadow stories are directly inspired by Smith’s overt stories!

ELIZA BENNET’S FIRST “FIRST IMPRESSIONS”:

As for Ann Radcliffe, she happens to be the other author I was going to write about today on my own accord, in followup on my claim yesterday that Eliza has such a strong reaction to seeing Pemberley with the Gardiners, because she’s NOT seeing Pemberley for the first time. Instead, she’s having a "deja vu" moment, but in the literal sense. She has literally "already seen" Pemberley before, when she was a small child born there! And so, her tour through the rooms of Pemberley on two legs is repeatedly subliminally reminding her of when she once crawled through them on four legs!

And here's how Radcliffe comes into that mix. Yesterday, I was trying to recall and retrieve other literary characters who unwittingly return to their birthplace, and have a feeling of "deja vu" based on actual early memories. Besides the most famous one, Oedipus (did you catch my sendup of the Sphinx’s riddle, in referring to Elizabeth at Pemberley on two legs and four legs?), I recalled that something strikingly similar happens to Emily St. Aubert, the heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho. Here’s how Nelson S. Smith explained it, in “Sense, Sensibility and Ann Radcliffe” in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 Vol. 13, No. 4, Nineteenth Century (Autumn, 1973), pp. 577-590:

“Throughout Dorothee's story of the Marchioness, prolonged over nearly forty pages, Mrs. Radcliffe hints that Emily might be her daughter. Later, Emily visits a dying nun, Agnes, who resides at the monastery of St. Claire. The first story which Emily hears suggests that Agnes may be the Marchioness. But Agnes turns out to be the original owner of Udolpho, mistakenly thought by Emily among others, to have been murdered by Montoni. Agnes then confirms that Emily must be the illegitimate daughter of St. Aubert and the Marchioness. When things finally get straightened out, the Marchioness turns out to be St. Aubert's sister (which explains the picture and the papers) whom he kept secret from Emily "whose sensibility he feared to awaken". …”

So I thought, hmmmm… that sounds a lot like Eliza when the Gardiners bring her to Pemberley. And so it’s no surprise that such passage in P&P is strikingly picturesque, given how central the picturesque was to Radcliffe’s fiction, including Udolpho.

But there’s more, and I’ll let the late Brian Southam (in Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts, 1964) set up the next part of my claim:   “First Impressions may also have begun as a literary satire…The object of the burlesque is hinted at in the title, for the phrase ‘first impressions’ comes directly from the terminology of sentimental literature…She would have known a…recent usage in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), where the heroine is told that by resisting first impressions she will ‘acquire that steady dignity of mind, that can alone counterbalance the passions.’ Here, as commonly in popular fiction, ‘first impressions’ exhibit the strength and truth of the heart’s immediate and intuitive response, usually love at first sight…There is a striking reversal of this concept in P&P; first impressions are effective with Elizabeth Bennet, yet in circumstances altogether unsentimental. The moment she catches sight of Darcy’s family home, she feels ‘that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!’; it is this sense of property which warms her heart towards Darcy, as she later admits to Jane, jokingly, but speaking more truly than she knows, confessing to a worldliness, a common humanity which no sentimental heroine could possess …Her violent first impressions of Darcy derive from prejudice and false reasoning…she has to learn how little the first impressions of her sharp intelligence are to be trusted…”

Southam was spot-on in all respects (and Tony Tanner approved Southam’s arguments a decade later), but he was not armed with the perspective I now have, of the “déjà vu” aspect of Elizabeth’s visit to Pemberley. Therefore, Southam couldn’t possibly realize yet another, punning meaning of JA’s original novel title “First Impressions”, which I flashed on this morning, and which my Subject Line hints at. I.e., when viewed through the lens of Eliza returning to her childhood home Pemberley, “first impressions” suggests that she is remembering her first “first impressions” in her entire life, when she was a small child at Pemberley!

But, within the ambit of that alternative reading, note that Elizabeth does not heed Radcliffe’s warning! She doesn’t do so, because she doesn’t realize that she’s falling under the powerful spell of “first impressions” formed nearly two decades earlier. These first “first impressions” exert a powerful influence on the adult mind, as Freud so aptly explained a century ago. And so, not recognizing them for what they are, Elizabeth does not resist them, she does not counterbalance the passion they arouse in her heart, and she instead mistakenly attributes them to Darcy himself, and her (otherwise justified) resistance to Darcy crumples and disintegrates.

And finally, in that same vein, I found one other remarkable punning textual wink at this same shadow meaning in the very famous exchange between Eliza and Lady Catherine during their epic showdown in the Longbourn wilderness. This is the perfect place for JA to hide such a wink in plain sight, since it is prompted by Lady Catherine’s panic that Eliza will shortly be returning to Pemberley again, but this time as its mistress!

And so when Lady C thunders her grandest line of impassioned oratory, “Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?", Elizabeth has had quite enough: "You can now have nothing further to say," she resentfully answered. "You have insulted me in every possible method.”

And that’s the perfect moment for JA to then wink at us via Elizabeth’s next line:

“I must beg to return to the house."

Do you get it? Of course, on the surface, we all understand that Eliza means to say that she must go back inside the house there and then at Longbourn, from the wilderness where she and Lady C have been walking. It’s Elizabeth’s deliberately defiant and impolite way of terminating their  head-butting “tete-a-tete”  on her own terms, and we cheer her for it. But, in the shadow story, Elizabeth is also unwittingly speaking on a metaphorical level. She’s saying “I must beg to return to Pemberley, my rightful home of origin, by marrying Darcy!”

And, in the shadow story of P&P, that is, alas, nothing to cheer for.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

“With these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted!”: Remembrance of Pemberley Past

While delving into modern scholarly reactions to Sir Walter Scott’s decidedly unromantic take on how Eliza comes to fall in love with Darcy in Pride & Prejudice, I was led to an article, “Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Hegel's Truth in Art: Concept, Reference, and History” by Claudia Brodsky Lacour in ELH 59/3 (Aut.1992), 597-623, which briefly discussed Scott’s cynical take on P&P.

As I was reading the discussion in Lacour’s article about Elizabeth’s strong emotional reaction upon first being led around the interior of Pemberley, in prelude to reading Lacour’s take on Scott’s take, my eyes were arrested by one of Lacour’s acute observations:  about the “strangeness” of Elizabeth’s reaction:

“Much has been made, and should be made, of this visit to Darcy's estate, for it is only in seeing it that Elizabeth begins to imagine herself in possible connection to Darcy- a connection, however, which remains mediated by the tasteful beauty and order of the estate itself. The narrator writes:

‘At that moment she felt, that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something,’ continuing, 'And of this place,' thought she, 'I might have been mistress! With these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted! Instead of viewing them as a STRANGER, I might have rejoiced in them as my own’.

Regardless of one's view of Elizabeth at this moment, the drift of her thoughts stands out markedly from the fiction. For it is a STRANGE thing indeed to regret being a "STRANGER" to "rooms," to wish to be more "familiarly acquainted" with them, to be able to "rejoice in them as one's own" rather than rejoice in the expressed passion of, or wish to become more familiar with, their owner. Such thoughts appear EVEN STRANGER when one considers that Elizabeth is not experiencing a naive displacement of feelings; she is freely viewing objects that please her in a way that Darcy's grave and apparently indifferent demeanor never pleased her, objects that, unlike Darcy's pride, condescending proposal, and disturbing letter, need not even be read, let alone responsively or dialogically transformed. Elizabeth's imaginings about Pemberley leave Darcy quite out of the picture, until she sees Darcy at Pemberley in a picture. Walking in the family portrait gallery she is "arrested" by her recognition of Darcy in a painting, "'with such a smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen, when he looked at her". The reader may remember that Darcy is frequently described by the narrator as consciously averting Elizabeth's eyes lest she discern the light of admiration for her in his own. Here in the portrait the very liveliness of mind absent from Darcy's person is represented, and, the narrator observes:

‘There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth's mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original, than she had ever felt in the height of their acquaintance. .. and as she stood before the canvas, on which he was represented, and fixed his eyes upon herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever raised before; she remembered its warmth, and softened its impropriety of expression.’……” END QUOTE FROM LACOUR

A wild idea popped into my head for the first time when I read Lacour’s thoughts about the strangeness of Elizabeth’s reaction to Pemberley and its rooms. Her perceptive flagging of that strangeness made me realize that, in the shadow story of P&P, there was a very different reason why Elizabeth initially reacts so strongly to the rooms at Pemberley---even, as Lacour also acutely observes, before Elizabeth’s eyes are arrested by Darcy’s portrait.  My Subject Line broadly hints at the reason for Elizabeth’s reaction that I see—can you guess what it is?

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Here’s my answer. While Lacour’s reasoning works very well for the overt story, the reason that occurred to me fits perfectly with one crucial element of the shadow story of P&P that I’ve been writing about since 2012.

The rooms of Pemberley, like any other great estate of ancient origin, would’ve had their own unique and enduring sights, sounds, and smells. I suggest to you that Eliza responds so strongly to walking through those rooms, even before she sees Darcy’s portrait, because those sensory experiences reawaken in Elizabeth’s mind (very much like the time-transporting aroma of Proust’s madeleines in Remembrance of Things Past) a subliminal matrix of distant sense memory; a memory of the time Elizabeth was very young………and lived at Pemberley, because she was herself born a Darcy!

And so, I suggest, the strangeness of her feeling so drawn to the rooms is a kind of déjà vu for her—she had toddled through those same rooms two decades earlier, had stared up at the portraits on the walls, had smelled the aromas from the kitchen, and also from the surrounding vegetation, and it all comes back to her gradually as Mrs. Reynolds shows her and the Gardiners around.

But because Eliza has no conscious memory of having been born and initially raised at Pemberley, she cannot account to herself for her strange feelings of “familiarity, and so, like a love potion, these inchoate positive feelings attach themselves to the next person she sees—and that turns out to be Darcy, in his portrait hanging on the wall! That’s why she sees him differently for the first time at that moment -- it’s because now she is seeing him through the rose-colored glasses of remembrance of the way she was as a very young happy child!

And JA, with her love of punning wordplay, also hints at this ancestral memory when we read this narration of Eliza’s thoughts:

'And of this place I might have been mistress! With these rooms I might now have been FAMILIARLY acquainted! Instead of viewing them as a STRANGER, I might have rejoiced in them as my own’.

Indeed, had Elizabeth not been sent away and adopted by the Bennets, she would indeed have been mistress of Pemberley! And with the rooms of Pemberley she was indeed one “familiarly” (as in having been born into the Darcy family!) acquainted! And when she was little, she did indeed rejoice in these rooms as her own, because they were her own—and guess what, Mrs. Reynolds showed her those particular rooms precisely because Mrs. Reynolds remembers Eliza as a child, and knows what parts of the home she spent her time in!

Now, I cannot (yet) explain with exactness why Elizabeth was sent away at a very young age, but I am very confident that the reasons were very much like those that drive the plotlines of the tales of the families of Genesis which JA knew so well: sibling rivalry, stepparents with sharply conflicting goals for their respective offspring, inheritance, etc.

So, that is the key shadow story element I was reminded of as I read that section of Lacour’s article. That idea of Eliza as a Darcy first came to me in 2012 as I listened to my friend Elaine Bander’s excellent breakout session at that year’s JASNA AGM on the parallels between P&P and Fanny Burney’s Cecilia. Revelation of a secret family relationship was a staple of 18^th century fiction, even the high quality variety by the likes of Burney, but also of the Gothic fiction we know JA loved, especially Radcliffe’s. But leave it to that sly elf, Jane Austen, to hide such a scenario in plain sight, but never reveal it explicitly.  

For example, Eliza being a Darcy provides a compelling reason----other than the usual explanation, which is that JA stooped to (what I would've seen as crass) authorial expediency----for the massive multiple coincidence of P&P that I’ve been harping on every chance I get for over a decade now. We have these three young men previously connected to each other with one degree of separation --- Mssrs. Darcy, Wickham, and Collins---- all showing up within a very short time of each other in a country town where none of them had previously been, and each promptly starts courting the same young woman, Elizabeth----who also is connected to a woman, Mrs. Gardiner, who came of age in the shadow of Pemberley when Darcy and Wickham were still children.

This is either hackwork, or it’s a telltale hint left by a clever, teasing genius. I prefer the latter explanation, how about you? If Elizabeth is an heiress of Pemberley in some fashion, who is due to inherit when she reaches adult age, then she would be a particularly sweet flower to which bees like those three young men would be attracted from a very long distance.

And Elizabeth’s age was another clue to her being an heiress, as we learn in Chapter 32:  

“…Pray, what is your age?"

"With three younger sisters grown up," replied Elizabeth, smiling, "your ladyship can hardly expect me to own it."

Lady Catherine seemed quite astonished at not receiving a direct answer; and Elizabeth suspected herself to be the first creature who had ever dared to trifle with so much dignified impertinence.

"You cannot be more than twenty, I am sure, therefore you need not conceal your age."

"I am not one-and-twenty."

The reason we hear this is not to give us yet another example of Lady C’s intrusive nosiness, it’s to alert us that when Elizabeth turns 21, and she inherits her Darcy fortune, Darcy’s reign at Pemberley will turn upside down. Unless, that is, Darcy marries Elizabeth before she turns 21, in which event “sanity” will be restored, and Pemberley will revert right back to Darcy, as her husband, as soon as she does. And, did I mention that this all is necessary because Darcy, despite all appearances, is actually illegitimate!

And there’s still another sly hint hidden in the novel text. Recall that eleven chapters earlier, we read this:

“…Mr. Darcy drew his chair a little towards her, and said, ‘You cannot have a right to such very strong local attachment. You cannot have been always at Longbourn.’…”)

Indeed Elizabeth has not been always at Longbourn, because she was originally at Pemberley! Or, to put it another way, Elizabeth’s “first impressions” of Pemberley were not formed the day the Gardiners brought her there, but two decades earlier. It is only after those infantile “first impressions” are rekindled, that their glow settles on Darcy like a shimmering aura, and Elizabeth exclusively attributes this to his improved behavior toward her.She’s literally impressed—but I think I also detect a hint at the naval meaning of the verb, in this novel written by the sister of two future admirals. I think Elizabeth is also impressed like the poor men who were impressed off the street against their will into the Royal Navy!

And it’s only after Eliza sees Darcy with new eyes that we read:

“Such a change in a man of so much pride exciting not only astonishment but gratitude—for to love, ardent love, it must be attributed; and as such its IMPRESSION on her was of a sort to be encouraged, as by no means unpleasing, though it could not be exactly defined.”

And all that I’ve been writing this past year about incest themes in Austen’s fiction obviously comes to the fore as well in regard to Elizabeth as a Darcy—if she is a Darcy, and so is Darcy, then they are at least part-siblings – which fits with my longstanding claim that one of the real-life models for Darcy is none other than Lord Byron, who of course sired a child on his half sister!

And I will end by noting the irony the above reading provides to this happy comment by Elizabeth to Darcy after they have declared their love for each other:

“…You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure."

How ironic, given that if Elizabeth could actually remember her past at Pemberley, she might feel very different about Darcy in the present.  

And so I owe Nancy Mayer special thanks, because if she had not been so persistent today in repeatedly rebutting my claims about Darcy as a shadow story villain, I would not have revisited Sir Walter Scott’s shrewd 1816 comments about Elizabeth and Pemberley, and I’d therefore never have revisited Lacour’s article focused on that particular section of P&P, etc etc.

Cheers, ARNIE

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