The Shakespearean source for Wickham’s bit lips, Mrs. Gardiner’s phaeton & coarse Eliza’s brown skin

In my post last week, I provided several hints all pointing to a particular Shakespeare play which I believe Jane Austen intentionally tagged in a variety of passages in Pride & Prejudice, including the seemingly trivial detail that Wickham “bit his lips” when Eliza challenged his version of the conflict between him and Darcy.  Now I am ready to reveal the answer to this latest literary quiz of mine:

The play---which to my knowledge has, with one offhand exception, never been connected by any literary scholar to Pride & Prejudice ---is Henry VIII, the very play which---not coincidentally, is explicitly alluded to in a complex, significant manner in Mansfield Park, the novel JA wrote next after P&P, most of all of the following passage in MP:

“To good reading, however, [Fanny] had been long used: her uncle read well, her cousins all, Edmund very well, but in Mr. Crawford's reading there was a variety of excellence beyond what she had ever met with. THE KING, THE QUEEN, BUCKINGHAM, WOLSEY, CROMWELL, all were given in turn; for with the happiest knack, the happiest power of jumping and guessing, he could always alight at will on the best scene, or the best speeches of each; and whether it were dignity, or pride, or tenderness, or remorse, or whatever were to be expressed, he could do it with equal beauty. It was truly dramatic. …

…."That play must be a favourite with you," said [Edmund]; "you read as if you knew it well."

"It will be a favourite, I believe, from this hour," replied Crawford; "but I do not think I have had a volume of Shakespeare in my hand before since I was fifteen. I ONCE SAW HENRY THE EIGHTH ACTED, or I have heard of it from somebody who did, I am not certain which. But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately."

Although Henry VIII is currently one of Shakespeare’s least popular plays, it was very popular during Jane Austen’s lifetime. Therefore, JA had reason to expect her more literate contemporary readers of P&P in 1813 to discern her implicit allusion to Henry VIII in P&P. However, when that didn’t happen, because, I believe, the allusion was subliminal, that’s why she then made sure, as she wrote MP later in 1813, to make her interest in Henry VIII explicit in MP.

But what does her allusion to Henry VIII in P&P mean? How does it add to our understanding of P&P?

I’ve been saying for years that the shadow story of P&P involves a Mr. Darcy who does not reform and repent after his unsuccessful first proposal to Elizabeth Bennet. Instead, the shadow Darcy is a powerful, narcissist, who cannot take no for an answer when he is thwarted, especially by a woman; and so he uses his considerable resources to subtly coerce Elizabeth into feeling first gratitude, and then love, toward him—most of all, by wowing her with his “palace”, Pemberley, and the prospect of her becoming “mistress” (or might we say, Queen?) of his “realm”?

It’s therefore very interesting, I suggest, to think about Mr. Darcy as a Regency Era Henry VIII, and Elizabeth as an Anna Bullen. Many parallels spring to mind as soon as you consider this unlikely parallel, and I’ll lead off with the words of an Austen scholar, Janet Todd, who almost scooped me (in her entry in the 2013 The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen) on this discovery:

“When one woman [Elizabeth] manages, in her own words, to cheat this man [Darcy] of ‘premeditated contempt’, he falls in love and then blames her for his predicament; he has been ‘bewitched’—for all the world as if he were Henry VIII contemplating Anne Boleyn. Now he grows obsessive, even more silent, and conflicted…” 

Todd did not make the leap to this being an intentional allusion on Jane Austen’s part---that’s what I was able to do, assisted (as is so often the case in my literary sleuthing, based on the textual clues that Jane Austen left, like so many bread crumbs, in the text of P&P, which led me to Henry VIII.

First, to amplify Todd’s sharp intuition, note that strong romantic sparks do indeed fly between Darcy and Elizabeth as they meet at a dance, just as they fly between Henry and Anna at a masque arranged by Wolsey.

And just as Elizabeth initially confides to worldly-wise older friend Charlotte Lucas that she has no interest whatsoever in marrying Darcy, regardless of his wealth and desirability to other women, so too does Anna initially confide to the old female court attendant pretty much the same sort of disdain about Henry’s interest in her. In both cases, the older, wiser friend, schooled by life in human nature, expresses strong skepticism, and is proved to be correct by the end of each story.

And, in general, there is a strong theme in both P&P and in Henry VIII –in the latter, explicit, in P&P implicit, of the notion of “trials”, and the difficulty of ascertaining the truth in a society riddled with rumors, lies, and innuendoes.

And there’s also a larger perspective here vis a vis the classification of plays within the Shakespeare canon. Although Henry VIII, for obvious reasons is generally included among the history plays, scholars have pointed out that it also partakes of some of the same elements as are found in his late romances, in particular the royal romances, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline. But it is way outside the box to think about P&P, the quintessential romantic comic novel, which has its strongest Shakespearean antecedents in the Bard’s romantic comedies --- Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It --- as also drawing upon Shakespeare’s final history play as if it were a romantic comedy

There’s much more to say about this allusion generally, but I’ll leave that for future posts—for now, I will run through the clues I presented, and indicate how they fit with the above summary:

CLUE ONE: There is a character in the Shakespeare play who, like Wickham, bites his lips in anger.

As I stated earlier, there are 4 references to lips bitten in anger in Shakespeare, but the one I believe JA particularly had in mind was the following speech in Henry VIII, while writing Wickham’s lip-biting. It is spoken by the wily Norfolk to Henry VIII, who poisonously describes Wolsey’s attitude toward the king who is already suspicious of Wolsey’s intentions:

NORFOLK ……My lord, we have Stood here observing him: some strange commotion Is in his brain: HE BITES HIS LIP, and starts; Stops on a sudden, looks upon the ground, Then lays his finger on his temple, straight Springs out into fast gait; then stops again, Strikes his breast hard, and anon he casts His eye against the moon: in most strange postures We have seen him set himself.

That made me wonder whether Shakespeare intended his audience to see Wolsey as a fall guy, and I found the following blog discussion of the historical Wolsey in that regard:

BanditQueen 12/02/13: “Cardinal Wolsey is one of Henry’s servants that I feel gets at least in media films a poor press; and is portrayed as someone who does not come over as one of history’s good guys. Certainly he had enough enemies at court to bring him down on charges that amounted to embezzlement and treason, but they had the power to persuade the King that Wolsey in his career had mishandled funds and monies that allegedly should have gone to the treasury were being used for his two pet foundations: the schools and colleges at Cambridge and Oxford Universities. The pamphlets that they put about probably made even more obscure claims about him in order to bring him down…I feel sorry for Wolsey as he had been close to the King, worked hard in his cause, done almost everything with his master’s approval and his desire always seemed to serve the King. His enemies cashed in if you like on his failure to get Henry the verdict he desired at Blackfriars in 1529; and with Henry turning against Wolsey bit by bit because of that failure; they were able to use what evidence they could find or plant to get Henry to move against his former first minster. I am of the personal opinion that WOLSEY WAS SOMETHING OF A FALL GUY to allow a new regime to take the place of him as Henry’s advisors.”

And speaking of taking falls, here’s Wolsey’s very famous speech, the one that many suspect is read aloud, to great effect, by Henry Crawford in the Mansfield Park salon:

So farewell to the little good you bear me. Farewell! a long farewell, to all my greatness!
This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hopes; to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him; The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And, when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do. I have ventured, Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth: my high-blown pride
At length broke under me and now has left me, Weary and old with service, to the mercy
Of a rude stream, that must for ever hide me. Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye:
I feel my heart new open'd. O, how wretched Is that poor man that hangs on princes' favours!
There is, betwixt that smile we would aspire to, That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin,
More pangs and fears than wars or women have: And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer,
Never to hope again.

And, speaking of Lucifer, Wickham is indeed a poor man who spends his life hanging on Darcy’s favors, a man as to whose Luciferian fall into notorious disgrace we read (which also answers my Clue FIVE):

“All Meryton seemed striving to blacken the man who, but three months before, had been almost an ANGEL OF LIGHT. He was declared to be in debt to every tradesman in THE PLACE, and his intrigues, all honoured with the title of seduction, had been extended into every tradesman's family. Everybody declared that he was the wickedest young man in the world; and everybody began to find out that they had always distrusted the appearance of his goodness. Elizabeth, though she did not credit above half of what was said, believed enough to make her former assurance of her sister's ruin more certain; and even Jane, who believed still less of it, became almost hopeless, more especially as the time was now come when, if they had gone to Scotland, which she had never before entirely despaired of, they must in all probability have gained some news of them.”

I also think of Wickham when we read about Wolsey as “a man of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking himself with princes” --- and it would certainly add an interesting twist to the next portion of Elizabeth’s jousting with Wickham, as Diane Reynolds’s colleague Tom Flynn described, regarding Wickham as a prospective country clergyman (a parody of Wolsey as a cardinal):

“[Wickham] asks if she had visited the village when she toured Pemberley.  She states that she had not; he reflects, “I mention it, because it is the living which I ought to have had. A most delightful place!—Excellent Parsonage House! It would have suited me in every respect. “

Elizabeth’s response here is perhaps my favorite line in the novel, revealing her wit, her knowledge of her opponent and her condemnation of his behavior.

“How should you have liked making sermons?” 

Had he any self-knowledge or integrity, Wickham could not make an honest affirmative answer to this question. Austen, through Elizabeth, has put him in checkmate. Wickham’s attempt to ruin Georgiana Darcy, his success in poisoning Elizabeth’s opinion of Darcy, his willingness to ruin Lydia, his greed in marrying Lydia solely for the money that Darcy offers him, all demonstrate that all his sermons would be grounded in hypocrisy. 

Wickham’s response is a wonderful comic stroke of character illustration, exemplifying his thorough lack of self -knowledge.

He declares that he would have liked making sermons “Exceedingly well.  I should have considered it part of my duty, and the exertion would soon have been nothing.  One ought not to repine; ---but, to be sure, it would have been such a thing for me! The quiet, the retirement of such a life would have answered all my ideas of happiness!” END QUOTE FROM FLYNN POST

So I see number of Wickham’s characteristics originating in the wily manipulative Wolsey. But that’s only the beginning. A bit later in the play, we hear Queen Katharine’s sympathetic eulogy for Wolsey who died a broken, yet strangely humble, almost saintly death—and I hear in the saintly Queen Katharine’s remarkably forgiving remarks about Wolsey the saintly Jane Bennet’s remarkably charitable  remarks about Wickham late in P&P:

KATHARINE

So may he rest; his faults lie gently on him! Yet thus far, Griffith, give me leave to speak him,
And yet with charity. He was a man Of an unbounded stomach, ever ranking
Himself with princes; one that, by suggestion, Tied all the kingdom: simony was fair-play;
His own opinion was his law: i' the presence He would say untruths; and be ever double
Both in his words and meaning: he was never, But where he meant to ruin, pitiful:
His promises were, as he then was, mighty; But his performance, as he is now, nothing:
Of his own body he was ill, and gave The clergy in example.

CLUE TWO: There is a character in the play who twice calls another character “not sound”, just as Eliza says the following to BFF Charlotte Lucas: 

[Charlotte] “…it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life."

"You make me laugh, Charlotte; but it is NOT SOUND. You know it is NOT SOUND, and that you would never act in this way yourself."

In 5.3 of Henry VIII, the wily royal counsellor Gardiner (more about him re Clue EIGHT, below), attempts to take down Cranmer, an attempt which will be firmly rebuked by the King later in the scene:

GARDINER  My lord, my lord, you are a sectary, That's the plain truth: your painted gloss discovers,
To men that understand you, words and weakness.

CROMWELL  My Lord of Winchester, you are a little, By your good favour, too sharp; men so noble,
However faulty, yet should find respect For what they have been: 'tis a cruelty To load a falling man.

GARDINER  Good master secretary, I cry your honour mercy; you may, worst Of all this table, say so.

CROMWELL  Why, my lord?

GARDINER  Do not I know you for a favourer Of this new sect? ye are NOT SOUND.

CROMWELL  NOT SOUND?

GARDINER    NOT SOUND, I say.

CROMWELL  Would you were half so honest! Men's prayers then would seek you, not their fears.

GARDINER  I shall remember this bold language.

CROMWELL    Do. Remember your bold life too.

It is no coincidence that the sole usages of the phrase “not sound” in the respective canons of Austen and Shakespeare appears in these two passages. And it’s also no coincidence, as I will explain re clue EIGHT, below, that the counsellor trying to sandbag Cranmer has the identical name as Elizabeth Bennet’s aunt and uncle Gardiner!

CLUE THREE: There is in an exchange in the play which is specifically echoed by Miss Bingley’s withering criticism of Eliza’s suntanned appearance:

"How very ill Miss Eliza Bennet looks this morning, Mr. Darcy," she cried; "I never in my life saw anyone so much altered as she is since the winter. She is grown SO BROWN and COARSE! Louisa and I were agreeing that we should not have known her again."

I believe JA had in mind the following sharp exchange between Wolsey and Surrey, right before Wolsey takes his Luciferian fall:

CARDINAL WOLSEY Till I find more than will or words to do it, I mean your malice, know, officious lords, I dare and must deny it. Now I feel OF WHAT COARSE METAL YE ARE MOULDED, envy: How eagerly ye follow my disgraces, As if it fed ye! and how sleek and wanton Ye appear in every thing may bring my ruin! Follow your envious courses, men of malice; You have Christian warrant for 'em, and, no doubt, In time will find their fit rewards. That seal, You ask with such a violence, the king, Mine and your master, with his own hand gave me; Bade me enjoy it, with the place and honours, During my life; and, to confirm his goodness, Tied it by letters-patents: now, who'll take it?

SURREY  The king, that gave it.

CARDINAL WOLSEY It must be himself, then.

SURREY  Thou art a proud traitor, priest.

CARDINAL WOLSEY Proud lord, thou liest: Within these forty hours Surrey durst better Have burnt that tongue than said so.

SURREY  Thy ambition, Thou scarlet sin, robb'd this bewailing land Of noble Buckingham, my father-in-law: The heads of all thy brother cardinals, With thee and all thy best parts bound together, Weigh'd not a hair of his. Plague of your policy! You sent me deputy for Ireland; Far from his succor, from the king, from all That might have mercy on the fault thou gavest him; Whilst your great goodness, out of holy pity, Absolved him with an axe.

CARDINAL WOLSEY This, and all else This talking lord can lay upon my credit, I answer is most false. The duke by law Found his deserts: how innocent I was From any private malice in his end, His noble jury and foul cause can witness. If I loved many words, lord, I should tell you You have as little honesty as honour, That in the way of loyalty and truth Toward the king, my ever royal master, Dare mate A SOUNDER MAN than Surrey can be, And all that love his follies.

SURREY By my soul, Your long coat, priest, protects you; thou shouldst feel My sword i' the life-blood of thee else. My lords, Can ye endure to hear this arrogance? And from this fellow? if we live thus tamely, To be thus jaded by a piece of scarlet, Farewell nobility; let his grace go forward, And dare us with his cap like larks.

CARDINAL WOLSEY All goodness Is poison to thy stomach.

SURREY  Yes, that goodness Of gleaning all the land's wealth into one, Into your own hands, cardinal, by extortion; The goodness of your intercepted packets You writ to the pope against the king: your goodness, Since you provoke me, shall be most notorious. My Lord of Norfolk, as you are truly noble, As you respect the common good, the state Of our despised nobility, our issues, Who, if he live, will scarce be gentlemen, Produce the grand sum of his sins, the articles Collected from his life. I'll startle you Worse than the scaring bell, WHEN THE BROWN WENCH LAY KISSING IN YOUR ARMS, lord cardinal.

CARDINAL WOLSEY  How much, methinks, I could despise this man, But that I am bound in charity against it!

NORFOLK Those articles, my lord, are in the king's hand: But, thus much, they are foul ones.

CARDINAL WOLSEY So much fairer And spotless shall mine innocence arise, When the king knows my truth.

And Surrey’s reference to the “brown wench” sheds light on a deeper, darker slander inherent in Caroline Bingley’s demeaning comment about Elizabeth’s skin color. Check out this entry in Gordon Williams’s A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature:

“Brown as indicator of wantonness (cf nut-brown maids) is marked in Heywood, Golden Age (1609- 11)… Marlowe’s Ovid (1580s) II.iv.40 claims that ‘nut-brown girls in doing have no fellow’; so Shakespeare alludes to Cardinal Wolsey’s amorousness…The colour indicates pubic hair in ‘BROWN MADAM, or MISS BROWN. The monosyllable.’ (Grose 1788). A phrase now used in sodomy denotes sexual confrontment in Unconscionable Gallant (c.1690; Pepys Ballads, V 236) where the gallant tells a mercenary lady that he is unwilling ‘To give more than a Crown for a bit of the Brown.’…”

CLUE FOUR: There is a character who, like Mrs. Bennet, is on a determined quest for a male to preserve the family “inheritance”.

That of course is Henry VIII himself, who runs through wives like Kleenex in search of a male heir.

CLUE FIVE: [As answered, above, Wickham = Wolsey]

CLUE SIX: That same character described in Hint FIVE, above, is explicitly named in one of Jane Austen’s juvenilia, in a passage that is significantly echoed by this letter from Mrs. Gardiner to niece Elizabeth Bennet: "Pray forgive me if I have been very presuming, or at least do not punish me so far as to exclude me from P[emberley]. I shall never be quite happy till I have been all round the park. A low PHAETON, with a nice little pair of ponies, would be the very thing.”

In a 2015 post of mine written without any idea of Henry VIII being alluded to in P&P, I wrote:

“…JA slipped yet another subtle Shakespearean allusion into Love&Freindship for good measure, when Laura abruptly turns philosophical after witnessing the phaeton accident which carries off her lover:    

"What an ample subject for reflection on the uncertain Enjoyments of this World, would not THAT PHAETON and THE LIFE OF CARDINAL WOLSEY afford a thinking Mind!" said I to Sophia” …Jane Austen wrote those words for Laura for the benefit of the “thinking mind” of her erudite readers, who might recognize that her burlesque of a hero’s fatal phaeton fall was a witty reference not only to the real life Prince of W(h)ales, as I discussed in the preceding section, but also to Cardinal Wolsey who gives the… famous tragic speech in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII about his own “fall” from political grace….”

CLUE SEVEN: There is a very powerful, noble male character in the play who casts his eye on one particular young lady, who is described as having a vivacious, charismatic personality—and by the end of the play, they have indeed married, and that young lady gets to be “mistress” of a real life “Pemberley” -albeit, not for very long.

As I’ve already written, above, that is Henry VIII smitten by Anna Bullen. And in that regard, here’s what the 15 year old Jane Austen wrote about Anna Bullen in her History of England:

“this amiable Woman was entirely innocent of the Crimes with which she was accused, and of which her BEAUTY, her ELEGANCE, and her SPRIGHTLINESS were sufficient proofs, not to mention her solemn protestations of Innocence, the weakness of the Charges against her, and the King’s Character.”

The 37 year old Jane Austen wrote something very resonant about Elizabeth Bennet in a letter to her sister right after P&P was finally published:        “…she really does seem to admire Elizabeth. I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, & how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know.”

CLUE EIGHT: There is an enigmatic character in the play who has exactly the same name as a key character in P&P, and who (according to my reading of the shadow story of P&P) plays a similarly crucial behind the scenes role in both the play and in P&P.

As I already stated above, that would be GARDINER, the shifty advisor to Wolsey and Henry VIII, who winds up getting sternly rebuked by the King when Gardiner tries to do a hatchet job on Cranmer.

I’ve long believed that Mr. Gardiner is actually a secret agent acting on behalf of Mr. Darcy during the latter half of P&P, in particular, with the crucial task of bringing Elizabeth to Pemberley “accidentally” so that she can be overwhelmed by Pemberley, Mrs. Reynolds, and Mr. Darcy’s insincere “reformation”

(all puns intended vis a vis Henry VIII). And that gives enormous ironic meaning to the final line of the novel:

“With the Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate terms. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.”

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The hidden “Prince of Whales” answer to Jane Austen's Emma charade, 1816 to 2006 to 2016

A lot of Janeites worldwide have heard by now that 2016 is the bicentennial of publication of Emma. Conversely, only a relative handful of Janeites know about a significant discovery about Emma made a decade ago by my friend and fellow Austen scholar, Colleen Sheehan -- i.e., after Emma had been out in the world for 190 long years---i.e., Austen’s dangerous, daring, derogatory satire of the Prince Regent as the “Prince of Whales”, the secret answer to the charade in Emma.

Colleen, a distinguished senior political science prof at Villanova, has been modest about her discovery since she published it in 2006, and if you Google “Prince of Whales” & “Emma”, you’ll see that a number of the hits are to my blog posts in which I’ve repeatedly spread the word over the past decade.

Another of my friends, Linda Walker, in her 2013 Persuasions article (speculating about S&S’s Colonel Brandon having been forcibly circumcised in India) is the only scholar other than myself to have embraced the large implications of Sheehan’s discovery:

“...[Austen] would have not only have known what circumcision was but wouldn’t have quailed at writing about it, employing the allusiveness with which she always protected herself.  In Emma, after all, Austen took on the Price Regent either despite or because of having more or less been ordered to dedicate it to him, composing a charade that could be solved, as Sheehan has so cleverly shown, not only as “Courtship” but also “Prince of Whales,” taken from a satirical poem on the fat, unfaithful spendthrift by Charles Lamb.  Anybody who missed the source of the insult might have been tipped off by the anagrams Austen devised with the first letters of two sets of four lines that twice, rearranged, spell “Lamb.”

 Jane Austen was fearless:  willing to address issues of sexuality, politics, the military, and family secrets….”

Besides Sheehan, Walker and myself, only Douglas Murray, Janine Barchas, Megan A. Woodworth, A. Marie Sprayberry, Laurie Kaplan, and Michelle Levy have taken note of Sheehan’s discovery during the past 10 years; and of them, only Murray, in 2007, gave it more than passing attention.

As to the vast body of other scholarly articles, book chapters, and dissertations that have been written about Emma during the past decade ---and I’d guess there’ve been a few hundred if not more—to say nothing of the thousand-plus articles written about Emma in the pop culture press, where the vast majority of Janeites (and Jane-curious folks) get their Austen info---it is, sadly, as if Sheehan’s discovery had never been made. This is the case, even though her articles detailing her findings have been right there at the JASNA website, the obvious place where any Austen researcher or scholar ought to begin, freely and readily searchable and readable.

So it is, ten years after, still an almost universal belief among Janeites that Jane Austen was humbled and/or discomfited by the royal request that Emma be dedicated to the Prince Regent, rather than (as Colleen, Linda, and I all believe) this dedication was actually the icing on the cake of Austen’s subversive “Prince of Whales” satire. I.e., what more delicious way to top off the satire than to actually have the butt of that satire demand a dedication to himself?!

But, even today in 2016, it would still shock the average Janeite, who has been fed a continuous diet of what I call the Myth of Jane Austen, to even imagine the possibility that Jane Austen would have taken on the most powerful man in Great Britain in this manner worthy of a Jonathan Swift with his modest proposal (which Diane Reynolds and I have previously argued is a source for Mr. Woodhouse’s porcine obsession in Emma).

And that’s not all. Even the trailblazing Sheehan in her pair of 2006 articles did not go so far as to suggest that this extrinsic political satire might significantly alter the way the plot of Emma should be read, because that, too, would be too far outside the box of conventional Austen scholarship. Whereas I believe the political satire and the alternative reading of the novel itself go hand in hand.

So, I have a proposal to all of you reading this post, if you’ve gotten this far. If you haven’t do so already, please read Sheehan’s two articles here (there’s a link to the second one at the end of the first one):

 http://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol27no1/sheehan.htm

Sheehan’s writing is jargon-free, and witty as well as informative, and an investment of thirty minutes of your time should suffice to give you a firm handle on her prima facie case for Jane Austen having intentionally alluded to the Prince Regent as the “Prince of Whales”.

Keep in mind also, as Colleen noted, the brothers Hunt, editors of the Examiner, were jailed for two years in 1812, for being too blunt in an editorial castigating the Prince for exactly the same miscreancy that Lamb and Cruikshank mocked. So JA was taking a real chance, gambling that neither the Prince nor anyone loyal to him would be clever enough to decode that highly derogatory secret answer.

After you’ve read that, please let me know if you believe Sheehan was correct that this was an intentional, daringly satirical poke at the Prince by Jane Austen. Or, instead, do you believe that this is somehow a coincidence? or that Jane Austen unconsciously recalled reading Lamb’s poem or seeing Cruikshank’s caricature, and unwittingly wrote her charade so that it would fit with such a scandalous alternative answer?

I’m very curious to know whether the lack of awareness of discoveries like Sheehan’s is just a problem of getting the word out, or is instead a much more troubling problem, of getting across a radical new idea about Jane Austen that doesn’t fit within the comfortable confines of the Myth of Jane Austen.

After I give people a chance to respond, I will write a followup post in which I will present brand-new evidence, just discovered by me, hidden in plain sight in the text of Emma itself, which provides dramatic new validation for Sheehan’s remarkable 2006 discovery.

Cheer, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

A quiz about Wickham’s bit lips, Mrs. Gardiner’s fantasy phaeton, & coarse Eliza’s brown skin

A few days ago, my friend Diane Reynolds shared a post at her blog Jane Austen & Other Writers   by her colleague Professor EmeritusTom Flynn…  

http://janeaustenandotherwriters.blogspot.com/2016/05/may-memories-first-encounters-with_29.html

…about his own personal Jane Austen journey. My eye was caught by something he wrote about Elizabeth Bennet’s and Mr. Wickham’s final encounter in Pride & Prejudice, after Wickham has just married Lydia:

“Elizabeth’s economical and layered response both condemns him and also permits him to save face, should he choose to do so. She reports that the housekeeper said “That [Wickham] had gone into the army, and she was afraid had—not turned out well.  At such a distance as that, you know, things are strangely misrepresented.”

Austen reports that Elizabeth intends this information to silence Wickham, and he does bite his lip. Yet Wickham emerges from this first encounter relatively unscathed.  He has not been so wounded that he considers retreating; rather, he adopts the dangerous strategy of returning to one of his earlier misrepresentations.”  END QUOTE FROM FLYNN POST

What caught my eye was that Wickham “bites his lip”. Jane Austen is typically sparing in such nonverbal details, and so I checked the context of that usage in P&P, to get a hang on this unusual detail (only one other Austen character bites her lip: Lucy Steele in Sense & Sensibility --in anger at her sister). Was this a clue to a covert allusion by to some prior literary work in which lips are bitten?:

“…And so, my dear sister, I find, from our uncle and aunt, that you have actually seen Pemberley."

She replied in the affirmative.

"I almost envy you the pleasure, and yet I believe it would be too much for me, or else I could take it in my way to Newcastle. And you saw the old housekeeper, I suppose? Poor Reynolds, she was always very fond of me. But of course she did not mention my name to you."

"Yes, she did."  "And what did she say?"

"That you were gone into the army, and she was afraid had—not turned out well. At such a distance as that, you know, things are strangely misrepresented."

"Certainly," he replied, BITING HIS LIPS…. "

What emotion was Wickham leaking? Was it anger, like Lucy (who, you’ll recall, becomes Lucy Ferrars à Lucifer, after she marries), or anxiety, or a combination of the two? I was also reminded of the angry thumb-biting of Montague at Capulet in the first scene of Romeo & Juliet:

SAMPSON  Nay, as they dare. I will bite my thumb at them; which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it.

ABRAHAM Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?  SAMPSON I do bite my thumb, sir.

ABRAHAM Do you bite your thumb at us, sir? SAMPSON [Aside to GREGORY] Is the law of our side, if I say ay?

GREGORY No. SAMPSON No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.

That encouraged me to check to see if any Shakespeare play in which a character bit his/her lips---as opposed (ha ha) to their thumbs--and I found four of them. After looking them over, and sleuthing things out, I’ve now concluded that one of them is indeed a Shakespeare play which JA intentionally tagged, when she wrote the seemingly trivial detail that Wickham bit his lips. 

For those of you who enjoy my literary quizzes, I give the following NINE hints (this is a very solvable quiz, ladies and gentlemen!); but, in all events, as usual, I’ll reveal my answer and give my analysis, within the next two days:

ONE: There is a character in the Shakespeare play who, like Wickham, bites his lips in anger.

TWO: There is a character in the play who twice calls another character “not sound”, just as Eliza says the following to BFF Charlotte Lucas: 

[Charlotte] “…it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life."

"You make me laugh, Charlotte; but it is NOT SOUND. You know it is NOT SOUND, and that you would never act in this way yourself."

THREE: There is in an exchange in the play which is specifically echoed by Miss Bingley’s withering criticism of Eliza’s suntanned appearance:

"How very ill Miss Eliza Bennet looks this morning, Mr. Darcy," she cried; "I never in my life saw anyone so much altered as she is since the winter. She is grown SO BROWN and COARSE! Louisa and I were agreeing that we should not have known her again."

So far, these hinted echoes may sound trivial, but the remaining hints make clear that this is not a casual allusion, it goes to the heart of Pride & Prejudice, specifically how we are to think about Elizabeth, Darcy, Wickham, and another major character in P&P to be named later—see Hint EIGHT, below.

FOUR: There is a character who, like Mrs. Bennet, is on a determined quest for a male to preserve the family “inheritance”.

FIVE: There is a charismatic, manipulative character in the play who takes a precipitous—dare I say, Satanic?---fall from grace, because of some shady financial and other dealings, very much like that described in the following passage about Wickham in P&P:

“All Meryton seemed striving to blacken the man who, but three months before, had been almost an ANGEL OF LIGHT. He was declared to be in debt to every tradesman in the place, and his intrigues, all honoured with the title of seduction, had been extended into every tradesman's family. Everybody declared that he was the wickedest young man in the world; and everybody began to find out that they had always distrusted the appearance of his goodness. Elizabeth, though she did not credit above half of what was said, believed enough to make her former assurance of her sister's ruin more certain…”

SIX: That same character described in Hint FIVE, above, is explicitly named in one of Jane Austen’s juvenilia, in a passage that is significantly echoed by this letter from Mrs. Gardiner to niece Elizabeth Bennet: "Pray forgive me if I have been very presuming, or at least do not punish me so far as to exclude me from P[emberley]. I shall never be quite happy till I have been all round the park. A low PHAETON, with a nice little pair of ponies, would be the very thing.”

SEVEN: There is a very powerful, noble male character in the play who casts his eye on one particular young lady, who is described as having a vivacious, charismatic personality—and by the end of the play, they have indeed married, and that young lady gets to be “mistress” of a real life “Pemberley” -albeit, not for very long.

EIGHT: There is an enigmatic character in the play who has exactly the same name as a key character in P&P, and who (according to my reading of the shadow story of P&P) plays a similarly crucial behind the scenes role in both the play and in P&P.

NINE: (For those diligent souls who go so far as to do a Shakespeare word search) The play is NOT Coriolanus, Taming of the Shrew, & Richard III --- it’s the fourth one!   ;)

Happy sleuthing, y’all- --- as I said, I’ll be back….in two days with my best explanation as to what it all means!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Joe F.O.X. & Mr. D.A.R.C.Y. make offers that Kathleen & Elizabeth cannot refuse

I ended my post last week about Mr. Bennet’s “independence” with my take on his comments about Mr. Darcy as a kind of Regency Era Don Corleone: 

“ "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 hiave 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.”  

END QUOTE FROM MY PRIOR POST

Today, I return to this curiously striking similarity between the Darcy and Corleone “families”, in order to acknowledge that I’m actually not the first Austen scholar to see Darcy’s Godfatherliness — I was beaten to the punch two decades ago by the subtle brilliance of the late, great Nora Ephron in her sneakily erudite romcom You’ve Got Mail. This is a tale of authorial genius that you can’t refuse to read!

I’ve previously blogged on several occasions… http://tinyurl.com/ofmur5r  http://tinyurl.com/nlvvjm3

…about the veiled allusion in You’ve Got Mail to Shakespeare’s great “romcom” Much Ado About Nothing that is best viewed through the lens of Ephron’s not-so-veiled allusion to Pride & Prejudice.  And, because of that undisguised evocation of P&P in You’ve Got Mail, I’d guess that a pretty large number of Janeites have seen You’ve Got Mail, and therefore are familiar with the three scenes in which The Godfather is explicitly mentioned, even if they’ve never paid those mentions any particular attention. Now I will show you how significant those “passing” references actually are.

In the first such scene, Kathleen suddenly realizes that the nice guy who brought kids to her bookstore is actually her business nemesis, Joe Fox, heartless bookstore magnate. Thereupon, she immediately confronts him: 

KATHLEEN    Fox?  Your last name is Fox?

Joe spins around, looks at her.

JOE     F-O-X.

KATHLEEN God, I didn't realize.  I didn't know who you--

JOE   -- were with. (quoting) "I didn't know who you were with."

KATHLEEN  Excuse me?

JOE   It's from The Godfather.  When the movie producer realizes that Tom Hagen is the emissary of Vito Corleone --

Kathleen is staring at him.

JOE -- just before the horse's head ends up in his bed--never mind --

KATHLEEN  You were spying on me, weren't you? You probably rented those children.

JOE     Why would I spy on you?

KATHLEEN   I am your competition.  Which you know perfectly well or you would not have put up that sign saying "Just around the Corner."

JOE    The entrance to our store is around the corner.  There is no other way to say it. It's not the name of our store, it’s where it is.  You don't own "around the corner."

Kathleen’s justifiable suspicion that Joe has been spying on her iconic “village” bookstore in order to crush it, and her witty, sarcastic “suspicion” that he rented two children to make him appear kind and humane, is uncannily in synch with my longstanding suspicion that in the shadow story of Pride & Prejudice, Mr. Darcy similarly stage-manages a completely inauthentic, faked performance of himself as the generous, benevolent patron of Pemberley, who “accidentally” shows up just as Elizabeth (not coincidentally) is brought there by her uncle and aunt.

In the midst of being bowled over by the Pemberley Experience, Elizabeth slides right by her perceptive observation of the ambiguity of Darcy’s power:  “As a brother, a landlord, a master, she considered how many people's happiness were in his guardianship!—how much of pleasure or pain was it in his power to bestow!—how much of good or evil must be done by him!”  

Elizabeth doesn’t pay any attention to the “evil” side of that ambiguity, nor does she realize that the “adoring servant” Mrs. Reynolds is just as much of a role as the two “fake children” that Kathleen mockingly suspects Joe has rented for the occasion. But rest assured that Nora Ephron understood this very well indeed!

We know this in part because Ephron has Joe Fox in effect boast about his own omnipotence by invoking The Godfather. Like Donald Trump, Joe is so arrogant and certain of his power that he indirectly boasts about it by implicitly comparing himself to Tom Hagen, the outwardly friendly face of the murderous Corleone family. And we find explicit authority on that category of boast in this speech by Mr. Darcy, which fits very well indeed with Joe Fox’s real pride of his rapacious business career:

"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."

"Nothing is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast."

"And which of the two do you call my little recent piece of modesty?"

"The indirect boast; for you are really proud of your defects in writing, because you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of thought and carelessness of execution, which, if not estimable, you think at least highly interesting….”

So far, then, we can already see Ephron weaving P&P and The Godfather together via the character of Joe Fox. But this is only the beginning.

In the second such scene, Joe and Kathleen, who’ve been trading instant messages on AOL without knowing each other’s identities, discuss (in IMs) Kathleen’s business woes dealing with….Joe!:

JOE   I'm a brilliant businessman.  It's what I do best.  What's your business?

KATHLEEN  No specifics, remember?

JOE   Minus specifics, it's hard to help. Except to say, go to the mattresses.

KATHLEEN What?

JOE  It's from The Godfather.  It means you have to go to war.

KATHLEEN (to herself) The Godfather?

KATHLEEN  What is it with men and The Godfather?

JOE  The Godfather is the I Ching.  The Godfather is the sum of all wisdom.  The Godfather is the answer to any question. What should I pack for my summer vacation?  "Leave the gun, take the cannoli."  What day of the week is it? "Maunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday.” And the answer to your question is "Go to the mattresses.”….You're at war.  "It's not personal, it’s business.  It's not personal it’s business."  Recite that to yourself every time you feel you're losing your nerve. I know you worry about being brave, this is your chance.  Fight.  Fight to the death.

Once again, Joe reveals his true (and ugly) self via his Godfather-mania, yet Kathleen is not quite able to consciously connect the dots (“What is it with men and The Godfather?”) between Joe’s invocation of same, and her online “friend”’s. This is also Ephron counterbalancing Joe’s worship of The Godfather with Kathleen’s worship of Pride & Prejudice. But, by the end of You’ve Got Mail, it’s also Ephron’s sharp irony: since Kathleen does not grasp the dark shadow story of P&P, in which Darcy does not actually reform, but merely pretends to reform, she is doomed to repeat Elizabeth’s error—believing that, in real life, a narcissistic man of power can receive an “instant message” that instantly transforms his character completely!

And that brings me to the third such scene, which occurs much later in the film, after Joe knows who Kathleen is, but she does not. This carries the implicit message that Joe still believes that it’s perfectly okay to retain complete control of his relationship with a woman he wishes to manipulate into loving him, by concealing that he is the same man as her dear online friend, and by showering her with apparent love and kindness.

And a prime example of this is when Joe talks with Kathleen about his own online persona:

JOE   Come on, I'm not going to write him.  Is that what you think?                                                

KATHLEEN   NY152.

JOE    One five two.  One hundred fifty two. Very interesting.  He's 152 years old. He has 152 hairs remaining on his head. He's had 152 moles removed and now he has 152 pockmarks.

JOE    His combined college board scores.

KATHLEEN His IQ.

JOE    The number of women he's slept with.

KATHLEEN   The number of times he's seen The Godfather.

JOE     That's the first good thing I've heard about him.

Note how subtly brilliant is Ephron’s dialogue there. Once more Kathleen inadvertently and subconsciously connects Joe and NY152 by bringing up male Godfather obsession, and Joe clearly enjoys validating it –safely, because he still conceals that he and NY152 are the same man. And only while writing this post today did I get a brief chill wondering whether Joe got a special charge out of telling the truth when he wrote “The number of women he’s slept with.”

Perhaps he is indeed the kind of man who keeps that kind of score. It’s not unrealistic, given that Ephron has subtly set the stage for this dark side of Joe’s character by letting us see his father and grandfather, both of them board-certified represensible serial lechers and cocksmen.

And once again we see Joe enjoying the narcissistic thrill of daring to hide it in plain sight (as an apparent joke) to Kathleen, because he feels so confident she would never suspect him of such a horrid thing.

It was only on my third or fourth viewing of You’ve Got Mail that I began to realize that the happy ending of You’ve Got Mail was every bit as tainted by strong doubt as that of P&P – in effect, Ephron has showed me, in several different but related ways, that she understood that P&P was a double story, with a romantic fantasy of an overt story masking a cautionary tale of a shadow story. And Ephron did this the way great storytellers do: not by heavy handed imitation, but by the subtlest kind of emulation of her literary models.

Most brilliant of all, Ephron confronts her audience with the same puzzle that JA presented her readers with — to show the heroine falling in love with a man who does not hesitate to manipulate her, to spy on her, to plan an elaborate ruse in order to get a second romantic chance with her, all the while controlling the entire situation, knowing everything about her, while allowing her to know nothing about his disguise until after her resistance to him has been reduced to nothing—and still, despite all these undisguised actions, Ephron manages to make the audience fall in love with Joe F.O.X. by the end, right along with poor motherless storeless Kathleen.

And, speaking of Kathleen’s mother, and thinking about that very poignant scene when Kathleen, standing and sadly looking at her now empty store, vividly recalls herself as a young girl dancing with her young mother, it makes me wonder whether Ephron had in mind the scene at Longbourn only a very short time before Darcy proposes a second time. Elizabeth is sitting and fretting about Darcy’s ignoring her, and then a young woman (as I’ve written before, I believe it is actually sister Mary Bennet) whispers this in Elizabeth’s ear: "The men shan't come and part us, I am determined. We want none of them; do we?"

Unfortunately for Elizabeth, she doesn’t hear this feminist whisper. And unfortunately for Kathleen, whose female world at her store inherited from her mother has been shattered by Joe’s having gone to the mattresses against her, she doesn’t hear this “instant message” from her long-dead mother, and allows herself to be abducted into Joe’s world – as we hear the romantic strains of “Somewhere over the rainbow”, if we pay really close attention, we might just hear Nora Ephron whispering to us “Don’t believe it, Kathleen has just put herself entirely into the hands of the Wizard of Oz, but this time it’s Kathleen whose still asleep at the switch, romantically speaking.”

And, finally, Ephron brought The Godfather into the mix, I think, most of all because she recognized that Michael Corleone, in his dreadful cold, narcissistic, compulsion to control his wife, was a perfect match for the Mr. Darcy of the shadow story, who will, I fear, treat Elizabeth at Pemberley much the same way that Michael treated his wife, making her a prisoner of his bloated ego and refusal to take no for an answer—because, after all, their idea of marriage was as an offer that no woman could refuse.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter