The play-within-the-episode really IS “the thing” in Frasier to delight our minds and hearts

There are two very long running TV shows, as to which my wife and I have seen pretty much every single episode, many of them twice, and some multiple times: Law & Order: SVU and Frasier. So I was surprised the other night while we watched Frasier reruns on Hallmark Channel, and we saw a couple of episodes we had somehow missed –it was a rare pleasure to, in effect, watch some “new” Frasier!

Beyond the astonishingly consistently high level of comedy that the show maintained for over a decade, one of the many smaller joys of Frasier is its sly erudition. A number of episodes are peppered with subtle allusions of all kinds, erudition which the show never flaunts (after all, the great running joke of the show is snobbery!), but which are there all the same for those who might notice and enjoy them.

Say, for example, the periodic popping up of Shakespeare. Most hardcore Frasier aficionados hear that name, and think of Season 8, Episode 12: ‘The Show Must Go Off”, which aired in February 2001. In it, the Crane brothers try to revive the career of an aging actor whom they long before saw perform Hamlet.  But when they see him perform again, it is quickly clear that he has lost it --what I instantly recall is that the genuinely great Shakespearean actor Derek Jacobi was perfect in the part.

Other fans may recall Episode 10 Season 5: “Where Every Bloke Knows Your Name”, with a groanworthy pun when the young Frasier and Niles literally trade childish snobberies over lunch at school:

Young Niles: This lunch is a culinary Hindenberg.

Young Frasier: Niles, have you ever considered that our food may be payback for your recent editorial, "Cafeteria Of Shame"?

Young Niles: Well, they can't intimidate me.  They'll never silence my pen.  I could write an exposé on their baked goods alone.

Young Frasier: [knocks bread roll off the table] Yes, this is the hardest roll since Hamlet!

Young Niles: Good one, Frasier.  May I use it?

Young Frasier: But of course.

And the title of Season 7 Episode 20 was an overt wink at Hamlet: “To Thine Own Self Be True”.

But one of the episodes which my wife and I watched the other night, which reminded me of Shakespeare in a much more comprehensive way than the above, was Season 3, Episode 14: “The Show Where Diane Comes Back”, which first aired in 1996. It requires no further explanation than that Diane Chambers (of course played by Shelley Long in Cheers, the show which gave birth to the character of Frasier Crane) shows up without warning in Seattle, and much frantic Frasierish hilarity, with a strong dose of television nostalgia, ensues.

Now, before I get into the Shakespearean weeds, I want first to orient you as to one important real life backstory that was very unusual about this episode, as per the following summary at a Frasier fansite, and which turns out to be extremely relevant to the rest of this post:

“This episode is a favorite with Kelsey Grammer and the Frasier writing staff, because it put to rest some real demons as well as the fictional ones. When Kelsey Grammer first started to appear on Cheers, Shelley Long campaigned strongly to get him and his character removed from the show. The producers disagreed and Frasier Crane soon became a regular, but there was bad blood between Grammer and Long for a very long time.  This episode not only allowed Frasier and Diane to have closure with each other, but also allowed Grammer and Long to demonstrate that there were no more hard feelings.”

And so clearly this episode (written by Christopher Lloyd --- NOT the same gent who played Doc in Back to the Future as well as the wild man in another long running TV comedy, Taxi), coming near the end of seven seasons of Frasier (which by then had long since established itself as an enormous critical and popular success), was clearly fraught with great emotional significance for everyone on the Frasier team, and so perhaps for that reason it received extra loving attention in its conception and execution.

Which finally brings me to Shakespeare—or, to be more specific, Shakespeare’s most famous play, and perhaps the most famous and influential work of literature in the past millennium in Western culture, a play which I’ve already mentioned--- Hamlet .The episode was nearly over, and my wife and I nearing that agreeable smiling doziness which is one of the gifts of late night Frasier watching, when I caught on to the sly game being played, and so I got out my DVD today and watched the episode again, so that I could point out to you all the winks at Hamlet hidden in plain sight in the episode, as I will now walk you through:

In the first scene, Diane’s unexpectedly showing up at the KACL studio as Frasier is signing off is played curiously like…the Ghost of Hamlet’s father suddenly appearing on the ramparts at midnight at Elsinore, which scares the guards (and then Horatio and finally Hamlet) half to death!:

ROZ: Frasier, that was security.  Some woman insisted on seeing you, she just blew right past them.

FRASIER: Oh, don't panic, Roz — probably just one of my more ardent fans.

Diane appears in the window and knocks on the glass. 

Frasier turns around.  She smiles and waves at him.

FRASIER (with eyes popping and mouth wide open, screams): "AAAAHHHH!!"

Then in the second scene in Niles’s psychiatry office, we hear this sly replay of Horatio responding to Bernardo about the ghost’s initial appearances.

NILES: Well?

FRASIER: She's back — the scourge of my existence.

NILES: Strange, I usually get some sign when Lilith is in town — dogs forming into packs, blood weeping down the wall.

FRASIER: I'm talking about . . . Diane Chambers.

Niles on his intercom.

NILES: Lucille, send Mr. Carr home.

FRASIER: She just showed up at the station today.  Apparently some play she wrote is being produced here in town.  I admit, I just sort of panicked when I saw her, but I think I covered it masterfully….

Of course the dogs and blood are a comic version of Horatio’s ominous catalog:

A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets:
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse:
And even the like precurse of fierce events,
As harbingers preceding still the fates
And prologue to the omen coming on,
Have heaven and earth together demonstrated
Unto our climatures and countrymen.--
But soft, behold! lo, where it comes again!

And what was that about Diane writing a play being produced in Seattle? Read on…..  Niles goes on to help Frasier acknowledge his lingering desire for revenge against Diane, for her having left him at the altar, which is comparable to the ghost’s inciting Hamlet’s desire for revenge against Claudius:

FRASIER: Well, I can't just tell Diane how awful she made me feel now!  It's a distant memory for her.  I'd feel weak!

NILES: You have no reason to feel weak.  You've moved on in your life too.  You have a new career, new wealth, new success. You simply need closure in this one area.

FRASIER: You know, what you just said made a lot of sense.

NILES: You're going to get closure.

FRASIER: No, that business about my success!  I tuned you out after that.  I'm going to invite Diane over for dinner tonight, and I'm really gonna flaunt my success, really rub her nose in it!  That'll prove I'm not just some cast-aside that never got over her.  Niles, I know it's not psychologically sound.  But we're still human.  We have to do what feels good sometimes, don't we?

Then, in the next scene, we have Frasier about to meet Diane at his apartment, just as Hamlet finally encounters the ghost of his dead father after the guards and Horatio have alerted him:

The doorbell rings.

FRASIER: She's a one-time Boston barmaid who had a nervous breakdown and ended up in a sanitarium, where I met her, fell for her, and then was so mercilessly rejected by her that to this day there is a sucking chest wound where once there dwelled a heart!

Of course the report about Diane’s nervous breakdown is a wink at Hamlet’s madness, both real and pretended, which is the central theme and mystery of Hamlet!  And then, after we hear this exchange, as they both fall over themselves to impress each other. We get three more winks at Hamlet—can you spot them?:

DIANE: So, there I was, on the balcony of my Malibu beachhouse, when a pod of whales passed by.  I knew I had to commune with these gentle giants, so like a flash, I was on the beach, scrambling to my kayak.  But cruel fortune interceded, when, not twenty yards offshore, I suddenly discovered myself entangled in an enormous bed of-of, um—

NILES: Sea kelp?

DIANE: Exactly right, sea kelp!

MARTIN: Oh, that's funny—I thought he said "seek help."

DAPHNE: So, you haven't told us how you've come to be in Seattle.

DIANE: Oh, a small theater group has decided to produce a play I've written.

FRASIER: Which one?

DIANE: Oh, my most recent work.  It's a sort of feminist odyssey, experimental in places, in tone akin to Saroyan, with a soupcon of Gide, and a hearty nod to Clifford Odets!

FRASIER: I meant which theater?

DIANE: Oh!  The Roundabout.

MARTIN: That seems appropriate.

Here are the three hints:

First, Diane’s noticing a pod of WHALES passing by as she observes them from a distance is a wink at this:

POLONIUS  My lord, the queen would speak with you, and presently.

HAMLET  Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?

LORD POLONIUS  By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.

HAMLET  Methinks it is like a weasel.

LORD POLONIUS  It is backed like a weasel.

HAMLET  Or like a WHALE?

LORD POLONIUS  VERY LIKE A WHALE.

Second, of course Diane, like Hamlet, enlists a small theater group to put on a play he chooses and rewrites in such a way as to confront Claudius with an enactment of the murder the ghost told Hamlet that Claudius committed. And just wait till the end of this episode to see how that plays out!

And third, even though there is indeed a Seattle theater called “The Roundabout”, what makes that name seem especially appropriate for Diane’s play is of course that Shakespeare’s Globe was the quintessential theater in the round!

Fast forward now to the second half of the episode, and we have a long manic monolog by Frasier about Diane, in which Niles sits and listens and doesn’t say a word – which is the slyest sendup imaginable of one of Hamlet’s manic monologues spoken to his confidant, Horatio, who after Act 1 only speaks to agree with everything Hamlet says, no matter how crazy!:

And then, skipping still further ahead, we cut to the chase, the leadup to a comic version of Hamlet’s staging of the Mousetrap:

DIANE: Frasier, these past few weeks, you've given so much of yourself to me.  I want to give the one gift I have to bestow.  I want you to be the first person to see my play. Will you come to dress rehearsal tonight?

FRASIER: Diane, I'd be honored?

DIANE: Oh, wonderful, wonderful!

FRASIER: Are you sure you're ready for this?

DIANE: Oh yes, it's time.  Tonight, I bare myself to you.

FRASIER: Big step, Diane.

DIANE: Oh well, I have to say I'm a little nervous about it.  But, barring any lighting or prop problems, the whole thing will be over in a couple of hours.

Of course, speaking of “lighting problems”, when Claudius freaks out and cuts off the performance of the Mousetrap, we hear this:

CLAUDIUS  Give me some light: away!

ALL:  Lights, lights, lights!

And that brings us to the play within the episode which is what first alerted me to search out all the above Hamlet subtext:

Frasier sits alone in a small theater, as Diane addresses him

DIANE: Well, the stage is set, my players are prepared.  So, without further ado, I give you Rhapsody and Requiem, a play by Diane Chambers.

When the curtain opens, we see a replica of Cheers, with look-alikes of all characters.

“SAM”: Boy, it sure is great having Mary-Ann back. Just wasn't the same when she was gone.

“CLIFF”: Yeah, well, you know, uh, recent studies at John Hopkins University revealed that the expression "absence makes the heart grow fonder," is in actuality rooted in scientific bedrock.

“CARLA”: Yeah, so's your head.

“SAM”: Ease up there, Carla.

“NORM”: Evenin', everybody.

“SAM”: Hey there, Norm.  What would you say to a beer?

“NORM”: What's a nice beer like you doing in a face like this?

Diane laughs offstage at her own joke. Then his own look alike enters

“DR. CRANE”: Salutations, all.

 “SAM”: Hey there, Doc.  What can I get you?

“DR. CRANE”: Ooh, a prickly choice, Sam.  It reminds me of the one the 18th-century wit John Wilkes faced when asked by the Earl of Sandwich whether he expected to die on the gallows or of the pox.  "That depends, sir," he said, "on whether I choose to embrace your principles or your mistress."

Diane look-alike enters.

So, it’s obvious that the above is an extended, bravura riff on the Mousetrap scene in Hamlet, with Diane, as Hamlet, confronting Frasier, as Claudius, with a reenactment of their past, and then her motive becomes apparent:

“DIANE”: Forgive me.  I suppose that was a tad inconsiderate.

“DR. CRANE”: Quite all right.  A loving spirit like yours can't be bridled.

“DIANE”: But I did leave you at the altar.

“DR. CRANE”: No, you know I hold no ill-will toward you for that.

Frasier getting agitated.

“DR. CRANE”: Could we just stop for a second?  This whole getting-left-at-the-altar thing—I just don't know what I'm supposed to be feeling.

Frasier stands up and interrupts the show:

FRASIER: I may be able to illuminate that for you! [gets up and storms onstage] What you are feeling is that this woman has reached into your chest, plucked out your heart, and thrown it to her hell-hounds for a chew toy!  And it's not the last time either!  Because that's what this woman is!  She is the devil!  There's no use running away from her, because no matter how far you go, no matter how many years you let pass, you will never be completely out of reach of those bony fingers!  So, drink hearty, Franklin, and laugh!  Because you have made a pact with Beelzebub! And her name is Mary Ann!

Frasier storms out of the theater.  The rest of the cast members break into applause.  Diane stands there, mortified.

And so there we have Frasier, like Claudius, finding not his conscience, but his desire for revenge, being caught by what he has just watched onstage; but because Frasier is a comedy, and not a tragedy like Hamlet, the ending is one of mutual forgiveness and moving on, rather than a stage littered with corpses!

When Frasier and Diane see each other in the next scene, she is making notes on her play script (again, like Hamlet amending the Mousetrap), and as they speak, we get one last giant wink at Hamlet:

DIANE: Well, at the very least I obviously owe you an apology for the first time that things went awry between us.

FRASIER: Oh, it's all right.

DIANE: No, it was a time in my life when—

FRASIER: No, Diane, it isn't necessary.  The things I said . . . well, they just needed saying.  Besides, I don't really feel all that harshly—and in retrospect, I'm reasonably sure that you are not the devil . . . although he does have the power to assume pleasing shapes.

DIANE: Well, you should know I've decided to go back to Los Angeles.  Watching the play tonight through fresh eyes,  I—well, I just don't think it's ready.

FRASIER: I'm sure things'll work out fine.  Well, I think I've said what I came to say…..

Of course, there we have Frasier slyly paraphrasing one of Hamlet’s most memorable lines, when the melancholy Dane struggles with the question of whether he can trust the honesty and good intentions of the ghost he has seen and listened to, and then comes up with the idea for the Mousetrap as a solution:

I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim'd their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I'll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle: I'll observe his looks;
I'll tent him to the quick: if he but blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds
More relative than this: the play 's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

So, in conclusion, how lovely that the Ghost of Diane which has haunted Frasier for years is finally laid to peaceful rest by the end of the episode, just as (per the interview I quoted at the top) the real life Kelsey Grammer and Shelley Long apparently made their peace many years after things got pretty rotten in the state of Cheers!

Cheers (all puns intended), ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

What Jane Austen meant by "I do not write for such dull elves as have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves"

Today in Austen L and Janeites, Ellen Moody summarized her thoughts about Jane Austen the author, which prompted me to reply:

Ellen wrote: "[In contrast to Woolf] I'm not sure Austen has thought her ideas through. 3 kinds of topics: a kind literal versimilitude clung to and worked out in all particulars (time, place, date,costume, customs, whatever); an intense interest in her central heroines (deep engagement), and off-the-cuff not explained references to morality: Henry feels about such and such a character the way he ought. Well what does that? None of her phrases are particular enough to be able to see what her position is, and she is so often joking. She has some literary criticism of a more thematic sort in the fragments or unfinished novels as well as the two posthumous books."

Ellen, I could not disagree more fundamentally with what you've written, above. For starters, you claim that "None of her phrases are particular enough to be able to see what her position is, and she is so often joking". In this you entirely miss the essence of Jane Austen as an author. She was NOT joking when she wrote this to CEA: “There are a few Typical errors–& a ‘said he’ or a ‘said she’ would sometimes make the Dialogue more immediately clear–but ‘I do not write for such dull Elves As have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.'”

You are yourself a very very sharp elf, but you seem to have a deep constitutional aversion to exercising the ingenuity you so obviously have a great deal of, when it comes to determining what Jane Austen means! You insist that she be more particular, without realizing that her failure to do so is deliberate and didactic. She may sound like she’s joking, but she really does insist on her best readers being proactive, and in particular being willing to exercise imagination in order to ascertain her meaning. And why is this didactic? Because, as I’ve often noted, in real life we do not have omniscient narrators perched on our shoulders explaining to us what everything means in our daily lives. Living an examined life is a struggle at which we can never achieve perfection, or anything close to it, because life is (as we hear in Shakespeare in Love) a mystery in so many ways, perhaps most of all in regard to our own selves.

And, I also disagree with you fundamentally, in that my research has proven beyond doubt that JA read and thought deeply and extensively about all the greatest issues that confronted humankind in her lifetime, from war to slavery to women's rights to social justice to agriculture to medicine, etc etc; as well as the more intangible realms we today call epistemology and psychology -- she just refused to be explicit about any of it, both so as to be able to get her novels published, and then widely read, without being censored by powers-that-were that would abhor her radical feminism and gender fluidity; but also ‘cause, as I said above, she expected her readers to work hard to discern her meaning.  In that hard work, we develop our mental muscles, and we also rein in the natural pride and prejudice that all human beings start from before we painfully gain wisdom. Her novels are actually veiled encyclopedias about the wide world she studied so diligently from her corner of the English countryside.

As just one of a thousand examples, please really read closely the post I just wrote yesterday about Mary Crawford's parody of Hawkins Browne's parody of Pope - you will see that it opens the door wide into the excellent comment you made yesterday about your recent re-read of MP: 

“The real attack on heartless conspicuous consumption.” Indeed, that is the core insight that drove Rozema’s excellent film adaptation, and it is borne out by Mary Crawford’s sophisticated and wise allusion, which points directly toward Browne’s parody of Pope’s critique of avarice at the highest levels of English society.

And, apropos your observation about JA’s intense focus on her heroines, that is not because she somehow lost track of, or was not interested in, the other characters, quite the contrary! Jane Fairfax is the true heroine of the novel named Emma, but Jane Austen, that wickedly sly elf, told the story from the point of view of the wrong character, Emma Woodhouse, who understands so pitifully little of the life she observes around her, and yet she drags so many readers of the novel down into the pit of confusion with her. The same is true of Charlotte and Mary in P&P, vis a vis the clueless Elizabeth, and also Marianne and Lucy, vis a vis the clueless Elinor, etc etc.

So, as I will be asserting at the JASNA AGM in October (I hope you will come and hear me speak!), I believe Jane Austen was passionate to the literal day she died in her conviction that she had a God-given duty to use the once-in-a-century great genius she was born with, in order to better the lives of people, but particularly women, around the world. And in my opinion, she did a pretty darned good job, as she is still changing lives for the better every single day, two centuries after her death!

The War of the Roses between Wickham and Darcy: Pride & Prejudice reduced to red and white

In a continuation of the thread set forth in my immediately preceding post, there was further discussion in Austen-L and Janeites regarding the thorny question of who is good and who is bad, as between Wickham and Darcy.

First Ellen Moody responded: "Wickham is the one we are to reprobate but in some previous version the second half was more complicated than what we have.

Then Nancy Mayer chimed in: "In the version we have of P & P, Wickham seduces Lydia away with promises of marriage -- which he has no plans to offer--.In the first half he lies to Elizabeth. If Elizabeth hadn't been ticked off by Darcy's snub towards her she wouldn't have paid so much attention to Wickham. She knew it was bad manners to disclose such history to a stranger at first meeting. His behaviour wasn't at all well bred. He doesn't reform. His character doesn't change.

I then offered an outside the box new perspective. Apropos the point they were discussing, we all know by heart the following exchange between Elizabeth and Jane right after the Hunsford/Rosings episode:

"Most earnestly did [Jane] labour to prove the probability of error, and seek to clear the one [Wickham] without involving the other [Darcy].

“This will not do,” said Elizabeth; “you never will be able to make both of them good for anything. Take your choice, but you must be satisfied with only one. There is but such a quantity of merit between them; just enough to make one good sort of man; and of late it has been shifting about pretty much. For my part, I am inclined to believe it all Darcy’s; but you shall do as you choose.”

It was some time, however, before a smile could be extorted from Jane...."

I long ago recognized that this was another one of those many passages scattered throughout all of JA’s novels, which I’ve been steadily collecting over the years, in which JA hides a giant hint at an alternative interpretation of what happens in the story. JA perfected this art, by having the hint be expressed by an unreliable character – unreliable, that is, in the eyes of the fallible heroine, and therefore ignored at the expense of the accuracy of the heroine’s understanding.

Here’s the hint – in so many words, Elizabeth, beneath her playful tone, is unwittingly revealing the zero-sum assumption upon which she is basing her opinions about Darcy and Wickham: i.e., that, as between these two main romantic interests of hers, if one is good, the other must be bad. The only question she believes she must answer is, who is the good guy, and who the bad?

But note the context in which Elizabeth makes this pronouncement to Jane—although it is often overlooked, it is crucial. Elizabeth makes this claim in specific rebuttal to Jane’s attempt to assess Wickham and Darcy in a very different way—i.e., as separate, independent persons – which, if you think about it, is exactly the way we ought to judge any other two people we meet.

That Elizabeth conflates Darcy and Wickham in her mind, almost as if they were conjoined twins, is a kind of “prejudice” which impedes her ability to judge their respective characters accurately. She finds both Darcy and Wickham attractive, and so she can’t quite separate them in her mind. And Jane Austen even gives us a clever foreshadowing of Elizabeth’s confusion, and the ambiguity of the presentation of Wickham and Darcy in the novel, when Wickham first appears, in Chapter 15:

“Mr. Darcy…was beginning to determine not to fix his eyes on Elizabeth, when they were suddenly arrested by the sight of the stranger [Wickham], and Elizabeth happening to see the countenance of both as they looked at each other, was all astonishment at the effect of the meeting. Both changed colour, one looked white, the other red. Mr. Wickham, after a few moments, touched his hat—a salutation which Mr. Darcy just deigned to return. What could be the meaning of it? It was impossible to imagine; it was impossible not to long to know.”

As I’ve written in the past, there is absolutely no way for the reader to ascertain from the above passage who turned white and who turned red—and, even more importantly than that superficial ambiguity, there is no way the reader can determine whether turning white was a sign of anger, fear, and/or surprise, and similarly regarding turning red. That moment is a microcosm of Elizabeth’s conflation of Darcy and Wickham in her mind, and of the ambiguity that is everywhere in the epistemological treatise disguised as a novel that is Pride & Prejudice.

But, back to the question of who is good and who is bad, generations of readers have been so deeply enmeshed in, and charmed by, Elizabeth’s endlessly light, bright, and sparkling speeches, that precious few have been able to step back and realize that Jane is not a foolish Pollyanna in this instance, that is just how Elizabeth sees her. Jane can actually be plausibly viewed by the reader as the clear-eyed “studier of character” of the two eldest sisters, the one who understands that there are no simple dichotomies in human personality. Whereas Elizabeth, with her inflated sense of her own psychological acuity, is the fantasist, the poor student of character, who reduces everything to black and white—or rather, as the above passage suggests, to red and white.

And so, with all that as introduction, now I am going to actually follow the above-quoted hint that JA put in Jane Bennet’s mouth, and suggest to you that what JA is hinting at is that there are actually (at least) TWO plausible possibilities regarding relative goodness and badness, as between Darcy and Wickham:

ONE: That Wickham is a bad man who tells lies about Darcy, who is a good man who tells the truth about Wickham. That of course is the view that Elizabeth arrives at eventually, and is therefore also the view of almost all readers of P&P. But I claim that this is only what happens in the overt story of P&P, one of the two parallel fictional universes that Jane Austen deliberately created.

TWO: Wickham is a bad man who however does tell the truth about Darcy, who is also a bad man and who however does also tell the truth about Wickham. That is a view that I believe I am currently alone in holding, and I claim that this is exactly what happens in the shadow story of P&P.

If you think about it, it’s really obvious that Elizabeth is not stating an objective fact about Wickham and Darcy to Jane, all she’s revealing is her own subjective and very confused point of view. How many times in human history, on both the personal and the national level, have there been situations in which two persons or groups are in conflict with each other, and both are bad, but in different ways. Just think Hitler and Stalin. The battles in life are not always between good and evil, sometimes they’re between Evil #1 and Evil #2.

And haven’t we seen this same pattern presented many times in literature as well? Sibling rivalries in the Bible are not all clearcut battles of good vs. bad, nor are they in Shakespeare, to name two huge examples. And that brings me to my final point, which is that perhaps most aptly to Wickham and Darcy, we have the War of the Roses as depicted in Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy and Richard III. That scene about Darcy and Wickham turning red and white turns out to also be a giant hint by Jane Austen suggesting the sublminal allusive presence of the long bloody conflict between the Red Rose and the White Rose.

I’ve previously written about various aspects of Shakespeare’s tetralogy dramatizing the conflict between the Yorkist and the Lancastrian branches of the Plantagenet family, as I believe they were alluded to by Jane Austen in Pride & Prejudice:  “Henry VI, Part 2: The first thing we do, let’s kill….Lady Catherine! (in Cheapside)”   http://tinyurl.com/q5pl4tg

But I believe this is the first time I’m explicitly stating that Wickham and Darcy have part of their origins in Shakespeare’s warring cousins. And the allusion fits so well, because there are no clearcut good guys and bad guys in Shakespeare’s complex fictional universe. It’s pretty clear that Shakespeare spread the blame for the horrors of that war, in which (as Henry VI realizes as he watches the battle from his molehill) killing was a family affair, very generously between both sides, who take turns committing atrocities, each believing themselves justified by an ever spiraling cycle of revenge.

And of course, Jane Austen could not putting one final hint at that conflict in the mouth of Mrs. Bennet, as she sneers at Elizabeth who has just rejected Mr. Collins’s proposal:

“Aye, there she comes,” continued Mrs. Bennet, “looking as unconcerned as may be, and caring no more for us than if we were at YORK, provided she can have her own way.” 

York indeed!

All of which tells me that JA, from her radical feminist perspective, with clear-eyed objectivity, catalogued many varieties of male no-goodness, and, to those who could discern her double stories, was in effect imagining what the dying Mercutio, who got caught in the crossfire between Montagues and Capulets, might’ve said about Wickham and Darcy: “A plague on BOTH their houses!”

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Darcy & Wickham: Pride & Prejudice’s (un)natural characters and (im)probable plots: What(ely)?!

Ellen Moody started a thread today in Austen L & Janeites about her rereading Pride & Prejudice for the umpteenth time, which prompted me to crystallize several aspects of the double-story structure of Pride & Prejudice from a fresh perspective, which I’d like to share now.

First, here’s the first post I wrote, which was a response to some of what Ellen wrote:

ELLEN: "This time…I did ask myself if the plausibility of Wickham's story, which is utterly dismissed by Elizabeth upon the second reading of the letter, was really meant to be dismissed. We were to dismiss the idea of the paragon Darcy's jealousy, take everything Darcy said as true with no subtext he doesn't allow for."
MY REPLY: Ellen, had you read the many dozens of posts I've written over the past decade about Pride & Prejudice (like all of JA's novels) being a double story, you'd know that I've been claiming all along that the above ambiguity you've now noted for the first time was not only deliberate on Jane Austen's part, it happens to be the fork in the road of dual interpretation that leads to the two alternative endings of P&P:
The overt story is the road to the left in which Wickham was (as almost all Janeites have always believed) lying about Darcy in every important regard; but the shadow story is the road to the right (which I am the first and only person to have ever taken) in which Wickham was telling the truth about Darcy in every important regard.
Another way of putting this is that in the overt story, Darcy actually does repent and reform his character after the first proposal; but in the shadow story, Darcy merely pretends to reform, while simultaneously staging a series of choreographed experiences for Elizabeth which result in the complete demolition of her previous (healthy and insightful) resistance to Darcy, who has alas remained the same narcissistic bully he always was.


ELLEN: "Similarly, given that we have two long dialogues between Darcy and Elizabeth at the end, one of which even if tongue-in-cheek talk about the moral of the story... and his apologies and explanations are even abject at moments, maybe Austen did not think she needed to show us gradual change."
MY REPLY: No, I suggest instead to you that the best explanation is as I explained above- it's a deliberate and permanent ambiguity-- the famous lopping and cropping was primarily for that purpose.

ELLEN: "I found the story of how marriage is forced in the case of Charlotte Lucas among the most moving. I'm with the character in Jane Austen Book club who reads Charlotte as a closet lesbian spinster"
MY REPLY: And I’ve also written several posts over the past 7 years about Charlotte as a lesbian who (exactly like Anna Howe in Richardson’s Clarissa) is in romantic passionate but implicit love with the heroine.  But, unlike Anna in Clarissa, Charlotte uses her wits and audacity to tip the course of events in the shadow story of P&P so as wind up living in close proximity to her beloved Elizabeth again. And the way Charlotte accomplishes that daring maneuver is to take a page out of Lucy Steele's playbook in Sense & Sensibility, by provoking Lady Catherine the same way Lucy provokes Mrs Ferrars, into unwittingly doing exactly what Charlotte wants done - Lucy and Charlotte each use invisible hands to move the behavior of others.

ELLEN: "I note that if Austen did cut the Bingley and Jane material, which still makes sense, she didn't Elizabeth and Charlotte nor Jane and Elizabeth. As before I was very moved by Jane's emotional pain, her continued distress, and her seeing what the world is, but not being able to admit the point of view so producing "candid" interpretations except when driven otherwise."
MY REPLY: And I've been saying all along that Jane Bennet has a secret life that Elizabeth has never been aware of - a secret life very similar to that of her namesake Jane Fairfax in the shadow story of Emma - concealed pregnancy, giving up of her newborn to a trusted married friend (in this case Charlotte), with the father a forbidden lover (in this case, Darcy).

And now, here’s the second post I wrote, responding to Diane Reynolds’s excellent response to both Ellen and myself:

DIANE: "This book [P&P] is so comedic in many ways, the dry run for Emma in Lizzie's cluelessness, that it's more than plausible to have doubts about her flip-flop to utterly believing Darcy. "

MY REPLY: Exactly, but even more than that. As I've also suggested, I’m pretty sure that when JA noted, with what must’ve been real disappointment, how readers hadn’t noticed Lizzy’s cluelessness in the latter half of P&P – she realized that she needed to up the ante several notches on the visibility of heroinic cluelessness when she wrote Emma. And then she had to wait till 1816, after Emma was published, to be rewarded with Walter Scott's canny passing comments about Eliza Bennet's suspicious conversion to Darcyism right after seeing Pemberley! Now that I think about it, Scott (who wrote Marmion, the source JA paraphrased in her “dull elves” witticism) was indeed a sharp elf and good student, who probably learned how to read the lines beneath the words in P&P by reading Emma!

DIANE: “I agree too with Ellen about the poignancy in the novel and in the way women relate and suffer. It especially jumps out to me that Austen cares so much --that it's so important for her to convey to us how much Charlotte cares for Elizabeth--that she breaks out of Lizzie's pov and gets into Charlotte's head--Charlotte, without a doubt, does care deeply about Elizabeth's opinion and is perceptive enough (in a way Lizzie is not!) to know how surprised and baffled Elizabeth is going to be by her engagement to Mr. Collins. Austen needs us to know that.”

MY REPLY: Unquestionably, this was herstory JA felt compelled to tell, to be sure it did not just disappear like the invisible lives of “common” country folk described so poignantly in the line from Grey’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”, which Austen tellingly quoted in two of her novels (NA and Emma). But, again, Charlotte does not merely care deeply about Elizabeth’s opinion; as a pragmatically closeted lesbian, she also cares deeply about Elizabeth’s body, heart, and soul as well, and that is the passion that drives Charlotte to the audacious action she takes which brings her back into close proximity with Elizabeth by novel’s end. That is truly a poignant and heart-warming love story for the ages!

And…perhaps, Diane, you, too, have wondered about how this motif of unrequited, unspoken lesbian love might’ve played out in JA’s real life? I.e., is it possible that Jane Austen, as a young woman, was herself a romantically clueless Elizabeth Bennet vis a vis the older and wiser Martha Lloyd?; and then, years later, as a self-confident, worldly-wise, fortyish, independent woman and artist in words finishing the writing of P&P,  JA revisited this romantic paradigm, but by this time reunited with Martha at Chawton; and perhaps also playing the romantically self aware Charlotte Lucas vis a vis clueless niece Fanny Knight?

For the remainder of this post, I want to take a longer look at the idea of the improbability of Darcy’s lightning fast reformation of character, and the centrality of the unresolvable question of whether Wickham tells the truth about Darcy or not. By pure chance, I noticed only yesterday that there is a huge (and I believe, utterly unintended) irony in Bishop Whately’s famous 1821 review of NA & Persuasion in which he discussed realism in fiction. In a nutshell, he praised Jane Austen as a great master of realistic fiction, who he believed never took a false step into either unnatural characters or improbable events. The irony I refer to relates to Whately’s missing that JA committed both of those authorial offenses in P&P, but did so not in error, but as a bravura demonstration that she could pull off such a brilliant stunt without being caught (as Virginia Woolf so aptly put it) in the act of greatness. This all will emerge as I lead you through a couple of key passages in the literary bishop’s essay, with my comments interspersed:

WHATELY: “…a heavy complaint has long lain against works of fiction, as giving a false picture of what they profess to imitate, and disqualifying their readers for the ordinary scenes and everyday duties of life.”

MY COMMENT: Of course that sounds just like the commonly held belief as to the theme of Northanger Abbey, but then Whately surprises us with a twist:

WHATELY: “And this charge applies, we apprehend, to the generality of what are strictly called novels, with even more justice than to romances. When all the characters and events are very far removed from what we see around us,--when, perhaps, even supernatural agents are introduced, the reader may indulge, indeed, in occasional day-dreams, but will be so little reminded by what he has been reading, of anything that occurs in actual life, that though he may perhaps feel some disrelish for the tameness of the scene before him, compared with the fairy-land he has been visiting, yet at least his judgment will not be depraved, nor his expectations misled; he will not apprehend a meeting with Algerine banditti on English shores, nor regard the old woman who shews him about an antique country seat, as either an enchantress or the keeper of an imprisoned damsel.”         

MY COMMENT: So Whately is clearly saying here is that, despite all the propaganda during JA’s lifetime about the dangers of reading Gothic novels, and despite the superficial appearance that JA is following that party line in writing NA, he doesn’t think readers will actually confuse fantastical fiction with real life. Only psychotics, and perhaps a few seriously naïve teenagers.

And, those who’ve followed me for a while know that I believe he’s (seemingly unwittingly) agreeing with what I have long seen as Jane Austen’s actual and very subversive message in writing NA, which is that intelligently written Gothic novels can carry a powerful, beneficial metaphorical message to readers: i.e., that imagination is actually an indispensable asset required for any intelligent person to discern the horrid “domestic tyranny” that does lurks in everyday life, unnoticed by “realistic” adults.

But now Whately turns his gaze toward the realm of realistic fiction, and (to my mind, acutely) detects an actual danger of misleading readers there instead:

WHATELY: “it is otherwise with those fictions which differ from common life in little or nothing but the improbability of the occurrences: the reader is insensibly led to calculate upon some of those lucky incidents and opportune coincidences of which he has been so much accustomed to read, and which, it is undeniable, may take place in real life; and to feel a sort of confidence, that however romantic his conduct may be, and in whatever difficulties it may involve him, all will be sure to come right at last, as is invariably the case with the hero of a novel.”

MY COMMENT: So, Whately is turning conventional wisdom on its head, and saying that realistic fiction like Austen’s ought not to reward their characters’s haphazard, foolish thinking and behavior with happy endings, because readers will extrapolate directly to expecting comparable luck in their own real lives. I.e., an author of realistic fiction who makes “lucky incidents and opportune coincidences” seem natural and probable, lets suggestible readers off the moral hook, because they’ll expect dei ex machini to intervene and rescue them, no matter how foolishly they act. And I agree with Whately on that point as well. The bishop then makes a key distinction between unnatural characters (those who suddenly behave completely out of character) and improbable (lucky) events, and that brings him to the point where I see that huge irony relating to P&P. Whately launches into a critique of what he sees as Maria Edgeworth’s excessive reliance on both unnatural and improbable events in her 1809 novel Ennui, a novel which JA most certainly read (as she surely read all of Edgeworth’s fiction):

WHATELY: “We shall, perhaps, best explain our meaning by examples, taken from a novel of great merit [i.e., Ennui] in many respects. When Lord Glenthorn, in whom a most unfavourable education has acted on a most unfavourable disposition, after a life of torpor, broken only by short sallies of forced exertion, on a sudden reverse of fortune, displays at once the most persevering diligence in the most repulsive studies, and in middle life, without any previous habits of exertion, any hope of early business, or the example of friends, or the stimulus of actual want, to urge him, outstrips every competitor, though every competitor has every advantage against him; this is unnatural.”          

MY COMMENT: Now stop and consider how well Whately’s elegant summation of Glenthorn’s unnaturally sudden transformation from frog to prince resembles Darcy’s unnatural metamorphosis – and yet Whately, who has clearly read P&P, and is reviewing two other Austen novels, never consciously glimmers on any parallelism. But that’s only half of Whately’s massive Trojan Horse Moment, because the other half pops up in the very next sentence:

WHATELY: “When Lord Glenthorn, the instant he is stripped of his estates, meets, falls in love with, and is conditionally accepted by the very lady who is remotely intitled to those estates; when, the instant he has fulfilled the conditions of their marriage, the family of the person possessed of the estates becomes extinct, and by the concurrence of circumstances, against every one of which the chances were enormous, the hero is re-instated in all his old domains; this is merely improbable.”        

MY COMMENT: There you have a parallel to the improbability of the coincidences in P&P – not merely those in the cascade of “dominoes” that drive the final volume of P&P (Lizzy “accidentally” being taken to see Pemberley; Darcy ‘accidentally’ running into her in the Pemberley shrubbery; Lydia “accidentally” revealing that Darcy was at her wedding’ someone “accidentally” passing the false rumor of Elizabeth and Darcy being engaged on to Lady Catherine, etc.); but go back to the colossally improbable quadruple coincidence that comprises the first half of P&P (Darcy, Wickham, Collins, Mrs. Gardiner all focused “independently” on Elizabeth, as I last outlined here: http://tinyurl.com/h5phlxg  In short, there is no great story in the history of literature more dependent on improbable coincidences than P&P –and yet, JA, in her mastery, has somehow convinced millions of readers over 2 centuries that everything in P&P is not only probable, it’s so compellingly real that we care as much about Darcy and Elizabeth as we do about any fictional characters ever created!

With that in mind, now savor the unintended irony of the following remaining comments about probability in novels in Whately’s review, when he criticizes Edgeworth while praising Austen:

WHATELY: “…. Among the authors of this school there is no one superior, if equal, to [JA] the lady whose last production is now before us…Miss Edgeworth, indeed, draws characters and details conversations, such as they occur in real life, with a spirit and fidelity not to be surpassed; but her stories are most romantically improbable (in the sense above explained), almost all the important events of them being brought about by most providential coincidences; and this, as we have already remarked, is not merely faulty, inasmuch as it evinces a want of skill in the writer, and gives an air of clumsiness to the fiction, but is a very considerable drawback on its practical utility: the personages either of fiction or history being then only profitable examples, when their good or ill conduct meets its appropriate reward, not from a sort of independent machinery of accidents, but as a necessary or probable result, according to the ordinary course of affairs. Miss Edgeworth also is somewhat too avowedly didactic…

…The moral lessons also of this lady's [JA’s] novels, though clearly and impressively conveyed, are not offensively put forward, but spring incidentally from the circumstances of the story; they are not forced

upon the reader, but he is left to collect them (though without any difficulty) for himself: hers is that unpretending kind of instruction which is furnished by real life; and certainly no author has ever conformed more closely to real life, as well in the incidents, as in the characters and descriptions. Her fables appear to us to be, in their own way, nearly faultless; they do not consist (like those of some of the

writers who have attempted this kind of common-life novel writing) of a string of unconnected events which have little or no bearing on one main plot, and are introduced evidently for the sole purpose of bringing in characters and conversations; but have all that compactness of plan and unity of action which is generally produced by a sacrifice of probability: yet they have little or nothing that is not probable…”

MY COMMENT: And now, if you were in doubt as to where you think Whately stood on the question of probability in JA’s novels, here you get it, explicitly and without qualification:

WHATELY: “…the story proceeds without the aid of extraordinary accidents; the events which take place are the necessary or natural consequences of what has preceded; and yet (which is a very rare merit indeed) the final catastrophe is scarcely ever clearly foreseen from the beginning, and very often comes, upon the generality of readers at least, quite unexpected. We know not whether Miss Austin ever had access to the precepts of Aristotle; but there are few, if any, writers of fiction who have illustrated them more successfully. The vivid distinctness of description, the minute fidelity of detail, and air of unstudied ease in the scenes represented, which are no less necessary than probability of incident, to carry the reader's imagination along with the story, and give fiction the perfect appearance of reality, she possesses in a high degree…”

MY FINAL COMMENT: There can be no greater tribute to JA’s genius than that she could receive the universal acclaim of Whately and all her other readers for 200 years for her natural plots with necessary consequences, and yet she has based it all on a string of wild improbabilities and unnaturalnesses, beside which those of  Edgeworth and Fielding might pale in comparison –and ultimately why did she do it?

Because what was unnatural and improbable in the overt story of each of her novels, but particularly in Pride & Prejudice, was a reflection of the profound errors made by the clueless heroine of each novel, who misjudged the actions and motivations of their fellow characters whom they observed. In the shadow story, however, there is nothing unnatural or improbable, only trueness to real life that the heroine cannot properly discern and understand.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The infallible economic sense/scents of Mary Crawford’s poetic Popish pause in Mansfield Park

It’s been nearly a year since I last revisited the scene in Chapter 17 of Mansfield Park when Mary Crawford chats with sister Mrs. Grant about brother Henry, and the shadow his rakish flirtations are throwing on Maria Bertram’s impending marriage to Mr. Rushworth:

"I rather wonder Julia is not in love with Henry," was [Mrs. Grant’s] observation to Mary.

"I dare say she is," replied Mary coldly. "I imagine both sisters are."

"Both! no, no, that must not be. Do not give him a hint of it. Think of Mr. Rushworth!"

"You had better tell Miss Bertram to think of Mr. Rushworth. It may do her some good. I often think of Mr. Rushworth's property and independence, and wish them in other hands; but I never think of him. A man might represent the county with such an estate; a man might escape a profession and represent the county."

"I dare say he will be in parliament soon. When Sir Thomas comes, I dare say he will be in for some borough, but there has been nobody to put him in the way of doing anything yet."

"Sir Thomas is to achieve many mighty things when he comes home," said Mary, after a pause. "Do you remember Hawkins Browne's 'Address to Tobacco,' in imitation of Pope?—

     Blest leaf! whose aromatic gales dispense

     To Templars modesty, to Parsons sense.

I will parody them—

     Blest Knight! whose dictatorial looks dispense

     To Children affluence, to Rushworth sense.

Will not that do, Mrs. Grant? Everything seems to depend upon Sir Thomas's return."  END QUOTE

I live for fresh epiphanies about bits of narration like “said Mary, after a pause”, because I’ve long since learned that such seeming throwaways are often important hints that Jane Austen has hidden in plain sight for her proactive readers. They invariably alert us to speculate as to what a character is thinking during such an unexplained pause—and so in this case, I asked myself what Mary thought about, before she popped out her witty parody of Browne’s imitation of Pope. As my Subject Line suggests, Mary’s pause is indeed pregnant with rich hidden meaning, as you’ll learn, below.

To start, part of Mary’s pause was surely to give even the quick-witted Mary time to recall Browne’s parody of Pope, and then to generate her own version. And by the way, as with all of Mary’s bon mots (particularly “rears and vices”), don’t you agree that this one is perfectly, sarcastically tailored to describe the situation the clear-eyed Mary observes in the unholy trinity she observe: the reckless and cynical Maria, who marries purely for money and status; the foolish and naive Mr. Rushworth, who lacks the slightest clue why Maria is really marrying him; and the imperious and mercenary Sir Thomas, who barely lifts a finger to discourage Maria from her loveless, cynical engagement, because, it is clear from this and many other passages in the novel, his fatherly eyes are full of pound notes falling like aromatic fruit from the large, tempting Tree of Money at Sotherton.

So we can see, at least in part, why Mary pauses, and then comes up with that particular couplet of Browne’s as her starting point. Its verbiage and cadence provides her with a ready and suitable template onto which she can quickly graft the themes of Rushworth’s stupidity and Sir Thomas’s dictatorial greed. But is there more to Mary’s pause, and the Browne allusion, than that?  To begin to figure this out, we must start with the full text of Browne’s 1736 short poem, “A Pipe of Tobacco: In Imitation of Six Several Authors [of which Alexander Pope is actually only one of the six]”:

Blest Leaf! whose aromatic gales dispense
To Templars modesty, to parsons sense:   
So raptur'd priests, at fam'd Dodona's shrine
Drank inspiration from the steam divine.
Poison that cures, a vapour that affords
Content, more solid than the smile of lords:
Rest to the weary, to the hungry food,
The last kind refuge of the wise and good:
Inspir'd by thee, dull cits adjust the scale
Of Europe's peace, when other statesmen fail.
By thee protected, and thy sister, beer,
Poets rejoice, nor think the bailiff near.
Nor less, the critic owns thy genial aid,
While supperless he plies the piddling trade.
What tho' to love and soft delights a foe,
By ladies hated, hated by the beau,
Yet social freedom, long to courts unknown,
Fair health, fair truth, and virtue are thy own.
Come to thy poet, come with healing wings,
And let me taste thee unexcis'd by kings.

It is clear that for some reason Browne is playfully extolling an apparent absurdity--- the miraculous benefits, to various categories of little people, from smoking tobacco. In that sense, it seems an early 18^th century satirical precursor of Marx’s very serious and very famous dictum issued a century later: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people". Had the worldly wise Mary Crawford somehow lived to read Marx, she’d have nodded in agreement, don’t you think?

And that (seemingly accidental) resonance got me wondering -- perhaps beneath the seeming frivolity of Browne’s doggerel, written a half century before the French Revolution, there was some more serious, even proto-Marxian, meaning concealed in it --- a veiled critique of class- and money-stratified European society, a world in which the little people could be easily seduced by cheap, simple physical pleasure into accepting a system totally and permanently rigged against them. Was this sort of critique on Mary Crawford’s mind as well, as she observed Maria marrying for money with her greedy father’s hypocritical approval? I think so!

Those speculations reminded me of yet another question I had considered a few times before, but had never found the answer to, nor did I ever learn that any other Austen or Pope scholar had found it either: i.e., if Browne’s poem was (as Mary states) in imitation of Pope, which specific Pope poem was it in imitation of? And why is it that none of the annotations and other discussions of MP that I searched in online even asked that question? If we could find it and read it, surely we would then find clues to Browne’s deeper meaning. And, in turn, that would surely tell us the rest of the story as to why Mary chose that particular couplet as her parodic base.

This time around, using Google, I quickly located what I am certain is that specific Pope poem that Browne and Mary Crawford had in mind. It can be found in his Moral Essays: Epistle III: “Of the Use of Riches”  written to Allen, Lord Bathurst. The Argument explains the title:

“That it is known to few, most falling into one of the extremes, Avarice or Profusion. The point discussed, whether the invention of money has been more commodious or pernicious to mankind. That Riches, either to the Avaricious or the Prodigal, cannot afford happiness, scarcely necessaries. That Avarice is an absolute frenzy, without an end or purpose. Conjectures about the motives of avaricious men. That the conduct of men, with respect to Riches, can only be accounted for by the Order of Providence, which works the general good out of extremes, and brings all to its great end by perpetual revolutions. How a Miser acts upon principles which appear to him reasonable. How a Prodigal does the same. The due medium and true use of riches. The Man of Ross. The fate of the Profuse and the Covetous, in two examples; both miserable in life and in death. The story of Sir Balaam.”

Avarice, covetousness, misery. May I pause at this moment and say “BINGO!” Just as I suspected, Mary Crawford was clearly aware that “Of the Use of Riches” was the theme of Pope’s poem behind Browne’s parody-she was thus a very sharp elf indeed, to have both Pope and Browne at her mental fingertips, ready for just such an occasion. Maria, Rushworth, and Sir Thomas are all totally busted!

And that is more the case, the more closely we look. Here is the opening couplet of Pope’s poetic Epistle III which Google led me to:

Blest paper-credit! last and best supply!   [Is that an echo of Henry’s Miltonian “Heaven’s last best gift”?]
That lends Corruption lighter wings to fly!  [Like Satan’s wings flying into Eden?]
Gold imp’d by thee, can compass hardest things,  [Satan and his imps]
Can pocket States, can fetch or carry Kings;
A single leaf shall waft an Army o’er,
Or ship off Senates to a distant Shore;
A leaf, like Sibyl’s, scattered to and fro
Our fates and fortunes, as the winds shall blow, (lines 69-76)

The above short poetic passage has actually had a surprisingly complicated publication history (because despite JA’s having playfully referred to Pope as “infallible” in an 1813 letter which she wrote while deeply engaged in the writing of Mansfield Park, Pope was fallible—or finicky-- enough to have regularly revised lines in his poems over the course of several editions). However, the keywords and phrases that Browne so clearly echoed are, I am sure you’ll agree, obvious in the above quotation.

For those of a truly wonky disposition, I include, in the remainder of this post, a few brief excerpts from Julian Ferraro’s article, “The Presentation and Representation of Epistles to Several Persons” in Proceedings of the British Academy  #91, 111-124 (1998), analyzing the sharp economic critique in Pope’s poem, which I assert was on Browne’s, Mary Crawford’s, and Jane Austen’s minds

“…the reader is provided with alternatives, all of which derive their authority directly from the poet….the result that the boundaries of the prime text become blurred… The Epistle to Bathurst in particular seems to have been contrived to defy any easy accommodation within a moral scheme. Rather than providing a firm foundation for its maxims and aphorisms, Pope’s reworkings of that poem seem directed towards giving full play to ironies and ambivalences...The section of the Epistle to Bathurst in which Pope describes the effects on society of paper-credit is one which evolves significantly as he revises the poem for the various editions of the second volume of the Works...

…In the 1744 text, the qualification ‘advanc’d so high’ is removed. It is no longer paper-credit taken to extremes but paper-credit per se that contributes to corruption, a shift reflected in the removal of ‘now’ from the second line. Thus, the revised couplet embraces the concept of paper-credit in a wholly ironic way, directed explicitly at the current state of affairs:

Blest Paper-credit! Last and best supply!

That lends Corruption lighter wings to fly!

[This image of paper-credit ironically echoes Proverbs 23.5: ‘Wilt thou set thine eyes upon that which is not? For riches certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle toward heaven’.]

…the fact that the poet has felt it necessary to alter his text is itself a further indictment of the society that he criticizes. .…Pope has replaced the nebulous ‘they’ with his original villain. It is not just the new fangled paper-credit and the corruption it facilitates that ‘may’ destroy established hierarchies, but the perennial evil, ‘Gold.’

In the text of the 1735 Works, the second line of the couplet is revised…’may’ being replaced by ‘can’; what is described is no longer a potential but a proven ability. In the 1744 ‘deathbed’ edition, the lines are revised once more. Pope now addresses the lines directly to ‘Blest paper-credit’ and reinforces the sense of immediacy by emphasizing the power of the winged monster with a threefold repetition of the word ‘can’:

Gold, imp’d by thee, can compass hardest things,

Can pocket States, can fetch and carry Kings;

This revision reestablishes paper-credit as an agent rather than an object, giving it an identity that the poet addresses, as it were, face to face….the satirist boldly confronting a virtual personification of the economic system whose vices he denounces, a physical realization of paper-credit which Pope continues to develop in revision to the imagery in the lines that follow.

…In the last lines of the poem, Pope again suppresses controversial –possibly treasonable—lines until the poem is incorporated in the 1735 Works. MS 1 reads

His Wife, Son & Daughter, Satan! Are thy own;

His Wealth, yet dearer, forfeit to the Crown’

The Devil and the King divide the prize,

And sad Sir Balaam curses God and dies.”   END QUOTE FROM FERRARO

Those last references to Satan, the Devil, and the cursing of God, all further point to the well recognized Paradise Lost subtext of MP. And so, let me conclude by pointing out that once again Mary Crawford, under the superficial appearance of thoughtless selfish inappropriate joking, is actually the Truthteller and Whistleblower about all the moral rot at Mansfield Park.

In a followup post, I will relate all of the above to my February 2016 ruminations about the Aphra Behn subtext that I previously saw in Pope’s, Browne’s, Mary Crawford’s, and Jane Austen’s meanings, but for now, I think I’ve given you enough --- so, in honor of Browne’s ode to tobacco, just put all my Austenian heresies in your pipe and smoke ‘em!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Galigai, St. Swithin, & Diana Parker: the dying Jane Austen’s ambition for immortality & gender justice

I am VERY pleased and honored to announce that the 2017 JASNA AGM Steering Committee has notified me that I am one of the lucky ones who will get to deliver a breakout session talk in Huntington Beach, CA at the AGM that will run from Oct. 6-8, 2017!!!!

By the way, if you want to go, rooms at the beachfront hotel where it will be held are going to go very fast, based on past experience, so go here and reserve your room now: http://jasna.org/agms/huntington/hotel.html

This will be my third AGM presentation (2010 in Portland, OR and 2014 in Montreal), and I will be counting the days (277 to be exact) till it starts! And finally, for those who might be interested in coming to hear my talk, here's the beginning of my blurb describing what I'll have the luxury of 40 minutes to articulate in detail:

"Galigai, St. Swithin, & Diana Parker: the dying Jane Austen’s ambition for immortality & gender justice"

Nearly all Austen biographers, following her brother Henry (“in spite of such applause, so much did she shrink from notoriety, that no accumulation of fame would have induced her, had she lived, to affix her name to any productions of her pen“) and her nephew James Edward (“little thinking of future fame, but caring only for 'the queerness and the fun’ “), would have us believe Jane didn’t reach (or even wish) for literary immortality; that she’d be shocked to learn of her still widening fame 200 years after her early death while at the peak of her powers. 

I’ve come to know a different Jane, a proud, ambitious artist; and, ironically, I find the best evidence of her proud (but well-regulated) ambition, not in her six novels, but, when physical death loomed large, in her 1817 writings, in which she thrice asserted her power and her will to survive…at least, on paper!: 

(1) in her late letter to old friend Anne Sharp (“Galigai for ever and ever, the influence of strength over weakness indeed”); 

(2) in her last fiction, the Sanditon fragment (“The world is pretty much divided between the weak of mind and the strong; between those who can act and those who cannot; and it is the bounden duty of the capable to let no opportunity of being useful escape them. My…complaints…are happily not often of a nature to threaten existence immediately. And as long as we can exert ourselves to be of use to others,...the body is the better for the refreshment the mind receives in doing its duty"); AND 

(3) in her deathbed testament, the “fanciful” “When Winchester Races” (“When once we are buried you think we are gone But behold me immortal!...Set off for your course, I'll pursue with my rain.… Henceforward I'll triumph in shewing my powers…”). 

 I’ll start there, browse the novels & letters, then circle back to her juvenilia; and show that, for her entire writing life, Jane not only wished for immortality, she grabbed for it with both (far from mouldering) hands! 

See you there, I hope!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter