Several years ago, Diana Birchall wrote a very interesting article about Warren Hastings entitled something like "Gold Mohrs and Palanquins" for Jane Austen's Regency World, in which, among many other points, she mentioned, in passing, Maria Payne, who was a companion to Mrs. Warren Hastings during the latter's old age.
Diana and I had, back when she wrote the article (in 2006, I believe), tossed ideas back and forth very briefly about the following very cryptic passage which begins Letter 28, dated December 1, 1800, which I had noticed for the first time and brought to her attention:
“Shall you expect to hear from me on Wednesday or not?-I think you will, or I should not write, as the three days & half which have passed since my last letter was sent, have not produced many materials towards filling another sheet of paper.-But like Mrs. Hastings, " I do not despair "-& you perhaps like the faithful Maria may feel still more certain of the happy Event.”
At the time, as I recall, we were not able to make much of it, and even two weeks ago, I looked at it again and found I had nothing fresh to say about it. Tonight, though, I was startled into recalling the above quoted passage (still fresh in my memory from rereading it two weeks ago) when I read, this evening, the _following_ parallel passage which begins Letter 30 dated January 3, 1800:
"The "perhaps" which concluded my last letter being only a "perhaps," will not occasion your being overpowered with surprise, I dare say, if you /should/ receive this before Tuesday, which, unless circumstances are very perverse, will be the case. I received yours with much general philanthropy, and still more peculiar good will, two days ago; and I suppose I need not tell you that it was very long, being written on a foolscap sheet, and very entertaining, being written by you. Mr. Payne has been dead long enough for Henry to be out of mourning for him before his last visit, though we knew nothing of it till about that time. Why he died, or of what complaint, or to what noblemen he bequeathed his four daughters in marriage, we have not heard."
Hmmm....how very strange that Letter 28 and Letter 30, written less than 5 weeks apart, _both_ begin with an apparently absurdist discussion about (a) durations between letters passing between the Austen sisters, and also about (b) the lengths of their letters, and then _both_ (c) also lurch abruptly into an apparent non sequitur about a subject never previously addressed by JA in any prior letter, i.e., the Payne family.....
I had never connected these two introductory epistolary passages before, but I reaized right away that in some way they _must_ be connected....but how??
First, it drove me back to Le Faye's Bio Index, and then to my old notes about Diana's article, to refresh my dim memory about Mr. Payne, both his life and his demise. What I learned from Le Faye is that Mr. Payne died suddenly and intestate (i.e., without a Will) on December 7, 1800, just 6 days after JA began Letter 28 writing about "the faithful Maria" who "may feel still more certain of the _happy_ Event."
That is very curious, don't you think? What does JA mean, exactly, by "we knew nothing of it till about that time"? Is "it" Mr. Payne's death? And when is "about that time"? Is she saying that she knew about Mr. Payne being mortally ill _before_ he died, or after? It seems that JA and CEA know what JA meant, but it seems very muddy to me, and I wonder if that was intentionally so, JA did not want to be too precise, in case other eyes at Godmersham than CEA's read Letter 30.
Apparently Henry Austen has been in mourning for Mr. Payne, because Henry is Eliza's husband, and Mr. Payne was (as Le Faye tells us) Warren Hastings's old friend, and Eliza of course was (officially) Warren Hastings's goddaughter. If JA really did not know about Mr. Payne being ill when she wrote Letter 28 on December 1, it seems to me a very improbable coincidence for JA to suddenly write about this man's daughter so cryptically on December 1, only to have him suddenly drop dead six days later!
No, surely JA and CEA first heard (from Henry, no doubt) that he was dying, _then_ JA wrote Letter 28, _then_ JA heard the news of his actual death.
And....bigger question----why is JA making this jarringly tasteless joke about this man bequeathing his daughters to noblemen? Especially when you consider that Maria Payne is one of those four daughters, and that she is as attached to Daylesford as Harriet Smith was to Hartfield during the first part of Emma, and JA has written that weird thing about Maria Payne and "the happy Event" in Letter 28.
And...perhaps the seemingly silly discussion of durations between letters, and lengths of letters, in some way is a veiled reference to the perhaps sensitive subject of the chronology of these letters in relation to Mr. Payne's final illness and death? Again, maybe JA is conveying information to CEA in a coded fashion.
My sense is that Le Faye recognized this connection between these opening sections of Letters 28 and 30, and all this "smoky" fuzziness on JA's part, and Le Faye was hoping nobody else would notice it. But, being pragmatic, she knew that perhaps some stubborn readers (like myself) might, and then she did not want anyone to make any unpleasant inferences, such as inferring that Mr. Payne's death was not _that_ sudden, and that JA and CEA had been informed of his being mortally ill at least a week or two before he actually died, and therefore "the happy Event" JA was suggesting that Maria (Payne) was feeling "still more certain" about was her own father's imminent _death_! That would not be borne!
Except I really do think it is the most logical inference from the material at hand. Certainly it fits with JA's joke about the daughters being bequeathed to noblemen, which would, according to the black humor of the joke, be a "happy Event" for Maria!
And Le Faye's bio index also revealed that Mr. Payne had, during his life, been an old friend of Warren Hastings, so it would make sense that the Austens would pay close attention to the death of this man, who, Le Faye also tells us, had connections via his deceased mother, to the Royal Family!--Hence JA's wisecrack about bequeathing his daughters to noblemen.
And.... it also just occurs to me as I write this, that there is even blacker humor in JA's joke. Why? Because Le Faye's Bio Index emphasizes Mr. Payne's very sudden death (so sudden, we are to infer, that he had no time to make a Will). And the clear implication is that because he was intestate, his estate, a la Jarndyce v Jarndyce, took 6+ years to settle, and during that long duration of his probate estate, his unfortunate wife apparently was burdened with the obligation to pay for the upkeep of the royal menagerie for that whole time, because that apparently had been _his_ obligation while alive, although I have no idea why the Royal Family did not pay its own bills for its own menagerie.....
Anyway, the darker humor of JA"s joke is based on the conceit of a man bequeathing his daughters to noblemen, as if his daughters were _farm_ animals, which is darkly funny if the delay in estate settlement apparently caused his wife to have to shell out big bucks to pay for the upkeep of _royal_ animals.
In short, JA was never far away from her dark vision of Englishwomen being treated like farms animals under English marriage and family laws and customs.
In summary, then, Le Faye's handling of all of this is very strange, and that fits with the fact that Mr. Payne was, as I mentioned above, an old friend of Warren Hastings. After all, if memory serves me right, Le Faye took a big bite out of David Nokes and another well known Austen scholar some years ago, because they dared to suggest what has been rumored for over 200 years by many people, i.e., that Eliza Hancock de Feuillide Austen was Warren Hastings's illegitimate daughter, sired on JA's paternal aunt Philadelphia. So it would make sense that Le Faye would be extra vigilant about anything unsavory in JA's Letters (which of course were long in the public domain) which pertained to Hastings, and would, if she could, divert readers from any sort of inference that JA was not kindly disposed toward Warren Hastings.
Of course, as I have blogged and posted in these groups, I am convinced that JA was _not at all_ kindly disposed toward Warren Hastings, despite the sugar coated mythology to the contrary that has been promulgated over two centuries by the likes of Le Faye.
Very interesting, as Arte Johnson would have said......
Cheers, ARNIE
sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com
P.S. And, in light of all the above, should we make anything of the following last P.S. to Letter 66?:
"The Portsmouth paper gave a melancholy history of a poor mad woman, escaped from confinement, who said her husband and daughter, of the name of _Payne_, lived at Ashford, in Kent. Do you own them?"
Le Faye has no Bio Index entry for a Payne family living in Kent. Perhaps the reason is that there was no such family, and that there was no such "melancholy history" in real life at all, but that this was JA's (characteristic) sort of mini-fantasy (like "Mr. Floor who is _low_ in our estimation"), a kind of "bookend" to her "faithful Maria" confabulation in Letter 28, prompted by some news about Maria Payne?
Monday, June 20, 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Non-Dwelling on My Fanny's Hill Street Blues
As collateral benefit from my research earlier today into the “improvement” and “capability” wordplay of P&P and MP, I noticed something else for the first time today, which is the common thread in the following four short excerpts from the last three chapters of MP:
Ch. 46: To-morrow! to leave Portsmouth to-morrow! She was, she felt she was, in the greatest danger of being exquisitely happy, while so many were miserable. The evil which brought such good to her! She dreaded lest she should learn to be insensible of it. To be going so soon, sent for so kindly, sent for as a comfort, and with leave to take Susan, was altogether such a combination of blessings as set her heart in a glow, and for a time seemed to distance every pain, and make her incapable of suitably sharing the distress even of those whose distress she thought of most. Julia's elopement could affect her comparatively but little; she was amazed and shocked; but it could not occupy her, could not _DWELL_ on her mind. She was obliged to call herself to think of it, and acknowledge it to be terrible and grievous, or it was escaping her, in the midst of all the agitating pressing joyful cares attending this summons to herself.
Ch. 47:She had met him, he said, with a serious—certainly a serious—even an agitated air; but before he had been able to speak one intelligible sentence, she had introduced the subject in a manner which he owned had shocked him. "'I heard you were in town,' said she; 'I wanted to see you. Let us talk over this sad business. What can equal the folly of our two relations?' I could not answer, but I believe my looks spoke. She felt reproved. Sometimes how quick to feel! With a graver look and voice she then added, 'I do not mean to defend Henry at your sister's expense.' So she began, but how she went on, Fanny, is not fit, is hardly fit to be repeated to you. I cannot recall all her words. I would not _DWELL_**upon them if I could. Their substance was great anger at the /folly/ of each….
Ch. 47: ….all this together most grievously convinced me that I had never understood her before, and that, as far as related to mind, it had been the creature of my own imagination, not Miss Crawford, that I had been too apt to _DWELL_ on for many months past. That, perhaps, it was best for me; I had less to regret in sacrificing a friendship, feelings, hopes which must, at any rate, have been torn from me now. And yet, that I must and would confess that, could I have restored her to what she had appeared to me before, I would infinitely prefer any increase of the pain of parting, for the sake of carrying with me the right of tenderness and esteem….
Ch. 48:Let other pens _DWELL_ on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest. My Fanny, indeed, at this very time, I have the satisfaction of knowing, must have been happy in spite of everything. She must have been a happy creature in spite of all that she felt, or thought she felt, for the distress of those around her. She had sources of delight that must force their way. She was returned to Mansfield Park, she was useful, she was beloved; she was safe from Mr. Crawford; and when Sir Thomas came back she had every proof that could be given in his then melancholy state of spirits, of his perfect approbation and increased regard; and happy as all this must make her, she would still have been happy without any of it, for Edmund was no longer the dupe of Miss Crawford.
So, within the short space of a little more than two chapters, we have four usages of the word “dwell”, and all of them expressed in the negative, in terms, respectively, of incapability, avoidance, regret, and refusal:
INCAPABILITY: When Fanny learns that Edward will pick her up the next day, the Bertram family scandals could _not_ dwell on her mind, she had to dutifully force herself to think about them.
AVOIDANCE: Then, Edmund tells Fanny that he would rather _not_ dwell upon what Mary said to him about the Maria/Henry fracas.
REGRET: Then Edmund regrets having been _too_ apt to dwell upon an idealization of Mary Crawford.
REFUSAL:And finally the narrator joins this “dwelling” chorus by _refusing_ to dwell on the Bertram family’s guilt and misery, leaving it to “other pens”.
So it’s not a happy ending, so much as a stuffing down of uncomfortable memories and feelings.
“Let other pens dwell” is of course more famous than the other three combined, because it is a rare JA narrative intrusion. But no prior commentator I can find has connected these four passages before and spotted “dwell” as the link. Furthermore, this blurring of the line between narrator and heroine, viatheir shared “non-dwelling”, is compounded by the narrator referring to “My Fanny”, in the next sentence.
It’s almost as though the narrator _is_ Fanny Price Bertram, but at age 40, thinking back twenty years, and writing the story of how she met and married Edmund, editing out the worst parts.
Which…..is exactly the temporal scheme of another very famous English novel with another famous heroine named Fanny, who tells _her_ story as a reminiscence of _her_ “coming out” ---Fanny Hill!
Which perhaps is why there are four references to the _hill_ at Sotherton, and also why Mrs. Grant says to Mary Crawford early in MP:"Ah! You have been in a bad school for matrimony, in _Hill_ Street."
And also why Mrs. Norris says: “And when we got to the bottom of Sandcroft _Hill_, what do you think I did?”(especially when we realize that one of the awful “clients” Fanny Hill must endure at Mrs. Cole’s is named Mr. _Crofts_).
And perhaps the most telling parallel of all in a novel with an infamous pun about “rears and vices”, consider the scene near the end of Fanny Hill involving Fanny’s horror at witnessing homosexual sex, vis a vis the “business” (that vague word is repeated twice) that Henry transacts with William at Hill Street, described in a passage that teems with Freudian innuendoes:
“[Henry’s] last journey to London had been undertaken with no other view than that of introducing her brother in _Hill_ Street, and prevailing on the Admiral to exert whatever interest he might have for getting him on. This had been his business. He had communicated it to no creature: he had not breathed a syllable of it even to Mary; while uncertain of the issue, he could not have borne any participation of his feelings, but this had been his business; and he spoke with such a glow of what his solicitude had been, and used such strong expressions, was so abounding in the /deepest/ /interest/, in /twofold/ /motives/, in /views/ /and/ /wishes/ /more/ /than/ /could/ /be/ /told/, that Fanny could not have remained insensible of his drift, had she been able to attend.”
Fanny could not have remained insensible of Henry’s drift, and, I suggest, neither can we any longer.
Cheers, ARNIE
Ch. 46: To-morrow! to leave Portsmouth to-morrow! She was, she felt she was, in the greatest danger of being exquisitely happy, while so many were miserable. The evil which brought such good to her! She dreaded lest she should learn to be insensible of it. To be going so soon, sent for so kindly, sent for as a comfort, and with leave to take Susan, was altogether such a combination of blessings as set her heart in a glow, and for a time seemed to distance every pain, and make her incapable of suitably sharing the distress even of those whose distress she thought of most. Julia's elopement could affect her comparatively but little; she was amazed and shocked; but it could not occupy her, could not _DWELL_ on her mind. She was obliged to call herself to think of it, and acknowledge it to be terrible and grievous, or it was escaping her, in the midst of all the agitating pressing joyful cares attending this summons to herself.
Ch. 47:She had met him, he said, with a serious—certainly a serious—even an agitated air; but before he had been able to speak one intelligible sentence, she had introduced the subject in a manner which he owned had shocked him. "'I heard you were in town,' said she; 'I wanted to see you. Let us talk over this sad business. What can equal the folly of our two relations?' I could not answer, but I believe my looks spoke. She felt reproved. Sometimes how quick to feel! With a graver look and voice she then added, 'I do not mean to defend Henry at your sister's expense.' So she began, but how she went on, Fanny, is not fit, is hardly fit to be repeated to you. I cannot recall all her words. I would not _DWELL_**upon them if I could. Their substance was great anger at the /folly/ of each….
Ch. 47: ….all this together most grievously convinced me that I had never understood her before, and that, as far as related to mind, it had been the creature of my own imagination, not Miss Crawford, that I had been too apt to _DWELL_ on for many months past. That, perhaps, it was best for me; I had less to regret in sacrificing a friendship, feelings, hopes which must, at any rate, have been torn from me now. And yet, that I must and would confess that, could I have restored her to what she had appeared to me before, I would infinitely prefer any increase of the pain of parting, for the sake of carrying with me the right of tenderness and esteem….
Ch. 48:Let other pens _DWELL_ on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest. My Fanny, indeed, at this very time, I have the satisfaction of knowing, must have been happy in spite of everything. She must have been a happy creature in spite of all that she felt, or thought she felt, for the distress of those around her. She had sources of delight that must force their way. She was returned to Mansfield Park, she was useful, she was beloved; she was safe from Mr. Crawford; and when Sir Thomas came back she had every proof that could be given in his then melancholy state of spirits, of his perfect approbation and increased regard; and happy as all this must make her, she would still have been happy without any of it, for Edmund was no longer the dupe of Miss Crawford.
So, within the short space of a little more than two chapters, we have four usages of the word “dwell”, and all of them expressed in the negative, in terms, respectively, of incapability, avoidance, regret, and refusal:
INCAPABILITY: When Fanny learns that Edward will pick her up the next day, the Bertram family scandals could _not_ dwell on her mind, she had to dutifully force herself to think about them.
AVOIDANCE: Then, Edmund tells Fanny that he would rather _not_ dwell upon what Mary said to him about the Maria/Henry fracas.
REGRET: Then Edmund regrets having been _too_ apt to dwell upon an idealization of Mary Crawford.
REFUSAL:And finally the narrator joins this “dwelling” chorus by _refusing_ to dwell on the Bertram family’s guilt and misery, leaving it to “other pens”.
So it’s not a happy ending, so much as a stuffing down of uncomfortable memories and feelings.
“Let other pens dwell” is of course more famous than the other three combined, because it is a rare JA narrative intrusion. But no prior commentator I can find has connected these four passages before and spotted “dwell” as the link. Furthermore, this blurring of the line between narrator and heroine, viatheir shared “non-dwelling”, is compounded by the narrator referring to “My Fanny”, in the next sentence.
It’s almost as though the narrator _is_ Fanny Price Bertram, but at age 40, thinking back twenty years, and writing the story of how she met and married Edmund, editing out the worst parts.
Which…..is exactly the temporal scheme of another very famous English novel with another famous heroine named Fanny, who tells _her_ story as a reminiscence of _her_ “coming out” ---Fanny Hill!
Which perhaps is why there are four references to the _hill_ at Sotherton, and also why Mrs. Grant says to Mary Crawford early in MP:"Ah! You have been in a bad school for matrimony, in _Hill_ Street."
And also why Mrs. Norris says: “And when we got to the bottom of Sandcroft _Hill_, what do you think I did?”(especially when we realize that one of the awful “clients” Fanny Hill must endure at Mrs. Cole’s is named Mr. _Crofts_).
And perhaps the most telling parallel of all in a novel with an infamous pun about “rears and vices”, consider the scene near the end of Fanny Hill involving Fanny’s horror at witnessing homosexual sex, vis a vis the “business” (that vague word is repeated twice) that Henry transacts with William at Hill Street, described in a passage that teems with Freudian innuendoes:
“[Henry’s] last journey to London had been undertaken with no other view than that of introducing her brother in _Hill_ Street, and prevailing on the Admiral to exert whatever interest he might have for getting him on. This had been his business. He had communicated it to no creature: he had not breathed a syllable of it even to Mary; while uncertain of the issue, he could not have borne any participation of his feelings, but this had been his business; and he spoke with such a glow of what his solicitude had been, and used such strong expressions, was so abounding in the /deepest/ /interest/, in /twofold/ /motives/, in /views/ /and/ /wishes/ /more/ /than/ /could/ /be/ /told/, that Fanny could not have remained insensible of his drift, had she been able to attend.”
Fanny could not have remained insensible of Henry’s drift, and, I suggest, neither can we any longer.
Cheers, ARNIE
Darcy's and Lizzy's Mutual "Improvement"....and the "Capability" Crawfords
In Austen L today, Ellen Moody wrote, re: Jane Brown's The Omnipotent Magician: Lancelot 'Capabililty' Brown, 1716-1783:
"This appears to be an worthwhile biography which while it does not replace Dorothy Stroud's "magnificent" Life first published in 1950 and thoroughly revised 25 years later, adds much, if at times Brown slides into novelizing. A full informative review by John Barrell: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7176032.ece I hope I need not review the connections between this man's work and the aesthetics of landscape and Austen's ironic and celebratory attitudes towards it."
Ellen, thank you for bringing the link for the above review to the group, I read it with great interest.
At first It led me to revisit the way that JA alluded to "Capability" Brown in MP, as Alistair Duckworth so comprehensively discussed 40 years ago, in an article that was expanded into a book, in terms of how the idea of "improvement" of estates and other physical structures becomes a defining battleground between the reckless urbanized improver, Henry Crawford, and the defenders of imperiled ancient nature, Fanny and Edmund.
But, as I refreshed my reading of Duckworth, it also led me to realize that there is even more going on with this motif of "improvement" and "capability" than is treated in Duckworth's excellent and comprehensive analysis of this theme, when one pays even more attention to JA's wordplay than Duckworth already did.
Duckworth, in addition to his well known analysis of the theme of architectural and landscape improvement in JA's novels, takes explicit notice of the usage of the word "capabilities" in Chapter 9 of MP [when the improvement of Sotherton is first discussed by Crawford, Rushworth, et al] and also, elsewhere in his book, Duckworth takes note of the metaphorical meaning in P&P of one usage of the word "improvement" as it pertains to _people_ as opposed to buildings. But he never goes further than that, and I quickly realized that there was much rich ore to be mined in this wordplay vein which neither Duckworth, or anyone else that I could detect after some online searching, had never tapped. So here goes.
IMPROVEMENT AND CAPABILITY IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE:
First, recall the following very famous passage in Chapter 41 of P&P in this light:
[Lizzy] "....But I think Mr. Darcy _improves_ upon acquaintance." "Indeed!" cried Mr. Wickham with a look which did not escape her. "And pray, may I ask?—" But checking himself, he added, in a gayer tone, "Is it in address that he _improves_? Has he deigned to add aught of civility to his ordinary style?—for I dare not hope," he continued in a lower and more serious tone, "that he is _improved_ in essentials." "Oh, no!" said Elizabeth. "In essentials, I believe, he is very much what he ever was."
I love the slyness of the clever pun on "address"--of course a residence like Pemberley has an "address", too, and, amidst the myriad narrative references in P&P to "addresses" in terms of how a person speaks to another, especially the amorous addresses of a man toward a woman in courtship, JA playfully wakens that different, locational meaning in the reader's mind at _one_ single place in the entire novel, in Chapter 23:
"The promised letter of thanks from Mr. Collins arrived on Tuesday, _addressed_ to their father..."
But second and more important than this sly bit of subliminal wordplay, think about P&P and the strong emphasis throughout the novel on human _improvement_--this is arguably the central theme of the novel, as it applies not only to Darcy and Elizabeth, who each "improve" so as to be worthy of the other---but also the further echo when Lizzy speaks one last time with Wickham and they discuss how Georgiana is also _improved_ since last he saw her.
And there is other wordplay that teases the reader at the edges of the metaphor of "improvement" as applicable to both people and buildings.
The following one is amazingly clever:
“Elizabeth here felt herself called on to say something in vindication of [Darcy's] behaviour to Wickham; and therefore gave them to understand, in as guarded a manner as she could, that by what she had heard from his relations in Kent, his actions were CAPABLEOF A VERY DIFFERENT CONSTRUCTION; and that his character was BY NO MEANS SO FAULTY, nor Wickham's so amiable, as they had been considered in Hertfordshire."
I put the relevant phrases in all caps to point to the architectural metaphor that Lizzy inadvertently draws, speaking about Darcy almost as if he were a building which was "capable of a very different construction" which was "by no means so faulty"! And of course this should remind those who have read the scholarly literature about P&P of the oft repeated insight that when Lizzy sees Pemberley, her feelings of love for Darcy are translated into her rhapsodies of blissful reactions to seeing Pemberley and its grounds. I.e., Pemberley _becomes_ Darcy at that moment!
And speaking of the sexual overtones of Lizzy's responses upon first seeing Pemberley, consider the subliminal foreshadowing of those feelings in the following passage in Chapter 31, which points, I claim, to Capability Brown in a very risque way:
//
//"My fingers," said Elizabeth, "do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault—because I will not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe /my/ fingers as _capable_ as any other woman's of superior execution."
Lizzy has, I claim, no idea of the secondary meaning of what she is saying there, in terms of her own fingers's "capability" for "improvement" in terms of "playing" a very different sort of "instrument"!
IMPROVEMENT AND CAPABILITY IN MANSFIELD PARK:
As briliant as JA's wordplay is in P&P with the words "improvement" and "capability" as they pertain to people, it is even more pervasive and brilliant in Mansfield Park. It is far beyond the scope of this message to unpack all of the many ramifications of this theme in MP, but I suggest to you that if you search the word "capability" and its variants in MP, you will find yourself marveling at the twenty different places in the novel where JA spins out a dozen different nuances on this theme.
In my opinion, the most important aspect of this treatment by JA in MP is the way that Henry and Mary Crawford play around with the words "improvement" and "capability". In the case of Mary, the "improvement" she is most concerned with throughout the entire novel is the need she perceives for "improvement" of _Edmund_, in terms of his career (from the clergy to the law), his location (from the country to the city), and his sexuality (from his original rigid propriety toward her own extreme moral flexibility). And, in the case of Henry, it's even more alarming, as he, like Sir Thomas, notices the "improvement" in Fanny's _body_, and practically drools with lecherous delight over the prospect and challenge (a la Lovelace) of seducing a moral paragon.
You get the general drift, I think, and, as I suggested, if you want more, just do the word searches in MP that I suggested, and you will pass the same enjoyable time I did savoring each of JA's many deployments of her wordplay artistry firmly in the service of her deepest and most important themes.
Cheers, ARNIE
sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com
P.S.: I almost forgot to give you the two usages in JA's letters:
Letter 56: “Mr. Choles is gone to drive a Cow to Brentford, & his place is supplied to us by a Man who lives in the same sort of way by odd jobs, & among other _capabilities_ has that of working in a garden, which my Mother will not forget, if we ever have another garden here.”
Given Brown's fame for his handling of gardens, I think that is a deliberate allusion by JA for CEA's delectation.
Letter 132(D) to Clarke, 12/21/15: “I am quite honoured by your thinking me _capable_ of drawing such a clergyman as you gave the sketch of in your note of Nov. 16. But I assure you I am not.”
And here, I find exquisite JA's intentional irony of pretending to be incapable of depicting a clergyman as the fool Clarke asks her to, when, only the year before, JA has published MP, in which she demonstrated, as I have suggested in my above post, her own astonishing capability to draw clergymen like Edmund Bertram and Dr. Grant, two of the most memorable depictions of clergymen in all of English literature!
"This appears to be an worthwhile biography which while it does not replace Dorothy Stroud's "magnificent" Life first published in 1950 and thoroughly revised 25 years later, adds much, if at times Brown slides into novelizing. A full informative review by John Barrell: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7176032.ece I hope I need not review the connections between this man's work and the aesthetics of landscape and Austen's ironic and celebratory attitudes towards it."
Ellen, thank you for bringing the link for the above review to the group, I read it with great interest.
At first It led me to revisit the way that JA alluded to "Capability" Brown in MP, as Alistair Duckworth so comprehensively discussed 40 years ago, in an article that was expanded into a book, in terms of how the idea of "improvement" of estates and other physical structures becomes a defining battleground between the reckless urbanized improver, Henry Crawford, and the defenders of imperiled ancient nature, Fanny and Edmund.
But, as I refreshed my reading of Duckworth, it also led me to realize that there is even more going on with this motif of "improvement" and "capability" than is treated in Duckworth's excellent and comprehensive analysis of this theme, when one pays even more attention to JA's wordplay than Duckworth already did.
Duckworth, in addition to his well known analysis of the theme of architectural and landscape improvement in JA's novels, takes explicit notice of the usage of the word "capabilities" in Chapter 9 of MP [when the improvement of Sotherton is first discussed by Crawford, Rushworth, et al] and also, elsewhere in his book, Duckworth takes note of the metaphorical meaning in P&P of one usage of the word "improvement" as it pertains to _people_ as opposed to buildings. But he never goes further than that, and I quickly realized that there was much rich ore to be mined in this wordplay vein which neither Duckworth, or anyone else that I could detect after some online searching, had never tapped. So here goes.
IMPROVEMENT AND CAPABILITY IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE:
First, recall the following very famous passage in Chapter 41 of P&P in this light:
[Lizzy] "....But I think Mr. Darcy _improves_ upon acquaintance." "Indeed!" cried Mr. Wickham with a look which did not escape her. "And pray, may I ask?—" But checking himself, he added, in a gayer tone, "Is it in address that he _improves_? Has he deigned to add aught of civility to his ordinary style?—for I dare not hope," he continued in a lower and more serious tone, "that he is _improved_ in essentials." "Oh, no!" said Elizabeth. "In essentials, I believe, he is very much what he ever was."
I love the slyness of the clever pun on "address"--of course a residence like Pemberley has an "address", too, and, amidst the myriad narrative references in P&P to "addresses" in terms of how a person speaks to another, especially the amorous addresses of a man toward a woman in courtship, JA playfully wakens that different, locational meaning in the reader's mind at _one_ single place in the entire novel, in Chapter 23:
"The promised letter of thanks from Mr. Collins arrived on Tuesday, _addressed_ to their father..."
But second and more important than this sly bit of subliminal wordplay, think about P&P and the strong emphasis throughout the novel on human _improvement_--this is arguably the central theme of the novel, as it applies not only to Darcy and Elizabeth, who each "improve" so as to be worthy of the other---but also the further echo when Lizzy speaks one last time with Wickham and they discuss how Georgiana is also _improved_ since last he saw her.
And there is other wordplay that teases the reader at the edges of the metaphor of "improvement" as applicable to both people and buildings.
The following one is amazingly clever:
“Elizabeth here felt herself called on to say something in vindication of [Darcy's] behaviour to Wickham; and therefore gave them to understand, in as guarded a manner as she could, that by what she had heard from his relations in Kent, his actions were CAPABLEOF A VERY DIFFERENT CONSTRUCTION; and that his character was BY NO MEANS SO FAULTY, nor Wickham's so amiable, as they had been considered in Hertfordshire."
I put the relevant phrases in all caps to point to the architectural metaphor that Lizzy inadvertently draws, speaking about Darcy almost as if he were a building which was "capable of a very different construction" which was "by no means so faulty"! And of course this should remind those who have read the scholarly literature about P&P of the oft repeated insight that when Lizzy sees Pemberley, her feelings of love for Darcy are translated into her rhapsodies of blissful reactions to seeing Pemberley and its grounds. I.e., Pemberley _becomes_ Darcy at that moment!
And speaking of the sexual overtones of Lizzy's responses upon first seeing Pemberley, consider the subliminal foreshadowing of those feelings in the following passage in Chapter 31, which points, I claim, to Capability Brown in a very risque way:
//
//"My fingers," said Elizabeth, "do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault—because I will not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe /my/ fingers as _capable_ as any other woman's of superior execution."
Lizzy has, I claim, no idea of the secondary meaning of what she is saying there, in terms of her own fingers's "capability" for "improvement" in terms of "playing" a very different sort of "instrument"!
IMPROVEMENT AND CAPABILITY IN MANSFIELD PARK:
As briliant as JA's wordplay is in P&P with the words "improvement" and "capability" as they pertain to people, it is even more pervasive and brilliant in Mansfield Park. It is far beyond the scope of this message to unpack all of the many ramifications of this theme in MP, but I suggest to you that if you search the word "capability" and its variants in MP, you will find yourself marveling at the twenty different places in the novel where JA spins out a dozen different nuances on this theme.
In my opinion, the most important aspect of this treatment by JA in MP is the way that Henry and Mary Crawford play around with the words "improvement" and "capability". In the case of Mary, the "improvement" she is most concerned with throughout the entire novel is the need she perceives for "improvement" of _Edmund_, in terms of his career (from the clergy to the law), his location (from the country to the city), and his sexuality (from his original rigid propriety toward her own extreme moral flexibility). And, in the case of Henry, it's even more alarming, as he, like Sir Thomas, notices the "improvement" in Fanny's _body_, and practically drools with lecherous delight over the prospect and challenge (a la Lovelace) of seducing a moral paragon.
You get the general drift, I think, and, as I suggested, if you want more, just do the word searches in MP that I suggested, and you will pass the same enjoyable time I did savoring each of JA's many deployments of her wordplay artistry firmly in the service of her deepest and most important themes.
Cheers, ARNIE
sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com
P.S.: I almost forgot to give you the two usages in JA's letters:
Letter 56: “Mr. Choles is gone to drive a Cow to Brentford, & his place is supplied to us by a Man who lives in the same sort of way by odd jobs, & among other _capabilities_ has that of working in a garden, which my Mother will not forget, if we ever have another garden here.”
Given Brown's fame for his handling of gardens, I think that is a deliberate allusion by JA for CEA's delectation.
Letter 132(D) to Clarke, 12/21/15: “I am quite honoured by your thinking me _capable_ of drawing such a clergyman as you gave the sketch of in your note of Nov. 16. But I assure you I am not.”
And here, I find exquisite JA's intentional irony of pretending to be incapable of depicting a clergyman as the fool Clarke asks her to, when, only the year before, JA has published MP, in which she demonstrated, as I have suggested in my above post, her own astonishing capability to draw clergymen like Edmund Bertram and Dr. Grant, two of the most memorable depictions of clergymen in all of English literature!
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Jane Austen's Letter 29: "So, Lady Bridges in the delicate language of Coulson Wallop is IN FOR IT! "
In Jane Austen's Letter 29, we read the following:
"So, Lady Bridges in the delicate language of Coulson Wallop is IN FOR IT! "
Le Faye's footnote advises the reader that Lady Bridges was pregnant, but what you have to work to find out is that Lady Bridges was the new bride of (and, at 22, eleven years younger than) the eldest Bridges son, Brook-William, and she wound up bearing him 4 children before she really _was_ "in for it", and died after giving birth to a baby girl. But then, Brook-William was not fazed, he remarried within three years, and since his "blue beard" was perhaps by then tinged with more than a touch of "grey", it took him seven years to murder his second wife in childbirth, when it only took him five years to finish off the first Lady Bridges!
So Jane Austen had this guy pegged a mile off. Add this vignette to the long list of Jane Austen's complaints about dutiful English wives being made serially pregnant by their proper English husbands until they either died or were overwhelmed with childcare.
And someone recently pointed out that Cassandra Austen spent a lot of time at Godmersham without Jane. I just did the math, and it seems to me that Cassandra was at Godmersham [the estate of brother Edward] for three months continuously between Letter 23 and Letter 33! I like to think that this was Cassandra being a very good sister to Jane, by relieving Jane of her share of being the tireless aunt to six (count 'em, six) children under the age of 8 at Godmersham. I feel confident from all the echoes of the novels in these letters that JA made the most of the time.
And there is another detail that is easily missed in the above quotation. Coulson Wallop was the younger (and presumably not disabled) brother of Lord Portsmouth (who, as I have previously claimed, is represented by Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion), and Coulson apparently had a certain flair for telling it like it was that JA and CEA apparently felt a certain fondness for. Alas, poor Coulson died a scant 4 years after Letter 29 was written, at the tender age of 34.
Cheers, ARNIE
"So, Lady Bridges in the delicate language of Coulson Wallop is IN FOR IT! "
Le Faye's footnote advises the reader that Lady Bridges was pregnant, but what you have to work to find out is that Lady Bridges was the new bride of (and, at 22, eleven years younger than) the eldest Bridges son, Brook-William, and she wound up bearing him 4 children before she really _was_ "in for it", and died after giving birth to a baby girl. But then, Brook-William was not fazed, he remarried within three years, and since his "blue beard" was perhaps by then tinged with more than a touch of "grey", it took him seven years to murder his second wife in childbirth, when it only took him five years to finish off the first Lady Bridges!
So Jane Austen had this guy pegged a mile off. Add this vignette to the long list of Jane Austen's complaints about dutiful English wives being made serially pregnant by their proper English husbands until they either died or were overwhelmed with childcare.
And someone recently pointed out that Cassandra Austen spent a lot of time at Godmersham without Jane. I just did the math, and it seems to me that Cassandra was at Godmersham [the estate of brother Edward] for three months continuously between Letter 23 and Letter 33! I like to think that this was Cassandra being a very good sister to Jane, by relieving Jane of her share of being the tireless aunt to six (count 'em, six) children under the age of 8 at Godmersham. I feel confident from all the echoes of the novels in these letters that JA made the most of the time.
And there is another detail that is easily missed in the above quotation. Coulson Wallop was the younger (and presumably not disabled) brother of Lord Portsmouth (who, as I have previously claimed, is represented by Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion), and Coulson apparently had a certain flair for telling it like it was that JA and CEA apparently felt a certain fondness for. Alas, poor Coulson died a scant 4 years after Letter 29 was written, at the tender age of 34.
Cheers, ARNIE
Rachel Brownstein's Recantation of Feminist Reading of Jane Austen in Why Jane Austen
In Janeites and Austen L, Christy Somer brought forward the following quote from Rachel Brownstein's recent book _Why Jane Austen_:
"If Austen’s class and gender position informed her perspective as a writer -and it did- her genius made that perspective singular.The unique specificity of that genius -its distinctiveness and distinction- is what the novels most importantly convey. To read them for truths about the author's personal life and times, or wisdom about the readers own, is to read through or around or past them: the project is, finally, beside her point or mine…”
I find it fascinating that Brownstein has recanted (in the passage quoted above) her earlier feminist readings of Austen's novels, and I now suspect she might not be the only one who has done so. What will be very interesting to me will be to see the reaction of Brownstein, and of those who have followed her path, to the evidence I will bring forward in my book, to see if my argument causes any of them to recant their recantation. I look forward to that intellectual debate.
Cheers, ARNIE
"If Austen’s class and gender position informed her perspective as a writer -and it did- her genius made that perspective singular.The unique specificity of that genius -its distinctiveness and distinction- is what the novels most importantly convey. To read them for truths about the author's personal life and times, or wisdom about the readers own, is to read through or around or past them: the project is, finally, beside her point or mine…”
I find it fascinating that Brownstein has recanted (in the passage quoted above) her earlier feminist readings of Austen's novels, and I now suspect she might not be the only one who has done so. What will be very interesting to me will be to see the reaction of Brownstein, and of those who have followed her path, to the evidence I will bring forward in my book, to see if my argument causes any of them to recant their recantation. I look forward to that intellectual debate.
Cheers, ARNIE
Jane Austen's Letter 23: Heathcote & Chute forever....and the Lords of the Creation
I just came across something that relates to Letter 23, which of course we discussed in Janeites and Austen L in early May, but which was written by JA to CEA only a few months before Letter 29:
First here is the relevant passage from Letter 23 which I wish to comment on:
"This morning we called at the Harwoods', and in their dining-room found
"Heathcote and Chute forever." Mrs. William Heathcote and Mrs. Chute -- the first of whom took a long ride yesterday morning with Mrs. Harwood into Lord Carnarvon's park, and fainted away in the evening, and the second walked down from Oakley Hall attended by Mrs. Augusta Bramston; they had meant to come on to Steventon afterwards, but we knew a trick worth two of that. If I had thought of it in time, I would have said something civil to her about Edward's never having had any serious idea of calling on Mr. Chute while he was in Hampshire; but unluckily it did not occur to me."
Le Faye's footnote quotes Chapman to say that "Heathcote and Chute forever" is an election cry, and that makes sense, especially given that Mrs. Heathcote's brother in law became an MP for Hants after Mrs. Chute's husband filled that role from 1798-1806.
But...JA is referring here not to Mssrs. Heathcote and Chute, but to Mrs. Heathcote and Mrs. Chute! And the playful tone of JA's "fainted away in the evening" and "we knew a trick worth two of that" suggests to me that JA enjoyed some spirited, affectionate, and witty repartee with both of those ladies.
And I find confirmation of all of that in the following passage from Deborah Kaplan's _JA Among Women_:
"Women’s complaints about specific domestic tasks could lead them to articulate a more generalized resentment against subordination. In 1800,
Elizabeth Chute, for example, shifted her anger from the necessity of
sustaining the role of homemaker all the time to the great ‘difference between husbands& wives.’ Confiding in Elizabeth Gosling about her husband, she burst out: ‘He seems to think it strange that I should absent myself from him for four& twenty hours when he is at home, tho’ it appears in the natural order of things that he should quit me for business or pleasure, such is the difference between husbands& wives. The latter are sort of tame animals, whom the men always expect to find at home ready to receive them: the former are *lords of the creation* free to go where they please. “
It is perfectly consistent with my central claims of JA's feminism in general, and her deep resentment and antipathy toward subordination of women in English society in particular, that she would be fast friends with Mrs. Chute, who could write such passionate and sarcastic things about male chauvinism.
And it is no coincidence that Mrs. Chute refers to men as "Lords of the Creation", which of course is how I found this passage in the first place, as I investigated the use of that very same phrase in the Epilogue to Centlivre's Wonder, which I have speculated may well have been written by Jane Austen herself, perhaps even many years after the Austen amateur theatrical performance of that play in 1789.
Cheers, ARNIE
First here is the relevant passage from Letter 23 which I wish to comment on:
"This morning we called at the Harwoods', and in their dining-room found
"Heathcote and Chute forever." Mrs. William Heathcote and Mrs. Chute -- the first of whom took a long ride yesterday morning with Mrs. Harwood into Lord Carnarvon's park, and fainted away in the evening, and the second walked down from Oakley Hall attended by Mrs. Augusta Bramston; they had meant to come on to Steventon afterwards, but we knew a trick worth two of that. If I had thought of it in time, I would have said something civil to her about Edward's never having had any serious idea of calling on Mr. Chute while he was in Hampshire; but unluckily it did not occur to me."
Le Faye's footnote quotes Chapman to say that "Heathcote and Chute forever" is an election cry, and that makes sense, especially given that Mrs. Heathcote's brother in law became an MP for Hants after Mrs. Chute's husband filled that role from 1798-1806.
But...JA is referring here not to Mssrs. Heathcote and Chute, but to Mrs. Heathcote and Mrs. Chute! And the playful tone of JA's "fainted away in the evening" and "we knew a trick worth two of that" suggests to me that JA enjoyed some spirited, affectionate, and witty repartee with both of those ladies.
And I find confirmation of all of that in the following passage from Deborah Kaplan's _JA Among Women_:
"Women’s complaints about specific domestic tasks could lead them to articulate a more generalized resentment against subordination. In 1800,
Elizabeth Chute, for example, shifted her anger from the necessity of
sustaining the role of homemaker all the time to the great ‘difference between husbands& wives.’ Confiding in Elizabeth Gosling about her husband, she burst out: ‘He seems to think it strange that I should absent myself from him for four& twenty hours when he is at home, tho’ it appears in the natural order of things that he should quit me for business or pleasure, such is the difference between husbands& wives. The latter are sort of tame animals, whom the men always expect to find at home ready to receive them: the former are *lords of the creation* free to go where they please. “
It is perfectly consistent with my central claims of JA's feminism in general, and her deep resentment and antipathy toward subordination of women in English society in particular, that she would be fast friends with Mrs. Chute, who could write such passionate and sarcastic things about male chauvinism.
And it is no coincidence that Mrs. Chute refers to men as "Lords of the Creation", which of course is how I found this passage in the first place, as I investigated the use of that very same phrase in the Epilogue to Centlivre's Wonder, which I have speculated may well have been written by Jane Austen herself, perhaps even many years after the Austen amateur theatrical performance of that play in 1789.
Cheers, ARNIE
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Jane Austen the literary historical poker player
[Derrick Leigh wrote the following in response to Anielka Briggs's post in Janeites and Austen L about Jane Austen's youthful Sharade about James I's homosexuality] "It doesn't take young inquiring minds long to work out what is involved in homosexuality, even without the benefit of sex education. The Carr-pet joke is an old chestnut, and the subject is introduced much earlier in the school history curriculum in the form of Edward II, whose similar inclination towards his male favourites would have been remarked upon as being the reason for his deposition and reputed death by red hot poker, as a warning against the evils of sodomy. The gory details of that would certainly have burned an impression on young minds."
Derrick, your rapier-sharp sexual innuendo is positively Austenesque, both in its wit and also in the penetrating insight of your observations!
I had never heard that tale of Edward II before, and surely you are right in suggesting (if I read you correctly) that JA was inspired by that ribald folktale, at least in part, to write her Carr-pet Sharade. I was inspired to do a bit of followup, and what I found is strongly supportive of drawing that inference.
First here is what Wikipedia has to say:
"The popular story that the king was assassinated by having a red-hot poker thrust into his anus has no basis in accounts recorded by Edward's contemporaries. Thomas de la Moore's
account^// of Edward's murder was not written until after 1352 and is uncorroborated by other contemporary sources. Not until the relevant sections of the longer Brut chronicle were composed by an anti-Mortimer Lancastrian polemicist in the mid-1430s was the story widely circulated."
This suggests that the tale of Edward II's unfortunate end was in circulation as early as 4 centuries before JA would have read or heard about it. But here where JA's literary knowledge would have kicked in. Given that I believe (following and extending Jocelyn Harris's pioneering discoveries) that JA was very familiar with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I also think it very likely that JA would have made the association between this tale of the macabre death of Edward II, on the one hand, and Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale", on the other. In Chaucer's famous Tale, a very blackly comic romantic quadrangle, the
parish clerk Absolon takes his revenge on Alisoun's lover the student Nicholas by delivering a similar and very uncomfortable intrusion upon the rear end of Nicholas (but, because of its short duration, nonfatal in that instance). There's no way that JA failed to see this linkage.
And, thinking about that made me quickly realize that the source for Chaucer's choice of that sort of karmic revenge on Nicholas must itself have been that very same tale about Edward II's death, given that Chaucer was born a mere 13 years after the death of Edward II, and would therefore have composed the Miller's Tale in part in reaction to that account of barbarous regicide. And a quick Google search confirmed that I am not the first to spot that ghoulish parallel:
http://www.c-s-p.org/flyers/9781847186133-sample.pdf
_The Canterbury Tales Revisited – 21st Century Interpretations_ (2008)
P. 16 et seq.: "Queer Punishments: Tragic and Comic Sodomy in the Death of Edward II and in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale" by Kathleen A. Bishop
So what I see is Chaucer writing "The Miller's Tale" in part as a not so veiled allusion to the death of Edward II, and then I see JA reading both Chaucer and historical accounts of Edward II's death, and realizing they are the same, and then adding her own layer to this ongoing "conversation".
And then I found this:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=176011
It's interesting that the man who wrote the above debunking article is named Mortimer--hard to imagine that he would be trying to protect the family name, 700 years later!---but I mention this because I don't think it matters at all whether the story was apocryphal, in terms of JA's riffing off it--what matters is whether it was a story in circulation in JA's time, and she knew about it, and saw Chaucer's hand in the mix, and decided to join the parade.
One last point--I was curious to see if I could find any published sources contemporary with JA's life where the tale about Edward II's painful death was mentioned, and here is the only one I found:
http://books.google.com/books?id=rlQVAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA10&dq=Edward+poker&hl=en&ei=XZP3Tdi9AcLUgQejlrWRDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCwQ6AEwADgU#v=onepage&q=Edward%20poker&f=false
_An Epitome of Juridical or Forensic Medicine_ by George Edward Male (1816), at P. 10, in the midst of a rather matter-of-fact discussion of the recommended procedure for an autopsy following discovery of a corpse where nothing is known as to the cause of death:
"...The other abdominal viscera, and the whole length of the intestinal canal, should be traced, as it is possible that hernia, introsusception, or inflammation, may have been the cause of death; an empoisoned clyster may have been administered, or (as in the case of king Edward the Second) a hot poker or other instrument thrust up the rectum. ..."
Even though I did not find a published source contemporary with JA's teen years, for the reasons set forth above, I am convinced that Derrick was spot-on in connecting the dots from JA's Carr-pet Sharade to the perhaps-apocryphal tale of Edward II's painful death, it only adds to all the long list of veiled allusions to male homosexuality which populate JA's novels.
Cheers, ARNIE
P.S.: Now whether Mitford had any of the above in mind when she wrote the following in 1813, that remains to be seen:
"[JA]was no more regarded in society than a poker or a fire-screen, or any other thin upright piece of wood or iron that fills its corner in peace and quietness. The case is very different now; SHE IS STILL A POKER—BUT A POKER OF WHOM EVERY ONE IS AFRAID."
Derrick, your rapier-sharp sexual innuendo is positively Austenesque, both in its wit and also in the penetrating insight of your observations!
I had never heard that tale of Edward II before, and surely you are right in suggesting (if I read you correctly) that JA was inspired by that ribald folktale, at least in part, to write her Carr-pet Sharade. I was inspired to do a bit of followup, and what I found is strongly supportive of drawing that inference.
First here is what Wikipedia has to say:
"The popular story that the king was assassinated by having a red-hot poker thrust into his anus has no basis in accounts recorded by Edward's contemporaries. Thomas de la Moore's
account^/
This suggests that the tale of Edward II's unfortunate end was in circulation as early as 4 centuries before JA would have read or heard about it. But here where JA's literary knowledge would have kicked in. Given that I believe (following and extending Jocelyn Harris's pioneering discoveries) that JA was very familiar with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I also think it very likely that JA would have made the association between this tale of the macabre death of Edward II, on the one hand, and Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale", on the other. In Chaucer's famous Tale, a very blackly comic romantic quadrangle, the
parish clerk Absolon takes his revenge on Alisoun's lover the student Nicholas by delivering a similar and very uncomfortable intrusion upon the rear end of Nicholas (but, because of its short duration, nonfatal in that instance). There's no way that JA failed to see this linkage.
And, thinking about that made me quickly realize that the source for Chaucer's choice of that sort of karmic revenge on Nicholas must itself have been that very same tale about Edward II's death, given that Chaucer was born a mere 13 years after the death of Edward II, and would therefore have composed the Miller's Tale in part in reaction to that account of barbarous regicide. And a quick Google search confirmed that I am not the first to spot that ghoulish parallel:
http://www.c-s-p.org/flyers/9781847186133-sample.pdf
_The Canterbury Tales Revisited – 21st Century Interpretations_ (2008)
P. 16 et seq.: "Queer Punishments: Tragic and Comic Sodomy in the Death of Edward II and in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale" by Kathleen A. Bishop
So what I see is Chaucer writing "The Miller's Tale" in part as a not so veiled allusion to the death of Edward II, and then I see JA reading both Chaucer and historical accounts of Edward II's death, and realizing they are the same, and then adding her own layer to this ongoing "conversation".
And then I found this:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=176011
It's interesting that the man who wrote the above debunking article is named Mortimer--hard to imagine that he would be trying to protect the family name, 700 years later!---but I mention this because I don't think it matters at all whether the story was apocryphal, in terms of JA's riffing off it--what matters is whether it was a story in circulation in JA's time, and she knew about it, and saw Chaucer's hand in the mix, and decided to join the parade.
One last point--I was curious to see if I could find any published sources contemporary with JA's life where the tale about Edward II's painful death was mentioned, and here is the only one I found:
http://books.google.com/books?id=rlQVAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA10&dq=Edward+poker&hl=en&ei=XZP3Tdi9AcLUgQejlrWRDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCwQ6AEwADgU#v=onepage&q=Edward%20poker&f=false
_An Epitome of Juridical or Forensic Medicine_ by George Edward Male (1816), at P. 10, in the midst of a rather matter-of-fact discussion of the recommended procedure for an autopsy following discovery of a corpse where nothing is known as to the cause of death:
"...The other abdominal viscera, and the whole length of the intestinal canal, should be traced, as it is possible that hernia, introsusception, or inflammation, may have been the cause of death; an empoisoned clyster may have been administered, or (as in the case of king Edward the Second) a hot poker or other instrument thrust up the rectum. ..."
Even though I did not find a published source contemporary with JA's teen years, for the reasons set forth above, I am convinced that Derrick was spot-on in connecting the dots from JA's Carr-pet Sharade to the perhaps-apocryphal tale of Edward II's painful death, it only adds to all the long list of veiled allusions to male homosexuality which populate JA's novels.
Cheers, ARNIE
P.S.: Now whether Mitford had any of the above in mind when she wrote the following in 1813, that remains to be seen:
"[JA]was no more regarded in society than a poker or a fire-screen, or any other thin upright piece of wood or iron that fills its corner in peace and quietness. The case is very different now; SHE IS STILL A POKER—BUT A POKER OF WHOM EVERY ONE IS AFRAID."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
