The Imagination of Einstein, Darwin….and the “Experimentally Acquainted” Jane Austen!

I sometimes do the double acrostic in the Sunday paper, to wake my brain up, and this morning I _loved_ the quotation which was revealed upon my solving the puzzle, and decided to write about it:

“I believe in intuition and inspiration. … At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason….Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.”

You might be surprised to learn that the famous author of these words was not an artist, but was one of the greatest scientists of all time, Albert Einstein. My point in bringing it forward here today in a Jane Austen venue is that I continue to strongly believe that Jane Austen was 100% in agreement with Einstein on this crucial, fundamental point, i.e., that imagination is the supreme gift.

All of my literary sleuthing during the past decade has shown me, a thousand times over, that Jane Austen spent her all-too-short life accumulating a staggering quantity of knowledge in a wide variety of subjects. Time and time again, I have been astonished to learn that she had a sophisticated understanding not only of a multitude of literary sources, but also of the humanities and natural sciences as well. I believe that she never missed a chance, when in the presence of a new library, to make extracts of passages which would be meaningful to her for her writing.

However, as knowledgeable as I believe JA to have been, I am also certain that she herself fervently believed that having all the knowledge in the world--born of extensive reading, as Darcy recommended-would be a sterile useless accomplishment unless it was harnessed and subjugated to a strong, fertile and free imagination, and was used for the betterment of humankind.

And so that is one reason why I argue so vigorously and tirelessly against the conventional Janeite interpretations of the dangers of over-imagination in _Emma_ and _Northanger Abbey_. Yes, on the surface, it does appear that JA is telling cautionary tales, in which Emma Woodhouse and Catherine Morland allow their imaginations to run away with themselves, and harm results therefrom.

But...beneath the apparent parody of imagination gone amok, there is a much deeper and truer _anti_-parody, i.e., an inversion of that apparent satire of Emma and Catherine, which carries the very serious warning that JA was implicitly sending to all her readers, especially her female readers---and that dire warning is that it is ten times _more_ dangerous to have too _little_ imagination than to have too _much_ imagination. In a nutshell, one can learn to ignore part of what one has already perceived, but one cannot learn to see what one cannot see in the first place!
So, I think JA and Einstein would have each considered the other to be the very best of company, and I conclude by reiterating a claim I have been making the past 6 years, ever since I first learned that _another_ of history’s greatest scientists was a lifetime Janeite---I refer to Charles Darwin, originator of the theory which Einstein referred to in his above quotation—evolution.

My claim is that Charles Darwin imbibed Jane Austen as a child at the knee of Mrs. Pole, his stepmother and the widow of his famous biological and intellectual ancestor, Erasmus Darwin...

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/01/lady-gordon-mrs-pole-lady-robert-kerr.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/02/experimentally-acquainted.html

...but, far more important, I believe that Charles Darwin’s lifelong devotion to Jane Austen’s fiction resulted in the intense cultivation of his own scientific _imagination_, as applied to the complex adaptive systems of nature, with all their intertwined feedback loops of cause and effect, which can never be reduced to simple linear analysis. Darwin’s theory of evolution, updated and validated as it has been by his many scientific successors over the past century and a half, is a theory that can be used to grasp the complexity of the origins and development of life on Earth, and to discern the secrets of nature, whom Einstein referred to as the secrets of “the Old One”.

And I assert that, in addition to all the scientific knowledge that Charles Darwin accumulate during his career from the realm of science, none of that knowledge was more important to the development of his own scientific imagination than the lifelong rereading of Jane Austen’s novels, each of which is itself a remarkable representation of the complex adaptive system of _human_ nature and society, with intertwined feedback loops of cause and effect which can never be reduced to simple linear analysis.

And so, however paradoxical it might at first seem, I say that Einstein was right---all great scientists are also artists, and all great artists are also scientists, and it is no accident that Mrs. Pole, Charles Darwin’s step grandmother, wrote the following opinion about Mansfield Park:

“"There is a particular satisfaction in reading all Miss A----'s works -- they are so evidently written by a Gentlewoman -- most Novellists fail & betray themselves in attempting to describe familiar scenes in high Life; some little vulgarism escapes & shews that they are not _experimentally acquainted_ with what they describe, but here it is quite different. Everything is natural, & the situations & incidents are told in a manner which clearly evinces the Writer to /belong/ to the Society whose Manners she so ably delineates." Mrs. Pole also said that no Books had ever occasioned so much canvassing & doubt, & that everybody was desirous to attribute them to some of their own friends, or to some person of whom they thought highly. -- "

Indeed, JA was “experimentally acquainted” with the social world she described in her novels, and she deployed the full measure of her own boundless imagination in order to give all of her readers full access to those same worlds.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The Honorable Mr. Yates is...the Player King of Mansfield Park!

In Janeites & Austen L, Christy Somer presented a normative interpretation of the character of Mr. Yates in Mansfield Park, and I strongly disagreed with her, as follows:

Christy, you and I could not disagree more as to the significance of the role that Mr. Yates plays in the Lover's Vows episode in Mansfield Park. From the passages about Yates that you've quoted, I see Mr. Yates as an integral part of Jane Austen's elaborate but veiled allusion to Hamlet in Mansfield Park--an allusion that had been previously noted by some Austen scholars (most notably Roger Sales in his wonderful book Jane Austen & Representations of Regency England), but as to which I was the first, in 2006, to unpack the full significance of such allusion, as I first publicly outlined here in my blog back in September 2010:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/09/mousetrap-of-mansfield-park.html

In essence, in that lengthy post, I sketched the case for Tom Bertram having subtly choreographed the entire Lover's Vows episode from Day One, all for the purpose of confronting his father with a staged performance which would mirror back to Sir Thomas the heinousness of Sir Thomas's past misdeeds, and perhaps awaken his dormant conscience.

However, I did not in my 2010 post dwell on the importance of Mr. Yates, whom I have always seen as Tom Bertram's willing and talented confederate---and I realized only today that Mr. Yates actually is Jane Austen's version of the Player King in Hamlet--he's the acting veteran who just happens to show up at "Elsinore" at precisely the right moment to spark the performance of a home theatrical specifically designed to catch the conscience of the King.

And there are multiple Hamletian layers here. Kotzebue knew his Shakespeare, and Baron Wildenhaim was _his_ version of King Claudius! And Jane Austen saw all of that very clearly, which is, along with Mrs. Inchbald's particular translation, the main reason why I believe she chose Lover's Vows to be _her_ play-within-the-novel. And this gives us one great advantage in interpreting JA's intentions in this regard, as we have the entire text of Lover's Vows at our disposal, whereas Shakespeare scholars have searched in vain for the text of the Mousetrap or The Murder of Gonzago.

And so, also for the first time today, I realized that it was possible to identify, with a high degree of probability, the very speech that Mr. Yates would have been in the midst of delivering as Sir Thomas walked in on him, while Tom Bertram, watching from the wings, carefully observed his father's reactions to Yates the way Hamlet observed Claudius's reactions to the Mousetrap. Tom's satisfaction was such that he could barely hold his countenance as he observed "...such an exhibition, such a piece of true acting, as he would not have lost upon any account. It would be the last--in all probability--the last scene on that stage; but he was sure there could not be a finer. The house would close with the greatest éclat.."

This was Tom Bertram's purpose from Day One, I suggest, and he and Yates had been waiting for just this moment for Yates to deliver the following speech for its intended audience of one, Sir Thomas Bertram:

" Go.--Your heart will tell you how to act.[Exit Anhalt.] [Baron distractedly.]Who am I?What am I?Mad--raving--no--I have a son--A son!The bravest--I will--I must--oh![with tenderness.]Why have I not embraced him yet?[increasing his voice.]why not pressed him to my heart?Ah!see--[looking after him]--He flies from the castle--Who's there?Where are my attendants?[Enter two servants]. Follow him--bring the prisoner back.--But observe my command--treat him with respect--treat him as my son--and your master.[Exit].

Please note that this is the _only_ speech given by Baron Wildenhaim in the entire text of Lover's Vows in which he is actually ranting, and isn't it remarkable that it is the scene in which his world has been turned upside down, because he has just learned that Frederick is actually his illegitimate son, the fruit conceived from the Baron's extramarital tryst with Agatha, just before he carelessly abandoned her to a life of disrepute? And in Lover's Vows, it is not long afterwards that the Baron delivers a followup speech to the above, one which reminds us of Claudius's tortured guilty soliloquy after he has stormed out of the Mousetrap:

"Young man!Frederick!--[calling after him.]Hasty indeed! would make conditions with his father.No, no, that must not be.I just now thought how well I had arranged my plans--had relieved my heart of every burden, when, a second time, he throws a mountain upon it.Stop, friend conscience, why do you take his part?--For twenty years thus you have used me, and been my torture."


This was the effect Tom hoped to achieve by confronting his father with Yates as Baron Wildenhaim upon his return to his private chambers at Mansfield Park.

A Mousetrap indeed, but alas, judging by his behavior subsequent to his return to Mansfield Park, I fear that Sir Thomas's conscience was _not_ caught.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The Hunger Games, Titus Andronicus, Philomela, & Mary Crawford's Heathen Heroes

The following is a link to my blog post earlier today about the veiled allusion to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus in Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/04/hunger-gamess-veiled-allusion-to.html

You may ask, what is the relevance of my post to Jane Austen? And my answer to that reasonable question is that just as Shakespeare was particularly interested in the Philomela myth (which is a tightly wound ball of rape, mutilation, murder, cannibalism, and revenge) from Ovid's Metamorphoses when he wrote the tragic character of Lavinia for Titus Andronicus, so too have I long been of the opinion that the young Jane Austen showed a surprising (and, from my perspective, highly disturbing) interest in that same disturbing Philomela myth when she wrote her juvenilia poem, Ode to Pity, and included the following line therein:

While Philomel on airy hawthorn Bush
Sings sweet and Melancholy, And the thrush
Converses with the Dove...

Now, it's not just the reference to Philomel which leads me to this opinion, because I acknowledge that merely reciting the name Philomel would not by itself prove that JA meant to invoke all the horror of the Ovidian tale. What has made me so certain of JA's darker meaning is that this reference is embedded in a poetic context in Ode To Pity with a great deal of jarring, almost grotesque clanging of metaphors, which most decidedly point in a dark but mysterious direction.

But that's not all there is to the Jane Austen connection to Philomel. Speaking of things jarring and grotesque, writing my above linked blog post also led me to realize, as a collateral benefit, that JA's interest in Philomel was not merely a passing youthful fancy on JA's part. No, I now am convinced that when Mary Crawford and Edmund Bertram have the following exchange about Sir Thomas's imminent return from Antigua....

"Your father's return will be a very interesting event."

"It will, indeed, after such an absence; an absence not only long, but including so many dangers."

"It will be the forerunner also of other interesting events: your sister's marriage, and your taking orders."

"Yes."

"Don't be affronted," said she, laughing, "but it does put me in mind of some of the old heathen heroes, who, after performing great exploits in a foreign land, offered sacrifices to the gods on their safe return."


...I believe that Jane Austen, through her wickedly satirical creature Mary Crawford, is very very pointedly and specifically painting a portrait of Sir Thomas as nothing less than a Regency Era Titus Andronicus! The allusion becomes obvious when you look closely at the precise circumstances which arise at the very beginning of Titus Andronicus, in Act 1, Scene 1.

What do we have? A heathen war hero, Titus Andronicus, has just returned to Rome after performing great exploits in the wars against the Goths, bringing back with him as prisoners the Goth queen Tamora and her three sons---and what does Titus do immediately upon his safe return with only a handful of his own sons surviving, as he prepares to inter the most recently deceased of his sons?

Of course, like any worthy heathen hero, he promptly _sacrifices_ Alarbus, one of Tamora's sons, in order to take ritual revenge for the deaths of so many of his own sons, specifically for the one whom he is at that moment interring in the family mausoleum.

And that sacrifice of the Goth prince is the first domino to fall in a grotesquely tragic spiral of revenge which leaves nearly every major character in Titus Andronicus dead by the end of Act 5.

But JA (via Mary) also points to Lavinia when she refers to "your sister's marriage"---because Lavinia, daughter of the returning hero Titus Andronicus, is also supposed to be married to Bassianus, one of two princes vying to be emperor--however, in short order, Lavinia is passed around like a piece of meat, first to the other prince, Saturninus, who first claims Lavinia as bride, then just as quickly rejects her as nonconforming goods, then she is raped, mutilated and eventually murdered by her own father.

And I believe we see shadows of Lavinia in both Maria Bertram and Fanny Price.

So, Sir Thomas as Titus Andronicus.....a darkly droll, satirical concept that JA has baked into a pie and served to her readers in Mansfield Park, her darkest novel. And perhaps, JA also closes the loop with her youthful reference to Philomel, with both Ode to Pity and Mansfield Park pointing toward dark secrets of the Austen family which must not be spoken aloud, but can only be hinted at.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The Hunger Games’s Veiled Allusion to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

Let me start with a large caveat: before last Saturday, I knew absolutely NOTHING about The Hunger Games book trilogy, or the new film adaptation of the first book in the series, other than that the books were the biggest hit in publishing since Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code, and that the film was breaking box office records. None of this hype had raised in me any particular desire to read the books and/or to see the film.

Then, as part of family holiday activities, I wound up tagging along on Saturday to a showing of the new film, with no expectations other than that it would probably be a well-made action movie. [From here on in, be prepared for some spoilers, if you don’t know about the books or the film]

Imagine my surprise when two hours passed quickly with no squirming in my seat (always a good sign), and with my mind working at the end. As I walked out of the multiplex, I found myself thinking that this big-budget, mass market film, while simplistic, had nonetheless managed to produce a satisfying and powerful resonance with one of the most crucial issues in current American politics— it was clear to me, even before I sampled some online interviews with the author, Suzanne Collins, that the same populist sensibility informed the story told in this film as provided the energy that fueled 2011’s global Occupy Wall Street movement--a movement which I strongly support, as evidenced by the following-linked sample of posts at my blog during the past year:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/search?q=Occupy

In The Hunger Games as depicted in the film, we have an authoritarian, cynical central government, which enforces its tight control over the oppressed 99% for the benefit of a morally degraded, grotesquely flamboyant and self-absorbed 1%, in part by means of a futuristic form of gladiator entertainment, The Hunger Games, which both intimidate and entertain the downtrodden plebeian masses, as well as providing spicy entertainment for the jaded elite.

As many have pointed out, this is a futuristic reimagining of the Roman Empire, emphasized via character names (Caesar, Brutus, Portia, Cinna, Cato, etc.) and even the “Capitol” of “Panem” (from the Latin for “bread”, as in “bread and circuses”, and as in the crust of bread thrown to the heroine in flashback earnly in the movie).

And speaking of ancient Rome brings me to the serendipity when has led me to write this post today, because, by pure coincidence, I saw The Hunger Games right after my own literary sleuthing had independently led me to a close examination of the one Shakespeare play which I had never previously taken seriously, Titus Andronicus:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_Andronicus

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/titus/full.html

At a future time, I will post about the OTHER literary sleuthing I was doing that led me to look closely at Titus. What occurred to me as I was watching The Hunger Games, however, was that there was an eerie parallelism between the way that the 24 contestants were rapidly whittled down, one by one, and the way that pretty much every one of the (14, by my count) main characters in Titus Andronicus winds up dead by the end of the play—what these two high body count stories have in common is that the dead are killed by each other, bloodily and in close quarters.

So,with all the Roman imagery and names in the Hunger Games, I had a strong gut feeling that it was not only Shakepseare’s very famous and popular play, Julius Caesar, which Collins had in mind while writing this trilogy. No, she was also slyly pointing to the much less well known and much less well loved early play of Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus.

I was so sure of my gut feeling, because my closer look at Titus had already led me to understand that the endless parade of grotesque violence that occurs in Titus Andronicus is NOT gratuitous, it is not frivolous or cruel, it is actually thematic and carries a highly moral message. Close study reveals that the young Shakespeare was grappling with the universal theme of revenge head-on, and was laying out a carefully constructed sequence of falling dominoes, which illustrated what happens in any human society when people begin to take the law into their own hands. What happens is that mercy goes by the boards entirely, and humans, tragically, choose instead to perpetuate a cycle of violence, until everyone is dead. In this sense, Titus Andronicus is closely akin to other greater and more famous Shakespeare tragedies in which the blood lust for revenge leave corpses strewn everywhere, such as Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet.

And doesn’t that sound like the Hunger Games? Here is the cruel logic of President Snow and his government, who created the Hunger Games so that a dog-eat-dog, shoot-first mentality (yes, the awful tragedy of the murder of Trayvon Martin is ALSO anticipated by Titus) would be celebrated and enjoyed, instead of being seen for the true horror that it is. Or, in Occupy Wall Street terms, let the 99% fight it out for the crumbs, and learn to love the fight, while the 1% indulge in their gluttony and titter.

And now I approach my punch line. Thinking about revenge in Shakespeare’s plays got me wondering why the central tragic character of Titus Andronicus had not made an appearance in The Hunger Games—I refer to Lavinia, the daughter of Titus, who suffers the especially cruel sequential fate of having her fiancé brutally murdered; then being dragged off to the deep forest to be raped, with the rapists using the fiance’s corpse as a pillow (and “raping” chillingly sounds a lot like the “reaping” which describes the selection process for the Hunger Games); then having her tongue cut out and her hands cut off so that, like the mythical Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, she cannot accuse the culprits; then, after she does manage to nonverbally identify them nonetheless, her final fate is to be slain by her own father, Titus, because….she was raped! Sounds a great deal like the fate suffered by Jesus during his last days, doesn’t it? And that’s NOT an accident, nor, I suspect, is the opening of The Hunger Games only two weeks before Easter Sunday!

Anyway, out of curiosity, I Googled “Lavinia” and “Hunger Games” and was led to the following:

http://thehungergames.wikia.com/wiki/Lavinia

As those of you who’ve read the trilogy carefully already know, “Lavinia is an Avox [“no voice”] girl who worked as a Capitol servant for Katniss before the 74th and 75th Hunger Games…..Years later, Lavinia waited as an Avox whose tongue had been cut out for committing crimes against the Capitol….”

Not having read the trilogy myself, I will not attempt to interpret this allusion to Lavinia in Titus Andronicus beyond the superficial analysis I’ve provided, above. But don’t you find it curious that I just knew that Shakespeare’s Lavinia had to be somewhere on Collins’s radar screen when she wrote this trilogy? This illustrates the power of reading allusively.

I merely wanted to illustrate that there are not only allusive shadows in the novels of Jane Austen or the plays of Shakespeare, as I have been writing about online for the past decade, they are also to be found in popular literature and movies, if one tunes one’s antennae and listens carefully---and one’s appreciation of such popular stories can be enhanced by knowing and learning more about the high literature that undergirds it.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Sir Thomas Bertram “so unintelligibly moral, so infamously tyrannical”

In response to my most recent post in Austen L about Sir Thomas Bertram's Biblically, mythologically huge & burning wrath at the performance of Lovers's Vows at Mansfield Park, Christy Somer wrote the following:

"...And Mr. Yates’s perception of him reveals a bias slightly fractured into what some might interpret as ambiguity: "He had known many disagreeable fathers before, and often been struck with the inconveniences they occasioned, but never, in the whole course of his life, had he seen one of that class so unintelligibly moral, so infamously tyrannical as Sir Thomas."
This "that class so unintelligibly moral, so infamously tyrannical" ...is what opens the door for some conjecture, and to view Sir Thomas very negatively."

I responded as follows:

Christy, thank you _very_ much for spotlighting that passage. I had not paid attention to it before. I immediately found the two couplets of adverb and adjective (“unintelligibly moral” and “infamously tyrannical”) quite intriguing, and checked to see if either had been published prior to JA's writing MP. This proved a very fruitful exercise, as you will see, below.

UNINTELLIGIBLY MORAL:

“unintelligibly moral” yielded no hits in Google Books other than, of course, in Mansfield Park itself! Upon reflection, this is not surprising, because the couplet is an oxymoron. The typical phraseology would be “_intelligibly_ moral”, referring, e.g., to some aspect of the good which was readily graspable as such by an ordinary person.

However, JA never missed a chance for topsy-turvy phraseology for satirical purposes, and surely Yates’s description of Sir Thomas is quite satirical---Yates is euphemistically suggesting that Sir Thomas’s moral wrath is unintelligible, i.e., it makes no sense.

In that satirical regard, perhaps you were, as I was, immediately reminded of _another_ passage in a JA novel:

[Catherine]: “…I cannot speak well enough to be _unintelligible_."
[Henry] "Bravo! An excellent satire on modern language."

I can only echo Henry Tilney’s praise of Catherine, and similarly applaud Yates’s “unintelligibly moral” bon mot, but also add that I believe that Yates’s satire, unlike Catherine’s, was conscious and intentional—evidence for his intentionality is provided in the next part of this post.

INFAMOUSLY TYRANNICAL:

The other couplet, “infamously tyrannical”, is even more interesting than the first. I submit that it is no coincidence that I found the following passage in Cobbett's Weekly Political Register for 02/23/1811 (i.e., only two years before JA began writing MP), under the caption “Summary of Politics”. In this article, William Cobbett rebuts claims regarding "the liberty of the press" by a letter-writer using the pseudonym "Publicola". In the below-quoted excerpt, Cobbett was sarcastically disputing Publicola’s grand claims for the very positive societal effects of a free press:

"...there is another part of this Letter, which is still more likely to lead to mischievous consequences. I allude to the passage, where the writer pronounces a general eulogium on the Liberty of the Press, and ascribes to it what does by no means belong to it, thereby confusing the not ions of the reader, setting his mind upon the wander, and, which is still worse, causing him to believe, that there is a great deal of Liberty of the Press where there is no such thing. The author says, that "we owe every thing to the Liberty of the Press; and that our arts, our sciences, and our learning, have all sprung from this source." I wonder that he had not added the grass and the grass and the trees….
What, for instance, had the Liberty of the Press to do with the discoveries of Newton, or with the logic of Locke, or with any of the discoveries and inventions in mechanics, in chemistry, in agriculture, in manufactures, in navigation, or in war? … What had the Liberty of the Press to do with all, or with any of, these things?——It is not true, that we owe any of the arts and sciences to the Liberty of the Press. The French and the Germans surpass us in most of the arts and sciences. There are very few in which they do not greatly surpass us; and, have they had such a great deal of the Liberty of the Press?
This question is a home one. It is one that must be answered; or the position must be abandoned….
But I am satisfied, that it is a very great mistake to suppose that the Liberty of the Press is, by such means, raised in the estimation of the public; for, if our arts, our sciences, and our every thing good proceed from the Liberty of the Press, how will the public reason upon the subject of any Attorney General's prosecutions for libel? Will they not say,"Aye, very true, that is a little hard; but yet, they leave us a great deal of Liberty of the Press; for any man may cultivate the arts and sciences. Yes, yes; we have, after all, a great deal of good out of this Liberty of the Press, which gives us all our arts and sciences, and we see them flourish exceedingly, and, of course, we have a pretty fair share of the Liberty of the Press."
Now, I put it to the reader, whether this is not the course of reasoning, to which Publicola's position, if adopted, must inevitably lead? And, then I ask him, if it be possible for any, the very bitterest, foe to freedom, and especially to the Liberty of the Press, to suggest any thing more likely to do it mischief? If this notion be adopted, I really see very little reason to complain of what was done by the infernal Court of Star Chamber; for they very freely suffered any man to write about the arts and sciences as much as he pleased…..The Court, that INFAMOUSLY TYRANNICAL Court of Star Chamber, whose proceedings so materially assisted in bringing Charles the First to the block, and some of the members of which Court came to the same end themselves; even that succession of insolent and inexorable tyrants, even that Court, which it was one of the greatest and most glorious works of our forefathers to overthrow; even that gang of unjust and base ruffians in power, freely, very freely permitted any man to write upon such subjects; very freely indeed…” END QUOTE

So, it seems that Yates is revealing by his phraseology that he is actually an avid follower of Cobbett’s opinions, and is not the foppish airhead that most Janeites believe him to be. One more example of how JA plays with subjectivity, and leads the reader down the garden path by filtering the reader’s access to other characters through the mind of the heroine. Fanny being so decidedly acquiescent (with one notable exception) to Sir Thomas’s will, she would not be reading Cobbett, and she would not approve of Mr. Yates one little bit—but JA hints to us that Yates _did_ read Cobbett, and that JA herself _did_ approve of Yates.

Yates is in effect drawing an analogy, with Mansfield Park standing in for England as a whole, and with Lover’s Vows as a dramatized political essay purveying “unsex’d female”, “Jacobin” rabble-rousing views. Yates is criticizing the despotic Sir Thomas’s crackdown on “liberty of the press” within the confines of Mansfield Park, and the phrase “infamously tyrannical” very specifically equates Sir Thomas with the infamous Star Chamber of English history, which was designed to bring to secret justice those too powerful to be tried in ordinary courts, such as, as Cobbett notes, even Charles I himself.

By the way, Cobbett was apparently a very interesting and not-easily-pigeonholed pundit, as you can readily gather from his Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cobbett

What makes Cobbett’s apparently negative comments about liberty of the press extraordinary is the following factoid about Cobbett’s personal circumstances at the precise moment that he wrote the above essay:

“Cobbett was found guilty of treasonous libel on 15 June 1810 after objecting in The Register to the flogging at Ely of local militiamen by Hanoverians. He was sentenced to two years imprisonment in infamous Newgage Prison. While in prison he wrote the pamphlet Paper Against Gold, warning of the dangers of paper money, as well as many Essays and Letters. On his release a dinner in London, attended by 600 people, was given in his honour, presided over by Sir Francis Burdett who, like Cobbett, was a strong voice for parliamentary reform.”

Cobbett was apparently a true curmudgeon and free-thinker, who had the intellectual integrity to argue against excessive praise for the very freedom which he had been denied, resulting in his writing the above quoted piece while imprisoned for libel!

Just the kind of level headed, seeing-both-sides sort of pundit that I think JA would have loved to read, for precisely that rare quality of integrity.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Stargazing in Mansfield Park....and Jane Austen's Strong Interest in Elizabeth Inchbald the Outspoken Feminist Author

On Monday, in my post about Jane Austen's strong interest in Elizabeth Inchbald....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/04/jane-austens-strong-interest-in.html

....I wrote the following aside to Anielka:

"...Not coincidentally, I was just thinking about Mrs. Inchbald 10 days ago in regard to Jane Austen, Anielka, and I believe you know the exact reason why, because it was something _you_ wrote 10 days ago, seemingly entirely unrelated to Mrs. Inchbald, which quickly led me to her, and also led me to update and improve my old files on JA's interest in her. And I bet you already know exactly what it was, so I will give you the chance to tell everybody first--if you don't by tomorrow morning EST, then I will...."


I waited an extra day to give Anielka a chance to reply, if she chose to do so. Then, when she posted earlier today about Fanny and Edmund's stargazing in Mansfield Park, for a brief moment I believed that Anielka was indeed, in a roundabout way, going to conclude her post by revealing the hidden connection I had in mind between Mrs. Inchbald and that post on another subject which Anielka wrote nearly 2 weeks ago. But as Anielka didn't, now I will, as promised.


To wit: the multi-talented, ambitious Mrs. Inchbald was not merely a playwright, novelist, and literary critic, she was also, for a long period of time, a famous _actress_ on the English stage, a fact which JA (whom we know avidly followed the English stage and its famous actors) would have been well aware of.

And it just so happens that one of the roles Mrs. Inchbald was famous for was that of _Callista_, the she-heroine of Rowe's famous play, The Fair Penitent, which Anielka discussed nearly two weeks ago here in Austen-L....

http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind1203d&L=austen-l&T=0&F=&S=&P=3704

....in relevant part as follows:

"Is it possible that it is Nicholas Rowe's pen which Austen believes must dwell on guilt and misery? The parallels between the unfaithful Calista and the unfaithful Maria are there. Calista and Lothario are sometimes cited as the inspirations for Richardson's Clarissa and Lovelace, Richardson characters we know Austen knew. It would make a simply superb joke if Austen is referring to Calista. Calista, well known for her interminable and somewhat unlikely post-stabbing, pre-death speeches commits suicide. Maria, on the other hand, does no such thing and is restored to "tolerable comfort" albeit with Aunt Norris. Does Austen also mean to suggest that Maria, like Calista was "not greatly at fault herself" and was pursued/tempted by Henry (as Calista is actively compromised by Lothario)? And then we have Fanny's strange sorrow for Edmund - a sorrow "so founded on satisfaction" and passing for the greatest gaiety in some senses. Now if Austen does raise the spectre of Rowe here then we are forced to reconsider Fanny's sorrow. If we accept Rowe's great comment on guilt being the source of sorrow then Fanny feels guilty that Edmund feels as he does thanks to her own refusal of Henry's offer.....but Fanny's guilt and attendant sorrow and founded on a satisfaction. Is this the satisfaction that she was correct to refuse Henry because of his bad Lothario-like character, or is it that Fanny is satisfied because Edmund is freed from any connection with Mary Crawford and hence is in harmony with Fanny's wish to be united to Edmund?"

I agreed then that The Fair Penitent was indeed an allusive source for MP, and now I add to that the following two additional points:

First, Fanny's and Edmund's stargazing in MP, with Fanny's explicit reference to Arcturus and the Bear, is there, I suggest, in no small part because the myth of Arcturus begins with the seduction and impregnation---by the ultimate royal libertine Zeus, whom the Prince Regent seemed to strive to emulate----of the nymph _Callisto_, for whom Rowe's _Calista_ is obviously named!

And second, I assert that the interest that Jane Austen took in Mrs. Inchbald, as expressed in the allusive subtexts of Mansfield Park, was not limited to the overt allusion to Lover's Vows, but also included a _covert_ allusion to Mrs. Inchbald's famous role as Rowe's fair penitent (or--as Anielka apparently did not realize--as Richardson actually causes Lovelace's buddy Belford to call Rowe's Calista, a "luscious wench"), and even further into the biography of Mrs. Inchbald herself!

Indeed, concealed just beneath the surface of Mansfield Park, we have a complex allusive "cake" in which Greek mythology, Rowe, Richardson, and other literary sources are layered, linked together through literary time by transformations of the name Callisto ==> Calista ===> Clarissa, all of which inform the shadows of Mansfield Park.

And there may be one last layer. In regard to mythological allusions in MP, it has been noted on several occasions that Mary Crawford, singing and playing her harp, is a Regency-Era Circe, a siren whose song cannot be resisted by Edmund, who is like a latter-day member of the crew of the great "heathen hero" Odysseus. However, in light of what I have just written, above, about Callisto, Calista, and Clarissa in the subtext of MP, I add a more speculative suggestion. I.e., that Mary Crawford's "gleefully" hypnotizing Edmund away from stargazing with Fanny is intended to put the mythologically informed reader of MP in mind of Odysseus, not only in regard to his more famous encounter with Circe, but also in regard to his seven year layover with _another_ nymph who kept him away from returning to his true love, Penelope--a nymph whose name is not that far removed from those I listed above---_Calypso_!

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

"To be a renter, a chuser of books!": Fanny Price's (and Jane Austen's) Joy in a Circulating Library

The following passage in Chapter 40 of Mansfield Park is one that I feel safe in asserting is usually sped by without particular notice. The first-time reader who does not know the end of the story is by Chapter 40 in extreme suspense wondering whether Fanny will finally give in to Henry Crawford's romancing, and the closely related question of whether Edmund and Mary will work things out between them. But the casual REreader will _also_ find little in this passage that would seem, at first glance, to add to one's understanding or the enjoyment of the story or its characters, which might have been missed upon first or earlier reading:

"The intimacy thus begun between [Fanny and Susan] was a material advantage to each. By sitting together upstairs, they avoided a great deal of the disturbance of the house; Fanny had peace, and Susan learned to think it no misfortune to be quietly employed. They sat without a fire; but that was a privation familiar even to Fanny, and she suffered the less because reminded by it of the East room. It was the only point of resemblance. In space, light, furniture, and prospect, there was nothing alike in the two apartments; and she often heaved a sigh at the remembrance of all her books and boxes, and various comforts there. By degrees the girls came to spend the chief of the morning upstairs, at first only in working and talking, but after a few days, the remembrance of the said books grew so potent and stimulative that Fanny found it impossible not to try for books again. There were none in her father's house; but wealth is luxurious and daring, and some of hers found its way to a circulating library. She became a subscriber; amazed at being anything /in propria persona/, amazed at her own doings in every way, to be a renter, a chuser of books! And to be having any one's improvement in view in her choice! But so it was. Susan had read nothing, and Fanny longed to give her a share in her own first pleasures, and inspire a taste for the biography and poetry which she delighted in herself. In this occupation she hoped, moreover, to bury some of the recollections of Mansfield, which were too apt to seize her mind if her fingers only were busy..."

However, I realized only a short while ago, while reading this passage for another purpose, that the careful student of Jane Austen's _life_, as depicted indirectly in her fiction, ought to sit up and take very close notice of this passage, as I just did, upon realizing that this passage actually _begs_ to be interpreted as veiled autobiography about JA's own career as a reader and a writer!

I.e., I think it highly plausible to interpret this passage as JA looking back at two principal phases of her _own_ life history as a reader. Phase one, which ended in 1800, was when JA, like Fanny at Mansfield Park, was limited to books which were already on hand in the home library, supplemented by what I suspect was the rare occurrence of a brother bringing a book home and sharing it with Jane.

Now, I do _not_ mean to suggest that these were lean years in terms of JA's access to great literature, because it is abundantly clear from study of JA's juvenilia that she was already, by the age of 17, extremely well read in a variety of great literary works. However, what I gather from the above passage about Fanny is that things changed dramatically for JA as a reader when she finally had access to _urban_ circulating libraries with a large selection, first in Bath but then, apparently, even more so in Southampton.

So I believe that the move to Bath in 1801, and then the second move later to Southampton in 1806, for all the distress that these moves seem to have caused JA in so many other ways, were nonetheless positive events in _one_ crucial sense for JA, which is that her stints in Bath and Southampton were apparently the first time in her life when JA could not only subscribe to a circulating library, but was able to physically walk to such a library itself, and (repeatedly) pick and choose books entirely on her own unmediated by any decisions on the part of anyone else, especially a brother or a father.

When I read Fanny's full throated joyful but silent (if you will) INburst "To be a renter, a chuser of books!", I hear Jane Austen herself remembering her own exultation when she (who had to wait till her mid-twenties or older) finally experienced that same freedom.

And I suspect that during the 8 years from early 1801 until early 1809, JA took full advantage of that precious freedom, at least to the extent allowed by her limited finances, of access to all the books she wanted to read (and make extracts from, before returning to the circulating library). So that, by the time she finally arrived at Chawton, and got her "room of her own", with the privacy and time to write, her long program of deep and broad literary research had borne rich fruit, and JA was ready to go back to S&S, to go back to P&P, to go back to NA, and to revise them all with the benefit of having steeped her brain in all the books which nourished her already fertile creative imagination. And that opened the door to the wonders of MP, Emma and Persuasion.

All of which makes Patricia Rozema's heretical decision to depict Fanny Price as a secret writer a whole lot _less_ heretical, I think, as this passage from Chapter 40 of MP draws such a powerful parallel between Fanny Price and her creator, Jane Austen.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter