More of Captain James Benwick in Persuasion as a Negative Representation of Captain Charles Austen

Earlier today, I wrote briefly about Letter 123 as being, in part, JA’s coded and not very positive view in 1815 of brother Charles Austen’s overly quick attachment to his sister in law after the death of his wife in 1814 ….

http://listserv.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind1310d&L=austen-l&T=0&F=&S=&P=2013

…and I intended to return to amplify on the following comments with which I concluded:

“So, viewing Letter 123 through the lens of JA making a veiled commentary on Charles's blossoming relationship with his young sister in law, we can see that the reference to Cassy playing The Hermit was doubly loaded. I.e., JA was sarcastically but veiledly commenting that Charles was the furthest thing from Beattie's hermit, and he was anything but a husband consumed with grief over the death of his wife. And JA was in effect casting little Cassy as Hamlet, who (metaphorically) is the Hermit of Hamlet, the brooding child mourning the death of a beloved parent, and watching the surviving parent in effect marry with the funeral meats used to furnish the marriage table!

And best of all, does any of this sound like anything in one of Jane Austen's novels--such as, e.g., the novel that she had already begun to write as she wrote Letter 123?  Of course, JA revisited what she must have seen as brother Charles's shocking lack of grieving for his dead wife, when she created the character of James Benwick, who similarly does not spend a long time grieving for his dead fiancee FANNY Harville!”

Apparently, I am the first (1) to see Letter 123’s veiled sarcasm directed at Charles Austen, (2) to realize that Captain Benwick’s short-lived grief for his dead fiancée Fanny is also a veiled criticism of Charles Austen’s short-lived grief for his dead wife, and (3) to connect the dots between (1) and (2) and realize that this connection is no surprise, given that Letter 123 and Persuasion were written contemporaneously by JA. 

What’s disturbing--yet oddly fascinating--is to observe the power of the mythology around the Austen family, which prompts Austen scholars to sugar-coat and drastically distort reality, in this instance. I think the general blindness of Austen scholars to Jane Austen’s judgment on Charles Austen via the Benwick character in Persuasion is a particularly good (or bad) example of this phenomenon.

Exhibit “A” of this phenomenon has to be Sheila Johnson Kindred’s 2009 Persuasions article “The influence of Naval Captain Charles Austen's North American experiences on Persuasion and Mansfield Park.”

Read the following, and ask yourself, did Kindred read the same Persuasion that we all know and love?  

“Finally, an echo of Charles and Fanny's devotion to each other occurs in another context in Persuasion. Recall that Captain Benwick, Wentworth's lieutenant on the Laconia, had been engaged to the beautiful young Fanny Harville. He is made desolate by her death while he is at sea and is in deep mourning when the reader first meets him. A similar catastrophic event had shattered Fanny and Charles's relationship when suddenly in early September 1814 she died from complications following the birth of their short-lived daughter Elizabeth. This unexpected death of a sister-in-law, who was only twenty-four, occurred in the period before Jane began to write Persuasion. She was touched by Fanny's tragic demise and the deep effect it had on the grieving Charles. Her closeness to this event may explain her characterization of the emotionally devastated Captain Benwick in chapters eleven and twelve of Persuasion.”

The whole point of our hearing how emotionally devastated Benwick is left by his uncontrollable grief for Fanny—how he even asks Anne for recommendations for poetry to read to help him through his grief (like, perhaps Beattie’s The Hermit?) ---is the devastating irony of his abrupt turnabout, when Anne (and we later learn, also Harville and Wentworth) is shocked to learn that Benwick has gotten engaged to Louisa so quickly. This is Hypocrisy with a capital H.

  

Even Peter Knox-Shaw, in his wonderfully subversive 2004 book Jane Austen & The Enlightenment, where he repeatedly demonstrates that he does not wear blinders, fails to reach the point of seeing Benwick as a negative representation of Charles Austen, when Knox-Shaw discusses Benwick and Charles Austen vis a vis naval grief, real and fictional, at ppg. 221-2.

And even the strongly outside the box Janine Barchas, in her 2009 Persuasions article “Artistic Names in Austen’s Fiction: Cameo Appearances by Prominent Painters”, speculates, along with the equally outside the box Jocelyn Harris, that the “small miniature portrait” of Captain Benwick which Wentworth agrees to refit for delivery to Louisa Musgrove was an allusion to a miniature of Frank Austen, without seeming to consider how much  better it would fit if it were an allusion to the Benwick-like Austen brother, Charles.

But back to the Kindred article, which by the way, had to get past the editorial process at Persuasions in 2009 only 4 years ago, during which this error should have been caught by other scholarly eyes---such is the power of the still prevalent Austen mythology, that a paragraph like the above which ignores what we learn about Benwick after Chapter 12 of Persuasion, could be presented to Janeites as a valid description of Jane Austen’s family, and not even be challenged….until now, by me.

To see the character Benwick as Jane Austen’s positive tribute to Charles Austen’s admirably intense grief, instead of as her parody of his less than noble haste into the arms of another woman (and with considerably larger income than Fanny Harville would have had), is to completely misunderstand and misrepresent the true Jane Austen. Benwick’s worst sin is not just that  he was inconstant in his grief for Fanny Harville-it is the intense hypocrisy of his exaggerated grieving followed by his exaggerated speed in marrying another woman, which makes the veiled allusion to Charles Austen so disturbing.

And so it’s obvious why this scholarly neutering of JA’s sometimes brutally honest satire happens—it is too disruptive of the myth of Jane Austen to imagine that she would, in her novel considered by most Janeites to be a love letter to both of her brothers in the Royal Navy, present such a harsh parodic portrait of her younger sailor brother’s moral and emotional foibles.

It’s a Pandora’s Box Moment for Austen scholarship—because if this sort of harsh parody is possible, then who knows, maybe this nutty conspiracy theorist Arnie Perlstein is also correct in some of his other outside the box interpretations about Jane Austen.  

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Jane Austen’s Letter 123: The Hidden Explosiveness of “Believe me, my dear Sister-Aunt”, & Other Subtextual Tales

In addition to the “eye weakness” subtext of Letter 123 to which I devoted an entire post earlier today….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-subtle-spect-ocular-subtext-of-jane.html

…I will now make the case for additional, similar subtext, of equal significance to that of the “eye weakness” subtext, all crammed into this short, seemingly trivial & innocuous Letter 123 to 10 year old niece Caroline Austen.

Letter 123 now seems to me to be a textbook example of how JA effortlessly and frequently met the challenge of writing her letters so as to communicate dicey and even explosive meaning in code to knowing readers of those letters other than the named addressee, while at the same time preserving total opacity to a reader not “looking for trouble”.  I’ve divided this post into four topical sections, and this is one post you really want to read all the way to the end, because I’ve saved the best (or the worst, depending on your point of view) for the fourth and last section.

The Delights of Taking Care of Children:

“It gives us great pleasure that you should be at Chawton. I am sure Cassy must be delighted to have you.”

Of course on the surface these two sentences appear merely to be Aunt Jane delighting in the prospect of her two age-similar nieces, Caroline (age 10) and Cassy (age 7), getting to spend some quality time together at Chawton.

But first, I believe it did not escape Jane Austen that “Cassy” also just happened to be the childhood nickname of sister Cassandra, who was at that very moment at Chawton taking care of Caroline and Cassy. So, that second sentence takes on a new ironic layer of meaning, if it is read to refer to Aunt Cassandra’s own feelings about now having Caroline around to attend to and contend with, along with the younger, perhaps more difficult, Cassy, who was already there, and for whom, as Diana pointed out, the recent death of her mother was a still-fresh wound.

For that matter,  I also wonder how delighted 7-year old Cassy really was to suddenly have an older rival for her aunt Cassandra’s attentions right there in the Cottage. Sounds like droll irony on JA’s part, because we know JA was already aware of Cassy’s jealous bossiness as JA described it in Letter 120 to Anna Lefroy, when little Cassy, less than a month earlier, put the kibosh on a visit with her aunts to the very pregnant Anna at Wyards in favor of a trip to the fair that she really wanted to take.

Jane Austen would not have been blind to these family dynamics, and I think she was working for a wry smile from Cassandra upon reading the above, as if to say, I just bet you must be delighted to have more children to care for.

Jane Austen’s Precious Pianoforte:

“You will practise your Music of course, & I trust to you for taking care of my Instrument & not letting it be ill used in any respect.-Do not allow anything to be put on it, but what is very light.”

Here, what comes through loud and clear, without resort to hints, and from the rapid fire repetition of several emphatic warnings and prohibitions, is the real fear that JA has that somehow Caroline will mess up JA’s precious pianoforte. My guess is that Caroline minded her aunt’s stern admonitions. For sure, it tells us just how important that pianoforte was to JA’s mental and spiritual health—I imagine her piano playing as a deeply nourishing private discipline & practice, a time for communing with her own imagination in preparation for the sacred act of literary composition. So, JA was not leaving her pianoforte vulnerable to the vagaries of a 10-year old’s judgment, and was being crystal clear about the supreme importance of its not being “ill used in any respect”.

The Hermit:

“I hope you will try to make out some other tune besides the Hermit.”

Thanks to Diana, for pointing out Le Faye’s gloss on this sentence, and then quoting the first stanza and giving us that brief bio re Beattie’s sad family history. I think that brief bio is the key to understanding JA’s subtext in the above sentence.

First, I think it clear that JA was aware of the deep sadness underlying Beattie’s familiar lyrics (which are the voice of human grief, agonizing over the pain and despair of knowing that deceased loved ones are, unlike the perennial fruits of Mother Nature,  never going to return in the spring—Beattie’s dead wife and children were gone forever.

Was it just a coincidence, then, that the overarching theme of Letter 123 is the Austen family dynamics at Chawton , in particular the presence at Chawton of a little girl who has just lost her mother, and perhaps, with a 7-year-old’s mind, was at times lost in fantasies of a return of her mother, in defiance of the cold, harsh finality of those lryics?

So this is what leads me to speculate that Caroline Austen in fact had not playing the Hermit all the time, or even at all, on Jane Austen’s pianoforte! This was another one of JA’s spontaneous fantasies which dramatize an important message—and that message, which I believe she thought Caroline capable of understanding, even at 10, was that Caroline should be extra sensitive to little Cassy’s needs during her visit at Chawton. In effect, “don’t play the Hermit all the time” could be translated as  “Be a good cousin, and do what you can to raise the little girls spirits, perhaps by playing cheery songs!”.

My Dear Sister-Aunt:

“Now that you are become an Aunt, you are a person of some consequence & must excite great Interest whatever you do. I have always maintained the importance of Aunts as much as possible, & I am sure of your doing the same now. Beleive me my dear Sister-Aunt”

On the surface, this appears to be a charming attempt by JA to make Caroline Austen feel some sense of herself as special, given her seniority, at least in comparison to the younger Austen cousins from the two naval families. Whereas, in her birth family, Caroline was “the baby”.

This charming attempt takes on more significance when viewed in the context of the veiled request that I suggested in my third section, above, that JA was making to Caroline, i.e., that Caroline not do anything to rekindle little Cassy’s grief over losing her mother. JA takes this final moment, then, to reiterate this theme of Caroline as playing an adult-like role vis a vis younger relatives, whether it be a grieving 7 year old cousin or a newborn niece.

But in her characteristic mode of hiding her biggest secrets in plain sight, JA casually tosses in something extra from left field as she signs off on Letter 123, something that gives the informed reader pause…in this case, it’s JA’s calling Caroline “my dear Sister-Aunt”.

If this peculiar turn of phrase sounds familiar to a reader familiar with literature that Jane Austen might have been familiar with, there’s a very very good reason. There are (at least) two famous works of literature which I believe Jane Austen knew very well indeed, which contain dialog which refers to exactly that same sort of familial double-relationship:

Act 2 Scene 2 Hamlet:

Hamlet: You are welcome: but my UNCLE-FATHER and AUNT-MOTHER are deceived.

Guildenstern:  In what, my dear lord?

Hamlet: I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.

Sophocles’ Antigone:

Ismene: 

Bethink thee, sister, of our father's fate,

Abhorred, dishonored, self-convinced of sin,

Blinded, himself his executioner.

Think of his MOTHER-WIFE (ill sorted names)

Done by a noose herself had twined to death

And last, our hapless brethren in one day,

Both in a mutual destiny involved,

Self-slaughtered, both the slayer and the slain

Now why in the world would JA, in a letter to her young niece, make a veiled allusion to

 (1) Hamlet’s hint to Guildenstern that he is only pretending to Claudius and Gertrude that he is crazy, even as he slips in a dig about the incestuous nature of Claudius’ marriage with Gertrude, and/or to

(2) Ismene’s (in talking to sister Antigone) description of the ill-fated incestuousness of their own family, in which Jocasta, mother of Oedipus as well as of Ismene and Antigone, was also the wife of Oedipus, hence Ismene’s epithet for Jocasta?

And actually, Shakespeare had the entire Oedipus Trilogy firmly in mind when he wrote Hamlet- so what better way for JA to kill two allusive birds with one stone than to select this double-relatedness epithet format, which uniquely appears in both of those sources, one ancient and one early modern.

But that’s all background, so let’s cut to the chase. The common theme in these two literary sources, it is obvious, is incest—incest with tragic consequences.

And so, incredible as this will sound, this allusion becomes ten times more explosive, when we realize that there actually is a very plausible reason, based on real textual evidence, why JA, in a letter written while Emma was on the verge of being published, might make a veiled allusion to this theme of incest, i.e., why JA would in effect cast herself and Caroline in an amateur mini-theatrical based on the two most tragic instances of incest in Western literature.

This more than decided whiff of incestuous innuendo would of course be utterly imperceptible by a 10 year old, but might just be brought to mind in any adult who was “intimate by instinct” with Shakespeare, as I suspect many members of the Austen family were besides Jane Austen.   

So…try to wrap your mind around the possibility that JA, in this way, was hinting in Letter 123 at the explosive riddle she had hidden, double-wrapped for safekeeping, at the end of Emma (which she was on the verge of publishing).  For those of who for whom this double-wrapped riddle does not ring a bell as to what I am referring to, I am suggesting that in Letter 123 JA combined:  

(1) Jane Fairfax’s concealed pregnancy, with Jane covertly giving her newborn baby girl to Mrs. Weston [all discovered by me in 2005), with

(2) Anielka Briggs’s 2007 discovery (right after I revealed #1 to her) of Jane Austen’s word game in Emma, with the newborn Anna Weston === > Ann Aweston === > Anna Austen, who just happened to be Caroline Austen’s elder half-sister.

Translated into simple English, the combination of (1) and (2) leads to the inference---whether imagined by JA or factually lived by her, I believe we will never know for sure either way—that Jane Austen was the biological mother of Anna Austen Lefroy, but gave her newborn daughter to her brother James Austen, and his wife, to raise as if their own biological child.

And so, there would be an odd consistency in JA including an epistolary hint to this event, that may or may not have occurred in 1793 when JA was 17, in a letter to Caroline Austen, who, according to this ambiguity, would be the younger  “sister-cousin” of Anna.  

And you thought Letter 123 was nothing special when you first read it, right?

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The Subtle Spect-Ocular Subtext of Jane Austen’s Letter 123 (to Her 10-Year Niece Caroline Austen)

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be much of anything significant going on in the first sentence of the very short Letter 123 from Jane Austen to her 10-year old niece, Caroline (of course, the much younger of brother James’s two daughters): 

"I have not yet felt quite equal to taking up your Manuscript, but think I shall soon, & I hope my detaining it so long will be no inconvenience.-

But upon closer examination of the context, subtle subtexts emerge from between the lines. And these subtexts have significant implications which, amazingly enough, relate to a very significant theme in Persuasion, which I’ve hinted at in my Subject Line, and which I’ve written about previously.  Let me explain.

Diana Birchall wrote the following in Janeites & Austen L: “Jane Austen writes from Henry's house at Hans Place, to James's younger daughter Caroline, age ten….Henry is still severely ill, though just beginning to be considered out of the gravest danger.”

Reading the first part of Letter 123, my first thought was to wonder, in the midst of all the family angst over Henry’s life-threatening illness, about the toll Henry’s suddenly dangerous illness has taken, to little fanfare, on Jane Austen herself, over the preceding few weeks! In particular, I find the following discreetly worded lines…

 “I have not YET FELT QUITE EQUAL to taking up your Manuscript…”

…highly suggestive. JA seems to be reporting, albeit in code graspable only by adult eyes at Chawton like sister Cassandra's, that JA is feeling more than a little overwhelmed emotionally and logistically by the stressful demands of caretaking for Henry. And wouldn’t that be just typical of the way the Austen family operated? When it was a brother who was ill or in trouble, Mrs. Austen and everyone else was on full alert, the family troops were mobilized, and frequent concerned bulletins were sent in every direction until the crisis eased.

But it’s been a persistent theme of JA’s letters, to say nothing of her novels, that female illness, worries, and concerns—especially those of unmarried younger females like JA--- rarely receive anything remotely resembling that sort of mobilized and proactive response---the quintessential example of this being JA, during her final illness, having to sit on three chairs placed together to simulate a sofa, so that her mother could have the actual sofa.

So I read this line as JA’s faint cry for help, or at least recognition, of what she was going through at that time. Here she is awaiting publication of Emma, her crowning literary achievement, and yet, as we will shortly read in Letter 124, that publication is on hold while JA tends to Henry.

But that’s all only the half of it. Upon further consideration of the full context, it occurred to me that, under that emotional stress, JA may well have even taken physically ill herself. The word “yet” is very pregnant, it suggests that in the previous letter to Chawton re Henry’s dangerous illness, as to the subject matter of which Caroline would have been informed to some appropriate extent, JA had also reported some symptoms of physical illness from which JA needed to recover, somehow, while tending to Henry’s recovery.  

And if I’m correctly reading JA between the lines, and JA is recovering from physical illness in some way as she writes Letter 123, my further inference would be that the malady was very likely a “weakness” in her eyes.

Why? You’ll recall that JA did write about that eye weakness explicitly in a few of her letters, and, I argued in a recent series of seven posts in late August and early September of this year, beginning here…..

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-wild-idea-about-weakness-in-eyes-of.html

…and ending here…..

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/09/i-yield-upon-great-persuasion-if-i-was.html

….that JA also wrote about her vision impairment indirectly but pervasively in Persuasion, the very same novel which JA had already begun writing as she wrote Letter 123, by covertly depicting Anne Elliot as having a serious “weakness” in her eyes!

But back to Letter 123 and JA’s eye weakness. Isn’t it a truism that each of us has particular areas of medical vulnerability, the “weak links” in our bodies which tend to betray us when our immune system is lowered? And I think JA’s weak link was her vision, and this would also fit perfectly with the duty which JA was delicately apologizing for to Caroline for failure to perform—reading Caroline’s manuscript!

And this also dovetails perfectly with one other biographical detail. It now seems likely to me that JA’s communications (by letter, and also no doubt in person) to 10-year old niece Caroline about JA’s persistent eye “weakness” left quite a profound and lasting deposit in Caroline’s memory banks. Why? Because it was Caroline Austen herself, who wrote the following words more than a half century later in her memoir about JA, My Aunt Jane Austen:

“She found a resource sometimes in that simple game [cup and ball] when she suffered from weak eyes and could not work or read for long together"

This is pretty much the only detail that Caroline reports about her aunt’s health in that brief Memoir, so it speaks to the strong impression that was made on Caroline about JA’s eyes, an impression which first became particularly strong during those few weeks in October, 1815.

So, in conclusion, upon such examination, informed by a grasp of JA’s subtextual code, we can see that what might have appeared at first to be a little white lie, told by a considerate aunt to a sensitive 10 year old niece to excuse a negligent failure to inspect that niece’s first literary efforts, was actually a deep glimpse into, and further validation of, the subtextual code which permeated all of JA’s writings, both imaginary & novelistic and realistic & epistolary.

We need no longer be blind to the Jane Austen Code.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter