More About Jane Austen’s Newly Discovered Scrap

In response to my post yesterday....

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/02/jane-austens-radical-critique-of.html

...about the exciting news reports about a new scrap of text handwritten by Jane Austen herself found glued into a copy of her nephew's 1870 Memoir, Nancy Mayer, Diane Reynolds, and Ellen Moody all responded in Janeites & Austen L, and I responded to their  responses as follows:

First, re the authorship of The Scrap, I repeat the game-changing point I made yesterday:  

"The failure of scholarship (in the attribution of the two English articles) I allege is easily demonstrated by the following embarrassing fact ---nobody involved, either at the Museum, the College, or the two newspapers, knew or thought to connect the dots between The Scrap and the 8-line poem Jane Austen wrote in 1807 (as part of a friendly family female poetry competition rhyming every line with the word “rose”), the subject of the second half of which is….the inside story on a rustic parishioner’s tenuous grasp of the meaning of a Sabbath sermon!:

Happy the lab’rer in his Sunday clothes!
In light-drab coat, smart waistcoat, well-darn'd hose,
And hat upon his head, to church he goes;
As oft with conscious pride, he downward throws
A glance upon the ample cabbage rose
Which, stuck in button-hole, regales his nose,
He envies not the gaiest London beaux.
In church he takes his seat among the rows,
Pays to the place the reverence he owes,
LIKES BEST THE PRAYERS WHOSE MEANING LEAST HE KNOWS.
Lists to the sermon in a softening doze,
And rouses joyous at the welcome close.

While seeing the rest of the currently concealed text of The Scrap will hopefully shed further light (and how exciting to experience real suspense in Austen studies, as Janeites await the results of the paper-ungluing process!), my money remains on The Scrap being a revisiting by JA herself of the exact sentiment undeniably expressed by HER in 1807 in the above Rose Poem, a poem written in the exact voice of Mary Crawford!

After all, The Scrap is practically word-for-word identical with the 10^th line of the Rose Poem!  Unless someone wants to go way out on a limb and argue that James Austen read sister Jane’s 1807 satirical poem and chose to plagiarize its punch line in a sermon, what plausible explanation is there for this unmistakable echoing, other than that  Jane was (as she often did in all her writings) echoing herself?

As I laid out in careful detail in my previous post, this scenario being played out right now on the Internet has been played out dozens of times since 1870—here’s the basic “script”: JA wrote something that the preservers of The Myth of Jane Austen find troubling in its implications, but they can’t get away with ignoring (or destroying) this embarrassing evidence of JA’s subversiveness, so they do what they can, and engage in damage control and protest too much about what it “really”means---in this  case, there’s a little of everything--attribution of  the embarrassing text to another family member; ignoring the clear satirical perspective; and ignoring a clear conflict of interest, and motivation to deceive, for the chief obscurer. In short, they minimize, they trivialize, and (as I showed again, above), when all else fails, they just plain ignore any additional textual evidence (from the Rose Poem, from what Mary Crawford says in several different ways) which makes the embarrassing satirical content obvious.

And I must also reiterate my emphasis on motivation to deceive—very specifically in this case, they ignore James Edward Austen Leigh’s proven track record as deceiver in the Memoir—with his “creative editing” of JA’s letters, his distortions of key biographical facts, which I’ve documented numerous times in the past.  Think I am exaggerating? Well, here’s one particularly egregious example of JEAL’s editorial shenanigans, among many:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/01/news-that-really-made-jane-austen_20.html

To paraphrase Edmund Bertram, the (clergy)man who could engage in such blatant deception of his readers would be beyond the reach of MY “sermons” about literary critical deception and cluelessness!

But perhaps the saddest part of the current episode in literary spin doctoring is that I don’t believe any of it is intentionally deceitful or misleading. E.g., I don’t see Deirdre Le Faye barging in and imperiously dismissing claims of JA’s subversiveness by someone like Paula Byrne, unaware of how much she resembled Lady Catherine in such moments. Rather, the Myth of the sanitized, unthreatening Jane Austen is still so deeply engrained in mass consciousness, among Janeites and lay persons alike, that the Bowdlerizing assumptions arise spontaneously—as has been the case among good-faith “experts’ like the fellow trying to unglue the remainder of The Scrap, or the journalists uncritically reporting his blithe assumptions as if they were Gospel truth, or the readers criticizing all this  attention to Jane Austen . It is a banal collaboration that assures no disturbance of the Myth, which sails on undisturbed.

By the way, Diane correctly pointed out that the use of the masculine pronoun two centuries ago was often a kneejerk mechanism for hiding female identity, and so we should not automatically assume that The Scrap is about men only. However, in my reading, I did not automatically assume this, I based my interpretation on the fact that there were no female clergypersons giving sermons during JA’s lifetime. So if I am correct that the Scrap’s satire is directed at clergymen like the fictional Dr. Grant (the selfish gluttonous bon vivant) but also the fictional Edmund Bertram (who spends the entire novel rationalizing away all sorts of moral failures), then “man” really meant “man” in JA’s mind as she wrote The Scrap.

And behind Dr. Grant and Edmund Bertram, her deepest and most embarrassing satire was directed at the real life Reverend James Austen, whose serious moral lapses (e.g., his and his wife Mary also being the primary models for John & Fanny Dashwood—Elllen, that is the sensitive aspect of veiled Austen family biography in S&S that the Austen family wished to ignore and obfuscate, for obvious reasons) were a source of great distress and suffering on JA’s (and niece Anna’s) part over many years. And James Austen, I repeat, was James Edward Austen’s beloved FATHER!

Now, further  addressing Nancy’s suggestion about my trumping up a big controversy. It’s one thing if an unsophisticated laborer dozes in the pew while narcissistically focusing on display in church rather than moral improvement. As Nancy pointed out, that was a commonplace sentiment among the devout, to fret over the common folk not really paying attention in church. But it’s a much more serious (and subversive) satire, if JA’s primary target was-as I say it was--the clergy who were supposed to be the engines of moral improvement for their congregations filled with such laborers. If the shepherds have lost their way, the sheep might indeed be better off finding their own way. That’s not a message the leaders of the Anglican Church would want to be widely disseminated, especially among female readers of JA’s novels who might also be led to question the sexism which saturated every nook and cranny of the Anglican Church JA knew so well, from the inside.

So Nancy, I cannot agree with you that I am generating a false controversy, quite the contrary—this is a very old story of obscuring the true voice of Jane Austen, and even if I am the only voice pointing this out, I will continue to draw upon my own extensive research (which immediately alerted me to the existence of the Rose Poem, that nobody else even was aware of) to illustrate each and every such distortion that pops up, and show that the emperor is still naked.

 That was my first reply, which crossed Diane Reynolds's excellent followup, to which I immediately responded as follows: 

Diane: "Arnie points to the 1807 JA poem with a similar sentiment--no matter who ultimately authored the short quote, it could well be part of an ongoing family discussion, part of the family culture" 

Diane, although I know you don't mean it that way, I am always leery of references to Austen family culture which are usually code for Jane Austen being part of a Borg-like collective, in which she toed a conservative family line. I believe JA was fiercely independent in her thinking from a very young age, and that she pushed back HARD against all attempts by her family to rein her in. So, for all the reasons I have now stated twice, I am extremely confident that she authored The Scrap for her own satirical purposes. 

Diane: "I don't know that this means JA took her brother's sermons seriously in the aggregate (she may or may not have) but it does indicate that she took this particular issue seriously. That someone would preserve this particular quote written out by her suggests not only that this was important to her but that someone else knew she took this seriously."

Indeed, with my proviso that I see her as having been particularly sensitive to her brother's hypocrisy in his sermonizing--like Edmund Bertram, talking the talk but not walking the walk, instead rationalizing away all sorts of questionable behavior. 

Diane: "The idea of implicitly condemning rote prayer--what the Quakers would call "professing with possessing" the faith is a non-conformist view and at least hints at a social conscience--to feel fully the full force and meaning of Biblical texts would suggest changing behavior in ways that would help "the least of us." This points to a more radical view of religious faith--that worship and prayer are about more than individual or communal salvation for an afterlife in heaven--ie, about more than magical incantations for personal protection--religion is about enacting faith in the world. That this would be radical, of course, is always surprising to me, but it remains so to this day."

 Brilliantly articulated, Diane, and I agree on all counts. Indeed, JA was keenly aware of the sad irony that her own genuinely compassionate form of Christianity would have been considered "radical" and "Jacobin" in her day, because she dared to see the powers that be in England as corrupt, hypocritical, and selfish - i.e., exactly as Mary Crawford describes Dr. Grant! 

Diane: "I recognize that I project a good deal of myself into this reading of Austen, as we all tend to do, for one of my passions or bugaboos is that people don't actually read what is in front of them--don't thoroughly feel the full force and meaning of words on a page, but I think as well this was at the heart of Austen's project--much of her novelistic sleight at hand is arguably aimed at encouraging people to read in a fully engaged way. " 

Again, brilliantly summarized, and I could not agree more. My interpretation of The Scrap and the Rose Poem are, I claim, perfect examples of actually reading the words on the page that JA wrote, and taking them all very seriously, instead of buying into Bowdlerized, sanitized reframes of those words.

Diane: "As both Arnie and Ellen point out, the new scrap does connect strongly to MP and its exploration of the role of the clergy. While I read Austen's voice as satiric, rather than anticipating mid-Victorian piety--and I agree with Arnie that she identifies more closely with Mary than Fanny on the behavior of the clergy, I would agree Austen does indict using clergy livings as sinecures: It is not by accident that Maria points out the hovels on the outskirts of Sotherton, the site of the conversation in the Sotherton chapel, or that hovels in Emma appear on Vicarage Lane." 

Exactly so once again! As usual, Diane, you reward me for bringing my thoughts to these groups, as you always play a key role in teasing out more and more value from them, and inducing me to refine my stances.

 Cheers,ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Jane Austen’s Radical Critique of the Anglican Clergy in her Newly Discovered 1814 Scrap & Her 1807 Rose Poem: Prayers Repeated By Clergymen Without Thorough Understanding & Feeling

Yesterday in The Telegraph, Sam Marsden reported that:

“[a] newly uncovered manuscript in which Jane Austen writes of men reciting prayers unthinkingly could shed light on the gestation of one of her novels. The scrap of paper features a fragment copied out by the author from a sermon written by her brother, the Rev James Austen...The passage in Austen’s handwriting, dating from 1814, states:

"Men may get into a habit of repeating the words of our Prayers by rote, perhaps WITHOUT THOROUGHLY UNDERSTANDING – CERTAINLY WITHOUT THOROUGHLY FEELING THEIR FULL FORCE & MEANING.” 

This reflects a theme that she wrote about in her novel Mansfield Park, which was published in the same year. The small piece of manuscript is glued into a first edition dating from 1870 of The Memoirs of Jane Austen, by the novelist’s nephew, James Edward Austen Leigh. David Dorning, a conservator at West Dean College…has the job of removing it from the book so the passage on the back can also be seen. “When I initially read it, I thought it was the sort of thing that Jane Austen might write. Then I realised that it was a sermon by her brother. I thought maybe all the Austens felt like that about men,” he joked.”   END QUOTE

Another article by Alison Flood, also about “The Scrap”, ran in The Guardian, and added a comment by the curator of the Jane Austen House Museum: "What especially intrigued us about this fragment is its apparent date, 1814, and the evidence that offers of the cross-currents between Austen's family life and her literary reflections on prayer in Chapter 34 of Mansfield Park, published the same year…” END QUOTE

For reasons I will outline below, the above-quoted newspaper articles epitomize a deep and widespread misunderstanding of Jane Austen’s attitude toward the Anglican clergy---based in part on a failure of competent, thorough scholarship, and in part on the incredible persistence of the Myth of Jane Austen, which still prevails worldwide nearly two centuries after her death. It is an agile myth, which dances on the head of a pin, so as to see this most satirical and individualistic of fiction writers as, nonetheless, a pious, humble, obedient, orthodox believer in patriarchal, Tory, Anglican Church doctrine.  As you’ll see, that Myth obstructs the ordinary Janeite’s understanding of The Scrap, and also of the religious thematics of Mansfield Park!

For starters, these two major English newspapers both unashamedly relied (for the claim that the actual author of The Scrap was not really Jane but instead was her elder clergyman brother James) upon an unfounded, offhand, joking guess by the man charged with the technical task of separating the precious document from the book it was stuck in. This was not a starting point that promised much in terms of leading the reader to genuine insight about this recent discovery, an event of significance to Janeites hungry for even a new sentence of her writing.  And after all, it wasn’t a laundry list dug out of a linen trunk at an abbey, it was an important reflection on the lack of correlation between spoken prayer and felt belief.

The failure of scholarship I allege is easily demonstrated by the following embarrassing fact ---nobody involved, either at the Museum, the College, or the two newspapers, knew or thought to connect the dots between The Scrap and the 8-line poem Jane Austen wrote in 1807 (as part of a friendly family female poetry competition rhyming every line with the word “rose”), the subject of the second half of which is….the inside story on a rustic parishioner’s tenuous grasp of the meaning of a Sabbath sermon!:

Happy the lab’rer in his Sunday clothes!
In light-drab coat, smart waistcoat, well-darn'd hose,
And hat upon his head, to church he goes;
As oft with conscious pride, he downward throws
A glance upon the ample cabbage rose
Which, stuck in button-hole, regales his nose,
He envies not the gaiest London beaux.
In church he takes his seat among the rows,
Pays to the place the reverence he owes,
LIKES BEST THE PRAYERS WHOSE MEANING LEAST HE KNOWS.
Lists to the sermon in a softening doze,
And rouses joyous at the welcome close.

You must notice the almost 100% parallelism between:

ONE: the country laborer who “ [l]ikes best the prayers whose meaning least he knows” in the “Rose Poem”, which has been universally acknowledged, since its first publication in 1884, to have been composed by Jane Austen no later than 1807,  

and

TWO: “"[m]en [who] may get into a habit of repeating the words of our Prayers by rote, perhaps without thoroughly understanding – certainly without thoroughly feeling their full force & meaning”, in The Scrap, composed, so the cited “experts” assert, not by Jane Austen, but by her brother, James, and merely transcribed by Jane, at a time roughly coinciding with her publishing of Mansfield Park in 1814.

The extreme parallelism I cited between ONE and TWO makes it very clear that Jane Austen herself not only wrote but also authored not only the 1807 Rose Poem but also The Scrap (including whatever additional text on the back is eventually recovered, as we all hope it will be). 

In the rest of this post I want to focus on why it fit so much better with the Myth of Jane Austen, for experts to concoct a theory out of thin air that one of the world’s greatest novelists would act as a mere scrivener for one of her clergyman brother’s sermons, rather than to dare to think that she’d have written The Scrap herself. After all, it bears another repetition that THE SCRAP IS IN JANE AUSTEN’S OWN HANDWRITING! So the burden of proof sufficient to shift authorship from her to anyone else should have been heavy, right? And yet, the shift was passed off by all concerned without the slightest hesitation, or even acknowledgment of anything questionable having been done.

This is no accident, no mere carelessness. As you’ll see, beneath the apparent cluelessness is an indictable sleight of hand, born of desire, dating back to the dawn of modern Austen studies, on the part of generations of a determined coterie of conservative Austen scholars, to conceal her true, subversive, radical feminist critique of every aspect of her patriarchal society, and in particular of the Anglican church which, I am certain she felt, was an arch-conspirator in that patriarchy when it ought to have been its strongest critic.

And here’s where the orthodox dogma about Jane Austen’s personal Christianity comes in. Almost all Janeites assume that Jane Austen would never have written an even faintly sacrilegious word about the Anglican church, an ancient institution in which both her father and her eldest brother were clergymen, and her third eldest brother in turn became a clergyman later in his life, and her two sailors and sister were all known for their piety.

Somehow ignored in all of this is the fact that some of the biggest fools, opportunists, and gluttons (all of the deadly sins well represented) in her novels are clergymen—Mr. Collins, Mr. Elton, Dr. Grant—and even some of the “heroes” are clergymen who don’t show a great deal of spine or character in a pinch—Edward Ferrars and Edmund Bertram, to name the two worst clergyweenies.  Only one of the six lead clergymen in her novels is free of any significant bad scent, and is actually heroic--- Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey.  16% is not a percentage that suggests a healthy respect on Jane Austen’s part for the clergy as they actually were, on the ground.

Why am I so focused on clergymen in Austen’s novels? Because The Scrap refers to those who REPEAT the words in prayers without apparent comprehension of their true meaning---well, it would be the men giving the sermons who would be leading the flock in the repetition of those words! And what would the Janeite world think, if word spread that Jane Austen, in a random scrap found in a desk at her death, was being very satirical about clergyman talking the talk, but not walking the walk?  Shocking!  So a great deal is at stake in this seemingly small issue—hence the need to stonewall.

So, e.g., the only two Austen scholars to have ever published commentary on the 1807 Rose Poem I quoted above, David Selwyn & Laura Mooneyham-White, are two of the most conservative of Austen scholars---and no surprise, both of them interpret it as completely vanilla, unthreatening, unsubversive, trivial silliness, a chuckling portrait of country manners which don’t really matter one way or the other.

Whereas, 5 months ago, when I first became aware of the Rose Poem’s existence (nearly a decade into my long, intense research, precisely because this poem was invisible, i.e., it had never been treated as worthy of serious study), it was immediately clear to me that it was actually, under the mask of a trivial bit of mildly satirical wordplay, a wide portal deep into the allusive, subversive depths of Jane Austen’s radical Christianity, as well as further evidence of her virtuosic allusions to Shakespeare.

I have long seen Jane Austen as espousing a radical Christianity, very personal and eccentric to herself,  one which actually took a concern in the weak and the poor as did Jesus himself, and which was a searing critique of every one of the varied forms of patriarchal hypocrisy and self-deception which characterized both the men in the pulpits and the men in the pews with equal sharpness.  Here is my blog post from over 4 months ago, where I spelled out my interpretation of the Rose Poem in great detail:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/09/jane-austen-extreme-rhyming-daughter.html

But today I am focused on The Scrap. What these two newspaper articles also fail to alert the reader to is the presence of a massive conflict of interest in their presentation of the meaning of The Scrap, another factor which dictated the preference for James Austen as casually presumed author thereof, instead of the true author, sister Jane.

To wit: as the two recent newspaper articles both disclose, but without realizing the significance thereof, The Scrap was found glued into a first edition of the 1870 Memoir of Jane Austen’s life and writing, authored by her nephew James Edward Austen Leigh (or JEAL)—who just happened to be the only son of the Reverend James Austen, as well as the sole heir of the fortune of Jane Austen’s Mrs. Norris-like Aunt Leigh-Perrot!

So in effect we have an ageing son ascribing authorship of the skeptical opinion about some men’s sincere feeling for and understanding of Christian doctrine to his own long-dead clergyman father. Whereas, if these lines were authored by Jane Austen herself, then we might wonder whether the “men” whose religious sincerity and comprehension is questioned in The Scrap might include not only the male parishioners sitting in the pews on Sunday, but also the male clergymen—like brother James Austen!!--who delivered the sermons to them! I.e., was this a stinging satire of the shepherds as much or more as of the sheep under their spiritual care?

Well, if the author of The Scrap was himself a “shepherd”, then the implication would be that he was sermonizing, preaching to, and talking only about, the “sheep”. But if the author of Tthe Scrap was a “sheep”—and a female one, at that---then, well, maybe, all bets would be off. Maybe the effectiveness, or relevance, of the “shepherd”’s meaning as he “repeated” spiritual verses in his sermon, might be at fault.

And the conflict of interest is even more salient when I tell you that I have over a period of years  documented numerous other cases in which JEAL, in the 1870 Memoir, whitewashed and bowdlerized facts about Jane Austen and/or her family—especially Jane Austen’s angry veiled critique of her brother James and his and his wife’s treatment of both Jane Austen herself, and also her beloved niece Anna (James’s daughter)….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/04/james-edward-austen-leighs-hyper.html

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/04/half-years-residence-in-her-family.html

…all in order to propagate the myth of a pious conservative Jane Austen who deeply loved and respected her brother James (again, JEAL’s father)—you can see this is a propaganda campaign that succeeded so well that even almost a century and a half later, the Myth of Jane Austen still rules the ethereal waves of Austen scholarship. And these recent articles are proof of the longevity of that reign.

So I conclude by giving you a quick tour of my alternative vision of Jane Austen, one which does not require closing one’s eyes to obvious meanings in the texts that survive, both Jane Austen’s novels and also her other writings (such as The Scrap), and I direct you, ironically, to the most powerful evidence for the notion that Jane Austen wrote The Scrap as a parody of the kind of hypocrisy exhibited by James Austen himself—and those are the words of the “bad guys”, Mary and Henry Crawford, in Mansfield Park.

The Myth of Jane Austen would have you believe that pious, frightened, strict believer Fanny Price represents Jane Austen’s point of view on religious matters in Mansfield Park, her most overtly religious novel; and that the Crawfords (especially witty, outspoken Mary) represent the fashionable, modern, secularized dismissal of organized religion that Jane Austen supposedly abhorred.  But I suggest to you that it was Mary Crawford who would have written the Rose Poem and The Scrap, and not Fanny Price—see if you agree as you read the following excerpts from Mansfield Park! I’ve given the full passages for maximum context, but have put in ALL CAPS the lines which relate most directly to the Rose Poem and The Scrap. NOTE IN PARTICULAR the repeated expositions of the theme of hypocrisy in the clergy, the apparent lack in most men of the cloth of understanding of and feeling for the meaning of the sermons and prayers they repeat! I.e., The Scrap could easily have been an epigraph for Mansfield Park itself!

Chapter 9: "It is a pity," cried Fanny, "that the custom [of twice daily chapel services] should have been discontinued. It was a valuable part of former times. There is something in a chapel and chaplain so much in character with a great house, with one's ideas of what such a household should be! A whole family assembling regularly for the purpose of prayer is fine!"

"Very fine indeed," said Miss Crawford, laughing. "It must do the heads of the family a great deal of good to force all the poor housemaids and footmen to leave business and pleasure, and SAY THEIR PRAYERS HERE TWICE A DAY, WHILE THEY ARE INVENTING EXCUSES THEMSELVES FOR STAYING AWAY."

"That is hardly Fanny's idea of a family assembling," said Edmund. "If the master and mistress do not attend themselves, there must be more harm than good in the custom."

"At any rate, it is safer to leave people to their own devices on such subjects. Everybody likes to go their own way—to chuse their own time and manner of devotion. The obligation of attendance, the formality, the restraint, the length of time—altogether it is a formidable thing, and what nobody likes; and if the good people who used to kneel and gape in that gallery could have foreseen that the time would ever come when men and women might lie another ten minutes in bed, when they woke with a headache, without danger of reprobation, because chapel was missed, they would have jumped with joy and envy. Cannot you imagine with what unwilling feelings the former belles of the house of Rushworth did many a time repair to this chapel? The young Mrs. Eleanors and Mrs. Bridgets—STARCHED UP INTO SEEMING PIETY, BUT WITH HEADS FULL OF SOMETHING VERY DIFFERENT—especially if the poor chaplain were not worth looking at—and, in those days, I fancy parsons were very inferior even to what they are now."

For a few moments she was unanswered. Fanny coloured and looked at Edmund, but felt too angry for speech; and he needed a little recollection before he could say, "Your lively mind can hardly be serious even on serious subjects. You have given us an amusing sketch, and human nature cannot say it was not so. We must all feel at times THE DIFFICULTY OF FIXING OUR THOUGHTS AS WE COULD WISH; but if you are supposing it a frequent thing, that is to say, a weakness grown into a habit from neglect, what could be expected from the private devotions of such persons? Do you think the minds which are suffered, which are INDULGED IN WANDERINGS IN A CHAPEL, would be more collected in a closet?"

"Yes, very likely. They would have two chances at least in their favour. There would be LESS TO DISTRACT THE ATTENTION FROM WITHOUT, and it would NOT BE TRIED SO LONG."

"The mind which does not struggle against itself under one circumstance, would find objects to distract it in the other, I believe; and the influence of the place and of example may often rouse better feelings than are begun with. The GREATER LENGTH OF THE SERVICE, however, I admit to be sometimes TOO HARD A STRETCH UPON THE MIND. One wishes it were not so; but I have not yet left Oxford long enough to forget what chapel prayers are."

"You assign greater consequence to the clergyman than one has been used to hear given, or than I can quite comprehend. One does not see much of this influence and importance in society, and how can it be acquired where they are so seldom seen themselves? How can TWO SERMONS A WEEK, even supposing them worth hearing, supposing the preacher to have the sense to prefer Blair's to his own, do all that you speak of? GOVERN THE CONDUCT AND FASHION THE MANNERS OF A LARGE CONGREGATION for the rest of the week? One scarcely sees a clergyman out of his pulpit."

"You are speaking of London, I am speaking of the nation at large."

"The metropolis, I imagine, is a pretty fair sample of the rest."

"Not, I should hope, of the proportion of virtue to vice throughout the kingdom. We do not look in great cities for our best morality….

Chapter 11: "I have been so little addicted to take my opinions from my uncle," said Miss Crawford, "that I can hardly suppose—and since you push me so hard, I must observe, that I am not entirely without the means of seeing WHAT CLERGYMEN ARE, being at this present time the guest of my own brother, Dr. Grant. And though Dr. Grant is most kind and obliging to me, and though he is really a gentleman, and, I dare say, a good scholar and clever, and OFTEN PREACHES GOOD SERMONS, and is very respectable, I see him to be AN INDOLENT, SELFISH BON VIVANT, who must have his palate consulted in everything; who will not stir a finger for the convenience of any one; and who, moreover, if the cook makes a blunder, is out of humour with his excellent wife. To own the truth, Henry and I were partly driven out this very evening by a disappointment about a green goose, which he could not get the better of. My poor sister was forced to stay and bear it."

“…A man—a sensible man like Dr. Grant, cannot be in the habit of TEACHING OTHERS THEIR DUTY EVERY WEEK, cannot go to church twice every Sunday, and PREACH SUCH VERY GOOD SERMONS in so good a manner as he does, without BEING THE BETTER FOR IT HIMSELF. It must make him think; and I have no doubt that he oftener endeavours to restrain himself than he would if he had been anything but a clergyman."

"We cannot prove to the contrary, to be sure; but I wish you a better fate, Miss Price, than to be the wife of A MAN WHOSE AMIABLENESS DEPENDS UPON HIS OWN SERMONS; for though HE MAY PREACH HIMSELF INTO A GOOD-HUMOUR EVERY SUNDAY, it will be bad enough to have him quarrelling about green geese from Monday morning till Saturday night."

"I think the man who could often quarrel with Fanny," said Edmund affectionately, "must be beyond the reach of any sermons."

Chapter 34: "A SERMON, WELL DELIVERED, is more uncommon even than PRAYERS WELL READ. A sermon, good in itself, is no rare thing. It is more difficult to speak well than to compose well; that is, the rules and trick of composition are oftener an object of study. A thoroughly good sermon, thoroughly well delivered, is a capital gratification. I can never hear such a one without the greatest admiration and respect, and more than half a mind to take orders and preach myself. There is something in THE ELOQUENCE OF THE PULPIT, when it is really eloquence, which is entitled to the highest praise and honour. The preacher who can TOUCH AND AFFECT such an heterogeneous MASS OF HEARERS, on subjects limited, and long worn threadbare in all common hands; who can say anything new or striking, anything that rouses the attention without offending the taste, or WEARING OUT THE FEELINGS OF HIS HEARERS, is a man whom one could not, in his public capacity, honour enough. I should like to be such a man."

Edmund laughed.

"I should indeed. I never listened to a distinguished preacher in my life without a sort of envy. But then, I must have a London audience. I could not preach but to the educated; to those who were capable of estimating my composition. And I do not know that I should be fond of preaching often; now and then, perhaps once or twice in the spring, after being anxiously expected for half a dozen Sundays together; but not for a constancy; it would not do for a constancy."

Here Fanny, who could not but listen, involuntarily shook her head…”

And here I voluntarily shake MY head, and conclude this post with the hope that I’ve convinced you (a) that the Myth of Jane Austen lives on, continuing to obscures truths like (b) Mary Crawford speaking in the true voice of Jane Austen in these spirited debates about preachers and the disconnect between their own sermonizing and their own adherence to the morals they repeat and preach to others, as Jane Austen remembered both her 1807 Rose Poem and The Scrap as she LOL’ed to herself while writing Mansfield Park.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

ADDED Feb. 5, 2014 at 11 am EST my followup post responding to several responses to my initial post: 

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/02/more-about-jane-austens-newly.html
 

Reconfirmation Bias Among Conservative Literary Scholars: Jane Austen’s Hidden Special Victims Unit

The Flat Earth Society came to my mind yesterday after reading Michael Chwe’s recent NY Times Op/Ed piece …..

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/opinion/sunday/scientific-pride-and prejudice.html?hp&rref=opinion

…entitled “Scientific Pride and Prejudice”, in which Chwe concisely and clearly addressed the issue of  “confirmation bias” in science and literary criticism.  Let me explain how I made that strange association.

First, here are the excerpts from his piece that particularly caught my eye:

“A major root of the crisis is selective use of data. Scientists, eager to make striking new claims, focus only on evidence that supports their preconceptions. Psychologists call this “confirmation bias”: We seek out information that confirms what we already believe. “We each begin probably with a little bias,” as Jane Austen writes in Persuasion,  “and upon that bias build every circumstance in favor of it.” Despite the popular belief that anything goes in literary criticism, the field has real standards of scholarly validity.

…In literary criticism, the question of how one’s arguments are influenced by one’s prejudgments has been a central methodological issue for decades. Sometimes prejudgments are hard to resist.

… We all bring different preconceptions to our inquiries, whether about Austen or the electron, and these preconceptions can spur as well as blind us. Perhaps because of its self-awareness about what Austen would call the “whims and caprices” of human reasoning, the field of psychology has been most aggressive in dealing with doubts about the validity of its research…the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman suggests that “to deal effectively with the doubts you should acknowledge their existence and confront them straight on, because a posture of defiant denial is self-defeating.” Everyone, including natural scientists, social scientists and humanists, could use a little more self-awareness. Understanding science as fundamentally a human process might be necessary to save science itself. “  END QUOTE

I wish to add a very simple but absolutely crucial gloss to Chwe’s otherwise unimpeachable thesis---one which Chwe would, I am very confident, be in hearty agreement with.  When he writes “Scientists, eager to MAKE striking new claims, focus only on evidence that supports their preconceptions,”, I would add  the following corollary:  “And those, whether other scientists or lay people, eager to REJECT striking new claims, ALSO focus only on evidence that supports their preconceptions.”

I.e., it is not only the scientists (like the biologists Chwe mentioned who very publicly and embarrassingly got it wrong about discovering a new life form a few years ago) and the literary critics (like Chwe himself, with his Austenian game theory claims, who was recently attacked for same by Deresiewicz) who must be on guard against confirmation bias, it’s equally incumbent upon those status-quo defenders who, as Thomas Kuhn so eloquently asserted in his brilliant and hugely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, hold on to debunked theories, such that new, better theories only achieve wide acceptance from the next generation of scientists.

Here’s a perfect example of this conservative bias: as I pointed out the other day as I supported Chwe in rebutting Deresiewicz’s (unfounded) claims that Chwe’s game theory analyses of Austen were “intellectually bankrupt”, Deresiewicz unwittingly revealed a glaring example of his own (if you will) REconfirmation bias when he baldly asserted, based on nothing other than his own preconceptions about JA’s writing, that “Austen was a novelist. She didn’t write textbooks, she had no use for concepts, and she wasn’t interested in making arguments. If she had a research program, as Chwe insists, it was into the techniques of fiction and the possibilities of the English language….” Talk about begging a big question!

If you agree with what Deresiewicz claims there, then I suggest to you that you may share his misguided preconception about what being a novelist meant to Jane Austen, a preconception which, I suggest, is deeply at odds with the actual evidence everywhere in her writing. That textual evidence shows that she was extremely interested in concepts, in making veiled arguments about every aspect of human life, and indeed was a lifelong & perpetual “studier of character”, i.e., psychologist, and observer/analyst of human nature and behavior.

But Deresiewicz did not invent his preconception, he absorbed it from pretty much everything he has read or heard from other Austen scholars, in much the same way that (as per Henry Crawford) English folk supposedly learn(ed) Shakespeare:

“But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately."

Now, in the realm of Austen studies, it is clear to me how so intelligent and learned a critic as Deresiewicz clearly is, could yet feel so confident in making such a huge assumption, and then not even bother to support it with evidence. It is because, I infer, he was articulating the Standard Model of Austen criticism. It needs no explanation, because it is what “everyone” already believes. Somehow, that weight of  cumulative opinion is supposed  to suffice  by itself.

But that’s the key point—Jane Austen, in writing that passage, anticipated (indeed, invited) that sort of reaction to her writing! Think about it---do you really think that Henry Crawford was speaking for Jane Austen personally, and that she believed that any ordinary Englishman of any brain would just fall into the flow of Shakespeare’s meaning immediately, intimate with that meaning by instinct?

Upon examination, I suggest, this is nonsense! Even a brilliant man like Henry Crawford, with both an excellent formal education and also obvious native intellectual of the highest order, would have had to study Shakespeare very carefully indeed over a long period of time, to achieve the level of intimacy with Shakespeare which he so obviously had achieved. Is Shakespeare so simple to understand?  Of course not! There are infinite depths in Shakespeare that a lifetime of study is not sufficient to fully grasp.

And Jane Austen, of course, knew this very well, because my research has conclusively established that she had herself, when she wrote Henry’s speech, studied Shakespeare very closely over her entire writing career spanning nearly 3 decades, and had recreated (in both senses of that word) Shakespeare in her own personal style and in a novelistic medium with unparalleled success.

And here’s the best part. JA was self-confident enough in her own writing, and in her own understanding of the likes of Shakespeare, that she  could afford to wink at patronizing, condescending reactions to her writing in this way—it’s not just in that passage that JA parodies the kind of dismissive interpretation of her as a writer of “mere novels”, writing for a supposedly undiscriminating unintellectual female readership. What she’s really saying, on a meta level, using the charismatic Henry Crawford as her ventriloquist’s dummy, is that any reader who believes they can absorb HER meaning by instinct, without any conscious effort and study, is going to wind up with exactly the wrong opinion about Shakespeare, and about her writing as well!

If there is any characteristic that unites JA with Henry Crawford, and with Lizzy Bennet during the first half of P&P, it is what Darcy so succinctly expressed:

"I shall not say you are mistaken," he replied, "because you could not really believe me to entertain any design of alarming you; and I have had the pleasure of your acquaintance long enough to know that you find great enjoyment in occasionally professing opinions which in fact are not your own."

Elizabeth laughed heartily at this picture of herself…”

And I assert, with a high degree of confidence, that a significant portion of the basis of the widespread mistaken preconceptions that still widely prevail about Jane Austen, are based on a widespread fundamental failure to recognize that JA, via Darcy, was describing Jane Austen herself, both as to the opinions that her novels seem to express on her behalf, and also as to the opinions her letters seem to express as well. In a nutshell, Darcy was describing Elizabeth’s ironical inclinations, and in so do, he points backwards to his own creator, Jane Austen, for whom irony was the heart and soul of every word she wrote.  

Now, that sets the stage for me to return to Chwe’s op/ed piece, and to my claim that reconfirmation bias is at least as big a risk for those who preserve the status quo in science and literary criticism, as confirmation bias is for those who would demolish it. If  anything, the longer  an opinion is held, the harder it will be to change. So old wrong  ideas will be much harder to give up than new wrong  ideas!

Just think about the once widespread certainty that the sun revolves around the earth, that infectious diseases are caused by demons, that life on earth did not evolve, and a thousand other once-widely held “certainties”, both ancient and modern, which have, sooner or later, been discarded by educated people as a result of scientific evidence to the contrary.

It’s easy to reconstruct the kinds of preconceptions that people must have once held, in order to so tenaciously cling to such wrong ideas. Reconfirmation bias is the intellectual equivalent of digging in one’s heels. And so it just seems to be easier to spot confirmation bias in reformers than in conservative thinkers. But we’re all of us, reformers and conservatives, human beings subject to that same sort of potential prejudice and preconception.

Which brings me at long last to my punch line--- my central claim, which I have kept busy for nearly a decade researching, is that Jane Austen’s novels are all double stories, as to which the concealed “shadow stories” are reflective of an author who was a radical free-thinking feminist who was a fierce critic of all patriarchal aspects of her society. Obviously, this view is currently espoused only by a small number of Janeites who’ve become familiar with my theories, and have found them convincing based on the diffuse format I have presented them in to date.

So, from my (admittedly mostly solitary) side of the telescope, the universal belief that JA’s novels are not double stories is comparable to the once universal belief that the world is flat. I claim that each Austen novel is a “house” which consists of not one, but two stories (all puns intended).

But I also fully recognize that the burden of proof I will carry in order to achieve wide acceptance of my claims will be very heavy. Hence the decade I’ve spent patiently peeling away successive layers of JA’s literary onions, compressing my conceptual framework tighter and tighter together. And a key portion of my argument, I have also long recognized, will be to demonstrate the reconfirmation bias that I see everywhere in contemporary Austen literary criticism.

Chwe wrote about the grave danger of “focus only on evidence that supports their preconceptions”. I will therefore leave you with perhaps the best example I know of reconfirmation bias among Janeites who do not believe JA was a radical critic of her patriarchal society, or that she expressed the sharpest part of her critique  sub rosa, just beneath the light bright and sparkling surface of her novels.

In 1999, i.e., 14 years ago, Jill Heydt-Stevenson presented unassailable evidence, expressed in clear terms, that Garricks’s Riddle, which Mr. Woodhouse struggles to recall in Chapter 9 of Emma, is, when read in full (i.e., including, crucially, the much dicier stanzas he can NOT recall) the expression of a syphilitic man’s depraved urge to cure his venereal disease by having sex with a “frozen maid”, i.e., a virgin girl.

Now, this was 14 years ago, so it dates back to the beginning of Internet discourse about Jane Austen. Since 2005, when I first read JHS’s claims about Mr. Woodhouse’s hidden meaning, I’ve written about it  many times in Austen L, in Janeites, and in my blog. And her work has been cited, albeit always in passing, in many subsequent books and articles.

But how many of you who reading this today, who have a firmly held opinion about JA’s authorial intentions being very different from those I’ve ascribed to her, above, have ever really tried to come to terms with WHY JA would insert such a disgusting, horrifying subtext as this in one of her novels, and what’s more, to do it in such a subliminal way?

This is a theme that we’d expect to see instead in the long running Special Victims Unit TV series starring Mariska Hargitay, not in Emma, and especially not in a scene that, superficially, as we fondly observe and listen to Emma, her father, Harriet and Mr. Elton  seems to be nothing other than a masterful comedy of romantic errors.

Garrick’s Riddle in Emma is evidence that supports my otherwise seemingly preposterous conception of Jane Austen. Before rejecting my admittedly radical new interpretation of its significance out of hand, and before suggesting that I have been guilty of confirmation bias, have you focused enough on this evidence to properly assess its implications for your theory of Jane Austen?  Have you paid attention to JA’s near universal deployment of irony in her writing?

Specifically, have you considered whether this evidence might, combined with hundreds of other disturbing cruxes and ambiguities scattered throughout JA’s novels, support my claim that there are actually two versions of each of these novels, one of them much darker than previously understood in Austen novels?  

And if you haven’t considered, and are not prompted by this post to do so now, then how exactly does that differ from what I’ve dubbed reconfirmation bias?

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter