Willoughby drunk or not drunk: that IS the question…Austen wanted us to struggle to answer!

The final straw that prompted me to post my reaction earlier today….  http://tinyurl.com/j6mh3k4  ….to Helena Kelly’s book was the dismissive review of it that John Mullan wrote, that just ran in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/16/jane-austen-secret-radical-helena-kelly-review

You might infer from my previous post that I’m not a fan of Kelly or her book. That’s true, but I still found unsavory the passive aggressive nastiness of Mullan’s attack on her and it. What most got under Mullan’s skin, it seems to me, was Kelly’s blithe insistence that she knew something crucial about Jane Austen (i.e., that she was a secret radical), an insight that for two centuries had eluded Mullan and all other Austen scholars ---- except, as Kelly, alas, neglected to mention, and as I outlined in my previous post, for me—but that is not my topic today.

I am writing this post about one part of Mullan’s revenge on Kelly for the crime of challenging his entrenched idea of Jane Austen. As I see it, Mullan took a page out of Deirdre Le Faye’s reactionary playbook (when she harshly and personally attacked David Nokes and his excellent 1998 Austen biography), by suggesting Kelly was a careless reader of Austenian detail, and therefore was not trustworthy on the Austen Big Picture:  

“And there’s the thing: while Kelly is making her claims about the subtexts that have evaded previous critics, Austen admirers will keep noticing little mistakes about what is going on in the novels. She says that Willoughby is drunk when he turns up at what he fears is Marianne’s deathbed in Sense and Sensibility, but in fact his “Yes, I am very drunk” is entirely sarcastic.” END QUOTE FROM MULLAN

I was intrigued, and located the passage in Kelly’s book that had prompted this correction by Mullan: “Where we hear [Willoughby’s] repentance in his own words, he is mawkish, self-indulgent; remember that he turns up at what he thinks is Marianne’s death-bed intoxicated (‘yes, I am very drunk’) and demands Elinor’s attention, as of right. There’s nothing redemptive about the scene.” END QUOTE FROM KELLY

Mullan’s confident assertion of Kelly’s error brought me up short, because I didn’t recall for sure whether Willoughby was drunk or not. So, as is my custom in such matters, I took nobody’s word as gospel, and instead went back to Austen’s text to search for an answer. So that you can have the same opportunity, before I go further, I suggest that you reread the relevant passage, and see if you can come to your own definitive answer to that question:

“…Elinor, starting back with a look of horror at the sight of him, obeyed the first impulse of her heart in turning instantly to quit the room, and her hand was already on the lock, when its action was suspended by his hastily advancing, and saying, in a voice rather of command than supplication, "Miss Dashwood, for half an hour—for ten minutes—I entreat you to stay."

"No, sir," she replied with firmness, "I shall NOT stay. Your business cannot be with ME. The servants, I suppose, forgot to tell you that Mr. Palmer was not in the house."

"Had they told me," he cried with vehemence, "that Mr. Palmer and all his relations were at the devil, it would not have turned me from the door. My business is with you, and only you."

"With me!"—in the utmost amazement—"well, sir,—be quick—and if you can—less violent."

"Sit down, and I will be both."

She hesitated; she knew not what to do. The possibility of Colonel Brandon's arriving and finding her there, came across her. But she had promised to hear him, and her curiosity no less than her honor was engaged. After a moment's recollection, therefore, concluding that prudence required dispatch, and that her acquiescence would best promote it, she walked silently towards the table, and sat down. He took the opposite chair, and for half a minute not a word was said by either.

"Pray be quick, sir,"—said Elinor, impatiently;—"I have no time to spare."

He was sitting in an attitude of deep meditation, and seemed not to hear her.

"Your sister," said he, with abruptness, a moment afterwards—"is out of danger. I heard it from the servant. God be praised!—But is it true? is it really true?"

Elinor would not speak. He repeated the inquiry with yet greater eagerness.

"For God's sake tell me, is she out of danger, or is she not?"

"We hope she is."

He rose up, and walked across the room.

"Had I known as much half an hour ago—But since I AM here,"—speaking with a forced vivacity as he returned to his seat—"what does it signify?—For once, Miss Dashwood—it will be the last time, perhaps—let us be cheerful together.—I am in a fine mood for gaiety.— Tell me honestly"—a deeper glow overspreading his cheeks—"do you think me most a knave or a fool?"

Elinor looked at him with greater astonishment than ever. She began to think that he must be in liquor;—the strangeness of such a visit, and of such manners, seemed no otherwise intelligible; and with this impression she immediately rose, saying, "Mr. Willoughby, I advise you at present to return to Combe—I am not at leisure to remain with you longer.— Whatever your business may be with me, it will be better recollected and explained to-morrow."

"I understand you," he replied, with an expressive smile, and a voice perfectly calm; "yes, I am very drunk.— A pint of porter with my cold beef at Marlborough was enough to over-set me."

"At Marlborough!"—cried Elinor, more and more at a loss to understand what he would be at.

"Yes,—I left London this morning at eight o'clock, and the only ten minutes I have spent out of my chaise since that time procured me a nuncheon at Marlborough."

The steadiness of his manner, and the intelligence of his eye as he spoke, convincing Elinor, that whatever other unpardonable folly might bring him to Cleveland, he was not brought there by intoxication, she said, after a moment's recollection, "Mr. Willoughby, you OUGHT to feel, and I certainly DO—that after what has passed—your coming here in this manner, and forcing yourself upon my notice, requires a very particular excuse.—What is it, that you mean by it?"—

"I mean,"—said he, with serious energy—"if I can, to make you hate me one degree less than you do NOW. I mean to offer some kind of explanation, some kind of apology, for the past; to open my whole heart to you, and by convincing you, that though I have been always a blockhead, I have not been always a rascal, to obtain something like forgiveness from Ma—from your sister."

"Is this the real reason of your coming?"

"Upon my soul it is,"—was his answer, with a warmth which brought all the former Willoughby to her remembrance, and in spite of herself made her think him sincere.

"If that is all, you may be satisfied already,—for Marianne DOES—she has LONG forgiven you."

"Has she?"—he cried, in the same eager tone.— "Then she has forgiven me before she ought to have done it. But she shall forgive me again, and on more reasonable grounds.—NOW will you listen to me?"

Elinor bowed her assent.

"I do not know," said he, after a pause of expectation on her side, and thoughtfulness on his own….”

So, what do you think? Was Willoughby really drunk, as Kelly opined? Or merely sarcastic about it, as Mullan claimed? For Kelly to have stated he was drunk without any qualification does have the appearance of her having only noticed Willoughby’s “I am very drunk”, without registering the narration that followed soon afterwards: “The steadiness of his manner, and the intelligence of his eye as he spoke, convincing Elinor, that whatever other unpardonable folly might bring him to Cleveland, he was not brought there by intoxication…”

So that proves Mullan is correct, right? Well….no! I believe that Mullan got so wrapped up in springing his little trap on Kelly, that he inadvertently hoist himself on his own pedagogical petard. Let me show you how. First, please read that narration again, but this time ask yourself a different question--- is the statement that Willoughby “was not brought there by intoxication” an objective fact that an omniscient narrator is telling us, such that we can be sure it is correct? That seems to be Mullan’s interpretation. Or is it a subjective opinion of Elinor’s, and therefore open to the reader’s own analysis of the facts presented in this passage?

I think it’s clear that “She began to think that he must be in liquor” and “…convincing Elinor…he was not brought there by intoxication” are both Elinor’s opinions, and are not objective facts. In your rereading, did you pick up on all the subtle clues that JA provided in her description of Willoughby’s behavior and in the words he speaks? Were you able to come to a definitive conclusion as to whether he’s really drunk, or only being sarcastic about it? Mullan confidently states that Willoughby was being sarcastic, but he gives no basis for this inference, he believes it's obvious. And yet, it appears that the evidence which convinces Mullan of this is Elinor's suddenly being convinced that he wasn't drunk---he's on no firmer ground than Kelly!

I sure wasn’t convinced either way. And so I believe therefore that there is a third possibility—i.e., that Kelly and Mullan are BOTH wrong, because this passage, it seems to me, was carefully and deliberately written by Jane Austen to be completely ambiguous as to whether Willoughby is actually drunk! And why, you may ask, would Austen be so uncooperative as to deliberately create such an ambiguity? Because, among several good reasons that come to mind, that ambiguity allows the novel to provide to the reader a kind of verisimilitude to real life experience. I.e., none of us has the benefit of an omniscient narrator perched on our shoulder, telling us The Truth – we have to work from the impressions we derive with our senses and our minds, and struggle to make sense of what is going on around us, especially when it comes to interpreting the feelings and actions of other people!

And so, I believe you will find, if you go through that passage, you will find all sorts of interesting data about what is going on with Willoughby during his lengthy conversation with Elinor (is there a longer conversation between two characters, especially in the sheer number of responses back and forth, in any of JA’s novels?), but I for one do not find any of it determinative. It seems to me to be equally plausible that Willoughby is very drunk, highly worked up after a very long strenuous horseback ride, highly worked up about the possibility of Marianne being mortally ill, or some combination of the three. We cannot know for sure, because all of our data is filtered through Elinor’s mind and heart, and that is NOT a reliable source, especially given that Elinor has probably herself partaken of some more of Mrs. Jennings’s potent Constantia wine, and that Elinor is half-crazy with worry about Marianne, and frantically missing her mother as well. 

How ironic that both Mullan and Kelly are both wrong, because they are both certain about something no reader is justified in being certain about. And that leads me to the ultimate irony of Mullan’s final slam at Kelly:   “Here is [Austen’s] true radicalism: not in her opinions – most of which are unknowable – but in the sheer audacity of her fictional technique.” To which I respond, Metaphysician Mullan, heal thyself, because you lecture Ms. Kelly about her having failed to appreciate “the sheer audacity of [Austen’s] fictional technique”, when you yourself have failed to appreciate what I think is the most audacious aspect of Jane Austen’s fictional technique—her radical commitment to creating an ambiguous, and therefore lifelike, fictional reading experience, so that readers who realize this will be more likely to resist the urge to leap to overhasty conclusions about the outside world…and ourselves. 

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

ALL the Shadow Stories of Jane Austen the Secret Radical (Feminist)

In Janeites, Ellen Moody wrote: “Brief comment for those thinking of buying or going out of their way to obtain [Helena Kelly’s new book Jane Austen the Secret Radical]:  I suggest it's mistitled. It opens with a novelistic recreation of Jane Austen's consciousness (goes into this kind of thing far more than Nokes) and briefly retells her early coming into the world in a way that is pure Janeism. It does things like slide by Eliza's parentage. The tone is complacent.  OTOH, it is not jargon ridden at all: it seems aimed at a large general audience. The attitude towards the replacement picture of JA in the 1870s is a case in point: the earlier one is "amateurish," and before you know it, this new one is made somehow just as or more accurate. In comparison (thus far) Maggie Lane is hard stuff, has grit. Arnie need not worry.”

Nancy Mayer wrote in reply to Ellen: “According to a review of the book I saw, she is presenting some of the theories we have been hearing from Arnie for the last decade, if not longer. I'd rather read Jane Austen and the law.”

Thank you both, ladies, very much, for the above shout-outs!  It gives me great pleasure that we three have found a way, over time, to agree to disagree strenuously with each other, yet with courtesy and mutual personal respect. Ellen, I really sincerely appreciate your final sentence-- we’ve sometimes agreed and sometimes disagreed in our interpretations of Austen, but what we’ve both recognized all along is that there is something very similar about us both—we’re both obsessive scholars who’ve devoted countless hours to close reading of serious literature that we love, albeit each in our own way.

And Nancy, I always smile when I tell people that there’s a person I’ve engaged with online for 15 years, who disagrees with 99% of my ideas about Jane Austen, and says so in no uncertain terms every chance she gets, and yet she defends my right to express my ideas in the online Austen group she moderates, and we get along very well personally, so much so that we often joke about the chasm that separates us in our shared love of Jane Austen!  ;)

As for Kelly’s book, I’ve deliberately avoided saying anything about it publicly since I first became aware of it three months ago, before it was actually published. As some who follow me in these groups might have guessed, my right eyebrow first involuntarily raised itself about 3 inches when I saw the title, and then saw the name of the author, for a number of reasons, some of which I will outline below, reserving the right to raise some others if and when the time feels right to me to do so. I will present only facts, and leave it to you, the reader, to infer what they all point to.

First, I refer you to the following paragraph in the chapter about me (entitled ‘The Jane Austen Code’) in Deborah Yaffe’s 2013 book  Among the Janeites, a chapter in which Deborah (who is another Janeite friend with whom I amicably but strongly disagree about Jane Austen) expressed many of the same, not terribly positive critiques of my ideas that Nancy has expressed in terser terms over the years. In the passage quoted below, Deborah described her skeptical reaction to hearing me speak publicly at the 2010 JASNA AGM in Portland, Oregon (where I did not live then, but moved here two years ago) on the topic set forth in the following link (still on display at the JASNA website---just scroll down to Breakout Session C2):  http://www.jasna.org/agms/portland/breakout.html

“The talk was vintage Arnie, a semi-convincing, semi-outlandish tapestry woven from the puns he detected in Austen’s use of words like ‘constitutional’ and ‘confinement’, the allusions he perceived to works by other writers, the evidence of feminist anger he found in her letters, and the biographical information he had unearthed about long forgotten contemporaries who, he was convinced, had provided models for her characters. Curiously, Arnie’s central thesis--that Austen meant her readers to understand that the mother of Northanger Abbey’s hero, Henry Tilney, had died in childbirth, not from the “bilious fever” Henry describes, and that this detail revealed Austen’s outrage at the dangerous serial pregnancies that married women of her time often endured—seemed to have little bearing on his controversial theory of shadow stories….In the months after the Portland meeting, it looked as if some of Arnie’s fantasies might be coming true. JASNA chapters in Florida, California, and Oregon invited him to speak. A joint presentation with a local college professor drew two hundred Janeites to a kickoff event for a new south Florida chapter of JASNA, which Arnie planned to organize. The Miami Herald previewed the meeting, and mentioned Arnie’s book, which now had the working title The Shadow Stories of Jane Austen, the Secret Radical Feminist….”

Before I went back and reread Deborah’s last sentence, I had nearly forgotten that working title for my first Austen book. And as I read The Shadow Stories of Jane Austen, the Secret Radical Feminist….”, for some odd reason my eyebrow started twitching again…

But let me move on to the following 2012 online review, also still visible at the JASNA website, written by Jana Bickel, about the talk I gave in late 2011 to the Southern California JASNA chapter: http://www.jasnasw.org/2011_winter_meeting____do_not_physic_them____medicine_in_jane_austen_s_time_109513.htm     

“Now for the heart of the presentation, the concealed pregnancies. At first I was willing to concede there might be a few concealed pregnancies like Lydia Bennett, Maria Bertram, possibly Jane Fairfax. Well, having been secretly married to Frank Churchill it is possible that Jane Fairfax might have been pregnant and that might explain her illness and nervousness about Churchill’s interest in other women. But no, that isn’t what Perlstein means. He means that Jane is truly a fallen woman (a so much nicer phrase than the word that initially came to mind), with Colonel Campbell, Mr. Elton, and John Knightly and, to top it off, who leaves a baby for Mrs. Weston to raise. Perlstein is on a roll now. More concealed pregnancies….like Marianne’s illness and poor Mrs. Tilney “murdered by childbirth.” More shameful secrets. Harriet a little schemer in bed with Frank Churchill and Mr Elton among others. But the worst is yet to come. What was the real reason Jane moved to close to Pemberley? Give up. So Jane could be close to Mr. Darcy….” 

With that introduction, I now turn your attention to Kelly’s book, a good deal of which can actually be accessed online at Google Books. That’s where I first scanned through it about 6 weeks ago. Imagine my surprise when I saw that her chapter about Northanger Abbey focused on the same death in childbirth subtext I spoke about at length at the 2010 JASNA AGM. But, what’s more, pretty much all of Kelly’s specific bullet points on that argument were also the same as my own! To be specific, here is a list that is not complete, but will still give you the idea of how uncannily close her 2016 argument is to my 2010 argument:

ONE: the death of Mrs. Tilney as death in childbirth;
TWO: that Mrs. Tilney was thereby metaphorically "poisoned" by her husband’s semen;
THREE: that the General was therefore literally a latter day "Bluebeard", who, by impregnating her, thereby "murdered" her;
FOUR: that Mrs. Tilney’s "bilious fever" was really "puerperal fever";
FIVE: Austen’s comic contrast of the wifely survivor of double digit pregnancies, Mrs. Morland, to Mrs. Tilney, as a key clue to the above subtextual theme;

SIX: Giving examples of Jane Austen's persistent negative attitude toward real life serial pregnancy in her social circle; and, last and most significantly, because it is a global point: 

SEVEN: that the above subtext was part of Austen's global, significant, but covert concern about the ownership of women's bodies by men, which was sanctioned by every major English societal institution, a truly Gothic horror implicit in everyday English marriage.

Now, as to Point Seven, those of you reading this in Janeites or Austen-L, I ask you----how many times have I quoted Henry Tilney’s rant (“Remember the country and age in which we live…We are Christians ….voluntary spies…”)  and called it an anti-parody, an illustration of Austen’s actual outrage at how all the powers that be in England did absolutely nothing to protect women? I’d guess it must be about 100 or more by now (and that is also probably the number of times Nancy has politely advised me I was wrong!)

Now read the following excerpt from Caroline Criado-Perez’s glowing Guardian review, six weeks ago of Kelly’s “sublime literary detective work”:

“Marriage as Jane knew it involved a woman giving up everything to her husband – her money, her body, her very existence as a legal adult. Husbands could beat their wives, rape them, imprison them, take their children away, all within the bounds of the law.” And that is before we even get on to the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth that were implicit in any marriage plot at a time where “almost every family had a tale of maternal death to tell”. Through a combination of beautifully precise close readings alongside Austen’s biographical, literary and historical context, Kelly shows us that the novels were about nothing more or less than the burning political questions of the day..."

So, out of Kelly’s entire book, which includes interpretations of all six Austen novels, Criado-Perez was most impressed by…….Kelly’s argument about Northanger Abbey …..which just happens to track my own in every detail!

But, some of you might say, this could all be coincidence, something in the realm of “great (or crazy) minds think alike”, the result of 21^st century changes which have made these radical themes visible in Austen for the first time. Well, be aware also of the following additional facts:

First, Kelly was a grad student at Oxford in June 2007 when she attended my talk there at the Romantic Realignments Seminar (at which I had been invited to speak by Senior Professor Fiona Stafford and her two (then) grad students, Georgina Green (now Perry) and Olivia Murphy), on the topic of the puzzles and “shadow story” of Emma. Kelly even met me in person, in company, the next evening after my talk before I left Oxford! So from then onward, for the next 9 ½ years till her book came out, she knew very well who I was and what sort of subversive interpretations I made about Jane Austen. 

Second, in 2010, when Kelly’s (excellent) article about enclosure appeared in Persuasions Online, I emailed her at that time to praise her insights in that article, and identified her as a kindred spirit in looking at the darker side of Austen’s novels. Although Kelly did not reply to me then, she did acknowledge to me in a Tweets six weeks ago that she had indeed previously looked at my blog posts about her article. So, again, she had a refresher about my “heretical” stance about Jane Austen .

Third, what I didn’t recall till last month was that Kelly ALSO attended the same July 2009 Chawton House conference (Title: “New Directions re Jane Austen”) that I did, at which I gave an updated version of my 2007 Emma talk. It was a massive event, with 70 speakers over 4 days, and most of the leading Austen scholars in the world were there, in addition to unknowns like her and me. Here is the Persuasions Online article by Gillian Dow at Chawton House Library & U. of Southampton… ... http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol30no2/editors.html   ...which mentions Kelly specifically as  having been one of the presenters, about her (excellent) enclosure research that she wrote an article for in the 2010 Persuasions Online, for which I emailed Kelly praise back then.

On a hunch, I retrieved from my computer hard drive my Word file for my final script for my 20-minute July 2009 talk at that Chawton House conference. That’s when I was reminded of what I wrote and said near the end of it, after I had gone through my argument for Jane Fairfax being pregnant in Emma, and when I was extrapolating my points (about women's bodies in jeopardy) to other Austen novels besides Emma. Here's what I said to my audience (which included Deirdre Le Faye and the late Brian Southam):

"In Northanger Abbey, Austen wanted us to ignore Henry Tilney and recognize that Catherine Morland’s Gothic fantasies of General “Tyranny” as the wife-murdering Bluebeard of Northanger Abbey were all too valid in a world where husbands, including several of Austen’s own brothers, routinely “murdered” their wives with a little too much “love and eloquence”! While in London this coming week, I intend to visit the memorial erected in the 17th century by Samuel Morland in honor of his two wives who died in childbirth, a memorial I strongly suspect was visited by the young Jane Austen over two centuries ago. But that “disorder” also includes the sexual awakening of a girl (the hyacinth that Catherine learns to love, the sexual architecture of she explores that dark and stormy night in Northanger Abbey). As with all other issues raised by her novels, Austen offers elusive complexity and ambiguity."

END QUOTE FROM MY JULY 2009 SCRIPT FOR MY CHAWTON HOUSE TALK

Did you notice my claim at the end of that quote about Catherine’s sexual awakening at the Abbey, which is not so closely related to my argument about death-in-childbirth? For some reason, it also causes my eyebrow to quiver. Maybe that’s because of the odd similarity of that last part in my 2009 talk about Catherine Morland’s sexual awakening, to the following passage in Kelly’s chapter on NA:

“As Catherine explores the Abbey, with all its faults, storms, drawers, divisions, cavities, crevices, folds, etc., Austen takes the reader on a merry subliminal tour through Gothic sexual suggestiveness, upping the ante on Austen’s literary sources such as Radcliffe’s Udolpho, Lee’s The Recess, and even Cleland’s Fanny Hill, among others. The morning after Catherine’s phantasmagorical experiences that dark and stormy night in the Abbey, Henry’s approval of her floral appreciation is a perfect double entendre  for her nocturnal romp in a carnal garden:  “At any rate, however, I am pleased that you have learnt to love a hyacinth. The mere habit of learning to love is the thing; and a teachableness of disposition in a young lady is a great blessing. Has my sister a pleasant mode of instruction?”   END QUOTE FROM KELLY          

Learning to love a hyacinth, dark and stormy night at the Abbey, hmmm………. One last time, my right eyebrow has now started twitching again. And you know what that means – the upturned knows.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter 

Constantia Wine, the Eve of St. Agnes, & Sense & Sensibility

Earlier this year, I suggested here…. http://tinyurl.com/z2rzk2c  ….that the allusion to the Eve of St. Agnes hidden in the implicit calendar of Sense & Sensibility (which I noted several years ago) was also connected to the Romeo & Juliet subtext of Queen Mab the horse Willoughby offers to Marianne; in a (hazel) nutshell, both have at their core erotic/romantic dreams.

Today I take note of yet another sly hint in S&S at the Eve of St. Agnes—specifically, the ritual of the wine that a single young woman customarily drinks, so she will dream of her future husband. Here is the relevant passage (with the hint in ALL CAPS):

“…In the drawing-room, whither [Elinor] then repaired, she was soon joined by Mrs. Jennings, with a wine-glass, full of something, in her hand.

"My dear," said she, entering, "I have just recollected that I have SOME OF THE FINEST OLD CONSTANTIA WINE in the house that ever was tasted, so I have brought a glass of it for your sister. My poor husband! how fond he was of it! Whenever he had a touch of his old colicky gout, he said it did him more good than any thing else in the world. Do take it to your sister."

"Dear Ma'am," replied Elinor, smiling at the difference of the complaints for which it was recommended, "how good you are! But I have just left Marianne in bed, and, I hope, almost asleep; and as I think nothing will be of so much service to her as rest, if you will give me leave, I will drink the wine myself."

Mrs. Jennings, though regretting that she had not been five minutes earlier, was satisfied with the compromise; and Elinor, as she swallowed the chief of it, reflected, that though its effects on a colicky gout were, at present, of little importance to her, its healing powers, on a disappointed heart might be as reasonably tried on herself as on her sister.”

We all know that Elinor winds up drinking the wine that Mrs. Jennings suggested she bring to Marianne. But would you believe that Mrs. Jennnings, in her Miss Batesian way, has dropt a sly clue about the Eve of St. Agnes? It’s in the name of the variety of wine she touts so highly. I had a hunch that “Constantia” might mean something more than wine, and sure enough, when I Googled “Constantia” and “St. Agnes” together, I was first led here: http://tinyurl.com/jxf94ko  That’s an image of the 1654 painting by Pietro da Cortona entitled “Saint Constantia's Vision before the Tomb of Saints Agnes and Emerentiana”.

Never heard of it? Well, I quickly found this about Saint Constantia: “Saint Constantia, or Constance (d. 350 AD) was the daughter of the Roman emperor Constantine; after being healed miraculously (of leprosy) at the tomb of St. Agnes, she took a vow of virginity.”

That only whetted my appetite for the more complete explanation lovingly provided here:

http://www.stconstance.org/our-patron/   “Saint Constance was born in about 325 AD, as Constantine Augustus. Her father was the Emperor, Constantine the Great. She had leprosy, which made her very sad, and she cried often. Since the leprosy created ugly spots on her face, not many people could bear to look at her, or even be with her. Giving up hope at times, she wanted to wear a mask. Her father had doctors from every land searching for a cure, but it seemed hopeless. As a last resort, a friend told Constance about a young martyr named Agnes, at whose tomb cures were known to happen. On the way to the tomb of Saint Agnes, a woman overheard Constance and her friend questioning each other about what to do when they arrived at the tomb. The woman explained how God performs miracles when people pray to Him through the saints. Constance was moved by this woman’s faith and become a Christian. Upon arriving at the tomb of Saint Agnes, Constance covered her face with a scarf and knelt down to pray, as the woman had taught her. When she got up and removed the scarf, the leprosy was gone from her face, as well as from the rest of her body.
Saint Constance chose not to marry. She spent the rest of her life helping others, the way that God had helped her, working with the sick and giving them hope. She died in about 354 AD, near the Basilica of Saint Agnes, which was commissioned by Constance. This basilica was built at the site where she was cured.”

So now we can understand not only why Mrs. Jennings serves “Constantia” wine, it’s why she touts its healing properties-- but JA, with masterfully ironic understatement, has reduced leprosy to gout!: “Whenever he had a touch of his old colicky gout, he said it did him more good than any thing else in the world.” And, in that same vein, it’s also why “Elinor, as she swallowed the chief of it, reflected, that though its effects on a colicky gout were, at present, of little importance to her, its healing powers, on a disappointed heart might be as reasonably tried on herself as on her sister.” From leprosy to gout to a broken heart in three short steps!

And by the way, Wikipedia reveals that Jane Austen is not the only famous author who wove “Constantia Wine”, with special powers, into a story:

“In Charles Dickens’ last (and unfinished) novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Constantia wine is served to the Reverend Septimus by his mother. "As, whenever the Reverend Septimus fell a-musing, his good mother took it to be an infallible sign that he ‘wanted support,’ the blooming old lady made all haste to the dining-room closet, to produce from it the support embodied in a glass of Constantia and a home-made biscuit."

In Charles Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal (poem XXVI) entitled sed non satiata, Baudelaire compares the charms of his beloved to the pleasures brought by Nuits-Saint-Georges and Constantia wine: “Even more than Constantia, than opium, than Nuits, I prefer the elixir of your mouth, where love performs its slow dance.” 

And finally, our own Diane Reynolds, recent author of her biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the women in his life, will get a kick out of this account (by the young Bonhoeffer in his diary) of a visit to certain art heritage sites in Rome with a Sense & Sensibility aura:

"Then Sant'Agnese fuori. In spite of a lot of restoration, it gives the impression of being stylistically pure. The catacombs are very interesting. Among other things, a painting of the Madonna without a halo but with a halo above her head, Santa Costanza.". The editor glosses this as follows “St. Agnes outside the walls was founded at a nearby site by Constantia, daughter of Constantine...Saint Constance is the mausoleum for the daughter of Constantine; it has mosaics from the 4th century."

So now you have yet another example of why the wise reader will pay as close attention to Mrs. Jennings’ ‘trivial’ dialog as to Miss Bates’s ‘little matters’. And you ain’t heard nothing yet—wait till my next post, when I’ll tell you how Mrs. Jennings’ glass of Constantia wine is actually the key to one of the most significant plot turns in the shadow story of Sense & Sensibility, as it helps Marianne with what really ails her!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Shakespeare’s Richard III & Austen’s Richard Morland: Very respectable men who’d never been handsome

In Austen-L, Maria Elena Torres responded to my previous post…http://tinyurl.com/hnhhmrw

  …..as follows:   “Hi Arnie - I'm going to toss a little monkey wrench into this thoughtful post by saying that Jane was aware of the controversy surrounding Richard's true character, and seemed as open to the Walpole point of view as to Shakespeare's point of view:

"Richard the 3d: The Character of this Prince has been in general very severely treated by Historians, but as he was a *York*, I am rather inclined to suppose him a very respectable Man. It has indeed been confidently asserted that he killed his two Nephews & his Wife, but it has also been declared that he did *not* kill his two Nephews, which I am inclined to beleive true; & if this is the case, it may also be affirmed that he did not kill his Wife, for if Perkin Warbeck was really the Duke of York, why might not Lambert Simnel be the Widow of Richard. Whether innocent or guilty, he did not reign long in peace, for Henry Tudor E. of Richmond as great a villain as ever lived, made a great fuss about getting the Crown & having killed the King at the battle of Bosworth, he succeeded to it."​  

Since she displays an open hostility to Henry VII and VIII (as well as to Elizabeth I!), I would have guessed, if going by historical perspectives, that she would have disliked the name Henry much more than Richard! ​That said, taking Shakespeare's play as influential (as is certainly is), I think your suggestion has merit.”

Thanks very much, Maria Elena, for that excellent reaction! I didn’t think to look at the teenaged JA’s view of Richard III, which you quoted, above, but, as I’ll now explain, you’ve just prompted me to uncover yet another, and very crucial, piece of the puzzle, which broadens the scope of JA’s allusion to Richard III, and conclusively demystifies JA’s oft-expressed, supposed dislike of the name “Richard”!

As with many other passages in the 16 year old JA’s satirical History of England, it is very dangerous to take what JA says about Richard III at face value, as if she literally meant what she wrote. To paraphrase Darcy’s admiring comment on Elizabeth Bennet’s playful wit, I have had the pleasure of Jane Austen’s acquaintance long enough to know that she found great enjoyment in occasionally professing opinions which in fact were not her own….and nowhere more so than in her Juvenilia, and in particular her opinions about the past kings and queens of England. There could not be a closer synchronicity than between Elizabeth Bennet’s witty dialog in P&P, and JA’s witty absurdities in her History of England.

And so I suggest to you that, as with her infamous Sharade on James I’s predilection for his Carr-pet, the young author’s pronouncements are more riddles than averrals.

In that vein, my eye was particularly drawn to this line describing Richard III:

“…as he was a York, I am rather inclined to suppose him a very respectable Man.”

Richard III a very respectable man? Really??? The irony fairly drips off the page! I decided to search in JA’s novels, to get a better sense of her usage of that word “respectable” in her fiction, and that’s when I struck pure gold. The narrator’s wry description of Catherine’s father, Mr. Richard Morland, in Northanger Abbey, of which I initially only quoted a portion in my previous post, but will now present in its very revealing fullness, uses that identical phrase:   

“Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard — and he had never been handsome.”

Millions of eyes have read that passage in NA during the past two centuries, but none before mine today have ever looked at it through a special “Richard III” lens. When I did, I immediately noticed the giant hint in that post-dash afterthought --- “never been handsome”! Of course we’re right back with Richard III, whose extreme lack of handsomeness is the thread which runs through the heart of Richard III. One of the motors which drives Richard’s relentless, ruthless ambition for the kingship is the way he has been scorned all his life for his deformed hunch-backed appearance, with several characters angrily likening him to a toad, adder, spider, and other unhandsome beasts.

So, to sum up so far, when JA, seemingly as a bit of irrelevant comedy, points out that Mr. Morland had never been handsome, right after saying he was a very respectable man, despite his name being Richard, JA, at 15 already the mistress of ironic understatement, is giving THREE giant hints that all point like a laser beam to Shakespeare’s Richard III----and, as an added inside joke for her family and close friends, to her own juvenile description of him as well!

But that giant three-part wink at Shakespeare’s Richard III points to an even deeper, thematic current of evil masked by the surface of respectability in Northanger Abbey. Look at the following excerpt from Act 3, Scene 7 of Richard III, in which Richard and his co-conspirator Buckingham acts out their roles in a cynical playlet quickly improvised by Richard (called Gloucester in the play text), who briefly dons the mask of a pious hermit more interested in private prayer and contemplation of God than in assuming the throne of England, while Buckingham plays the part of the people’s earnest advocate, persuading Richard to hear a higher call, for the sake of the English people, and accept the crown. It is one of the sharpest and most cynical ironies about the power of a Big Lie, in a play filled with them—and the echoes of it are scattered throughout Northanger Abbey:

GLOUCESTER

…When holy and devout religious men
Are at their beads, 'tis hard to draw them thence,
So sweet is zealous contemplation.

Enter GLOUCESTER aloft, between two Bishops. CATESBY returns

LORD MAYOR  See, where HE STANDS BETWEEN TWO CLERGYMEN!   [Richard Morland, clergymen]

BUCKINGHAM

Two props of virtue for a Christian prince,
To stay him from the fall of vanity:
And, see, a book of prayer in his hand,
True ornaments to know a holy man.
Famous Plantagenet, most gracious prince,
Lend favourable ears to our request;
And pardon us the interruption
Of thy devotion and right Christian zeal.

GLOUCESTER

My lord, there needs no such apology:
I rather do beseech you pardon me,
Who, earnest in the service of my God,
NEGLECT the visitation of my friends.   [Richard Morland, not neglected]
But, leaving this, what is your grace's pleasure?

BUCKINGHAM

Even that, I hope, which pleaseth God above,
And all good men of this ungovern'd isle.

GLOUCESTER

I do suspect I have done some offence
That seems disgracious in the city's eyes,
And that you come to reprehend my ignorance.

BUCKINGHAM

You have, my lord: would it might please your grace,
At our entreaties, to amend that fault!

GLOUCESTER    Else wherefore breathe I in a Christian land?  [Henry Tilney’s famous rant, see below]

BUCKINGHAM

Then know, it is your fault that you resign
The supreme seat, the throne majestical,
The scepter'd office of your ancestors,
Your state of fortune and your due of birth,
The lineal glory of your royal house,
To the corruption of a blemished stock:
Whilst, in the mildness of your sleepy thoughts,
Which here we waken to our country's good,
This noble isle doth want her proper limbs…[it doesn’t take long after this for Richard to accept the crown!]

Most significantly, the Satanic Richard cynically turns truth on its head, when he speaks of breathing in “a Christian land” of England, and JA pays a subtle homage to Richard’s cynical deception, when she has Henry Tilney castigate Catherine for imagining the General to be a wife murderer:    

“If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?”

As I’ve pointed out a hundred times in the past 8 years, despite the superficial appearance that Henry has corrected Catherine’s faulty perceptions, JA is really engaged in anti-parody here—she expects us to realize that Henry is actually wrong wrong wrong– English wives were actually the victims of the neglect of Law,  Church, Crown, & Society, which did look the other way as they were abused and neglected. And can you think of a better description of Richard III’s many crimes than we read in Henry’s list of horribles? Richard does commit atrocities, he does connive to twist the law of succession in his favor, he does get away with perpetrating the most outrageous frauds on all those around him in plain sight, by manipulating the perspectives of those observers.

And as a prime example of that, when Richard pulls off his remarkable seduction of Lady Anne, he does it in part with two pathetic claims of “poor” (remember,Richard Morland was not poor) lovesickness:

GLOUCESTER

Look, how this ring encompasseth finger.
Even so thy breast encloseth MY POOR HEART;
Wear both of them, for both of them are thine.
And if THY POOR DEVOTED SUPPLIANT may
But beg one favour at thy gracious hand,
Thou dost confirm his happiness for ever.

So, putting all of the above together with the evidence I presented in my first post yesterday, now I hope you’ll agree I’ve made a conclusive case that JA’s famous aversion to the name Richard was, at its base,  a covert, repeated hint at her longstanding fascination with Shakespeare’s first archvillain, Richard III. She winked at this in her letters mocking the real-life Dr. Hall and Mr. Richard Harvey; in Mrs. Musgrove’s mourning for son Richard in Persuasion; and also in the very respectable but not very handsome Richard Morland in Northanger Abbey!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter 

The “frightening” reason for Jane Austen’s mysterious antipathy for the name Richard

Yesterday, my wife and I went to the movies with good friends to see the National Theatre Live screening of Richard III, starring Ralph Fiennes, who was magnificently, seductively vile in the title role. The equally stellar supporting cast included Vanessa Redgrave as King Henry VI’s widow, Queen Margaret, whose curses early in the play prophesy the eventual unhorsed fatal downfall of Shakespeare’s first great archvillain.

The three hour performance was emotionally challenging, especially in the aftermath of a US presidential election, which finds an uneasy half of the electorate (myself included) casting a worried collective gaze on a president-elect who was compared six weeks ago to Shakespeare’s Richard III by Stephen Greenblatt, writing with eerie prescience:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/opinion/sunday/shakespeare-explains-the-2016-election.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=1

“For his theatrical test case, Shakespeare chose an example closer to home: the brief, unhappy reign in 15th-century England of King Richard III. Richard, as Shakespeare conceived him, was inwardly tormented by insecurity and rage, the consequences of a miserable, unloved childhood and a twisted spine that made people recoil at the sight of him. Haunted by self-loathing and a sense of his own ugliness — he is repeatedly likened to a boar or rooting hog — he found refuge in a feeling of entitlement, blustering overconfidence, misogyny and a merciless penchant for bullying. From this psychopathology, the play suggests, emerged the character’s weird, obsessive determination to reach a goal that looked impossibly far off, a position for which he had no reasonable expectation, no proper qualification and absolutely no aptitude.” END QUOTE

The current production of Richard III also made that eerie contemporary resonance clear. It exerted a subtle, hypnotic appeal to the audience’s Schadenfreude, as Fiennes’s twisted, brilliant, exhibitionistic sociopath constantly confides in us, while he, Iago-like, orchestrates a slow motion royal trainwreck. He pulls the strings on a series of murders of every person he imagines blocks his path to the crown, and seduces women in every direction, only to find himself overwhelmed with guilty dreams once seated on the throne for a brief historical moment.

As always when I see a good production of a Shakespeare play for the first time, it brings aspects of the play to life for me in ways that I can never quite equal from a mere reading of the play, and this was no exception. And, as also regularly happens, a surprising Jane Austen connection popped up when least expected. In Act 1 Scene 2, the young, recently widowed Lady Anne, addressing the shrouded corpse of her murdered father in law (the late King Henry VI), utters a bitter string of insults and curses at the absent Richard, Duke of Gloucester (and future King Richard III), the deformed Machiavel who has recently murdered both Henry VI and his son, Lady Anne’s late husband. Near the end of her speech, she conjures up this macabre fantasy:

If ever [Richard] have child, abortive be it,
Prodigious, and untimely brought to light,
Whose ugly and unnatural aspect
May fright the hopeful mother at the view;
And that be heir to his unhappiness!
If ever he have wife, let her be made
As miserable by the death of him
As I am made by my poor lord and thee!

As I listened to those lines, for the first time I heard a distinct Austenian echo. Do any of you Janeites reading this post hear that same echo? Scroll down to see…..

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In Jane Austen’s Letter #10 dated October 27-28, 1798 to sister Cassandra, Jane infamously makes what appears to be a shocking, and –- dare I say it?---Richard the Third-like?--- heartless comment about a neighbor’s childbearing misfortune: “Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, oweing to a fright.—I supposed she happened unawares to look at her husband.”

Think about the startlingly close parallels: in both Lady Anne’s final curse, and in Jane Austen’s tasteless joke, we have a mother giving birth to a stillborn child sired by a very ugly father; and that mother suffers a severe fright caused by her suddenly viewing an extremely ugly face (in one case the ugly face of her husband triggering the stillbirth; in the other Lady Anne describes the ugly face of Richard’s as yet imaginary infant son, who takes after his ugly father). This already is all too close for coincidence, but there is much more to this allusion by Jane Austen, once we delve more deeply.

Here’s what Le Faye has to say about Mrs. Hall and her frighteningly ugly husband: “Reverend Dr. Henry Hall was the vicar of Monk (West) Sherborne and Pamber in Hampshire. “Dr. Hall may have been ugly, but his parishioners remembered him as being ‘a man of a kindly disposition and none ever went to the rectory without being well cared for”.  “

Despite Dr. Hall’s seeming to be undeserving of JA’s bile, I recalled that I had first written about that very bad joke of JA’s more than five years ago here…  http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/02/dr-halls-stillborn-child-and-mrs.html   …a post in which I also showed that JA had revisited a variation of her bad joke on poor Dr. Hall in Letter 19, written only 6 1/2 months after Letter 10: "…at the bottom of Kingsdown Hill we met a gentleman in a buggy, who, on minute examination, turned out to be Dr. Hall — and Dr. Hall in such very deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead. These are all of our acquaintance who have yet met our eyes."

Clearly, Dr. Hall triggered some pretty strong hostility from JA! And think about how that equally black humor in Letter 19 resonates with Shakespeare’s Lady Anne who, in the same speech I quoted, above, is “in such very deep mourning” because her father in law and her husband were indeed dead! And think also about how the real life Dr. Hall was in fact much older than his young wife, just as Richard III was much older than his wife-for-a-brief-time before he had her murdered, Lady Anne!

So it is pretty clear from the above two examples that Jane Austen, in writing to sister Cassandra, strongly associated the unhandsome Dr. Hall with Shakespeare’s Machiavellian deformed monster, Richard III. We may never know why this was so, but it seems sure that Cassandra was in on this literary joke. But that’s still not all.

In that above-linked post of mine five years ago, without the slightest inkling that Richard III might be involved, I wrote the following about Austen’s two epistolary swipes at Dr. Hall and their “...strong parallels to the passage about Mrs. Musgrove and her dead son [in Persuasion]….: "They were actually on the same sofa, for Mrs. Musgrove had most readily made room for him: they were divided only by Mrs. Musgrove. It was no insignificant barrier, indeed. Mrs. Musgrove was of a comfortable, substantial size, infinitely more fitted by nature to express good cheer and good humour, than tenderness and sentiment; and while the agitations of Anne's slender form, and pensive face, may be considered as very completely screened, Captain Wentworth should be allowed some credit for the self-command with which he attended to her large fat sighings over the destiny of a son, whom alive nobody had cared for."

Here we have another mother mourning a son dead far too young. But surely you now also recall the Christian name of Mrs. Musgrove’s ‘thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable’ son ---Richard, as in Richard III! And Anne Elliot shares the Christian name of Lady Anne in Richard III. The coincidences pile upon each other in a remarkable heap of veiled allusion on JA’s part, spread among her letters and her fiction.

So, have I just finally found the explanation to one of the great Austenian mysteries --- just as it’s not clear what was so bad about Dr. Hall, many have wondered what’s so bad about the name “Richard”? Why is it that Mr. Morland in NA is called “a very respectable man, though his name was Richard”? In Letter 6 dated Sept. 16, 1796, to CEA, JA wrote “Mr Richard Harvey’s marriage is put off, till he has got a Better Christian name”. And why was Richard Musgrove called a “troublesome, hopeless son”? 

Many Austen scholars have attempted to explain this mysterious antipathy for this very common English

surname, in both her letters and her novels, and I even wondered long ago whether it might have anything to do with Shakespeare’s arch-villain Richard III. But until today, I never had anything specific to go on beyond the name itself, and other than my knowing how deeply JA drank in general from Shakespeare’s bottomless well.

So I now see Jane Austen, barely into her twenties, seemingly deeply immersed in, and fascinated by the character of Richard III. Might Richard III have provided part of the inspiration for JA’s great female Machiavelle, Lady Susan Vernon, which was written by her during the same time period as Letters 10 and 15 containing her Dr. Hall vendetta.  

And she never lost that fascination ---look at what she famously wrote to her sister Cassandra 15 years after Letter 15, while watching a London stage performance of the Don Giovanni story:  “I have seen nobody on the stage who has been a more interesting Character than that compound of Cruelty and Lust”. I cannot imagine a better description of the character of Shakespeare’s Richard III than that, and so we see that JA’s fascination with seductive literary Machiavels never waned from one end of her writing career to the other!

So please indulge me as I conclude with “A Richard, a Richard, my kingdom for a Richard!”

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Kate Hamill's Shakespearean adaptation of Sense & Sensibility at the Folger & in NYC

In further reply to Nancy's request for tales of the recently concluded JASNA AGM in Washington DC, I will now speak about one of the two highlights for me -- seeing the stage adaptation of Sense & Sensibility at the Folger Library theatre. Here are four links describing it:

http://www.dramatists.com/cgi-bin/db/single.asp?key=5174

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/05/theater/review-a-whirlwind-of-delicious-gossip-in-sense-sensibility.html?_r=0    [Brantley’s review is particularly generous and accurate]

http://www.folger.edu/sense-and-sensibility

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/10/31/folgers-sense-and-sensibility-a-hit-thats-always-moving/

Kate Hamill’s adaptation, which originated off Broadway in NYC a couple of years ago, is firstrate in all respects. I honestly can’t think of anything I didn’t like, and that is rare. In the course of 160 minutes of decidedly unsquirmy watching, pretty much the entire story of the novel gets told, and told well. Hamill’s seamless blending of the novel’s dialog and Hamill’s own is remarkably well executed—just as with Whit Stillman’s film Love and Friendship (aka Lady Susan), excellent taste and discretion is shown in that delicate enterprise. There is a nice blend of humor, romance, and pathos in what is selected for enactment from the novel text, very much in the spirit of Emma Thompson’s iconic 1994 film version, especially in the way that the loving, contentious relationship between the elder Dashwood sisters is brought to vivid life, but this play is by no means a knockoff of Thompson.

The one surprise was the way Edward was depicted--not the endearing, quiet, sad way Hugh Grant played him, but as more of a fool and buffoon, i.e., more like his brother Robert, who is even more over the top in this production. But that was okay with me, because I am one who finds the Edward Ferrars of the novel to be an extremely compromised hero – Hugh Grant is NOT Jane Austen’s Edward---just as I see Edmund Bertram as less than an attractive marital option for Fanny in MP.

The performers were uniformly excellent, even spectacular; totally professional and often inspired, the small cast effortlessly handling the doubling of many of the roles. My special personal favorite was Caroline Stefanie Clay, who was an overpowering force of nature in the role of Mrs. Jennings.

Here’s what I wrote about Hamill’s production in February, after reading Brantley’s review and before I knew I’d get to see it at the Folger:

“While you should read Brantley’s cogent review in its entirety, I was particularly struck by vivid this description:

“And suddenly, they’re all talking at once, wildly and obsessively — to us, to one another, to themselves. What we’re hearing is a whirlwind of gossip, of voices bearing conflicting truths and falsehoods about love affairs and scandals, independent incomes and inherited real estate. Such gossip is the architect of Austen’s society. And perhaps the most ingenious element of Mr. Tucker’s production is its use of gossip as the force that shapes the destinies of Austen’s characters. No matter how private the scene, there are always eavesdroppers nearby, waiting to spread and reconfigure the latest rumors.”

That tells me that Hamill has understood just how crucial the sense of claustrophobic conversation, subject to constant risk of overhearing, is in all Jane Austen’s novels (and her letters, for that matter). It  results in one drawing-room tete-a-tete and ensemble after another, some of which are subtler versions of the famous scenes in Much Ado About Nothing, when the matchmaking pranksters stage performances of “accidental” eavesdropping, in order to gull Beatrice and Benedick into acknowledging their repressed love for each other.” END QUOTE

I can say now, after actually seeing the play, that Hamill was, to my eyes, acutely aware of the Shakespearean romantic comedy aspects of S&S, because I had a sense, as I watched, that I almost could be watching a lost Shakespeare play written in prose – it really was that good! She is a play-writing talent to be reckoned with!

My seat in the balcony, stage right along the front of the stage, looking down at the performers, was a unique, interesting perspective from which to observe the very clever staging which all the reviews have praised, involving the never ending sliding of chairs to and fro around the stage in a kaleidoscope of shifting scenes that generated a great deal of variety and nuance with minimal props.

That staging ingenuity reminded me a lot of the production of Pride & Prejudice at the Enso Theatre here in Portland that I saw and enjoyed a lot earlier this year, and now I suspect that Kate Lushington might have seen Hamill’s adaptation first, and drew wonderful inspiration from it. This is a way of updating Jane Austen without sacrificing the core novel, which is what I found unsatisfying about video adaptations like The Lizzy Bennet Diaries , which are at heart fanfic that take enormous liberties  with Austen’s story.

Hamill’s adaptation will not shed surprising light on Austen’s novel for any longtime Janeite, but it does bring the novel to life in a vibrant, entertaining, witty fashion, and that is good enough for me! So, if you get a chance to see this production anytime soon, see it! Its run has been extended till Nov. 13 at the Folger in DC (theatre capacity about 300, by my visual count), and, after a pause, it is running again in NYC, with no end in sight, which is no surprise given the universal thumbs up word of mouth (forgive my mixing metaphors) the show has so deservedly received.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode onTwitter

SHADOW ALERT: “Labours not her own”: Jane Austen’s Concealed Pregnancy in Emma

Nancy wrote: “Any one go to the [JASNA] AGM [about Emma in Wash. DC a few weeks ago]? I would love to hear about the workshops and breakout sessions you attended. Please share.”

Nancy, I did go, and had not realized that I forgot to post about it afterwards, as I had intended, so thanks for the jog to do it now! I have three separate posts to write, and this is the first.

I was happy to see Ellen there, and am grateful to her for the following generous anecdote about me that she included in her last blog post:

“A small snapshot for now: Arnie Perlstein was there and responded to the lecturer of the key note address. This lecturer (semi-famous with a book written from a post-colonial stance on Austen) asserted rather incoherently about there being so much that is invisible in Emma, but he did not go on to tell us what this was: the lecturer did take a page where servants were mentioned but he did not try to prove 18th century readers seriously read the book to find out about the Woodhouse servants. He seemed to try to make jokes, to have a jocular stance: when he would quote something the audience found funny, they did laugh, and he looked relieved. I sometimes wonder if the speakers are told to try to “lighten” it up; they tend to ride over the nebulous. Arnie got up so gratified and began to talk of Jane Fairfax’s pregnancy and some other of his favorite theories. The lecturer looked embarrassed. But it fit his thesis. Arnie was stopped. Since the academic was too cowardly or careful to say what these invisible depths were (perhaps sexual?), his lecture was to my mind exposed as having nothing in it (invisible?).”

END QUOTE FROM ELLEN’S BLOG

Let me provide some important, additional context for Ellen’s kind comments about me. The lecturer was U. of East Anglia Professor Bharat Tandon, the editor of a high profile 2012 edition of Emma, and his Introduction to that edition includes the following suspicious passage: 

"the historic ambience surrounding Austen's words came to reveal, not some secret text that ran completely against the grain of what I thought I knew--The Jane Austen Code, as it were--but resonances that only deepened my appreciation of those words, the care with which Austen's relatively few details were chosen and pitched to be suggestive to readers less distant from them then we are now."

Of course that is a major passive-aggressive, almost sarcastic swipe at me and my “shadow story” theory, in which Tandon didn’t even show me the minimal respect of naming me. Now that I think about that,  maybe that’s because then he’d have had to also provide a footnote citing my blog, and he wanted me to remain “invisible” to the wider reading world, especially that part which takes its literary wisdom only from literary academics, and who don’t read Austen blogs, or even read the posts in these groups!  Anyway, despite not naming me explicitly, Tandon unmistakably tags three key elements of my Austen scholarly persona and stump speech: “The Jane Austen Code”; “ran completely against the grain”; and “some secret text”.

Not very nice of Tandon; kinda mean, if I really think about it. But I prefer instead to reframe it as unwitting flattery. Clearly my claims about Austen’s shadow stories -- backed up by my obsessive documentation of so many textual details of the Jane Austen Code that provide substance to those shadows --- have really gotten under his skin. My ideas are like grains of sand which have gotten under the hard shell of his orthodox reading of Emma, such that he can’t put them out of his mind. They form “pearls” of inconvenient, uncomfortable wisdom, as it were. And yet, he doesn’t have a clue how to give an alternative explanation of all of Emma’s shadows that is anywhere close to mine in power. Such a quandary—or, more apt to Emma --- Poor Professor Tandon!

So, now if you reread what Ellen wrote, above, in light of that context, you’ll be ready to see the poetic justice of my comment to him as the first responder in his Q&A, which I’ll now recount. Tandon’s plenary talk…. http://jasna.org/agms/washingtondc/plenary.html    …was entitled ““Labours Not Her Own”: Emma and the Invisible World”. That quote is not from Austen, but it is from a work that Jane knew very well, so much so that she alluded to it very saliently in S&S: the “infallible” Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. I don’t believe he ever actually made the sort of noteworthy allusive connection between Pope’s poem and Emma, which one might have expected from his title, nor in fact did he give one single original interpretation of text in Emma during the entire hour he spoke.

Speaking of Tandon’s title, I hadn’t paid attention to it before I sat down in the large ballroom audience to hear his talk, but as soon as I did focus on it, and heard him begin to speak about what is invisible in Emma, I knew in a flash what my Q&A comment would be. This is more or less what I said right after the polite applause died down:

“Professor Tandon, I agree that there is much that is invisible hidden in the shadows of Emma, but if I may pick up on your quotation from Pope, I’d suggest that the most dazzling jewel hidden just beneath the text of Emma, waiting to be fetched to the surface by the alert reader, is the “labour” endured by the shadow heroine of the novel, Jane Fairfax, about whom Emma and therefore also the reader obsesses. In other words, I am suggesting that the “labour” is Jane’s concealed pregnancy.”

Ellen is correct, I enjoyed the mixed wave of laughter and gasps that greeted my punch line, which (as Ellen also pointed out) left Tandon nearly speechless. I wish I could remember his reply, but it was not responsive. I wonder if he realized in that moment, or perhaps later, that I was that very same purveyor of “The Jane Austen Code” whom he had taken that unprovoked swipe at 4 years ago. In any event, while he was replying, the moderator made sure to snatch the mike out of my hand, no doubt out of fear I might say something else scandalous. But I had a dozen people tell me later in the conference how much they enjoyed that moment, and that was reward enough!

So thanks again, Ellen –who herself asked a couple of intelligent questions in other Q&A’s at sessions I also attended – do you recall what you asked, Ellen? Your comments about Tandon have provided me with an independent validation of my own reaction to Tandon’s talk, which I found to be 95% vague theorizing often veering away from Emma, and less than 5% actual words from Emma – and of that 5%, pretty near to 0% original insight into the shadows of Emma.

Cheers, ARNIE

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