Darcy & Wickham: Pride & Prejudice’s (un)natural characters and (im)probable plots: What(ely)?!

Ellen Moody started a thread today in Austen L & Janeites about her rereading Pride & Prejudice for the umpteenth time, which prompted me to crystallize several aspects of the double-story structure of Pride & Prejudice from a fresh perspective, which I’d like to share now.

First, here’s the first post I wrote, which was a response to some of what Ellen wrote:

ELLEN: "This time…I did ask myself if the plausibility of Wickham's story, which is utterly dismissed by Elizabeth upon the second reading of the letter, was really meant to be dismissed. We were to dismiss the idea of the paragon Darcy's jealousy, take everything Darcy said as true with no subtext he doesn't allow for."
MY REPLY: Ellen, had you read the many dozens of posts I've written over the past decade about Pride & Prejudice (like all of JA's novels) being a double story, you'd know that I've been claiming all along that the above ambiguity you've now noted for the first time was not only deliberate on Jane Austen's part, it happens to be the fork in the road of dual interpretation that leads to the two alternative endings of P&P:
The overt story is the road to the left in which Wickham was (as almost all Janeites have always believed) lying about Darcy in every important regard; but the shadow story is the road to the right (which I am the first and only person to have ever taken) in which Wickham was telling the truth about Darcy in every important regard.
Another way of putting this is that in the overt story, Darcy actually does repent and reform his character after the first proposal; but in the shadow story, Darcy merely pretends to reform, while simultaneously staging a series of choreographed experiences for Elizabeth which result in the complete demolition of her previous (healthy and insightful) resistance to Darcy, who has alas remained the same narcissistic bully he always was.


ELLEN: "Similarly, given that we have two long dialogues between Darcy and Elizabeth at the end, one of which even if tongue-in-cheek talk about the moral of the story... and his apologies and explanations are even abject at moments, maybe Austen did not think she needed to show us gradual change."
MY REPLY: No, I suggest instead to you that the best explanation is as I explained above- it's a deliberate and permanent ambiguity-- the famous lopping and cropping was primarily for that purpose.

ELLEN: "I found the story of how marriage is forced in the case of Charlotte Lucas among the most moving. I'm with the character in Jane Austen Book club who reads Charlotte as a closet lesbian spinster"
MY REPLY: And I’ve also written several posts over the past 7 years about Charlotte as a lesbian who (exactly like Anna Howe in Richardson’s Clarissa) is in romantic passionate but implicit love with the heroine.  But, unlike Anna in Clarissa, Charlotte uses her wits and audacity to tip the course of events in the shadow story of P&P so as wind up living in close proximity to her beloved Elizabeth again. And the way Charlotte accomplishes that daring maneuver is to take a page out of Lucy Steele's playbook in Sense & Sensibility, by provoking Lady Catherine the same way Lucy provokes Mrs Ferrars, into unwittingly doing exactly what Charlotte wants done - Lucy and Charlotte each use invisible hands to move the behavior of others.

ELLEN: "I note that if Austen did cut the Bingley and Jane material, which still makes sense, she didn't Elizabeth and Charlotte nor Jane and Elizabeth. As before I was very moved by Jane's emotional pain, her continued distress, and her seeing what the world is, but not being able to admit the point of view so producing "candid" interpretations except when driven otherwise."
MY REPLY: And I've been saying all along that Jane Bennet has a secret life that Elizabeth has never been aware of - a secret life very similar to that of her namesake Jane Fairfax in the shadow story of Emma - concealed pregnancy, giving up of her newborn to a trusted married friend (in this case Charlotte), with the father a forbidden lover (in this case, Darcy).

And now, here’s the second post I wrote, responding to Diane Reynolds’s excellent response to both Ellen and myself:

DIANE: "This book [P&P] is so comedic in many ways, the dry run for Emma in Lizzie's cluelessness, that it's more than plausible to have doubts about her flip-flop to utterly believing Darcy. "

MY REPLY: Exactly, but even more than that. As I've also suggested, I’m pretty sure that when JA noted, with what must’ve been real disappointment, how readers hadn’t noticed Lizzy’s cluelessness in the latter half of P&P – she realized that she needed to up the ante several notches on the visibility of heroinic cluelessness when she wrote Emma. And then she had to wait till 1816, after Emma was published, to be rewarded with Walter Scott's canny passing comments about Eliza Bennet's suspicious conversion to Darcyism right after seeing Pemberley! Now that I think about it, Scott (who wrote Marmion, the source JA paraphrased in her “dull elves” witticism) was indeed a sharp elf and good student, who probably learned how to read the lines beneath the words in P&P by reading Emma!

DIANE: “I agree too with Ellen about the poignancy in the novel and in the way women relate and suffer. It especially jumps out to me that Austen cares so much --that it's so important for her to convey to us how much Charlotte cares for Elizabeth--that she breaks out of Lizzie's pov and gets into Charlotte's head--Charlotte, without a doubt, does care deeply about Elizabeth's opinion and is perceptive enough (in a way Lizzie is not!) to know how surprised and baffled Elizabeth is going to be by her engagement to Mr. Collins. Austen needs us to know that.”

MY REPLY: Unquestionably, this was herstory JA felt compelled to tell, to be sure it did not just disappear like the invisible lives of “common” country folk described so poignantly in the line from Grey’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”, which Austen tellingly quoted in two of her novels (NA and Emma). But, again, Charlotte does not merely care deeply about Elizabeth’s opinion; as a pragmatically closeted lesbian, she also cares deeply about Elizabeth’s body, heart, and soul as well, and that is the passion that drives Charlotte to the audacious action she takes which brings her back into close proximity with Elizabeth by novel’s end. That is truly a poignant and heart-warming love story for the ages!

And…perhaps, Diane, you, too, have wondered about how this motif of unrequited, unspoken lesbian love might’ve played out in JA’s real life? I.e., is it possible that Jane Austen, as a young woman, was herself a romantically clueless Elizabeth Bennet vis a vis the older and wiser Martha Lloyd?; and then, years later, as a self-confident, worldly-wise, fortyish, independent woman and artist in words finishing the writing of P&P,  JA revisited this romantic paradigm, but by this time reunited with Martha at Chawton; and perhaps also playing the romantically self aware Charlotte Lucas vis a vis clueless niece Fanny Knight?

For the remainder of this post, I want to take a longer look at the idea of the improbability of Darcy’s lightning fast reformation of character, and the centrality of the unresolvable question of whether Wickham tells the truth about Darcy or not. By pure chance, I noticed only yesterday that there is a huge (and I believe, utterly unintended) irony in Bishop Whately’s famous 1821 review of NA & Persuasion in which he discussed realism in fiction. In a nutshell, he praised Jane Austen as a great master of realistic fiction, who he believed never took a false step into either unnatural characters or improbable events. The irony I refer to relates to Whately’s missing that JA committed both of those authorial offenses in P&P, but did so not in error, but as a bravura demonstration that she could pull off such a brilliant stunt without being caught (as Virginia Woolf so aptly put it) in the act of greatness. This all will emerge as I lead you through a couple of key passages in the literary bishop’s essay, with my comments interspersed:

WHATELY: “…a heavy complaint has long lain against works of fiction, as giving a false picture of what they profess to imitate, and disqualifying their readers for the ordinary scenes and everyday duties of life.”

MY COMMENT: Of course that sounds just like the commonly held belief as to the theme of Northanger Abbey, but then Whately surprises us with a twist:

WHATELY: “And this charge applies, we apprehend, to the generality of what are strictly called novels, with even more justice than to romances. When all the characters and events are very far removed from what we see around us,--when, perhaps, even supernatural agents are introduced, the reader may indulge, indeed, in occasional day-dreams, but will be so little reminded by what he has been reading, of anything that occurs in actual life, that though he may perhaps feel some disrelish for the tameness of the scene before him, compared with the fairy-land he has been visiting, yet at least his judgment will not be depraved, nor his expectations misled; he will not apprehend a meeting with Algerine banditti on English shores, nor regard the old woman who shews him about an antique country seat, as either an enchantress or the keeper of an imprisoned damsel.”         

MY COMMENT: So Whately is clearly saying here is that, despite all the propaganda during JA’s lifetime about the dangers of reading Gothic novels, and despite the superficial appearance that JA is following that party line in writing NA, he doesn’t think readers will actually confuse fantastical fiction with real life. Only psychotics, and perhaps a few seriously naïve teenagers.

And, those who’ve followed me for a while know that I believe he’s (seemingly unwittingly) agreeing with what I have long seen as Jane Austen’s actual and very subversive message in writing NA, which is that intelligently written Gothic novels can carry a powerful, beneficial metaphorical message to readers: i.e., that imagination is actually an indispensable asset required for any intelligent person to discern the horrid “domestic tyranny” that does lurks in everyday life, unnoticed by “realistic” adults.

But now Whately turns his gaze toward the realm of realistic fiction, and (to my mind, acutely) detects an actual danger of misleading readers there instead:

WHATELY: “it is otherwise with those fictions which differ from common life in little or nothing but the improbability of the occurrences: the reader is insensibly led to calculate upon some of those lucky incidents and opportune coincidences of which he has been so much accustomed to read, and which, it is undeniable, may take place in real life; and to feel a sort of confidence, that however romantic his conduct may be, and in whatever difficulties it may involve him, all will be sure to come right at last, as is invariably the case with the hero of a novel.”

MY COMMENT: So, Whately is turning conventional wisdom on its head, and saying that realistic fiction like Austen’s ought not to reward their characters’s haphazard, foolish thinking and behavior with happy endings, because readers will extrapolate directly to expecting comparable luck in their own real lives. I.e., an author of realistic fiction who makes “lucky incidents and opportune coincidences” seem natural and probable, lets suggestible readers off the moral hook, because they’ll expect dei ex machini to intervene and rescue them, no matter how foolishly they act. And I agree with Whately on that point as well. The bishop then makes a key distinction between unnatural characters (those who suddenly behave completely out of character) and improbable (lucky) events, and that brings him to the point where I see that huge irony relating to P&P. Whately launches into a critique of what he sees as Maria Edgeworth’s excessive reliance on both unnatural and improbable events in her 1809 novel Ennui, a novel which JA most certainly read (as she surely read all of Edgeworth’s fiction):

WHATELY: “We shall, perhaps, best explain our meaning by examples, taken from a novel of great merit [i.e., Ennui] in many respects. When Lord Glenthorn, in whom a most unfavourable education has acted on a most unfavourable disposition, after a life of torpor, broken only by short sallies of forced exertion, on a sudden reverse of fortune, displays at once the most persevering diligence in the most repulsive studies, and in middle life, without any previous habits of exertion, any hope of early business, or the example of friends, or the stimulus of actual want, to urge him, outstrips every competitor, though every competitor has every advantage against him; this is unnatural.”          

MY COMMENT: Now stop and consider how well Whately’s elegant summation of Glenthorn’s unnaturally sudden transformation from frog to prince resembles Darcy’s unnatural metamorphosis – and yet Whately, who has clearly read P&P, and is reviewing two other Austen novels, never consciously glimmers on any parallelism. But that’s only half of Whately’s massive Trojan Horse Moment, because the other half pops up in the very next sentence:

WHATELY: “When Lord Glenthorn, the instant he is stripped of his estates, meets, falls in love with, and is conditionally accepted by the very lady who is remotely intitled to those estates; when, the instant he has fulfilled the conditions of their marriage, the family of the person possessed of the estates becomes extinct, and by the concurrence of circumstances, against every one of which the chances were enormous, the hero is re-instated in all his old domains; this is merely improbable.”        

MY COMMENT: There you have a parallel to the improbability of the coincidences in P&P – not merely those in the cascade of “dominoes” that drive the final volume of P&P (Lizzy “accidentally” being taken to see Pemberley; Darcy ‘accidentally’ running into her in the Pemberley shrubbery; Lydia “accidentally” revealing that Darcy was at her wedding’ someone “accidentally” passing the false rumor of Elizabeth and Darcy being engaged on to Lady Catherine, etc.); but go back to the colossally improbable quadruple coincidence that comprises the first half of P&P (Darcy, Wickham, Collins, Mrs. Gardiner all focused “independently” on Elizabeth, as I last outlined here: http://tinyurl.com/h5phlxg  In short, there is no great story in the history of literature more dependent on improbable coincidences than P&P –and yet, JA, in her mastery, has somehow convinced millions of readers over 2 centuries that everything in P&P is not only probable, it’s so compellingly real that we care as much about Darcy and Elizabeth as we do about any fictional characters ever created!

With that in mind, now savor the unintended irony of the following remaining comments about probability in novels in Whately’s review, when he criticizes Edgeworth while praising Austen:

WHATELY: “…. Among the authors of this school there is no one superior, if equal, to [JA] the lady whose last production is now before us…Miss Edgeworth, indeed, draws characters and details conversations, such as they occur in real life, with a spirit and fidelity not to be surpassed; but her stories are most romantically improbable (in the sense above explained), almost all the important events of them being brought about by most providential coincidences; and this, as we have already remarked, is not merely faulty, inasmuch as it evinces a want of skill in the writer, and gives an air of clumsiness to the fiction, but is a very considerable drawback on its practical utility: the personages either of fiction or history being then only profitable examples, when their good or ill conduct meets its appropriate reward, not from a sort of independent machinery of accidents, but as a necessary or probable result, according to the ordinary course of affairs. Miss Edgeworth also is somewhat too avowedly didactic…

…The moral lessons also of this lady's [JA’s] novels, though clearly and impressively conveyed, are not offensively put forward, but spring incidentally from the circumstances of the story; they are not forced

upon the reader, but he is left to collect them (though without any difficulty) for himself: hers is that unpretending kind of instruction which is furnished by real life; and certainly no author has ever conformed more closely to real life, as well in the incidents, as in the characters and descriptions. Her fables appear to us to be, in their own way, nearly faultless; they do not consist (like those of some of the

writers who have attempted this kind of common-life novel writing) of a string of unconnected events which have little or no bearing on one main plot, and are introduced evidently for the sole purpose of bringing in characters and conversations; but have all that compactness of plan and unity of action which is generally produced by a sacrifice of probability: yet they have little or nothing that is not probable…”

MY COMMENT: And now, if you were in doubt as to where you think Whately stood on the question of probability in JA’s novels, here you get it, explicitly and without qualification:

WHATELY: “…the story proceeds without the aid of extraordinary accidents; the events which take place are the necessary or natural consequences of what has preceded; and yet (which is a very rare merit indeed) the final catastrophe is scarcely ever clearly foreseen from the beginning, and very often comes, upon the generality of readers at least, quite unexpected. We know not whether Miss Austin ever had access to the precepts of Aristotle; but there are few, if any, writers of fiction who have illustrated them more successfully. The vivid distinctness of description, the minute fidelity of detail, and air of unstudied ease in the scenes represented, which are no less necessary than probability of incident, to carry the reader's imagination along with the story, and give fiction the perfect appearance of reality, she possesses in a high degree…”

MY FINAL COMMENT: There can be no greater tribute to JA’s genius than that she could receive the universal acclaim of Whately and all her other readers for 200 years for her natural plots with necessary consequences, and yet she has based it all on a string of wild improbabilities and unnaturalnesses, beside which those of  Edgeworth and Fielding might pale in comparison –and ultimately why did she do it?

Because what was unnatural and improbable in the overt story of each of her novels, but particularly in Pride & Prejudice, was a reflection of the profound errors made by the clueless heroine of each novel, who misjudged the actions and motivations of their fellow characters whom they observed. In the shadow story, however, there is nothing unnatural or improbable, only trueness to real life that the heroine cannot properly discern and understand.

Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The infallible economic sense/scents of Mary Crawford’s poetic Popish pause in Mansfield Park

It’s been nearly a year since I last revisited the scene in Chapter 17 of Mansfield Park when Mary Crawford chats with sister Mrs. Grant about brother Henry, and the shadow his rakish flirtations are throwing on Maria Bertram’s impending marriage to Mr. Rushworth:

"I rather wonder Julia is not in love with Henry," was [Mrs. Grant’s] observation to Mary.

"I dare say she is," replied Mary coldly. "I imagine both sisters are."

"Both! no, no, that must not be. Do not give him a hint of it. Think of Mr. Rushworth!"

"You had better tell Miss Bertram to think of Mr. Rushworth. It may do her some good. I often think of Mr. Rushworth's property and independence, and wish them in other hands; but I never think of him. A man might represent the county with such an estate; a man might escape a profession and represent the county."

"I dare say he will be in parliament soon. When Sir Thomas comes, I dare say he will be in for some borough, but there has been nobody to put him in the way of doing anything yet."

"Sir Thomas is to achieve many mighty things when he comes home," said Mary, after a pause. "Do you remember Hawkins Browne's 'Address to Tobacco,' in imitation of Pope?—

     Blest leaf! whose aromatic gales dispense

     To Templars modesty, to Parsons sense.

I will parody them—

     Blest Knight! whose dictatorial looks dispense

     To Children affluence, to Rushworth sense.

Will not that do, Mrs. Grant? Everything seems to depend upon Sir Thomas's return."  END QUOTE

I live for fresh epiphanies about bits of narration like “said Mary, after a pause”, because I’ve long since learned that such seeming throwaways are often important hints that Jane Austen has hidden in plain sight for her proactive readers. They invariably alert us to speculate as to what a character is thinking during such an unexplained pause—and so in this case, I asked myself what Mary thought about, before she popped out her witty parody of Browne’s imitation of Pope. As my Subject Line suggests, Mary’s pause is indeed pregnant with rich hidden meaning, as you’ll learn, below.

To start, part of Mary’s pause was surely to give even the quick-witted Mary time to recall Browne’s parody of Pope, and then to generate her own version. And by the way, as with all of Mary’s bon mots (particularly “rears and vices”), don’t you agree that this one is perfectly, sarcastically tailored to describe the situation the clear-eyed Mary observes in the unholy trinity she observe: the reckless and cynical Maria, who marries purely for money and status; the foolish and naive Mr. Rushworth, who lacks the slightest clue why Maria is really marrying him; and the imperious and mercenary Sir Thomas, who barely lifts a finger to discourage Maria from her loveless, cynical engagement, because, it is clear from this and many other passages in the novel, his fatherly eyes are full of pound notes falling like aromatic fruit from the large, tempting Tree of Money at Sotherton.

So we can see, at least in part, why Mary pauses, and then comes up with that particular couplet of Browne’s as her starting point. Its verbiage and cadence provides her with a ready and suitable template onto which she can quickly graft the themes of Rushworth’s stupidity and Sir Thomas’s dictatorial greed. But is there more to Mary’s pause, and the Browne allusion, than that?  To begin to figure this out, we must start with the full text of Browne’s 1736 short poem, “A Pipe of Tobacco: In Imitation of Six Several Authors [of which Alexander Pope is actually only one of the six]”:

Blest Leaf! whose aromatic gales dispense
To Templars modesty, to parsons sense:   
So raptur'd priests, at fam'd Dodona's shrine
Drank inspiration from the steam divine.
Poison that cures, a vapour that affords
Content, more solid than the smile of lords:
Rest to the weary, to the hungry food,
The last kind refuge of the wise and good:
Inspir'd by thee, dull cits adjust the scale
Of Europe's peace, when other statesmen fail.
By thee protected, and thy sister, beer,
Poets rejoice, nor think the bailiff near.
Nor less, the critic owns thy genial aid,
While supperless he plies the piddling trade.
What tho' to love and soft delights a foe,
By ladies hated, hated by the beau,
Yet social freedom, long to courts unknown,
Fair health, fair truth, and virtue are thy own.
Come to thy poet, come with healing wings,
And let me taste thee unexcis'd by kings.

It is clear that for some reason Browne is playfully extolling an apparent absurdity--- the miraculous benefits, to various categories of little people, from smoking tobacco. In that sense, it seems an early 18^th century satirical precursor of Marx’s very serious and very famous dictum issued a century later: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people". Had the worldly wise Mary Crawford somehow lived to read Marx, she’d have nodded in agreement, don’t you think?

And that (seemingly accidental) resonance got me wondering -- perhaps beneath the seeming frivolity of Browne’s doggerel, written a half century before the French Revolution, there was some more serious, even proto-Marxian, meaning concealed in it --- a veiled critique of class- and money-stratified European society, a world in which the little people could be easily seduced by cheap, simple physical pleasure into accepting a system totally and permanently rigged against them. Was this sort of critique on Mary Crawford’s mind as well, as she observed Maria marrying for money with her greedy father’s hypocritical approval? I think so!

Those speculations reminded me of yet another question I had considered a few times before, but had never found the answer to, nor did I ever learn that any other Austen or Pope scholar had found it either: i.e., if Browne’s poem was (as Mary states) in imitation of Pope, which specific Pope poem was it in imitation of? And why is it that none of the annotations and other discussions of MP that I searched in online even asked that question? If we could find it and read it, surely we would then find clues to Browne’s deeper meaning. And, in turn, that would surely tell us the rest of the story as to why Mary chose that particular couplet as her parodic base.

This time around, using Google, I quickly located what I am certain is that specific Pope poem that Browne and Mary Crawford had in mind. It can be found in his Moral Essays: Epistle III: “Of the Use of Riches”  written to Allen, Lord Bathurst. The Argument explains the title:

“That it is known to few, most falling into one of the extremes, Avarice or Profusion. The point discussed, whether the invention of money has been more commodious or pernicious to mankind. That Riches, either to the Avaricious or the Prodigal, cannot afford happiness, scarcely necessaries. That Avarice is an absolute frenzy, without an end or purpose. Conjectures about the motives of avaricious men. That the conduct of men, with respect to Riches, can only be accounted for by the Order of Providence, which works the general good out of extremes, and brings all to its great end by perpetual revolutions. How a Miser acts upon principles which appear to him reasonable. How a Prodigal does the same. The due medium and true use of riches. The Man of Ross. The fate of the Profuse and the Covetous, in two examples; both miserable in life and in death. The story of Sir Balaam.”

Avarice, covetousness, misery. May I pause at this moment and say “BINGO!” Just as I suspected, Mary Crawford was clearly aware that “Of the Use of Riches” was the theme of Pope’s poem behind Browne’s parody-she was thus a very sharp elf indeed, to have both Pope and Browne at her mental fingertips, ready for just such an occasion. Maria, Rushworth, and Sir Thomas are all totally busted!

And that is more the case, the more closely we look. Here is the opening couplet of Pope’s poetic Epistle III which Google led me to:

Blest paper-credit! last and best supply!   [Is that an echo of Henry’s Miltonian “Heaven’s last best gift”?]
That lends Corruption lighter wings to fly!  [Like Satan’s wings flying into Eden?]
Gold imp’d by thee, can compass hardest things,  [Satan and his imps]
Can pocket States, can fetch or carry Kings;
A single leaf shall waft an Army o’er,
Or ship off Senates to a distant Shore;
A leaf, like Sibyl’s, scattered to and fro
Our fates and fortunes, as the winds shall blow, (lines 69-76)

The above short poetic passage has actually had a surprisingly complicated publication history (because despite JA’s having playfully referred to Pope as “infallible” in an 1813 letter which she wrote while deeply engaged in the writing of Mansfield Park, Pope was fallible—or finicky-- enough to have regularly revised lines in his poems over the course of several editions). However, the keywords and phrases that Browne so clearly echoed are, I am sure you’ll agree, obvious in the above quotation.

For those of a truly wonky disposition, I include, in the remainder of this post, a few brief excerpts from Julian Ferraro’s article, “The Presentation and Representation of Epistles to Several Persons” in Proceedings of the British Academy  #91, 111-124 (1998), analyzing the sharp economic critique in Pope’s poem, which I assert was on Browne’s, Mary Crawford’s, and Jane Austen’s minds

“…the reader is provided with alternatives, all of which derive their authority directly from the poet….the result that the boundaries of the prime text become blurred… The Epistle to Bathurst in particular seems to have been contrived to defy any easy accommodation within a moral scheme. Rather than providing a firm foundation for its maxims and aphorisms, Pope’s reworkings of that poem seem directed towards giving full play to ironies and ambivalences...The section of the Epistle to Bathurst in which Pope describes the effects on society of paper-credit is one which evolves significantly as he revises the poem for the various editions of the second volume of the Works...

…In the 1744 text, the qualification ‘advanc’d so high’ is removed. It is no longer paper-credit taken to extremes but paper-credit per se that contributes to corruption, a shift reflected in the removal of ‘now’ from the second line. Thus, the revised couplet embraces the concept of paper-credit in a wholly ironic way, directed explicitly at the current state of affairs:

Blest Paper-credit! Last and best supply!

That lends Corruption lighter wings to fly!

[This image of paper-credit ironically echoes Proverbs 23.5: ‘Wilt thou set thine eyes upon that which is not? For riches certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle toward heaven’.]

…the fact that the poet has felt it necessary to alter his text is itself a further indictment of the society that he criticizes. .…Pope has replaced the nebulous ‘they’ with his original villain. It is not just the new fangled paper-credit and the corruption it facilitates that ‘may’ destroy established hierarchies, but the perennial evil, ‘Gold.’

In the text of the 1735 Works, the second line of the couplet is revised…’may’ being replaced by ‘can’; what is described is no longer a potential but a proven ability. In the 1744 ‘deathbed’ edition, the lines are revised once more. Pope now addresses the lines directly to ‘Blest paper-credit’ and reinforces the sense of immediacy by emphasizing the power of the winged monster with a threefold repetition of the word ‘can’:

Gold, imp’d by thee, can compass hardest things,

Can pocket States, can fetch and carry Kings;

This revision reestablishes paper-credit as an agent rather than an object, giving it an identity that the poet addresses, as it were, face to face….the satirist boldly confronting a virtual personification of the economic system whose vices he denounces, a physical realization of paper-credit which Pope continues to develop in revision to the imagery in the lines that follow.

…In the last lines of the poem, Pope again suppresses controversial –possibly treasonable—lines until the poem is incorporated in the 1735 Works. MS 1 reads

His Wife, Son & Daughter, Satan! Are thy own;

His Wealth, yet dearer, forfeit to the Crown’

The Devil and the King divide the prize,

And sad Sir Balaam curses God and dies.”   END QUOTE FROM FERRARO

Those last references to Satan, the Devil, and the cursing of God, all further point to the well recognized Paradise Lost subtext of MP. And so, let me conclude by pointing out that once again Mary Crawford, under the superficial appearance of thoughtless selfish inappropriate joking, is actually the Truthteller and Whistleblower about all the moral rot at Mansfield Park.

In a followup post, I will relate all of the above to my February 2016 ruminations about the Aphra Behn subtext that I previously saw in Pope’s, Browne’s, Mary Crawford’s, and Jane Austen’s meanings, but for now, I think I’ve given you enough --- so, in honor of Browne’s ode to tobacco, just put all my Austenian heresies in your pipe and smoke ‘em!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Galigai, St. Swithin, & Diana Parker: the dying Jane Austen’s ambition for immortality & gender justice

I am VERY pleased and honored to announce that the 2017 JASNA AGM Steering Committee has notified me that I am one of the lucky ones who will get to deliver a breakout session talk in Huntington Beach, CA at the AGM that will run from Oct. 6-8, 2017!!!!

By the way, if you want to go, rooms at the beachfront hotel where it will be held are going to go very fast, based on past experience, so go here and reserve your room now: http://jasna.org/agms/huntington/hotel.html

This will be my third AGM presentation (2010 in Portland, OR and 2014 in Montreal), and I will be counting the days (277 to be exact) till it starts! And finally, for those who might be interested in coming to hear my talk, here's the beginning of my blurb describing what I'll have the luxury of 40 minutes to articulate in detail:

"Galigai, St. Swithin, & Diana Parker: the dying Jane Austen’s ambition for immortality & gender justice"

Nearly all Austen biographers, following her brother Henry (“in spite of such applause, so much did she shrink from notoriety, that no accumulation of fame would have induced her, had she lived, to affix her name to any productions of her pen“) and her nephew James Edward (“little thinking of future fame, but caring only for 'the queerness and the fun’ “), would have us believe Jane didn’t reach (or even wish) for literary immortality; that she’d be shocked to learn of her still widening fame 200 years after her early death while at the peak of her powers. 

I’ve come to know a different Jane, a proud, ambitious artist; and, ironically, I find the best evidence of her proud (but well-regulated) ambition, not in her six novels, but, when physical death loomed large, in her 1817 writings, in which she thrice asserted her power and her will to survive…at least, on paper!: 

(1) in her late letter to old friend Anne Sharp (“Galigai for ever and ever, the influence of strength over weakness indeed”); 

(2) in her last fiction, the Sanditon fragment (“The world is pretty much divided between the weak of mind and the strong; between those who can act and those who cannot; and it is the bounden duty of the capable to let no opportunity of being useful escape them. My…complaints…are happily not often of a nature to threaten existence immediately. And as long as we can exert ourselves to be of use to others,...the body is the better for the refreshment the mind receives in doing its duty"); AND 

(3) in her deathbed testament, the “fanciful” “When Winchester Races” (“When once we are buried you think we are gone But behold me immortal!...Set off for your course, I'll pursue with my rain.… Henceforward I'll triumph in shewing my powers…”). 

 I’ll start there, browse the novels & letters, then circle back to her juvenilia; and show that, for her entire writing life, Jane not only wished for immortality, she grabbed for it with both (far from mouldering) hands! 

See you there, I hope!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter 

Shakespeare’s holy hilltop fool Henry VI was McCartney’s Fool on a Hill!

I posed the following quiz the other day:

“I happened to read closely, for the first time, the following memorable speech spoken by King Henry VI in Act 2, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3, a scene introduced by “Alarum. Enter KING HENRY VI ALONE”, during which the King is observing one of the major battles of the War of the Roses, at Towton, at which enormous casualties were suffered by both sides.  I invite you all to do the same -- please read it through, slowly, savoring the Shakespearean language; and then at the end of the quotation I have two questions for you. Answering them will require NO prior Shakespearean expertise, just (in the case of Question #1) a knowledge of modern popular culture which we all have, unless you’ve been living in a cave. ;)   I promise I’ll deliver a very interesting and surprising payoff at the end of this whole exercise, when I reveal my answers in a followup post on New Year’s Day, along with a summary of any answers I receive from all of you, as well. 

But first, Henry VI speaks from the heart, so please listen:

This battle fares like to the morning's war,
When dying clouds contend with growing light,
What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails,
Can neither call it perfect day nor night.
Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea
Forced by the tide to combat with the wind;
Now sways it that way, like the selfsame sea
Forced to retire by fury of the wind:
Sometime the flood prevails, and then the wind;
Now one the better, then another best;
Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast,
Yet neither conqueror nor conquered:
So is the equal of this fell war.

Here on this molehill will I sit me down.
To whom God will, there be the victory!
For Margaret my queen, and Clifford too,
Have chid me from the battle; swearing both
They prosper best of all when I am thence.
Would I were dead! if God's good will were so;
For what is in this world but grief and woe?

[AND NOW PAY PARTICULAR ATTENTION TO THIS PART!]

O God! methinks it were a happy life,
To be no better than a homely swain;
To sit upon a hill, as I do now,
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run,
How many make the hour full complete;
How many hours bring about the day;
How many days will finish up the year;
How many years a mortal man may live.
When this is known, then to divide the times:
So many hours must I tend my flock;
So many hours must I take my rest;
So many hours must I contemplate;
So many hours must I sport myself;
So many days my ewes have been with young;
So many weeks ere the poor fools will yean:  [i.e., wean]
So many years ere I shall shear the fleece:
So minutes, hours, days, months, and years,
Pass'd over to the end they were created,
Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.

Ah, what a life were this! how sweet! how lovely!
Gives not the hawthorn-bush a sweeter shade
To shepherds looking on their silly sheep,
Than doth a rich embroider'd canopy
To kings that fear their subjects' treachery?
O, yes, it doth; a thousand-fold it doth.
And to conclude, the shepherd's homely curds,
His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle.
His wonted sleep under a fresh tree's shade,
All which secure and sweetly he enjoys,
Is far beyond a prince's delicates,
His viands sparkling in a golden cup,
His body couched in a curious bed,
When care, mistrust, and treason waits on him.  END QUOTE

At that point in this same short scene, a father and a son (both unnamed, and obviously unrelated to one another) enter and each tells, in alternation, a brief, Oedipally tragic tale of having unwittingly slain his son and father, respectively, in the battle of Towton. In each case, the King mourns these tragic losses, and then the scene ends with Henry being abruptly whisked away from danger by his wife (the queen), his son, and his courtier Exeter.”   END QUOTE FROM MY PRIOR POST

And now I am ready, as promised, to answer the questions I posed to you:

QUESTION #1: Is there a famous work of 20th/21^st Century art which you’re specifically reminded of by Henry’s long soliloquy – in particular the specific imagery that Henry VI uses? Once you think of the work of art that popped into my head while reading Henry’s speech, you will know it’s the one I had in mind, the parallels are that strong, so that when you then reread the speech, it will, I believe, be obvious to you. But I want to know if others have the same reaction.”

And here’s my answer: THE FOOL ON THE HILL, 1967, lyrics and singing of course by Paul McCartney –I’ve put the words which echo Henry VI”s above speech in ALL CAPS to give a strong visual sense of how closely Sir Paul echoed the words that Shakespeare put in the mouth of his most famous holy fool. In that scene, King Henry VI indeed sat alone on a hill and, even as his heart broke to watch the horrific, pointless slaughter on the ground, kept his third eye focused on the great cosmic cycles of days and years, and their concomitant natural cycles of birth and rebirth:

DAY after DAY
ALONE ON A HILL
The MAN with the FOOLISH grin is keeping PERFECTLY stillBut NOBODY wants to KNOW him
They CAN SEE that HE's just a FOOL
And HE NEVER GIVES an answer

CHORUS:

But the FOOL on the HILL
SEES the sun going DOWN  
And the EYES in his head
SEE the WORLD spinning 'round

WELL on the way
Head in a CLOUD
The MAN of a THOUSAND voices talking PERFECTLY loudBut NOBODY ever hears him
Or the sound he appears to MAKE
And HE never SEEMS TO notice
[CHORUS]

And nobody seems to like him
They can tell what he wants to do
And he never shows his feelings

[CHORUS]

HE never listens to them

HE knows that they’re the FOOL

They don’t like him    

[CHORUS]

I hope you can see that it’s much more than a mere repetition of keywords that could have occurred by accident. It's the idea of a holy fool who sees a deeper truth than those who mock and dislike him – and it’s even the choice of the recorders as the solo instrument for the song – that just happens to be a modern version of the pan flute which is the instrument of choice of the kind of good shepherd King Henry VI wishes he could be to his subjects the lambs he watches slaughtering each other. The resonance is extremely strong and pervasive, it's really as if McCartney set out to paint a picture in simple, modern words set to music, the much more complex poetry of the young Shakespeare (who was about the same age when he wrote Henry VI as Sir Paul was when he wrote "The Fool on the Hill". And...after all "The Fool on the Hill" was part of an album and film (Magical Mystery Tour) which included the song "All You Need is Love" which I think would make a an equally good title for King Henry VI's Christlike vision of a kinder, better world at peace!

In this regard, you may be interested to know that Paul McCartney has given a couple of different explanations of his inspiration for the lyrics, neither of which explicitly involves Shakespeare, and yet, are not contradictory to that possibility:

First the McCartney biographer Barry Miles wrote this in 1997:   “The song's lyrics describe the titular "fool", a solitary figure who is not understood by others, but is actually wise. McCartney said the song relates to someone like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: 'Fool on the Hill' was mine and I think I was writing about someone like Maharishi. His detractors called him a fool. Because of his giggle he wasn't taken too seriously ... I was sitting at the piano at my father's house in Liverpool hitting a D 6th chord, and I made up 'Fool on the Hill.'

www.songfacts.com

“Paul McCartney wrote this song. It's about a man who is considered a fool by others, but whose foolish demeanor is actually an indication of wisdom. An event which prompted this song happened when Paul was walking his dog, Martha, on Primrose Hill one morning. As he watched the sun rise, he noticed that Martha was missing. Paul turned around to look for his dog, and there a man stood, who appeared on the hill without making a sound. The gentleman was dressed respectably, in a belted raincoat. Paul knew this man had not been there seconds earlier as he had looked in that direction for Martha. Paul and the stranger exchanged a greeting, and this man then spoke of what a beautiful view it was from the top of this hill that overlooked London. Within a few seconds, Paul looked around again, and the man was gone. He had vanished as he had appeared. A friend of McCartney's, Alistair Taylor, was present with Paul during this strange incident, and wrote of this event in his book, Yesterday. Both Paul and Alistair could not imagine what happened to this man. He had seemed to vanish in thin air. The nearest trees for cover were too far to reach by walking or running in a few seconds, and the crest of the hill was too far as well to reach in that short time. What made the experience even more mysterious, was that just before this man first appeared, Paul and Alistair were speaking to each other of the beauty they observed of the view towards London and the existence of God. Once back home, they spent the morning discussing what had happened, trying to make some sense of it. They both agreed that this was something others were infer occurred as a result of an "acid trip," but they both swore they had not taken or used any drugs. When Paul filmed the sequence for this song in the film, it shows him on a hilltop overlooking the town of Nice.”

And very spooky, isn’t it, that Paul filmed that scene in Nice, not that far from where Joan of Arc led the French against the English in a great battle, all as reimagined by Shakespeare in Henry VI Part One?

In any event, my personal (and unprovable) guess is that either Sir Paul forgot, or was deliberately being coy, about having seen, in 1965, the BBC film of the groundbreaking 1963 stage condensation by Barton of the 4 plays into The War of the Roses, which was not long before Macca wrote “The Fool on the Hill”. The 22 year old David Warner played Henry and I bet that is what inspired Macca although he said he was thinking of the Maharishi. And that’s one reason why I gave you the following link to the scene from that film in which David Warner waxes so poetically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI8QMJmQEbE&index=31&list=PL71808247F47E2A6E

And that leads me directly to my other….

….Question #2: What do you think Shakespeare wished his readers/audience to infer about Henry’s state of mind at the precise moment when he delivers this speech? The answer to that question popped into my head after I realized the answer to Question 1, and I started thinking about the whole thing. It was only then that I found out that my answer to Question 2 fit like a glove with both history and Shakespeare.

If you watch that video clip of Warner’s speech, I believe you’ll agree that it is clear that the director sees this scene as purely internal – i.e., the unnamed Father and unnamed Son fade in and out of Henry’s tortured consciousness, and were not meant by Shakespeare to be seen as actual combatants who just happened to wander into the King’s presence and speak these lines. And the film also makes it clear that after those other characters fade to black, Henry is suddenly brought back to real life in the midst of battle, not entirely alone as he seemed to be after the initial battle cried faded.

And that fits with my other two hints:

HINT # ONE: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” –soliloquy by King Henry V (i.e., Henry VI’s father) in Henry IV Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1; a play written by Shakespeare out of historical order, i.e., he wrote it after he wrote the Henry VI trilogy. 

What is apparent from the entire speech by Henry V is that he is lying down trying to sleep, and that is, I assert, Shakespeare deliberately echoing the scene with Henry VI on the molehill, and hinting to us that Henry VI was himself in a dream or altered state of consciousness of some kind, just like his father-- and that's why Henry VI explains his shepherd alter ego's situation watching (but not really watching) the battle as a kind of dream:

His wonted SLEEP under a fresh tree's shade,
All which secure and sweetly he enjoys,
Is far beyond a prince's delicates,
His viands sparkling in a golden cup,
His body couched in A CURIOUS BED,
When care, mistrust, and treason waits on him

A curious bed --as in, a bed of roses!

HINT #TWO: “Henry the 6^th: I cannot say much for this Monarch's sense.”—Jane Austen, age 15, in her brief, satirical take on Henry VI in her The History of England.

And the above quote tells me that Jane Austen was well aware of what Shakespeare was up to in that scene, when she, in her typical ironic mode, pretty much says that King Henry VI was crazy, and part of that craziness involved seeing hallucinations! 

In a followup post, I will get into the weeds about all of the above, and flesh things out a good bit more, especially about the famous psychological problems that the real King Henry VI suffered from, and also how mainstream Austen scholars have misunderstood her witty comment for a very long time. But for now I just wanted to get my first post of 2017 out there as soon as possible!

Happy new year!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Delvings in and beneath Gaskell’s North & South

I’m so glad Tracy Marks recently began an interesting thread in Austen-L about the striking, very thinly veiled allusion by Elizabeth Gaskell in North and South to Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. 

The more I read about it, and also read in North and South itself, the more significant I find it.

First here are a few highlights from Janine Barchas’s 2008 article setting out the broad strokes of Gaskell’s allusion:

“Mrs. Gaskell's North and South (1854-55) has all the makings of a deftly refashioned P&P. Here the relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy is replayed when Margaret Hale's prejudice against the North and so-called "shoppy people" prompts her hasty misjudgment of John Thornton, the Milton manufacturer . Like all clever adaptations, Gaskell's has a twist, as it inverts our gendered expectations of the main protagonists: it is the "queenly" Margaret, not Thornton, who intimidates with a proud bearing and a "straight, fearless, dignified presence habitual to her". In Gaskell, Margaret plays the proud Darcy, as it were. Originally published as a serial in Household Words in 1854 with Charles Dickens's editorial assistance, N&S may be the first full-length reworking of P&P… N&S masked any debt to Austen. That is to say, Gaskell never acknowledged an influence outright, and, as a result, historians of the novel have never observed more than a vague family resemblance between her fictions and Austen's…

Gaskell's heroine navigates a pattern of marriage proposals strikingly similar to that traced in P&P. The first "wrong" proposal comes at the novel's start: Gaskell's version of the sexless Mr. Collins is a respectable, albeit dull, London barrister named Henry Lennox. The second proposal, ill-worded and ill-timed, comes from the opinionated Thornton for whom the heroine has already declared her utter disregard. Yet even after his rejection, Thornton proves his virtue and devotion with actions

intent upon saving the heroine's reputation (Margaret is in jeopardy of being associated with a nighttime brawl at a train station). As if on cue the novel closes with the expected proposal do-over in which dislike, it proves, has turned to love. Throughout it all, Margaret's false romanticization of life in the South, and her extreme prejudice against manufacturing people of the North are adjusted--just like Darcy's

‘fastidious’ dislike of rustic entertainments and his snobbery that uncles in Cheapside will "'very materially lessen'" a girl's chance "'of marrying men of any consideration'"--during the course of the story.

END QUOTE FROM BARCHAS

Just from my own brief delvings the past 24 hours, I can already see that Gaskell was a very sly, playful literary elf who learned much from JA’s subtle, subversive art of fiction. How so?  I’ll give you one beautiful example, which is exactly in the vein of Austen’s witty, allusively sophisticated wordplay.

First, read this passage from Chapter 50 of N&S, only a few chapters before the romantic climax at the end. Mr. Thornton, the “Mr. Darcy” of the novel, reflects on his career as a self-made industrialist, and his “pride” therein:

“But the truth was, Mr. Thornton was hard pressed. He felt it acutely in his vulnerable point—his pride in the commercial character which he had established for himself. Architect of his own fortunes, he attributed this to no special merit or qualities of his own, but to the power, which he believed that commerce gave to every brave, honest, and persevering man, to raise himself to a level from which he might see and read the great game of worldly success, and honestly, by such far-sightedness, command more power and influence than in any other mode of life. Far away, in the East and in the West, where his person would never be known, his name was to be regarded, and his wishes to be fulfilled, and his word pass like gold. That was the idea of merchant-life with which Mr. Thornton had started. 'Her merchants be like princes,' said his mother, reading the text aloud, as if it were a trumpet-call to invite her boy to the struggle. He was but like many others-men, women, and children-alive to distant, and dead to near things. He sought to possess the influence of a name in foreign countries and far-away seas,—to become the head of a firm that should be known for generations; and it had taken him long silent years to come even to a glimmering of what he might be now, to-day, here in his own town, his own factory, among his own people. He and they had led parallel lives—very close, but never touching—till the accident (or so it seemed) of his acquaintance with Higgins. Once brought face to face, man to man, with an individual of the masses around him, and (take notice) out of the character of master and workman, in the first instance, they had each begun to recognise that 'we have all of us one human heart.' [quote from Wordsworth’s “The Cumberland Beggar”] It was the fine point of the wedge; and until now, when the apprehension of losing his connection with two or three of the workmen whom he had so lately begun to know as men,—of having a plan or two, which were EXPERIMENTS lying very close to his heart, roughly nipped off without trial,—gave a new poignancy to the subtle fear that came over him from time to time; until now, he had never recognised how much and how deep was the interest he had grown of late to feel in his position as manufacturer, simply because it led him into such close contact, and gave him the opportunity of so much power, among a race of people strange, shrewd, ignorant; but, above all, full of character and strong human feeling.”

So, where’s the sly game played by Gaskell? I suggest to you that in this passage, Gaskell was paying an homage to one particular self-made English manufacturer, who did indeed “become the head of a firm that should be known for generations” via “experiments lying very close to his heart”. Indeed, his firm is still as well known today as it was to Gaskell’s generation. Who? Josiah Wedgwood, that’s who! ---as you read here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/wedgwood_josiah.shtml

“Wedgwood was an innovative designer, a manufacturer of high-quality pottery and a campaigner for social reform. Josiah Wedgwood was born into a family of potters on 12 July 1730, at Burslem, Staffordshire. His father's death in 1739 led him to an early start working as a 'thrower' in the pottery of his eldest brother, Thomas, to whom he was later apprenticed. An attack of smallpox seriously weakened Josiah, and in 1768 he had to have his right leg amputated. This meant he was forced to abandon throwing but he subsequently gained a wider insight into the potter's craft - for example the work of the 'modeller' - and this encouraged his love of experimentation.

Thomas refused Josiah a partnership in the business, so the younger man moved first to a small pottery run by John Harrison, then more happily to the firm of Thomas Wheildon of Fenton. From there, he opened works of his own, first at his cousin's Ivy House and later at the Brick House factory. At these works, Wedgwood made many models himself, and also prepared clay mixes. In June 1769, he opened a new factory at Etruria, near Stoke-on-Trent, in partnership with Thomas Bentley. Attached to the factory was a village where Wedgwood's workmen and their families could live in decent surroundings.

Wedgwood greatly improved the clumsy ordinary crockery of the day, introducing durable, simple and regular wares. His cream coloured earthenware was christened 'Queen's Ware' after Queen Charlotte, who appointed him queen's potter in 1762. Other eminent patrons included Empress Catherine II of Russia, who ordered 952 such pieces in 1774.

Wedgwood experimented with barium sulphate (caulk), and from it produced jasper, in 1773. Jasperware, which is used for a whole host of ornaments, blends metallic oxides, often blue, with separately moulded reliefs, generally white. Some such reliefs were designed for Wedgwood by John Flaxman. Other wares included black basaltes, frequently enhanced by 'encaustic' colours like red, to imitate Greek vases.

Wedgwood was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1783, primarily for inventing the pyrometer to measure oven temperatures. He took a keen interest, too, in efficient factory organisation, and in improving the transport of raw materials and finished wares by canals, such as the Grand Trunk Canal, and by road.

In 1780, when Wedgwood's long-term business partner died, he asked his friend Erasmus Darwin for help. Darwin's son would later marry Wedgwood's daughter, and they were the parents of Charles Darwin, the naturalist who formulated the theory of evolution. Charles would himself, in turn, marry a Wedgwood. When Wedgwood died on 3rd January 1795 he left a thriving business and a fortune to his children.”

Now, some of you will no doubt reasonably respond that while it sounds possible that I am correct about Gaskell’s homage, why should it be Wedgwood in particular, from among several English manufacturers whose careers also fit those same general parameters Thornton listed in his speech? Well, how about this for starters (and finishers): Elizabeth Gaskell was herself the niece of Josiah Wedgwood’s niece!:

Mrs. Gaskell: Haunts Homes and Stories by Esther Alice Chadwick (1913):  “Mrs. Gaskell’s aunt…was a niece of Josiah Wedgwood, her mother being sister to the famous inventor of the pottery which bears his name. Another sister of Josiah Wedgwood was the mother of the well known naturalist, Charles Darwin”

And that brings me to one other, very specific hint that Gaskell hid in plain sight in the above quoted passage from N&S, which I say was deliberately pointed by her like a laser beam at her collateral ancestor Josiah Wedgwood:

“It was the fine point of the wedge”

“wedge”, as in Wedgwood!! That’s exactly the sort of significant name-game that Jane Austen played a hundred times in her fiction, and here we see Gaskell playing it in a big way! As far as I can tell, nobody else has previously spotted this, but that’s only a reflection, I suggest, that nobody ever took the time to look at the speech and think about it in relation to Gaskell’s biography, which is all it took on my part.

So, this tells me that it would be profitable to spend some more time delving into the text of North and South, to see what fresh Austenian allusions, beyond those already identified by other scholars, might pop up under the lens of my Austenian “shadow story” spectacles. In particular, I am intrigued by the parallel circumstances which lead to Margaret Hale achieving a shocking elevation in financial status at the end of the story, just as Elizabeth Bennet does.

Before I close, let me also draw your attention to another detail with Austenian significance-- about Gaskell being a Wedgwood cousin of both Charles Darwin and his wife Emma. Gaskell was 2 years younger than Charles, who was 1/2 Wedgwood (on his mother’s side), while his wife Emma’s paternal grandfather was Josiah himself. So both Charles and his wife Emma were cousins of Elizabeth Gaskell of about the same age.

This suggests to me the strong possibility that when they were all young, Elizabeth Gaskell spent time around the Darwin family matriarch, Mrs. Pole (that very same lady I’ve recently written about again, who rendered the very favorable opinion about Jane Austen having been “experimentally acquainted” with the snobbish class of people she skewered in Mansfield Park). If so, perhaps her first taste of Jane Austen came at the suggestion of her great-cousin Mrs. Pole? In that regard, I’ve just been reading a very interesting article about the possible allusion to Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution in North and South:  “Gaskell, Darwin, and North and South by Carol A. Martin in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 15, No. 2 (summer 1983), pp. 91-107.

And finally, Gaskell’s apparent strong Janeism in 1855 when she wrote N&S also opens up very interesting questions about her communications with the supposed Austen-depreciator (as to which I violently disagree) Charlotte Bronte. Despite achieving fame sooner, Bronte was 6 years younger than Gaskell, and we know that after publication of Jane Eyre, Gaskell reached out to Charlotte. And of course Gaskell eventually wrote the first biography of Charlotte Bronte.

In that regard, then, is it relevant that the benefactor of the heroine in N&S is named “Mr. Bell” as in Currer Bell!)? I believe so, and I also suspect that the back and forth between Gaskell and Bronte  included some discussion of Jane Austen’s fiction!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Shakespeare’s Henry VI envisions a world without war

The other day, I happened to read closely, for the first time, the following memorable speech spoken by King Henry VI in Act 2, Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3, a scene introduced by “Alarum. Enter KING HENRY VI ALONE”, during which the King is observing one of the major battles of the War of the Roses, at Towton, at which enormous casualties were suffered by both sides.

I invite you all to do the same -- please read it through, slowly, savoring the Shakespearean language; and then at the end of the quotation I have two questions for you. Answering them will require NO prior Shakespearean expertise, just (in the case of Question #1) a knowledge of modern popular culture which we all have, unless you’ve been living in a cave. ;)   I promise I’ll deliver a very interesting and surprising payoff at the end of this whole exercise, when I reveal my answers in a followup post on New Year’s Day, along with a summary of any answers I receive from all of you, as well.

But first, Henry VI speaks from the heart, so please listen:

This battle fares like to the morning's war,
When dying clouds contend with growing light,
What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails,
Can neither call it perfect day nor night.
Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea
Forced by the tide to combat with the wind;
Now sways it that way, like the selfsame sea
Forced to retire by fury of the wind:
Sometime the flood prevails, and then the wind;
Now one the better, then another best;
Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast,
Yet neither conqueror nor conquered:
So is the equal of this fell war.

Here on this molehill will I sit me down.
To whom God will, there be the victory!
For Margaret my queen, and Clifford too,
Have chid me from the battle; swearing both
They prosper best of all when I am thence.
Would I were dead! if God's good will were so;
For what is in this world but grief and woe?

O God! methinks it were a happy life,
To be no better than a homely swain;
To sit upon a hill, as I do now,
To carve out dials quaintly, point by point,
Thereby to see the minutes how they run,
How many make the hour full complete;
How many hours bring about the day;
How many days will finish up the year;
How many years a mortal man may live.
When this is known, then to divide the times:
So many hours must I tend my flock;
So many hours must I take my rest;
So many hours must I contemplate;
So many hours must I sport myself;
So many days my ewes have been with young;
So many weeks ere the poor fools will yean:  [i.e., wean]
So many years ere I shall shear the fleece:
So minutes, hours, days, months, and years,
Pass'd over to the end they were created,
Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.

Ah, what a life were this! how sweet! how lovely!
Gives not the hawthorn-bush a sweeter shade
To shepherds looking on their silly sheep,
Than doth a rich embroider'd canopy
To kings that fear their subjects' treachery?
O, yes, it doth; a thousand-fold it doth.
And to conclude, the shepherd's homely curds,
His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle.
His wonted sleep under a fresh tree's shade,
All which secure and sweetly he enjoys,
Is far beyond a prince's delicates,
His viands sparkling in a golden cup,
His body couched in a curious bed,
When care, mistrust, and treason waits on him.  END QUOTE

At that point in this same short scene, a father and a son (both unnamed, and obviously unrelated to one another) enter and each tells, in alternation, a brief, Oedipally tragic tale of having unwittingly slain his son and father, respectively, in the battle of Towton. In each case, the King mourns these tragic losses, and then the scene ends with Henry being abruptly whisked away from danger by his wife (the queen), his son, and his courtier Exeter.

Okay now for my two questions, the answers to which I request that you respond to me privately by sending me an email at arnieperlstein@gmail.com  prior to this Saturday, Dec. 31, at Midnight PST – I will then post my followup post on Sunday, and summarize any answers I received, without naming names of my respondents. You can then chime in to any followup discussion as you wish.

Question 1: Is there a famous work of 20th/21^st Century art (as to which I’m being deliberately vague --- it could be a novel, a movie, a painting, a play, a song, or a poem, or some combination thereof) which you’re specifically reminded of by Henry’s long soliloquy – in particular the specific imagery that Henry VI uses? Once you think of the work of art that popped into my head while reading Henry’s speech, you will know it’s the one I had in mind, the parallels are that strong, so that when you then reread the speech, it will, I believe, be obvious to you. But I want to know if others have the same reaction.

Question 2: What do you think Shakespeare wished his readers/audience to infer about Henry’s state of mind at the precise moment when he delivers this speech? The answer to that question popped into my head after I realized the answer to Question 1, and I started thinking about the whole thing. It was only then that I found out that my answer to Question 2 fit like a glove with both history and Shakespeare.

To assist you in answering the second question, I give you three additional hints:

ONE: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” –soliloquy by King Henry V (i.e., Henry VI’s father) in Henry IV Part 2, Act 3, Scene 1; a play written by Shakespeare out of historical order, i.e., he wrote it after he wrote the Henry VI trilogy.

TWO: “Henry the 6^th: I cannot say much for this Monarch's sense.”—Jane Austen, age 15, in her brief, satirical take on Henry VI in her The History of England.

THREE: Watch the following YouTube clip of David Warner, as King Henry VI, delivering that very same speech in the BBC 1965 production https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI8QMJmQEbE&index=31&list=PL71808247F47E2A6E

If you put these three hints together, and really think about them in tandem, I’m hoping that the answers to my two questions will eventually pop into your heads, too! If not, no worries, I will reveal all on Sunday in any event!

Happy thinking, and happy new year!

Cheers, ARNIE

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