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CMP#10  "I speak what appears to me the general opinion"

10/30/2019

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Picture
​Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels.  Click here for the first in the series.​
   "May the coward never wear a red coat, nor the hypocrite a black one."  -- 1802 after-dinner toast
PictureDetail of Rowlandson cartoon. A Clergyman with gout takes a nap, no doubt after a good dinner.
   Jane Austen included some unflattering portraits of clergymen in her novels. Mr. Collins manages to be both pompous and obsequious.  Emma learns that Mr. Elton is shallow and spiteful. Dr. Grant "will not stir a finger for the convenience of any one."
   Was it daring for Austen to portray clergymen in this light? Was it radical? More importantly, did she actually oppose the Church of England, as discussed in my previous post?
     Complaints about incompetent or corrupt clergy were quite prevalent in conversation and literature during the long 18th century. One of the first English novels, Tom Jones, featured a sadistic clergyman, Mr. Thwackum. 
    Austen deliberately included several explicit discussions about the clergy in Mansfield Park. Perhaps these might serve as a better guide to her opinions. 
​   
Edmund Bertram, the second son of Sir Thomas Bertram, will not inherit the title and the mansion and the slave plantations in Antigua, but there are two "livings" set aside for him--that is, two parishes, and he is to become a clergyman.  Mary Crawford, a sophisticated young lady from London, is dismayed by this news. She thinks clergyman are lazy, selfish and, worst of all, unfashionable. "A clergyman is nothing."
    Edmund replies that her opinions are a "commonplace censure" of the typical clergyman.
   Commonplace, but I still was surprised to find, in the memoirs of Henry Hunt, a conversation between father, mother and son which makes exactly the same points.
   Henry Hunt was a radical activist and famous orator of Regency times, most famous for being the featured speaker (though he was arrested as soon as he started speaking) at the Peterloo Massacre. He was sent to prison by the authorities. And though Hunt was a radical, he was able to publish his memoirs from prison in 1820. There's no reason to suppose that Hunt cribbed from Mansfield Park, but the two books do show, indeed, how commonplace the censure of the clergymen was. 

PictureHugh Blair was a Scottish minister whose sermons were very popular
  In his memoirs, Hunt recounted the time he told his father he'd rather become a farmer, like his father, than go to university. His father, perhaps to test his resolve, offered to pay for his university education and then buy him "a good living, and you will then have secured to you for life a thousand or perhaps twelve hundred pounds a year; and you will have nothing else to do, for six days out of the seven, but hunt, shoot, and fish by day, and play cards and win the money of the farmer's wives and children by night."
​   Hunt's father doesn't actually want his son to become a clergyman, as will become clear. But the father's description is similar to Mary Crawford's: 
"​​It is indolence, Mr. Bertram, indeed. Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish—read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work, and the business of his own life is to dine.”
    Edmund replies that she is painting with too broad a brush: "There are such clergymen, no doubt, but I think they are not so common as to justify Miss Crawford in esteeming it their general character."
    This is also how Henry Hunt's mother reacts. She says to her husband: 
"[R]eally, my dear, although there is too much truth in the picture you have drawn, yet you have been a little too severe upon the clergy, when speaking of them in the mass. There are many excellent and worthy men, who follow the precepts of their great master, who are an ornament to that society to which they belong, and are, therefore, most deserving members of, and do great credit to, the profession which you have so indiscriminately reprobated."

PictureHenry Hunt 1773 - 1835
  Mary sticks to her guns: “I speak what appears to me the general opinion; and where an opinion is general, it is usually correct. Though I have not seen much of the domestic lives of clergymen, it is seen by too many to leave any deficiency of information.”
   And so does Henry Hunt's father: "Do not tell me about ornaments to society; the best of them are the 
drones of society, and, without contributing any thing to the common stock, they feed upon the choicest honey, collected by the labour of the industrious bees... they may be very necessary evils; but you are aware, my dear, that what I say is true as to most of them that we know...." (This part about feeding on honey is a reference to the fact that clergymen were supported by tithes, a percentage of all the produce of the farms in their parish, a tax which Hunt's father obviously resents.)
   Mary Crawford also suggests that lazy clergyman don't even write their own sermons: "How can two sermons a week, even supposing them worth hearing, supposing the preacher to have the sense to prefer Blair's to his own, [improve public morals?]"

   The 1836 version of Hunt's memoir adds the detail of Hunt's father saying, "by a visit to the metropolis, you can lay in a stock of manuscript sermons, which will last you for the whole of your life." ​

PictureA clergyman: "a Shepherd who fleeced all his sheep" by taking their produce in tithes
 A book called Tithes Abolished and Priestcraft Detected (1816)  also fulminated against the "wicked sway" of "arbitrary," "covetous" parsons. I can't find any indication that the book got the author, Edward Tovey, into trouble with the authorities. Tovey is scathing in his criticism of Church of England clergy "who do not look into the Bible from Monday morning to Saturday night, and who are in the habit of buying their sermons, at so much per dozen" and he quotes  Bible verses to underscore his opinion.
  "What must induce such men to become preachers?" Tovey asks. "Not for the good of souls, but for the sake of tithes, or to get a good living or benefice."
   We have, then, a sophisticated woman from London, an old-style country squire, and a cranky Evangelical farmer, who all agree that clergyman (or some of them) are lazy, greedy, hypocrites. Even though Henry Hunt, Mary Crawford, and Edward Tovey differ widely in their world views in general (and Mary is a fictional character), they all unite in the "commonplace censure" of the clergy. 
    The satirical cartoon above is from "A Clerical Alphabet" which features 26 unflattering portraits of clergyman. It shows an avaricious clergyman carrying away the produce of his parishioners. 

     Austen provided another brief conversation between Mary Crawford and her brother Henry. They are dining at the Grants, and Dr. Grant has been talking to Edmund about how to maximize the revenue from his living. Making he's talking about enclosing common fields and growing more crops, maybe he's giving Edmund pointers on how to collect all the tithes to which he is entitled.
  Miss Crawford, who had been repeatedly eyeing Dr. Grant and Edmund, now observed, “Those gentlemen must have some very interesting point to discuss.”
   “The most interesting in the world,” replied her brother—“how to make money; how to turn a good income into a better. Dr. Grant is giving Bertram instructions about the living he is to step into... They were at it in the dining-parlour. I am glad to hear Bertram will be so well off. He will have a very pretty income to make ducks and drakes with, and earned without much trouble. I apprehend he will not have less than seven hundred a year... and a sermon at Christmas and Easter, I suppose, will be the sum total of sacrifice.”
    Fanny Price loves Edmund, and so it follows that tithing must be just and reasonable to her. That is, if Edmund thinks tithing is reasonable, then it's reasonable to Fanny.
    Tithes and farming (in addition to tutoring) was how Austen's own father supported his family. Recall, as well, that Austen made a merry joke out of the idea that she include the abolition of tithes as a theme in one of her novels, and this was after she'd written Mansfield Park, her supposedly anti-Church novel.
​    I should note that according to Dr. Kelly, Edmund Bertram is not a good guy. It is not just that she​ dislikes him, she thinks Austen intends for us to dislike him. It's not just that he's boring or preachy, it's that he's complicit in the slave trade and she thinks he doesn't really love Fanny. But that's another debate.
​       Another argument that Henry Hunt's father advanced against becoming a clergyman is that clergyman are obscure.
   "If," said [the father] "you intend to lead a quiet, easy life, that of a clergyman will exactly suit you, if you be disposed to make one of the common herd of mankind,,, But if you have any ambition to be a shining character in the world, that is the very last profession I would recommend..."

    This was also Mary Crawford's chief objection. She compares the profession unfavorably with more glamorous ones:  "The profession, either navy or army, is its own justification. It has everything in its favour: heroism, danger, bustle, fashion. Soldiers and sailors are always acceptable in society. Nobody can wonder that men are soldiers and sailors.”
   Edmund answers: “A clergyman cannot be high in state or fashion. He must not head mobs, or set the ton in dress. But I cannot call that situation nothing which has the charge of all that is of the first importance to mankind, individually or collectively considered, temporally and eternally, which has the guardianship of religion and morals, and consequently of the manners which result from their influence."
​   Although Edmund expresses himself in euphemisms, as Austen tends to do when talking about religion, he is speaking very seriously about Christianity, salvation, and society. It's clear he really believes in the doctrines of Christianity.

    I think Jane Austen's gravestone proclaims that she and her family did, too. 
   These last two posts have addressed the question of whether putting Mr. Elton and Mr. Collins in her novels was a daring act for the times she lived in. But I did not revisit Dr. Kelly's assertion that Mansfield Park is a protest against the sugar plantations owned by the Church of England. Since Austen doesn't mention these plantations in the novel--for that matter she doesn't even mention sugar--Kelly's assertion rests on the symbolism and allusion she claims to find. I did touch on this briefly in the past, and will write more about Mansfield Park in the future.
   Next post: Rule Britannia!

      Henry Hunt makes an appearance in the final book of my Mansfield Trilogy. He recounts his conversation with his father over the dinner-table, to Fanny Price's disgust.

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"It Would Not Be Near So Much Like a Ball"

10/20/2019

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18th century moralists warned about the effect of novels on susceptible females ..
as do 21st century literary critics.
PictureDangerous Romance
  The unstated assumption behind Shannon Chamberlain’s Atlantic essay is that we shouldn’t enjoy novels with Happy Ever After endings (“What Jane Austen Thought Marriage Couldn’t Do,” October 3, 2019).
   Her opening sentence is: "Spend any amount of time searching for the villainous mastermind behind the marriage plot in Anglophone literature and inevitably Jane Austen’s name comes up."
   Even if the intent is to be tongue-in-cheek, Chamberlain is assuming that a) romantic novels are pernicious and b) her readers will agree with her on this point.
   Admittedly, some avid readers of romance novels make jokes along the same lines: "Mr Darcy," reads the sweatshirt, "giving women unrealistic expectations since 1813."

  Austen, Chamberlain goes on to say, "leaves herself open to several justifiable criticisms... [she focuses] too much on younger women at the expense of making older ones either irrelevant or ridiculous." Also, Austen doesn't illustrate what happens after the wedding.
   These two criticisms remind me of Caroline Bingley’s remark that balls would be more rational if they featured “conversation instead of dancing." "Much more rational,” her brother agrees, “but it would not be near so much like a ball."
   Surely anyone who wants conversation instead of dancing is free to pick up the book of their choice and let the rest of us enjoy some time alone with our favourite Austen heroes?

Picture
  One justification, I suppose, for taking Austen to task is that she is so ubiquitous and influential. Austen’s tone is ironic rather than sentimental and her concluding love scenes are notoriously restrained and brief, yet she is associated with palpitating romance today.
   Chamberlain provides some context for Austen's novels. Austen wrote at a time when marriages were no longer arranged by parents and started being love matches. People began to expect more happiness and fulfillment from marriage. (Let me mention in passing that it is nice to see an acknowledgement in a mainstream magazine that capitalism is responsible for freeing women from being chattel.) So therefore Austen can be criticized because she didn't “leave [her] readers much idea about how to conduct themselves once the rice is swept up and the bill for the reception comes in.“ 

  Plenty of Austen's contemporaries did write novels about how to conduct themselves. In fact the “conduct novel” was a best-selling genre in Austen’s day, giving advice on morality, friendships, and raising children. In Hannah More's Coelebs in Search of a Wife, a saintly wife reforms her husband. Conduct novels were overtly didactic. And most importantly, they weren't funny.
   To fault Austen for not writing about happy marriages is to be tone deaf to the comedy. I get the impression that post-modern interpretations of Austen all begin by draining the comedy out. Without the comedic lens, Mr. Bennet is just a lousy husband and father, and Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park is a negligent mother, and That’s Not Funny.
   But Austen is comic. Austen even laughs at Elizabeth Bennet's sorrow when she changes her mind about Mr. Darcy and laments her lost opportunity. Alas, "n
o such happy marriage could now teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was." 
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    There is a happy marriage, with happy children, in Pride & Prejudice--Elizabeth Bennet’s aunt and uncle, the Gardiners. The Gardiners are pleasant characters but they function essentially as a plot device to get the hero in the same room with the heroine. Catherine Morland’s curiosity about the death of General Tilney’s unhappy wife is crucial to the plot of Northanger Abbey, her own parents’ happy marriage is not.
   This is not a bug, it’s a feature. All of the literary criticism in the world will not change the fact that stories about unmarried young women are more compelling than stories about their mothers, and Ill-matched couples are more useful for comedic purposes than happily-married ones.
   Austen sensitively depicts a man (Edmund Bertram) who is infatuated with a beautiful, cynical woman (Mary Crawford) and he learns a bitter lesson when he finally sees her for what she is. We see marriages in which a woman (Fanny Dashwood) dominates her husband, and we read of a marriage in which the husband (General Tilney) oppressed his wife and dominates his children. Are these not valuable object lessons? For Austen is a moralist as well as a comic. She portrays sensible as well as silly older women, too. As 
Kathryn Sutherland points out, what set Austen apart from her contemporaries was the realism of her novels.

Picture18th century moralists warned against the effect of novels and plays on susceptible females.
     The idea that novels gave young women unrealistic notions of life was a common criticism in Austen’s day as well. To cite just one example, Sir Edgerton Brydges wrote in 1820 that novels “often do much mischief… they cherish… false views of life, which it is the proper business of books to correct and cure.”
   So we find that a 19th century baronet is in perfect accord with a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. 
     I will close with the following quote from Sense & Sensibility, as evidence that Austen perfectly well understood that the intense felicity of courtship settles down into something else after marriage--and she paid her readers the compliment of supposing they understood it as well:

  "[Edmund Ferrars] could do nothing till he were assured of his fate with Miss Dashwood; and by his rapidity in seeking THAT fate, it is to be supposed... in spite of the modesty with which he rated his own deserts, and the politeness with which he talked of his doubts, he did not, upon the whole, expect a very cruel reception. It was his business, however, to say that he DID, and he said it very prettily. What he might say on the subject a twelvemonth after, must be referred to the imagination of husbands and wives."


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    About the author:

    I'm a writer and a teacher of English as a Second Language.  "Laowai" means foreigner. Check further down for tags for specific subjects. My earlier posts (prior to June 2017) are about my time in China, more recent posts focus on my writing. Welcome!

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