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CMP#35  How Daring Was Austen?

4/5/2021

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​Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. Folks today who love Jane Austen are eager to acquit her of being a woman of the long 18th century. Further, for some people, reinventing Jane Austen appears to be part of a larger effort to jettison and disavow the past. Click here for the first in the series.  

Was Austen Silenced Over Slavery?
PictureProblematic
      I have been hesitating over how best to open up a long discussion of Austen, Mansfield Park and the abolition movement. Should I start with what I think Mansfield Park is really about, i.e. the mistakes made by a father in the education of his daughters? Or should I start with what I think Mansfield Park is not about, i.e. it is not primarily an anti-slavery, anti-Empire novel? Should I set the stage with a discussion about what people said and thought about slavery in Austen's time? This blog post will serve as an outline for the topics I intend to touch on, and as I publish each post, I'll come back and link to it here.
      It’s not just that I want to lay out my arguments clearly. I am worried -- as any sane person would be these days -- that in the current climate my remarks will be misconstrued. 
     When I say I disagree that Mansfield Park is an anti-slavery novel, it does not mean I want to shut my eyes and ears and read my dear sweet Jane without troubling my conscience about the ugly underbelly of Regency England.
    I am saying that if you read Mansfield Park for the anti-slavery, there just isn’t much to find there, compared to other books. If you want to read fiction and non-fiction books written in Georgian or Regency times that discuss slavery, I can point you to some books that do. If you want to read books written in Georgian or Regency times with Black characters in them, I can point you to a few. 
      This doesn't guarantee that the views of these 18th writers will be entirely in accord with your views. This doesn't guarantee you will be delighted with their portrayals of Black people. But the point is, these other authors did discuss the subject.

PictureHoeing in the cane fields
     For more than a century and a half after Mansfield Park was published, reviews and analysis of the novel never so much as mentioned the fact of slavery. It's not hidden: Sir Thomas owns property in Antigua and his niece asks him a question about the slave trade. But it's not central to the plot, either. In  Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage 1811-1940, a collection of the reviews of Austen's work during that period, the word "Antigua" appears twice, and only to explain that Sir Thomas went there and came back. The word "slavery" is used once, by Thomas Macauley, but not in reference to Austen's writing. 
    
It is generally agreed that the issue of slavery in Mansfield Park came to the forefront with a famous 1993 essay by Edward Said in which he criticizes Austen for her apparent lack of concern about the slaves whose labour provided the sugar and hence the wealth that supported the Bertrams' lifestyle. However, two years before Said, Moira Ferguson was explaining that Austen was all about protesting slavery and the patriarchy.
         An honest perusal of Mansfield Park shows there is no anti-slavery message in the text, nothing in the words that Austen, a famously articulate writer, actually wrote. 
​        So it must be there in the symbolism. Much symbolism has been found.  Today, the confident faith of Austen fans that their girl was a Total Badass rests on the premise that 
Mansfield Park is filled with anti-slavery messages. They interpret passing references to imported shawls or pug dogs or apricot trees as being filled with editorial meaning, while ignoring the remarks about Sir Thomas that Austen actually makes. Sometimes Austen's defenders empower Austen by explaining she actually means the opposite of what she says. Often it is asserted that Fanny and even the Bertram daughters are stand-ins for slaves, and Mrs. Norris is a plantation overseer. I think this is an interpretation which will become increasingly problematic.    
       It has also been confidently asserted that Austen wasn’t more explicit about slavery because (a) she was a woman and therefore wasn't able to air heterodox opinions and (b) it was legally dangerous to discuss such matters, 
that going this far in a novel -- with Fanny Price asking her uncle a question about the slave trade -- was daring stuff.  

    ​ "In fact," scholar George Boulukos explains, "there is no evidence that readers, publishers or booksellers of early nineteenth-century London either looked askance at fictional works treating these topics or worried that such topics might upset the public’s sense of propriety.”  
​        In future posts, I will give examples of people who 
did write about slavery and social issues during this period, far more explicitly than Austen ever did. The topic was not “veiled in silence” but even raised in children’s literature.
     (Granted, we can also find examples of people writing appalling and racist things. People disagreed about stuff back then, as they do today.)

   For now, here's one example of some anti-slavery literature which was much more explicit than Austen:
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     Evenings at Home was a very popular series of children's books written by John Aiken and Anna Laetitia Barbould. 
    If it was not controversial to speak out against slavery in a book for children, if it was not controversial to assert that savages are people too, it was not necessary for Jane Austen to disguise her disapproval of slavery with a reference to apricots. Especially since Mansfield Park was published years after the slave trade was outlawed. Coming out against the slave trade in 1814 would be about as controversial as being against fox hunting today. The apricots are just apricots. In the novel, they feature in a squabble between Mrs. Norris and Dr. Grant. 

   In addition, I have yet to find an example of a woman being sent to prison for seditious libel in the UK for anything that she wrote. I haven't found an example of anyone, male or female, going to prison for writing against slavery.
​    In fac
t, it was publishing forbidden opinions that was the crime, not the writing.  Some women were sent to prison for publishing. In 1822 a radical atheist named Richard Carlile was convicted of blasphemy and seditious libel. His wife continued publishing his newspaper, so she followed him to prison. Then his sister carried on publishing, and she was sent to prison.
    The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had a poor servant, Dan Healey, who was arrested in August, 1812, for posting political handbills Shelley had written. That was considered publishing. Shelley didn't pay the £200 fine on behalf of his servant (who was an Irish orphan), so he, not Shelley, spent six months in prison.
   
  In other words, if Mansfield Park was seditious, it was Austen's publishers Thomas Egerton or John Murray who were in trouble. If either of them warned her, "Whoa lady, you'd better dial that anti-slavery stuff back a bit or I won't publish it," no such correspondence survives. Shelley, on the other hand, did have documented issues with his publishers over material he wrote that they refused to publish.
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    I concede that even if it wasn’t illegal to write about slavery or the patriarchy, cancel culture was a thing back then, too. Radicals, liberals and conservatives attacked each other in journals, in newspapers, and with pamphlets. You could say that the feminist and radical Mary Wollstonecraft was cancelled posthumously. (Her husband published a biography of her after her death and the details of her unconventional private life shocked the public.) Anna Laetitia Barbould got a scathing review for an anti-war poem. Fanny Burney's The Wanderer was criticized for its subject matter -- the oppression of women -- in addition to its "prolix and obscure" style.
​      But lots of people get bad reviews. And Austen never got a bad review because of perceived unorthodox views. Does this mean she pulled her punches about her opinions, or does it mean she didn't have radical opinions? 
   Of course, those of us who admire Austen believe that she was an enlightened humanitarian. The fact is though, you won’t find much about the lower classes, Black people, slavery, or empire in Austen, compared to Anna Letitia Barbould or Lady Morgan or Jane West or Mary Brunton or Maria Edgeworth or Patricia Wakefield or Amelia Opie or Sarah Burney. Sorry, but it’s true. What you will find in Austen is wonderful writing and exquisite control of her subjects and plots. And hilarity. And unforgettable characters. And some subtle moral philosophy in stories about self-knowledge, self-reflection and self-control.

    Next, it's a deep dive into the "dead silence" in Mansfield Park, the passage of the book that refers to the "slave trade," and after that, the role that Sir Thomas Bertram, patriarch and slave-owner, plays in the novel.


In my Mansfield Trilogy, there is a moral reckoning over slavery for Sir Thomas and his family. Click here for more about my books.
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SHELLEY AND THE UNKNOWN LADY is free this week!

12/15/2020

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    Happy holidays! 
​
   If your idea of holiday reading includes cuddling up with some romantic poetical angst, help yourself to a e-copy of my novella, Shelley and the Unknown Lady. This tale inserts Mary Crawford, a character from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, into a real-life mystery concerning the tragic life of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. This special offer is available through Amazon until Friday, December 18. 

The story opens with Mary encountering Percy Shelley in the woods, stark naked. This is based on true fact. When Shelley lived in Bagni di Lucca in Italy, he found a sunny rock near a waterfall where he liked to strip down and read.  I've posted the opening of the story below:

PictureLady with groom, Gallery of Fashion 1795
Bagni di Lucca, Tuscany, Italy, June 1818
   Madame Ciampi was busy setting out the breakfast platters in the dining room when she heard the tinkle of the bell in the lobby. She hurried to respond, hiding her irritation at the interruption. There, to her surprise, stood the English lady who had arrived late last night, looking as fresh as a flower, and attired in an elegant riding habit.
   “Madam Ciampi,” said her new tenant,“Did you arrange for a horse for me?”
   “Certainly, madam,” came the reply, and fortunately it was true—she had managed to make arrangements with the riding stable last night. “But—does madam intend to ride out so early? Or will you take some breakfast first, ma’am?”
   The lady stepped to the entrance to the dining room and looked about. Save for a housemaid and a waiter, the room was empty.
   “I shall take some coffee,” she said to Madam Ciampi.
   “And shall I arrange for a guide to escort madam?” Madam Ciampi followed her guest into the dining room.
   “I hardly think it necessary,” replied the lady, taking a seat by the front window which overlooked the river.     “There is only one road to the forest, is there not?”
   “But, madam—”
    “That will be all.”
    Madam Ciampi walked away, elaborately shaking her head. She relieved her feelings by tugging firmly on the wooden shutters which framed the windows facing eastward over the Appenine hills. The shutters closed with an emphatic bang and Madam Ciampi snapped the latch firmly into place. This was not Venice, thank the blessed saints—here in Tuscany people were sober and decent.
    Peculiar, arrogant, and demanding as the English were, she had to admit they had restored the prosperity of Bagni di Lucca. In the cafés, at the baths, in the casino, one only heard English spoken. At least this new lady spoke Italian—unlike the others, who believed anyone could understand them if they spoke loudly and slowly enough.
    A few more of Madame Ciampi’s lodgers were now drifting down from their apartments, calling for tea or coffee, exchanging greetings, and taking note of the fashionable newcomer seated by the window. But the beautiful stranger ignored everyone and everything, watching out the window until she saw a groomsman lead a small brown mare into the courtyard. Then she gracefully rose and collected her hat and riding crop.
   “I shall return for dinner,” she informed Madam Ciampi.
   “Very good, Madam Crawford.”

PictureBagni di Lucca, Italy
   Mary was briefly taken aback at hearing herself addressed by her maiden name, even though it was she who had impulsively signed the hotel register as “Mrs. Crawford” the previous evening. It was all right, she reassured herself; she was not assuming a disguise; she was throwing one off. She was no longer forced to play the part of the dutiful clergyman’s wife.
   Mary stroked her little brown mare’s nose, then expertly inspected the girth and the harness before climbing on the mounting block. Once she was settled on the saddle, she dismissed the groom and directed the mare out of the courtyard at a slow walk, getting to know her new mount and letting the horse get to know her. It felt so good to be on horseback again.​
   Bagni di Lucca, the Baths of Lucca, was a series of little settlements strung out along a narrow valley between forested hills. Mary rode out along the main road—indeed, the only road—toward the upper village, while taking note of the features of the resort which Madam Ciampi had described to her. Here was the casino, here were the baths and the steam grotto. Here was the villa of Napoleon’s sister, the Princess Borghese. The Princess had lived apart from her husband for years because royalty, even upstart Corsican royalty, could do as they pleased.
    Mary likewise intended to do as she pleased, for during her marriage she had often been unhappy, and if she was unhappy, it followed logically that it was Edmund’s fault. Or, if she must admit to one error, it was in marrying Edmund in the first place. “A clergyman is nothing,” she had told Edmund upon learning he intended to take orders. She was fitted by character and ability to be the partner of a great man, a man whose name and reputation outlived his death, someone whose bust adorned the halls of Parliament.
   Heaven knows she had tried to elevate Edmund out of obscurity. Once, she had collected and made fair copies of his sermons, intending to have them published. But Edmund’s formal style, so much like his father’s, was of a former age. She engaged a writer to revise his staid essays into passionate epistles, but her first candidate had taken her money and produced, after much delay, some very indifferent work, and another had rejected her overture so indignantly that she was too mortified to ask anyone else.
   That spring in Rome Mary had realized, with a sense of desperation amounting almost to panic, that her thirtieth birthday was approaching. Thirty! So little time left to fulfil her ambitions. Then came the letter from home, the unexpected stroke, the final rupture.
   Mary continued upward, passing more lodging-houses and villas, until she came across the path made by other wanderers over the years, a path which led into the chestnut forests which spilled across the hillside. Looking back, she could glimpse the river twisting down through the valley below her. Before her, the bridle path, lit by patches of dappled sunlight, beckoned her into the forest.
   It was fashionable, these days, to fall into raptures over a scenic prospect or a lightning-blasted oak, but Mary had never pretended to be an enthusiast for Nature. It was enough to have quiet and solitude to consider the past and plan for the future, and she was grateful to have arrived early in the season, when there were still few visitors in town. More tourists would arrive as June turned to July—old soldiers taking their ease after years of fighting Napoleon’s armies; nannies herding young children up and down the street, gout-ridden old men hobbling to the hot baths while the young ladies set up their easels by the river.
   Mary was so absorbed in her thoughts that at first the faint sound of rushing water did not obtrude upon her notice. Then she paused and looked about her. There was definitely a stream nearby. Hadn’t her landlady spoken of a little waterfall in the forest? Exploring the source of that sound would make as good a destination as any for her morning’s ride, and accordingly, Mary directed the mare off the path to a rougher track through the trees. She was not afraid of getting lost in the wood, for she need only travel downhill again to find her way back to the village.  

PictureLandscape with dancing fauns and nymphs, Fillipo Lauri
   Before long, Mary came to a clearing which revealed a narrow, stony gorge. She made note of a large, low, flat boulder which would serve as an excellent mounting block. She slid down from her saddle and tied the mare to a tree before advancing on foot to the edge of the gorge. A few feet below her, a narrow stream flowed, hemmed in by large boulders on either side. She could not judge the water’s depth, for it was so clean and clear she could see the pebbles and sand at the bottom as though viewed through glass.
   Uphill, a tumble of boulders obscured the sight, but not the sound, of a small waterfall. Sunshine illuminated the leaves of some alder trees which had managed to establish themselves on top of the rocky escarpment.  Apart from the rushing water, the grove was absolutely quiet, and so still, that she gave a little start when she sensed something moving on top of the boulders.
    Looking up, she saw a large creature. It was not a bird, because it had no feathers, nor a beast, because it was not covered in fur.
   Was she in the grip of some delusion? Had all the hours of walking about in marble palaces and museums, looking at old frescoes of nymphs and fauns in sylvan glades, so affected her fancy? For here, perched on top of the highest boulder, with his back to her, was a naked faun.
    But—weren’t fauns covered all over with fur? Or at least, didn’t they have hairy haunches? She tried to recall the fauns in the paintings she had seen in Rome and Pisa and Florence. This creature on the rock above her was bare-skinned and so slender that his spine, shoulder blades and ribs were all clearly visible. And he was reading a book. Did fauns read books?
    Just then, her horse noisily passed wind. The sound pulled the attention of the faun from his reading, and he looked around, looked down, and saw her. He smiled--a mischievous smile, just as she supposed a faun might smile. He rose, turned to face her, and made a graceful bow, as though they were both in the Court of St. James. He was completely naked and made no effort to use his book to shield his private parts.
Mary observed that the faun had long slender legs which were not hairy. From her vantage point at ground level, she was denied a view of his feet, so she was unable to determine if he had the hoofs of a goat. Nor could she spy any horns hiding in the dishevelled brown curls which covered his head.
   “Welcome to my study,” said the faun. “Or, should this boulder serve as my pulpit? And shall these leaves, ablaze in the sunlight, serve as our stained-glass windows? Have you come to hear a dramatic monologue or a sermon—what would best suit you?” He turned a page in his book, struck an affected attitude and declaimed:

Down Pindus steep Penëus falls
And swift and clear through hill and dale
It flows, and by Larissa’s walls
And through wild Tempe, loveliest vale--
PictureBotticelli Satyr
   Mary gasped in surprise—again. The faun had turned into a man—a real man—a completely naked man, completely at ease with himself. She was more amused than affronted, but propriety demanded that she look away, so she did.
   “Pray excuse me, sir, for disturbing your solitude.”
  “Oh. I say. I did not intend to discompose you, madam. Well, actually, to tell the truth, I delight in discomposing people. Wait just one moment.” And the young man, who was clearly an Englishman and a gentleman by his speech and accent, disappeared behind his boulder and emerged at ground level a brief moment later, wearing a loose-fitting lawn shirt and some wide-legged trousers. He was barefoot.
   “How do you do?” said the young man, advancing upon Mary. “What a fine animal you have got there. Is she yours or is she from the local stables? Are you newly arrived at Bagni di Lucca? I only came here last night myself. You are English, I presume. Are you—” and he broke off and stared at Mary with some perplexity. Mary stared back; or rather, she was unable to look away—there was something entirely captivating in the young man’s air, his open, intelligent countenance, his large and expressive eyes.
   “We have met before, madam, have we not?” he asked abruptly.
Mary nodded as she suddenly realized this strange man looked familiar.
   “Did we dine together at the Leigh Hunts, perhaps?” he asked, as he ran his long slender fingers through his unruly curls, as though it might aid his memory. “Or, are you acquainted with Mrs. Boinville?”
   “No, sir, I do not know those persons. And yet, I am almost certain we have met before,” Mary returned. “But surely if we had, we would be able to recollect the occasion.”
  “Yes!” The young man smiled in a most engaging fashion. “At least, I am certain I could never forget meeting you. Beauty such as yours is not to be forgotten. Perhaps I saw you in a painting by Botticelli.”
    “That is just what I was thinking,” Mary replied. “I thought at first you were a faun out of a painting.”
   At this, the man threw back his head and laughed—loudly, immoderately. His wild, high-pitched glee instantly recalled to Mary the circumstances of their first meeting.
   “You—you are the hermit of Marlow!” she exclaimed.   

PicturePercy Bysshe Shelley, 1792 - 1822
    Now it was the young man’s turn to be briefly discomposed.
   “I am! That is to say, I once was—but not a handful of people, I think, know that particular pen name. How came you—-” sudden recollection dawned upon his countenance. “Ahhh! You are the lady I met at Grey’s Inn.   You asked me to be your husband’s amanuensis! Or rather—” with a quicksilver change of mood, he became decidedly less friendly. “You asked me to re-write your husband’s sermons, to make them more evangelical, and I refused you.”
   “You certainly did refuse me,” said Mary, likewise retreating to a chillier tone. “You fell upon the floor, actually fell upon the floor, laughing me to scorn.”
   “I did, too,” said the man, not at all abashed by her reproof. “But, what a preposterous notion, that I—of all people—should write Christian sermons!” He spat out the word “Christian” with particular loathing. “Christianity, or rather, the false creed which profanes the name of one of the wisest, gentlest, noblest beings to walk upon this earth. I—to help keep the labouring classes in superstition and ignorance!” He sighed and shook his head. “Well, madam, if it is any consolation to you, there have been moments since that day when I could have made good use of the handsome fee you offered me.”
    “As I recall, you said no amount of money would induce you to help propagate falsehoods and idolatry.”
    “Oh, no doubt I said that, and much more,” the man said, suddenly reassuming his original cheerfulness. “So, did you engage another writer?”
    Ordinarily, Mary would have replied that her affairs were no business of his, especially since he had declined her generous offer so peremptorily, but she was still so taken aback by this unlikely meeting and the odd demeanor of the man that she answered, “No, I abandoned the scheme. At least for now.”
   “I see. Well, I might entertain myself by arguing you back into it, just to test my powers of persuasion,” he answered. “How extraordinary it is, that we should meet again, and in such an enchanted spot! This cannot be mere happenstance. What can this signify?”


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By the way, the poem that Shelley is beginning to declaim in this excerpt is not one of his -- it is by his friend Thomas Love Peacock. He published some political pamphlets anonymously as "The Hermit of Marlowe" when he was living in the suburb of Marlowe, before he left England for Italy.

Check out my other novels here. And be sure to get your copy of Shelley and the Unknown Lady before Friday!. 
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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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