While reading Jane Austen: the Secret Radical, I had the irresistible idea of trying my own hand at writing a spoof of the type of literary criticism that Helena Kelly employs. It was surprisingly easy -- I had my parodies, published below, written in under an hour.
Modern literary criticism contains two basic elements: One, drawing connections between disparate things in the book which have no obvious relevance to the plot or the theme to find symbolism where none was intended. This is an especially clever technique because it is non-falsifiable. You can pronounce that some inanimate object in the book is freighted with meaning, and nobody can dig the author up out of her grave to contradict you.
Nothing was wanting but to be happy when they got there Secondly, investing classic literature with overtones of modern attitudes towards sex, gender identity, colonialism, imperialism, race and intersectionalism.
Consider the picnic on Box Hill in Emma. We modern readers can't help thinking about the servants preparing, carrying and setting out the meal, and then waiting respectfully at a distance while the ladies and gentlemen sat and ate it, and then cleaning up after the ladies and gentlemen when they were all finished with their nice al fresco repast. But none of that is mentioned in the novel, only a brief reference to servants and carriages at the end of the passage. To Austen, servants were a fact of life.
Consider the picnic on Box Hill in Emma. We modern readers can't help thinking about the servants preparing, carrying and setting out the meal, and then waiting respectfully at a distance while the ladies and gentlemen sat and ate it, and then cleaning up after the ladies and gentlemen when they were all finished with their nice al fresco repast. But none of that is mentioned in the novel, only a brief reference to servants and carriages at the end of the passage. To Austen, servants were a fact of life.
Half of the following excerpts are from Helena Kelly's Jane Austen: the Secret Radical and half are parodies that I have written. She is quite serious, and I am just kidding. Can you tell which are which? Give your answers in the comments below!
Seriously? 1. Then, too, an astonishing proportion of the surnames in Sense and Sensibility are metallic ones. We have the Steele sisters. We have the Ferrars family (that is, ferrous, containing iron). Willoughby’s rich cousin is called Mrs. Smith—a common name, true, and one that Jane uses in three separate novels, but nevertheless a smith is a worker of metal. Willoughby marries an heiress called Miss Grey, recalling the jeweler Gray’s; the sharing of names is something we’ll return to. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), a “gray” or “grey” is also a spot of discoloration that marks the flaw in a metal, particularly in a gun, and when we first encounter Willoughby, on the rainy hillside above Barton Cottage, he’s carrying a gun.
2. Shoes are more predominate in Emma than they are in any other of Jane's novels, although the word "shoe" itself appears only four times. This should not surprise us, for shoes both display and conceal, reveal and hide. We have Mr. Knightley with his thick leather gaiters, Emma's trouble with her shoes when she is walking with Harriet and Mr. Elton. Miss Bates is obsessed with shoes and whether they have gotten damp or dirty; as a clergyman's daughter, she knew that sandals were connected in the Bible with uncleanliness. If something unpleasant is picked up in the outside world, it can be thoughtlessly discarded by the privileged class in Highbury -- Emma's bootlace is tossed into a ditch, Isabella tells her father, "I could change my shoes the moment I get home." For them, there will always be more bootlaces and shoes. The gypsies, of course, are all bare-footed.
3. One of Miss Bingley's favourite words is 'delighted'. She tells Elizabeth Bennet, "I hear you are quite delighted with Wickham." That word is chosen deliberately. De-lighted of course has a double meaning -- a light can be extinguished, can be put out. Wickham's name is a revelation; "wick" refers to the wick of a candle, which was, apart from firewood, the chief source of light in Jane's world. "Ham" would have reminded astute readers of Ham, the son of Noah. They would have known the bible passage describing how Ham saw the nakedness of his father when Noah was passed out drunk. If Wickham is the senior Mr. Darcy's illegitimate son, could this be the real reason why Wickham has been cast out of Pemberley – does he know unspeakable truths about his own father? Can Wickham shed light on the hidden sins of Pemberley?
4. Almost immediately we are reminded of slavery and the complicity of landowners like Sir Thomas; Mrs. Price offers up one of her sons to go to Sir Thomas's West Indian estates – that is, his sugar plantations where his slaves toiled -- and another to go to Woolwich. Woolwich was a military academy. Only a few years previously to the events in Mansfield Park, the British Army had invaded what is now Haiti, intending to brutally put down the slave uprising there.
5. Mansfield Park includes repeated references to “pheasants,” game birds that were difficult to buy and that (like slaves, after the Mansfield ruling) couldn’t be legally recovered if they got away and so had to be carefully kept and carefully bred to maintain an adequate population. Jane barely mentions pheasants elsewhere in her writing.
5. Mansfield Park includes repeated references to “pheasants,” game birds that were difficult to buy and that (like slaves, after the Mansfield ruling) couldn’t be legally recovered if they got away and so had to be carefully kept and carefully bred to maintain an adequate population. Jane barely mentions pheasants elsewhere in her writing.
6. Perhaps we’d do better to view the abrupt shifts, the gaps that open up in the text, as thematic. Persuasion features a lot of sudden drops and breaks. The words “fall” and “fell” appear more often in this short book than they do in Jane’s longer novels. The heroine Anne’s nephew falls from a tree and breaks his collarbone. Her headstrong rival in love, Louisa Musgrove, falls and cracks her skull on the Cobb at Lyme. Her father, Sir Walter, and eldest sister, Elizabeth, scrambling to maintain their social position, take a house on a street in Bath where planned building work had been halted because of landslides.
7. Jane makes a point of telling us that Captain Harville has gathered “something curious and valuable from all the distant countries” he’s visited; he displays them in his rented house in Lyme. Are we meant to imagine that he has already added, or will add, some of the Lyme “curiosities”—fossils—to his collection? There is, too, a faintly reptilian flavor to two of the ships Captain Wentworth has sailed on—the Asp and the Laconia. “Asp” is a poetic term for a snake. Sparta, in Laconia, was associated with serpents. There were dozens of other, non-reptilian ship names Jane could have borrowed or invented, but she doesn’t.
8. But a close reading of Mansfield Park reveals how Austen really intended for us to understand Fanny – there is the public Fanny and the hidden, secret Fanny who takes refuge in the East Room. More than a hundred years before the illness was diagnosed, Jane has given us a portrait of someone with dissociative identity disorder, commonly (and inaccurately) called, having a split personality. The truth is seen -- but not fully understood -- by Mrs. Norris, who says of her: "she likes to go her own way to work…. she certainly has a little spirit of secrecy." And it is Mrs. Norris who says, "Fanny is not one of those who can talk and work at the same time." But Fanny is not merely daydreaming, she has retreated from reality entirely. The uncomfortable truths of Mansfield Park are too painful.
Click here for parts one, two and three of my review of Helena Kelly's Jane Austen: the Secret Radical
Click here for information about my novel, A Contrary Wind: a variation on Mansfield Park
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