Miss Emma’s Matchmaking Agency for Literary Characters et aliae

At the Atlas Theater, 1333 H Street, NE

Dear friends and readers,

I thought I’d recommend to those who live in or near the DC area to come to the Atlas Theater to see and hear Alexandra Petri’s witty allusive comedy, Miss Emma’s Matchmaking Agency for Literary Characters (directed by Joan Cummins). I also take this opportunity to recommend and describe briefly a few new recent books of Austen criticism.

Emma painting Harriet as a way of seducing Mr Elton (1996 Emma by Andrew Davies)

Izzy has blogged praising the play, and capturing its central core. A large part of the fun are the continual parodies and allusive recreations of lines and remembered scenes or images from the apparently famous and still read (or assigned in school) literary works in which the characters who Miss Emma (Lilian Oben) is determined to marry off appear. It’s one of a large number of events (plays, concerts, musicals) that comprise this year’s Capital Fringe Festival.

What was especially cheering to me was that just about all the members of the audience “got” the jokes and puns. What a motley set of books — it appeared that most people in an audience of 40 or so people knew enough of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Sherlock, Jane Eyre, Great Gatsby, but also Oscar Wild’s Portrait of Dorian Grey, Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar not to omit Austen’s Emma. I’ve gone to three plays thus far and this was the biggest audience, notwithstanding that Fugard’s Master Harold and the Boys is a known powerful masterpiece and was done in central DC. The audience had a larger share of middle-aged women dressed conservatively than is usually seen at Fringe plays. Austen drew ’em in.

I probably will not be able to convey an experience of the delights of the play as I can’t remember its lines accurately. The fun also depends on delivery, as when Daisy Buchanan (Milica Boretic) falls languidly all over the body of Don Juan (Admad Helmy) because his shirt is just so b-e-a-u-t-f-u-l. A minimum of iconic costume brought before us (to add to my list above) Captain Ahab, Philip Marlowe (a hilarious send-up of the prose style and tone of the books was uttered by Caleb Erickson), Prince Charming, Holden Caulfield (as depressed and defensive as Esther Greenwood), Nancy Drew and Medea. Each actor/actress played several roles and Emma, as in Austen’s book, managed to make mighty mismatches as well as close matches that somehow still didn’t seem to work. As Yvette remarked, the central pair, Don Juan, doing community service work at such an agency to make up for his rakish history, and Emma were dressed in modern dress. After all the mis-couplings and sly send-up of normative romance ideas, it was deflating to be given a happy ending, with Emma ending up with Don Juan! Austen labelled the character in a burlesque play centering on him “a compound of cruelty and lust”.

Maybe it was an unusually enjoyable “sequel” or development out of Austen, because is the author was hardly slavishly attached to re-inventing the original text — all the while (oddly but not inaccurately) I was aware the original character was exposed as egoistic, uncomfortable with sex, not knowing herself very well. There was a moment when Emma realizes that Don Juan must marry her, I hoped for a line about an arrow through her heart, but it did not come. Disappointingly, Petri never lifted an allusive line from Austen’s Emma: the character was got right: she has to assimilate those who come before her into her world-view, she vicariously enjoys this, she is not keen on actual physical sex at all, but that Don Juan was substituted for Mr Knightley measures the distance we have come as women to what we tolerate and accept and supposedly want in man from Austen’s ideals.

***********************

Stoneleigh Abbey

Claire Harman reviewed yet another book on Jane Austen of the “and” type for the Times Literary Supplement, June 27, 2014. This one couples her name with the noun, Adlestrop. Jane Austen and her mother visited Adlestrop, one of the wealthy branche’s of the Austen families property: Victoria Huxley, Jane Austen and Adlestrop. The last time they came was with the Rev. Thomas Leigh who wanted to lay claim to the property; his wife, Mary, wrote a family history of the Leighs which included the Austens, and the fine old pile of stone everyone coveted (at least they did the rents). The book’s source then seems genuinely to add to the stock of primary documents from which secondary studies are written, and for that reason and Harman’s judgement that Mary Leigh quotes accurately from it, that I mention it here as worth perusal. It is said to be “scholarly, detailed, meticulous;” you learn that Warren Hastings has a house nearby — another way the Austens could connect to him.

Illustration for a postcard

In a recent JASNA newsletter, a perceptive review of Paula Byrne’s successful and original (if idiosyncratic) study of Austen’s life, The Real JA: A Life among Small Things, views and (occasionally) writing too: Devoney Looser has a good review on Paula Byrne’s The Real JA: A Life among Small Things. Looser gives credit where it’s due — the real originality of the way the book proceeds from a small concrete objects genuinely associated with Austen to some explication of her writing, an aspect of her life or times that is then shed light on persuasively. Looser also critiques Byrne in ways academics don’t often — that suggests that despite all her efforts Byrne has not quite ‘arrived” — Looser does not accept the portrait nor the characterization of Austen Byrne is determined to turn her into. What I did like best was Looser’s insight was that behind all Byrne’s efforts is areally a desire to find an Austen desirable to men, avidly wanted by men and I’m with her in thinking this no more ‘real” or desireable than the stories of the gentle asexual spinster who wrote out a compensatory need to romance.

This is Byrne’s best book thus far: it has the most life in its style — it has a nice mood I’ll call it. And she’s interesting on these small things — the problem is (as Nancy Mayer has suggested) there is a quiet skewing going on and sometimes misinformation. Like her other three she is strongest at providing context even if the context is sometimes not proven or not quite apt. I’m enjoying it because she goes on at length about details often left out in accounts which stick to a general trajectory design.

Byrne’s chapter on cocked hats is a case in point. She brings out a great deal of interest about Henry’s life including how he managed to avoid getting involved in a mutiny and the cruelty that was meted out to the people who led it — and state terror against the local community sympathetic to the mutineers, themselves hungry for bread. Byrne then turns to P&P and asserts that all this is in P&P. No it’s not. Austen only takes the non-violent and more bright aspects of local militias and the slight references to say flogging remain slight …

Her book on Jane Austen and Drama may be read for the interest of the drama for again and again similarly she asserts that this or that is in a book or influenced Austen when there is no such proof nor does she demonstrate one.

*******************

Elinor (Hattie Morahan) and Marianne (Charity Wakefield) in a fundamental clash (2008 S&S by Andrew Davies)

Simlarly packaged, John Mullan’s What Matters in Jane Austen. Mullan’s book is the same size, has a similar kind of cartoon picture, similarly readable, hagiographic, and he goes on about small things in Austen — in his case the how accurate she is — almost crazily so — when it comes to time, distance, and details about her characters lives which he does go into to show how meaningfully she uses these. He too weighs in on Austen’s character and is of the school that is willing to admit (as I see it) that she hardly knew any literary people in her era, was not known by anyone beyond her family-friend circle. He is not willing to admit that this made part of the limitation of her outlook and book’s perspectives but is is implicit in how he works her actual literal concrete details that she so literally and painstakingly developed as probable narratives.

Mullan has a chapter on sisters and finds on the whole more antagonism and indifference as much as closeness. I believe him when he says there are only 5 significant conversations between Elinor and Marianne and the first two give Marianne these comic cliches (as jokes partly) and the last is the Imlac conclusion to the novel. By contrast there are 12 private ones between Jane and Elizabeth in P&P, many nuanced and long: I know I made the experiment of counting scenes between Jane and Elizabeth in the 1995 P&P and found Colin Firth right to suggest he was hardly in it: the movie can be better thoroughly analysed as the journey of two close sisters. He goes over first names: the only wife to address her husband by his first name familiarly (without the Sir Lady Bertram uses) is Mary Musgrove and he does similarly: the conversations show a lack of respect. Admiral Crofts talks of Sophy but she addresses him as Admiral. Telling details on widows and widowers too.

He carries on bringing home to you aspects of Austen’s text that are really there and people are inclined to deny or overlook. By the time he finished with the importance of weather, I realize why she said she works with twigs to make trees. Remember how she complains in her letters she doesn’t get much “experience” (in her imagination she does, but what we are confronted with does matter). You thought there are no lower class people or servants in Austen. Think again. I knew that in MP the names and people are there and pile up – and that they are often connected to Mrs Norris who is seeking power over these people but also connected to them. But Mullan almost persuades me the servants and lower classes are there — not quite as he does not quite persuade me the seaside works as a danger throughout the novels.

Then he gets to characters who never talk – are never quoted directly — and who are never on stage. Emma is littered with such absent presences — now think of Mrs Churchill. I didn’t realize Captain Bentick is never directly quoted. I’m not sure Mullan’s explanations are satisfying — he’s a bit too popular and coy but that this pattern of characters who are important but not there in some sense and never speak does tell us something about the author psychologically and I’m not meaning to me snarky and call her anal-retentive.

********************

Mannydown where Austen danced at assemblies and which she could have been mistress of had she chosen to marry and have children (18th century print)

Yes; I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible — Catherine Morland, Northanger Abbey

I wish I could read D. Miller in detail understanding his sentences one by one, for his view of the inward retreating life of Austen would help make us understand her books deepl. His book is ostensibly on Austen’s style: she takes the distanced stance she does in order to detach herself from a stigmatized self. According to Miller, Austen uses her satiric distanced narrator to keep at bay the social doom that would follow if she ever wrote as the person she was. Thus her real self can not appear in her fiction. No successful unmarried woman can be found, no artist. Instead we have a narrator unmarked by all the things that make for a particular persona, and the characters too must not be witty in the way she was — only the narrator is permited the caustic hard statements. It’s a kind of refusing personhood in her very own book. In her books all we get are women gung ho on marriage, which was far far from her case.

He also goes into the nuances, the melancholy of the style, the more than occasional harshnesses, and what he calls the paranoia. This could have some connection to her crueller portraits of young women who are isolated and powerless too. His book on inward policing in imbricated ways in novels (Dickens’s, Trollope’s) very worth while too — if you can decipher the sentences.

Ellen