Barrett’s The Heroine & Dibdin’s The Birth-day (in German: Reconciliation): telling sources for Emma

We have drank tea & I have torn through the 3rd vol of the Heroine, & do not think it falls off. — It is a delightful burlesque on the Radcliffe style — Austen, Wed-Thurs, 2-3 March 1814

Emma’s first sight of Harriet (Samantha Morton), innocent country girl (1995 BBC/WBGH Emma)

Emma’s first dream: Harriet, erotically enthralled with Mr Elton (Dominic Rowan) above her in status (due to Emma’s encouragement)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve just finished reading a burlesque of romance by Eaton Stannard Barrett, The Heroine, published in 1813. While I’ve seen it identified as a central source for Emma (in Margaret Kirkham’s Jane Austen: Feminism and Fiction), I’ve also noticed that it is not always mentioned in editions of Emma and when it is, kept brief. Since it’s a deeply conservative, nay reactionary text in the tradition of Cervantes’s Don Quixote (as pointed out by Gary Kelly among others), its importance in understanding how Austen meant her text to be read (against what context) needs to reiterated.

Most immediately striking is an incident early in the book which is only resolved at its end when Cherry Wilkinson (our heroine) recognizes how wrong, deluded, and harmful has been her behavior: the story anticipates that of Harriet Smith, down to the use of a letter written by Cherry/Emma in an attempt permanently to part an innocent and poor country girl, Mary, from William, a suitable male in love with her and eager to marry her.

When Cherry encounters the happy a village girl, Mary, anticipating her marriage to a young kind farmer, William, in order to inject the necessary misery & melancholy into Mary’s life — so essential for the lives of heroines and women with any self-respect — Cherry pretends she has a suitor she wants to get rid of, concocts a letter to him, and then with the most transparent of excuses (that her relationship with this man is not approved of), she has Mary copy it out and sign it. The story makes no sense — why would this William accept a letter from Mary dismissing him. Mary would have to be an idiot — and in fact long ago Elizabeth Jenkins recognized that were we to take Harriet really seriously she’d be an imbecile. Mary then sends this to William, devastating William, and leading him (out of jealousy) to break off the match. She teaches Mary to think herself well rid of him, but we know that Mary has lost her best chance at happiness. (pp. 157ff)

Cherry’s behavior is not just malicious, snobbish, callous, it’s a means by which Barrett is enabled to present the miseries of romances as something concocted by silly women or unscrupulous men for silly women. Consistently Barrett reveals he has no understanding of the serious function of such books in the psychological life of women as lived in western patriarchal society.

At the book’s Cherry is awakened to her gross errors, her pride, her wrong idea she can run her life and her desires to be this active heroine doing daring deeds; in moments that are very like (though more crudely written) Emma’s, Elizabeth’s, Marianne’s, she is inwardly harrowed, humiliated, her pride mortified and admits to herself what damage she’s done and was doing — and hands herself over to a worthy heroine who has rescued and protected her, Edward Stuart (very much a Mr Knightley figure). We have a scene like Lennox’s The Female Quixote where a clergyman is dragged in to have her talk like Marianne religiously. Cherry must go back and rejoin Mary and William whose lives she came near ruining. She must admit where is the aslyum where she cruelly deposited her aging father as a manma is and release him from months of suffering. Since this all is done partly parodically it releases us from really blaming Cheery as we only partly believe it. And she did not mean any harm …

As will be seen, the parallels do not stop there. I mentioned Cherry’s aging father, Mr Wilkinson, stashed away with an obtuse jailer whom Cherry tricks into taking in, tying down and (whether mistakenly or not) mistreating him in the way mad people could be in the era. Cherry is now free from whatever control the old man exerted. Gradually her good suitor, Edward Stuart (intended by her father for a wise stable husband) begins to be aware of how Cherry has been perverted by her books, and he spends much of the book turning up in the nick of time rescue her from the results of others preying on her again and again.

Stuart is a version of Mr Knightley. He is sensible and what’s more what happens is we begin to see Cherry likes and respects him. They share the same sense of humor, at times they seem to be on the same wave length. In a rare moment of common sense and prophetic dream Cherry wishes she could marry Stuart and dreams of how pleasant life would be with him (pp. 118, 125). She also sees an old man with another child and half-admits her father is her father (a rare moment) worries over Mr Wilkinson.

Opening of 2009 Emma: Emma (Romola Garai) absorbed with Mr Knightley (Jonny Lee Miller) watching over her

A childlike explanation and his male patience

Here we have Mr Knightley, Emma and Mr Woodhouse. Movies can give us insight into books – -they are forms of reading the books. I can see Johnny Lee Miller in the role of Edward Stuart in just the way he plays Mr Knightley (in the 2009 Emma) and where we are told he can make Cherry laugh and laugh brings to mind how in 1972 Emma that happens (John Carson and Doran Goodwin) — the others don’t show how M K and Emma share a sense of humor: Davies gives his Emma too much intelligence, gravity, and the movie with Gweneth Paltrow turns Emma into a romance heroine. The actress where the conception is closest to Cherry is the way Romola Garai is directed to act as really innocent, sweet, even loving (not the way Emma is presented in 1972 where she’s neurotic or 1995 where she’s arrogant)

His plot-design imitates Cervantes’s Don Quixote from beginning to end. Again and again Cherry meets bad or dire situations and misunderstands them completely in terms of her idealistic romance reading; hence she is often in danger — Like Quixote she tilts at versions of windmills. He shows the real world of London now and again, and has believable enough characters.
Predatory males are after Cherry: continually deluding and trying abduct, rape, marry Cherry to get her inheritance, until she is saved by Stuart.

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1972 Emma scripted Denis Constanduros): Emma (Doran Goodwin) tells her father (Donald Eccles) she is going to marry Mr Knightley

The book is not the only source for Emma: Kirkham makes the argument that Charles Dibdin’s adaptation of Kotzebue’s Reconciliation as The Birth-day is another direct sources for Austen’s Emma and if so, there were possibly early drafts of Emma in the early days of Austen coming to live in Bath or perhaps still at Steventon. The letter all such argument hinge on (Gay seems to accede in her book on JA and Drama as does Paula Byrne) is a letter by Austen written from Bath in 1799, the visit taken because Edward was feeling (psychologically probably) ill; a single line where Austen does not even mention the name of the play, Wed 19 June 1799: “The play on Saturday is I hope to conclude our Gaieties here.” That’s it; if scholars hadn’t studied assiduously what plays were played in the Bath theater that day we’d never have made the connection. Byrne produces a playbill from 1803 and of course the Austens were in Bath then, so (for Byrne) that clinches the connection again.

I’ve read the play and have to admit there are parallels, especially in language — about how the Mr Knightley character (Harry) is prepared to live with the sweet heroine, Emma Bertram (her name is striking) so as to allow her to marry and not desert her weak aging father, one of two elderly brothers who have long feuded over a piece of land. Harry’s benevolence of character is important, one servant’s name is William. I did ask myself though was I looking for parallels because they had been put before me.
It does have the housekeeper who is one of the two brother’s mistress — this seems to have been almost usual, so common as to be assumed. And she has a lover in the live-in-lawyer that advises this other elderly brother.

What’s really of interest is Austen’s attitude towards Kotzebue because if there is an allusion or use (and it’s nowhere as central as Lovers’ Vows to Mansfield Park), what did she think of him. Modern critics are divided, except to say most of his plays are utterly unplayable, filled with sentimental absurdities. Yet in his time he was seen as radical, immoral, a Jacobin. How can this be? Well the plays do expose the miseries and treacheries of family life, and especially in the one that held the English stage for much of the 19th century, The Stranger how blood is not thicker than water, shame and money are. There a woman and man are turned off, turned out for life because they sexually transgressed, the man turning into a misanthrope.

Perhaps it was thought immoral to really reveal how family members treated one anther in intimate life and yet people in Europe went in droves. It was one place where whatever happened to them could be seen, validated, and cured — with the sentimental endings.

Kirkham insists that Austen despised Kotzebue — through Lovers Vows. I disagree; I think the scene in the novel between Edmund and Mary that is played and is about marrying for love is seen by Austen as serious and beautiful. It’s hard to know how she felt about the incestuous love of Frederick and his mother, but presumably like the audience at the time she was prepared to pretend it was not there and instead see the scene as transgressive sex.

Emma reassuring her father, Mr Woodhouse (Michael Gambon) — they are a particularly touching pair in this film

I tried to imagine Austen reading or watching The Reconciliation in 1803 and there I did see something neither Kirkham or Byrne, or Gay brings up: that in that year Mr Austen was probably failing. He was a weak aging man. It seems to me a fantasy element of wish fulfillment in Austen could be to imagine herself as Emma taking care of Mr Austen. Many details about this aging man’s dependence on his family are found in Dibdin and I suspect are presented more movingly in the original German.

Miss Taylor and Mr Weston turned into high school teachers in 1996 Clueless: a permutation which does not lose the paradigm of reconcilation, resignation

On Dibdin and his play itself: it’s a thin piece where the exposure of the wicked cunning housekeeper is so swift and easy, one wonders why it was not done before. It might be the adaptation has eliminated all depth from the original. The change of title signals how transformed the text is. Dibdin’s play emphasizes how the birthday of Emma’s father and his brother leads to their reconciliation. Inchbald coarsened Lovers Vows considerably; I’ve read Benjamin Thompson’s translation and it actually makes of Kotzebue an intelligent play in some ways — with intricate thought and tensions and moving depths at moments. There’s more than one long scholarly analysis of Sheridan’s adaptation of Kotzebue’s Pizarro — a play about post-colonialism I suppose — which finds in that matter of interest, these family colonalizers (the Austens were that) who felt forced to be coopted by their needs to aggrandize themselves or just live by working for these powerful in gov’ts taking over other people’s lands and wealth. Smith deals with this in Ethelinde and her hero, like Austens’ Edmund, does not want to serve immorally and himself become degraded that way.

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Barrett’s text is of much more interest for itself. At times, especially in the prologue and earlier parts of the book, it’s genuinely funny, at moments post-modern.

We begin with an anonymous writer is a character now living on the moon where all characters in books go from the moment the manuscript is finished until such time as the book is no longer read. Real living people have ghostly representatives there too as long as they are writers and thus appear in books.

So, authors, you need not get your book into print. Austen’s Darcy and Elizabeth were on the moon from at least November 1796 on and are still there. Anonymous people (like Junius) are invisible.

Amanda Price finds Darcy in Austenland (Pemberley) (Lost in Austen, a post-modern adaptation, scripted by Guy Andrews, 2009)

The text is presented as a series of letters from Cherry to an unnamed correspondent and begins as a transparent parody of Pamela. The style is nothing like Radcliffe; the prose is simple and direct. These really could be renamed Chapters as there is little use of epistolarity, but the mode combined with the obvious caricatured presences does has the effect of ironic distance.

Cherry meets two male characters who tell their histories and these are told with feeling: the stories of the poet Higginson and the player Montmorenci are autobiographical depictions of Barrett reading. Barrett includes his own highly romantic verse, and he imitates Milton. We get Miltonic parodies 50 years late. No one was doing this by 1813. He is not just caricaturing women (Horner and Zlosnick in their article want to absolve Barrett from anti-feminism but the book is reactionary in more ways than this), he was repudiating his own love of Georgics, Virgil. He is making fun of what once allured him.

Barrett is enormously well-read in romance; my edition by Sadleir includes pages and pages of allusions from major (Goethe’s Werther) to minor and popular books (Children of the Abbey). If anything Radcliffe is a minor presence in his book; he may be thinking of her when he writes against “impassioned sensibility … exquisite art … depicting the delicate and affecting relations between the beauties of nature and the deep emotions of the soul” that seduce female readers sexually (“voluptuous languor”), but his text is far more like Walpole’s Otranto. Famous characters are brought on stage, from Grandison to Cecilia and no type of romance is exempt, including the more realistic like Austen’s. There’s a torn manuscript, but also battles of villagers very like those in Tom Jones. An exchange of brief billets imitates the opening of Rousseau’s Julie and again lest we miss it the author alludes to Eloise. Marmontel. Douglas’s Norval (the very passage Austen alludes to which was reprinted as bleeding hunks in anthologies), comes in for a mention.

As he proceeds more deeply he hits some central paradigms squarely: deep into the novel we meet the mother figure, of course tied down in a dungeon, but unlike the usual starvation, she has grown fat. The novel hits a surreal level with the grotesque portrait of this woman as a statue and seems to me like other gay-art I’ve seen in the Zombie Austen books (and at times Sondheim’s lyrics). The paradigm of the girl rescued by the young man is so endemic (p. 222 here, and in S&S, Romance of Forest, Ethelinde, Caroline de Lichtfield for starters) and is found in a hilarious central novel whose wackiness is spot on. “It was on a nocturnal night in autumnal October; the wet rain feel in liquid quantities, and the thunder rolled in an awful and Ossianly manner … ” “Wet!” exclaimed the fair unknown, wringing a rivulet of rain from the corner of her robe, “O ye gods, wet!”

It’s all held together by the conceit of Cherry as a Don Quixote half-mad person humored by all around her, partly protected because some believe her an heiress, partly protected by Stuart who (for example) tells the woman at whose house Cherry is staying that she is not well. She reads this inset novel in the room she is put into (rather like Catherine Morland is).

Austen’s books are as much sent up. The central heroine’s young man is Theodore de Willoughby. Theodore from Romance of the Forest or any number of novels, and Willoughby from S&S or Celestina or any number of novels. We have the classic scene of the girl enticed into the shrubbery and then run away with, pp 223- 224. I thought the moral of Clarissa might be: girls do not go into shrubberies, particularly at midnight She is here rescued by Stuart.

He keeps up a remarkable cleverness. It’s very hard to think up incidents in such a burlesque mode. Lennox has to turn Female Quixote into a courtship novel. The device is the Don Quixote one again and again: many of the people around Cherry are playing along, and she herself is half aware she is play-acting. When she tries to take over Lady Gwyn’s castle (as a comfortable one) and gets Jerry to round up local peasants and dresses them in absurd outfits with sticks and charges at Lady Gwyn, Lady Gwyn calls the local militia (what they were good for) and Cherry immediately decamps. Found back in the ruin with no food, no ceilings, no windows, she falls back on real money Jerry lends her; similarly the two predators, Betterton (rake) and Montmorenci (who turns out to be someone named Abraham Grundy) come to abduct her to somehow wrest the fortune they think she has and Barrett has them fall in and out of the unreal chivalric talk and their own sordid language and motives

There’s an interesting argument about how difficult it is to tell a historical figure from an imaginary one or history itself from romance, again showing a real interest in the topic. He’s at his best when he sees his book and characters as books, “how will it read?” is the important question to authors we are told.

Tory anti-Jacobin politics, a repressive stance on all issues is woven in too. The book is dedicated to Canning, an intelligent pro-war Tory, and Barrett’s other texts probably were also meant to help him find a place. At court Betterton who is the man seeking Cherry for her money and would rape her if he could rages at the judge as someone who “does dark deeds for an usurping oligarchy,” who “minister our vague and sanguinary laws … determines points of law without appeal, imprisons our persons without trial … breaks open our houses with a standing army.”

This is in fact precisely what the establishment was doing in the 1790s and when they had to in the first part of the 19th century and continues to do. Again if Austen did like this book she was liking conservative reactionary Toryism (p. 165) He connects novels of sentiment to then modern politics, to sentiment, to France and “its vicious refinement” Julie is a “criminal book” (p 350) — by speaking sentimentally and acting virtuously in the romance way you end up a victim or corrupt yourself. The tired arguments are trotted forth too: reading romance makes you unfit for real life (the way men want to live it), the woman is fed false ideal notions and needs antidotes like Hannah More’s Coelebs in Search of a Wife, sermons (p 351) and most of all to follow the wisdom of her elders, fathers, in this book husband.

Again Lost in Austen, Darcy growing indignant at this public exposure of his family and himself: he does not much favor novels

For some complete citations, see comments.

Ellen