Jane Austen, Closet Classicist? a little Latin and less Greek then and now

My soul is sick with everyday’s report of wrong and outrage with which the earth is filled — William Cowper (anticipating Alice Oswald, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch and Anne Carson below)

Friends and readers,

This week on Janeites, the subject of Austen’s knowledge and use of the Latin and Greek classics in her novels came up. What I discovered as a result of looking at women’s translations and adaptations of the classics then and now, and what the age of sensibility and romance poets said was on the one hand, a continual turning away from the violence, a love of the Horatian ideal of retirement and friendship, and on the other how these older classics even if individuals enjoy them, love translating them, are used to separate and stigmatize women, lower class people (by excluding them) and teach forms of elitist. No fault of theirs this latter.

Diane Reynolds had bought Mary DeForest’s slender self-published kindle book, Jane Austen Closet Classicist, where (like several other writers recently) claims to uncover a secret of hidden Austen, this time finding a systematic use of stories from the classical pantheon into novels “by, for and about women.” We had been talking of intertextualities in Austen, and enthused by the idea I went to see what in the consensus handbooks/companions, Margaret Anne Doody, Alan Richardson (“Reading Practices” in Todd’s JA in Context) and Chapman had to say. Alas, they could not find any quotation from the Latin or Greek classics in any form, no sense of enjoyment in the one citation in one of her letters Jan 24, 1809) where she writes of “Homer, and Virgil, Ovid and Propria que Maribus,” thus associating the two major writers with an Eton grammar, and thereby boys’ lessons which maybe she shared in with her brothers. The one reference in her novels is indirect, the statement in Northanger Abbey where she decries the mindless and unfair praise of pseudo-scholarship and learning in snippets from much-respected non-fictional male texts on comparison to disdain for novels, especially those by and for women. The one reference to learning in the novels is the absurdity of the way the Bertrams’s girls boast of their “knowledge” to Fanny: they know “the Roman emperors as low as Severus; besides a great deal of Heathen Mythology.”

The trembling Pilot, from his Rudder torn,
Was headlong hurl’d; thrice round, the Ship was tost,
Then bulg’d at once, and in the deep was lost.
And here and there above the Waves were seen
Arms, Pictures, precious Goods, and floating Men.
The stoutest Vessel to the Storm gave way,
And suck’d through loosen’d Planks the rushing Sea.
From Dryden’s Aeneid

It so happened that at the same time I was reading in Dryden’s wonderful translations of Virgil (The Aeneid, the Georgics) and from Homer, and some of the medieval and Renaissance poets, my favorites once upon a time, The Flower and the Leaf (visionary faery poetry), Palamon and Arcite (from Chaucer). I was reading James Winn’s great biography of Dryden as part of a project where I was reading Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, comparing these to other biographies and critical studies (his life of Gray against David Cecil’s and Edmund Gosse’s, his life of Swift against Victoria Glendinning’s, his Pope against Peter Quennell’s and Maynard Macks’). It was sad or hard to think that Austen had never enjoyed Dryden’s Virgil, or Pope’s Iliad, or another of the many translations and imitations from the classics in the era, at least two by a woman, Madame Dacier’s Homer and Sapphic lyrics (Dacier read Greek). And Anne Finch did many, though from Petrarch, and French author’s translations of the Latin and Greek

Leauing my Soul, and this forsaken air
With darknesse cover’d, and with black dispair,
I by the rising streaks of Cynthia’s light,
My greifs bewail, and dread th’approaching night . . .
My soul, till morning, thus her anguish shews,
When soft Aurora cheerful light renews.
— From Finch’s translation of a Petrarch sonnet

From her Tasso:

. . . . Thyself may’st be
Transform’d into a Flame, a Stream, a Tree;
A Tear, congealed by Art, thou may’st remain,
‘Till by a burning Sigh dissolved again
(Reynolds’s edition of Finch, p 117, lines 61-54)

I was also thinking about how Johnson’s biographies of these male poets (Dryden, Pope) relate to Virginia Woolf’s, both highly innovative in their era, on the cusp of significant change, Johnson into psychological analysis, character creation through finding the life of the poet in his work, Woolf through reading biography as an imaginative subjective art, no longer a commemorative pious family product, but inextricably bound up with the historical period in which the individual lived. (Woolf too when she writes of these male classics Latin or Greek texts, like Austen, tellingly, rarely, domesticates them; there is often an old woman on the scene carrying sticks, e.g., in Orlando her book, and then Sally Potter’s movie too).

To return to biography, we can see the first two steps of this biographical history, in which Johnson and Woolf partcipate, epitomized in the biographies of Austen: first the nostalgic family exemplary impressionist type, in the memoir of his Aunt Jane by her nephew; then the Bloomsbury portrait type in the early 20th century by the gentlemanly David Cecil:

This older edition (mid-century) shows how classical forms are associated with Austen’s 18th century

The third step or phase is of art, part fiction, sticking to facts still is first seen in Elizabeth Jenkins and more recently Claire Tomalin and David Nokes. Appropriately the thrust into fictionalization Woolf suggests biography must turn to (from Nigel Nicholson, in her own “Lives of the Obscure”) is found most graphically in films, with Gwyneth Hughes’s Miss Austen Regrets (2008), basing her script on Nokes’s apprehension and portrait of Austen in her letters.

Olivia Williams as Austen writing on her desk on a bench in the garden, a probably invented scene

Diane wrote she was interested in how (according to DeForest), Austen “upended the heroic, epic tradition and made love and domestic concerns central—seeing this not as a deficit but actually a positive—a subversive positive, an assertion of the equal or greater importance of the realms of relationship and domesticity. The minor poets didn’t background or submerge or subordinate war and conquest and heroism by mistake or because they were bad writers or limited, says DeForest, but because they consciously wanted to show that these ‘grand’ things were less actually important that what is usually called the ‘small stuff.'”

Mnesius rolled in sand Thrasius lost in silt
Ainios turning somersaults in a black pool
Upside down among the licking fishes
And Ophelestes his last breath silvering the surface
All that beautiful armour underwater
All those white bones sunk in mud
And instead of a burial a wagtail
Sipping the desecration unaware.
–Like Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson too Oswald values the obscure people shattered and thrown away meaninglessly

I thought of how later 20th century women poets rewrote the Iliad as an fierce anti-war poem, Alice Oswald’s Memorial: A Version of Homer’s Iliad (a small hardback): it’s made of up paragraphs of all the people who died, with surrounding poignant descriptions. The original’s horrific violence is brought out. And Simone Weil’s The Iliad or The Poem of Force, which I own in French, with her commentaries on her translated verses and James P.Holoka’s English commentary and translation following hers (it’s a critical edition published by Peter Lang as a paperback).

From Weil Englished:

…violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch. It comes to seem just as external to its employer as to its victim. And from this springs the idea of a destiny before which executioner and victim stand equally innocent, before which conquered and conqueror are brothers in the same distress. The conquered brings misfortune to the conqueror, and vice versa.

And

…war effaces conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own “war aims.” It effaces the very notion of war’s being brought to an end. To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end. Consequently, nobody does anything to bring this end about.

There’s also a brilliant graphic novel about Iris Murdoch’s use of the classics to overturn a patriarchal order (by Brian Nicol, see Her Moral Depth). One of the changes and transformations Samuel Johnson comes up against is the older neoclassic male-centered ideals and satiric norms of poets like Pope and Prior were being replaced by a poetry of sensibility, and romance and private agons found in Collins, Byron, Cowper, with Crabbe attacking the hierarchical establishment as ferociously unjust.

Austen does give us a sense of how she felt about these classics in the fragmentary two passages I cited and described above: she looks upon the classics as school texts and men’s scholarship out of an acute awareness of her body, gender, class — as a woman stigmatized. Is this imposition on women still true. Yes. Woolf reminds us in A Room of One’s Own of a history of public schools and libraries, universities women are excluded from without special permission, men’s luxurious clubs. From the 16th through early 20th century the classics and learning Latin and Greek functioned to segregate upper class men (gentlemen) from all other men and men from women. A rare woman poet to show a sense of the culture is Mary Wortley Montagu in her satires and Horation retirement poetry.

Give me Great God (said I) a Little Farm
in Summer shady, & in Winter warm
where a cool spring gives birth to a clear brook
by Nature slideing down a mossy Rock
Not artfully in Leaden Pipes convey’d
Or greatly falling in a forc’d Cascade
Pure & unsully’d winding throu’ ye Shade.
All bounteous Heaven has added to my Praier
a softer Climate and a purer Air.

Our Frozen Isle now chilling Winter binds
Deform’d by Rains, & rough wth blasting Winds
ye wither’d Woods grown white wth hoary Frost
by driving storms their scatter’d beautys lost
The Trembling birds their leaveless coverts shun
And seek in distant Climes a warmer Sun
The Water Nymphs their silenced Urns deplore
Even Thames benumb’d a River now no more
The barren Meadows give no more delight
by Glist’ning Snows made painfull to ye Sight ..
The opening of Montagu’s Constantinople

We see in men’s novels of the 18th through 20th century they use Latin tags — a rare women to use these is Elizabeth Gaskell (she went to very good all girl dissenting academies). Nancy Mayer pointed out that at the end of the 18th century Erasmus Darwin advised women they were allowed to read the classics, and urged them to read translations. Nancy provided the list offered to women: Horace, Ovid, Cicero, Virgil, Sailust, Terence, Phaedrus, Persius, Nepos, Pliny, Juvenal, Justin, Cato, Tibullus. It omits some beautiful poetry (Propertius) and the Greek anthology (also translated very early and part of the background of 17th century lyrics by poets like Cowley and Anne Finch). Upper class or genteel women’s substitute for learning Latin or Greek was to learn French; in the later 18th through 19th century we find them learning Italian (reading Dante while stirring soup); George Eliot went further and learned German when German Bible studies came in.

Texts function in a habitus, a context. The original immediate ones matter, are felt too. Shakespeare presents a picture of himself as a boy in school learning his Latin grammar (Merry Wives of Windsor). Dryden did all his translation in the last ten years of his life to make ends meet. Once William & Mary were in, he was out as a Stuart person. No more plays to be produced for him. His pension taken. So these beautiful verses are the product of hard desperation- and an ability to escape. He was escaping to the world of The Flower and the Leaf in his Fables ancient and modern. Anthony Trollope did not go to university and created his own self-esteem in how good he had been at Latin as a boy in public schools (where he was otherwise disdained for not being able to pay his fees, having shabby clothes) and late in life turned to Horace (we see this in his Old Man In Love). Horace was also a class marker for him that meant he belonged.

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A photo of Remedios Varo, escaped from the horrors of WW2 to Mexico (with her beloved cat)

Can we empathize with Austen’s sense of exclusion? Not quite. Looking at individual cases, we find that the spread of public schools has disseminated these texts with their wisdom, beauty, terrifyingly human stories. And yet exclusionary practices carry on, partly because the classics are seen as “not useful” and “hard.” Also they too emerge from particular and often anti-intellectual contexts in the US and social and racial conflicts.

On Janeites Catherine Schmick Janofsky who today holds an advanced degree in the classics and archaeology (they go together today) provided details of her younger years and when she taught in schools. “My junior high in Arizona, a school with maybe 200 students, offered Latin and Greek. I was in heaven. Alas, we moved home to San Diego when I was a sophomore and the school of 3000, Patrick Henry, did not. I took three years of German and continued through college. I had to wait til college at SDSU to continue. I majored in Latin. Latin, German, and Greek studied at one time makes for an interesting year. Classical archaeology at that time demanded it, two ancient, one modern. I took Spanish and Latin in grad school, in preparation for a royal dig in Belieze.” Then as a teacher in a charter and in a public school, children were taught Latin and this made them feel part of an elite. The public school children may not be able to eat (free lunches to the poor are now cut) but they could decline verbs and be part of an elite. Ironic human experience. Surely ambiguous — the child is being taught to reject its own background. So however good the texts might be in themselves, the context is teaching elitism and valuation of private schools poisons the public.

Diane Reynolds wrote that when her parents moved the family to where the children could go to a better school, she hoped for Latin but “the list of classes only meant that a class had been taught or might be taught again, not that it was currently on offer. My high school not only didn’t offer Latin, it didn’t offer German. I took French, which I had already started, and Spanish, the only other possibility. I picked up some reading German in college—two semesters worth—just enough to pass PhD language exams, which was why the course existed. And took Old English in graduate school and Hebrew in my Mdiv. (I tell my students, Jane Austen novels are not written in Old English, as they insist!) I suppose my point is to lament the general dearth of teaching foreign languages in this country. It really is a loss. I also find that taking just a few semesters of a language, at least for me, is not enough: it simply doesn’t stick without longer exposure.”

Alice Neel, a painting of Isabel Bishop (mid-20th century American artist) arriving at the studio

My story: as with Diane, in most schools I went to in NYC in the 1950s or 60s the two languages on offer were French or Spanish. Spanish was taken by the large numbers of Spanish speakers, and French lingered on as an instrument for college, and thus elite learning. Richmond Hill High School where I went was an unusual school for actually offering Latin. I heard that was dropped not long after I left — it used to have a good reputation as a public school (when humanities were valued). German classes in my experience are offered where there are German immigrants: again it’s a kind of cheat: the child is not extending his language or culture base. In Richmond Hill we did have Italian classes because there was a population of Italian people in Richmond Hill itself.

Fast forward to the 1990s in Virginia, in TC Williams High School, on offer are French, Spanish, and Latin, a lot of Latin, at least one Latin class for every hour of the day. How is this? I was one among many parents who put their kids in Latin classes in order to stream them automatically with other kids going to college. If you took Latin, you were streamed automatically into academic type classes. Who would take Latin? very few black kids (there were some), hardly any hispanic (one a class maybe). There were separate vocational streams in TC. There were also streams for AP.

How this happens? here are not that many classes for each subject. Say you are in AP English, it’s given but once a day, and so all taking that begin to have schedule which resembles others. Let’s say 50% of them take Latin — it was not as big as that. The largest number of language classes were in Spanish because of a sizable hispanic population in Alexandria. Izzy is Aspergers Syndrome (or Autistic Level 1) and I protected her from bullying, stigmatizing and cruelty (disabled children are mistreated) by putting her in Latin; she did love it from a young age: she read Edith Hamilton at 8 and had books of mythology and was keen on Latin because of her father. We what was the social result of her taking Latin. Laura, our older girl, was having bad difficulties too: as a pretty and sexy-looking girl, she was harassed (damned if you do and damned if you don’t), and she fought back by hitting someone hard with a book. She got into trouble, was shamed. Putting her into the Latin classes automatically put her in different classes from these thug boys and nasty girls. Other parents knew about this so in TC Williams at the time there was not only a Latin teacher, but two assistant teachers and Latin was taught every hour of the day; in the junior high at the time which took a population from Old Town the Junior High Latin was given four times a day.

Front Page (there is a 1966 reprint available on Amazon)

I was told most of these children did not go on for Latin in college. My two daughters did — and that is the family background. I’ll begin telling of this family background with a description of a family book owned by Jim, which I’m now told is called a “pony.” A slang name again suggests a coterie with its own inner language. It’s a fat Aeneid first published in 1882 and reprinted in the US in 1952 by the David McKay Company in New York. This one is a volume from a set of books called Classic Interlinear Translations; this one for the Aeneid (one volume of The Works of P. Virgilius Maro.” It’s described as a “interlinear translation, as nearly literal as the idiomatic difference of the Latin and English languages will allow, adapted to the system of classical instruction. Combining the methods of Ascham, Milton, and Locke by Levi Hart and V. R. Osborn. For each line of the Aeneid as Virgil wrote it, there is one beneath where the Latin is rearranged as an English sentence. And beneath that an English translation. This was Jim’s book in England (so it traveled across the pond) in the later 1950s, which he used in a local public (=private) school. Laura has said since Dad’s book made her very popular in college. She never let it out of her sight; when others used it they had to sit next to her. Izzy took it to Sweet Briar.

James Edward Austen-Leigh and Austen’s brothers were part of the male culture that read Latin — it made them superior to lower class men too, they were gentleman. My husband had many years of Latin in a public school as a day boy (wearing a different colored shirt so as to stigmatize him). Yet as an man he was fascinated by the history of the period as many of those who have such backgrounds. He had been taught manners and how to negotiate with middle class people in conferences. But his original context was the canning, caned when he didn’t do it right, buggery, suffering (the boys had had to stand in the pouring rain one day ruining their clothes as limousines ferrying MPs slid by). He still had the left over signs of welts in his palms from when he was struck with a hard stick in the hand hard. He was supposedly being lifted into another class by this training. Right. Still He could be amused by Winnie-the-Pooh in Latin – I still have that his copy of that book.

Years later when Izzy returned from Graduate school with her MLIS and was having brutal time getting a job, and becoming utterly isolated, she started at George Mason at night taking senior level BA courses and graduate for no credit or just a pass, so she would be people. And for the first 5 terms she took Roman history and yet more Latin classes. Alas, the 11 people she me and were with her for all that time lost out at the 6th term. Mason abolished the Latin and Greek or classical department because they said there were not enough students. They pretended not to and said they were merging just Latin with the Italian department because the Italian teacher (just one – -see the state of foreign language learning) could also teach latin. Izzy went on for 2 more terms at night and there was not one class offered. All 11 people who had been known to one another, sort friends, broke up. One of small tragedies of budget cutting. We have just seen a repeat of this in Fairfax county in disabled services where the people are deeply in need of the social environment and contact and pleasure.

My other Aeneid

As to myself I took 2 and 1/2 years of Latin in college (Queens, CUNY, I got there by two buses and livd in a rent control apartment in Kew Gardens) and got to the point where I could read simplified Latin texts. I used this groundwork later in life to pass an exam in medieval Latin for my Ph.D. (we had to pass two tests for an advanced level of language or 3 for a beginner or reader’s level). So I passed a beginner in Latin, French and Italian. Many years after this while translating Vittoria Colonna’s poems, I tried to read Renaissance Latin by one of Vittoria Colonna’s cousin, a treatise in which he was supposedly commending women and her as the great example of virtue. It dripped with condescension, and that it was in Latin made it unavailable for women to read. It’s claimed she read Latin but I’m no sure. I’m skeptical of all claims of women reading Latin in the Renaissance unless we have some proof. She wrote an Italian mixed with Spanish and never refers to a Latin text she read. Veronica Gambara by comparison translated a Latin poem and wrote a poem herself in Latin. But my real knowledge such as it is comes from translations and I enjoy translations and translating as such and enjoyed the different ones as a result of the translator. I knew Allen Mandelbaum who was a teacher in my graduate school and took and read his translation of Dante (as well as The Aeneid) and I have some good memories of this time – mixed as everything is too — each has its context and history.

Still l’ecriture-femme: women interested in home, domestic setting, a travel book in time

Izzy today enjoys reading Mary Beard, her Christmas present last year was Beard’s SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, this year Pompeii: The life of a Roman Town. She doesn’t like the Aeneid herself, much prefers Horace to other Latin texts. She remembers Pliny the Younger whose letters seem to have charmed her. For me Confronting the Classics is a favorite book, in which I’ve stuffed paper essays by Beard from the TLS. I do not ignore Beard’s upper class antecedents and her present prestigious position at Oxford. That’s why she has her “A Don’s Blog on the TLS website. I own Anne Carson’s strange book of grief over her brother’s death, Nox, through a translation of Catullus’s poem on his brother’s death with many pages from other books (meaningful to her and him) and papers cut out and pasted into a series of accordion like pages. My favorite classics are the translated texts I’ve mentioned

I seem to have traveled a long way from Jane Austen and the classics. I’ve been exploring how the classics function in two friends’ lives and lives I know best today, how class, gender, monetary circumstances, local culture and our individual natures shaped how we understand and remember what we read and how these texts function for us. All this connects back to Austen — if only to say how long this stigmatizing of women and lower class people has been going on. And along the way I’ve shown how men and women have translated and responded to this poetry, these stories. I end on the poet thought the greatest of Austen’s period, Pope, his original Epilogue to his two last Horatian-Juvenilian satires: peculiarly apt for today’s times once again.

Vice now in charge.

In golden chains the willing World she draws,
And hers the gospel is, and hers the laws:
Mounts the tribunal, lifts her scarlet head,
And sees pale Virtue carted in her stead!
Lo! at the Wheels of her Triumphal Car,
Old _England’s_ genius, rough with many a scar,
Dragg’d in the dust. his arms hang idly round,
His Flag inveted trails along the ground.
Our youth, all liv’ry’d o’er with foreign gold,
Before her dance; behind her crawl the old.
See thronging millions to the Pagod run,
And offer country, parent, wife, or son.
Hear her black Trumpet thro’ the land proclaim,
That ‘Not to be corrupted is the Shame.’
In soldier, churchman, patriot, man in pow’r,
‘Tis Av’rice all, Ambition is no more!
See, all our nobles begging to be slaves.
See, all our fools aspiring to be knaves.
The wit of cheats, the courage of a whore,
Are what ten thousand envy and adore.
All, all look up, with reverential awe,
On crimes that scape, or triumph o’er the law;
While Truth, Worth, Wisdom, daily they decry —
‘Nothing is sacred now but villany.

Yet may this Verse (if such a verse remain)
Show there was one who held it in disdain.

Ellen