Friday, December 3, 2010

Venus Day

Charlotte Collins, novelist
Here as promised is the story of Charlotte Collins the greatest English language novelist of all time. That name not ringing any bell? Perhaps you know her better under her maiden name of Charlotte Lucas? Well, you've heard of her most famous book. It's called Pride and Prejudice. No, the Pride and Prejudice. It's not like there is more than one of them.

You don't believe she wrote it? Well, try reading it again and compare Charlotte's insights into Elizabeth's character versus Elizabeth's insights into Charlotte. Again and again, Elizabeth underestimates Charlotte or just gets her wrong. Charlotte, however, is unfailingly penetrating in her assessments of Elizabeth.

I know, I know, "But Charlotte commits the greatest sin possible by marrying for pragmatic reasons rather than love." Well, maybe. But is Elizabeth any better? She is just as stuck with Lady Catherine now as Charlotte is. You don't think that Lady Catherine isn't going to get over her humiliation and be back in her usual form do you?

But but, Elizabeth really loves Darcy!

Does she? To really love someone you have to understand them and Elizabeth, by her own admission, doesn't even begin to grasp Darcy. Here is an example, in his second declaration of love, Darcy blames everything on his pride and claims his parents were not to blame. Do you believe that? You do? Then why does Darcy have two last names? Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy. Nobody who gave their child that name could be anything but a pretentious git of the very worst kind. (Lady Catherine isn't an exception, she is typical of her family.)

And what names they are. "Darcy", with its arrogant assertion of Norman blood—this from a family of great wealth but no distinction whatsoever beyond what they married into—is really something. My mother used to say, "Always wash your hands after handling money, the commonest people have money."

But as bad as "Darcy" may be, "Fitzwilliam" is worse. First of all it's a name that someone in the family married into and nothing they come by legitimately. Second it comes loaded with its own boatload of pretension: it is "Fitzwilliam" from "fils de William". Any time you see "Fitz" in a name like this it means that someone way back when was the bastard son of someone they thought it worth claiming descendance from even at the price of parading their illegitimacy. "Fitzroy" meant the king's bastard son, "fils du Roi". The pretension in "Fitzwilliam"is a million times worse because they aren't claiming descendance from any old king but from William the Conqueror.

And all they are is really rich. That they were so proud of having "Fitzwilliam" in the family by marriage that they were willing to saddle their son with it just to keep up what is most likely a bogus claim is very telling. At best, the William in question might have been the mayor of some little burg who knocked up some particularly trampy chambermaid whose descendants later got rich dishonestly. It almost certainly wasn't William the Conqueror.

I know, millions of women had very meaningful "experiences" while fantasizing about Colin Firth but the only difference between Mr. Collins and Mr. Darcy is one of degree. The two marriages are more or less alike.

A mirror image
If you still don't believe me, consider how easily the story could be reversed. You could tell pretty much the same story only have the beautiful girl marry a rich man with a house for pragmatic reasons and have her more sensible best friend marry the poor clergymen dependent on the munificence of others for his living.

Here is the trajectory of Elizabeth's story.
Elizabeth meets a wealthy man named Darcy but finds his personality less than attractive, then she falls under the charm of a handsome rogue named Wickham in whom she puts her trust leading to almost disastrous consequences for her and her family until she is saved by the man she originally put off and now she suddenly "sees" his real virtue and marries for love.
Meanwhile, steady Charlotte waits until all other claims against Mr Collins are cleared up so that she can pursue the man she sees as a good solid bet.
It's not hard to imagine that the other way around, wherein it is Charlotte who really marries for love and Elizabeth is the purely pragmatic one marrying for protection and comfort.

Can't do it? Maybe the names are getting in your way. Let's change the names of our characters so we can see the thing afresh.
A young woman, let's call her Marianne, meets a wealthy man with a nice country seat, let's call him Colonel Brandon, but finds his personality less than attractive, then she falls under the charm of a handsome rogue, let's call him Willoughby just for variety's sake,  in whom she puts her trust leading to almost disastrous consequences for her and her family until she is saved by Brandon, who she originally put off, but now she suddenly "sees" his real virtue and marries for what are probably really pragmatic reasons of wanting someone to protect and keep her.

Meanwhile, another, more steady woman, let's make her a sister for a little more variety and call her Elinor, waits until all other claims against, oh it's so hard just making up names on the fly like this, I'll call him Edward Ferrars for lack of anything better, are cleared up so that she can pursue the man she really loves.
That's not so hard is it. And yes, it is pretty much the same story structure isn't it?

Charlotte Collins does this all the time. There is a character named Eliza in Sense and Sensibility who gets entangled with Willoughby before the action and ends up pregnant. It's not terribly hard to imagine that, but for the grace of God, her namesake in Pride and Prejudice could easily have met the same fate. I know we don't like to discuss this sort of possibility; I mean that Wickham might have nailed Elizabeth. Oh sorry, it sounds so crude when I put it that way. "Nailed" is such an ugly word to describe the act of ... whoops we wouldn't want to call it "'love" would we? . Would "seduced" be any better?

Actually, seduced is a little unfair to Wickham. Yes, he is a liar and cad but Elizabeth rather throws herself at him doesn't she? Seduction is really giving him too much credit. I know, only the horrible Lydia could do something quite that brazen. Well, Lydia is bad, true, but the difference between she and Elizabeth is one of degree not kind.

Okay, if that is too crude and dirty for you, consider instead Mary Crawford from Mansfield Park. She is likable and not a tramp but she doesn't work out so well and the similarities between Mary and Elizabeth are awfully compelling. Actually, that one even pains me. I read Mansfield Park and I can't help but wonder if maybe Charlotte has had second thoughts about Elizabeth.

Here is a hypothesis, what if, in writing Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte based Elizabeth on her best friend forever only to have that BFF disappoint her deeply between the time she finished Pride and Prejudice and before she started writing Mansfield Park?

Actually, it's a pseudonym
I haven't been completely honest here. "Charlotte Collins" was actually  a pseudonym that was assumed by a woman named Jane Austen to write the novel. Later she changed her mind and published under the simpler pseudonym of "a lady" but she kept Charlotte Collins as the name of the character she based on herself.

She did this because there were some touchy privacy issues involved. You see Charlotte/Jane never married. Mr. Collins is actually based on her father and the whole story is her brutally honest (complete with many warts) but loving way of presenting the portrait of a man she loved, he was her father after all, in print. She portrayed the man in several of her novels under different names, Mr Elton, for example. Sometimes, she idealized him a bit, as a loving daughter is wont to do, and so we get the more positive portraits we see in Henry Tilney, Edward Ferrars and Edmund Bertram but the relationships are always with fatherly types whom you can't imagine actually ... I'm sorry I can't bring myself to use the words.

Okay, I'm making all this up but you don't really have any way of knowing that some of it may not be true. This is a continuation of my point from yesterday. A good novelist, and Austen is the best, can create an endless number of characters out of very limited biographical resources. And she can place these characters into a shockingly limited number of basic story structures and still come up with stories that are profoundly different from one another even though her various stories parallel one another to a degree that is really quite astounding.

A while ago, I read a journalist who mocked the Nancy Drew stories by saying they aren't stories about a girl having a bunch of different adventures so much as they are stories of the same girl having the same adventure over and over again. That sounds damning until you read Jane Austen. The difference between her stories and the Nancy Drew stories is not that Austen always tells fresh stories but that she is much better at telling what is more or less the same adventure over and over again.

Towards the end of In Search of Lost Time Proust has his narrator Marcel make the same point to Gilberte while they are having tea. Telling variations on the same simple stories over and over again is, says Proust, what great artists do. It's what Shakespeare did and it's what Sophocles did. (One of the big weaknesses in the Nancy Drew stories is that all the adventures are needlessly complex; a better writer would have written more simply.)

One of the marks of a truly great novelist is that they have a number of basic character types whom they can shuffle and move about in a variety of approaches. Austen did it, so did Henry James, Edith Wharton and Evelyn Waugh.

And the same is true of our lives. We don't judge a woman better than other women because she has new or different adventures from other women but because she plays the same music only more meaningfully. (Yes, I would say the same thing about men and I started to yesterday. Today I'm focusing on women though.)

Final thought, if you've ever sneered at Charlotte Collins you only succeeded in proving something about yourself by doing so. Have I ever sneered at her: yes, back when I was callow youth. I know better now.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post is here

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