Jane Austen: Closet Classicist. (Miscellany) (original) (raw)

Persuasions; The Jane Austen Journal, 2000

Abstract

Mary DeForest has a doctorate in classics and teaches Latin at the University of Colorado at Denver. Besides her work on classical authors, she has published on the classical tradition in modern literature, particularly in the novels of Jane Austen. ********** IN WRITINGS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, words of Greek and Latin proclaimed the message NO GIRLS ALLOWED as emphatically as the sign on a boys' tree house (DeForest 1992). Books written for men confronted the reader with passages in Latin or Greek; books written for women did not. While learned women were treated with hostility, unlearned women were mocked for not knowing what they had been forbidden to study. Consequently, women's feelings about the classics must have been complex. The admiration they were instructed to feel for ancient literature was charged with feelings of exclusion, of inferiority, of injustice. Women novelists who possessed a classical education faced a unique challenge. To ignore classical literature meant losing half the literary tradition; to emphasize classical literature meant losing female readers. If Jane Austen did learn Latin and Greek, neither she nor her family would have publicized this fact. If she wanted to learn either language, she was born into the right family (DeForest 1988). In the eighteenth century, a woman's access to classical learning depended almost entirely on the presence of a sympathetic brother or father. Jane Austen's father and brothers were scholarly, literary, and--most important--her first readers. They assisted her in a far more adventurous enterprise than learning dead languages. Her father tried to find a publisher for her novel in 1797; fourteen years later, her brother Henry succeeded. If her father and brothers encouraged her to write and even to publish, they probably encouraged her intellectual development as well. This meant learning the classical languages. Certainly, they would have taught her as much as she wanted to learn. Her father, who had trained his sons for Oxford, supplemented his income by training other boys. Would he not have taught a gifted child what he taught the sons of other people? It is known that he prized Latin so highly that he almost prevented his son's adoption by a wealthy family: he feared the boy's Latin would suffer. Nevertheless, it would have hurt his career as a clergyman in a conservative community if he flouted convention and let it be known that he had given his daughter a classical education. Out of a similar discretion, he hid his daughter's identity when h e approached the publisher with her book. Classical education would be their secret. That they did share a secret is implied that in a short play Austen dedicated to her father, "The Mystery" (Minor Works 55-57). This one-page play is composed of whispers and allusions, which the characters, inside the story, hear and understand, but which the reader, outside the story, misses. The classical names of two characters, Corydon and Daphne, may allude to the nature of the mystery. The gulf between the worlds inside and outside the text precisely mirrors the gulf separating men and women. Baffled and excluded, the reader of "The Mystery" learns how women feel when men thrust Greek and Latin into the conversation. If George Austen included his daughter among the classically educated, and if his prudence kept her from joining the men on center stage, she reassures him in allegorical language. In the preface, she offers him the "Comedy, which tho' an unfinished one, is I flatter myself, as complete a Mystery as any of its kind." Though her education may never be complete, it will be hidden from the world. In the second volume of her juvenile pieces, she acknowledges his help more openly. She inscribed the first page with ex dono mei patris, "a gift of my father." These words mean more than the paper they are written on. Only one part of the gift was the physical notebook; the other was the ability to compose a Latin inscription. …

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