Thursday
Yesterday, drawing from the chapter in my book where I examine Jane Austen’s critique of literature that can lead people astray, I focused on how Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price may have used Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa to retain her moral compass. I should have mentioned, by way of contrast, that those around her are using a racy play by Elizabeth Inchbald to engage in inappropriate behavior. Most notably, Henry Crawford uses the play to cuckold Maria Bertram’s fiancé, casting her in a role where he himself can have an intimate moment with her.
Today, drawing from the same chapter, I make a comparison between how Marianne and Willoughby use poetry in their courtship and how Paulo and Francesca do in Dante’s Inferno. Austen herself doesn’t have Dante in mind but the parallels are illuminating, as are the contrasts.
Dante shows the two famous lovers trapped in the second circle of Hell, reserved for the lustful. The couple is based on an actual incidents of lovers caught in an adulterous affair and killed by the husband. (Francesca notes that he is destined for one of Inferno’s lower circles.) The two are blown about perpetually by the winds of their desire, never finding a point of stability. As Dante puts it (in John Ciardi’s translation),
And now the sounds of grief begin to fill
My ear; I’m come where cries of anguish smite
My shrinking sense, and lamentation shrill –
A place made dumb of every glimmer of light,
Which bellows like tempestuous ocean birling
In the batter of a two-way wind’s buffet and fight.
The blast of hell that never rests from whirling
Harries the spirits along in the sweep of its swath,
And vexes them, forever beating and hurling.
When they are borne to the rim of the ruinous path
With cry and wail and shriek they are caught by the gust.
Railing and cursing the power of the Lord’s wrath.
Into this torment carnal sinners are thrust.
So I was told – the sinners who make their reason
Bond thrall under the yoke of their lust.
A major culprit for their transgression, Francesca tells Dante, was the Arthurian tale about Lancelot’s love for Guinevere. Until they encountered that story, all was well:
But if there is indeed a soul in Hell
to ask of the beginning of our love
out of his pity, I will weep ad tell:
On a day for dalliance we read the rhyme
of Lancelot, how love had masted him.
We were alone with innocence and dim time.
After that, as it were, all hell broke loose:
Pause after pause that high old story drew
our eyes together while we blushed and paled;
but it was one soft passage overthrew
Our caution and our hearts. For when we read
how her fond smile was kissed by such a lover,
he who is one with me alive and dead
breathed on my lips ahd tremor of his kiss.
That book, and he who wrote it, was a pander.
That day we read no further.
Reading is also a key part of Willoughby and Marianne’s relationship. It begins romantically—he rides up out of the mist when she has sprained an ankle and carries her home—and continues on in the same vein:
His society became gradually her most exquisite enjoyment. They read, they talked, they sang together; his musical talents were considerable; and he read with all the sensibility and spirit which Edward had unfortunately wanted.
We know what they’re reading because Marianne’s older sister Elinor and Elinor’s admirer Edward, both on the sense side of the sense-sensibility spectrum, good-naturedly tease her about her favorite poets:
“Well, Marianne,” said Elinor, as soon as he had left them, “for one morning I think you have done pretty well. You have already ascertained Mr. Willoughby’s opinion in almost every matter of importance. You know what he thinks of Cowper and Scott; you are certain of his estimating their beauties as he ought, and you have received every assurance of his admiring Pope no more than is proper. But how is your acquaintance to be long supported, under such extraordinary despatch of every subject for discourse? You will soon have exhausted each favourite topic. Another meeting will suffice to explain his sentiments on picturesque beauty, and second marriages, and then you can have nothing farther to ask.
Edward, meanwhile, weighs in during a conversation about how the family would spend a large fortune were they suddenly to inherit one:
What magnificent orders would travel from this family to London,” said Edward, “in such an event!…[A]s for Marianne, I know her greatness of soul, there would not be music enough in London to content her. And books!—Thomson, Cowper, Scott—she would buy them all over and over again: she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree.
For a while, Marianne and Willoughby are as absorbed in each other as Paulo and Francesca, so much so that they rudely ignore everyone else. There’s a real danger that Marianne, blown by the same winds, could lose her way. That’s because Willoughby is not one of Scott’s admirable heroes but a cad who has ruined one woman (Colonel Brandon’s Ward) and who will dump Marianne for an heiress. After he does, Marianne sinks into the melancholic self-absorption that Cowper helped romanticize and that alarmed many parents. To cite two instances, Cowper writes in Book III of The Task,
I was a stricken deer that left the herd
Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt
My panting side was charged when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.
And in “The Castaway,” about a young man who falls overboard, Cowper concludes,
No voice divine the storm allay’d,
No light propitious shone;
When, snatch’d from all effectual aid,
We perish’d, each alone:
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.
This is heady stuff for a moody, heartbroken 16-year-old. Thomson’s The Seasons, meanwhile, is the kind of poem that encouraged long walks in nature, and Marianne, venturing out despite a threat of rain, catches a chill and almost dies. In other words, one could say that Scott almost ruins her, Cowper almost drives her mad, and Thomson almost kills her.
If Marianne doesn’t lose herself entirely in a Paulo and Francesca passion, it’s because she is grounded. She has, for a guide, a wise older sister and, for additional reading material, the poetry of Alexander Pope, whose heroic couplets (say, in Essay on Man) urge a balance between reason and emotion. Marianne may have only a grudging appreciation for Pope, but she has at least read him.
And so Marianne does not end up in an Inferno of endless desire but in a good, if not tempest-like, marriage. Those readers wishing she had ended up with Willoughby should consult Dante.
