Mastering And Commanding The Woman

Madame's Nightshirt

Mrs. Peperium

 

Back the early days of our marriage, I disappointed Mr. P greatly by not possessing half the zeal he has for the reading of military history.  Or even an eighth.  He had entered the marriage as a most enthusiastic groom, bent on making his bride give in completely to his tastes. Understanding he had married an avid reader, (By our wedding day, I had read Jane Austen's six novels 4,598,320 times)  Mr. P was confident he could commandeer me into reading what he wanted me to read. Being an enthusiastic bride, at the bookstore I let Mr. P place his iron grip on my shoulder, steer me to the bookshelf he wanted to visit and let him buy me the books he wanted to buy. Then I began reading them. Mr. P was delighted. He had mastered his wife.

But, it wasn't long before Mr. P found himself in the same posish the Army Corps of Engineers did with The Mississippi. The ACE rerouted The Mississippi to make her a much more intelligent river, according to their ideas. For a while she did play ball and the ACE was delighted.  But then The Mississippi must have decided her way was the better way for her. Most naturally, she began retrieving her old route by flooding thousands of people out of their homes.  Reading military history wasn't really natural to me so I stopped reading Mr. P's  books and, naturally assumed my old reading habits by rereading Jane Austen for the 4,598,321st time.  Thankfully, Mr. P is not feminized so there were no floods of tears. 

But I would be fibbing if I said he was not a wounded man.  He was. Then one Sunday afternoon I rubbed salt into his wound.  He suggested we play a military strategy board game called Gettysburg.  I agreed. While pouring the adult beverages that Mr. P said would stimulate our minds for optimum strategizing he suggested, "Why don't you be The South?"

"Sure."

Mr. P, absolutely tickled pink I had consented to be rolled over by him -Mr. North, contentedly sat down to play the game. The first few turns were mine, as if you recall, historically speaking, it took time for The North to arrive on the scene. Imagine his very real dismay when he and his troops finally showed up, I drove him and his entire army into the ground.  And it didn't even take 3 days.  It only took a little more than 1 1/2.

"How did you do that?" he almost cried.

"It was simple."

"No it wasn't. How did you know which positions to assume?"

"Oh that was the easiest part."

"You don't read military history. How did you know this?"

"So, you're admitting that when you suggested I be The South, you intended to beat me?"

"Soundly."

"That's not nice."

"Yes it is. How did you do it? This was not beginner's luck."

"You're right.  I suspected you wanted to beat me.  And thought, I could let you beat me but..."

"There is no but. You were supposed to let me beat you. Soundly I might add."

"You've already added that. But if I let you beat me then you wouldn't know how much I do pay attention to you, my dear sweet husband."

"Huh?"

"I know how I've disappointed you by not reading military history..."

"Go on..."

"Well, just because I don't read military history doesn't mean I don't listen to you when you read it aloud to me.  You've read to me how the South fought the battle.  And you've read how they should have fought the battle. I simply used the should have battle plan you read to me.  With all your reading about how important it is to change the battle plans according to realities on the ground, I'm surprised you didn't see what I was up to and change your battle plan.  You just kept on using The North's original one."

I would be fibbing if I said Mr. P had nothing to say to that. I would be fibbing even more if I said Mr. P never ever again expressed his dismay at me beating him, soundly.  So imagine my very real surprise when a few months later he suggested we play Gettysburg again.

"Sure."

"Why don't you be The South again?"

"Great."

To cut a very long and very boring story short, Mr. P beat me.  Soundly I have to add. In the time since we had last played, Mr. P had devised a battle plan for the North to beat the battle plan the South should have fought.  Or he looked it up in a book, I still do not know because he refuses to tell. He knew me well enough to know I would just once again use the South's should have fought plan expecting victory.  I did. By the time I caught on that Mr. P had adjusted his plan to the new realities on the battlefield,  I was dead.  And so was my entire Army. Well that's not true. A few units survived to fight another day with Mr. P but they never did.  I've not consented to play Gettysburg again because I don't read military history therefore lack the brains to devise a new battle plan.

It wasn't long after that Mr. P did discover a history I was willing to read about, food history.  And being Mr. P, he bought me books related to the history he was interested in. It wasn't long before I was making him a few of the dishes he had long read about and longed to try. To say he loved this is an understatement.  He, always the sharpest knife in the drawer, understood he had mastered his wife, just not in the way he originally thought he would.  And in a way that allowed her to be a happily-mastered wife. Which made him a even more happy Master and Commander of the ship of his affairs.

People often forget that when one reads, even if it is military history, they are taking in more than just things military. Armies and officers do have to eat.  Surprisingly too, they not only ate, they dined very well when circumstances allowed.  This fact is recounted in military history books as well as historical novels of military men, like the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. I've never read any of the 19 or so O'Brian books but I have seen the movie. Isn't that a perfectly dreadful admission? Naturally I fell head over heels in love with Jack Aubrey and even more head over heels in love with Steven Maturin.  I say naturally because I had been primed to fall for them because of my ongoing 28 year love affair with Captain Frederick Wentworth. Captain Frederick Wentworth is the hero, both Naval and Ashore of Jane Austen's Persuasion. One of Jane's brothers was a Naval officer who was at Trafalgar so she knew of what she wrote.  She wrote about what women were, and still are, interested in when it comes to Naval officers. She also touched lightly on life aboard for the wife who accompanied her Naval officer husband. It sounds as if it was an elegant and delightful life. Through Persuasion, Jane managed to persuade me that if I were ever to read military history, it would have to be about the Royal Navy. Hearts of Oak and all that whatnot.

But happily, I do not have to read Royal Navy military history because I was recently gifted with Lobscouse & Spotted Dog. L & S is the cookbook to accompany the Aubrey-Maturin series. Indeed the commanding Forward - mentioning of all seaports, Boston- was penned by the Master himself, Patrick O'Brian.  I have not had time to really delve into the book but just from glances, it is an excellent book.  The recipes will at first  seem more than odd, unless you've experience with historical cooking, but they really aren't odd. They are incredibly well-researched and amusing.  In fact, many of the dishes are still around to this day, just updated in terms of ingredients. Even Boiled Baby if you can believe that one.  If you enjoy enjoy the Aubrey-Maturin series, the Royal Navy, or historical cooking, I highly recommend this book.

...

More here.

Comments

[MCNS]

This one sounds easy enough to make:

Grog

Serves 1

Ingredients

½ cup rum
1 cup of water to half a cup of rum

Method
Mix all the ingredients.

[Andrew Cusack]

RK gave me one of those Jane Austen books (he's a fan) but after about twenty pages I couldn't take any more. I put it down and haven't picked it back up since. I don't think I'm missing anything.

[Mrs. Peperium]

OK Andrew...do you want me to beat you with a Morning Star or are you just pretending you want me to beat you? Because I will...happily too...and yes I can get my hands on one....

Here. Read. Absorb:

What is it about Lizzy? - Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Posted by Lincoln Allison

Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
first published 1813

Lincoln Allison - recently retired as Reader in Politics, University of Warwick - will be continuing his education by reading those classics he has previously neglected. He will be sharing his thoughts on these books in a series of Retrospective Reviews.

I have heard it described, simply, as the best novel ever written, also as the most philosophically profound and as the most elegant statement of a conservative outlook. There have been numerous film and television interpretations, a Bollywood version and a sequel published 180 years after the original as well as a contemporary bestseller clearly descended from it. But I have never read it until now and I finally approached it as part of a determination to try new things in old age: skiing and Ms Austen so far. I am talking, of course, about Pride and Prejudice.

I bring to the subject, as Mr Bennet might have said, the virtue of an almost entirely complete ignorance combined with a determination to avoid all sources of instruction, whether commentaries, "Introductions", websites or whatever. Another virtue would be my own prejudice: I assume that it is essentially what my sons (as difficult to marry off as Mr Bennet's daughters) would call a "chick book" concerned with "relationships" (yuk). And, finally, I can offer considerable curiosity: if even half of what I have heard about this book is true then it is a very significant thing indeed.

In the age of the visual media one cannot seriously aspire to complete ignorance and I have seen several versions and been with secretaries as they swooned about Colin Firth's interpretation of Mr Darcy. Also, it would be only fair to say that I do have some knowledge of a later generation of novelists, especially Trollope, Mrs Gaskell and the Brontes, with whom to compare Jane Austen.

So we start, in the visual age, with an image of pretty girls and handsome men flitting about a beautiful landscape. It is hard to get beyond this in film or television and the danger must always be that Jane Austen's world is offered as an escape from our own, not merely more elegant but also more "timeless" and cosy. The book, by contrast, is terrifying. Because the Bennets have no sons their house at Longbourn is entailed to a pompous idiot of a cousin. Depending on their actions the daughters face "ruin", destitution or complete domination by a man who might be at best unattractive and at worst bad. The alternative is happiness (or "felicity") which is equated entirely with marriage and mutual love. Thus the girls play a game for high stakes, a game of attractions, of crucial yeses and noes in which you get to play your trump card only once.

On screen, the marriage of the Bennet parents can seem an amusing thing, classic English sitcom placed in time halfway between the Fords of The Merry Wives of Windsor and the Buckets of Keeping Up Appearances. On paper it is a sad prison of an institution. As a part Mr Bennet must rank as the most desirable for an English actor of a certain age to play with his cynically dry wit and his apparently contemptuous affection for the womenfolk around him. On paper he has [Ch. 42]:

married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her.

He nevertheless has five children by her, but in advising those children he must steer a very careful path in guarding them from both his own fate but also in avoiding the shelf.

The conservatism of the novel is the easiest aspect on which to draw conclusions. Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South or Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, to take two of my favourites, seethe with a spirit of social criticism and the desire for reform. Margaret Hale, in North and South, cares intensely about the plight of the poor in the industrial towns. Lizzy Bennet cares fiercely too, but only about those for whom she has a personal affection or to whom she has a duty. War and industrialisation are (famously) far off in the background for her. Nobody could be more immune to Voltaire's stigmatisation of those who love humanity but forget to love human beings. She takes complete responsibility for playing the one card she has: on visiting Pemberley, home of Mr Darcy, she specifically treats as "evidence" the good testimonial of his housekeeper as to his character, to be put alongside his income and his pleasing appearance. If you think the world would be a better place if filled with Lizzy Bennets then surely you are a conservative, at least with a small "c".

You could argue, I suppose, that a feminist critique of the society in which the Bennet girls find themselves is implied by its description. But you could equally well argue that a defence of the social system is implied by the narrative. In discussing the institution of marriage, particularly with Asian students, I often polemically stigmatised modern western partnerships as "disco marriages" entered into without proper regard for their consequences and financial constraints and with disastrous effects on happiness, particularly that of the children. Unlike some of her sisters – or many of our contemporaries - Lizzie is a model for those who would take serious matters seriously.

As for the claim that this is a philosophical novel, I find it rather obscure and paradoxical, in a way which might please Mr Bennet or Oscar Wilde (who often sound quite alike). It is not religious and raises no overtly philosophical questions. It is philosophical, though, in that it is ethical and does not subject imperatives to relativism or contextualisation. "Ruin" is ruin, to be avoided, not analysed.

I am scarcely qualified to give an opinion on how good it is as a novel, but I will anyway. It is an absolute cracker. It makes you laugh and it makes you want to cry. Its prose is complex, ironic, elegant stuff, but you care enough to read it more than once if that is what is required to get the full flavour of nuance. I note that though the opening line is the most famous ("It is a truth . . ." etc.) the opening lines of some of the other chapters have a delightful, confident banality about them. For instance [Ch. 10]:

The day passed much as the day before had done.

Or [Ch. 41]:

The first week of their return was soon gone. The second began.

The story is good and there is a substantial minor pleasure in observing the conventions of the time. For example, when the party of Lizzie's uncle and aunt arrive at Pemberley in the known absence of its owner they simply go round it as if it were a National Trust property commenting on its furniture. I also found it interesting how little concern the characters have with title when compared to income.

But what makes it great is the character of Elizabeth, the second of the Bennet's daughters. The writing of fiction remains a kind of magic for me and I cannot begin to understand how a spinster in the Regency period using only pen and ink succeeds in creating a character whom I would unequivocally elect as the woman in fiction I would most likely to have chatted up. (Eat your heart out slaggy Emma Bovary and Becky Sharpe, boring Margaret Hale and the rest.) Lizzy is fierce and feisty, loyal and determined. She also has a "physicality" as the sociologists put it, which leaps off the page. She walks and walks: walks to think, walks off her frustrations, walks to get places. In chapter 8, carriageless but determined, she walks the three miles from Longbourn to the much grander Netherfield, arriving flushed and muddy. Perhaps she is even a little niffy. Our author makes it clear that the women who receive her are contemptuous, but the men are rather excited. In chapter 44 the hostile Miss Bingley derides her appearance as "brown and coarse". Frankly, whatever else she is, it seems likely that Lizzy is a bit of an animal, rather threatening to the other females of her species.

(I have an interest in this, having had to deal with feminist accounts of sport and leisure which overemphasise the Marx-derived idea that men contrive to make women weak and submissive so as to more easily render them into controllable properties. I have enormous intuitive difficulty with the idea of weakness being attractive and there is scholarly counter-argument in, for example, Allen Guttmann's Women's Sport: a History, but it is good to be able to cite Jane Austen.)

Postscript – Seeking Instruction
Having come to my own conclusions about the book I could not resist reading the Introductions to the two editions in the house. My father's old school certificate copy, a CUP edition purchased in 1929, has an introduction by Mrs Frederick Boas written in 1909. (It is abridged, incidentally: couldn't they manage whole books in those days?) My own Wordsworth Classic has an introduction by Ian Littlewood published in 1993; I note that such essays no longer include a date of actual completion.

They are naturally quite different. Mrs Boas confines herself largely to the facts about the book and the author combined with an aesthetic analysis which is based on Jane Austen's own comment that she was a painter of ivory miniatures who eschewed the epic scale. She sees a continuity to her own times so that Austen's female characters:

may stand equally well for maidens in our own day.

Dr Littlewood, on the other hand, is bound to see Austenland as a distant place much in need of decoding, the whole maidenly predicament having evaporated in western societies by 1993. I take his point that Lizzy has an ironic detachment from the social conventions of her day, but would stress that it makes her conservatism all the more interesting. I very much like his idea that insofar as this is a version of Cinderella, what her prince must do is to love her for her intelligence and autonomy.

I am less impressed with his notion – typical of contemporary academia - that this represents a unique particular of social history in which Darcy is able to cross a frontier and marry a social inferior. It is true that Lizzy's enemies like Miss Bingham and the appalling Lady Catherine de Bourgh stress her social inferiority and the "impossibility" of the liaison, but they would, wouldn't they? Upward social mobility is the true universal and (from the side of Pride) a man of considerable wealth and autonomy whose eye was caught by a fit, feisty, bright-eyed young woman (with just a hint of coarseness and brownness) would have found it within his power to transcend social divisions in most periods of history.

Lincoln Allison has recently retired as Reader in Politics, University of Warwick.
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[Crackie]

I remain unconvinced. I think that second game of Gettysberg was Mrs. P's equivalent of "client golf."
And if you do beat Andrew up, with a Morning Star or otherwise, please do remember to make video.