As a
final angle on Sidney Parker in Sanditon
as having a strange resonance with Lovelace from Richardson's Lovelace, my eye
was also caught by the following comments by Tom Parker about his brother
Sidney Parker in Chapter 4:
“There—now
the old House is quite left behind.”
“What
is it, your Brother Sidney says about it’s being a HOSPITAL?’
‘Oh! my dear Mary,
merely a Joke of his. He pretends to advise me to make a HOSPITAL of it. He
pretends to laugh at my Improvements. Sidney says any thing you know. He has
always said what he chose of and to us, all. Most Families have such a member
among them I believe Miss Heywood.—There is a someone in most families
privileged by superior abilities or spirits to say anything.—In ours, it is
Sidney; who is a very clever Young Man,—and with great powers of pleasing…’
It
certainly sounds to me like Sidney Parker is making a droll joke about his
family’s hypochondria, when he suggests to his brother Tom that the Parker
family ancestral estate in Sanditon, a place which the Parker family is so dedicated
to developing as a medical mecca, should be converted to a hospital.
But when
I checked to see whether Richardson's Lovelace had any connection to any sort
of hospital, guess what? I found an article entitled "Redemptive Spaces:
Magdalen House and Prostitution in the Novels and Letters of Richardson" by
Martha J. Koehler in Eighteenth Century Fiction 22/2, in which Koehler wrote about
correspondence between Samuel Richardson and Lady Bradshaigh, which was
published prior to JA’s writing Sanditon, regarding Richardson and the Magdalen
House for former prostitutes.
“It is
in the midst of these arguments concerning sexuality, representativeness, and
narrative structure that a rhetorical Magdalen House is erected. Richardson
picks up an earlier thread from the long letter, concerning the importance of
“testing” Clarissa’s virtue; he has argued that for the “sake of the Moral” it
is imperative for Lovelace to abuse Clarissa as he does, to show “that there
was one strictly virtuous Woman in the Sex.” This strand comes together with
the arguments about seduced women and reparation as he imagines all those who
would fail such a test: “‘What a fine time of it,’ as Lovelace says on this
very Subject, ‘would the Women have, if they were all to be put to the Test,’
as he puts Clarissa! My Hospital in this Case were it to extend over half a
County, I doubt would not be long in filling.”
Later
in that article, Koehler writes: “Various
constructions and themes in Samuel Richardson's novels and his early letters to
Lady Bradshaigh, examined in the context of mid-century reformist writings
about prostitution, such as the Magdalen narratives, reveal his ambivalent
treatment of fallen women. These constructions include the distinction between
seduced and hardened women in Pamela as
well as the undoing of that distinction in Clarissa,
the irreducible nature of women's partiality for libertines and its corollary,
the desexualization that becomes the condition for Clarissa's paragon status,
and the distinctively female vice of moral indignation against women in Sir Charles Grandison. In this essay, I
show that Richardson's sympathetic and progressive impulses towards Magdalens
could not keep pace with those impulses that were traditional and misogynistic.”
What I
take away from the above is that this is yet another seemingly trivial reference
in Sanditon to Sidney Parker by his siblings, which carries a Lovelace
resonance. Each one alone (the Isle of Wight scheme, the Hare, and now the Hospital)
might just be a random unintended echo by Austen – but taken altogether, and
placed alongside the covert Lovelace echoes in Persuasion, it seems far more likely that this is an intentional pattern
created by Jane Austen, in order to throw shadows on the character of Sidney
Parker, despite his family’s descriptions of him as a great guy.
And, by
the way, I surveyed all published Austen scholarship regarding the character of
Sidney Parker, and the general consensus is that while he does seem the most
likely candidate to have become the man with whom the heroine Charlotte will
fall in love, there is an almost as wide consensus that Sidney has more than a
whiff of Austen’s inconstant charmers, like Willoughby, Wickham, Henry
Crawford, and Frank Churchill – and those echoes of Lovelace are very congruent
with those earlier scholarly opinions .
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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