The Home/Owner Metonymy

Last time my blog entry dwelt on and in Pemberley, the stately home in Pride and Prejudice that is the focus of so many kinds of desire for characters, readers, and viewers. This blog, alas a little more technical, lingers once again in Pemberley’s majestic grounds to explore how readers of Pride and Prejudice, like readers of detective novels and causal visitors to other people’s houses, come to understand that homes “tells us” something about their owners and inhabitants.

            In the last blog, I noted what is both obvious and necessary to repeat: that Pemberley the house represents, and indeed “stands in” for, its owner and the novel’s hero, Fitzwilliam Darcy. When my students hear “stand in” or “represents” in a literary context, they tend to assume that Pemberley is a metaphor for Darcy, and that Elizabeth can intuit something about Darcy because he and his house share crucial similarities. Metaphor, is after all, a rhetorical figure based on likeness: if, say, Lydia were in her impudent way to call Darcy a “stick,” it would be because he looked like one, or held himself like one. Good metaphors depend on a certain degree of surprise in their claim to likeness. The first person who called his beloved’s cheeks “roses” might have surprised her into love; by the time Shakespeare wrote the parodic Sonnet 130, “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun,”  roses, gold wires and damask were dead metaphors, or clichés.  For those who would insist that these figures for body parts are similes, not metaphors, marked as they are with the word “like,” I would say that metaphors are silent similes, and that similes are a form of metaphor. Indeed, I try to persuade my students out of the metaphor/simile distinction, which sometimes seems to be the only rhetorical lesson passed on in high schools.

It is tempting to read Pemberley metaphorically, especially when we glimpse the place for the first time through Lizzy’s eyes:

 They gradually ascended for half a mile, and then found themselves at the top of a considerable eminence, where the wood ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of a valley, into which the road with some abruptness wound. It was a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills;—and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place where nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste.

The metaphoric reading is frankly looking good here. Darcy, like Pemberley is “handsome”; while perhaps not “large,” he can be easily imagined as tall. He is of a higher class than Lizzy and therefore “an eminence” toward which it makes sense to “ascend.” He is also, like the road which leads to the mansion, perhaps regrettably “abrupt”; with his coldness and rigidity, “stone” seems a perfect refection of his character. Although we—and Lizzy—are not used to thinking of Darcy as informal, perhaps the passage is indicating a deeper likeness between house and owner that we have yet to penetrate: Darcy may be stiff and standoffish on the surface, but underneath his clothes (as the A&E “undressed” adaptation makes tantalizingly clear) he is charming and even vulnerable. 

 There are some challenges to a metaphoric reading, although they can be forcefully overcome. It is perhaps harder to find a specific referent for the “swelling” “stream of natural importance,” but luckily we have that most beloved concept of English teachers everywhere—the phallic symbol—to fall back on. Clearly, then, Pemberley reveals Darcy to be deeply, and indeed naturally, masculine. By the time I get to the swelling stream, most students are having doubts, although they are almost always too polite to object. They are satisfied, if not entirely happy, to let English teachers be English teachers.

And for better or worse, this is what I am. It is at this point that I introduce another, perhaps humbler, literary figure, less famous than metaphor. I propose that we should be reading Darcy’s relationship to his house, not as metaphor, but as metonymy. Metonymy, like metaphor, is a form of substitution, but that substitution is based not on likeness but on proximity and association. Here is one homey example of the difference. As a gardener, I have long delighted in a particular plant that grows well in Houston and in many other places: the buddleia, a sage-green perennial with purple or white flowers. Buddleia’s more informal name, which I learned when I first planted one many houses ago, is “butterfly bush.” Sitting in the garden with my first buddleia, I began to ponder its nickname: was it called a butterfly bush because its two-part blooms looked (vaguely) like butterflies, or because it attracted actual butterflies? In essence, my gardening question was one about rhetoric: I was asking (myself) if the name “butterfly bush” is a metaphor (the buds are like butterflies) or metonymy (the plant attracts/is proximate to/can be associated with the presence of/ butterflies). In the case of this particular plant the answer is simple: the name derives from its desirability to butterflies, and its place in the metonymically named “butterfly garden.” Of course, you could have a metaphoric butterfly garden, as I believe some people do, in which the plantings form the outline of a large butterfly, but this is another story that takes us too deep into the garden.

Metonymies can describe a natural relationship—as in the example above—or a social or conventional one. My example here is, perhaps not surprisingly, also domestic in nature. One day, when my older son was a toddler, I walked into his bedroom on a very sunny morning to have him ask me to “shut the mice.” My first, anxious, thought was that he was delirious; I was moving towards his bed to check his forehead for fever, when something clicked. My son was in fact asking me to shut the blinds; the word “mice” came from “three blind mice.” Ross, at his early stage in language acquisition was performing what we might call metonymic slippage, unconsciously substituting “mice,” which were very much part of his representational world, for the word “blind” with which was less familiar. This may have been Ross’s first truly literary moment. 

So how does metonymy help us to understand Darcy? If metaphor offers us physical attributes and character, naming for us that he is tall, abrupt, cold, but surprisingly informal, metonymy allows us to think about history and about the cultural context that surrounds Darcy’s relationship with his house. Here we can imagine Darcy’s historical relationship—as I mentioned in the earlier entry—with landscape architects, and his agency and hard work in turning Pemberley into a Georgian showpiece while retaining its sense of legacy. While we cannot—and probably should not—imagine Darcy with a spade digging out the ponds that surround Pemberley House, we can think about his management of an estate that would have included many hundreds of workers and tenants. Metonymy can also help us to think about Darcy’s family, who would have made their own changes to Pemberley over the course of centuries; we might remember a casual comment early in the novel about how Darcy has been adding to his father’s library. Metonymy can even help us to think differently about Lizzy’s role as mistress: less perhaps as trophy wife than as manager, charitable visitor—in other words “lady of the manor.” We can also think about the role of Pemberley in a global economy, about whether we think—as is certainly possible—that money from the estate was entangled in the slave trade. We can participate mentally in the debate arising only this year about the National Trust’s decision to highlight the dependence of many of its tourist attractions on a slave economy. Metonymy takes us beyond character, beyond individuals, to a larger world and larger histories. I like to call the metonymy that makes these particular histories visible the home-for-owner metonymy, or more visually, the “home/owner metonymy” or, as in my marginal notes, the H/O/M, the slashes suggesting a form of slippage or shorthand.  

 In Pride and Prejudice as in many other 19th-century novels, the H/O/M is supported by other metonymies, most notably the servant/wife metonymy and the sister/wife metonymy. In the same Pemberley scene in both the novel and the visual adaptations, the housekeeper attests to what a wonderful “master” Darcy is, surprising Lizzy and her aunt and uncle, who have hitherto seen him, of course, as domineering and masterful in the negative sense. They also learn from the housekeep that Darcy is an attentive brother, generous and considerate with gifts and affection. In a world in which young women often did not spend much time alone with suitors—especially if the suitors weren’t suitably distant relatives (think cousins) or lifelong acquaintances--metonymy was a useful tool for sizing up the character of the man you were considering marrying. If your potential suitor was nice to his mother (often dead in novels) or his sister (often still alive and kicking), he would likely be nice to you. If he was thoughtful to his servants, surely, that thoughtfulness would extend to his wife. Metonymy, then, is not only about the house but about the household. It provides for innocent brides and expert readers alike a way of approximating the moral worth of a suitor.

Pride and Prejudice is only a particular spectacular and efficient example of the H/O/M and the other metonymies home visits make possible. In detective fiction the stakes are even higher than the marriage plot; observations about someone’s home provide clues to the identity of murderers. And it is not simply in fiction that we make use of the H/O/M. We all rely on the H/O/M in daily life judging others—and ourselves—by the homes we inhabit. My next entry will take on real-life uses of the home/owner metonymy and our own unconscious investments in the relationship between character and space.