Newspaper writers sometimes describe an idea of female weakness and timidity as reminiscent of "one of Jane Austen's young ladies."
Could they be supposed to have read Jane Austen's works, they
might conceivably be thought to have Fanny Price in mind. In none other of the five heroines can one discover an explanation of this strange abuse of language, and Emma Woodhouse, with her
forwardness and overbearing insensibility, is almost too strong for the modern stomach. She is the only one of Jane Austen's heroines who suffers from the limitations of her time; her troubles
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arose from her having a great deal of health and vigor and nothing at all to do.
With all her intelligence, Emma was not capable of finding enough occupation for herself to keep her rational; she had never taken the trouble to practice sufficiently, and though she could never have played as well as Jane Fairfax, she had the honesty to be ashamed, considering her talents, of not playing better than she did. With her drawing it was the same thing. She was always meaning to read a great deal, and often drew up lists of books, but the resolve never came to anything; as Mr. Knightly said: "'I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma. She will never submit to anything requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding.'" Her abounding energy, for which she had no proper outlet, made her throw herself with undue eagerness and interest into the amusement of influencing other people's lives.
The attitude is a tiresome one at best; but when it concerns the love affairs of others it is something worse. Mr. Knightley accused Emma of indelicacy; we should frame the criticism in another manner, but in the substance of what he said we should agree exactly.
Indeed, Emma's conduct with regard to Harriet Smith was not only most severely condemned in the result, by which Harriet, having been talked into love with Mr. Elton, has perforce to be very
wretched when the mistake is discovered, but is repellent to the normal mind from the beginning. To give a friend's affairs a helpful push in the right direction is one thing; but to decide upon a match and endeavor to bring it about as if the two people concerned were merely clay in the hands of a superior being, is highly distasteful, and not any the less so because Emma was in fact cleverer, richer and better born than any of her neighbors
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in Highbury. In that readiness to acknowledge her own faults which is one of her most sympathetic characteristics, she owned the
wrongness of what she had been doing. "It was assuming too much, making light of what ought to be serious--a trick of what ought to be simple." It is her capacity to recognize her faults and to try to cure them that is responsible for most of our warmth of feeling towards Emma. Elizabeth Bennet is mistaken and repents, but the process in her is a much more spontaneous one. Emma had committed herself to a course of arrogant meddling implying so much that is
disagreeable in the nature that indulges in it, that it is the sign of a really honest and courageous character that she can shake off her weakness as she does, and that once she has seen her conduct in its true colors, she makes no attempt whatever at self-justification.
"When it came to such a pitch as this, she was not able to refrain from a start or a heavy sigh, or even from walking about the room for a few seconds: and the only source whence anything like
consolation, or composure, could be drawn, was in the resolution of her own better conduct, and the hope that, however inferior in spirit and gaiety might be the following and every future winter of her life to the past, it would yet find her more rational, more acquainted with herself, and leave her less to regret when it were gone."
The mood of the day that culminated in this misery is enhanced by one of Jane Austen's most emotional passages of natural description.
"The evening of this day was very long and melancholy at Hartfield.
The weather added what it could of gloom. A cold stormy rain set in, and nothing of July appeared but in the trees and shrubs, which the wind was despoiling, and the length of the day, which only made such cruel sights the longer visible." Even more emotional is the passage which immediately follows this one in the next
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chapter. Emma has come out into the garden, from which, though she is as far as possible from knowing it, she will return engaged to Mr. Knightley.
"The weather continued much the same all the following morning; and the same loneliness and the same melancholy seemed to reign at Hartfield, but in the afternoon it cleared; the wind changed into a softer quarter; the clouds were carried off; the sun appeared, it was summer again. With all the eagerness which such a transition gives, Emma resolved to be out of doors as soon as possible. Never had the exquisite sight, smell, sensation of nature, tranquil, warm and brilliant after a storm, been more attractive to her."
The episode of Mr. Knightley's strawberry party contains a picture of landscape, full of that character which Jane Austen recognized and loved as truly English, though she had never been outside of
England. Mrs. Elton's conversation has driven the usually serene Jane Fairfax to ask Mr. Knightley to show them the whole extent of the grounds, and the party accordingly begin to walk.
"It was hot . . . they insensibly followed one another to the delicious shade of a broad, short avenue of limes, which, stretching beyond the garden at an equal distance from the river, seemed the finish of the pleasure grounds. . . . It was a charming walk, and the view which closed it was extremely pretty. The considerable slopes, at nearly the foot of which the Abbey stood, gradually acquired a steeper form beyond its grounds; and at half a mile distant was a bank of
considerable abruptness and grandeur, well-clothed with wood; and at the bottom of this bank, favorably placed and sheltered, rose the Abbey Mill Farm, with meadows in front, and the river making a close and handsome circle around it."
"It was a sweet view--sweet to the eye and the mind. English
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verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright without being oppressive." Jane Austen herself seems to have been so much penetrated by the fairness she was describing, and her mind so full of all the lovely prospects she had ever seen, that she made in this passage what is perhaps her one and only mistake on a question of detail. She goes on to describe the surroundings of the farm as
"rich pastures, spreading flocks, orchards in blossom and light columns of smoke ascending." When the master of Godmersham had come to this point in his sister's work, he said: "I should like to know, Jane, where you get those apple trees of yours that blossom in July?"
Another passage of the novel which recalls the background of the Austen family is the pastime of Harriet Smith in making up an album of charades. A collection exists of charades made by Mr. Austen, Cassandra, James and Jane herself; one of her contributions was upon a bank note.
You may lie on my first by the side of a stream,
And my second compose to the nymph you adore,
But if, when you've none of my whole, her esteem
And affection diminish, think of her no more.
The episode of the charade submitted by Mr. Elton, which Emma
applies to Harriet though it is really intended for herself, offers another instance of the complex yet clear and brilliant structure so characteristic of the book. It takes her barely a moment to resolve the word into "courtship" "while Harriet was puzzling over the paper in all the confusion of hope and dullness."
Mr. Elton's charade concludes with the lines:
Thy ready wit the word will soon supply, May its approval beam in that soft eye!
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and Emma admits that "soft" is the justest epithet that could be given to Harriet's eye. The previous line is less strikingly apposite.
"'Harriet's ready wit! All the better. A man must be very much in love, indeed, to describe her so.'" And when Harriet is prevented by a sore throat from coming to the party at Randalls, and Mr
. Elton has not availed himself of the opportunity of staying at home that Emma has held out to him, she reflects: "'What a strange thing love is! He can see ready wit in Harriet, but he will not dine alone for her.'"
When the fearful truth of the real nature of Mr. Elton's attachment has burst upon her on the drive home, and she is at last alone in her bedroom in the turmoil of mind the discovery has produced, she goes over all the incidents of Mr. Elton's behavior which she had thought at the time to be a sign of his devotion to Harriet. "'To be sure, the charade, with its "ready wit"--but then, the "soft eyes" --in fact it suited neither; it was a jumble without taste or truth. Who could have seen through such thick-headed nonsense?'"
The description of Mrs. Goddard's school, from whence Emma
selected the lovely, stupid Harriet to be her chosen friend and companion, has frequently been compared with the Abbey School at Reading, as described by Mrs. Sherwood. The excellent, good-hearted, non-academic Mrs. Goddard does, in her attitude towards the business of female education, suggest that of Mrs. Latournelle.
"Mrs. Goddard was the mistress of a school--not of a seminary, or an establishment, or anything which professed in long sentences of refined nonsense, to combine liberal acquirements with elegant morality, upon new principles, and new systems--and where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity,--but a real, honest,
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old-fashioned boarding-school . . . where girls might be sent to be out of the way, and scramble themselves into a little education, without any danger of coming back prodigies . . . she had an ample house and garden, gave the children plenty of wholesome food, let them run about a great deal in the summer, and in winter dressed their chilblains with her own hands." One recollects Mrs. Sherwood's account of the Abbey School's very elastic time-table; of the long summer evenings spent in wandering under the trees of the garden; and when Jane Austen speaks of Mrs. Goddard's "leaving her neat parlor, hung round with fancy-work" to spend the evening by Mr.
Woodhouse's fireside, one remembers that Mrs. Latournelle's parlor was decorated with weeping willows and tombstones embroidered in chenille. But the difference between the plain and sensible Mrs.
Goddard, and old Mrs. Latournelle with her passion for anecdotes of theatrical life, is as fundamental as that between the Highbury boarding school, whence its twenty young couples walked to church every Sunday, and that truly romantic establishment, formed
partially of an abbey gate-house, in whose turrets the girls might sit gossiping and dreaming as long as they pleased. The Abbey School would not have done for Highbury, and old Mrs. Latournelle would have startled Mr. Woodhouse.
The aspect of Emma which is disagreeable to the modern reader is its dwelling upon distinctions of class in so bold and uncompromising a manner. This element has an importance in the historical aspect of Jane Austen's work. Her work as a whole is of so diamond-like a quality in the immutability of its value, that this is perhaps its only aspect of temporal importance--namely, the rise and selfconscious development of the middle class; to us it is painful. Most of this trouble is of course centered in Emma herself; a great
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deal of the book is quite untainted by it. Mr. Knightley, for example, is entirely free from it. Again, the character of Mrs. Elton, which occupies, with that of Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates, the most
important position in the novel's comic relief, owes nothing to a scale of social values in the author's mind. Mrs. Elton is extremely funny in her conviction that Miss Augusta Hawkins had held such a place in society as Mrs. Elton only could surpass; her self-complacent assumption of social equality with Miss Woodhouse,
and the patronizing good nature she showed Jane Fairfax because the latter, though infinitely more educated, elegant and better bred than Mrs. Elton, was, at the same time, in much narrower circumstances, do depend for a great deal of their comedy on the conditions of the then-existing social structure; but the character of Mrs. Elton, like that of Mr. Collins, is one fundamentally suited to the purposes of comedy. In any society, Mrs. Elton would have been delightfully intolerable. If self-consequence and meanness, a total lack of humility, perception and real goodness of heart, cannot show
themselves in one sort of behavior, they will in another. Such qualities are like the damp in a house's structure, that walks along the fabric until it finds a weakened spot, then shows itself upon the ceiling. A society in which there are no well-born heiresses to be insulted by the bumptious familiarity of a social climber, will still recognize the essential truth of Mrs. Elton's character.
Nevertheless, it is difficult not to be disgusted with Emma for the ruthless way in which she detached Harriet from her friends, Robert Martin's sisters, who had been at school with her: and disgust is the one impression that a heroine ought not to provoke. Nor is it possible to deny that this episode would have seemed less horrible in 1815
than it does today. At the same time, though one cannot think that Jane Austen
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would have been shocked in the same manner that we are by Emma's handling of the Miss Martins, yet the drawing of these young
women, in their simple, dignified reception of truly disgraceful treatment, and the extent to which poor Harriet suffered from being obliged through her blind admiration and affection for Emma, to throw them off, make it plain enough that Emma's conduct is
condemned.
"A bad business," indeed, but though Emma is proved to be, and comes to realize herself mistaken in her attitude, the book strikes an uncongenial note, because that sort of mistake, and that particular attitude, are, to our minds, absolutely repellent. Emma is the only heroine of whom we can say that her mistakes are those to which she was rendered liable by her time, rather than by the common failings of humanity.
At the same time, one of the charms of the book is that of her conversations with Mr. Knightley, not only of dramatic interest because they display so clearly the character of each, but because, though somewhat better expressed, they are those that we hear
among intelligent men and women of today; in particular that to which the proposal of Robert Martin and Harriet's refusal of it under Emma's influence gave rise.
"'. . . She is a greater simpleton than I ever believed her. What is the foolish girl about?'"
"'Oh, to be sure,' cried Emma, 'it is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage. A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her.'"
"'Nonsense! A man does not imagine any such thing.'" Emma continues:
"'Supposing her to be, as you describe her, only pretty and goodnatured, let me tell you, that in the degree she
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possesses them, they are not trivial recommendations to the world in general, for she is, in fact, a beautiful girl, and must be thought so by ninety-nine people out of an hundred; and till it appears that men are much more philosophic on the subject of beauty than they are
generally supposed, till they do fall in love with well-informed minds instead of handsome faces, a girl, with such loveliness as Harriet, has a certainty of being admired and sought after, of having the power of choosing from among many, consequently a claim to be nice. Her good-nature, too, is not so very slight a claim,
comprehending as it does, real, thorough sweetness of temper and manner, a very humble opinion of herself, and a great readiness to be pleased with other people. I am very much mistaken if your sex in general would not think such beauty and such temper the highest claims a woman could possess.'"
"'Upon my word, Emma, to hear you abusing the reason you have, is enough to make me think so, too. Better be without sense, than misapply it as you do.'"
"'To be sure!' cried she playfully. 'I know that is the feeling of you all. I know that such a girl as Harriet is exactly what every man delights in--what at once bewitches his senses and satisfies his judgment.'" . . .
"'I have always thought this a
very foolish intimacy,' said Mr.
Knightley presently, 'though I have kept my thoughts to myself; but I now perceive that it will be a very unfortunate one for Harriet.'"
Today, when the great population of surplus women, and the
economic difficulty of marriage for a man, have filled every
magazine and the woman's page of every newspaper with
suggestions and advice on how to attract the interest of the opposite sex, the substance of this argument comes home with a force that time has not diminished.
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Mr. Knightley, although Lord Brabourne did not like him, is thought by some to be the most satisfactory of Jane Austen's heroes. For one thing: though he is presented to us through the eyes of women, he is drawn in a more detached manner than Darcy, Edmund Bertram or
Captain Wentworth: We see the qualities of those men as they
appear to women's resentment or gratitude or admiration, but it is difficult to imagine with what difference Mr. Knightley would
appear to a man. He is calm, good-natured, honest, and has the dignity of a human being who has an essentially reasonable standard of values. His powers of judgment are as sound as Emma's are weak.
He told her from the beginning that she was mistaken in thinking she would be able to influence Mr. Elton's destiny, in spite of Mr. Elton's excessive amiability and his anxiety to ingratiate himself at
Hartfield. He pointed out, what no one else apparently was able to see, that there could be no satisfactory reason for Frank Churchill's delaying his visit to Randalls on his father's second marriage. "'There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do if he chooses, and this is, his duty.'" He also warned Emma that she might not quite understand the degree of intimacy between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, and was laughed to scorn for his pains. He never relaxed his logical and forthright manner of speech, and yet even Mrs. Elton was not offended by it; his protective kindness to Miss Bates and Jane Fairfax was such that Emma supposed at one time he might be in love with the latter; but his behavior was inspired by nothing more interesting than goodness of heart and the quickness of a practical man in putting his impulse of kindness into action. He is also excellent in his relations with other men. Mr. Elton liked him, and that, considering how Mr. Elton must have appeared to him, was much in his favor. Mr. Woodhouse liked and depended on
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