To round out this rash of disastrous news, Fanny gets another letter from Edmund indicating that now Julia has eloped and run off to Scotland with Yates! Indeed, the Bertram’s household has been turned upside down. Since the family is in such disrepair, Edmund implores Fanny to make her return to Mansfield as fast as possible. He also indicates that Sir Thomas has requested that Fanny bring her younger sister Susan with her. The girls leave the next day. Ironically, the Bertrams need Fanny to help restore order to their household. Fanny’s stock has increased now more than ever. She has become priceless to her gentry cousins.
In the aftermath of these tragic events, Fanny learns that Mr. Rushworth has been able to procure a divorce from Maria, but Crawford has refused to marry her (leaving the girl in a most disgraceful position). Henry Crawford has ruined his own reputation, which vindicates Fanny. Now she is praised for her ability to resist his advances; and finally Edmund rejects Mary once and for all. In the end (happy for some), Edmund recognizes the value of his cousin and proposes marriage to Fanny. Sir Thomas recognizes that Fanny is the daughter he always wanted, and although he is sad at the prospect of her departure to his son’s house, he is comforted by the knowledge that her sister Susan can take Fanny’s place as a significant member of the family. Mr. Grant dies shortly after Fanny and Edmund are married, allowing them to move back to the parsonage at Mansfield. Through the strength of her character, Fanny has managed to move up the social hierarchy to become a member of the gentry—by way of marriage.
• • •
From a wide-angle perspective, the significance of Mansfield Park is that it allows us to witness not only a family in transition, but also a society in transition. A century earlier, the landed and gentrified Bertram family would have had a much more solid foundation morally and financially. But at the end of the eighteenth century, as depicted by Austen, a family (and country) are in chaos and crisis. Great Britain’s imperial colonial activity, the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, and war have all converged to change dramatically the fortunes of landed and middle-class families alike. Since colonial activity (which is fueling the Industrial Revolution) has created opportunities for a multitude of British subjects, social status can now be gained via capitalism, not exclusively by birthright. War too will change fortunes in an instant. Mr. Price of Portsmouth has bad fortune, but his son William will likely fare much better. War, if he survives it, will help him prosper.
And even domestically we see how Fanny’s good fortune is gained through the marriage market. Austen is adamant that marriage should not be arranged; title and fortune should not be reasons alone for the package deal. Marriage should be entered into for love. Ironically, however, marriage for love in Austen’s world always results in social advantage. The great irony in this novel is that members of the middle class are able to rise in status and cure the ills of a gentry that is having to negotiate major changes in the social fabric of their country. Sir Thomas’s visit to Antigua shows us that the gentry is trying to change with the times. But simultaneously, Tom, Henry, and Yates are representatives of a gentry that is lazy, narcissistic, and entirely lacking in ambition. Indeed, in Austen we are witnessing a changing of the guard. Fanny, Edmund, and William are among the new breed of honorable characters that inhabit the gentry; Tom Bertram, John Yates, and Henry Crawford are on their way out.
Chapter 5
Emma
Jane Austen wrote Emma over a period of fourteen months when she was living a quiet country life in Hampshire with her mother and sister Cassandra. She published her novel in December of 1815, and it would be the last work she would see into publication before her death in July of 1817. On the surface, Emma has a great deal in common with other Austen novels in that, as Austen said of all her books, “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.” Indeed, Emma presents us with a small circle of characters, all of whom live in or visit the small town of Highbury in Hampshire. But upon closer inspection, we discover that in part, the character of Emma Woodhouse is a radical departure for Austen from the kinds of heroines she had been creating up until this point in her career. The major difference: Emma is not interested in marriage.
The theme of marriage is central to all of Austen’s novels, and they each include what is called the “marriage plot.” This term is used in academic circles to describe domestic novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that include marriage as the central focus. Marriage is the story’s inevitable conclusion, but the audience is usually taken on a roller-coaster ride with the characters as they negotiate obstacles only to eventually find their ways together in union. Emma is no exception. However, the interesting question to consider in this marriage plot is: Why is Emma initially not interested in getting married? When we remember how intricately all of Austen’s novels are connected with aspects of economics and social-class hierarchy, the answer becomes clear: unlike the remainder of Austen’s heroines who are deeply interested in getting married, Emma is financially well off and therefore does not fathom a reason to get married. As we learn in Austen’s novels, marriage is as much an economic arrangement as anything else. Austen’s heroines strive for true love, but none is destitute in marriage. Idealistically, they dwell on love and quality of character before financial solvency, but in reality they would make very different decisions if their partners had no wealth. In Emma’s case, we know that she has a dowry of £30,000 (approximately $2,500,000). Her money would have been invested in government bonds at a yield of 5%, and thus she would have had an annual income equivalent of $125,000.
As Virginia Woolf might say, Emma Woodhouse has a room of her own and therefore doesn’t require a husband to provide one for her. However, we see from the early pages in the novel that other female characters are not so lucky. During this period in history, employment options for women were scarce. If an unmarried woman had no familial source of support, she might find work as a governess or a teacher, but options were not vast. Miss Taylor, for example, had been Emma’s governess just before the action of the novel gets underway. She held that position for sixteen years! Having no family money of her own and no father or brothers to support her, she had no alternative (excepting marriage) than to spend so many years of her life in the employ of Mr. Woodhouse. She served in one of the few employment options that were available to women of the early nineteenth century, and she could only give it up when she accepted the marriage proposal of Mr. Weston. This is also the case for Jane Fairfax, the orphan, who is staying in Highbury with her aunt Miss Bates and her grandmother Mrs. Bates. Since the Bates family is in a poor financial situation themselves, Jane has no alternative but to seek a governess position. As Austen demonstrates, Jane is not happy about this unsettling necessity.
The novel makes clear that marriage is essential to the survival of a gentry woman who has no other income. Thus, we witness the positive effects of marriage on the likes of Miss Taylor/Mrs. Weston and Miss Fairfax/Mrs. Churchill. But in addition to showing how marriage can help a woman, Austen also reveals the potential consequences of remaining single. In Miss Bates especially, the reader sees the clear consequences to a woman who fails to marry. Miss Bates had grown up a genteel woman, who was well provided for by her father and brother. Following the death of the males in the family, however, Miss Bates became a spinster. She and her mother live largely upon the kindness and charity of other well-monied members of the Highbury community. Austen draws her as one who the reader pities because of both her lack of wealth, and because of the distasteful aspects of her personality. She is a terrible gossip, other characters that she interacts with seem barely to tolerate her, and she has no ability to gauge when her company is proving tiresome to her audience.
Beyond the dependence women have on money and men in this early nineteenth-century English society, Austen also has a lot to say about how women spend their time. In short, there is simply not a great deal for women of the gentry to do outside of visiting, socializing, and gossiping. Wom
en of this social class have plenty of servants for all household and child-rearing duties, so this leaves ample time for idleness and social activities. Emma is a perfect example of an intelligent woman, who has too much time on her hands. Aside from looking after her father, the aging Mr. Woodhouse, Emma is entirely free of responsibility. And what she chooses to do throughout the lion’s share of the novel is to play at matchmaking. Since Emma has no desire to marry herself, she expends all the energy she might otherwise use for pursuits in that direction on finding a match for her new friend, Harriet Smith. This theme of how a woman of means during this period spends her time is significant. Whether Austen intended to make this point or not, the fact remains that early nineteenth-century women were in the business of killing time. If a woman wasn’t obsessed with the goal of marriage, the only option left (Austen appears to be saying) is to play at matchmaking and ensure that someone else will be successful in marriage.
As much as Emma resists marriage, Austen ultimately shows that marrying for true love is the only acceptable outcome. Emma teaches that marriage to the right man, in spite of financial independence, should be pursued. And so it is with Emma, who finds her match in the man who has acted the part of her mentor throughout the novel, Mr. Knightly. And as Emma and Harriet Smith, the major characters in the novel, fall in line, the novel reminds us that social and economic hierarchies in society will ultimately be maintained and should not be tampered with. Emma and Knightly are joined in union at the top of the gentry’s hierarchy, and Harriet (who is of lower social standing than Emma) and the farmer, Robert Martin, find their union together in the lower-middle class. Emma had been so keen on matching Harriet with Philip Elton, the young and handsome vicar of Highbury; however, she ultimately discovers that the match is not to be.
Social class is also important in Emma because here Austen shows the reader a hint of life below the gentry and middle-class positions in society. During this time, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, poor people, whose ancestors had been subsistence farmers on medieval estates, are being pushed off the land by Enclosure Acts. These Acts of Parliament, initiated during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, privatized once public lands and prevented subsistence farmers from being able to freely plant crops and graze animals the way they had for centuries. This produced a sizeable underclass of drifters, many of whom eventually found their ways into cities seeking employment. In Emma we see evidence of the underclass when Harriet Smith is accosted for money by a group of “gypsies.” The scene provides the reader a window into social class issues we would hardly expect to encounter in a Jane Austen novel. The situation is harrowing for the young woman until Frank Churchill heroically arrives on the scene, saves her, and chases the gypsies away. The presence in the text of the brief encounter with a band of gypsies provides a hint to the reader that not all of England is living like the high-society characters that we find in Austen’s novels. These gypsies remind us that the novel is from a period of history when there is extreme polarity between the rich and poor in society. Additionally there is a reference to a thief who has run off with one of Mr. Weston’s chickens. These references are brief and easy to overlook, but they are nonetheless important; Austen’s world is not the hermetically sealed paradise that it sometimes seems to be. The outside world—poverty, thievery, the emerging Industrial Revolution—does exist.
Finally, in Emma, Austen has created a “comedy of manners.” This genre of literature was extremely popular in the Restoration, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and was made so by the likes of William Congreve, Richard Sheridan, and Oscar Wilde (among many others). Aside from providing laughs, a comedy tends to bring a community together, and most comedies end in marriage(s). By definition, a comedy of manners is a parody of stereotypes in fashionable society. These comedies (and Emma is no exception) often involve love interests, flirtations, and greed, and characters are obsessed with appearances rather than true moral conduct. Although there is ultimately a high standard of moral conduct (created by Knightly among others) that is upheld in Emma, there is also quite a bit of shallow and self-consumed behavior that is worthy of critique.
• • •
Emma is the younger of two daughters, and lives in a country estate called Hartfield with her father, Mr. Henry Woodhouse. When Emma was just a child, she lost her mother, and was cared for by a governess named Miss Taylor. When the novel’s first page is turned, Emma is twenty years old, and Miss Taylor has recently wed Mr. Weston, leaving (aside from their several servants) Emma and her father to fend for themselves. From the outset we see a marriage between a woman of no means (Miss Taylor) and a man of property (the widower Mr. Weston), who owns a family estate in the area called Randalls (this kind of marital arrangement is common in all of Austen’s novels). Mr. Weston, we discover, had been married to a Mrs. Churchill, who passed away. They had a son together named Frank, now 23, and following the death of his mother, Frank was raised under the name of Churchill by his aunt and uncle in London. As we shall see, Frank becomes an increasingly important character in the novel after he initially comes to town to visit his father and his father’s new bride. The Westons, Woodhouses, Knightlys, and the Bates family (Miss and Mrs.) are all living in a small provincial area in southern England called Highbury, in Hampshire. Because the marriage between Mr. Weston and Miss Taylor involves a character whose social status greatly increases due to marriage, it foreshadows some of the other love interests and matches that appear later in the novel.
Emma is dedicated to caring for her father, who is a card-carrying hypochondriac. He is allergic to change, and he detests being exposed to the slightest chill. His fussy nature, and Emma’s adept strategies for dealing with it, adds significant comic value to the novel. Emma’s dutiful qualities are admirable, but less pleasing is the fact that Emma is a spoiled young woman, who is used to having her own way, and who thinks more of herself than is generally healthy.
Another group of characters that often appears consists of Miss Bates, her niece, Miss Jane Fairfax, and Mrs. Bates. Mrs. Bates is a contemporary and friend to Mr. Woodhouse. She is relatively poor. Her granddaughter Jane, who stays with the Bates family, is young, very attractive, and an accomplished piano player. And lastly, Miss Bates, is a pitiable spinster. She’s a dedicated friend to Emma, but also very sad, lonely, and gossipy. She provides another example of Austen’s comedic wit; however, at times Miss Bates’ conversation can be painfully boring. In her thirties, she has little money, no prospects, and as she ages, her situation will likely become worse.
With her dowry in place, however, our heroine Emma, as mentioned, takes a keen interest in playing matchmaker. To prevent Emma from getting into too much trouble, she is repeatedly mentored by her longtime neighbor and brother-in-law, the 37-year-old, most eligible bachelor George Knightly. Of particular concern to Knightly is the way Emma seems to be tampering with the social-class hierarchy. As in all of Austen’s novels, the cast of characters includes lower-echelon members of the gentry along with those of the middle class. In her matchmaking, Emma threatens to disrupt and manipulate the existing social order.
The matchmaking aspect of the plot begins when Emma takes credit for the marriage between her former governess and Mr. Weston. Emma is so proud of herself that she thinks she can do the same for her new acquaintance, Harriet. Harriet is an attractive but gullible young woman, who has been educated at a nearby school called Mrs. Goddard’s. She has romantic feelings for a successful local farmer, the aforementioned Robert Martin, but Emma convinces Harriet that she can do better (both Harriet and Robert would qualify as members of the lower-middle class, not the gentry).
This is problematic due to the fact that Harriet’s parentage is uncertain. She is socially on par with the successful farmer, but Emma leads her to believe that she can attract a man from the gentry.
As a match for Harriet, Emma has in mind the local vicar. Members of the clergy in Austen’s time qualify as belonging to the lower e
chelon of the gentry (along with, as noted earlier, those in the legal profession and officers in the army or navy). Emma doesn’t realize it yet, but Philip Elton considers his social status as being far above Harriet’s. And part of the parody that Austen weaves through the use of Vicar Elton is that he cares far too much about his social station. In line with a comedy of manners, Elton is more concerned with appearances than he is with his morals and manners. The depiction of Elton has much in common with Mr. Collins of Pride and Prejudice fame.
Emma begins her matchmaking strategy by planning activities that involve the three of them. One of the activities is for Emma to paint a portrait of Harriet with Elton in attendance. Emma thinks her matchmaking plan is progressing well, so much so that when Robert Martin proposes marriage to Harriet, Emma makes sure that Harriet refuses. Harriet is like a plaything to Emma, and in this regard, Emma is not sensible. Emma feels the loss of Miss Taylor in her everyday life—this is mainly why she has adopted Harriet as a new friend. But Knightly is not in favor of Emma’s meddling. He likes Robert Martin and thinks that he would be a fine and respectable match for Harriet. Emma, on the other hand, scoffs at Martin’s credentials for marrying. She belittles Martin for his occupation and lack of education. The social ranks and codes in Austen’s society are rigid. Austen has Emma meddle with the social structure, but finally she just succeeds in making a mess of things. Her plan totally backfires when Elton professes his powerful feelings of love for Emma, not Harriet. Elton was under the impression all along that Emma had been flirting with him. As we can imagine, Elton is not going to get over this fast. He’s angry and feels as though he has been duped and toyed with. To Emma’s satisfaction, he unexpectedly flees to Bath for an indefinite period of time.
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