Jane Austen For Beginners

by Robert Dryden

  From this point, the comedy of manners (or errors, we might say) picks up steam. To begin with, news arrives that during his stay in Bath, Elton has already proposed marriage to Augusta Hawkins, a well-monied woman, who is egotistical, obnoxious, difficult to get along with, and always insists on being the center of attention. Her father is a Bristol merchant, thus we discover that her money is derived from trade and not land and we can locate her in the middle class. When she arrives in Highbury, she continually talks about her life and the people she knows back at home. Elton’s extremely quick decision to make a proposal of marriage shows a good deal about his character; his move would seem calculated to get back at Emma. In Elton and his new bride, Austen is continuing to show us how superficial some people in this society can be. Elton appears to have married for both spite and for money.

  Meanwhile, Frank Churchill arrives on the scene and impresses everyone in Highbury with his good looks, excellent manners, and thoughtful personality. He is enthusiastic about being a guest in the village. He heartily approves of his new stepmother whom he had never met before, and he showers Emma with a great deal of attention. Emma loves the attention, and for a brief while, she entertains the notion that she might be falling in love with Frank. But finally she dismisses the idea, thinking instead that Harriet and Frank might just make the perfect couple. All plans and flirtations are curtailed, however, when Frank discovers that his aunt’s health has taken a turn for the worse, and he is forced to leave abruptly. At first Emma is sad to lose him, but over time her feelings for Frank become less intense. She decides not to encourage his affection.

  Some months later Frank returns to Highbury for another visit. Emma worries about how Frank will act with her. She assumes that her “indifference” will have decreased his feeling, and essentially she is right. He is not nearly as attentive to Emma, and spends most of his time either going to or coming from the house of Mrs. Bates. During this visit, there are no emergencies to pull Frank away, so a ball is planned and comes to fruition. That evening, however, there is a most awkward moment when Harriet has no partner. Elton is available to dance, but he refuses to ask Harriet. He shows his true colors as a bitter man. Knightly then rises to the occasion, saving Harriet some awkward embarrassment. Emma is impressed with Knightly’s gentlemanly behavior. And when she tells him so, the two of them have a dance together, foreshadowing their future connection. The complication here is that, unbeknownst to Emma, Harriet has now taken a liking to Knightly.

  Continuing the comedy of manners, Emma persists in playing matchmaker for Harriet, although after the unfortunate experience with Elton, she plays it sly; she insists to Harriet that she doesn’t want to hear any names or have any direct influence. The comedic part is that Emma believes she is playing cupid between Harriet and Frank, when in actuality, Harriet is interested in Knightly. And to fuel the comedy further, Knightly (who is the smartest character in the novel) begins to suspect that there may be something going on between Frank and Jane Fairfax.

  Another significant moment in the narrative occurs when all the characters have a picnic at a location called Box Hill. The group is out of sync from the beginning. And adding to the ill feeling, Emma is rude to Miss Bates, insulting her by indirectly stating that her conversation is dull. Although she hides it well, Miss Bates feels the insult most intensely. Later, Knightly scolds Emma for her behavior. We see here and elsewhere that Knightly mentors Emma, at times praising her for her correct behavior and at other times scolding her for her bad behavior. This kind of mentor/mentee relationship is one that we see often in Austen’s novels. Think, for example, of Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, or Edmund and Fanny in Mansfield Park.

  Next we learn that Mrs. Elton has found a governess position for Jane Fairfax. But before Jane is forced to accept it, Mrs. Weston informs Emma that Frank and Jane Fairfax are engaged. Jane has been saved! Since Frank Churchill possesses old family money and a landed familial estate in Yorkshire, we see yet again an example in Austen’s work of different social classes coming together through the bond of marriage. As we know, Jane Fairfax has no money or status in the gentry. She had been forced to find a position as governess and to work for wages. Now, however, she won’t have to; her social status is increased dramatically.

  As it turns out, Frank and Jane had been engaged since Frank’s first visit to Highbury. They had to keep the engagement a secret because Frank knew that his aunt would never approve of the match, as Miss Fairfax’s social status is well below their own. Since his aunt has passed away, the couple can now come out in public about their commitment to each other. Emma is sympathetic to Frank and doesn’t harbor animosity, but she does feel the weight of having to break the news to Harriet. Remember that Emma thinks Harriet is in love with Frank Churchill. To Emma’s surprise, however, Harriet already knows about Jane and Frank, and Emma is doubly surprised to discover that Harriet never had intentions of being with Frank. All along, Harriet tells Emma, she has been in love with Mr. George Knightly! Emma is shocked. Through this information Emma comes to the realization that she too is in love with Knightly and has been so all along.

  Emma happily comes to find that Knightly shares her own feelings. The only obstacle in the way of Emma and Knightly being together is Emma’s father, who could not live without his daughter and who would refuse to be moved to another residence. But Knightly (the knight in shining armor, so to speak) has already taken this obstacle into consideration; he proposes that he and Emma reside together at Hartfield while Mr. Woodhouse is still living. This is an offer that Emma can’t refuse; she, Knightly, and her father will live happily ever after.

  The final loose end to tie up is how to break the news of her engagement to Harriet. Emma dreads telling Harriet that she is now engaged to Knightly, because she fears that Harriet still has strong feelings for him. But then Knightly delivers the good news that Robert Martin has just proposed to Harriet a second time, and she has accepted. Harriet, we discover, has always maintained feelings for Robert. We assume that Emma’s meddling momentarily confused Harriet, but the correct conclusion is finally realized. Ultimately the social order is reestablished in spite of Emma’s tampering. The prosperous farmer is not above or beneath Harriet Smith; the match between them is just right, and the social hierarchy has been maintained.

  • • •

  Since Jane Austen is so adamant about the need to marry for true love rather than social status or finances, we might think it possible for a Harriet Smith to marry the likes of a Vicar Elton, or a Frank Churchill, or a George Knightly. But since Harriet’s parentage is uncertain, and she finds herself somewhere between the middle and lower-middle classes, the gap between her social status and that of a George Knightly is simply too great to overcome. Austen can toy with the idea of such a match (and perhaps like Emma, toy with the possibility of Harriet marrying up such a great distance), but it’s not a realistic conclusion. In this sense, we might view Austen as a hypocrite. Marriage, she is saying, should be based on true love, but only when the partners are relatively compatible in social standing.

  Emma does maintain social-class order, and just as in the other novels, marriages in Emma take place between characters that are relatively compatible in their social standing. But different from all the other novels, in Emma Austen presents us with a wider spectrum of social-class positions. At the top of the social hierarchy we have the power couple, Emma and George Knightly. Taking into consideration the size of Emma’s dowry, and the fact that her fortune will be merging with Knightly’s property and fortune, this powerful union in the landed gentry is rivaled in the Austen oeuvre only by Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth Darcy of Pride and Prejudice fame. Below Emma and Knightly are three marriages that constitute the lower to middling segment of the gentry. Here we have Vicar Philip and Augusta Elton, the Westons, and Frank and Jane Churchill. These marriages are of the scale we are used to seeing in Austen’s novels. Similar marriages in other novels include: Persuasion’s
Anne and Frederick Wentworth, Mansfield Park’s Fanny and Edmund Bertram, and Sense and Sensibility’s Elinor and Edward Ferrars and Marianne and Colonel Christopher Brandon. All of these characters are from the lower level of the gentry or the upper level of the middle class. In the social-class hierarchy, Harriet Smith’s marriage to Robert Martin is the lowest marriage in all of Austen’s work. Arguably then, Emma contains marriages at both the highest and the lowest levels in any Austen novel.

  Well beneath the social-class status quo in Emma are the group of gypsies that accost Harriet Smith, and the party(ies) responsible for stealing a bunch of chickens from Mr. Weston’s coop. These references are so dramatically outside the realm of Austen’s polite social circle that they provide us with a reality check. We can’t read these passages without acknowledging that just at the margins of Austen’s world (and the margins of the pages in her novels) there are thousands of poor and desperate members of the English underclass, who are stranded in extreme poverty. Austen acknowledges the poor and needy in Emma’s (and her own) society when she has Emma and Harriet make a charitable visit to a poor family in Elton’s vicarage; however, since Harriet and Emma are so preoccupied with matchmaking and the prospect of seeing Elton, we are left with the feeling that Emma’s compassion for the underclasses extends only so far.

  In addition to the wide spectrum of social-class positions presented in Emma, Austen produces a heroine who is arguably her most diverse creation. Simply put, Emma is complicated. From one perspective, she is not a likeable character. In the main, she is egotistical, bossy, manipulative, and at times she lacks patience and empathy. Indeed she is not a typical Austen character. From another perspective, however, Emma may just be Austen’s most progressive (dare I say feminist) character. The fact that Emma is not interested in marriage for much of the narrative is significant. In a world where a woman’s sole ambition is supposed to be to attract a suitable partner, it is striking and radical that initially she wants no part in a marriage.

  Also significant is that this highly intelligent young woman, capable of accomplishments well beyond the imagination of her patriarchal society, is bored sick in her day-to-day existence. She takes up the occupation of matchmaking and she gets herself into trouble because there are no greater challenges that she can pursue. Her charge is to look after her hypochondriac father. Beyond that, her choices are limited. As all upper-class women of the period could attest, their primary occupation (aside from attracting a husband) was killing time by any means necessary. As a woman of the gentry, Emma has no chores to perform and no cooking to do. The undesirable tasks related to her father’s care are undoubtedly handled by servants. So aside from socializing with the Westons or the Bates family, Emma takes it upon herself to play at matchmaking. This is her amusement.

  Although Emma has a sizeable dowry and is relatively independent, she could not (in a Woolfean sense) have “a room of her own.” Her society couldn’t envision it. Even Jane Austen lacked a room of her own as she was forced to do all of her writing amidst distractions in the common sitting room. Even so, Emma Woodhouse is an example of a female character in literature who is ahead of her time. You might even say that she has a tinge of the masculine about her. That is, when we describe her as pushy, egotistical, self-centered and the like, we put her down for not acting as a lady of the period should. But aren’t these same qualities often respected in a man? Aren’t successful men (of any period) often described as stubborn, aggressive, self-centered, hard-charging, and egotistical? Indeed, when Austen wrote Emma, she anticipated that her character would not be appreciated the way her other heroines had been up to that point. Her nephew, J. E. Austen-Leigh, reports that upon completion of the novel, Austen had written to a friend that “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” Perhaps we dislike Emma because she is different from other Austen characters that we are used to. She lacks the warmth, softness, and vulnerability of other Austen heroines, such as an Anne Elliot or a Fanny Price. But that shouldn’t dissuade us from appreciating Austen’s most unusual creation. Emma may not be a successful cupid, but she provides us with another example of a free-thinking woman, who stubbornly goes against the grain of her society. Most readers of Emma will appreciate the mentoring that Knightly provides for Emma from time to time throughout the course of the novel. Knightly, we might say, sets Emma straight and guides her behavior to fall in line with expectations and manners of the day. But let us also appreciate the unruly, spoiled, and self-centered Emma, for she, just like the woman who created her, has moxie. She is a precursor for heroines to come whose societies will eventually be able to conceive of a woman’s room of her own.

  Chapter 6

  Northanger Abbey

  Northanger Abbey is Jane Austen’s first completed novel. When she was writing it at the Austen family home in Steventon, both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility were in the works, but Northanger Abbey was the first to the finish line. Austen drafted this novel during the years 1798 and 1799 when she was nearing her mid twenties. Ironically, however, it wouldn’t be published until late in 1817, after she had passed away. Her brother Henry initially helped her strike a deal with a publisher in 1803, but the book was never printed. Following his sister’s death, Henry bought back the book rights and published it elsewhere along with Austen’s final novel Persuasion.

  Northanger Abbey is an appropriate beginning for Austen in that it’s her least complicated novel. The heroine is a young impressionable girl, who comes of age, and the messages are straightforward and lack the kind of sophistication found in Austen’s other five novels. Nonetheless, the work presents us with extremely well-developed characters, who are engaging, funny at times, and thoroughly believable. We see the maturation of Austen’s protagonist, and we also see the early brilliance of Austen’s use of narration. The narrator here, and in her other novels, does not merely present us with a dry accounting of events; rather, she is like a character in the text. The narrator is sarcastic, bold, opinionated, and at times she even steps out of the story to provide us with significant background information.

  We also see a plot that will be repeated throughout all of Austen’s other works: Middle-class characters interact with lower-level members of the gentry in English society and increase their social status by way of marriage. As we have discussed so often in these pages, members of the middle class may not have the social pedigree of members of the landed gentry, but their manners and morals sometimes exceed those of their more wealthy counterparts. Additionally, new money-making opportunities are enabling some members of the middle class to compete with the gentry for status in society. In the early and middle portions of the eighteenth century, high society would have consisted exclusively of aristocrats and members of the gentry who had a landed title. Now, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, members of the middle class are mingling with gentry figures in high society. We see this in Northanger Abbey where Austen has the middle-class Thorpes and Morlands rub elbows with the likes of the Tilneys.

  The opening chapters present us with our heroine, Catherine Morland, the fourth of ten children in a family on the cusp between the middle class and the gentry. Her father is a clergyman (the same as Austen’s own father), not rich and not poor, and her mother, as we observe by her yield of children, has a “good constitution.” As a child, Catherine was a tomboy, who is described as neither beautiful nor intelligent, but at the age of fifteen, “her love of dirt gave way to an inclination for finery, and she grew clean as she grew smart.” It was at this age Catherine began training to be a heroine, and thoroughly indulged her love of literature.

  When we meet Catherine at seventeen, she is a voracious reader of novels, and has a special passion for Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho. Since the novel is by far the most popular literary form with twenty-first century readers, we may find it hard to believe that in Austen’s day the novel (meaning “new”) was the least popular and least r
espected form of literature. In order to confront the negative stigma placed on the novel, Austen’s narrator presents her readers with a battle of the sexes—a debate between great English literature of the eighteenth century written by men (Alexander Pope, Laurence Sterne, and Matthew Prior) and less accepted English novels written by women (Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Ann Radcliffe). Late eighteenth-century England saw a major rise in literature written by women. In particular, women were pioneers of the novel. Women of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the primary writers and readers of novels, and distinguished men of letters did not take them seriously. Educated men viewed novels as pulp. To counter the stigma, Austen defends women writers, women readers, and the novel. She has her narrator argue that literature by women is art “in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.” Austen’s defense of novels and of the women who write and read them is an early example of feminism. She provides a justification of sorts for her life’s ambition in addition to paving the road for her protagonists.

  The Gothic novel plays an important role in Catherine’s education. She is under a spell of sorts fuelled by her fascination with morbid tales of horror involving murders, terror, dark castles, the supernatural, and most importantly, heroines in distress. Austen knew well the Gothic tradition in literature that spanned the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As a young girl, Austen shared Catherine’s fascination with Gothic tales. And at the forefront of the Gothic tradition in literature was Radcliffe, whose The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) were blockbuster bestsellers. In Northanger Abbey Austen is celebrating the female author and the Gothic tradition, while at the same time (as we shall see) satirizing her protagonist’s innocence and gullibility. Austen is saying that fiction is fun, but it is not reality, and only trouble can come from believing that it is so.