by Jane Austen
2. It is a concrete realization of astonishing formal and technical creative originality, in which the narrative and dramatic possibilities and capacities of the novel as a genre are exponentially enlarged—as we observe, for the largest measure, in the fluid and continuously modulating relations between the authorial narrator and the chief characters—exploring and disclosing simultaneously shifting and evolving perspectives.
3. It constructs a succinct, telling, and detailed social and cultural context: Set in the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, it focuses on a country village located sixteen miles from London. This confined world is very largely concerned with itself and its internal goings-on; yet in it the weight and density of rapid, uncontrollable social change is registered in and through the lives of its carefully distributed array of characters.
Most of the almost innumerable critical discussions of Emma undertake to explore or analyze one or another of these general areas. But a central part of Emma’s greatness has to do with its rendering of all three into interanimated coherence. It does so (to continue for another moment at this pitch of schematic simplicity and abstraction) by dramatically juxtaposing and integrating the interests and questions set out in numbers 1 and 3—the personal and inward with the impingements of social and cultural circumstances. It achieves this interpenetration and transformation of both largely, though not exclusively, by such innovations as are adverted to in number 2. It dramatizes such interfusions through the deployment of original representational means—in prose, in style and idiom, in narrative voice and dialogue, and through the juxtaposition of a range of narrative discourses. That is to say, it represents with unprecedented fullness the interpenetration of these large, stipulated spheres of existence—the domain of individual, reflective consciousness and emotions as it engages, mediates, and is modified by external and public pressures. These pressures are exerted for the most part by other persons—family members, friends, and acquaintances—as well as by the familiar constraints imposed by gender, money, situation, fortune, age, accident, and other circumstances. How this is done and what it suggests about the registration and elaboration of meaning in narrative comprises one side of Emma’s extraordinary claim as a novel, an achieved textual totality, and it is the purpose of this introduction to explore how this complex, heterogeneous whole is put together.
The first sentence of Emma is only less well known than the legendary opening of Pride and Prejudice. “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” The immediate effect of this statement is to stop us, we readers, in our tracks. It is also a heads-up or alert, signaling to us as the narrator’s adherents and collaborators to step up the volume and fine-tune the attentiveness that we direct toward the page. It begins with a broadside of affirmations and modulates into a conclusion that intimates serious problems may exist in the offing. Emma is very good looking in a rather striking and forceful way (not pretty or, here, beautiful); she is intelligent and quick-witted; and she is more than affluent when it comes to material means. She takes pleasure as well in the amenities of an established place in which to live, the establishment being part of a settled order in which she also feels at home. And best of all, perhaps, she is blessed with a “happy” temperament or general tone of well-being. With all these fortunate and combined bestowals, is there anything else to ask for? Well, yes—since they amount, the narrator remarks without pausing, to no more than “seemed.” The dubiety carried in that ironic reservation turns the sentence around and prepares us for vexation and distress.
Emma has also reached a conventional juncture or locus of passage in the life cycle of European women and men. And this reference to numbers leads to a series of statements that informs us about how, in turn, those twenty-one years are to be regarded. Emma’s mother has been dead for about sixteen years, since that is the interval during which Miss Taylor has been employed as her beloved governess—Emma’s memory of her goes back to the age of five. Emma’s older married sister, Isabella, is at least six years her senior, since we soon learn that she has been married for seven years and already has five children, the youngest of whom is less than a year old. It is reasonable to assume that Emma “had been mistress” of her father’s house since she was about thirteen (a number that will come up later). Her father’s age we will get to in a bit.
Her father and governess have raised Emma with great affection and equal indulgence. Restraint and authority have been close to absent from her experience, and she has, within this atmosphere of tenderness, permissiveness, and admiration, grown up “doing just what she liked; highly esteeming Miss Taylor’s judgment, but directed chiefly by her own.” The consequent disadvantages of Emma’s situation were “the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too much of herself.” These “real evils” are at once modulated by “rather” and “a little too much.” There may be forebodings, but they are neither very dark nor desperate.
The novel begins, however, with Miss Taylor’s departure from the Woodhouse home of Hartfield. She has become Mrs. Weston, having just married a prosperous widower neighbor and taken up residence at Randalls, his recently purchased “little estate,” only a half-mile from the Woodhouses (p. 13). The wedding guests have gone, and Emma and her father are left to themselves “to dine together, with no prospect of a third to cheer a long evening.” Miss Taylor’s wedding precipitates in Emma a “gentle sorrow.” She understandably experiences Mrs. Weston’s happiness as a “loss” as well, and sits in “mournful thought” pondering “what she had lost” (p. 4). The good fortune of her dear friend is both a source of “satisfaction” to her and yet, more questionably, “a black morning’s work.” The lightly stressed irony is that Emma is responding to her idealized surrogate mother’s marriage as if it were an echo or shadow reenactment of her natural mother’s death sixteen years before. Even more, in recent years the two of them have stood on “equal footing” and in “perfect unreserve”; to Emma, Miss Taylor has been that most rare “friend and companion,” someone “peculiarly interested in herself, in every pleasure, every scheme of hers;—one to whom she could speak every thought as it arose, and ... could never find fault.”
With this approving mirror of another consciousness, another affirming yet senior female self, moving away into separateness and independence, Emma recognizes in herself the sense that things can never be the same for her again. “How was she to bear the change?” (p. 4). Indeed.
The “melancholy change” is compounded by Emma’s awareness that “she was now in great danger of suffering from intellectual solitude. She dearly loved her father, but he was no companion for her. He could not meet her in conversation, rational or playful” (p. 4). Mr. Woodhouse is somewhere between sixty-five and seventy years old.i Yet
the evil of the actual disparity in their ages ... was much increased by his constitution and habits; for having been a valetudinarian all his life, without activity of mind or body, he was a much older man in ways than in years; and though every where beloved for the friendliness of his heart and his amiable temper, his talents could not have recommended him at any time (pp. 4-5).
Although Emma dearly loves her father, they don’t have interests or resources in common. Emma loves talk, the back and forth of conversation, the playfulness of wit and the bite of argument; her father is somewhere else. He is obsessed to the point of looniness with his health; he lives in terror of the weather; drafts, heat, cold and colds, damp, snow, the dews of a summer evening all imperil him and everyone he can warn. And he is equally endangered by food: His fearful admonitions on thin gruel, pork, boiled eggs, and baked apples are the stuff of unforgettable comic turns. He has behaved as “quite an invalid” all his life (p. 190) and has in fact become one. He claims that he goes “no where” and is torpid and inert. He exi
sts at such a depressed level of vitality that he seems to be far older than his years. Friendly, affectionate, and amiable as he may be, he is neither brainy nor energetic. Mr. Woodhouse is effectively old enough to be Emma’s grandfather, and in the far-distant resolution of this novel he partially fills that functional role.
Emma is responsive to these striking differences between her father and herself, as she is also mindful of her responsibilities as a daughter. Her melancholy musings end as her father awakens from his postprandial repose:
and made it necessary to be cheerful. His spirits required support. He was a nervous man, easily depressed; fond of every body that he was used to, and hating to part with them; hating change of every kind. Matrimony, as the origin of change, was always disagreeable; and he was by no means yet reconciled to his own daughter’s marrying, nor could ever speak of her but with compassion (p. 5).
Although Emma is neither nervous nor easily depressed, she is nonetheless her father’s daughter. And in no characteristic is she more tellingly aligned with him than in her resistance to change—both change in general and in particular as it touches upon her own life circumstances, especially when it comes to marriage, marriage for herself, against which she has resolutely set her face. Her father’s opposition to change, which takes on epic and mythical comic proportions, focuses with phobic intensity on marriage. Change equals separation and loss; and marriage—“the origin of change”—is for him, no matter what the circumstances, always exogamous. ii Moreover, that babies largely come about by means of marriage is an idea that has never found a secure lodging in his mind. It remains something of an unexplained wonder how it is that he ever married; and it is even more of a challenge to imagine how he himself ever came to father two thriving daughters. It is part of Jane Austen’s comic genius and tact that she prompts such questions from her readers but utterly declines to undertake the provision of simple, rationalistic answers.
Mr. Woodhouse lives by his “habits of gentle selfishness,” and these behaviors include his being “never able to suppose that other people could feel differently from himself” (p. 5). Emma too, in a more differentiated sense, suffers from habitual, sustained self-reference. And although she is intermittently aware that this practice may not be the best way to understand and negotiate with both the world and herself, she does not at the outset and far beyond actually question its rightness for herself. Nor does she seriously examine her own disinclination to the idea of marriage for herself. Although she too is saddened by the “loss” of Miss Taylor, she feels obliged to be cheerful as her father emerges from somnolence to resume his lament over “Poor Miss Taylor.”
Emma is interrupted in her efforts to turn her father’s attention to less doleful matters by the entrance of Mr. Knightley, just returned from London, where he has been visiting with his brother’s family: John, his younger brother, Isabella, Emma’s older sister, and their five children. He has brought back good news of their uninterrupted good health, and his “cheerful manner” also always does Mr. Woodhouse good. He is part of the family, connected to them by marriage and long friendship, as well as by rank, class, status, propinquity, and the common interests that arise from them. He declines to commiserate with the “Poor Miss Taylor” of Mr. Woodhouse or even with Emma’s sense of loss—“ ‘How did you all behave? Who cried most?”’ He jollies them along with irony and good sense, remarking on the great improvement of Mrs. Weston’s new circumstances. Emma answers this observation by turning the conversation in her own self-referring direction, and Mr. Woodhouse mistakenly responds to Emma with further self-reference on his own part. In the service of momentary clarification, Emma then exclaims: “‘Oh, no! I meant only myself. Mr. Knightley loves to find fault with me, you know—in a joke—it is all a joke. We always say what we like to one another”’ (p. 8). Whether Knightley “loves” to find faults with Emma remains moot, as does all of it being a joke. And although both Emma and Knightley have the highest regard for openness of temperament and relatively uninhibited personal communication, they do not always say what they like, or feel, to one another. Still, what Emma has cheerfully asserted is more true than false, and it tends, additionally, in the right direction.
The narrator concurs:
Mr. Knightley, in fact, was one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them; and though this was not particularly agreeable to Emma herself, she knew it would be so much less so to her father, that she would not have him really suspect such a circumstance as her not being thought perfect by every body.
“Emma knows I never flatter her,” said Mr. Knightley (p. 8).
Having administered this semi-neutral and cooling dose, Knightley backs off, as does Emma. This reestablishing of dialectical balance permits him to continue his little lecture on Miss Taylor’s good fortune. First, she has emancipated herself from her condition of “dependence.” There can be no doubt of the correctness of her choice, both for herself and everyone else. “ ‘Every friend of Miss Taylor must be glad to have her so happily married.’ ” Next, it is entirely to her “ ‘advantage ... at [her] time of life to be settled in a home of her own, and how important to her to be secure of a comfortable provision’ ” (pp. 8-9). Knightley is here standing in for the narrator, as he recurs to the “comfortable home” of the novel’s opening sentence.iii Emma knows all this, he goes on, addressing both father and daughter, and hence “ ‘cannot allow herself to feel so much pain as pleasure.’ ”
Emma gaily changes gears and counters Knightley’s pedagogy by affirming that she is also happy on the occasion, and moreover Knightley has “ ‘forgotten’ ” one important element in her “ ‘joy’ ”—namely that she “ ‘made the match’ ” herself “ ‘four years ago,’ ” in the face of general disbelief in the prospect that Mr. Weston would ever marry again. When her father pleads with her to desist from exercising her prophetic powers again, Emma replies: “ ‘I promise you to make none for myself, papa; but I must, indeed, for other people. It is the greatest amusement in the world! And after such a success, you know!‘” (p. 9). And she goes on to elaborate on how only she foresaw the happy resolution so long ago, “ ‘planned the match’ ” from the outset, and should consequently be allowed to enjoy her “ ‘success.’ ”
Knightley responds to the jibes in both “forgotten” and “success” by sharply observing that there was nothing for him to forget since Emma’s “success” had been at best “ ‘a lucky guess,’ ” a purely mental operation. And Emma comes back with an utterance that is worthy of the novelist manqué that she turns out to be. Lucky guesses in human relations “ ‘are never merely luck.’ ” What passes between men and women is more subtle and complex than Knightley’s blunt logic accounts for.
Rather than pursuing this branch of disagreement further, Knightley ascends to a higher plane of generality. “ ‘A straight-forward, open-hearted man, like Weston, and a rational unaffected woman, like Miss Taylor, may be safely left to manage their own concerns. You are more likely to have done harm to yourself, than good to them, by interference’ ” (p. 10). It isn’t self-evidently clear what harm to herself Knightley may have in mind. However, when Emma answers her father’s repeated pleadings that she desist on the grounds that marriages “ ‘break up one’s family circle grievously,‘ ” and remarks that she must in any case first find a wife for the relatively newly arrived clergyman, Mr. Elton, her father gamely and vainly tries to head her off by suggesting that they invite him to dinner along with Knightley instead. Knightley laughingly declares time-out and brings to a close this bit of serial dispute and the first chapter itself. “ ‘Invite him to dinner, Emma, and help him to the best of the fish and the chicken, but leave him to choose his own wife. Depend upon it, a man of six or seven and twenty can take care of himself’ ” (p. 11).
It is worth recalling that the language or diction in which Knightley couches most of his assertions in this opening episode—from dependence/independence, to
home/comfortable provision, to straightforward/rational and self-management/interference, to choose your own wife/take care of yourself—is associated with or belongs to the idiom of individualism and individual choice and autonomy. This idiom is also common to (if not identical with) the ideals and ideology of the free market, of laissez-faire and noninterference, of a system of self-acting regulation and rational choice.iv
Knightley is the leading personage in the district (which includes at least two parishes). As an elder son, he has inherited Donwell Abbey, the extensive family estate. On its acres he rents out at least one (and possibly two) substantial farms. He also cultivates, for sale and profit, a home farm, which is large enough to require the services of a full-time steward. He is in addition a magistrate, or justice of the peace, for this local region. He is responsible for public order (see the episode of the gypsies on page 303) and is actively involved in the business affairs of the other men of substance and their families of the district, as well as the public responsibilities of the two parishes that the demographic geography of this novel includes. He keeps current with agricultural reports and developments, and keeps a weather eye open for the respectably needy (the Bateses)—that is, for those on the way down—as well for those on the way up (Robert Martin and his family). He belongs both to the social group or ranking of the landed gentry, and he is very much a modern capitalist. He devotes considerable energy in balancing the “free,” meritocratic claims made by the ideological adherents of the capitalist open market, and the counterclaims of ascribed status, social privileges, and inherited hierarchies exerted by the complex and traditional institutional matrix into which the newer capitalist agricultural economic order has to also fit. As this undertaking of adjusting and adapting two disparate and sometimes contradictory arrays of value and conceptual formulations develops throughout the novel, we can observe that such key terms as “independence” and “interference” are neither univalent nor stable. They vary in signification with context and character and can sometimes be applied to describe both identical and different phenomena in a single conceptual field.