by Jane Austen
The Coles were very respectable in their way, but they ought to be taught that it was not for them to arrange the terms on which the superior families would visit them. This lesson, she very much feared, they would receive only from herself; she had little hope of Mr. Knightley, none of Mr. Weston (p.188).
Only she is capable of reminding them of their proper place and of the propriety of their staying fixed in that station. In the event, however, both Knightley and the Westons (along with almost everyone else Emma is friendly with) are invited and accept, but no invitation arrives for the Woodhouses. Mrs. Weston’s consoling effort to account for the omission—“ ‘I suppose they will not take the liberty with you; they know you do not dine out,’ ”—makes no dent on the disappointed, disgruntled, and offended Emma. “She felt that she should like to have had the power of refusal.” And the presence of all her friends and the possibility of after-dinner dancing leave her paradoxically stranded: “Her being left in solitary grandeur, even supposing the omission to be intended as a compliment, was but poor comfort” (p. 188).
It turns out that the invitation arrives belatedly. And though Emma at once declares “ ‘of course it must be declined,’ ” she just as quickly asks the Westons “what they advised her to do ... their advice for her going was most prompt and successful.” The final ironic rub is delivered in the Coles’ explanation for the delayed arrival of the invitation. They had been “waiting the arrival of a folding-screen from London, which they hoped might keep Mr. Woodhouse from any draught of air, and therefore induce him the more readily to give them the honour of his company” (p. 189). Emma is obliged to admit that the Coles have “expressed themselves so properly,” that there was “so much real attention in the manner” of their explanation and “so much consideration for her father,” that she allows the Westons to “persuade” her of what she has already decided to do. And it is unmistakably not the Coles’ prose (let alone the Westons’ eloquence) that has done it, but Emma’s desire not to high-hat herself out of a pleasant, sociable, and even possibly exciting evening.
There is an unpleasantly tough, hard, and callous streak running through Emma’s character; that hardness is expressed in her snobbery and in a number of her other social responses. But it is expressed as well in her attitudes toward marriage. As Knightley first observes, Emma has never been in love: Despite her matchmaking impulsion, she has no experience of romantic or sexual love and hence can know little about it. Emma concurs, but takes the account one step further: “ ‘I never have been in love: it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall’ ” (p. 76). This is another of her declarative certitudes that is bound to be falsified. What is implied in this utterance, among much else, is that Emma has thus far in her young life only been in love with herself; or to rotate the formulation slightly, she has never yet fallen out of favor with herself. She has still to experience that abrupt precipitation into passionate dependency that is one of the genuine markers of sexual, romantic love. She conflates the economic dependency (and humiliation) of Miss Bates and her family with dependency in general and claims that her own, Emma’s, immunity from poverty will be sufficient to keep or preserve her “ ‘as sensible and pleasant as any body else’ ” (p. 77).
But Emma is “clever” and knows that as an unmarried woman she will not have “objects for the affections” that only marriage can supply. One thinks, almost naturally, of a husband, a mate, and an intimate companion, and then of children. But Emma makes it quite clear that she has isolated and distanced the idea of a husband and is thinking only about babies and children when she refers to objects of interest and objects for the affections. Moreover, she has prepared a line of defense against that deprivation. She will be the loving aunt of her sister’s children.
“There will be enough of them, in all probability, to supply every sort of sensation that declining life can need. There will be enough for every hope and every fear; and though my attachment to none can equal that of a parent, it suits my ideas of comfort better than what is warmer and blinder” (p. 77).
As it frequently happens with Emma, smugness and self-conceit consort with genuine, telling insight into herself. At the age of twenty, Emma is speaking with fatuous confidence about “declining life” and referring with gnomic compression to “every fear.” But she also brings forward the notion of comfort, which refers in this novel to a broad range of meanings—in this instance, to an inner state, a state of the emotions in which ease, equilibrium, and relaxation are foregrounded. “Warmer” will figure with increasingly manifest sense in the latter part of the narrative. And “blinder” also refers to another matrix of ideas. Emma will repeatedly indict herself for blindness, meaning self-deception, misreading, and misinterpreting. But she will also accuse Frank Churchill of using his extended flirtation with her as
“merely a blind to conceal his real situation with another. It was his object to blind all about him; and no one, I am sure, could be more effectually blinded than myself—except that I was not blinded—that it was my good fortune—that, in short, I was somehow or other safe from him” (p. 387).
She was, and then again she wasn’t. Emma, who regards herself as sharp-eyed and penetrating, has been both used and blinded (or deceived) by Frank. Love is blind, so it is said. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s comedies that Jane Austen seems to have had in mind when she was writing, in Emma, about multiple deceptions, mismatches, and gross errors of perception. “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind” (act 1, scene 1). And Cupid figures as one of the possible answers to the riddle that begins, “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid.” Cupid turns out not to be the correct answer, but the riddle itself is laden with references to love—that is, to sex—and its likely injurious consequences for health.viii When Elton is about to return to Highbury, bringing his bride with him, Emma observes that Harriet is still repining over her loss. In order, as she believes, to jolt Harriet out of her fruitless moping, Emma cleverly and not very scrupulously or subtly accuses her of ingratitude. Harriet is duly shocked and falls all over herself in hyperbolic protestations to Emma of love, thankfulness, and subservience. Emma’s self-conceit is touched, and as Harriet leaves, she silently reflects that “she had never loved Harriet so well, nor valued her affection so highly before.” She then gives herself a “serious” talking-to.
There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.... There is nothing to be compared to it. Warmth and tenderness of heart, with an affectionate, open manner, will beat all the clearness of head in the world, for attraction: I am sure it will. It is tenderness of heart which makes my dear father so generally beloved—which gives Isabella all her popularity.— I have it not; but I know how to prize and respect it. Harriet is my superior in all the charm and all the felicity it gives.... happy the man who changes Emma for Harriet (p. 241).
This splendid passage characteristically welds together Emma’s acute, if momentary, sense of personal shortcoming with her contrived, sustained self-bamboozlement. It is not an either/or proposition, as if one might conceivably make an exchange of one for the other—it never is. Emma’s supposed “clearness of head” also includes her cloudy pipe dreams of glorious triangularities; “for attraction” begins a detour that takes her away from her temporary, dispassionate self-analysis; and Isabella’s popularity is, as far as the text bears evidence, an assertion concocted out of pure wind. Nevertheless, she has touched on a sensitive if not excessively painful spot. Warmth and tenderness of heart are what she recognizes as being missing or undeveloped parts of her being. In other words, there is something inadequate or defective in her affections—her emotions or affects, as we would rather portentously say today. If for her Jane Fairfax embodies “coldness,” then Emma, even in her own estimation, is definitely cool. In other words, she may have to change, perhaps even to grow up. How such a development is to be brought about is a consideration that we will defer for the present.
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II
If we examine Jane Austen’s detailed representation of the society in which she sets Emma, one of the things that is likely to strike us as readers almost two hundred years later is that for all its traditional rural inertia, the local social world of this narrative and the larger world that is its context are in the course of going through complex, uneven, and even contradictory processes of change. The era of European-wide wars brought on by the epoch-making French Revolution, and its Napoleonic succession is coming to a final end. In Britain the sense of national emergency has subsided; restrictions on such activities as travel to the Continent have been lifted, and a bumpy and unpredictable transition to a peacetime yet rapidly changing economy has begun to set in.
Highbury itself, where all the dramatized action of the novel takes place, is a “large and populous village, almost amounting to a town” (p. 5). Such a description seems to suggest growth and increase. And when Frank Churchill is first introduced to this local scene, he notes that it appears “airy, cheerful, happy-looking.” He has his own reasons for producing this characterization, but he and his companions make their first pause
at the Crown Inn, an inconsiderable house, though the principal one of the sort, where a couple of pair of post-horses were kept, more for the convenience of the neighbourhood than from any run on the road; and his companions had not expected to be detained by any interest excited there; but in passing it they gave the history of the large room visibly added. It had been built many years ago for a ball-room, and while the neighbourhood had been in a particularly populous, dancing state, had been occasionally used as such: but such brilliant days had long passed away; and now the highest purpose for which it was ever wanted was to accommodate a whist club established among the gentlemen and half gentlemen of the place (p. 179).
The village has more than one inn, but its principal stopping place is nothing to boast about. Although it is only sixteen miles from London, it seems not to be located on a road that is directly connected to the city or, for that matter, is much used. The post-horses are the Regency equivalent of the village taxi. At some time in the past, the place was livelier than it now appears to be. There has been a visible downward demographic shift. Population has been lost, along with the leading and more prosperous social luminaries. At present the most notable social activity at the Crown is card-playing among the mixed bag of gentlemen and half gentlemen. With that unique English genius for ever-finer distinctions of class and status, Jane Austen leaves it to the reader to define what a half gentleman might be.
Frank Churchill wants to dance and good-naturedly challenges Emma to “ ‘revive the good old days of the room.’ ” After all, she is the presiding and authorizing female center of social activity. Frank’s companions point out to him “the want of proper families in the place, and ... that none beyond the place and its immediate environs could be tempted to attend.” He remains unpersuaded and argues that the well-kept houses that he sees around him could surely
furnish numbers enough for such a meeting; and even when particulars were given and families described, he was still unwilling to admit that the inconvenience of such a mixture would be any thing, or that there would be the smallest difficulty in every body’s returning into their proper place the next morning (p. 180).
The ratio of genteel or respectable families per acre has gone downhill. We are not told anything about the causes or meanings of this change. But Emma observes to herself that Frank seems to have inherited the indiscriminate sociability of his father. And she silently huffs and puffs that Frank’s “indifference to a confusion of rank bordered too much on inelegance of mind. He could be no judge ... of the evil he was holding cheap” (p. 180). It is as if the relation between peerless Emma and the illegitimate, fatherless and motherless, and effectively anonymous Harriet Smith portends nothing confused or inelegant. The stilted awkwardness of Emma’s formulations suggests their anachronistic inappropriateness, as she will duly learn.
But there are also counter-indications to this apprehension of downwardness. When John Knightley comes down to Hartfield to leave his two oldest boys with their grandfather and aunt for a holiday visit of “some weeks” in the spring (p. 261), their arrival coincides with a welcoming dinner for the Eltons that Emma feels obliged to hold. John Knightley represents in some degree a departure in social sensibility. It is fair to say that he is in general unsociable, unlike his brother and even his father-in-law. He prefers the excluding and private domestic circle of his considerable and growing nuclear family. He is one of the extreme partisans of “home” in this novel and is never comfortable when separated from wife, children, and their dwelling in Brunswick Square. He can also be peevish and a considerable grouch; in particular, he has to control his irritable temper when he is confronted with the perseverated anxieties, phobias, and obsessions of Mr. Woodhouse, a duty at whose performance he is only moderately successful. Ironically, however, he resembles his father-in-law in his own easily disturbed equilibrium, his insecurity and anxiety when the restricted family circumstances that he has established for himself are broken into. At the dinner party, he charges Emma with the care of his boys and enjoins her to send them home if “ ‘you find them troublesome.’ ” He is of course needling their affectionate aunt in his annoyance at the supposed exponential intensification of her social life.
“Here am I come down for only one day, and you are engaged with a dinner-party! When did it happen before? or any thing like it? Your neighbourhood is increasing, and you mix more with it ... every letter to Isabella [has] brought an account of fresh gaieties” (p. 280).
This semi-facetious account is in large measure hyperbole, and Emma fires back a sensible and convincing confutation. John Knightley has also, however, atypically expressed himself with some ambiguity when he remarks that “your neighbourhood is increasing.” He may simply imply that Emma’s rate of socializing has grown; but he may also mean that Highbury is also growing, or even that the range of those admitted into the precincts of the upper social circles has been enlarged. In any case, it is useful to recall Emma’s remark that “there was no denying that those brothers had penetration” (p. 121), meaning that their observations as a rule have some non-incidental point. Here the point suggests that the representation of Highbury’s situation as far as demographic circumstances and socio-economic changes are concerned is a mixed and uncertain picture, with indications and pointers going in more than one direction.
Such complexities and equivocalities are borne out in the life histories of most of the narrative’s significant characters. Mr. Weston is one of the sources for such impacted significations. A native of Highbury, he comes from a respectable family that for several generations “had been rising into gentility and property.” Well-educated, he was at the same time disinclined as a young man to enter into the “more homely pursuits” of profession or trade that engaged his brothers. He took advantage of the urgencies brought on by England’s response to the French Revolution and joined the county militia, which had been activated. The “chances of ... military life” had led Captain Weston to meeting Miss Churchill, “of a great Yorkshire family.” She fell in love with him, and they married. Her brother and his wife, however, were offended, indeed mortified, by the lowness of her choice, and “they threw her off with due decorum.” Though the young couple were in love, the marriage proved to be “an unsuitable connection, and did not produce much happiness.” Mrs. Weston, willful, resolute, and independent enough to defy her family’s interdictions, could not “refrain from unreasonable regrets at... [their] unreasonable anger.” She missed the opulence of the family estate, and although she never “ceased to love her husband ... she wanted to be at once the wife of Captain Weston and Miss Churchill of Enscombe.” After three years of living “beyond their income,” she died, leaving Mr. Weston a rather poorer man than before along with a young son. Her death from “a lingering illness” and the little boy’s half-deserted existence had led the for
bidding brother and sister-in-law to soften. Childless themselves, they offered to take over entirely the rearing of the boy. Mr. Weston, having given up his son to these resources of wealth and opportunity, now “had only his own comfort to seek and his own situation to improve as he could.”
He resigned from the militia and went into trade with his brothers in London. He did not work with exceptional ardor at his business and divided his time between employment in the city and “a small house in Highbury” where he enjoyed his leisure hours. After eighteen or twenty years of this not very strenuous existence, he discovered that he had “realized an easy competence”—he was a beneficiary, like many others in the middling ranks at the time, of an economy that prospered in wartime, and that was simultaneously expanding at an unheard-of rate. He had achieved independence. He could now purchase “a little estate adjoining Highbury, which he had always longed for.” He was free to marry without hindrance or second thoughts a woman “as portionless even as Miss Taylor,” a gentlewoman whose resources were so reduced that she had had to hire herself out as a governess. And he was now able “to live according to the wishes of his own friendly and social disposition” (p. 13).
For Weston the phases of the life cycle and the social cycle have happily coincided. In his mid-forties, he “had made his fortune, bought his house, and obtained his wife”—in that order. He was “beginning a new period of existence with every probability of greater happiness” (p. 13). On this occasion he was aware that “he had only himself to please in his choice.” Even more, in the person of Miss Taylor he had “the pleasantest proof of its being a great deal better to choose than to be chosen, to excite gratitude than to feel it” (p. 14). His trajectory in life is clearly meant to be paradigmatic of major tendencies of social change in the densely contextualized world of this novel. It is characterized by moderate but genuine mobility upward, and to a lesser degree by obstacles and detours along that route. Weston has augmented his freedom by means of the working of a growing commercial and market economy. In terms of social class he has achieved freedom from trade through his successful application to trade.