by Jane Austen
As they walk down the lane, Mr. Elton appears, and Emma realizes that her “stability in good thoughts” is about to vanish. But, she resiliently continues, “ ‘If we feel for the wretched, enough to do all we can for them, the rest is empty sympathy, only distressing to ourselves’ ” (pp. 82-83). And she at once resumes her imaginings and matchmaking. In such a passage, Jane Austen directs attention to the incompatibilities and cross-purposes, registered in personal attitudes and responsiveness, that cannot in this historical world be undone. Emma is self-consciously cognizant of the constraints that bind them all, and the narrator is a touch more aware of dissonances and overtones than Emma. These poor are of course among the Nobodies. They remain nameless and are swallowed up in the conventional abstractions of “sickness and poverty.” There is no hint of an imagination of possible social improvement, much less of structural change. It is Jane Austen and not Emma who puts us in the way of inferring such defects and fallings short.
Emma also takes brief notice of those who are external to the context of English society altogether. These are the gypsies, nomadic people who are both homeless and seek no home. They harass and terrify Harriet with their importunate begging, and Frank Churchill’s fortunate appearance turns “the terror” they had been creating in Harriet into “their own portion.” He half-carries the fainting Harriet to Hartfield, where she collapses; and he entrusts Emma to bring “notice of there being such a set of people in the neighbourhood to Mr. Knightley” (p. 303). These “trampers” may reduce Harriet to fear and trembling, but they are no more than a nuisance to individual persons. They represent nothing really dangerous, since they are an alien and external agency and signify no endogenous threat, precisely because they are so utterly exterior. The local magistrate will shoo them off. One of the better-known myths about gypsies was that they inveterately steal babies. Harriet Smith (Smith being the equivalent of X) does not know who her parents are and might be, for all she knows, a changeling as well as a foundling. Perhaps to her terrorized state of mind they were attempting to steal her back!xiv
There is nothing to do about the gypsies but move them on. They are there, inexplicably, outside the boundaries of full social intelligibility. But there are other anomalies as well. In Emma, Jane Austen goes to considerable lengths to name and particularize both outlying members of the respectable Highbury community and the servants who are omnipresent throughout and make comfortable life possible for their masters and mistresses. Among others, we learn about Mr. Perry and Mr. Coxe, whose son and daughter have mysteriously dropped the “e” from the spelling of their surname. We also hear of Mrs. Wallis, who runs the village bakery and who is supposed to be uncivil, and about James the coachman as well as his daughter, and Hannah and Patty and Mrs. Hodges, Knightley’s housekeeper, who frets over apple tart. These are all figures imagined in an effort to flesh out the representation (and our impression) of an actual functioning community, of a textured social world, including specified and individuated minor and subminor characters (as Dickens would shortly do). But this very effort paradoxically serves to bring into sudden relief instances in which the opposite occurs. When Frank Churchill brings Harriet to Hartfield, she is collapsing and leaning on his arm. Emma is outdoors and is surprised “when the great iron sweep-gate opened, and two persons entered” (p. 302). The great iron sweep-gate did not open by itself. Somebody pushed it open and pulled it to. This is a genuine reification in the sense that the servant who opens the gate has become invisible and been absorbed in the gate itself: The gate has been correspondingly endowed with human will and agency. Frank’s chance meeting with Harriet is represented in a similar mode. He has been on his way out of the village, but the “pleasantness of the morning had induced him to walk forward, and leave his horses to meet him by another road, a mile or two beyond Highbury” (p. 303). What has happened, to be sure, is that Frank has left his horse with the mounted servant who has accompanied him and has agreed to meet up with the servant and the horses again later on. But the servant’s identity, his human being, has been eclipsed; he has been erased and banished from the scene and from narrative consciousness, and the horses, intelligent creatures that they are, will no doubt find their way to the appointed meeting all by themselves. xv
Before we jump all over Jane Austen for having committed a false consciousness, we might reflect that such lapses are connected with the endeavor she is making to be more inclusive. She is, I believe, intuitively aware that the course of her own development (as well as that of the novel) requires the progressive and individualized incorporation of the Nobodies and Nothings who largely make up our and her world. These Nobodies include the Eltons and Mrs. Churchill before she was married; they embrace Weston and Frank Churchill as soon as he is compared to Knightley; they explicitly account for everyone in this novel except for the Knightleys and the Woodhouses (and the far-away Yorkshire Churchills). These gentry and lower gentry and less distinguished middling families are the experiential base out of which Jane Austen’s imagination rose, which it neither abandoned nor affirmed uncritically. As she enhanced the social range and creative reach of her novelistic intelligence, she concomitantly opened herself to including the lapses, contradictions, illogicalities, and even inhumanity that were constituent elements of the social and cultural world that she lived in, and of the larger consciousness that she both expressed and worked successfully to alter.
Another realization of how Jane Austen’s impulse to be extensive, exact, and complex can lead her into small but perceptible lapses occurs as Emma arrives at the Coles’ dinner party.
She followed another carriage to Mr. Cole’s door; and was pleased to see that it was Mr. Knightley’s; for Mr. Knightley keeping no horses, having little spare money and a great deal of health, activity, and independence, was too apt, in Emma’s opinion, to get about as he could, and not use his carriage so often as became the owner of Donwell Abbey (p. 193).
It is a fine, compact little passage, which (as usual in Jane Austen) serves multiple purposes. It sets up the comic exchange between Emma and Knightley on how Emma can infallibly, and by simple inspection, discern whether a gentleman is living up to his rank.xvi Her absurdity and comic boastfulness, however, also include warm praise of Knightley’s unaffected naturalness of bearing. He responds by saying, either to Emma herself or to himself or to the air or even to the reader, “‘Nonsensical girl!’ ”—but the reply, the narrator assures us, was not at all in anger. He has learned long since to accept and even to bear with humor Emma’s willful self-assertion, her aggressive determination to be herself (which means principally to be on top and in command on all occasions) as part of her interest and charm, along with the nonsensicalities and even mischief that it entails.
Emma’s praise, however, is also part of the continued irony trained against her. For unbeknown to herself, Knightley has put his carriage in use in order to send it out again to pick up and deliver Miss Bates and Jane Fairfax, who have been invited along with “the less worthy females” to join the company after dinner. And it will also take them back. The ever-considerate Mrs. Weston has also thought of putting their family carriage to this service in view of Jane’s delicate health and the cold weather, but Knightley has forestalled her. In any case, Knightley does not choose to treat them as “less worthy females” or less worthy anything else. Emma, we know, cordially dislikes both Miss Bates and Jane, though each of them for different reasons, and her class-bound appraisal of Knightley’s appearance as being solely motivated by equally class-bound self-approval is at once shot down. Mrs. Weston has been cultivating her own “plans”—which consist of the scenario that Knightley is going to be smitten by Jane’s beauty, elegance, and finished accomplishments, and that this will leave the way clear for a “match” between Emma and her stepson, Frank Churchill. She observes, knowing Knightley as they all do, that it is likely “ ‘that it was for their accommodation the carriage was used at all. I do suspect he would not have had a pair of horses for himsel
f, and that it was only an excuse for assisting them’ ” (p. 202).
Emma covers her slight surprise by praising Knightley’s habitual “ ‘unostentatious kindness’ ” and noting that when she was ribbing him about the carriage and the gentleman he “ ‘said not a word that could betray’ ” (p. 202). Mrs. Weston then discloses to Emma her suspicion, which is also a wish that Knightley and Jane are going to get together. At which point, Emma explodes in alarm: “ ‘Mr. Knightley must not marry! ... I cannot at all consent to Mr. Knightley’s marrying.... I have never had such an idea, and I cannot adopt it now.’ ” On top of that, there is her secondary, defensive fantasy about her little nephew, Henry, Isabella and John Knightley’s oldest son, inheriting the estate—“ ‘I could not bear to have Henry supplanted’ ” (pp. 202-203). This wild idea, we will eventually learn, is part of Emma’s self-mystification, and she will part with it without pain.
Two reasons are given for Knightley’s “keeping no horses.” One is that he has “a great deal of health, activity and independence” and is apt “to get about as he could.” He prefers being on his feet and moving around freely.xvii He likes to mingle and also to go off spontaneously in unexpected directions. As the chief landowner and personage in the neighborhood, he chooses to be present and on the scene. He is direct, practical, prudent, and down to earth. The second reason is that he has “little spare money.” This detail, one supposes, is there to suggest to us the uneven, uncertain, and rapidly fluctuating character of the state of both national and regional economies: Some are rising and some are falling. Knightley is trying with success to hold his own at Donwell. He even feels constrained to keep no horses, not even for his carriage, if Mrs. Weston, when she says, “ ‘he would not have had a pair of horses for himself,’ ” agrees with Emma and means that he rented, borrowed, or otherwise procured two horses for the specific occasion. We know that the Crown Inn keeps “a couple of pair of post-horses” to be used “for the convenience of the neighbourhood.” There may be horses to rent at the other, lesser inns of the village; there may even be a village stables, but we are not told. What we do know is that people do get around, even the super-sedentary Mr. Woodhouse. He owns a carriage and horses, and we even know the name of his trusty coachman. John Knightley also has a carriage for his family, into which he invites Elton on their way to dinner and Mr. Weston’s good wine. The Westons have a carriage too. Mr. Weston also rides on horseback to London and back in one fatiguing day. Mr. Elton rides his horse to London to get Harriet’s portrait framed, and after his marriage he also commands a “new” carriage. Mr. Perry performs his medical rounds with the help of a horse; and his unrealized plan of “setting up his carriage,” conveyed as news in the letter secretly sent Frank, almost causes that worthy to blow the cover on his engagement to Jane (p. 313ff). Frank in his turn hires a chaise to get to London for a haircut and surreptitiously to buy a Broadwood for Jane; otherwise he travels back and forth between Richmond and Highbury or Donwell on horseback. Emma fancies seeing “Mr. Cole’s carriage horses returning from exercise” as she stands idly in the doorway at Ford’s—newly gained affluence requires a show. Only the women and Knightley and the anonymous Nobodies and the gypsies, who are called “trampers,” go on foot; and even the gypsies have horses to pull their caravans. Or so it seems, until Miss Bates, “passing near the window” of one of her two rooms, “descried Mr. Knightley on horseback not far off” (p. 219). After that, Knightley appears either on horseback or without specification of his means of transportation. But when they all go to Box Hill for an outdoor party, the narrator inclusively notes “the gentlemen on horseback” (p. 349). Unless they were all leasing from Avis, there seems to be something to explain.
What is this apparent rigmarole all about? In the first place we can remark that those commentators who have criticized Jane Austen for omitting the details of daily, material, and historical life have not read her novels with sufficient care. Those works are, on the contrary, dense with such notations. The exceptional economy and steady flow of her prose make it very easy to overlook what she is actually doing. Knightley is the leading gentleman and chief agricultural man of business in this miniature society. Why make such a point of depriving him of his own horses and ready cash and then apparently contradict it? For when we finally get to Donwell Abbey, we find no signs of economic distress or strain.
... its ample gardens stretching down to meadows washed by a stream, of which the Abbey, with all the old neglect of prospect, had scarcely a sight,—and its abundance of timber in rows and avenues, which neither fashion nor extravagance had rooted up. The house was larger than Hartfield, and totally unlike it, covering a good deal of ground, rambling and irregular, with many comfortable and one or two handsome rooms. It was just what it ought to be, and it looked what it was (p. 325).
In this representation of a portion of the civilized world in which appearance and reality seem as closely allied as they are ever likely to be, Mrs. Elton characteristically introduces contradictory impulses and discordant tendencies. Gotten up “in all the apparatus of her happiness,” she leads the way in the ritual ceremony of gathering strawberries.
“The best fruit in England—every body’s favourite—always wholesome.... Delightful to gather for one’s self—the only way of really enjoying them. Morning decidedly the best time—never tired.... delicious fruit—only too rich to be eaten much of—inferior to cherries—currants more refreshing—only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping—glaring sun—tired to death—could bear it no longer—must go and sit in the shade” (p. 326).
The rhythmic trajectory of ideas in this virtuoso passage moves from inflated expectations of pleasure to disappointment, frustration, distress, and complaint. And what happens immediately thereafter is similar, or analogous, but in reverse. Mrs. Elton has just received word of an available “situation” for Jane. She is “in raptures.”
Delightful, charming, superior, first circles, spheres, lines, ranks, every thing: and Mrs. Elton was wild to have the offer closed with immediately. On her side, all was warmth, energy, and triumph (p. 326).
Mrs. Elton’s ecstatic expressiveness might be right out of Songs of Experience, as she exults in her power to exploit the misery and pain of another human creature and finds her happiness in this form of antagonistic cooperation.
The morning is hot and still, and the party scatters and disperses itself out of the gardens and
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 led to nothing; nothing but a view at the end ... which seemed intended ... to give the appearance of an approach to the house, which never had been there ... it was in itself a charming walk, and the view which closed it extremely pretty. The considerable slope, 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, favourably placed and sheltered, rose the Abbey-Mill Farm, with meadows in front, and the river making a close and handsome curve around it.
It was a sweet view—sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive (p. 327).
And the Abbey-Mill Farm itself is viewed, “with all its appendages of prosperity and beauty, its rich pastures, spreading flocks, orchard in blossom, and light column of smoke ascending” (p. 328) .
Throughout this scene, and through its shifting field of view, we are solicited to perceive the harmonious elements in a complex, irregular conceptual and material group of structures—culture and comfort resonate and consort equably together.xviii Donwell Abbey itself remains true to its historical identity—its unmodern yet becoming siting, “low and sheltered,” its unplanned and rather hap-hazard development through time—its avenue of limes and pleasure grounds leading to “nothing,”
and an “approach to the house, which never had been there.” Knightley is both a “preserver” and an “improver.” The improvements are clearly focused on what has been done to improve the use of the land—including its appearance. The owner has taken advantage of recent advances in science and agricultural technology: with meadows going down to the water and rich pastures and the river coming around and through the estate, there has had to be considerable investment in ditching and drainage to control the degree of moisture in the soil and to maintain its level. Those “spreading flocks” whose wool commands top prices must come from one or another of the newly developed and much improved breeds that were being created at this time—breeds whose names, taken from the British locations where they were said to be first developed, still exist today. And the same holds true for the steady increase of seasonal yields in fruits and vegetables (although fruit trees are not in bloom when strawberries are ripe).
But all these traces and suggestions of how such diversities of interests and activities are integrated into the sustaining life of an actual, imagined community are by those very tokens connected as well to such dissonances as are typically embodied in Mrs. Elton’s behavior and that have, in the first place, also prompted the narrator and Emma to “note” that Knightley keeps no horses and is strapped for cash. In a general cultural situation whose manifest properties are experienced, at different moments, as pulling one’s judgment in divergent and contraposed directions, it is not a surprise to find that tendencies of change and resistances to change, of both expansion and dislocation, are registered as, in, and through conceptual lapses or inconsistencies in an otherwise exquisitely coherent text. Our female Homer may occasionally nod, but what she is in her advanced modern way undertaking to create is an imagined world in which there are several orders, grades, and categories of change, both for good and for ill, and several equally diverse and equivocal kinds of stability or permanence.