by Jane Austen
One further figuration of this submatrix of minor discrepancies and inconsistencies in Emma is salient to this line of analysis and explanation. Chapter VIII of the third volume begins immediately after the fiasco of Box Hill and Knightley’s severe reproof of Emma for her rude and brutal behavior to Miss Bates. Emma is miserable, and she regards a “whole evening of backgammon with her father” as a pleasant relief from her abhorrent recollections of a “completely misspent” day. Her penitence has begun, and she quickly resolves to call on Miss Bates in a contrite, friendly, and “equal” spirit. Next morning she enters into a scene of confusion and disarray. Jane “looking extremely ill” is “escaping” along with her aunt into the next room. Miss Bates reenters and, struggling both to keep back her tears and maintain her “happy” face to the world, explains that Jane, who has been writing letters and crying all morning, has decided to accept at once the offered employment as governess—she has been putting off such a resolution for some time.
“One cannot wonder.... It is a great change; and though she is amazingly fortunate—... do not think us ungrateful, Miss Woodhouse, for such surprising good fortune ... but, poor dear soul; if you were to see what a headache she has. When one is in great pain, you know one cannot feel any blessing quite as it may deserve. She is as low as possible. To look at her, nobody would think how delightful and happy she is to have secured such a situation” (pp. 343-344) .
Miss Bates seems unconsciously to be trying to literalize the traditional Christian notion of the grace of affliction—and is having a hard time of it. It was all decided at the Eltons ’, to which the Bateses were conveyed after leaving Box Hill. Mrs. Elton has naturally been the activating agent of the offer and has been pressing Jane to accept the situation at Mrs. Smallridge’s—“ ‘only four miles from Maple Grove’ ”to have “ ‘ the charge of her three little girls.’ ” Mrs. Elton “ ‘ would not take a denial ... would not let Jane say ‘ No.’ ” She had been harrying Jane about it for several days, as “indefatigable” good friends do. Unknown to Mrs. Elton, Miss Bates, or Emma, Jane has had enough of Frank’s offensive and intolerable teasing, flirtatiousness, and semi-hysterical carrying-on and has decided that self-immolation is preferable to patient, protracted torture. While the Bateses were at the Eltons’ something else occurred.
“Mr. Elton was called out of the room before tea, old John Abdy’s son wanted to speak with him. Poor old John, I have a great regard for him; he was clerk to my poor father twenty-seven years; and now, poor old man, he is bed-ridden, and very poorly with the rheumatic gout in his joints—I must go and see him to-day; and so will Jane, I am sure, if she gets out at all. And poor John’s son came to talk to Mr. Elton about relief from the parish: he is very well to do himself, you know, being head man at the Crown, ostler, and every thing of that sort, but still he cannot keep his father without some help...” (p. 347).
In the course of this reported interview or petition, the younger Abdy informs Elton that Frank Churchill has been summoned back to Richmond (to be with his ailing aunt) with some urgency and that he has left promptly.
Emma has been only half-listening to this latter part of Miss Bates’ monologue:
There was nothing in all this either to astonish or interest, and it caught Emma’s attention only as it united with the subject which already engaged her mind. The contrast between Mrs. Churchill’s importance in the world, and Jane Fairfax’s struck her; one was every thing; the other nothing—and she sat musing on the difference of woman’s destiny (p. 348).
The chapter concludes after two further paragraphs. It is a marvel of compactness, and everyone in it seems to be talking past everyone else. Miss Bates readily accepts Emma’s contrition and good-will as if it were another confirming blow dealt to her by fate itself. Emma herself, in her subdued mood, listens at first with sympathy, then with diminishing attention, and finally “quite unconscious on what her eyes were fixed” (p. 348). Mrs. Churchill, tyrannical, arbitrary, capricious, was before she married “ ‘nobody ... barely the daughter of a gentleman; but ever since her being turned into a Churchill, she has out-Churchill’d them all in high and mighty claims: but in herself, I assure you, she is an upstart’ ”(p. 278) . Sufficient wealth will inevitably transform a Nobody into “everything,” while the Jane Fairfaxes, whom we all know, will remain to be reminded that nothing will come of “nothing.”
Yet if Jane Fairfax is nothing, then what is old John Abdy, or even his son? Old John was parish clerk, employed under Mr. Bates for more than a quarter of a century. He has been turned out in his old age and is now infirm and helpless. Miss Bates will visit him, but in her depleted state she surely has little except good wishes to give. His son is ostler at the Crown, itself slightly run-down, on a relatively unfrequented road, keeping only “a couple of pair of post-horses.” If Miss Bates has it right, “ ‘he is also head man ... and everything of that sort,’ ”which implies that he is a man of all work, which is what one might expect at an “inconsiderable house.” Yet Miss Bates runs on in her hyperbolic and virtually pathological cheerfulness to assert that “ ‘he is very well to do himself.’ ” So well to do that he has come to request relief from the parish because he cannot support his aged father on what he eams.xix If Jane Fairfax is nothing, then what is he, let alone his aged father? It puts one in mind of the notorious question featured in the arithmetic of political economy: What is a man worth? Is he worth more or less than nothing?
Emma recurs to her critical reflections shortly thereafter, when she has learned, to her utter surprise, about the secret engagement of Frank and Jane. She hears the news, to be sure, from the generous-hearted Mrs. Weston, who is always willing to take the extra step and make allowances and exceptions. She continues to affirm Jane’s
“steadiness of character and good judgment ... in spite of this one great deviation from the strict rule of right. And how much may be said in her situation for even that error!”
“Much indeed!” cried Emma feelingly. “If a woman can ever be excused for thinking only of herself, it is in a situation like Jane Fairfax’s.—Of such, one may almost say, that ‘the world is not theirs, nor the world’s law’ ” (p. 363).
Jane Austen among all our novelists is unsurpassed in pursuing arguments to logically consequent ends. It is part of her genius that such pressure often leads to comically absurd conclusions. But this is not such an instance. For we as readers are prompted by thematic continuities and densities, by proximity of occurrence within an unfolding narrative, and by analogical reasoning—all of these being cognitive habits by whose means Jane Austen herself has been tutoring us to read and reflect closely and coherently. Can such a claim as Emma is asserting here be extended to old John Abdy and his son? The answer is self-evident. And if a counterclaim of defense is raised that there are categorical distinctions to be maintained between the personal and the social and political, we must recall that it is just such conventional and convenient distinctions that Jane Austen often takes pleasure in overriding, that she persistently observes both the connections and disjunctions between the personal and the political or cultural, and that in precisely such asymmetrical and unpredictable appositions does she find the moral energies that justify the claims of both.xx
Still, if the determinations, judgments, and measurements of value put forward by political arithmetic remain outside the cultural and historical spectrum of terms available to Jane Austen—that is to say, outside the conceptual categories that she found enabling to her decisive narrative imagination—she is certainly not very far removed from bringing them into saliency and bearing. In any case, and to return to the earlier scene, the narrator and Emma are off somewhere musing about the contrasts in “woman’s destiny.” Miss Bates brings Emma back to focused awareness by observing that she is staring at Jane’s beloved pianoforte.
“Ay, I see what you are thinking of, the piano-forte. What is to become of that? Very true. Poor dear Jane was talking of it just now. ‘You must go,’ said
she. ‘You and I must part. You will have no business here. Let it stay, however,’ said she” (p. 348).
Emma talks to herself; Jane talks to her pianoforte. It comes as no alarming surprise that Jane Austen was closely percipient of—or at least attuned to—the characteristic phases of the growth of mind in the early nineteenth century. On the one hand, an expansion and deepening of self-consciousness through interior reflection and silent speech; on the other, an expansion and deepening of the self in its life of feeling through the expressive agencies of music and art.xxi On the whole, both of these amount to a growing apprehension that in order to make actual the grand priority of self-realization and development, individual persons, the outward and material manifestations of those spiritual selves, would have to contend forcefully against the impersonal might of circumstances.
Emma is deeply implicated in these antagonistic tendencies of impulse and attitude. Although, like her father, she is averse to change in both her personal life and in society at large, she is also vexed and distressed by the built-in inertia and confinements of the world that she at the same time dominates. After the disastrous outcome of her flight-to-the-moon scenario involving Elton and Harriet, Emma turns, for the first time in the narrative, to confront herself adversarially. Her own embarrassment and repugnance at Elton’s heated, tipsy advances are compounded in her compelled admission that she had been “grossly mistaken and misjudging in all her ideas on one subject” (p. 126). These sobering assessments are not as acute, however, as the shame she feels at having actively misled Harriet and caused her grief. She promises herself to be in the future “humble and discreet” and confirms her resolve to “[repress] imagination all the rest of her life.” The unlikelihood of her adhering to that vow is underscored by how rapidly she bypasses any reflection on serious wrongdoing or on the damage possibly inflicted on Harriet, who, Emma breezily estimates, will recover her “composure” by the time Elton returns from Bath. As for Elton himself, she has no compassion to spare, except in one sense: “Their being fixed, so absolutely fixed, in the same place, was bad for each, for all three. Not one of them had the power of removal, or of effecting any material change of society. They must encounter each other, and make the best of it” (p. 127). Although the principal meaning of this passage is evident enough—a country village has its disadvantages with which one must put up—its generalizing extension is equally plain. The pleasant familiarity of such a world has as its concomitant, in addition to its own permanence, the absolute fixity of those who are consigned or sentenced to live in it. They lack the resources to move away—let alone light out for the Territory—in the literal sense of relocation. Moreover, there is no possibility of their behavior effecting “any material change of society.” In this last phrase one detects impaction of meaning and a soliciting of interpretation. Such a world is not merely stable; it may also be apparently static, frozen, paralyzed—at least when it is regarded from a particular point of view.xxii
It is notable that Jane Austen, in common with the other great novelists of the nineteenth century, resists ascribing certainty and inevitability to the narrativized social and historical world of her novels. That world, despite its textual inhabitation of the unalterable past tense, is also comparatively open and unpredictable—the future before it is uncertain, occluded, and contingent. The characters in it make choices that are “real” in the sense that they are neither predetermined, inescapable, nor uniformly irrevocable. The obverse can also be true. Hence no sooner does Emma begin, quite validly, to complain about absolute fixity than the narrator also begins to undermine not merely the “absolutely” but the “fixed” as well. The great novelists had the capacity of representing contemporary life as being simultaneously comparatively stable and yet charged with the tension and threat of the eruption of immanent antagonistic forces. These unresolved antagonisms find partial expression in the less-than-coherent utterances, attitudes, and assertions of principle, along with their contraventions, that the characters in Emma—most notably Emma herself—meaningfully but unconsciously dramatize.
Once Emma has made this admission of being limited and “fixed” to herself, she is prepared to try out the attitude it leads to. Mrs. Weston informs her that Frank Churchill has had to postpone his maiden trip to Highbury. Emma in turn announces this news to Knightley, and “proceed[s] to say a good deal more than she [feels] of the advantage of such an addition to their confined society in Surrey” (p. 130). Her attitude toward change is so compromised that two pages after her lamentation about their being absolutely fixed she has to pump herself up to express pleasure at the idea of a newcomer to their world. Yet even Mr. Woodhouse, who embodies the principle of stasis and immobility, is able, when the Bateses are being discussed, of expressing himself to the effect that “ ‘It is a great pity that their circumstances should be so confined’ ”(p. 155). And Mrs. Weston comments on Jane’s accepting of the Eltons’ invitation along the same line:
“We cannot suppose that she has any great enjoyment at the Vicarage, my dear Emma—but it is better than being always at home. Her aunt is a good creature; but, as a constant companion, must be very tiresome. We must consider what Miss Fairfax quits, before we condemn her taste for what she goes to” (p. 256).
And when Emma at Donwell Abbey suddenly runs into Jane, she observes “a look of escape” in her expression (p. 329). Jane is indeed narratively conceived of as one of the candidates for absolute fixity, and her situation is compared not merely to that of a nun or a slave but to that of a prisoner as well.
Frank Churchill, whose path through life is marked by a progression toward increasing amplitude and latitude of choice, complains steadily about narrowness, tedium, and restriction. As for life at Enscombe, the considerable estate in Yorkshire, he tells Emma that “there was very little going on.” Mrs. Churchill’s alleged ill health and her general social indisposition result in their making “a point of visiting no fresh person.” Frank has wanted very much to travel, “to go abroad.” But Mrs. Churchill “would not hear of it.”xxiii She keeps him on a short leash, largely, we are led to conclude, for her own convenience. But Frank’s youthfulness is also expressed in impatience and impulsiveness. “ ‘Ah! that ball!—why did we wait for any thing?—why not seize the pleasure at once?—How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!’” (p. 233). When he drives off to London for a haircut, Emma primly comments to herself: “Vanity, extravagance, love of change, restlessness of temper, which must be doing something, good or bad” (p. 186). At Donwell Abbey, where Frank joins the group late, hot, and in ill humor, matters begin rapidly to come to a head. Frank again expresses his restless need to go abroad: “ ‘I ought to travel. I am tired of doing nothing. I want a change.... I am sick of England—and would leave it to-morrow, if I could’ ” (p. 331). This passage comes almost immediately after Emma’s (or the narrator’s) reflections on “English culture, English comfort,” and the juxtaposition itself renders the critical point.
But Emma herself can also feel the genuine need for something new. When the Westons know that Frank is finally coming to visit, Emma sincerely “rejoice [d] in their joy. It was a most delightful reanimation of exhausted spirits. The worn-out past was sunk in the freshness of what was coming” (p. 171). And Emma’s vivacity and energy require forms of expression. One such means is dancing—she loves to feel “the felicities of rapid motion” (p. 222). She may be confined, but she is not sedentary. As spring ripens into summer, the “state of schemes, and hopes, and connivance” continue to move at Hartfield—that is to say they continue to germinate and bubble in Emma’s head. As to “Highbury, in general, it brought no material change” (p. 312). Emma’s aversion to innovation has not deterred her from introducing a “large modern circular table ... which none but Emma could have had power to place there and persuade her father to use, instead of the small sized Pembroke, on which two of his daily meals had, for forty years, been crowded” (p. 315). In the cause of middle-class
comfort Emma has brought in a table at which there is no “natural” head. Comfort has trumped inconvenience, even though rank has been bypassed.xxiv Nevertheless, such narrative details serve to point toward the sub-textual conflict and ambivalence in which for most of the novel Emma is suspended.
One partial representation of this state of mind occurs when Emma accompanies Harriet to Ford’s, the village’s combined drapery shop and haberdashery. While Harriet is “hanging over muslins” and being indecisive
Emma went to the door for amusement. Much could not be hoped from the traffic of even the busiest part of Highbury; —Mr. Perry walking hastily by; Mr. William Cox letting himself in at the office door; Mr. Cole’s carriage-horses returning from exercise; or a stray letter-boy on an obstinate mule, were the liveliest objects she could presume to expect; and when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer (p. 210).
It is one of Jane Austen’s incomparable passages. In it Emma is represented in close alignment with her creator—both of them being simultaneously at this juncture “imaginists.” Emma is only occasionally bored; the workings of her own mind are frequently a source of amusement to her. The world of Highbury is pretty “fixed” when it comes to action or novelty. The “liveliest objects” Emma can imagine are fragments of ordinary movement; even these are more endowed with vitality than what she does actually see. She imagines an ordinary social scene, and then she perceives another one. The narrator is imagining Emma doing both—and both (along with the counterpart activity of the narrator herself) are represented on the level of the narrative as epistemologically equivalent. On this plane of metafictional discourse there is neither difference nor distinction between perception and imagination. The narrator, to be sure, is creatively in charge of both processes. Emma, who can complain about being “absolutely fixed,” is both amused and content with what she has imagined and what she perceives. She herself, “still to stand,” becomes for the moment fixed as well. Yet her mind is “lively,” active, self-sustaining, at ease with itself. It sees nothing but makes something out of it—“seeing nothing” itself becomes the source of mental activity and pleasure. And nothing, including everything in the perceived world, answers—answers back, responds. At this moment, Emma, like her creator, is at home in the world. Their minds and the perceived/imagined universe are represented as naturally yet miraculously fitting together.