by Jane Austen
But the forces of change are as relentless in their urgings as the countervailing impulses that gravitate toward stability and solidity. And this complication bears upon Emma’s personal destiny as well as on the social world represented in Emma with such deftness and economy. How is Jane Austen going to get Emma to move off the dime on which she pirouettes while going nowhere?
III
Emma is averse to change; she vows never to marry; she cannot envision leaving her father and their home; she is obsessed with reveries of matchmaking, and projects imaginary romantic engagements and marital entanglements, for others, among the people she knows and doesn’t know (Mr. Dixon, for example). She largely ignores, avoids, and bypasses questions of sex; she explicitly rejects the idea of her having babies, and her idea of her own future is vaguely specified.
At the same time she wants to be “first” in the eyes of an admiring world, particularly of the men in it. Yet she blinds herself to Elton’s patent sexual designs on her until it is too late for her to recover anything. She embarks upon a semi-serious flirtation with Frank Churchill and sustains it far beyond the point where it yields her pleasure, and almost, indeed, to the very end. Her management of this flirtation is such that she keeps Frank always at arms’ length. Moreover, when Frank is on the verge of confessing to her about his engagement to Jane (believing that Emma, with her famous powers of penetration, has seen through their pretense) she prepares herself to withstand a proposal to herself (p. 262) . How she behaves in the Frank-Jane-Emma triangle is the unbecoming inversion of her even more unseemly procedures in the Elton-Emma-Harriet confusion.
At the Coles’ dinner-party, when Mrs. Weston reveals to Emma her “discovery” that Knightley is very attracted to Jane, Emma goes into a protracted flap of consternation (I have cited part of this aria-like flurry earlier):
“How could you think of such a thing? ... Mr. Knightley must not marry!—You would not have little Henry cut out from Donwell? ... I cannot at all consent to Mr. Knightley’s marrying.... Mr. Knightley marry! No, I have never had such an idea, and I cannot adopt it now ... every feeling revolts. For his own sake, I would not have him do so mad a thing....
But Mr. Knightley does not want to marry. I am sure he has not the least idea of it. Do not put it into his head. Why should he marry? He is as happy as possible by himself.... He has no occasion to marry, either to fill up his time or his heart ” (pp. 202-203).
A better defense by denial might be difficult to locate. And shortly thereafter when Frank and Jane make music together, when Emma hears “the sweet sounds of the united voices,” Emma can only think of babies, of “a most mortifying change” in which little Henry would be ejected as “the heir of Donwell” (p. 206). Frank and Jane are expressing themselves erotically before her, but Emma, deaf and blind to what is obvious, displaces her response onto the unacceptable, abhorrent fantasy of Knightley and Jane producing at least one male baby while she continues to repudiate, as far as she herself is concerned, any personal connection with such affairs.
In fact, Emma seems at least on one occasion not to be on the easiest terms with her body. When the heated discussion about where to hold a ball gets underway, Mr. Woodhouse has a panic about drafts, and Emma is concerned with adequate space in which to dance. “ ‘It would be dreadful to be standing so close. Nothing can be farther from pleasure than to be dancing in a crowd—and a crowd in a little room’ ” (p. 224). Emma loves to dance, and Mrs. Weston, “capital in her country-dances,” is seated, and a waltz is beginning. Frank Churchill takes Emma’s hand “and [leads] her up to the top” (p. 207); the dance itself, however, seems less a combination of the two styles than a British domestication of the still notorious waltz. It is in any case not to be confused with the sexual arousal and turmoil reportedly induced by the waltz and represented as such by Goethe, in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), by Byron in The Waltz: An Apostrophic Hymn (1813), and in the testimony of numberless others.
Similarly Emma’s response to Harriet is also in part deflected. She is at first attracted to Harriet “on account of her beauty.” Harriet’s lovely good looks “happened to be of a sort which Emma particularly admired. She was short, plump, and fair, with a fine bloom, blue eyes, light hair, regular features, and a look of great sweetness.” And Emma spends the evening “admiring those soft blue eyes” (p. 20). In recent years a number of feminist and gay commentators have taken such remarks (along with others) to suggest a lesbian interest on the part of Emma and Jane Austen. Whatever the merit of this contention (and I believe that there is quite a bit of merit to it), it seems to me that Emma’s warm response to Harriet is also an expression of her suspended state of affective development and of her narcissism.xxv In being physically attracted to Harriet, she is in effect also admiring and arousing herself. For Harriet throughout the novel functions as Emma’s sexual stand-in. Her imaginings juxtapose Harriet sexually with the available but, for her, socially ineligible men in the novel—EIton, Frank, Knightley—while Harriet’s one real opportunity, Robert Martin, is fiercely embargoed by Emma herself.
When Frank has to leave Highbury to attend to the caprices of his sick aunt, Emma reflects that Frank has “almost told her that he loved her” and that this persuasion, plus everything else,
made her think that she must be a little in love with him, in spite of every previous determination against it. “I certainly must,” said she. “This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of every thing being dull and insipid about the house!—I must be in love” (pp. 235-236).
Knightley’s remark early on that Emma has never been in love was closer to home than even he might have reckoned. Emma feels let down after two exciting weeks, and she is also for the moment bored and at loose ends. That she mistakes boredom and momentary tedium for being in love suggests to us where she is. Her imagination of being in love at this moment intimates some negative inner state, some condition that compounds loss, frustration, and disappointment. It does not propose the ardent desire and yearning for the object, for the presence of another, that we ordinarily associate with romantic love. That desire and longing Emma tends to regard as “mania,” which is how she describes Harriet’s infatuation with Elton (p. 304) .
When Frank rescues Harriet from the gypsies, Emma happily succumbs to her fantasy-work again. She feels “on fire with speculation and foresight!—especially with such a ground-work of anticipation as her mind had already made.” In her heightened state, she thinks of what she is doing as analogous to the activities of “a linguist... a grammarian ... even a mathematician” (p. 303). These occupations have in common a concern with language, with codes and encryptions, with the interpretation of symbols, and with formulae that conjure up other worlds. She thinks of herself as “an imaginist,” and this arresting coinage suggests her shadow or secondary identity as a crypto- or pseudo-novelist, a proto-novelist, or novelist manqué. But she is also a constructivist and fantasticator—she simply makes things up, but considers such fabrications on her part as clever and penetrating interpretations. xxvi When it comes to matters of romance and adventure, her readings, despite her cleverness, are almost always wrong. Some unacknowledged source in her, some embedded contrariety of wishes, feelings, desires, and ideas, distorts her perceptions and judgments, the faculties of intelligence on which she sets particularly high store. This unresolved or unintegrated mental state impels her to perceive falsely what isn’t there (invention in this context is a failure of imagination) and to further deny or misperceive what is staring her in the face. The upshot is that she repeatedly substitutes unmoored fantasy for imaginative inference or genuine interpretation.
Emma had determined quite early that she was not in love with Frank Churchill. After he departs from Highbury, “she could not admit herself to be unhappy.” And although she continues to day-dream about herself and Frank,
the conclusion of every imaginary declaration on his side
was that she refused him ... “I do not find myself making any use of the word sacrifice.... In not one of all my clever replies, my delicate negatives, is there any allusion to making a sacrifice. I do suspect that he is not really necessary to my happiness. So much the better. I certainly will not persuade myself to feel more than I do” (pp. 237-238).
Admirable to a fault. And yet she continues to flirt with Frank long after she has come to this conclusion. She does so partly out of tedium—or the lack of anything more purposeful for her to do—partly out of mischievous high spirits, and partly, I suspect, out of her rivalrous dislike for Jane Fairfax. She continues to do so right up to the breaking point, which occurs at Box Hill.
The excursion begins and ends badly. Out of doors, the party disperses and never gets back together in either physical or social senses. There is no concord but only separateness and estrangement among the members of the outing. Even Frank is “silent ... stupid ... and dull,” at least in Emma’s eyes. Eventually he becomes talkative by turning to Emma and flirting with her intensely, openly, “and excessively.” Although to Emma this now “meant nothing,” she nonetheless responds in kind. At the same time, she is aware of a counter-tendency in herself. “Not that Emma was gay and thoughtless from any real felicity; it was rather because she felt less happy than she had expected. She laughed because she was disappointed” (p. 334). They exchange sallies of wit, and Emma comments that Frank is currently in “command” of his temper, although he had not been the day before at Donwell Abbey, where his behavior had “ ‘broken bounds.’ ” He then turns to the sulky and silent gathering, and “with lively impudence” tries to get them talking; he announces that Emma, as the presiding presence, “ ‘desires to know what you are all thinking of.’ ” Among the mixed replies is Knightley’s query whether Emma is really sure that she wants to know this. Emma at once answers, laughingly, of course not: “ ‘It is the very last thing I would stand the brunt of just now. Let me hear any thing rather than what you are all thinking of’ ” (p. 335).
Mrs. Elton is incoherently affronted, as are some others, so Frank changes his tack and proclaims that Emma wants instead to hear from each of them one “very clever” thing, or two “things moderately clever,” or “‘three things very dull indeed.’ ” Miss Bates, with her eternal humility and good humor, observes that this is just right for her, for as soon as she opens her mouth three dull things will surely pop out. “Emma could not resist. ‘Ah! ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me—but you will be limited as to number,—only three at once’ ” (p. 336). Miss Bates does not at first get it, but she does a double take, and is clearly hurt, and says to Knightley that she must really “ ‘make myself very disagreeable, or she would not have said such a thing to an old friend’ ” (p. 336). Emma has been teasing Frank about losing his “self-command,” but it is she who cannot control herself and lets herself go in order to turn a cruel piece of wit, in order not to pass up a one-liner.xxvii It was Emma who said that she did not want to hear what people were thinking, but it is she who gives uncensored expression to her private and hypercritical opinion of Miss Bates. Instead of talking to herself as she customarily does, Emma has turned off that inner interlocutor, and out has come frigid wit and withering resentment and aggression. Catastrophe.
The party continues to fall apart. Mr. Weston makes a well-meaning ass of himself, Mrs. Elton carries on as usual, and Frank goes on in his deplorable way. (At this point, Jane silently decides to pack it in and go for martyrdom as a governess.) The party breaks up as raggedly as it began. As Emma is waiting for her carriage, Knightley comes up to her and, seeing that they are alone, lets her have it. “ ‘How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation? Emma, I had not thought it possible’ ” (p. 340). Emma at first tries to “laugh it off,” but Knightley pursues her relentlessly and advances a full bill of particulars about Miss Bates and Emma that is both irresistible and crushing. For Miss Bates does represent a principle; in Emma’s mistreatment of her, the personal and the moral, the social and the cultural-political, are fused. Emma is for once utterly silenced.
She feels virtually undone. She weeps uncontrollably almost all the way home. She is “agitated, mortified, grieved” as never before. For the first time she really feels guilt about something she has done. She cannot shrug it off, nor will she feel better about it later on. “The truth of his [Knightley’s] representation there was no denying. She felt it at her heart. How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to Miss Bates!” (p. 341). What Knightley has said is true. How does she know that it is true? How do we? Because she feels it “at her heart.” It is a feeling cognition, a knowledge made possible and ratified by the emotions that accompany and are inseparable from it. It bears witness to its own truth by the depth of feeling to which it penetrates, which it disturbs and stirs. It is an axiom in philosophy being proved upon the pulses. Here Jane Austen joins the company of the great romantics, of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats.
From this moment onward the language that Emma uses about herself changes—the leading or operating words now become warmth, heart, feeling, open, contrition, and a cluster of related idioms. Knightley’s reprimand has been so sharp and fundamental, so drastically true, that Emma feels imperiled. It is almost as if he had threatened to expel Emma from her privileged place in his life and affections. Emma’s inner evolution and the movement of the narrative, the structural falling into place of narrative detail, now rapidly accelerate. It immediately follows that Mrs. Churchill expires and that the engagement of Frank and Jane is almost simultaneously revealed. Emma has been entirely taken in, and at first she feels general outrage. Mrs. Weston, who breaks the news to her, sympathetically reminds Emma that the two lovers must both have suffered greatly “ ‘under such a system of secresy and concealment.’ ” Emma is not quite forthcoming in her well-wishes, especially when she thinks of her inventions about Mr. Dixon, and she improves upon Mrs. Weston’s account by declaring the whole complication or imbroglio
“a very abominable sort of proceeding. What has it been but a system of hypocrisy and deceit,—espionage, and treachery? —To come among us with professions of openness and simplicity; and such a league in secret to judge us all!—Here have we been ... completely duped, fancying ourselves on an equal footing of truth and honour, with two people in the midst of us....” (p. 362).
Emma, as they say, goes over the top. The language that she finds to describe Frank and Jane’s secret engagement would be more appropriate if it were applied to the Gunpowder Plot or the French Revolution. She is of course blowing off steam, but the words that first occur to her describe a capital crime, as if England itself were being betrayed. But the speech is also theatrical, and Emma’s hyperbolic ranting is slightly farcical. It was bad behavior, to be sure, but it was neither fatal nor unforgivable—in Emma only illness is fatal.
Emma turns this same language on herself. When she reflects on her friendly offer to take the ailing Jane for a carriage-ride and on her sending arrowroot to comfort her—both of which amicable gestures were turned down—it now appears to her that “an airing in the Hartfield carriage would have been the rack, and arrow-root from the Hartfield store-room must have been poison” (p. 366). We are now dealing with a tragedy-queen, and Emma’s observations on her own role in this drama is accordingly elevated.
Of all the sources of evil surrounding [Jane] ... she was persuaded that she must herself have been the worst. She must have been a perpetual enemy. They never could have been all three together, without her having stabbed Jane Fairfax’s peace in a thousand instances (p. 381).
When Jane Austen was fifteen she wrote a short, satirical history of England. She regarded Queen Elizabeth with detestation and called her “that disgrace to humanity, that pest of society.” Her persecution, confinement, and execution of Mary Queen of Scots who was guilty of nothing more “than Imprudencies into which she was betrayed b
y the openness of her Heart, her Youth, and her Education,” is a shadowed anticipation of Emma’s description of how she has abused poor Jane.xxviii
Emma still has miles to go before she can catch up with herself. She thinks immediately of “ ‘poor Harriet,’ ” who has been the continued object of yet another of Emma’s fantasticated manipulations. She thinks of Harriet and is angry with Frank. “Frank Churchill had behaved very ill by herself [that is, Emma]—very ill in many ways,—but it was not so much his behaviour as her own, which made her so angry with him” (p. 365). This is a neat instance of double-entry moral bookkeeping. Emma then turns to confess her culpability to Harriet, who has already learned the news from Mr. Weston. Harriet believes that Emma “ ‘can see into everybody’s heart,’ ” but Emma is rapidly learning that she has seen into no one’s heart, least of all her own.