by Jane Austen
STEVEN MARCUS is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and a specialist in nineteenth-century literature and culture. A fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Literary Studies, he has received Fulbright, American Council of Learned Societies, Guggenheim, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Rockefeller, and Mellon grants. He is the author of more than 200 publications.
Notes to Introduction
i. He “had not married early.” Knightley is thirty-seven or thirty-eight; we can use this datum as a relevant marker for not marrying early. Isabella is near thirty. Somewhere in the upper sixties seems a workable estimate for Mr. Woodhouse.
ii. That both his daughters—two sisters, in fact—marry two brothers seems to provide him with no perceptible consolation, despite the implied endogamy.
iii. Indeed, he parses it. A home of her own is a place to be settled in, to let down roots and think of permanency and rest. And “comfortable” entails here provision—that is, resources and amenities and a certain style of life.
iv. None of this implies that Knightley is not perfectly capable of contradicting himself in both speech and behavior—which, in due course, he does.
v. Lionel Trilling seems to have been among the first to draw attention to Emma’s profound self-approval. He calls it self-love and does not adduce the noxious side of it that is commonly thought of as narcissism. He regards it as almost wholly beneficent and absolves it of any responsibility for the harm and damage that Emma inflicts on Harriet, Jane Fairfax, or Miss Bates. See Beyond Culture, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979, pp. 28-49.
vi. See Charles Lamb’s essay, “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist,” in Essays of Elia, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2003.
vii. The term refers to the place of business and even to the business itself, regardless of place. It is not a town house, an investment in city real estate, or, necessarily, a residence, although the historical identity of an urban merchant’s place of business and his domicile accounts for the origin of the idiom.
viii. A closer occurrence of blindness as a theme is found in Wordsworth’s great poem “Michael,” first published in 1800; it is at least possible that Jane Austen read it. This “pastoral poem” is about social change and its consequences for a traditional shepherd’s way of life and culture. Michael, childless until a very late age, loves the land on which his family has for generations worked and lived with passionate intensity.Those fields, those hills ... had laid Strong hold on his affections, were to him A pleasurable feeling of blind love, The pleasure which there is in life itself.
When a child is born to him and his wife long after they had any right to expect such an event, Michael responds again with passionate intensity. Although he of course loves his “Helpmate” of many years—to Michael’s heart This son of his old age was yet more dear—Less from instinctive tenderness, the same Fond spirit that blindly works in the blood of all—Than that a child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts, And stirrings of inquietude, when they By tendency of nature needs must fail.
The convergence of theme and diction seems to me more than coincidental. The double emphasis on blindness, the declining years of life, the tenderness of instinct, the implied warmth of blood all tend toward commonality. And what Emma’s idea of “comfort” defends her against is regarded in “Michael” as “stirrings of inquietude.” For Wordsworth the pleasurable feeling of “blind love” is virtually identical with the pleasure that life itself entails. It is instinctive and blind and good. But it also exposes us to tragic injury and bereavement when that love fails us or is lost. It is just such tragic intensity that Emma wants most to avoid. Hence her choice of comfort over the possibility of a love that brings tragic suffering and loss.
ix. Since Martin has inherited the farm from his father (p. 25), one can suppose that the lease on the property was for life, a circumstance that enhanced his status and justifies Knightley’s referring to him as “a gentleman-farmer.”
x. Knightley deploys the word “evil” in a sense that is different from our modern and almost exclusively moral usage. We largely reserve it for only the most dreadful, heinous actions or persons—for example, Hitler was evil. In Jane Austen it tends also to mean disadvantageous, unfavorable, troublesome. On the first page of Emma, the narrator remarks that Emma’s life of having her own way and thinking too well of herself constitute “the real evils” of her situation, and then goes on to call such evils “disadvantages.” And later on, Mr. Weston speaks of Highbury’s distance from Enscombe in Yorkshire as an “evil”—it is difficult and awkward for Frank to get away while his aunt is ill.Tony Tanner has, from a different perspective, also taken note of this usage. See Jane Austen, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 203.
xi. Knightley is echoing the sentiments of Burke. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke comes to discuss the confiscation of church property and the expulsion of monks from their former precincts:The monks are lazy. Be it so. Suppose them no otherwise employed than by singing in the choir.... They are as usefully employed as if they worked from dawn to dark in the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly, unmanly, and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations, to which by the social oeconomy so many wretches are inevitably doomed. If it were not generally pernicious to disturb the natural course of things, and to impede, in any degree, the great wheel of circulation which is turned by the strangely-directed labour of these unhappy people, I should be infinitely more inclined forcibly to rescue them from their miserable industry, than violently to disturb the tranquil repose of monastic quietude. Humanity, and perhaps policy, might better justify me in one than in the other. It is a subject on which I have often reflected, and never reflected without feeling from it. I am sure that no consideration, except the necessity of submitting to the yoke of luxury, and the despotism of fancy, who in their own imperious way will distribute the surplus product of the soil, can justify the toleration of such trades and employments in a well-regulated state (Reflections on the Revolution in France, New York: Penguin, 1968, p. 271).
xii. She is also one of the split-off and partial anti-types of Jane Austen herself. The daughter of a deceased clergyman who looks after her widowed mother, Miss Bates “had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her, into outward respect” (p. 18).
xiii. Mrs. Elton’s efforts to commandeer and appropriate Jane constitute a grim parody of Emma’s manipulations of Harriet Smith.
xiv. Such legends persist with extraordinary tenacity. In 1944, in Auschwitz, Primo Levi ran across a nineteen-year-old illiterate gypsy. Born in Spain, he had “wandered about” in central Europe and been swept up in Hungary by the Nazi dragnets. He begged Levi to write a letter for him to his fianceé. He showed Levi a photograph of her: “She was almost a child, with laughing eyes, a little white kitten by her side.” He explained, as if in justification, that she “had not been picked by him but by his father. She was an official fianceé, not a girl abducted unceremoniously” (Moments of Reprieve, New York: Penguin, 1987, pp. 68-69).
xv. An episode of instructive similarity occurs in Sense and Sensibility (vol. 1, chapter 16). The sisters are out of doors; in the distance they see a horseman riding toward them. As he comes closer they can “distinguish him to be a gentleman.” A bit closer and Marianne concludes that it must be Willoughby; Elinor, who is both calmer and may have sharper sight, disagrees. When he gets to within thirty yards, Marianne gives up and turns away, only to be called back by her sisters and by the horseman’s voice, which she at once recognizes as belonging to Edward Ferrars. “He dismounted, and giving his horse to his servant, walked back with them to Barton, whither he was purposely come to visit them.”The scene is exemplary. It concentrates on a distant figure who gradually comes into
focus as he gets nearer to the point of narrative perspective. We see him at several moments in his approach, as additional details become visible. Finally he is close enough to identify and to recognize his voice. He then dismounts and gives his horse to his servant, who has suddenly materialized. Up to that moment, the servant who is accompanying his master has been invisible and nonexistent to both the characters and the narrator.
xvi. She contends that “ ‘when people come in a way which they know to be beneath them,’ ” they invariably betray themselves by “ ‘a look of consciousness or bustle’ ” (p. 193).
xvii. In Emma, men move about and across distances easily and with regularity. Women are much more confined and restricted in their physical movements through space and geography.
xviii. Both of these keywords have a substantial history of usage in the nineteenth century. In Emma we observe in the two appearances made by “culture” the evolutionary shift from physical and agricultural cultivation to the prevailing sense of inner or mental cultivation, with its decided emphasis on literature, the arts, and languages. In “comfort,” repeatedly put into play throughout Emma, one can make out the emergence into hegemony of what one has to call a middle-class set of values. The aristocratic values or noble qualities that comfort supplants are conveyed on one side in such terms as “grandeur” (still in use in this passage to describe the abruptly sloping, wooded bank that at the distance of a half-mile, makes up the frame for the view from the Abbey to the Farm), “large,” “imposing,” “splendor,” “magnificent,” and “majestic”; and on another and equally important side by “luxury” and its long series of related words and expressions. “Comfort,” like “culture,” is increasingly interiorized as the century progresses and, in the end, expresses as much a mental and spiritual state of being as “culture” does—“I’m comfortable with that” or “That fits into my comfort zone” are among the latest, and very soggy, postmodern manifestations. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, New York: Oxford University Press, 1976, and Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, New York: Urizen Books, 1978.
xix. How to support the poor and indigent was very much a matter of heated public discussion and debate. See, among many others, Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.
xx. Emma’s quotation from Romeo and Juliet (act 5, scene 1) drives home the point. Romeo has just been falsely informed that Juliet is dead. He seeks a quick means to join her and recalls having seen an apothecary nearby: “Meagre were his looks, / Sharp misery had worn him to the bones.” He offers the poor man gold for a “dram of poison.” The apothecary hesitates because of the law that forbids on pain of death the dispensing of such agents. Romeo scornfully replies:Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness, And fear‘st to die? famine is in thy cheeks, Need and oppression starveth in thine eyes, Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back. The world is not thy friend nor the world’s law; The world affords no law to make thee rich. Then be not poor, but break it, and take this.
It can hardly be denied that the passage from Romeo and Juliet bears more relevantly on the Abdys, father and son, than it does on Jane. It may moreover be suggested that it is by means of such a displacement that this powerful and negative analogy, or disanalogy, is constructed here—that is to say, the unconscious defenses of displacement and denial, the very means by which the contradictions in question are put aside and pushed away, are at the same time the means by which those same contradictions are brought forward and revealed. The same defenses are also in action when the narrator causes Emma to effectively nod off while Miss Bates is recounting the incident of old John Abdy and his son.
xxi. It was Hegel who characteristically affirmed that music enhanced the listener’s awareness of the workings of the inner self. By means of the emotions evoked by music, the modern self—through deepening and enlarging the subjectivity of the ego—sustains its relation to the abstract, philosophical consciousness.
xxii. Emma has in this connection anticipated herself. When Elton has handed over his charade, Emma has confidently misconstrued it as being directed to Harriet: “ ‘It is a certainty. Receive it on my judgment’ ” (p. 66). However, she also cautions Harriet not to “ ‘refine too much upon this charade’ ” She is using “refine” in the sense of building or leaning on, freely interpreting or extrapolating to premature conclusions. “ ‘You will betray your feelings improperly, if you are too conscious and too quick, and appear to affix more meaning, or even quite all the meaning which may be affixed to it’ ” (p. 69, emphasis added). In the verbal games that Emma expertly plays, meanings keep shifting around. This destabilization of the established and conventional relations between words and meanings is, for Emma, an entry-way to a world of relative freedom—which can also be understood as both pseudo-freedom and the enabling freedom, limited but nonetheless actual, of an imaginative literary and linguistic creative force. Her advice to Harriet boils down to this: When verbal puzzles and ambiguities are in play, as they are in “courtship,” play it loose.
xxiii. The coming of peace to the Continent in 1814 and 1815 made travel there, after nearly twenty years of war, a practicable choice.
xxiv. On the other hand, there is this countervailing observation from Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical “A Sketch of the Past”: “The tea table rather than the dinner table was the centre of Victorian family life—in our family at least. Savages I suppose have some tree, or fire place, round which they congregate; the round table marked that focal, that sacred spot in our house” (Moments of Being, New York, 1985, p. 118). I owe this reference to Vicki Tromenhauser.
xxv. See, especially, Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988; “The Divine Miss Jane: Jane Austen, Janeites, and the Discipline of Novel Studies,” in Janeites: Austen Disciples and Devotees, edited by Diedre Lynch, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 25-44; and “Austen Cults and Cultures,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 211—226; and Terry Castle, “Was Jane Austen Gay?” London Review of Books, August 3, 1995. In any event, the ambiguous valence of Emma’s gender identity may owe as much to her uncertainty about the nature of inner sexual objects as it does to her desire for any specific sexual or gender configuration.
xxvi. If she had “lived” in the twentieth century, she might have taken a hint from the candor of P. G. Wodehouse, who observed of the cast of characters in his Blandings narratives: “I thought them all up, starting from scratch.”
xxvii. Nietzsche observed that “a witty remark is an epigram on the death of a feeling” Human, All Too Human (1880), vol. 2, part 1, number 202.
xxviii. R. W. Chapman, ed. The Works of Jane Austen, vol. 6, London: Oxford University Press, 1954, p. 146.
xxix. When John Knightley remarks that Isabella and Emma have handwritings that are “ ‘very much alike,’ ” his older brother responds, “ ‘I know what you mean—but Emma’s hand is the strongest.’ ” Emma observes, in turn, that Frank Churchill “ ‘writes one of the best gentlemen’s hands I ever saw.’ ” To which Knightley promptly rejoins, “ ‘I do not admire it.... It is too small—wants strength. It is like a woman’s writing’ ” (p. 267). Although Knightley suffers from nonstop jealousy of Frank and rarely passes up an opportunity to put him down or comment on his “puppy-dom,” the juxtaposition he implicitly makes of Emma’s and Frank’s handwriting also speaks for itself—at least in terms of conventional gender categories. In other words, such details bolster the supposition that Emma’s gender identity remains unresolved and slightly ambiguous.In The Mayor of Casterbridge, chapter 20, Hardy puts to use the same conventional belief about the gendered character of handwriting, to the painful discreditation of Elizabeth in the eyes of her father.
xxx. This ringing conclusion is to be traced back to its
first iteration in Emma’s mind, when she compared Mrs. Churchill with Jane Fairfax: “one was every thing, the other nothing” (p. 348).
xxxi. One of Jane Austen’s collateral descendants—if not her “lawful issue”—took her up on this epigram and added: “Truth is rarely pure and never simple” (Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, act 1).
xxxii. Two of Jane Austen’s sisters-in-law died shortly after childbirth—one of them, suddenly, soon after giving birth to her eleventh child. This sister-in-law, Elizabeth Knight, was married to Jane Austen’s older brother, Edward, from whose circumstances she took certain external details of Frank Churchill’s life—that is, adoption by a rich family connection, change of name, etc. (And from whom as well she derived the first part of Knightley’s name.) The other sister-in-law, the wife of Jane Austen’s younger naval brother, died, along with her baby, after giving birth to her fourth child.
Volume the First.
Chapter I.
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.
She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father; and had, in consequence of her sister’s marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses, and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.