by John Mullan
By naming her mistakes Emma trivialises and rises above them. As in that first use of the word by Mrs Weston, blunder has become a term for a foolish little error, an embarrassing tripping up. When Emma and Harriet later make their necessary visit to the vicarage to meet the new Mrs Elton, our heroine is conscious of irksome recollections, rather than truly mortified. ‘A thousand vexatious thoughts would recur. Compliments, charades, and horrible blunders’ (I. xiv). Those ‘vexatious thoughts’ do not yet comprehend any acknowledgement of her own manipulativeness. The word that she uses when she thinks about getting things wrong seems to have been overheard by others, even though Emma has never spoken it, only thought it. When Jane Fairfax fends off Mrs Elton’s highly unwanted offer to send one of her own servants to collect her letters, she tries to change the subject, veering off into praise of the post office. ‘So seldom that any negligence or blunder appears! So seldom that a letter, among the thousands that are constantly passing about the kingdom, is ever carried wrong’ (II. xvi). In this novel of blunders, of motives misunderstood and secret attachments almost betrayed, the word comes naturally. By the time that Frank Churchill uses blunder in the word game at Hartfield, there is a moment’s illusion that, like Captain Wentworth being passed the word by Anne Elliot, he has intuited it from Emma herself. When he later writes his long letter accounting for his conduct to Mrs Weston, passed by her to Emma and Mr Knightley, he curses the post in a sentence that uses the word ‘blunder’ twice. ‘Imagine the shock; imagine how, till I had actually detected my own blunder, I raved at the blunders of the post’ (III. xiv). You might think that he was picking up on what Jane Fairfax said earlier, except that he was not actually present to hear her words. He is expressing his feelings on finding that his letter of explanation never reached his lover, and then finding the mistake is his, not the post’s. (He absent-mindedly placed his letter to Jane Fairfax in his desk.) This sophisticated plotter is almost undone by the simplest of blunders.
Eventually, as a half-confession to Mr Knightley, Emma herself actually speaks the word when discussing the behaviour of Mr Elton. ‘I was fully convinced of his being in love with Harriet. It was through a series of strange blunders!’ (II. ii). The secret engagement between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax means that everyone in this novel gets things wrong, but Emma tells Mrs Weston that at least her error has been confined to a passing comment in confidence. ‘Your only blunder was confined to my ear, when you imagined a certain friend of our’s in love with the lady’ (III. x). She refers to Mrs Weston’s thought that Mr Knightley might have a tendresse for Jane Fairfax. Mrs Weston seizes on Emma’s special word when she replies, ‘True. But as I have always had a thoroughly good opinion of Miss Fairfax, I never could, under any blunder, have spoken ill of her.’ The exchange demonstrates why foolish mistakes are made not just narratively but even morally interesting by Austen. Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax have ensured that everyone will make mistakes, but some people’s mistakes, like Mrs Weston’s, are inert and harmless. Blunders show people up, and Mrs Weston, keeping her matchmaking ideas almost to herself, will do no damage with hers. A careful speaker, she is confident that she was never at risk of saying something derogatory about Jane Fairfax to her son-in-law. If she blundered, it was safely.
Emma’s mistakes are different and dangerous – dangerous to herself. Her realisation of this comes when Harriet tells her that she believes that Mr Knightley will propose to her. Emma is forced to see that it is she who has inadvertently encouraged her protégée towards Mr Knightley. ‘“Good God!” cried Emma, “this has been a most unfortunate—most deplorable mistake!—What is to be done?”’ But nothing is to be done. Like Frankenstein, it seems, Emma has created the being who will take what she loves and destroy her happiness. It is all her own doing. ‘How to understand it all! How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practising on herself, and living under!—The blunders, the blindness of her own head and heart!’ (III. xi) Blunders indeed – no longer just embarrassing mistakes, but disastrous errors, born, as she now acknowledges, of her own skills of self-deception. For the moment it appears that her blunders have built a plot that will end most unhappily for her. But at least her blunders, felix culpa, have shown her what she truly feels about Mr Knightley, if only by making it likely that she will lose him. Her stupid mistakes have shown her and us the way to her heart. Luckily Harriet is wrong about Mr Knightley; she too has misunderstood, and Emma is to be saved from a life as her father’s nurse and backgammon companion. It is naturally that other great causer of blunders, Frank Churchill, who finally waves the word away. He jestingly asks Emma to look at Jane Fairfax and see her remembering his error over knowing about Mr Perry getting a carriage. ‘Do not you see that, at this instant, the very passage of her own letter, which sent me the report, is passing under her eye—that the whole blunder is spread before her’ (III. xviii). Even in his state of grateful happiness, Frank Churchill is characteristically flippant about the painful mistakes of the past.
Not all Austen’s heroines blunder. Tony Tanner identifies just what it is that has always made Fanny Price a hard heroine to like. ‘She is never, ever, wrong.’1 This is not a matter of morality; it is a matter of fact. There are other Austen heroines whose moral judgement is impeccable: Elinor Dashwood and Anne Elliot can be trusted to be ‘right’ in their principles and moral sentiments. Yet both of them are mistaken about certain matters of fact. Fanny is not just morally unimpeachable, she is also right in her factual judgements. It is the novel’s great psychologist, Mary Crawford, who blunders. It is mostly Fanny whom she misunderstands, but not only her. Early on in her insertion of herself into the favours of the Bertram family, things go badly wrong on the visit to Sotherton, when, in the chapel, she launches into mockery of any family practice of religion. Imagine how tedious it was when attendance was mandatory for those young ladies and their servants, ‘especially if the poor chaplain were not worth looking at’ (I. ix). Edmund gently disputes her caricature, before she finds out from Julia that he is himself destined to become a clergyman. ‘Miss Crawford’s countenance, as Julia spoke, might have amused a disinterested observer. She looked almost aghast under the new idea she was receiving.’ She has put her foot in it. She is so taken aback that Fanny pities her, though soon enough she is ‘rallying her spirits, and recovering her complexion’.
Mary Crawford’s ‘lively mind’, as Edmund calls it, sometimes leads her into tactless sallies. Yet when she applies herself she can find how to please anybody – except Fanny. The Mansfield Park ball is a cameo of her psychological canniness, as she supplies each principal character with the lines they want to hear. To Sir Thomas, who has arranged the ball to honour Fanny, she speaks in warm praise of his niece. To Lady Bertram she gives the opportunity of boasting that Fanny’s elegant appearance is the creation of her own lady’s maid. To Mrs Norris she exclaims, with wonderful dishonesty, ‘Ah! Ma’am, how much we want dear Mrs. Rushworth and Julia tonight!’ (II. x). But Fanny she gets wrong. ‘Miss Crawford blundered most towards Fanny herself, in her attentions to please.’ She tries to gives her heart ‘a happy flutter’ by talking to her confidentially of her brother’s mysterious mission to London the next day. She has been ‘misinterpreting Fanny’s blushes’; Fanny is pained, not pleased. She does not relish Henry Crawford’s attentions. Her secret, fiercely guarded, keeps her safe from Mary Crawford’s knowing remarks. She loves Edmund. Mary Crawford never divines this, and so she will always misinterpret her. Her failure to see Fanny’s secret, and the blunders to which this failure leads, immunise Fanny against her charms.
For such a psychologically astute person, soon able to play the Bertrams at will, Mary Crawford’s tendency to blunder towards Fanny is extraordinary. She imagines, for instance, that she will win Fanny to her brother’s favour by telling her about all the London ladies who have been desperate for his attentions. ‘He has now and then been a sad flirt, and cared little for the havock he might be making in young ladies�
�� affections’ (III. v). When she sees Fanny blush at being told that she is the only young woman who ‘can think of him with any thing like indifference’, she imagines that she sees that she is not after all ‘so insensible’. The reader knows that the blush comes from embarrassed indignation. When she later lets Fanny know by letter that her brother has been seeing Mrs Rushworth in Twickenham, it is with some purpose that she wryly signals, ‘Now do not make yourself uneasy with any queer fancies . . .’ (III. xiv). She must think that she is making Fanny jealous, rather than outraging her. What a miscalculation to suppose that her insinuations would actually pique Fanny’s romantic interest in her brother. Miss Crawford’s blunders reveal her – to the reader as much as to the heroine – but perhaps they go some way to explain the preference for Mary Crawford over Fanny that readers have expressed down the years. We like people who make mistakes.
Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey is all blundering, of a thoroughly sympathetic kind. When solicited by Captain Tilney for an introduction to Isabella Thorpe in order to ask for a dance, she assures him through Henry Tilney that Isabella would not be interested (being engaged to her brother James). ‘Your brother will not mind it I know . . . because I heard him say before, that he hated dancing’ (II. i). Her naivety is complete: Captain Tilney’s disdain for dancing is an affectation that he will drop for any pretty girl, and Isabella will prove perfectly open to the attentions of a handsome new dancing partner. ‘How very little trouble it can give you to understand the motives of other people’s actions,’ comments Henry, smiling. Her mistakes please him. The parody plot of this novel all derives from Catherine’s egregious error in supposing that life might follow the plot of a Gothic novel. Yet most of her mistakes about other people are the consequences not just of naivety but of good nature. She misunderstands people who are mean-minded or selfish in ways that are foreign to her. Her blunders are charming and disarming.
Redundant blunders can feel like penalties for Austen’s heroines, destined for happiness but given an extra twist of pain first.
Mistakes and misunderstandings are central to Northanger Abbey, but Austen elsewhere likes to create them where they are surplus to her plots. In Sense and Sensibility there is a peculiar little episode where Mrs Jennings is allowed to make an unnecessary mistake about Elinor’s relationship with Colonel Brandon. In the most extraordinary shift of viewpoint in the novel, we see him suggesting to Elinor that he might offer Edward Ferrars ‘the living of Delaford’ through the eyes of Mrs Jennings, who can hear only fragments of what is being said (III. iii). She has ‘hopes’ that the Colonel will propose to Elinor, and believes that she is witnessing this happen (while rather disapproving of his ‘unlover-like’ manner of addressing her). For much of a chapter she and Elinor manage to talk at perfect cross-purposes, Mrs Jennings assuming that she has just become engaged to Colonel Brandon, before the misunderstanding is cleared up. It is a little narrative cul-de-sac – wholly unnecessary to the plot – but perhaps comically irresistible in a novel so concerned with the pains of waiting for the right proposal. In Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth is summoned into her father’s library to be told something astonishing. A letter from Mr Collins has suggested that she will soon be marrying Mr Darcy. ‘Now, Lizzy, I think I have surprised you’ (III. xv). Mr Bennet jokes with Elizabeth about the very thought of Mr Darcy being in love with her. ‘Never had his wit been directed in a manner so little agreeable to her.’ He has completely misunderstood her. ‘It was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried.’ She is not yet sure of Mr Darcy’s affection, and so finds Mr Bennet’s jests peculiarly painful. She is being ‘mortified’, punished for the prejudice against Mr Darcy that has given her father good reason for his blunder. It is a special taste of the intimacy between the father and his favourite daughter. This relationship is about to be displaced by Elizabeth’s intimacy with her husband-to-be and the scene is a kind of rehearsal for this.
Redundant blunders can feel like penalties for Austen’s heroines, destined for happiness but given an extra twist of pain first. One example comes near the end of Sense and Sensibility and is a mistake that is produced by Lucy Steele’s contrivance. The Dashwoods’ manservant, Thomas, has just returned from Exeter with news. ‘I suppose you know, ma’am, that Mr. Ferrars is married’ (III. xi). Elinor turns pale and Marianne falls back in her chair ‘in hysterics’. While Marianne is helped into another room, Elinor questions Thomas, who has met Lucy and her new husband in a chaise. He punishes her more by recounting how well and ‘vastly contented’ Lucy looked. Now Elinor knows what it is to relinquish all hope. ‘Day after day’ passes (III. xii). And then Edward suddenly appears, ‘white with agitation’, and clears up the torturing misunderstanding by explaining that Lucy has in fact married his brother Robert. Elinor almost runs from the room and bursts into ‘tears of joy’. The misunderstanding has been Lucy’s parting gesture. ‘That Lucy had certainly meant to deceive, to go off with a flourish of malice against him in her message by Thomas, was perfectly clear to Elinor’ (III. xiii). She told Thomas to give Elinor and Marianne ‘her compliments and Mr. Ferrars’s’, apparently confident that the message would be misinterpreted. It may seem a little far-fetched to the modern reader, but Lucy knows well how a servant will report things. A mistake about a name, as we know from Austen’s own letters, is the commonest kind of blunder.
On inquiring of Mrs. Clerk, I find that Mrs. Heathcote made a great blunder in her news of the Crooks and Morleys; it is young Mr. Crook who is to marry the second Miss Morley—& it is the Miss Morleys instead of the second Miss Crooke, who were the beauties at the Music meeting.—This seems a more likely tale, a better devised Impostor. (Letters, 27)
Elinor’s Lucy-induced misconception, which dispirits her for days, is a peculiar narrative trick, surplus to the requirements of the plot. Elinor has to be taught how powerful were her only partially acknowledged hopes of marriage to Edward – by having them dashed. It is reminiscent of the mistake in Persuasion, when Anne meets Captain Wentworth’s sister, Mrs Croft, who asks her if she knows that her brother is now married. ‘She could now answer as she ought; and was happy to feel, when Mrs. Croft’s next words explained it to be Mr. Wentworth of whom she spoke, that she had said nothing which might not do for either brother’ (I. vi). Anne is made to wait only a moment before her false impression is corrected. Austen likes to create these secret bubbles of feeling, which we experience with the heroine for some brief span before the mistake is corrected and relief floods in. Except that here she does something even cleverer. Anne has been defending her feelings so effectively that she is able to ‘answer as she ought’, even at the moment when the death sentence to her love for Captain Wentworth is pronounced. In imitation of her suppression of her feelings, the sentence goes on, after the tiniest of pauses at a semicolon, to register her mistake, and the relieving fact that it is Captain Wentworth’s brother of whom she speaks, with the barest flicker: ‘happy to feel’. She has managed to deny the stab she must experience when she briefly thinks he is married.
Misconceptions drive Persuasion. In one telling use of the title word near the novel’s end, ‘persuasion’ becomes a synonym for misunderstanding. Meeting Captain Wentworth at the White Hart, Anne recalls how, at the previous day’s encounter, ‘the same unfortunate persuasion, which had hastened him away from the concert room, still governed’ (II. x). This ‘persuasion’ is his idea that she is becoming attached to Mr Elliot. The misconception stirs him into acknowledging the force of his own love and Anne begins to see it. For much of the novel she has interpreted the man she loves wrongly. Yet the only true mistake is that made by Mrs Smith, nexus of all Bath gossip, who assumes wrongly that Anne has fallen for the attentive Mr Elliot. When Anne postpones their next meeting because she wants to go to the concert, Mrs Smith speaks to her ‘with an expression half serious, half arch’, predicting that she will not be getting many more visits from her friend (II. vii). Why does Austen allow this mistake? To let us se
e that, despite Mrs Smith’s knowledge of her suitor, the marriage would have gone ahead if he had been minded and she had been receptive. After the concert Anne visits her friend and finds her reading her face. ‘I perfectly see how the hours passed . . . Your countenance perfectly informs me that you were in company last night with the person, whom you think the most agreeable in the world’ (II. ix). Anne is amazed at her penetration, imagining that she is talking about Captain Wentworth. What is the point of this error? Partly to cement the internalisation of Anne’s drama of feeling: truly, no one knows of her love, of what is going on between her and Captain Wentworth. Though it takes place entirely in the view of others, though they are never alone together until he has finally declared himself to her, it is completely hidden. But it is also to push Anne and her friend to the realisation of what could have happened. The blunder – licensed by Mrs Smith’s correct inference that love is in the air – has chilling implications. Mrs Smith is self-interested enough to have hoped that her friend might influence her new husband, Mr Elliot, to regain her inheritance. Anne cannot understand why she spoke so favourably of him. ‘My dear . . . there was nothing else to be done’ (I. ix).
