by Jane Austen
These introductory pages amount to no more than a cursory traversal of the novel’s first chapter, but they are intended to suggest something of the complexity and depth of conception at which Jane Austen’s imagination is employed. That chapter also introduces a considerable number of the novel’s store of interconnected themes and provides a useful sample of how they arise out of concretely represented individual characters whose interests and relations generate the several levels of interest and discourse that Emma keeps continually in play.
I
As for Emma herself, Jane Austen famously declared that “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” Although one should on principle never trust the teller instead of the tale, she had, as usual, a point. There is considerably much about Emma to put one off: Her presumption, her snobberies, her maneuverings and manipulations have all served to mobilize a company of critical detractors. These disapproving voices often fail to take into account that Emma’s shortcomings are not, at least at first, easily separable from her attractive qualities: her high spirits, her intelligence and wit, her genuine thoughtfulness and capacity for generosity. Jane Austen goes out of her way to foreground Emma’s formidable endowment of personal and intellectual force and charm. When Harriet Smith is first introduced at Hartfield, Emma at once takes to her very good looks and to her deference and artless simplicity and falls to plotting an imagined future for Harriet that will elevate her place in the society of Highbury. Emma will take her in hand and “improve” her; she will “form her opinions and her manners.” It will certainly be for Emma “an interesting ... a very kind undertaking.” Newly energized by the prospect of having something in the way of purposefulness to occupy her, Emma turns to organizing the supper table.
With an alacrity beyond the common impulse of a spirit which yet was never indifferent to the credit of doing every thing well and attentively, with the real good-will of a mind delighted with its own ideas, did she then do all the honours of the meal, and help and recommend the minced chicken and scalloped oysters (pp. 20-21).
Emma is simultaneously pleased by her skills and competence as a hostess and by her fledgling scheme for managing Harriet’s future. Her behavior here is not private or covert (not yet), and she is never indifferent to recognition of her accomplishments and of the style in which she carries out “everything.” She is very much “on stage” a good deal of the time and is sensible of the opinions and judgments of others on her performances in her diverse range of roles. But she is also experiencing substantial self-approval; her “real good-will” is an expression of “a mind delighted with its own ideas.” If such a locution puts us in mind of a writer, artist, or novelist happily brooding over what she is about to put into action or execute, then we have only Jane Austen—or the narrator, if we insist-to blame. The ideas in question are also for the most part fantasies about couples and pairings, the very stuff of Jane Austen’s novels themselves, and hence by moderately strong implication metafictional comments or representations.
In chapter V of the first volume, Knightley and Mrs. Weston discuss, among other things, Emma’s new project of Harriet Smith, on which Knightley holds a very dim opinion. It is, according to him, only another installment of Emma’s sense of superiority; no one (except himself) ever resists her. She has been “mistress of the house and of you all since she was twelve.” Mrs. Weston responds by noting that Knightley must have thought her a bust at being a governess. “ ‘I am sure you always thought me unfit for the office I held.” Knightley agrees and remarks that Mrs. Weston, during her years with Emma, was really being trained to be a wife rather than a teacher or governess. “ ‘You might not give Emma such a complete education as your powers would seem to promise; but you were receiving a very good education from her, on the very material matrimonial point of submitting your own will, and doing as you were bid’ ” (p. 32). It was Emma who was the governess and authority. It was Emma who exercised the commanding will, who gave orders, and who was obeyed. She occupied the adult position in this dyad; in gendered terms, she filled the male role; it was her ego that was in charge.
Both Knightley and Mrs. Weston admire and care for Emma, despite these excesses. Knightley expresses himself on this topic in a strikingly salient observation. “ ‘I have a very sincere interest in Emma.... There is an anxiety, a curiosity in what one feels for Emma. I wonder what will become of her’ ” (p. 35). How will Emma turn out? The question has an interest of its own which goes quite beyond the matter of will Emma marry. Emma is someone with an as yet unspecified future, a fate or destiny, a set of possibilities that might find expression in some alternative structure. It is almost as if she were a narrative or a novel herself—with a probable but uncertain line of development, a Bildung, a contingent resolution. She has, in other words, the capacity for creating an identity for herself; and if her career in life includes marriage (and what follows from it), it will in any event be a strongly individuated choice and arrangement.
Knightley cannot restrain himself for long. When he learns from Emma that she has persuaded Harriet to turn down a proposal of marriage from Robert Martin—Knightley’s tenant farmer—in the hope (and, to Emma, the certain likelihood) of an offer from Mr. Elton, he explodes in exasperation at Emma’s misguided scheme. The two battle it out, with Emma getting decidedly the worse part. He breaks off the conversation and walks out without ceremony and in a state of high annoyance. Emma is momentarily shaken by their disagreement, but quickly recovers her composure and self-confidence. Knightley, she rather ruefully observes, has “walked off in more complete self-approbation than he left for her.” Moreover, she goes on, Knightley could have observed Elton “neither with the interest nor ... with the skill of such an observer on such a question as herself.” He is resentful, ignorant, and prejudiced. He did not “make due allowance for the influence of a strong passion at war with all interested motives. Mr. Knightley saw no such passion, and of course thought nothing of its effects; but she saw too much of it to feel a doubt of its overcoming any hesitations that a reasonable prudence might originally suggest” (p. 59).
Emma is, of course, talking through her hat. In her fantasy of a passionate courtship between Elton and Harriet she is unconsciously projecting some of her own unacknowledged wishes and desires onto both members of the pair; and in her repudiation of Knightley’s disapproval she is displacing her own misperceptions and misapprehensions onto his “conventional” moral authority. But what chiefly deflects her vision and confounds her observations here is that she is denying the palpable reality of Elton’s desire for her. Still further, she is denying desire in general and altogether so far as she herself is concerned. This denial runs deep and is one of the principal sources of the cognitive (and comic) distortions that characterize Emma’s schemes and plans for others.
“Mr. Knightley might quarrel with her, but Emma could not quarrel with herself.... She was sorry, but could not repent” (p. 61). She is in fact high on herself, and although she cannot be angry at herself at this point in the narrative, she will soon to her chagrin learn to be increasingly self-critical. Although Emma has to be educated and “cured” of her infatuation with herself, her self-love and narcissism do not at the same time, however much trouble and grief they precipitate for her and others, seem in the end to be irremediable and pathological. There is also something winning and untutored about her narcissism—it is part of her immaturity, part of the unachieved and uneven development of the emotions that we find her contending with throughout the narrative.
One of the technical devices that Jane Austen deploys to express and investigate this inner matrix is free indirect discourse, the narrator’s entry into Emma’s consciousness. Situated flexibly somewhere between narration and direct speech and fluidly shifting its properties, vectors, and psychic distances, this style of narrative permits the represented consciousnesses of both Emma and the narrator to permeate one another, sometimes to fuse, sometimes to be held distinct, some
times to be both a mingling of the two and something else at the same time. It is part of the experience the novel provides us with, of “getting to know” with intimacy and in copious and fulminating detail the imagined inner life of a represented character. To this end, Jane Austen represents Emma as habitually talking to herself. We eavesdrop on Emma’s silent conversations with herself. And one of the things we quickly come to learn is how much Emma enjoys the sound of her own (inner) voice. She is regularly aware of how delightful it is to be Emma. She talks to herself so much because she is such good company. And if this incessant silent chatter is further evidence of her narcissism, we might also recall that Knightley and Mrs. Weston agree that Emma is the very picture of “health,” an ascription that is repeated more than once in the narrative. And even though the health here is primarily physical and refers to Emma’s beauty and bloom, her “firm and upright figure,” her robust comportment and energetic bearing, there is an overflow or carry-over into a more general assessment. Knightley remarks, “ ‘I love to look at her; and I will add this praise, that I do not think her personally vain. Considering how very handsome she is, she appears to be little occupied with it; her vanity lies another way’ ” (p. 34). He means, to be sure, that Emma’s vanity lies in her preposterous overestimation of her powers of insight and judgment, her unshaken faith in her own capacity of “penetration.” This conventionally male metaphorical attribute is referred to ironically throughout the narrative (p. 20, p. 120, p. 299, and throughout). What Knightley leaves unsaid is that despite this silly and troublesome characteristic, he loves to listen to her as well. Even when she is spouting rubbish, Emma’s talk is a genuine pleasure to hear.
Part of that pleasure is incurred through Emma’s “playfulness.” She relishes the rapid stab of wit and paradoxical opposition; she plays uninterruptedly at “imaginistic” matchmaking. She is exceptionally skillful at games, particularly verbal ones: puzzles, riddles, and ciphers, “enigmas, charades, ... [and] conundrums” (p. 62), Scrabble avant la lettre are all integral to the ways she occupies her considerable spare time, engaged for the most part in self-amusement. She reads codes and encryptions with accomplished ease, even as she cannot recognize or interpret correctly matters that are passing in front of her nose. She thinks of Jane Fairfax’s behavior as “quite a separate puzzle” (p. 256). Frank Churchill is Emma’s superior at playing make-believe; his entire relation to her can be thought of as a kind of game of pretending, an exercise in frivolity, bluffing, and fakery, while his treatment of Jane has a distinct element of teasing, of sadistic playfulness and rule-breaking license to it. Emma also likes to “play” the piano, and she loves to dance—steps and rituals and elaborate patterns all appeal to her sense of “the rigour of the game.”vi
Emma’s playfulness, however, is carefully “placed” by her in a specific context of requirements: She must be “always first and always right.” And although she qualifies this by saying that the demand applies to her relations to men, it equally includes Mrs. Weston and Harriet as well as most of the lesser female lights of Highbury. When it does not, as it does not with Jane Fairfax and Mrs. Elton, Emma responds with coldness and remoteness. The form that her principal exercise of playfulness takes is that of romantic fantasy, of “match-making,” as she calls it. These fantasies reveal a singular and simple structure. They are almost all of them triangles, with Emma at one of the points performing as the managing director of the other two—and hence as a kind of displaced center. First there is Emma and Mr. and Mrs. Weston, a completed pairing that Emma believes she has brought about. Then there is Emma, Elton, and Harriet, which Emma totally misinterprets, denying Elton’s undisguised designs on herself and deflecting them onto Harriet—Harriet figuring here as the clearest instance of Emma’s constructing an imaginary and unconscious sexual life by proxy. Then there is Emma, Harriet, and Robert Martin—something unambiguously actual and ready, which Emma heads off, blocks, and tries to destroy. She behaves in this instance out of several motives: She enlists her always-handy snobbery to lower Martin in Harriet’s estimation; she absurdly elevates Harriet’s status simply by virtue of Emma’s having taken her up—that is, by her patronage. In effect, she keeps Harriet for herself by pursuing a fantastic and impossible object (Elton) and rejecting a plausible and logical one (Martin). The fantasticated triangle of Emma, Frank Churchill, and Jane Fairfax is a parody of Emma-Elton-Harriet. The symmetry in this second instance is to be found in Emma’s mistaken belief that Frank is in love with her, while he is all along secretly engaged to Jane. Indeed Emma never once suspects that anything at all exists between the two lovers. Emma’s fantasies are additionally and understandably set going full blast by the highly attractive Jane, and Emma rapidly cooks up another imaginary three-sided figure involving Jane and the invisible Mr. and Mrs. Dixon, which includes illicit love and a possibly adulterous affair. Then there are Emma’s off-the-wall fabrications about Harriet and Frank and, at the end, Harriet and Knightley, this latter helped along by Harriet herself. Finally there is the climactic triangle of Emma, her father, and Knightley, a fantasy that is also an actuality which will be resolved by extraordinary and even slightly magical measures.
These triangles represent among other things the classic unconscious fantasies of children about both familial and parental relations and the familiar sexual patterns or scenarios that such imaginations both trace out and figure forth. Their unpremeditated self-referential nature is to be observed in the manner in which the child is always the central figure in the pattern and also in the ways in which the child is both included in and walled out of the sexual activities of the parental figures. Emma’s lively curiosity about the affairs of others combines her impulse to be “first,” to be always centrally in on the action (in both fantasy and intellectual activity), with her actual repudiation and denial of personal, sexual desire.
This repudiation is brought forward in a number of passages in which Emma is prompted (mostly by herself) to enlarge upon her early arrived-at decision never to marry. When the innocent and slightly airheaded Harriet asks her in alarm: “ ‘Dear me! but what shall you do? how shall you employ yourself when you grow old?’ ” Emma begins her reply as follows:
“If I know myself, Harriet, mine is an active, busy mind, with a great many independent resources; and I do not perceive why I should be more in want of employment at forty or fifty than one-and-twenty. Women’s usual occupations of eye, and hand, and mind will be as open to me then as they are now; or with no important variation. If I draw less, I shall read more; if I give up music, I shall take to carpet-work” (p. 77).
Of course she does not know herself in any acceptable sense, and the parody fuses high comedy with pathos. The lameness of her protestations about self-sufficiency is accentuated by the circumstance that the detestable Mrs. Elton is also given to prating about her “resources,” both mental and otherwise. Mrs. Elton is one of several fractionated and split-off representations of parts of Emma. She is in genuine degree a caricature and parody of Emma, and some degree of our understanding of Emma and Emma is derived from our reading off from these subsidiary characters back onto Emma herself. The pathos of Emma’s reply is disclosed in the limp alternatives and vague specifications of her legion of independent resources.
Emma’s rejection of the idea of her marrying is also articulated in her resistance to change. “ ‘I cannot really change for the better. If I were to marry, I must expect to repent it’ ” (p. 76). Like so many of Emma’s categorical certainties, this “must” covers over doubt, anxiety, and uncertainty. It is a characteristic bit of Emma’s bravado, which is, however, and in its turn, connected with both her chutzpah and her courage. But her aversion to change is not restricted to her personal life. It is expressed in a global sense in her snobbery. The Woodhouses, along with the Knightleys, are at the top of the heap in Highbury. Emma, in addition, can add social privilege and superiority of inherited status to her personal claims to ascendancy and power. We have observed
this already in her treatment of Harriet and Robert Martin. Harriet, an illegitimate child with no known family, is raised above her “appropriate” plane simply by virtue of her personal connection with Emma; and Martin, a prosperous and upwardly mobile young farmer, is correspondingly demoted by Emma to being “Hodge,” illiterate, unmannerly, and uncouth simply because he is a farmer and labors for his livelihood—and is hence unworthy of any young woman whom Emma has stooped to “notice.”
The absurd comedy of Emma’s snootiness is admirably dramatized in the dinner party proposed by the Coles. The Coles, relative newcomers to Highbury, and personally “friendly, liberal and unpretending,” are also unfortunately “of low origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel.” The last few years, however, have “brought them a considerable increase of means—the house in townviihad yielded greater profits, and fortune in general had smiled on them”—unlike Highbury itself, which seems to have had both ups and downs. Accordingly they undertake to enlarge their circumstances and improve their amenities. They add to their house, increase their number of servants, purchase a grand piano, and “in fortune and style of living” were by this time “second only to the family at Hartfield.” Donwell Abbey is out of the parish as well as out of range, but they have surpassed in material and consumerist terms the Westons at Randalls. Their sociability plus their new dining room add up to expectations of a dinner party. They have already had some trial runs at parties “chiefly among single men.” Emma from on high pontificates that the Coles would “hardly presume to invite” the “regular and best families”—“neither Donwell, nor Hartfield, nor Randalls. Nothing should tempt her to go, if they did.”
