by Jane Austen
She has got it all wrong again. She has misconstrued Harriet’s sweetness as docile compliance with Emma’s pipe dream about a match with Frank, and has overlooked altogether Harriet’s infatuation with Knightley, an affection that, Harriet believes, Knightley returns. Emma directs her attention inward for a few minutes. This interval was
sufficient for making her acquainted with her own heart. A mind like hers, once opening to suspicion, made rapid progress: she touched ... she acknowledged the whole truth. Why was it so much worse that Harriet should be in love with Mr. Knightley, than with Frank Churchill? ... It darted through her with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself! (p. 370).
Once again, her heart and her capacities of drawing consequent and rational conclusions are put into dynamic correlation. The penetrating Emma is, in her turn, penetrated by the arrow of the god of love. And although the arrow flies straight and true, Emma’s recognition of its meaning is obliquely formulated. And once more it appears to her in the form of a negation—as a prohibition, injunction, or interdiction. Emma acknowledges her love for Knightley by, so to speak, backing into it. This admission is followed by another: How unconscionably she has treated Harriet. “How inconsiderate, how indelicate, how irrational, how unfeeling, had been her conduct!” (p. 370). At Box Hill Knightley had reproved her conduct to Miss Bates for its lack of feeling—its hardness and disregard. Now Emma remorsefully does it herself: It isn’t so much that her feelings are inappropriate or misdirected; it is that they aren’t quite there. Emma has already recognized earlier that she is neither tenderhearted nor easily susceptible to the warmer and blinder affections; now she has to realize that there has been an actual absence in her—that she has been unfeeling, armored, indifferent, even more than slightly anesthetized in her responses to life as it appears in the form of other people, and even as it is manifested in herself. Her defenses against emotion, particularly the emotions of sexuality, have been so prepotent that they have warped her intelligence and deformed her perceptions as to what she and other people think and feel.
Emma has a great deal to learn and as much to overcome. Flooded by a “confusion of sudden and perplexing emotions,” by all the “perturbation” brought about by “such a development of self” (p. 371), she must begin to face up to the circumstances of how little she understands about herself, how she has deceived, deluded, duped, and imposed upon herself, and how “totally ignorant of her own heart” and utterly bereft of “knowledge of herself” she has been (p. 371). Her “insufferable vanity” has encouraged her to believe “herself in the secret of everybody’s feelings” and to act with a high hand on such unfounded beliefs. “She was proved to have been universally mistaken” (p. 374). How could she have been anything else when she had such impaired and impoverished communications with her own deeper feelings. Her prolonged flirtation with Frank had been at once an introduction to romantic urgings and sexual impulses, and a contrivance or tactic to keep her feelings about Knightley at a secure distance. She has isolated her intimations of sexual attraction from her deeper affections and love. She has in doing so also disengaged her feelings about both men from each other and has carefully avoided instituting any “comparison” between them in her own affections. In this splitting away of one group of elemental affections from another equally powerful and primitive range of needs and desires, she has adapted herself to a familiar and disabling structural economy of the psyche. She has done so at the cost of inner integration and intelligence and by forfeiting, at least temporarily, her own further evolution. In her long-term resistance to change, it is she who has become fixed.
In this abrupt disclosure of herself to self-examination, it is instructive to observe that Emma never asks herself why she has behaved in this way, why she has done all these strange and even perverse things, what remote causes have impelled her to contrive such strategies. It is sufficient for now, for the time being, that she has perceived this much: “Till now that she was threatened with its loss Emma had never known how much of her happiness depended on being first with Mr. Knightley, first in interest and affection” (p. 376). Repeatedly and again she comes to a larger perception of what she feels by means of negative or contravening ideas and possibilities. It is the prospect of loss, “the dread of being supplanted,” that drives her to realize how dependent she is on Knightley’s attention and love. Nevertheless, she is still ready to settle happily for the “compromise” that Knightley remain “single all his life. Could she be secure of... his never marrying at all, she believed she should be perfectly satisfied. Let him but continue the same Mr. Knightley.... Marriage, in fact, would not do for her. It would be incompatible with what she owed to her father, and with what she felt for him. Nothing should separate her from her father” (p. 377). But she also begins to sense that all this inner palaver is slightly delusionary, as she talks with Mrs. Weston about Frank and Jane and their future together elsewhere, as she thinks about the baby that Mrs. Weston is about to give birth to, and how this new rival will also entail a loss on Emma’s part, and how the most unbearable deprivation of all would be Knightley’s marriage to Harriet. And although she is devastatingly candid about her failings, Emma remains throughout incurably friendly to herself: As she remarks about her mistreatment of Jane, “ ‘this is all to be forgotten.’ ” She forgives the trespasses of others generously and leads the way in forgiving herself. (And as she later remarks to Jane, “ ‘let us forgive each other at once’ ” (p. 416). Her basic trust in her own goodness prompts her to conclude, not without warrant, that when she looks inside herself she is not likely to find anything that is very bad.
She is in need of all her self-propelling goodwill in the episode that follows. It is the great comic scene of misperception, crisis, revelation, reversal, self-confrontation, proposal, and reconciliation between Emma and Knightley. He suspects that Emma is heartbroken over the news about Frank and Jane. (“ ‘Abominable scoundrel.... a disgrace to the name of man’ ” are his memorable eruptions of rivalry [p. 385]). Emma disabuses him and unflinchingly confesses to her vanity in pointlessly extending the flirtation and her folly in becoming so easily Frank’s dupe and his blind (p. 386). They commune over the undeserved good luck of Frank, “the favourite of fortune”; he is able, reflects Knightley, to fulfill every man’s wish, “ ‘to give a woman a better home than the one he takes her from’ ” (p. 388). He speaks of how in one respect he envies Frank, and Emma fears that he is on the point of bringing up Harriet. She thinks of changing the subject, but Knightley forges ahead and says that he must speak even though he may regret it at once. Emma, following her own fever chart of pain and pleasure, eagerly responds: “ ‘Oh, then, don’t speak it.... Take a little time, consider, do not commit yourself’ ” (p. 388). Knightley thanks her hollowly and, mortified, lapses into the deep, unbroken silence of rejection. At this moment, the comedy of errors comes to an end.
Emma could not bear to give him pain. He was wishing to confide in her—perhaps to consult her;—cost her what it would, she would listen. She might assist his resolution, or reconcile him to it; she might give just praise to Harriet, or, by representing to him his own independence, relieve him from that state of indecision, which must be more intolerable than any alternative to such a mind as his....
“I stopped you ungraciously, just now ... and, I am afraid, gave you pain. But if you have any wish to speak openly to me as a friend, or to ask my opinion of any thing that you may have in contemplation ... indeed, you may command me. I will hear whatever you like. I will tell you exactly what I think” (pp. 388-389).
In her exquisitely protracted obtuseness and denial, Emma persists in misreading the signs. But her comic misinterpretation of Knightley’s intentions and remarks is transformed by her sudden sense that by distancing herself from him she has also caused him pain. In her own urgency to avoid what she is convinced is the awful news about Knightley’s passion for Harriet, she has also cut herself off from his confidence
and intimacy. Spontaneously she sacrifices her own peace of mind to relieve Knightley of his pain—which she is causing by not permitting him to speak, though she thoroughly misconceives what it is that he is bursting to say. She will suffer anything, endure any “cost” if it helps him to overcome the terrible state of indecision that she imagines him to be in because, as she believes, he is so reluctant to inflict the pain on her that the revelation about himself and Harriet will incur, the pain of his final turning away from her, and of her final loss of him. And so she says, in effect, Go on, tell me about it. “ ‘I will hear whatever you like’ ” (p. 389). Whatever it may be, I will endeavor to take it. The rest is all surprise and delight—for both of them.
Emma had realized that she was not in love with Frank Churchill because the idea of sacrifice played no part in her thoughts about him or in her projections of the contingencies that a joint future for the two of them might involve. She finds herself more than prepared to make such a sacrifice for Knightley. And yet once more Emma comes upon the disclosure of love in an act that entails loss, pain, and negation. One of the possibilities started by this repeated occurrence focuses on how much Emma has to overcome before she is able actively to open herself to love, before she can commit herself to surrendering to desire and want and hence dependency. But Knightley, pursuing his lovemaking, detours her in an tangential direction. “ ‘You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it. Bear with the truths I would tell you now, dearest Emma, as well as you have borne with them’ ” (p. 389). He all but says, “Emma, you can take it like a man.”xxix And Emma’s busy mind follows this congenial line of explanation “without losing a word,” catching and comprehending “the exact truth of the whole.” The exact truth is succinctly articulated: “ ‘ That Harriet was nothing; that she was every thing herself’ ” (p. 390). Harriet is, after all, a Nobody, a cipher, a zero. And Emma, “everything herself,” is exalted as a young goddess, solitary in her narcissistic splendor and at the same time the central object of the universe—Her majesty the baby, as well as the best beloved of women. She is “first” for both Knightley and her father, “everything” to them and to herself too.xxx
IV
Having gotten this far, the narrator takes a step backward and sideways. “Seldom, very seldom does complete truth belong to any human disclosure.”xxxi Although she is referring literally to Emma’s withholding from Knightley an account of the double delusion of both herself and Harriet, there remains, as is customary with such narratorial comments in Jane Austen, a residue of generalizing extension. For Emma, who has passed from inner distress to “something so like perfect happiness,” has undergone a momentous “change” (p. 391). That change is not yet complete. Emma still cannot marry Knightley “While her dear father lived, any change of condition must be impossible for her.” Knightley agrees that Emma cannot leave her father, nor can Mr. Woodhouse suffer a “transplantation.” His comfort, his very life, would be at hazard. But Knightley can move in with the Woodhouses at Hartfield, which will be his home as long as Mr. Woodhouse lives. This solution turns out to be not merely negotiable but irresistible, and we can bring a long-delayed conclusion forward while unpacking some of its meanings. Knightley has known Emma since she was a child. His closer attention to her dates from her twelfth or thirteenth year. He has been her guide and mentor, the monitor of her conduct and voice of her conscience. He has also, in the absence of any strong, positive personal authority among her intimate family circle, functioned as her ego ideal. He is sixteen years older than she, about the same age as Miss Taylor/Mrs. Weston, who figured for Emma as a loving but insufficiently assertive surrogate mother. He is a surrogate father to Emma, but he is just as much an older, very senior brother and a literal brother-in-law. He might as well be a benevolent uncle, too. He is a whole spectrum of male imagoes wrapped up in one. Although Emma dearly loves her father, Mr. Woodhouse, despite all his sweetness and old-fashioned politeness of manner, is weak, fretful, selfish, and utterly incompetent as a father. What could be more “natural,” then, that Emma, unknown to herself, should want and love a much-improved version of a man so important to her entire life? And what could be more natural as well that she should isolate, conceal, and encapsulate that love, banish it from conscious awareness, since it is so close to violating fundamental taboos?
But Knightley also modulates the blunt force of his masculine identity. In volunteering to live at Hartfield after they are married, he is undertaking to behave in what was conventionally regarded as a woman’s role: He elects symbolically to feminize himself, although we are simultaneously and silently reassured to take heart, for he has plenty of masculinity to spare. Emma realizes that “in quitting Donwell, he must be sacrificing a great deal of independence ... that in living constantly with her father, and in no house of his own, there would be much, very much, to be borne with” (p. 406). She understands very well by now what sacrifice means to her. And although Knightley will have to postpone indefinitely the gratification of giving “ ‘a woman a better home than the one he takes her from’ ” (p. 388), he suffers no anxiety about having to forgo a late-in-life Oedipal triumph, nor is he at all concerned about supplanting Mr. Woodhouse. In short, Emma is succeeding at what was hitherto regarded as impossible. The ill-fated marriage between Mr. Weston and Miss Churchill went wrong, we recall, because of her vain desire “at once to be the wife of Captain Weston, and Miss Churchill of Enscombe” (p. 13). Emma will be at once the wife of Mr. Knightley and Miss Woodhouse of Hartfield. Here we enter upon the grand sweep of wish fulfillments with which the comedy closes. There will be for Emma dramatic change and no change at all. She will have it all.
But having it all brings into account a number of experiences that Emma has also tried not to contemplate. These include sex, babies, illness, and death, the fulfilling and downward curves of the life cycle. Emma is conscious in a semi-distinct way of some of this. For example, her first big quarrel with Knightley—the Harriet-Elton-Martin debacle—is quickly resolved after Isabella and her family arrive for Christmas. Emma senses that she can dispel Knightley’s anger by arranging to meet him with one of Isabella’s children. She chooses “the youngest, a nice little girl about eight months old, who was ... very happy to be danced about in her aunt’s arms.” Knightley’s gravity and reserve melt away, and he is delighted “to take the child out of her arms with all the unceremoniousness of perfect amity” (p. 88). However aware (or otherwise) she may be of what she is doing, Emma’s intuitions in this instance are directly on the mark. Knightley responds to this tableau of Emma and an infant in her arms with his own fantasy (conscious or not) of Emma as the mother of their baby. It helps matters along that this eight-month-old is also named Emma, and we begin to be prepared this early in the narrative for a perpetuation of Emma into the distant future. Knightley then counsels Emma to be “ ‘guided by nature’ ” rather than fancy or whim, and although this sentiment is at the time lost on her, he does go on to check himself and moderate his sternness by reminding himself and Emma that he is sixteen years older than she and has the “advantage” of “ ‘not being a pretty young woman and a spoiled child’ ” (p. 89). They shake hands and make things up.
This theme is recurred to in the grand finale of forgiveness, reconciliation, and resolution. Mrs. Weston is safely delivered of her child, a girl. Emma is delighted by the event, for it is again as if she were being reborn yet once more—Mrs. Weston, after all, took the place of her mother for many years, beginning when Emma was five. She immediately falls silently to planning a match between the newborn infant and little Henry or his brother. And she also imagines the growing young girl caring for Mr. Weston, her father, as he grows older, enlivening her father’s life and her own with “the fancies of a child never banished from home” (p. 417). It is, for a second time, a reduplication of Emma. She is like the first Catherine in Wuthering Heights, preparing herself for immort
ality while beginning to contemplate, with some seriousness, her actual mortality. As she imagines the happy life before herself and Knightley, she must also take other matters into account: “Such a companion for herself in the periods of anxiety and cheerlessness before her! Such a partner in all those duties and cares to which time must be giving increase of melancholy!” (p. 407). It is not only the decline and death of her father that she must be prepared for. It is the dangers of childbirth and of infant and maternal mortality, both of which were ever-present and almost daily perils in Jane Austen’s time, and to both of which her life and letters bear full testimony. xxxii
Emma will go on imagining, matchmaking, and amusing herself. Redeemed but by no means entirely regenerate, she will persist as what she is: lively, willful, difficult, self-referring, complicated, resistant, and stubborn. She did not want to marry, and her married life with Knightley will be strenuous with minor differences. It will not be like the marriage of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, which is based on the full-blooded chemistry of youth, physical beauty, and sexual passion. Emma retains her ambivalence along with her desires to dominate, lead, and exercise her personal gifts and powers. In her masterpiece, Jane Austen created a social world in which a number of lines of conflict, dissonance, and contradiction are foregrounded, and a heroine of whom something similar may be claimed. If she was not able to transcend and resolve such differences and discords, she gave expression to them in a memorable narrative structure and the dramatic and inward representation of a heroine so full and rich and inexhaustible that they may be equaled, but it is unlikely that they will be surpassed.
