Emma (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (5 page)

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:

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 town
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had 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.”

Only she is capable of reminding them of their proper place and of the propriety of their staying fixed in that station. In the event, however, both Knightley and the Westons (along with almost everyone else Emma is friendly with) are invited and accept, but no invitation arrives for the Woodhouses. Mrs. Weston’s consoling effort to account for the omission—“ ‘I suppose they will not take the liberty with you; they know you do not dine out,’ ”—makes no dent on the disappointed, disgruntled, and offended Emma. “She felt that she should like to have had the power of refusal.” And the presence of all her friends and the possibility of after-dinner dancing leave her paradoxically stranded: “Her being left in solitary grandeur, even supposing the omission to be intended as a compliment, was but poor comfort” (p. 188).

It turns out that the invitation arrives belatedly. And though Emma at once declares “ ‘of course it must be declined,’ ” she just as quickly asks the Westons “what they advised her to do ... their advice for her going was most prompt and successful.” The final ironic rub is delivered in the Coles’ explanation for the delayed arrival of the invitation. They had been “waiting the arrival of a folding-screen from London, which they hoped might keep Mr. Woodhouse from any draught of air, and therefore induce him the more readily to give them the honour of his company” (p. 189). Emma is obliged to admit that the Coles have “expressed themselves so properly,” that there was “so much real attention in the manner” of their explanation and “so much consideration for her father,” that she allows the Westons to “persuade” her of what she has already decided to do. And it is unmistakably not the Coles’ prose (let alone the Westons’ eloquence) that has done it, but Emma’s desire not to high-hat herself out of a pleasant, sociable, and even possibly exciting evening.

There is an unpleasantly tough, hard, and callous streak running through Emma’s character; that hardness is expressed in her snobbery and in a number of her other social responses. But it is expressed as well in her attitudes toward marriage. As Knightley first observes, Emma has never been in love: Despite her matchmaking impulsion, she has no experience of romantic or sexual love and hence can know little about it. Emma concurs, but takes the account one step further: “ ‘I never have been in love: it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall’ ” (p. 76). This is another of her declarative certitudes that is bound to be falsified. What is implied in this utterance, among much else, is that Emma has thus far in her young life only been in love with herself; or to rotate the formulation slightly, she has never yet fallen out of favor with herself. She has still to experience that abrupt precipitation into passionate dependency that is one of the genuine markers of sexual, romantic love. She conflates the economic dependency (and humiliation) of Miss Bates and her family with dependency in general and claims that her own, Emma’s, immunity from poverty will be sufficient to keep or preserve her “ ‘as sensible and pleasant as any body else’ ” (p. 77).

But Emma is “clever” and knows that as an unmarried woman she will not have “objects for the affections” that only marriage can supply. One thinks, almost naturally, of a husband, a mate, and an intimate companion, and then of children. But Emma makes it quite clear that she has isolated and distanced the idea of a husband and is thinking only about babies and children when she refers to objects of interest and objects for the affections. Moreover, she has prepared a line of defense against that deprivation. She will be the loving aunt of her sister’s children.

As it frequently happens with Emma, smugness and self-conceit consort with genuine, telling insight into herself. At the age of twenty, Emma is speaking with fatuous confidence about “declining life” and referring with gnomic compression to “every fear.” But she also brings forward the notion of comfort, which refers in this novel to a broad range of meanings—in this instance, to an inner state, a state of the emotions in which ease, equilibrium, and relaxation are foregrounded. “Warmer” will figure with increasingly manifest sense in the latter part of the narrative. And “blinder” also refers to another matrix of ideas. Emma will repeatedly indict herself for blindness, meaning self-deception, misreading, and misinterpreting. But she will also accuse Frank Churchill of using his extended flirtation with her as

She was, and then again she wasn’t. Emma, who regards herself as sharp-eyed and penetrating, has been both used and blinded (or deceived) by Frank. Love is blind, so it is said.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
is one of Shakespeare’s comedies that Jane Austen seems to have had in mind when she was writing, in
Emma,
about multiple deceptions, mismatches, and gross errors of perception. “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind” (act 1, scene 1). And Cupid figures as one of the possible answers to the riddle that begins, “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid.” Cupid turns out not to be the correct answer, but the riddle itself is laden with references to love—that is, to sex—and its likely injurious consequences for health.
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When Elton is about to return to Highbury, bringing his bride with him, Emma observes that Harriet is still repining over her loss. In order, as she believes, to jolt Harriet out of her fruitless moping, Emma cleverly and not very scrupulously or subtly accuses her of ingratitude. Harriet is duly shocked and falls all over herself in hyperbolic protestations to Emma of love, thankfulness, and subservience. Emma’s self-conceit is touched, and as Harriet leaves, she silently reflects that “she had never loved Harriet so well, nor valued her affection so highly before.” She then gives herself a “serious” talking-to.

This splendid passage characteristically welds together Emma’s acute, if momentary, sense of personal shortcoming with her contrived, sustained self-bamboozlement. It is not an either/or proposition, as if one might conceivably make an exchange of one for the other—it never is. Emma’s supposed “clearness of head” also includes her cloudy pipe dreams of glorious triangularities; “for attraction” begins a detour that takes her away from her temporary, dispassionate self-analysis; and Isabella’s popularity is, as far as the text bears evidence, an assertion concocted out of pure wind. Nevertheless, she has touched on a sensitive if not excessively painful spot. Warmth and tenderness of heart are what she recognizes as being missing or undeveloped parts of her being. In other words, there is something inadequate or defective in her affections—her emotions or affects, as we would rather portentously say today. If for her Jane Fairfax embodies “coldness,” then Emma, even in her own estimation, is definitely cool. In other words, she may have to change, perhaps even to grow up. How such a development is to be brought about is a consideration that we will defer for the present.

If we examine Jane Austen’s detailed representation of the society in which she sets
Emma,
one of the things that is likely to strike us as readers almost two hundred years later is that for all its traditional rural inertia, the local social world of this narrative and the larger world that is its context are in the course of going through complex, uneven, and even contradictory processes of change. The era of European-wide wars brought on by the epoch-making French Revolution, and its Napoleonic succession is coming to a final end. In Britain the sense of national emergency has subsided; restrictions on such activities as travel to the Continent have been lifted, and a bumpy and unpredictable transition to a peacetime yet rapidly changing economy has begun to set in.

Highbury itself, where all the dramatized action of the novel takes place, is a “large and populous village, almost amounting to a town” (p. 5). Such a description seems to suggest growth and increase. And when Frank Churchill is first introduced to this local scene, he notes that it appears “airy, cheerful, happy-looking.” He has his own reasons for producing this characterization, but he and his companions make their first pause