Emma (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (10 page)

It is notable that Jane Austen, in common with the other great novelists of the nineteenth century, resists ascribing certainty and inevitability to the narrativized social and historical world of her novels. That world, despite its textual inhabitation of the unalterable past tense, is also comparatively open and unpredictable—the future before it is uncertain, occluded, and contingent. The characters in it make choices that are “real” in the sense that they are neither predetermined, inescapable, nor uniformly irrevocable. The obverse can also be true. Hence no sooner does Emma begin, quite validly, to complain about absolute fixity than the narrator also begins to undermine not merely the “absolutely” but the “fixed” as well. The great novelists had the capacity of representing contemporary life as being simultaneously comparatively stable and yet charged with the tension and threat of the eruption of immanent antagonistic forces. These unresolved antagonisms find partial expression in the less-than-coherent utterances, attitudes, and assertions of principle, along with their contraventions, that the characters in
Emma
—most notably Emma herself—meaningfully but unconsciously dramatize.

Once Emma has made this admission of being limited and “fixed” to herself, she is prepared to try out the attitude it leads to. Mrs. Weston informs her that Frank Churchill has had to postpone his maiden trip to Highbury. Emma in turn announces this news to Knightley, and “proceed[s] to say a good deal more than she [feels] of the advantage of such an addition to their confined society in Surrey” (p. 130). Her attitude toward change is so compromised that two pages after her lamentation about their being absolutely fixed she has to pump herself up to express pleasure at the idea of a newcomer to their world. Yet even Mr. Woodhouse, who embodies the principle of stasis and immobility, is able, when the Bateses are being discussed, of expressing himself to the effect that “ ‘It is a great pity that their circumstances should be so confined’ ”(p. 155). And Mrs. Weston comments on Jane’s accepting of the Eltons’ invitation along the same line:

And when Emma at Donwell Abbey suddenly runs into Jane, she observes “a look of escape” in her expression (p. 329). Jane is indeed narratively conceived of as one of the candidates for absolute fixity, and her situation is compared not merely to that of a nun or a slave but to that of a prisoner as well.

Frank Churchill, whose path through life is marked by a progression toward increasing amplitude and latitude of choice, complains steadily about narrowness, tedium, and restriction. As for life at Enscombe, the considerable estate in Yorkshire, he tells Emma that “there was very little going on.” Mrs. Churchill’s alleged ill health and her general social indisposition result in their making “a point of visiting no fresh person.” Frank has wanted very much to travel, “to go abroad.” But Mrs. Churchill “would not hear of it.”
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She keeps him on a short leash, largely, we are led to conclude, for her own convenience. But Frank’s youthfulness is also expressed in impatience and impulsiveness. “ ‘Ah! that ball!—why did we wait for any thing?—why not seize the pleasure at once?—How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!’” (p. 233). When he drives off to London for a haircut, Emma primly comments to herself: “Vanity, extravagance, love of change, restlessness of temper, which must be doing something, good or bad” (p. 186). At Donwell Abbey, where Frank joins the group late, hot, and in ill humor, matters begin rapidly to come to a head. Frank again expresses his restless need to go abroad: “ ‘I ought to travel. I am tired of doing nothing. I want a change.... I am sick of England—and would leave it to-morrow, if I could’ ” (p. 331). This passage comes almost immediately after Emma’s (or the narrator’s) reflections on “English culture, English comfort,” and the juxtaposition itself renders the critical point.

But Emma herself can also feel the genuine need for something new. When the Westons know that Frank is finally coming to visit, Emma sincerely “rejoice [d] in their joy. It was a most delightful reanimation of exhausted spirits. The worn-out past was sunk in the freshness of what was coming” (p. 171). And Emma’s vivacity and energy require forms of expression. One such means is dancing—she loves to feel “the felicities of rapid motion” (p. 222). She may be confined, but she is not sedentary. As spring ripens into summer, the “state of schemes, and hopes, and connivance” continue to move at Hartfield—that is to say they continue to germinate and bubble in Emma’s head. As to “Highbury, in general, it brought no material change” (p. 312). Emma’s aversion to innovation has not deterred her from introducing a “large modern circular table ... which none but Emma could have had power to place there and persuade her father to use, instead of the small sized Pembroke, on which two of his daily meals had, for forty years, been crowded” (p. 315). In the cause of middle-class comfort Emma has brought in a table at which there is no “natural” head. Comfort has trumped inconvenience, even though rank has been bypassed.
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Nevertheless, such narrative details serve to point toward the sub-textual conflict and ambivalence in which for most of the novel Emma is suspended.

One partial representation of this state of mind occurs when Emma accompanies Harriet to Ford’s, the village’s combined drapery shop and haberdashery. While Harriet is “hanging over muslins” and being indecisive

It is one of Jane Austen’s incomparable passages. In it Emma is represented in close alignment with her creator—both of them being simultaneously at this juncture “imaginists.” Emma is only occasionally bored; the workings of her own mind are frequently a source of amusement to her. The world of Highbury is pretty “fixed” when it comes to action or novelty. The “liveliest objects” Emma can imagine are fragments of ordinary movement; even these are more endowed with vitality than what she does actually see. She imagines an ordinary social scene, and then she perceives another one. The narrator is imagining Emma doing both—and both (along with the counterpart activity of the narrator herself) are represented on the level of the narrative as epistemologically equivalent. On this plane of metafictional discourse there is neither difference nor distinction between perception and imagination. The narrator, to be sure, is creatively in charge of both processes. Emma, who can complain about being “absolutely fixed,” is both amused and content with what she has imagined and what she perceives. She herself, “still to stand,” becomes for the moment fixed as well. Yet her mind is “lively,” active, self-sustaining, at ease with itself. It sees nothing but makes something out of it—“seeing nothing” itself becomes the source of mental activity and pleasure. And nothing, including everything in the perceived world, answers—answers back, responds. At this moment, Emma, like her creator, is at home in the world. Their minds and the perceived/imagined universe are represented as naturally yet miraculously fitting together.

But the forces of change are as relentless in their urgings as the countervailing impulses that gravitate toward stability and solidity. And this complication bears upon Emma’s personal destiny as well as on the social world represented in
Emma
with such deftness and economy. How is Jane Austen going to get Emma to move off the dime on which she pirouettes while going nowhere?

Emma is averse to change; she vows never to marry; she cannot envision leaving her father and their home; she is obsessed with reveries of matchmaking, and projects imaginary romantic engagements and marital entanglements, for others, among the people she knows and doesn’t know (Mr. Dixon, for example). She largely ignores, avoids, and bypasses questions of sex; she explicitly rejects the idea of her having babies, and her idea of her own future is vaguely specified.

At the same time she wants to be “first” in the eyes of an admiring world, particularly of the men in it. Yet she blinds herself to Elton’s patent sexual designs on her until it is too late for her to recover anything. She embarks upon a semi-serious flirtation with Frank Churchill and sustains it far beyond the point where it yields her pleasure, and almost, indeed, to the very end. Her management of this flirtation is such that she keeps Frank always at arms’ length. Moreover, when Frank is on the verge of confessing to her about his engagement to Jane (believing that Emma, with her famous powers of penetration, has seen through their pretense) she prepares herself to withstand a proposal to herself (p. 262) . How she behaves in the Frank-Jane-Emma triangle is the unbecoming inversion of her even more unseemly procedures in the Elton-Emma-Harriet confusion.

At the Coles’ dinner-party, when Mrs. Weston reveals to Emma her “discovery” that Knightley is very attracted to Jane, Emma goes into a protracted flap of consternation (I have cited part of this aria-like flurry earlier):

A better defense by denial might be difficult to locate. And shortly thereafter when Frank and Jane make music together, when Emma hears “the sweet sounds of the united voices,” Emma can only think of babies, of “a most mortifying change” in which little Henry would be ejected as “the heir of Donwell” (p. 206). Frank and Jane are expressing themselves erotically before her, but Emma, deaf and blind to what is obvious, displaces her response onto the unacceptable, abhorrent fantasy of Knightley and Jane producing at least one male baby while she continues to repudiate, as far as she herself is concerned, any personal connection with such affairs.

In fact, Emma seems at least on one occasion not to be on the easiest terms with her body. When the heated discussion about where to hold a ball gets underway, Mr. Woodhouse has a panic about drafts, and Emma is concerned with adequate space in which to dance. “ ‘It would be dreadful to be standing so close. Nothing can be farther from pleasure than to be dancing in a crowd—and a crowd in a little room’ ” (p. 224). Emma loves to dance, and Mrs. Weston, “capital in her country-dances,” is seated, and a waltz is beginning. Frank Churchill takes Emma’s hand “and [leads] her up to the top” (p. 207); the dance itself, however, seems less a combination of the two styles than a British domestication of the still notorious waltz. It is in any case not to be confused with the sexual arousal and turmoil reportedly induced by the waltz and represented as such by Goethe, in
The Sorrows of Young Werther
(1774), by Byron in
The Waltz: An Apostrophic Hymn
(1813), and in the testimony of numberless others.

Similarly Emma’s response to Harriet is also in part deflected. She is at first attracted to Harriet “on account of her beauty.” Harriet’s lovely good looks “happened to be of a sort which Emma particularly admired. She was short, plump, and fair, with a fine bloom, blue eyes, light hair, regular features, and a look of great sweetness.” And Emma spends the evening “admiring those soft blue eyes” (p. 20). In recent years a number of feminist and gay commentators have taken such remarks (along with others) to suggest a lesbian interest on the part of Emma and Jane Austen. Whatever the merit of this contention (and I believe that there is quite a bit of merit to it), it seems to me that Emma’s warm response to Harriet is also an expression of her suspended state of affective development and of her narcissism.
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In being physically attracted to Harriet, she is in effect also admiring and arousing herself. For Harriet throughout the novel functions as Emma’s sexual stand-in. Her imaginings juxtapose Harriet sexually with the available but, for her, socially ineligible men in the novel—EIton, Frank, Knightley—while Harriet’s one real opportunity, Robert Martin, is fiercely embargoed by Emma herself.

When Frank has to leave Highbury to attend to the caprices of his sick aunt, Emma reflects that Frank has
“almost
told her that he loved her” and that this persuasion, plus everything else,

Knightley’s remark early on that Emma has never been in love was closer to home than even he might have reckoned. Emma feels let down after two exciting weeks, and she is also for the moment bored and at loose ends. That she mistakes boredom and momentary tedium for being in love suggests to us where she is. Her imagination of being in love at this moment intimates some negative inner state, some condition that compounds loss, frustration, and disappointment. It does not propose the ardent desire and yearning for the object, for the presence of another, that we ordinarily associate with romantic love. That desire and longing Emma tends to regard as “mania,” which is how she describes Harriet’s infatuation with Elton (p. 304) .