Emma (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (11 page)

When Frank rescues Harriet from the gypsies, Emma happily succumbs to her fantasy-work again. She feels “on fire with speculation and foresight!—especially with such a ground-work of anticipation as her mind had already made.” In her heightened state, she thinks of what she is doing as analogous to the activities of “a linguist... a grammarian ... even a mathematician” (p. 303). These occupations have in common a concern with language, with codes and encryptions, with the interpretation of symbols, and with formulae that conjure up other worlds. She thinks of herself as “an imaginist,” and this arresting coinage suggests her shadow or secondary identity as a crypto- or pseudo-novelist, a proto-novelist, or novelist
manqué.
But she is also a constructivist and fantasticator—she simply makes things up, but considers such fabrications on her part as clever and penetrating interpretations.
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When it comes to matters of romance and adventure, her readings, despite her cleverness, are almost always wrong. Some unacknowledged source in her, some embedded contrariety of wishes, feelings, desires, and ideas, distorts her perceptions and judgments, the faculties of intelligence on which she sets particularly high store. This unresolved or unintegrated mental state impels her to perceive falsely what isn’t there (invention in this context is a failure of imagination) and to further deny or misperceive what is staring her in the face. The upshot is that she repeatedly substitutes unmoored fantasy for imaginative inference or genuine interpretation.

Emma had determined quite early that she was not in love with Frank Churchill. After he departs from Highbury, “she could not admit herself to be unhappy.” And although she continues to day-dream about herself and Frank,

Admirable to a fault. And yet she continues to flirt with Frank long after she has come to this conclusion. She does so partly out of tedium—or the lack of anything more purposeful for her to do—partly out of mischievous high spirits, and partly, I suspect, out of her rivalrous dislike for Jane Fairfax. She continues to do so right up to the breaking point, which occurs at Box Hill.

The excursion begins and ends badly. Out of doors, the party disperses and never gets back together in either physical or social senses. There is no concord but only separateness and estrangement among the members of the outing. Even Frank is “silent ... stupid ... and dull,” at least in Emma’s eyes. Eventually he becomes talkative by turning to Emma and flirting with her intensely, openly, “and excessively.” Although to Emma this now “meant nothing,” she nonetheless responds in kind. At the same time, she is aware of a counter-tendency in herself. “Not that Emma was gay and thoughtless from any real felicity; it was rather because she felt less happy than she had expected. She laughed because she was disappointed” (p. 334). They exchange sallies of wit, and Emma comments that Frank is currently in “command” of his temper, although he had not been the day before at Donwell Abbey, where his behavior had “ ‘broken bounds.’ ” He then turns to the sulky and silent gathering, and “with lively impudence” tries to get them talking; he announces that Emma, as the presiding presence, “ ‘desires to know what you are all thinking of.’ ” Among the mixed replies is Knightley’s query whether Emma is really sure that she wants to know this. Emma at once answers, laughingly, of course not: “ ‘It is the very last thing I would stand the brunt of just now. Let me hear any thing rather than what you are all thinking of’ ” (p. 335).

Mrs. Elton is incoherently affronted, as are some others, so Frank changes his tack and proclaims that Emma wants instead to hear from each of them one “very clever” thing, or two “things moderately clever,” or “‘three things very dull indeed.’ ” Miss Bates, with her eternal humility and good humor, observes that this is just right for her, for as soon as she opens her mouth three dull things will surely pop out. “Emma could not resist. ‘Ah! ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me—but you will be limited as to number,—only three at once’ ” (p. 336). Miss Bates does not at first get it, but she does a double take, and is clearly hurt, and says to Knightley that she must really “ ‘make myself very disagreeable, or she would not have said such a thing to an old friend’ ” (p. 336). Emma has been teasing Frank about losing his “self-command,” but it is she who cannot control herself and lets herself go in order to turn a cruel piece of wit, in order not to pass up a one-liner.
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It was Emma who said that she did not want to hear what people were thinking, but it is she who gives uncensored expression to her private and hypercritical opinion of Miss Bates. Instead of talking to herself as she customarily does, Emma has turned off that inner interlocutor, and out has come frigid wit and withering resentment and aggression. Catastrophe.

The party continues to fall apart. Mr. Weston makes a well-meaning ass of himself, Mrs. Elton carries on as usual, and Frank goes on in his deplorable way. (At this point, Jane silently decides to pack it in and go for martyrdom as a governess.) The party breaks up as raggedly as it began. As Emma is waiting for her carriage, Knightley comes up to her and, seeing that they are alone, lets her have it. “ ‘How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation? Emma, I had not thought it possible’ ” (p. 340). Emma at first tries to “laugh it off,” but Knightley pursues her relentlessly and advances a full bill of particulars about Miss Bates and Emma that is both irresistible and crushing. For Miss Bates does represent a principle; in Emma’s mistreatment of her, the personal and the moral, the social and the cultural-political, are fused. Emma is for once utterly silenced.

She feels virtually undone. She weeps uncontrollably almost all the way home. She is “agitated, mortified, grieved” as never before. For the first time she really feels guilt about something she has done. She cannot shrug it off, nor will she feel better about it later on. “The truth of his [Knightley’s] representation there was no denying. She felt it at her heart. How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to Miss Bates!” (p. 341). What Knightley has said is
true.
How does she
know
that it is true? How do we? Because she
feels
it “at her heart.” It is a feeling cognition, a knowledge made possible and ratified by the emotions that accompany and are inseparable from it. It bears witness to its own truth by the depth of feeling to which it penetrates, which it disturbs and stirs. It is an axiom in philosophy being proved upon the pulses. Here Jane Austen joins the company of the great romantics, of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats.

From this moment onward the language that Emma uses about herself changes—the leading or operating words now become warmth, heart, feeling, open, contrition, and a cluster of related idioms. Knightley’s reprimand has been so sharp and fundamental, so drastically true, that Emma feels imperiled. It is almost as if he had threatened to expel Emma from her privileged place in his life and affections. Emma’s inner evolution and the movement of the narrative, the structural falling into place of narrative detail, now rapidly accelerate. It immediately follows that Mrs. Churchill expires and that the engagement of Frank and Jane is almost simultaneously revealed. Emma has been entirely taken in, and at first she feels general outrage. Mrs. Weston, who breaks the news to her, sympathetically reminds Emma that the two lovers must both have suffered greatly “ ‘under such a system of secresy and concealment.’ ” Emma is not quite forthcoming in her well-wishes, especially when she thinks of her inventions about Mr. Dixon, and she improves upon Mrs. Weston’s account by declaring the whole complication or imbroglio

Emma, as they say, goes over the top. The language that she finds to describe Frank and Jane’s secret engagement would be more appropriate if it were applied to the Gunpowder Plot or the French Revolution. She is of course blowing off steam, but the words that first occur to her describe a capital crime, as if England itself were being betrayed. But the speech is also theatrical, and Emma’s hyperbolic ranting is slightly farcical. It was bad behavior, to be sure, but it was neither fatal nor unforgivable—in
Emma
only illness is fatal.

Emma turns this same language on herself. When she reflects on her friendly offer to take the ailing Jane for a carriage-ride and on her sending arrowroot to comfort her—both of which amicable gestures were turned down—it now appears to her that “an airing in the Hartfield carriage would have been the rack, and arrow-root from the Hartfield store-room must have been poison” (p. 366). We are now dealing with a tragedy-queen, and Emma’s observations on her own role in this drama is accordingly elevated.

When Jane Austen was fifteen she wrote a short, satirical history of England. She regarded Queen Elizabeth with detestation and called her “that disgrace to humanity, that pest of society.” Her persecution, confinement, and execution of Mary Queen of Scots who was guilty of nothing more “than Imprudencies into which she was betrayed by the openness of her Heart, her Youth, and her Education,” is a shadowed anticipation of Emma’s description of how she has abused poor Jane.
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Emma still has miles to go before she can catch up with herself. She thinks immediately of “ ‘poor Harriet,’ ” who has been the continued object of yet another of Emma’s fantasticated manipulations. She thinks of Harriet and is angry with Frank. “Frank Churchill had behaved very ill by herself [that is, Emma]—very ill in many ways,—but it was not so much
his
behaviour as her
own,
which made her so angry with him” (p. 365). This is a neat instance of double-entry moral bookkeeping. Emma then turns to confess her culpability to Harriet, who has already learned the news from Mr. Weston. Harriet believes that Emma “ ‘can see into everybody’s heart,’ ” but Emma is rapidly learning that she has seen into no one’s heart, least of all her own.

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

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.