Emma (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (7 page)

Emma admits that although legally Harriet is a “Nobody” there can be no doubt that her father is both a gentleman and rich, thereby providing her with everything that Emma believes she needs. She and Knightley have a regular verbal brawl, with Knightley landing the best blows, and Emma “playfully” and energetically defending a bad cause. A number of slippery and disputable terms have also been put into play: yeomanry, gentleman-farmer, Nobody, gentility.

A recollection or recurrence of this spirited exchange takes place toward the end. Knightley, this time unbeknown to Emma, has “interfered,” has taken charge of the matchmaking, and has arranged for a meeting of Harriet and Martin in London; Martin has again proposed and this time been accepted. And this time Knightley breaks the news to Emma, although he is unduly anxious that she will still be adamantly opposed. He now calls Martin “ ‘my friend Robert.’ ” In his solicitude toward Emma, Knightly acknowledges that—

Martin’s character remains unblemished. His place or status in an inherited, customary social hierarchy is a circumstance that Knightley would like to change but cannot. Knightley would, in this instance, be happy to depart from the social regime of a market economy that in its turn is embedded in and constrained by a traditional, semi-feudal order of ranking. This disposition of legitimate authority allows for gradual, progressive change and the rising of worthy persons through the traditional grades or categories: from farmer to gentleman-farmer to bona fide gentleman. Knightley would be willing, for Robert Martin, to bypass the noninterference policy that guides doctrinally the social economy of a market-driven system, which has in turn been mixed into a supervening context of historical, inherited socio-political institutions. It would be close to violating his ideological principles (he has, ironically, already done so in masterminding the match of Martin and Harriet), and he would if he could, but he can’t.
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Still he relies as much on Martin as he does on his steward, William Larkins (along with Martin, one of the considerable group of enumerated and significant symbolically silent characters in
Emma) .
The laughter that Knightley refers to has to do with Larkins giving Knightley “permission” to keep back some extra apples (which he will doubtless give away), but the purport of his remark is that he depends on Martin and that his tenant’s Abbey-Mill Farm and Knightley’s home farm are connected by more than geographical proximity. In sum, the shiftings and irregularities or inconsistencies that are observable in Emma’s and Knightley’s statements about Robert Martin are refractions from an actual historical world of social changes and contradictions.

The Bates family is a counterpart to Weston and Martin, but going in the opposite direction. (As George Orwell described his own Anglo-Indian family, they are downstarts.) Mrs. Bates is the very old widow of “a former vicar of Highbury.” While Mr. Bates was alive, we are prompted to assume, the family occupied the same social position as Mr. and Mrs. Elton. But the defunct vicar left his family in a very poor way, almost without resources. Miss Bates, the unmarried daughter, is neither young, handsome, clever, or rich.
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She takes care of her “failing” parent and also does whatever she can for her niece, Jane Fairfax, the orphaned child of a sister—and also as good as penniless. Miss Bates is all goodwill and “contented temper,” simplicity and cheerfulness, “a recommendation to every body, and a mine of felicity to herself” (p. 18). She is a lesson in Christian acceptance and gladness and buoyancy in the midst of adversity and loss. She keeps herself spiritually afloat through an endless stream of talk, gossip, and scattered recollections. Her uninterrupted and harmless monologues form her chief defense against the poverty, emptiness, and subordination into which the family has descended.

The Bateses live in Highbury itself, in a house belonging to “people in business.” They rent two rooms up a flight of stairs, and “love to be called on” and included in almost any social occasion. They are dependent on Knightley and the Woodhouses for little luxuries of meat and fruit. Although they are in constant danger of falling through the cracks in the economic floor, their secure and well-cared-for neighbors undertake to support them through marginal assistance and by involving them in communal life by means of steady invitations and visits. Emma has been negligent in her attentions to them, and she is aware that she has behaved grudgingly and as “not contributing what she ought to the stock of their scanty comforts” (p. 139). Both Knightley, her external conscience, and “her own heart” have tweaked her over such “deficiency,” but Emma cannot overcome her distaste for applying herself to what is self-evidently her duty (the performance of what used to be called duty was unvaryingly unpleasant). It was to her all “very disagreeable,—a waste of time—tiresome women—and all the horror of being in danger of falling in with the second rate and third rate of Highbury, who were calling on them for ever, and therefore she seldom went near them” (p. 139). Emma regards genteel poverty as spiritually sordid and even contaminating. She also forgets that as the family of a clergyman, the Bateses were perforce well acquainted with the fourth and fifth rate as well, though perhaps not as friendly callers. The point is that there is no social safety net strung beneath the Bates women (or anyone else). They are the dependent objects of charity administered personally by members of their own social rank and local neighborhood; and Miss Bates’ Christian denials and self-denials as well as her mother’s fortuitous insensibility act as buffers against the perpetual abradings of their middle-class sensibilities that poverty and dependency remorselessly inflict. Jane Fairfax, by contrast, handsome, clever, and poor, is rubbed raw by these circumstances. And it is no surprise that Emma’s surpassing act of thoughtless cruelty, hardness, and irresponsibility should be dramatized in the personal insult she delivers, in the form of a witty remark, to Miss Bates in public, and within the hearing of others.

The Bates women are, then, illustrations of counter-tendencies in the inclusive representation of the social world in
Emma.
They are casualties of the larger circumstances of change and accident that move almost everyone in this novel around. The arc of Jane Fairfax’s life and fortune traces out one of the social movements taken by these underlying forces of inscrutable complexity. She is the orphaned niece and granddaughter of her two surviving relatives. Her father was a lieutenant of infantry who died “in action abroad.” Her mother sank “under consumption and grief soon afterwards” (p. 147). She has inherited from her mother a disposition that is easily upset and susceptible to suffering, as well as a delicate and unstable physical constitution (unlike Emma) . She became at the age of three “the fondling of her grandmother and aunt,” and in their reduced and straitened situation there appeared to be “every possibility of her being permanently fixed there,” with scanty means and no advantages of “connection or improvement.” A former fellow officer of her dead father, Colonel Campbell, who felt much indebted to him, returned eventually to England and sought out the orphaned girl. Married and with one daughter Jane’s age, he took Jane up and assumed responsibility for her education. She became part of his family and “had lived with them entirely, only visiting her grandmother from time to time” (p. 148). She is another one of the homeless people among the population of
Emma.

But Colonel Campbell’s fortune was no more than “moderate,” and so Jane was prepared by means of her excellent education to earn a “respectable subsistence hereafter” (p. 148). Her “heart and understanding had received every advantage of discipline and culture.” As she approaches majority she has become an elegant, cultivated, and accomplished young woman, “qualified for the care of children, fully competent to the office of instruction herself’ (p. 148). An evil future looms ahead of her, since she will as a governess enter into a situation of semi-permanent homelessness. She will also descend in status—a gentlewoman, educated but without means, enters a respectable, affluent family to be employed, ambiguously, as a semi-member of the family who is also an upper servant. Her companionship and deep friendship with Miss Campbell continue until ”that chance, that luck which so often defies anticipation in matrimonial affairs,” leads Miss Campbell (rather than the superior Jane) to engage the affections of a rich young man and finds herself ,“ happily settled,” while Jane,“ had yet her bread to earn.,”And so with ”the fortitude of a devoted noviciate, she had resolved at one-and-twenty to complete the sacrifice, and retire from all the pleasures of life, of rational intercourse, equal society, peace and hope, to penance and mortification for ever,” (p. 149). There is some question of how we are to take such a passage. Are we to read it in the sense that Emma’s avowal never to marry is to be read? We are persuaded that Emma will eventually marry—heroines who are handsome, clever, and rich almost invariably do. The question of interest in this connection is how Emma will find her way toward deciding to marry, how she will change, grow, and develop so that marriage becomes not merely her contingent but her appropriate, indeed her inevitable choice. I do not think that the passage about Jane is ironic in quite that way. There is nothing playful about Jane; she is straight and sober all the way. She thinks of herself as a nun entering a convent and sealing herself away from ampler life, resolved to do penance for the sin of poverty and to mortify herself for having desired to live fully, in accordance with her personal possibilities and gifts, as well as her desires. Later on, she compares the employment offices for governesses in London to slave markets: ” ‘offices for the sale, not quite of human flesh, but of human intellect“’ (p. 269). She feels acutely that she is a victim of a mysterious and far from benevolent set of forces.

This cheerless prospect is suddenly lightened; chance leads her to meet Frank Churchill at a seaside resort and watering hole. The two fall quickly and deeply in love, and Frank, in his youthful and passionate impulsiveness, successfully importunes her to undertake a secret engagement. This agreement, in violation of the protocols that governed courtship among the upper orders at the time, weighs heavily on Jane’s sense of propriety and acceptable conduct. The two lovers have also agreed to conduct a secret correspondence, and this covert behavior, along with the deception of others that it unavoidably involves, adds to the stress and constraint, the recessiveness and “restraint” that is so notable a feature of Jane’s manner of conducting herself. Her burdens are only made heavier by Emma’s dislike, envy, and rivalry, and by Frank’s impossible behavior when he comes to Highbury—he doesn’t even tell her that it is he who has bought the piano for her. As a crowning imposition of misery, Jane has been “taken over” by Mrs. Elton, who with sadistic glee keeps urging her to get on with it and allow Mrs. Elton to procure for her a “superior” situation, among her acquaintances near Bristol, as a governess.
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It is no wonder that Jane’s health begins to break down, her nerves to crack, and her composure to falter. She is rescued from being ground up by the forces of social circumstance, which also propel social change, only through the intervening exigencies of comic conventions, including the comic plot.

In
Emma
Jane Austen enlarges her social imagination in the direction of downward inclusiveness. When Emma takes Harriet along with her to visit a “poor sick family,” she is on a mission of charitable obligation and behaves with compassion and tact. She gives relief to these poor people in the form of money, along with her “personal attention and kindness.” She enters into “their troubles with ready sympathy” but does not idealize them; she could “allow for their ignorance and their temptations, had no romantic expectations of extraordinary virtue from those for whom education had done so little” (p. 78). As they leave the cottage, she moralizes to Harriet to the effect that such scenes serve to restore one’s sense of moral proportion; they make everything else appear “trifling.” At the moment, her consciousness is flooded with impressions brought about by squalor and misery; and, she goes on, she feels as if she could think about “ ‘these poor creatures all the rest of the day; and yet, who can say how soon it may all vanish from my mind?’ ” This morsel of easily won and easily understood self-critical reflection is parroted by Harriet, and Emma then proceeds to assert that she does not think “ ‘the impression will soon be over.’ ” She offers this self-correction as “she crossed the low hedge, and tottering footstep which ended the narrow, slippery path through the cottage garden.” Emma then repeats herself once again, as she pauses “to look once more at all the outward wretchedness of the place, and recall the still greater within” (p. 78).

As they walk down the lane, Mr. Elton appears, and Emma realizes that her “stability in good thoughts” is about to vanish. But, she resiliently continues, “ ‘If we feel for the wretched, enough to do all we can for them, the rest is empty sympathy, only distressing to ourselves’ ” (pp. 82-83). And she at once resumes her imaginings and matchmaking. In such a passage, Jane Austen directs attention to the incompatibilities and cross-purposes, registered in personal attitudes and responsiveness, that cannot in this historical world be undone. Emma is self-consciously cognizant of the constraints that bind them all, and the narrator is a touch more aware of dissonances and overtones than Emma. These poor are of course among the Nobodies. They remain nameless and are swallowed up in the conventional abstractions of “sickness and poverty.” There is no hint of an imagination of possible social improvement, much less of structural change. It is Jane Austen and not Emma who puts us in the way of inferring such defects and fallings short.