Emma (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (9 page)

And the Abbey-Mill Farm itself is viewed, “with all its appendages of prosperity and beauty, its rich pastures, spreading flocks, orchard in blossom, and light column of smoke ascending” (p. 328) .

Throughout this scene, and through its shifting field of view, we are solicited to perceive the harmonious elements in a complex, irregular conceptual and material group of structures—culture and comfort resonate and consort equably together.
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Donwell Abbey itself remains true to its historical identity—its unmodern yet becoming siting, “low and sheltered,” its unplanned and rather hap-hazard development through time—its avenue of limes and pleasure grounds leading to “nothing,” and an “approach to the house, which never had been there.” Knightley is both a “preserver” and an “improver.” The improvements are clearly focused on what has been done to improve the use of the land—including its appearance. The owner has taken advantage of recent advances in science and agricultural technology: with meadows going down to the water and rich pastures and the river coming around and through the estate, there has had to be considerable investment in ditching and drainage to control the degree of moisture in the soil and to maintain its level. Those “spreading flocks” whose wool commands top prices must come from one or another of the newly developed and much improved breeds that were being created at this time—breeds whose names, taken from the British locations where they were said to be first developed, still exist today. And the same holds true for the steady increase of seasonal yields in fruits and vegetables (although fruit trees are not in bloom when strawberries are ripe).

But all these traces and suggestions of how such diversities of interests and activities are integrated into the sustaining life of an actual, imagined community are by those very tokens connected as well to such dissonances as are typically embodied in Mrs. Elton’s behavior and that have, in the first place, also prompted the narrator and Emma to “note” that Knightley keeps no horses and is strapped for cash. In a general cultural situation whose manifest properties are experienced, at different moments, as pulling one’s judgment in divergent and contraposed directions, it is not a surprise to find that tendencies of change and resistances to change, of both expansion and dislocation, are registered as, in, and through conceptual lapses or inconsistencies in an otherwise exquisitely coherent text. Our female Homer may occasionally nod, but what she is in her advanced modern way undertaking to create is an imagined world in which there are several orders, grades, and categories of change, both for good and for ill, and several equally diverse and equivocal kinds of stability or permanence.

One further figuration of this submatrix of minor discrepancies and inconsistencies in
Emma
is salient to this line of analysis and explanation. Chapter VIII of the third volume begins immediately after the fiasco of Box Hill and Knightley’s severe reproof of Emma for her rude and brutal behavior to Miss Bates. Emma is miserable, and she regards a “whole evening of backgammon with her father” as a pleasant relief from her abhorrent recollections of a “completely misspent” day. Her penitence has begun, and she quickly resolves to call on Miss Bates in a contrite, friendly, and “equal” spirit. Next morning she enters into a scene of confusion and disarray. Jane “looking extremely ill” is “escaping” along with her aunt into the next room. Miss Bates reenters and, struggling both to keep back her tears and maintain her “happy” face to the world, explains that Jane, who has been writing letters and crying all morning, has decided to accept at once the offered employment as governess—she has been putting off such a resolution for some time.

Miss Bates seems unconsciously to be trying to literalize the traditional Christian notion of the grace of affliction—and is having a hard time of it. It was all decided at the Eltons ’, to which the Bateses were conveyed after leaving Box Hill. Mrs. Elton has naturally been the activating agent of the offer and has been pressing Jane to accept the situation at Mrs. Smallridge’s—“ ‘only four miles from Maple Grove’ ”to have “ ‘ the charge of her three little girls.’ ” Mrs. Elton “ ‘ would not take a denial ... would not let Jane say ‘ No.’ ” She had been harrying Jane about it for several days, as “indefatigable” good friends do. Unknown to Mrs. Elton, Miss Bates, or Emma, Jane has had enough of Frank’s offensive and intolerable teasing, flirtatiousness, and semi-hysterical carrying-on and has decided that self-immolation is preferable to patient, protracted torture. While the Bateses were at the Eltons’ something else occurred.

In the course of this reported interview or petition, the younger Abdy informs Elton that Frank Churchill has been summoned back to Richmond (to be with his ailing aunt) with some urgency and that he has left promptly.

Emma has been only half-listening to this latter part of Miss Bates’ monologue:

The chapter concludes after two further paragraphs. It is a marvel of compactness, and everyone in it seems to be talking past everyone else. Miss Bates readily accepts Emma’s contrition and good-will as if it were another confirming blow dealt to her by fate itself. Emma herself, in her subdued mood, listens at first with sympathy, then with diminishing attention, and finally “quite unconscious on what her eyes were fixed” (p. 348). Mrs. Churchill, tyrannical, arbitrary, capricious, was before she married “ ‘nobody ... barely the daughter of a gentleman; but ever since her being turned into a Churchill, she has out-Churchill’d them all in high and mighty claims: but in herself, I assure you, she is an upstart’ ”(p. 278) . Sufficient wealth will inevitably transform a Nobody into “everything,” while the Jane Fairfaxes, whom we all know, will remain to be reminded that nothing will come of “nothing.”

Yet if Jane Fairfax is nothing, then what is old John Abdy, or even his son? Old John was parish clerk, employed under Mr. Bates for more than a quarter of a century. He has been turned out in his old age and is now infirm and helpless. Miss Bates will visit him, but in her depleted state she surely has little except good wishes to give. His son is ostler at the Crown, itself slightly run-down, on a relatively unfrequented road, keeping only “a couple of pair of post-horses.” If Miss Bates has it right, “ ‘he is also head man ... and everything of that sort,’ ”which implies that he is a man of all work, which is what one might expect at an “inconsiderable house.” Yet Miss Bates runs on in her hyperbolic and virtually pathological cheerfulness to assert that “ ‘he is very well to do himself.’ ” So well to do that he has come to request relief from the parish because he cannot support his aged father on what he eams.
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If Jane Fairfax is nothing, then what is he, let alone his aged father? It puts one in mind of the notorious question featured in the arithmetic of political economy: What is a man worth? Is he worth more or less than nothing?

Emma recurs to her critical reflections shortly thereafter, when she has learned, to her utter surprise, about the secret engagement of Frank and Jane. She hears the news, to be sure, from the generous-hearted Mrs. Weston, who is always willing to take the extra step and make allowances and exceptions. She continues to affirm Jane’s

Jane Austen among all our novelists is unsurpassed in pursuing arguments to logically consequent ends. It is part of her genius that such pressure often leads to comically absurd conclusions. But this is not such an instance. For we as readers are prompted by thematic continuities and densities, by proximity of occurrence within an unfolding narrative, and by analogical reasoning—all of these being cognitive habits by whose means Jane Austen herself has been tutoring us to read and reflect closely and coherently. Can such a claim as Emma is asserting here be extended to old John Abdy and his son? The answer is self-evident. And if a counterclaim of defense is raised that there are categorical distinctions to be maintained between the personal and the social and political, we must recall that it is just such conventional and convenient distinctions that Jane Austen often takes pleasure in overriding, that she persistently observes both the connections and disjunctions between the personal and the political or cultural, and that in precisely such asymmetrical and unpredictable appositions does she find the moral energies that justify the claims of both.
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Still, if the determinations, judgments, and measurements of value put forward by political arithmetic remain outside the cultural and historical spectrum of terms available to Jane Austen—that is to say, outside the conceptual categories that she found enabling to her decisive narrative imagination—she is certainly not very far removed from bringing them into saliency and bearing. In any case, and to return to the earlier scene, the narrator and Emma are off somewhere musing about the contrasts in “woman’s destiny.” Miss Bates brings Emma back to focused awareness by observing that she is staring at Jane’s beloved pianoforte.

Emma talks to herself; Jane talks to her pianoforte. It comes as no alarming surprise that Jane Austen was closely percipient of—or at least attuned to—the characteristic phases of the growth of mind in the early nineteenth century. On the one hand, an expansion and deepening of self-consciousness through interior reflection and silent speech; on the other, an expansion and deepening of the self in its life of feeling through the expressive agencies of music and art.
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On the whole, both of these amount to a growing apprehension that in order to make actual the grand priority of self-realization and development, individual persons, the outward and material manifestations of those spiritual selves, would have to contend forcefully against the impersonal might of circumstances.

Emma is deeply implicated in these antagonistic tendencies of impulse and attitude. Although, like her father, she is averse to change in both her personal life and in society at large, she is also vexed and distressed by the built-in inertia and confinements of the world that she at the same time dominates. After the disastrous outcome of her flight-to-the-moon scenario involving Elton and Harriet, Emma turns, for the first time in the narrative, to confront herself adversarially. Her own embarrassment and repugnance at Elton’s heated, tipsy advances are compounded in her compelled admission that she had been “grossly mistaken and misjudging in all her ideas on one subject” (p. 126). These sobering assessments are not as acute, however, as the shame she feels at having actively misled Harriet and caused her grief. She promises herself to be in the future “humble and discreet” and confirms her resolve to “[repress] imagination all the rest of her life.” The unlikelihood of her adhering to that vow is underscored by how rapidly she bypasses any reflection on serious wrongdoing or on the damage possibly inflicted on Harriet, who, Emma breezily estimates, will recover her “composure” by the time Elton returns from Bath. As for Elton himself, she has no compassion to spare, except in one sense: “Their being fixed, so absolutely fixed, in the same place, was bad for each, for all three. Not one of them had the power of removal, or of effecting any material change of society. They must encounter each other, and make the best of it” (p. 127). Although the principal meaning of this passage is evident enough—a country village has its disadvantages with which one must put up—its generalizing extension is equally plain. The pleasant familiarity of such a world has as its concomitant, in addition to its own permanence, the absolute fixity of those who are consigned or sentenced to live in it. They lack the resources to move away—let alone light out for the Territory—in the literal sense of relocation. Moreover, there is no possibility of their behavior effecting “any material change of society.” In this last phrase one detects impaction of meaning and a soliciting of interpretation. Such a world is not merely stable; it may also be apparently static, frozen, paralyzed—at least when it is regarded from a particular point of view.
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