Jane Austen's 'Emma' in real time

Unsurprisingly, critics have widely divergent readings of the significance of this closing. A conventional reading holds that it does not detract from—that it even enhances—the prospect of our principles’ marital happiness. Bruce Stovel argues that, given that Mrs. Elton embodies “Emma’s worst qualities,” this final paragraph points to the expurgation of “the vain side of her own character”:

This passage tells us that Emma’s wedding ceremony is as un-Augustalike as possible: all the things that make the ceremony perfect, the absence of finery and parade and white satin, are seen by Mrs. Elton as deficiencies. The passage also tells us, slyly, in the words “from the particulars detailed by her husband,” that Mrs. Elton was not at the wedding; she has been excluded […]. (n.p.)

Similarly, L. J. Swingle argues that this juxtaposition encourages us to “experience this perfect union as some thing rising up against and triumphing over Mrs. Elton’s denigrating remarks”:

There is no universal agreement here, but rather a sort of warfare: on the one side, Mrs. Elton and her camp; on the other, the “small band of true friends,” whose predictions and hopes for the union are so perfectly answered. The pleasure this affords is that of observing conflict, and of seeing a desired element win out over an opposing force. […] [A]n essential part of our enjoyment in Jane Austen depends upon a principle of separation, the tension that exists between the Mrs. Eltons of society and the small band joined in celebration of union. Such satisfaction is grounded in a yearning for distinction, and thereby also exclusion. (p. 314)

For Joann Ryan Morse, however, it is Mrs. Elton’s inclusion in the broader community, even as she is excluded from the “small band of friends,” that is emphasized: “We make our life out of the circumstances life provides—[…] so we must meet and live with Mrs. Elton too, forever: with a hard-head [sic] as well as a genial spirit. Emma is a model of social inclusiveness and moral realism” (n.p.).

Other commenters take a dimmer view of Mrs. Elton’s intrusion. Roger Sales reads it in the context of the social and economic forces exerting change in Jane Austen’s time: he writes that the novel’s final marriages, with their promise of “bringing together Harriet of illegitimate birth, Robert Martin, tenant farmer, Knightley, landed-proprietor, and Emma of ancient stock,” provide “a mental prospect or idea of the nation only, without material evidence to substantiate it” (p. 104)). Against this background it is “significant, perhaps, that almost the last word in the novel is awarded to Mrs Elton as voice of the new force of individualistic competitive consumption […]” (ibid).

For Frances Restuccia, Mrs. Elton’s “fatuous comments” are a symptom of a “melancholia of the text” which, “rather than relinquishing signs, generates signs that are ‘absurd’ (Kristeva 1989, 47)” (p. 464). This melancholia is also evidenced by the “clichéd (dead)” nature of the “happily ever-after conclusion [‘the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union’], a strangely vapid (and incongruously mixed) plenitude” (p. 464).

Perfect Happiness?

Restuccia is not alone in feeling that the ending of Emma is an unhappy one; critics prophesy doom from various quarters. G. B. Stern laments, on account of Mr. Woodhouse’s continued oppression of the young couple: “Oh, Miss Austen, it was not a good solution; it was a bad solution, an unhappy ending could we see beyond the last pages of the book” (p. 239). On this “solution” Bernard Paris writes: 

It is difficult to say whether Emma and Knightley have (theoretically) any acceptable alternative to living at Hartfield. As Jane Austen presents the situation, it is unthinkable either for Emma to leave her father or for Mr. Woodhouse to move to Donwell. Either course, we are made to feel, would result in his death. The only solution which the author can sanction is to have Emma and Knightley submit to Mr. Woodhouse’s claims, to sacrifice their autonomy, and to live a life of “continual endurance.” This may be, in fact, the only way of reconciling the demands of morality with the actualities of the situation; but, as some readers have felt, it is hardly a happy ending. Since the death of Mr. Woodhouse is the only possible source of relief, the reader is left wishing for it, and imagining the suppressed impatience of Emma and Knightley, at the end of the novel. Emma’s oversolicitude about her father may well be, in fact, a defense against unconscious desires for his disappearance. The only way she can remain free of guilt when he dies is to hover about him, protecting him from every disturbing influence. (pp. 94–5)

For other critics, the problem lies in the characters of Emma and Knightley themselves. Eugene Goodheart writes that, given that “the much older Knightley [has found] himself mostly in the role of admonisher of Emma’s behavior,” “it is hard to see how such a relationship can thrive in the long tenure of marriage except perhaps as entertainment in fiction—unless Emma outgrows that dear insubordinately willful part of her nature. Is that possible, and if possible is it desirable? Without certainty I am inclined to see Emma as irredeemable in her autonomy” (p. 604). Marvin Mudrick, less sympathetic to Emma, reads the narrator’s projection of “perfect happiness” as ironic in tone: “there is no happy ending, no easy equilibrium, if we care to project confirmed exploiters like Emma and Churchill into the future of their marriages” (p. 206).

William Deresiewicz argues that this irony is discoverable through close attention to the text itself: “we can hear the dark notes of the ending only if our ear has been properly tuned by the rest of the narrative” (p. 53).

[...] [A]ll three of those key words—“perfect,” “happiness,” and “union”—have been so ironized by the novel’s handling of them as to make it a matter of very grave doubt whether they are not rather to be avoided. The “union” of that last sentence echoes the language of the first, where “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence” [vol. 1, ch. 1; p. 1]. This first union, as we have seen, is in fact the start of all her woe […].

“Happiness” and its derivatives are words that—aside from also being compromised right from the beginning by that talk of Emma’s “happy disposition”—belong, above all, to Miss Bates and Mrs. Elton. […]

As for “perfect,” no word in the book is as insistently or emphatically undermined. Of the dozens of times it or its derivatives appear, almost none is without qualification or irony, the leading example being the conundrum devised by Mr. Weston, that moral imbecile, on the very heels of Emma’s cruelty to Miss Bates: “What two letters of the alphabet are there, that express perfection?” […] Wicked indeed is the game Austen plays with us throughout the novel, flattering us with our ability to see past Emma’s blindness about Elton only the better to rub our noses in our own blindness about Frank, conjuring seductive appearances that continually giving [sic] way to hidden, hinted-at realities of a less pleasant nature. The logic of the novel’s language makes its final statement into just such another happy deception, one that leaves us with a story in which nothing gets settled, an apparently “perfect” work that terminates in nothing but loose ends, a novel that refuses to stop playing games with us. (pp. 53–4)

Perfect Happiness!

For Wayne C. Booth, however, the discovery of irony in the final lines of Emma is part of a “reaction to an earlier generation that overdid the picture of ‘gentle Jane’”—but this “fashion[]” “underplay[s] the value of tenderness and good will in Jane Austen” (1961, p. 110 FN 11). He writes that “if we look at Emma and Knightley as real people, this ending will seem false” (ibid.); however, “the sense of ‘perfectedness’ or completion, the sense obviously intended by Jane Austen,” is embodied in the ending of the novel when it is considered as a created work (p. 111):1

[...] [I]t is precisely because this ending is neither life itself nor a simple bit of literary irony that it can serve so well to heighten our sense of a complete and indeed perfect resolution to all that has gone before. If we look at the values that have been realized in this marriage and compare them with those realized in conventional marriage plots, we see that Jane Austen means what she says: this will be a happy marriage because there is simply nothing left to make it anything less than perfectly happy. It fulfills every value embodied in the world of the book […] It is a union of intelligence: of “reason,” of “sense,” of “judgement.” It is a union of virtue: of “good will,” of generosity, of unselfishness. It is a union of feeling: of “taste,” “tenderness,” “love,” “beauty.”

[...] All of the cheap marriage plots in the world should not lead us to be embarrassed about our pleasure in Emma’s and Knightley’s marriage. It is more than just the marriage: it is the rightness of this marriage, as a conclusion to all of the comic wrongness that has gone before. The good for Emma includes both her necessary reform and the resulting marriage. Marriage to an intelligent, amiable, good, and attractive man is the best thing that can happen to this heroine, and the readers who do not experience it as such are, I am convinced, far from knowing what Jane Austen is about […]. (pp. 110–1)

Similarly, Malcolm Bradbury, writing in 1962, argues that

The ‘end’ of the book beautifully enforces the weight and meaning of the book; the waters clear, and all the significances are laid bare in a simple delaying action which enables Jane Austen to make clear all the inadequacies of her characters and the moral lesson to be learned from them. Repentance in Emma is delayed to the last and therefore most effective moment, and it comes after a train of thought in which we see Emma affected, involved, pressed into realisation of her follies. On top of understanding comes marriage, a right resolution to the plot in that it enforces the significance of true understanding. The preparation is over and by extending the novel indefinitely by a closing sentence referring to “the perfect happiness of the union” Jane Austen assures us that it is an effective understanding that Emma has come to. (p. 342)

Rachel Brownstein’s reading, like Booth’s, relies on the idea that the novel’s ending signposts its own contrived, comic nature:

[T]he last words of Emma emphasize the social spirit of comedy. The ending transforms Emma’s wedding into an abstraction—a union—among other abstractions like wishes, hopes, confidence, and happiness. Doing so, it puts Emma and her life at a distance. […]

Jane Austen charms us by permitting us to share with her this detached view of brides and grooms. Separated from Emma in the end, we no longer share her subjective reality, her anxiety to understand the world and herself; but we perceive her understanding with Mr. Knightley sympathetically, seeing it as a distant analogue of our understanding with the narrator. So we can enjoy feeling detached and connected at once. To be an amused spectator of marriages seems, in the end, quite as delightful and companionable as marrying is. The reader can eat her romantic cake and have it, too, and even hedge her bets on Emma’s happiness ever after. (p. 211)2

Where Do We Go from Here?

Amidst these contradictory readings, what do we all agree on, and what are we sure of? Little to nothing. Thorell Tsomondo writes that Emma “creates illusions, makes us aware that what may appear to be a statement of clarification may be but the reformulation of the problem. And nowhere is this phenomenon more palpably felt than in the novel’s ending” (p. 79):

The language of exclusion dominates the passage. The reader is shown what the wedding is not: no “finery”, no “parade”. We are told that the ceremony is witnessed by a “small band of true friends”; that Mrs Elton, not part of the “small band”, knows about the wedding only by report. Yet in naming Mrs Elton and emphasizing her absence, and in invoking her “never seen” Selina, the final paragraph of the novel brings Mrs Elton, her finery and parade into relief so sharply that she threatens to obscure the bride. Her voice echoes too in the very language that insists on her absence. In “the small band of true friends, fully, answered in… perfect happiness” (emphasis added), the sentiment may be the bride’s […], but the sense of overstatement, “true”, “fully”, “perfect”, is characteristically Mrs Elton’s. It encapsulates her vocabulary of superlatives and false aristocratic exclusiveness […]. The language of the final paragraph bears at once the pressures of absence and presence, of measure and excess.

[...] Further, in having “the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends. . . fully answered” in the wedding, the novel doubles back upon itself. Emma has been without wishes, hopes, confidence, predictions and weddings; all, up to this point, catalogue a series of false assumptions and lessons in reinterpretation. (p. 80)

Is the result of this ‘final’ reinterpretation, then, sure to be the ‘correct’ solution (morally or politically)? Have we arrived, through the novel’s final marriages, at a full (and therefore static) reckoning with reality—with morality, “intelligence,” “virtue,” sympathy, “feeling” (Booth, p. 110)? Have we arrived at a stable (and therefore, presumably, desirable) vision of political possibility—of “probability,” “eligibility” [E vol. 1, ch. 9; p. 48], and Burkean unity in stratification that foreclose upheaval? Many critics point out that “the novel’s conclusion arranges the characters in their proper social places” (Poovey, n.p.)—but what is the significance of this fact?

Cecily Devereux argues that, at the close of Emma,

Impropriety and secrecy are banished; everything is, as Emma puts it, “decided and open,” and is thus, paradoxically, closed. That is, in banishing secrecy and impropriety, Emma closes her own channels for expression: her conversion from Miss Woodhouse to Mrs. Knightley is conjoined with her conversion from “joking” at the beginning of the novel to “musing” at its end. Emma, in the end, subdues its own inherent impropriety and covert subversion. (p. 53)

Crucially, however, it does not do so in an unobtrusive, naturalized way: “Emma foregrounds the construction of a decorous order by interrupting the narrative and the social exchanges it portrays with ludic subversions which always draw attention to the fragility of the order they rupture” (p. 54). If Emma “submits in the end to the patriarchal order,” it is “not, however, without providing the reader with all the clues necessary to solve the mystery of the disappearing heroine that is the subtext and the critical game of Austen’s fiction” (ibid.).

Tsomondo identifies a similar closing-off of possibility at the novel’s end:

Through prior ordering and a number of displacements Austen’s plot, fraught at the outset with the tensions of inequality and possibility, resolves itself with predictable propriety into the neat Emma-Knightley, Fairfax-Churchill, Harriet-Martin linkages. Disparities still exist but now they are  contained, as tradition would have them, in parallel units.

The metaphor, marriage, and the rigid paradigmatic class system within which it functions, produces the sense of a violent freezing of the metonymic movement and textual interplay which up to now has lent to the narrative the dynamic instability and openness that characterized it. The nineteenth-century novelistic convention of happy marriages provides a convenient ending to the work, and the class dimension may say much about Austen’s own feeling concerning the ingredients for happy marriages […]. (p. 81)

However, as do many other Austen critics, he draws a distinction between the broad plot movements and surface significations of Austen’s marriage plots on the one hand, and the covert implications of her systems of irony and epistemological questioning on the other: he claims that “the text finally resists this formulaic closure. Emma remains a discourse about art as a system of constantly shifting signification, where meaning is always at the level of interpretation, resisting solidification into moral, social or political abridgement” (ibid).

For every critic who traces conservatism in the lines of Austen’s plots, there is another ready to discover irony in her textual surfaces, a wink and a nudge in the laconic sketchiness of her romantic conclusions—to claim that Austen is trying to “make a conventional form work, while making it work for matters unconventional” (Booth 1983, n.p.)—to identify a distinction between an “aesthetic resolution” and a “genuine social solution” (Poovey).3 Perhaps it is the nature of a novel that warns us of the perils of attempting to reduce signs to a predictable system to appear to be always one step ahead.

Footnotes

Harper notes “complete, full, finished, lacking in no way” as a definition of “perfect” from the late 14th century. See also Brownstein on how “Jane Austen assumes her reader understands this plot’s conventional nature” and will “take the long comic view of Emma Woodhouse”: “The heroine’s marriage—one of several, as usual in comedy—is presented as a conventional arrangement from the literary and the social points of view” (p. 211).

For other readings that confirm the happiness of Emma’s ending, at least insofar as Emma and Knightley’s marriage is concerned, see Duckworth (pp. 177–8); Trilling (pp. 58–9); Tave (pp. 254–5) (Duckworth admits “some ‘doubt in the case’” as to the marriage of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax).

Of course we must not assume that a depicted solution must be a recommended one; neither should we envision “conservatism” versus “radicalism” or “subversion” as wholly dichotomous; nor should we theorize a homogeneous ‘hegemony’—a ‘patriarchal’ order that encompasses domination along the lines of both sex and rank (or ‘gender’ and ‘class’)—as though it were not possible to resent male rule while upholding the natural rightness of aristocratic rule, or vise versa. A more granular picture of what, exactly, is being subverted or upheld in Austen is necessary in order to articulate her political views based on her work, if indeed such a thing is possible. On the interplay of “class” and “sex” in Emma see Johnson (p. 127).

Discussion Questions

Why are Mrs. Elton’s prosaic grumblings allowed to intrude on the final paragraph of the novel?

Does Emma have a “happy ending”? What is meant by this phrase—an ending that would be joyful if it occurred in reality? A good solution to a narrative problem (where we may understand “happy” as in “fitting, appropriate, convenient” as well as “content, joyful”)? An ending that makes a reader joyful? Should we read “perfect happiness” as something “flawlessly joyful” or something “completely appropriate”?

Is Emma ‘ultimately’ a conventional, didactic domestic comedy? Is it an artwork that argues, at the metatextual level, about the epistemological and signatory problems we encounter when interpreting art? Does it have anything to say about how we ‘should’ read and interpret signs in our everyday lives (making it, as a text, both didactic and focused on epistemic systems)? What assumptions do we make when we construct an argument about what this text (or any text) ‘is’?

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. Ed. Stephen M. Parrish. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

Booth, Wayne C. “Point of View and the Control of Distance in Emma.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16.2 (September 1961), pp. 95–116. Repr. in The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd Ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 243–66.

Bradbury, Malcolm. “Jane Austen’s Emma.” Critical Quarterly 4 (1962), pp. 335–46. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8705.1962.tb01434.x.

Brownstein, Rachel M. “Why We Reread Jane Austen.” In Why Jane Austen? New York: Columbia University Press (2011), pp. 195–236.

Deresiewicz, William. “Emma: Ambiguous Relationships.” In Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets. New York: Columbia University Press (2004), pp. 86–126.

Devereux, Cecily. “‘Much, Much beyond Impropriety’: Ludic Subversions and the Limitations of Decorum in Emma.” Modern Language Studies 25.4 (Autumn 1995), pp. 37–56. DOI: 10.2307/3195487.

Duckworth, Alistair M. “Emma and the Dangers of Individualism.” In The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels. Baltimore, ML: John Hopkins Press, 1971, pp. 145–78.

Goodheart, Eugene. “Emma: Jane Austen’s Errant Heroine.” The Sewanee Review 116.4 (Fall 2008), pp. 589–604. DOI:10.1353/SEW.0.0087.

Harper, Douglas. “Etymology of perfect.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Accessed 20 October, 2022.

Johnson, Claudia L. “Emma: ‘Woman, Lovely Woman, Reigns Alone’.” In Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1988), pp. 121–43.

Kaye-Smith, Sheila, and G. B. Stern. Speaking of Jane Austen. New York: Harper & Brothers (1944).

Morse, Joann Ryan. “The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth: Shakespearean Comedy in Emma.” Persuasions On-Line 26.1 (Winter 2005).

Mudrick, Marvin. Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery. Princeton: Princeton University Press (1952).

Paris, Bernard. “Emma.” In Character and Conflict in Jane Austen’s Novels: A Psychological Approach. Detroit: Wayne State University Press (1978), pp. 64–95.

Poovey, Mary. “The True English Style.” Persuasions 5 (1983), pp. 10–12.

Restuccia, Frances L. “A Black Morning: Kristevan Melancholia in Jane Austen’s Emma.” American Imago 51.4 (Winter 1994), pp. 447–69.

Sales, Roger. Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England. Routledge: London (1996).

Stovel, Bruce. “Comic Symmetry in Jane Austen’s Emma.” Dalhousie Review 57.3 (1977), pp. 453–65.

Swingle, L. J. “The Perfect Happiness of the Union: Jane Austen’s Emma and English Romanticism.” The Wordsworth Circle 7.4 (Autumn 1976), pp. 312–19.

Tave, Stuart. “The Imagination of Emma Woodhouse.” In Some Words of Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1973), pp. 205–55.

Trilling, Lionel. “Emma.” Encounter 8.6 (June 1957), pp. 49–59.

Paris connects Emma’s late situation to that of Frank Churchill, in that both characters had been subject to “the damaging effects of manipulation by sick, life-denying parental figures”; on this topic “Austen has, understandably, no wisdom to offer. All that she can propose is to follow the self-effacing (or the perfectionistic) route of doing one’s duty” (p. 94). Thus the only solution is contrived incident which also serves to support the novel’s moral ethos:

[...] Emma is not forced by her situation to suspend the marriage. It would have been perfectly moral for her to proceed, expressing all the while her love and concern for her father. His unhappiness would have passed. Jane Austen’s amused tone suggests that she has some awareness of the irrationality of Emma’s decision, but she seems, nevertheless, to be basically sympathetic toward her heroine’s self-sacrificial behavior. She could not have had Emma behave differently, of course. Emma behaves as she must. But it was within the power of [Austen’s] rhetoric, if she had had a clear enough vision, to suggest the destructiveness of Emma’s solution and the preferability of the Knightleys’ alternative. As we have seen, Emma is in this instance saved from the consequences of her psychological problems by authorial manipulation of the plot. Form and theme work well together here. The comic action accords with the picture of the world which accompanies the self-effacing solution. Reality is antagonistic to Emma’s wishes as long as she is proud. When she becomes humble and unselfish, fortune turns in her favor. Virtue is rewarded. (ibid.)

Thus also Margaret Kirkham:

The final precipitation of the marriage, by Mr Woodhouse’s anxieties about a local poultry thief, is plainly intended to be taken lightly. While it fits perfectly with his character, the author expects us to enjoy the joke as she finds a piece of comic business with which to facilitate the wedding without which the book cannot be ended. I think that the reader is also supposed to see by this time what the schematic structure has been, and how an unlikely, even an absurd, plot has been worked upon so that it does not violate Nature or probability. At this point, if not before, we are to stand back from the fiction and its characters—to experience the mild alienation which results from being shown the constructional nuts and bolts—and, as we see that there was never any possibility of things working out in any other way, to ask what this particular handling of a stock situation shows us about it. (p. 125)

Michael Suk-Young Chwe also notes the manipulated nature of the robbery, but speculates that it may be attributable to Emma herself:

This “accidental” manipulation comes out of nowhere, like the gypsies who allow Frank Churchill to rescue Harriet, but it is not implausible. Austen shows us that seemingly impossible situations can be overcome with just the right change of circumstances, and what seems like a disadvantage, even the entire reason for the problem in the first place, can be used to one’s advantage. A successful manipulation is always possible if you are creative enough. Maybe the thievery was just a rumor created by Emma or her confederates, as one of the poultry houses reportedly robbed belonged to Mrs. Weston, Emma’s closest friend. Maybe Austen is showing off her own strategic thinking skills: the problem is posed at the very beginning of the novel, remains unchanged throughout, and the reader is given plenty of time to think of a solution. For Austen it is easy. (p. 185)

For Karen Newman, this prosaic incident is a telling example of how, in Austen, “our conventional expectations are often met but at the same time undermined by self-consciousness and parody” (p. 704); “Austen’s comic conclusions […] reveal the gap between sentimental ideals and novelistic conventions on the one hand, and the social realities of sexist prejudice, hypocrisy, and avarice on the other” (p. 705).

The Provisions of Poverty

It is also notable that this manipulated ending turns on poverty and food. Michael Lee writes that here “a food plot involving someone in or around the community who is impoverished enough to steal poultry becomes a stepping-stone for the marriage plot, disappearing along with the final obstacle of Mr. Woodhouse’s resistance to make way for ‘the perfect happiness of the union’” (p. 374). Though ultimately “disappear[ed]” by the plot, the hint at a starving populace remains unsettling. Sheryl Craig notes that “in Jane Austen’s lifetime, the economy had never been worse”; thus the poultry incident reminds the reader “of the hunger that must be allayed in order to maintain private property” (p. 140).

In the late 18th century, the enclosure of previously common land proved disastrous to the livelihoods of the rural poor: Janet Todd notes that

The loss of rights over ‘the commonable land which belongs to the parishioners in general’ deprived commoners of those small amounts of grazing and arable produce which enabled them to sustain economic independence, leaving them with what they could earn in wages from the large landowners. The price of a loaf of bread rose 600 per cent between the 1780s and 1801, and in the same period agricultural wages rose only about 20 per cent. Already on 17 January 1795 the Hampshire Chronicle recorded the acute distress of rural workers and commended the good people of the city for having raised £287 for relief of distress caused by the bad harvest. On 16 March 1795 the same paper carried a report on the continuing distress of the poor due to the high cost of meat and wheat, and on 27 April it reported that on 12 April 500 men of the Oxfordshire militia stationed near Seaford ‘notwithstanding the endeavours of the officers had taken arms and with bayonets fixed’ seized a vessel laded with flour at Newhaven. (p. 190)

During Austen’s time, the Poor Law placed a tax on landowners with which the country’s very poorest were to be fed: “no one could be allowed to starve to death” (Craig, p. 33), though provisions were scant (see Clark and Dutton, pp. 190–1). This law did not enjoy universal popularity. Margaret Doody places the pilfering of poultry within the context of political debate (spurred by the likes of Thomas Malthus and Herbert Spenser) about whether it were not more economically sound simply to allow the poor to starve and die. The former’s “most recent pamphlets (1814; 1815) defended the ‘Corn Laws’ banning importation of grain into England. Ostensibly Christian, Malthus advocated the sad necessity of denying food to the poor. Charity extended to keep people from dying constituted a danger to the economy” (p. 359).1 While Emma “engages in no overt philosophical commentary or argument as to whether it is right or inevitable to let the poor starve and die,” Doody argues that it is “a sustained riposte” to Malthus: “people are constantly engaged in feeding each other” in Highbury, frequently “feed[ing] those who are below them in status or income” (p. 359). Mr. Woodhouse’s reaction to the turkey theft is thus an “implicit critique” of Malthus and those who follow his principles:

“Pilfering was housebreaking to Mr. Woodhouse’s fears” (Emma, III, ch. 19). The narrative ridicules Mr. Woodhouse’s definition, even though the thieves indeed broke into an enclosure. Austen here indirectly casts ridicule on the “Alton Association,” wealthy landowners offering a reward of two guineas for information regarding stealing of poultry from enclosed ground […]. The Association zealously seeks to punish hungry persons who take turnips from the fields. (ibid.)

Particularities of the Picturesque

Does the poultry incident have anything to do with an earlier, similarly contrived, occurrence between Frank and Harriet? Willam Galperin describes how theories that govern “picturesque landscape” influence the rules of “realistic narrative” and domestic comedy (p. 21). In particular, Austen’s handling of Harriet’s encounter with the “gypsies” reflects how “the picturesque innoculates itself to […] irruptions of the other […] by admission of tempered variety and managed incident”; they are narratively “contain[ed]” and so “not a threat to the world of this novel” (ibid.). The “more ‘natural’” Frank/Harriet narrative that Emma had constructed out of that incident, however, “also projects the gypsies’ instrumentality in an order—specifically a social hegemony—that requires […] that the gypsies be taken seriously” (p. 21).2 For Galperin, the poultry theft is another moment that makes the “gypsies” instrumental in a “‘natural’” narrative (this time the Emma/Knightley match):

[...] [A]t the very end of the novel, by which point Emma is herself subject to the very [marriage] plot over which she had earlier contrived to exert control, the consummation of the story, and the strengthening of social hegemony through the consolidation of the Woodhouse and Knightley estates, is effectively motivated by the reappearance of the gypsies. Although initially resistant to his daughter’s marriage, as he is to almost any change in his everyday routine, Emma’s valetudinarian father cheerfully consents to her marriage, and to the addition of George Knightley to his household, but only in the wake of a rash of poultry pilferings in his neighborhood, which he is convinced are preliminary to housebreaking.

These pilferings—which are the work of gypsies (for there are no other suspects in the novel so far as I can tell)—are no more a threat to the social fabric of Highbury than they are likely to escalate to more invasive crimes that require, as the narrator puts it, a “son-in-law’s protection” [p. 318]. Rather the thefts, however unanticipated, are a device, a contrivance really, by which a social whole, no less than an aesthetic [picturesque] whole, perpetuates and legitimizes itself. And in this sense, they are, like the variety and activity that the picturesque composes into union, anticipated surprises: a feared and therefore palpable “roughness” to which the community, no less than the realistic domestic comedy that Austen is alleged to have written (and to some extent has written here), is continually on the alert. (ibid.)

Thus the picturesque and its derivative “theories, at once aesthetic and political,” demand a “containment of the other” that is “an opposition to substantive change and ultimately to any practice that might be deemed counterhegemonic” (ibid).

Galperin does not, however, read the novel as ultimately conservative: “despite all that Emma provides the readers by way of understanding the world it represents, it does not extend or govern that understanding sufficiently to contain the oppositional practices of characters who are plainly less reconciled to society than are other characters” (p. 22). These “oppositional practices” may be grasped by readers and especially by rereaders: “Numerous incidents and elements in the novel, including the famous Box Hill episodes—what another character, Mrs. Elton enthusiastically (and tellingly) imagines will be “a sort of gipsy party” [vol. 3, ch. 6 [42]; p. 232]—yield up possibilities to which readers […] are never directly guided by the narrator, yet to which, on subsequent readings, they are likely to be quite attentive” (ibid.). Thus Austen “make[s] the experience or consumption of the text” itself a “potentially oppositional” practice (ibid.).

Galperin’s solution to the identity of the poultry thieves is not accepted by all commenters. Jillian Heydt-Stevenson writes that “[t]he final enigma—who robbed Mrs Weston’s poultry-house ‘of all her turkies’?—remains unanswered, though, like the novel’s other riddles, it goes far to enable a wedding” (p. 164).

Footnotes

On Malthusian arguments (“[t]he opprobrium toward the hungry by the new political economy”) and food in Austen see also Lee, pp. 375–9.

See also “The Stuff of Romance.”

Discussion Questions

Does this ending seem contrived to you? How does its naturalness (or lack thereof) reflect on the construction of the novel as a whole?

What do you think Austen’s views on poverty were likely to be? Can we tell from her fiction?

Who do you think is likely to have committed the poultry thefts? Are we meant to be able to figure it out?

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. Ed. Stephen M. Parrish. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

Chwe, Michael Suk-Young. Jane Austen, Game Theorist. Princeton: Princeton University Press (2013).

Clark, Robert, and Gerry Dutton. “Agriculture.” In Jane Austen in Context, ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005), pp. 185–193.

Craig, Sheryl. Jane Austen and the State of the Nation. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan (2015).

Galperin, William. “The Picturesque, the Real, and the Consumption of Jane Austen.” The Wordsworth Circle 28.1 (Winter 1997), pp. 19–27.

Heydt-Stevenson, Jillian. “Games, Riddles and Charades.” In Sabor (2015), pp. 150–65. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781316014226.013.

Kirkham, Margaret. Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction. London: The Althone Press (1997).

Lee, Michael Parrish. “The Nothing in the Novel: Jane Austen and the Food Plot.” Novel 45.3 (Fall 2012), pp. 368–88. DOI: 10.1215/00295132-1722998.

Newman, Karen. “Can This Marriage Be Saved: Jane Austen Makes Sense of an Ending.” ELH 50.4 (Winter 1983), pp. 693–710. DOI:10.2307/2872923.

I like to think that Emma’s excessive fantasizing, her busy-bodying and restless management of other people’s lives, are to some extent an expression of a sense of confinement. Her mind must be active, and if she can’t turn her attention to the wider scene of nature and humanity, she must get busily to work on what’s going on in the minds and hearts of her immediate neighbors. When Mr. Knightley moves into the Field of the Heart, Emma will suffer no more from “intellectual solitude” [vol. 1, ch. 1; p. 2]. Moreover, as you will all remember, their marriage is immediately followed by a “fortnight’s absence in a tour to the sea-side” [vol. 3, ch. 19 [55]; p. 318]. Hooray! That interior landscape that is Emma’s mind is to be refreshed by sea breezes, and expanded to new and far horizons. (p. 38)

Similarly, Margaret Doody writes of this trip as a relief from confinement that will have far-reaching effects on the minds of the sea-goers:

There is something sad about Emma’s never having seen the sea. We think better of Mr. Knightley as erotic partner rather than as mere mentor because on their honeymoon he gives Emma “a fortnight’s absence” from Hartfield, “in a tour to the sea-side” (III, ch. 19). Nobody else  has offered her relief from looking after her father (except perhaps Mr. Perry), but Mr. Knightley appears to have noticed at last that she needs a respite. The imminent prospect of being himself shut in with Mr. Woodhouse has sharpened his perception, perhaps. It is hard on Mr. Knightley to leave Donwell; his going on honeymoon is a gift to Emma of himself. And both will benefit from the sea. (p. 351)

For Doody, this transformative power clings to the sea in all of the “later Austen novels,” in which “the human relation to the ocean is treated in many complex ways”; “[i]n personal encounters the sea offers a source of renewed energy” (p. 351). In Emma in particular the sea “becomes a separate place, not mere individual resorts but an idea—’the sea.’ Something that must be experienced rather than discussed, ‘the sea’ is an earthly ‘place’ not exactly locatable. It is a place that becomes both energy and a feeling” (p. 352).

Darryl Jones goes further in interpreting the prospected trip as a shift in the ethos of the novel: while previously, it “interpret[ed] a geographical index as a moral one” (as evidenced by the decay in moral standards at Box Hill), it ultimately proves “impossible” to continue “[c]olluding in Mr woodhouse’s hatred of change,” and “the novel ends on a hopeful note” through the mention of the planned tour (p. 144).

Shawn Normandin, however, sees a problem with this common interpretation. He concedes that

Emma’s prospects are potentially liberating […].Mary Jane Curry goes so far as to claim that “Emma’s wedding trip to the seaside … is an escape to freedom unlike anything she has experienced” (113). The seaside honeymoon could be emblematic of Emma’s exposure to a real world wider than her romantic fancies—especially if we agree with Juliet McMaster that Emma’s career as an “imaginist” (Austen, Emma 362) results from her isolation (McMaster 38). (p. 2)

However, he also points out that Austen, rather than narrating this trip directly, “makes it contingent on Emma’s marital ‘union’”:

We cannot be sure that Emma will see the sea; it is only a “plan,” which, like other plans in the novel (reading lists and matchmaking), may go awry. When Mr. Woodhouse hears of a neighborhood turkey-theft, “He was very uneasy; and but for the sense of his son-in-law’s protection, would have been under wretched alarm every night of his life. … But Mr. John Knightley must be in London again by the end of the first week in November” (528). Because Emma marries in mid- to late October, she probably has enough time to realize her plan, but her father’s anxiety about turkey thieves, combined with his well-attested disapproval of the sea, calls the plan into question: it might be more prudent to retrench a bit—get married, but avoid the seaside. By agreeing to move into his house, Mr. Knightley has already made a large concession to his father-in-law; foregoing a visit to the sea would be a minor sacrifice. Austen’s mentioning of the plan tempts readers to picture Emma at the shore, but the text does no picturing. The 2009 BBC adaptation of the novel ends with a shot of Emma and Knightley looking out at the waves (O’Hanlon); the film thereby dramatizes readers’ daydreams about the story, not what the text actually says. The text prompts readers to become imaginists while itself abstaining from that transgression. (pp. 2–3)

Haste and Hesitation

Mary A. Burgan argued in 1975 that Emma “must seek salvation outside her family relationships,” rather than “seek[ing] to manage a partial escape from social blame through a retreat to her filial status” as she does in the wake of the Box Hill debacle (“As a daughter, she hoped she was not without a heart” (vol. 3, ch. 8 [44]; p. 247)) (p. 548). In this sense, marriage to Mr. Knightley will prove morally edifying for Emma: yet

Even in the process of her engagement, Emma is tempted to let her father’s debility thwart her social salvation. [Quotes from “She could not bear” to “she could not proceed.”] A failure to proceed would be a failure of social will on Emma’s part; it would lead her back into the beguiling fancies she has so often cultivated which tell her that her dutifulness to her father may cover a multitude of sins and which encourage her to use her position as a dutiful daughter to indulge in snobbish caprice. The temptation is thwarted by Knightley’s decision to live at Hartfield. Such an arrangement can be criticized as a humiliation of Mr. Knightley, but I believe that it should be read as a sign of his ability to override Emma’s impulse to withdraw while honoring her genuinely saving feeling for her father. Marriage will permit Emma to retain the virtue of tolerance which she has learned from caring for her father, while widening that tolerance in the exercise of a more general good will. (p. 549)

Bernard Paris, in 1978, has a similarly negative view of Emma’s hesitation:

In one respect Emma does not change at all. She remains completely bound to her father. After Knightley’s proposal, the conflict which she has always feared between love and duty confronts her, but it is quickly resolved: she determines never to quit her father, weeps over the idea as a sin of thought, and decides that “while he live[s], it must be only an engagement” (III, xiv). Her conflict is easily disposed of because she does not really have to choose between the two men: Knightley is hers, whether she marries him or not. The problem is really Knightley’s. How is he to gain Emma in marriage without violating his (and her) sense of duty toward Mr. Woodhouse? The solution which he proposes is to make Hartfield his home. […]

Knightley’s solution, involving, as it does, an insistence on marriage, makes Emma’s conflict more severe. Not only has she no rational ground for opposing the union, but she also has a strong emotional need to comply with Knightley’s wishes. But she knows that even with Knightley’s sacrifice Mr. Woodhouse will be unhappy about her marrying. In her relations with her father, Emma has no power of self-assertion. Her need to be the perfect daughter is so compulsive that she cannot do anything, however justified, that will disturb him. She is a slave to his irrational claims. Even though Knightley is eager and Mr. Woodhouse is beginning to be resigned, Emma is paralyzed […]. (pp. 92–3)

As for us, we must leave our characters in this state of suspense and hesitation for a little time longer.

Discussion Questions

What is the significance of Emma and Mr. Knightley’s planned honeymoon destination?

Why is Emma less insistent upon marrying in the immediate future than is Mr. Knightley?

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. Ed. Stephen M. Parrish. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

Barchas, Janine. “Very Austen: Accounting for the Language of Emma.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 62.3 (December 2007), pp. 303–38. DOI: 10.1525/ncl.2007.62.3.303.

Burgan, Mary A. “Mr. Bennet and the Failures of Fatherhood in Jane Austen’s Novels.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 74.4 (October 1975), pp. 536–52.

Doody, Margaret Anne. Jane Austen’s Names: Riddles, Persons, Places. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2015).

Jones, Darryl. Jane Austen. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan (2004).

McMaster, Juliet. “Emma: The Geography of a Mind.” Persuasions 29 (2007), pp. 26–38.

Normandin, Shawn. “Seeing the Sea in Jane Austen’s Emma and Ann Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest.” The Explicator 77.3–4 (2019), pp. 1–4. DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2019.1626327

O’Hanlon, Jim. Director. Emma. BBC One, 2009.

The portrait incident is an important scene that is central to many scholars’ readings of Emma’s themes and for which many different readings exist.

The conventional reading of this scene presents it as evidence that Emma’s unruly imagination is in need of chastisement (whether from experience or from Mr. Knightley). A. Walton Litz, for example, argues that it demonstrates Emma’s “dependence on ‘previous conceptions,’ and her unwillingness to acknowledge her own limitations”:

Her “improved” drawing of Harriet suggests her desire to shape Harriet’s destiny; and Knightley’s criticism of the distortion in the picture touches Emma’s good sense, although she is too proud to acknowledge the truth in public. [Quotes from “‘You have made her too tall‘” to “‘Exactly so indeed!‘”] The episode of the drawing places the characters in relation to each other, and establishes Knightley’s role as critical guardian of Emma’s ambitious imagination (pp. 136–7).

The scene may thus also have a didactic function, encouraging readers to subject their imaginations or desires to their reason.1

Other readings emphasize Emma’s frustrated potential as an artist over her faults. Annette LeClair, like Litz, acknowledges that Emma’s prior conceptions “of what a woman should be” influence her work, but also argues that Austen uses the portrait-painting scene to comment on “the relationship between artist and audience” (n.p.). Emma is possessed of “genuine artistic energy” and a “keen pleasure” in producing, but her portrait, like “[a]ll of the womanly arts in Emma,” is “valued by the community less as a vehicle of self expression than as a means of serving the communal eye, ear, and interest in preserving its own institutions.” All of her “audience” members respond in ways that Emma cannot control and that disconcert her—by doubting the portrait’s likeness to reality, by perceiving a defect in its subject, by regarding its subject too literally, or by ignorantly defending it with misused terms. She “cannot own the final product of her labors after all.”2

Idle Idolizing

The surface motive for Emma to idealize Harriet is, of course, the desire to make her seem attractive to Mr. Elton. Joseph Wiesenfarth writes that

the portrait of Harriet is Emma’s attempt to create an image of the girl that corresponds to Mr Elton’s flattering suggestion that Emma has improved Harriet: [quotes from “‘You have given Miss Smith’” through to “Skilful has been the hand.’”] The ‘drawing out’ by the ‘skilful hand’ produces the portrait (p. 209).

Elizabeth Sabiston, though, notes that by giving her subject added height and darker coloring, Emma has unconsciously made her image of Harriet resemble herself. Though Emma generally “resists playing the protagonist in her own 'romances’ […] in the portrait episode she is both artist and, unconsciously, model” (p. 34). Cecily Devereux suggests that Emma’s unconscious motivation for this mixing is “the manipulation of her own representation.” Thus

[Emma’s] maneuverings around the portrait succeed primarily in effacing Harriet and drawing attention to herself. Harriet, in the course of Emma's appropriation of her expression, is rendered, for a while, almost speechless and almost incapable of directing her own actions […] By incorporating Harriet into dramas of her own imagination, Emma establishes a rhythm of crises of recognition which lead always away from Harriet and back to herself (pp. 49–50).

For Ashley Tauchert, the improvement of Harriet’s appearance is evidence that, in Emma, “improving consciousness [a desire to show ‘it should be otherwise’] is aesthetically realised […], so that a narratively expressed desire to make things as they should be tends in practice to make them more beautiful” (p. 125).

Exactly So Indeed!

The portrait incident and its lead-in are the first times that Mr. Elton appears ‘on stage,’ and thus the first times that we may directly judge his manners against what Emma has previously claimed them to be. As with other characters in Austen’s œuvre, Mr. Elton’s manners and character are revealed in large part through his dialogue. Per Howard S. Babb:

Not the equal of the Woodhouses socially, Mr. Elton keeps trying to boost his status by means of a spirited manner and a willingness to agree, both of these expressed in the phrase with which Jane Austen tags him, “exactly so.” Often he displays his verve through a heightened phrasing or diction which sounds modish: "Let me entreat you," ''so charming,” "How could you," "Is not this room rich in specimens,” "inimitable figure-pieces'' (p. 183).

This uncritical diction injures other characters’ (and readers’?) opinion of his judgment. LeClair notes that “[w]hen Mr. Elton mounts his desperate defense of Emma’s work, he lapses into a style that echoes that of the ever appreciative but undiscriminating Miss Bates” (p. 118). This style “links Mr. Elton’s commentary on Emma’s work with the theme of unperceptive judgments that characters make throughout the novel” (p. 119).

Emma’s appropriation of Mr. Elton’s diction (“it will be an ‘Exactly so,’ as he says himself”; vol. 1, ch. 6; p. 31) continues the motif referenced in the last write-up of repetition indicating a failure of communication. It also shows us that free indirect discourse is, in Emma, not solely the province of the narrator, but something that characters can and do wield.

Quite a Humourist

A lot of the humor in the portrait incident comes from the disconnect between the characters’ beliefs and desires and what we know to be really the case. The ambiguity maintained, not only in the creation of incidents that allow for the propagation of misunderstandings, but in the wording used to describe them (more on this in the next section of this write-up), allows the better-informed reader the pleasure of picking up clues and feeling in-the-know.3

The humor in this section in particular is especially rich and multifaceted:

The next thing wanted was to get the picture framed; and here were a few difficulties. It must be done directly; it must be done in London; the order must go through the hands of some intelligent person whose taste could be depended on; and Isabella, the usual doer of all commissions, must not be applied to, because it was December, and Mr. Woodhouse could not bear the idea of her stirring out of her house in the fogs of December. But no sooner was the distress known to Mr. Elton, than it was removed. His gallantry was always on the alert (vol. 1, ch. 6; p. 30).

The hinting that Emma must have done to get Mr. Elton to volunteer for this venture is evident only on closer inspection. On a first reading, this summary of the situation (at least until “some intelligent person whose taste could be depended on”) may seem to be narratorial, but the next lines make clear that they must have been Emma’s indirectly reported speech. The humor thus comes from the broadness of Emma’s hinting, the fact that Emma has evidently flattered Mr. Elton and our knowledge of how he must have taken it, and our understanding of the contradictory motives of the parties involved. Emma, of course, wants to give Mr. Elton more time with her flattering portrait as a matchmaking stratagem (one wonders whether Isabella truly would have been incapable of acquiring a frame if one were really necessary). Mr. Elton takes Emma’s complimentary hint as evidence, not only that he has her favor, but that he will be able to curry more by performing this commission well. Emma interprets this as rote “gallantry” rather than attributing his apparent eagerness to its true source.

Incidentally, the inclusion of the month in a subordinate clause of this indirectly reported speech, mentioned only because it forms part of Emma’s plan, exemplifies a tendency that Marcia Folsom notes in Austen to “reveal the days and dates in chance disclosures by the characters”: “the characters are conscious of the date markers incidentally, as asides in thoughts about something else that seems more important” (pp. xxiv–xxv). Such disclosures aid the realism of the novel insofar as they mimic the lived “experience of remembering what day it is” and organizing our activities accordingly more than any overt reckoning of the day or date would (ibid., p. xxiv).

Schrödinger’s Narrator

Debate regarding free indirect discourse in Emma often centers around the impact that its use has on narrative authority (see again Finch and Bowen versus Gunn), or competing interpretations of which sentiments are expressed by (predominantly) Emma versus the narrator.

It strikes me, however, that there are places where perhaps both the narrator and Emma are speaking, and humor is produced by the friction between what each of them means. References to Mr. Elton’s “love” and “attachment” have just such a double meaning throughout this and the last two sections. When Mrs. Weston speaks to Mr. Elton, for example, “not in the least suspecting that she was addressing a lover,” Emma of course reads Elton as a lover of Harriet (which would serve to make him warm in the defence of the portrait’s accuracy as a byproduct of his defence of its subject’s charms). Some readers on a first reading, and all readers on a second, realize the falsity of Emma’s interpretation. The phrase, however, is not in and of itself inaccurate: Mrs. Weston is addressing a lover (of Emma, which has made him warm in the defence of the portrait’s accuracy as a testament to its artist’s skill), and she does not suspect it. This latter meaning of the line, then, is the narrator’s, or the reader’s in collusion with the narrator.

Consider also the line in the section before last that describes Mr. Elton as speaking “with a sort of sighing animation, which had a vast deal of the lover” (vol. 1, ch. 6; p. 26); or Emma giving Mr. Elton “credit for stationing himself where he might gaze and gaze again without offence” (ibid., p. 29) in the last section; or these lines:

She must allow him to be still frequently coming to look; anything less would certainly have been too little in a lover; and he was ready at the smallest intermission of the pencil, to jump up and see the progress, and be charmed.—There was no being displeased with such an encourager, for his admiration made him discern a likeness almost before it was possible. She could not respect his eye, but his love and his complaisance were unexceptionable (ibid.).

Of course Emma is in one sense being correct on accident—correctly interpreting signs while misinterpreting where they lead. But it is at least not impossible to see this as being simultaneously narratorial commentary. Indeed, the wording of these lines would not need to be so carefully ambiguous if we were meant to understand them as representing Emma’s thinking alone. The narrator, then, is involved in a process of selection, focalizing their narration through Emma and yet letting ‘through’ only those parts of Emma’s thinking that are also in line with their knowledge of Mr. Elton’s motives.

David Amigoni writes, in an analysis of another passage, that “[f]ocalisation distinguishes between who sees (Emma), and who speaks (the narrator). Readers can only ‘peer beyond’ using the words provided by the narrator” rather than by Emma (p. 27). Here, though, all of the phrasing is plausibly Emma’s, and it is the words that are not provided by the narrator (that is, the careful suppression of any reference to the object of Mr. Elton’s “love” or “attachment”) that allow the reader to see the limitations in Emma’s point of view. This suppression becomes a clue the narrator leaves to the mystery plot that occupies volume one.4

Footnotes

1. See also Minter, pp. 56–7.

2. For other readings that emphasize Emma as artist see Lawry; Morgan; Havley; Fletcher; Goodheart; and Jones. Jones, like Sabiston, emphasizes the gendered nature of Emma’s experience: in taking a role as an “active shaper of perception,” Emma is usurping the “masculine activity” of producing art (p. 323).

3. John Wiltshire calls this “the comedy of cross-purposes,” p. 58.

4. On mystery and detective plots in Emma see Booth (1961), pp. 105–7; Monk (1990); and Belton (1998). Fry (1979) argues that the novel ultimately morally disapproves of mystery, both in its characters (e.g. Frank) and generically; Monk, however, points to the mystery plot in Emma as an indication of “how completely Jane Austen practices what she preaches against,” p. 350.

Discussion Questions

1. How do you read the portrait incident? What character traits does it reveal or what themes does it serve to develop? Does the text rebuke Emma for her manipulation of Harriet’s image, and/or is it sympathetic to her? Does the text rebuke Emma for her manipulation of Harriet’s image, and/or is it sympathetic to her?

2. How do we see Emma’s conception of Mr. Elton reveal itself or change throughout this section?

3. Who is ‘speaking’ throughout these and the last sections? What is the relationship between the characters and the narrator?

4. Are there any other ‘clues’ that may allow the reader to see what the characters are missing?

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

Babb, Howard S. “Emma: Fluent Irony and the Pains of Self-Discovery.” In Jane Austen’s Novels: The Fabric of Dialogue. Columbus: Ohio State University Press (1962), pp. 175–202.

Belton, Ellen R. “Mystery Without Murder: The Detective Plots of Jane Austen.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 43.1 (June 1988), pp. 42–59. DOI: 10.2307/3044980.

Booth, Wayne C. “Point of View and the Control of Distance in Emma.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16.2 (September 1961), pp. 95–116. Repr. in The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd Ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 243–66.

Devereux, Cecily. “‘Much, Much beyond Impropriety’: Ludic Subversions and the Limitations of Decorum in Emma.” Modern Language Studies 25.4 (Autumn 1995), pp. 37–56. DOI: 10.2307/3195487.

Fletcher, Loraine. “Emma, the Shadow Novelist.” Critical Survey 4.1 (1992), pp. 36–44.

Folsom, Marcia McClintock, ed. Approaches to Teaching Austen's Emma. New York: MLA (2004).

Fry, George. “Georgic Comedy: The Fictive Territory of Jane Austen’s Emma.” Studies in the Novel 11.2 (Summer 1979), pp. 129–46.

Goodheart, Eugene. “Emma: Jane Austen's Errant Heroine.” The Sewanee Review 116.4 (Fall 2008), pp. 589–604. DOI:10.1353/SEW.0.0087.

Havley, Cicely Palser. “Emma: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.” English: Journal of the English Association 42.174 (Autumn 1993), pp. 221–37. DOI: 10.1093/english/42.174.221.

Jones, Wendy S. “Emma, Gender, and the Mind-Brain.” ELH 75. 2 (Summer 2008), pp. 315–43.

Lawry, J. S. “‘Decided and Open’: Structure in Emma.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24.1 (June 1969), pp. 1–15. DOI: 10.2307/2932348.

LeClair, Annette M. “Owning Her Work: Austen, the Artist, and the Audience in Emma.” Persuasions 21 (1999).

Litz, Walton. A. “The Limits of Freedom: Emma.” In Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development. London: Chatto & Windus (1965), pp. 132–49. Excerpted in Austen [1815], pp. 373–80.

Minter, David Lee. “Aesthetic Vision and the World of Emma.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 21.1 (June 1966), pp. 49–59. 10.2307/2932698.

Monk, Leland. “Murder She Wrote: The Mystery of Jane Austen's Emma.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 20.3 (Fall 1990), pp. 342–53.

Morgan, Susan J. “Emma Woodhouse and the Charms of Imagination.” Studies in the Novel 7.1 (Spring 1975), pp. 33–48.

Sabiston, Elizabeth Jean. The Prison of Womanhood: Four Provincial Heroines in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987.

Tauchert, Ashley. “Emma: ‘The Operation of the Same System in Another Way’.” In Romancing Jane Austen Narrative, Realism, and the Possibility of a Happy Ending. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2005), pp. 111–36. DOI: 10.1057/9780230599697_6.

The pattern from the last section repeats itself in this one. We are again given Emma’s interpretation of an event (Mr. Elton “seconded a sudden wish of hers, to have Harriet’s picture,” in a “manner” which evidenced his love for Harriet; vol. 1, ch. 6; p. 26), followed by a more direct account of what occurred. In fact, as we may gather, it is Emma who emphasizes the prospective portrait’s subject (“What an exquisite possession a good picture of her would be!”); Mr. Elton instead focuses on the prospective artist’s skill and other work (“Let me entreat you, Miss Woodhouse, to exercise so charming a talent in favour of your friend. I know what your drawings are”; ibid., emphasis mine). Emma notices this and yet ignores ignores its implications (“Yes, good man!—thought Emma—but what has all that to do with taking likenesses?”; ibid., p. 27. See also Sabiston p. 33).

Mr. Elton, for his part, misses Emma’s insistent talking up of Harriet. He at one point misinterprets Emma’s compliment to Harriet’s modesty (“She thinks so little of her own beauty”; vol. 1, ch. 6; p. 27) as a concern that she (Emma) will not be able to exercise her talents. Indeed, Emma’s real pleasure in drawing comes through in ways that, to my mind, make Mr. Elton’s mistake understandable.1 When she says, for example, that “Harriet’s features are very delicate, which makes a likeness difficult; and yet there is a peculiarity in the shape of the eye and the lines about the mouth which one ought to catch” (ibid.), we can see how her principle concern could either be Harriet’s appearance, or the skill which she will have to employ in creating a likeness of it. And the ostensible reason for the trio’s perusal of Emma’s portfolio of portraits (“that they might decide together on the best size for Harriet”; ibid.) seems to me insufficient to account for the amount of time that Emma spends explicating them.

As in the last section, repetition of an interlocutor’s speech here represents a failure of communication; Mr. Elton’s repetitions of Emma’s words are modified by additions which reveal the real source of his interest: “Exactly so—The shape of the eye and the lines about the mouth—I have not a doubt of your success. Pray, pray attempt it. As you will do it, it will indeed, to use your own words, be an exquisite possession” (ibid., emphasis mine).

And again: “Mr. Elton seemed very properly struck and delighted by the idea, and was repeating, ‘No husbands and wives in the case at present indeed, as you observe. Exactly so. No husbands and wives’” (ibid., p. 28; emphasis original); he has entirely missed the fact that, in Emma’s construction, the spouse in question was the subject of the portrait, not its artist.2

A Thorough Knowledge of Drawing and Music

In the assessment of Emma’s skill at drawing and painting in this section we hear an echo of Knightley’s statement that Emma “will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience” (vol. 1, ch. 5; p. 22). We are informed that Emma “played and sang;—and drew in almost every style; but steadiness had always been wanting; and in nothing had she approached the degree of excellence which she would have been glad to command, and ought not to have failed of” (vol. 1, ch. 6; p. 27). By this logic, a gentlewoman’s ‘accomplishments’ are valued not only (or even primarily) for themselves, but to the extent that they evidence desirable traits in a marriageable woman (“steadiness”).

Commenters tend to assume that this is a narratorial decrying of a serious fault in Emma, but this passage may just as well be relaying Emma’s perspective. Per Hilary Schor:

We are reasonably certain that we are listening to an authoritative voice in the first few sentences of this passage: the assurance of the diagnostic authority of the “degree” of excellence which she would have been “glad to command, and ought not to have failed of” suggest a superior intelligence, ready to measure in turn reality, degrees of excellence, and moral duty—a voice we will come, in the novel, to associate with Mr. Knightley, certain what Emma ought to “submit to.” However, when we reconsider the passage, much less of it appears to be located in some external, objective perspective, and much more in Emma’s own: this paragraph knows nothing Emma herself does not know. […] Once we trace the path of knowledge in the elegant sentences, we might be considerably less certain that authorial knowledge rests in them, and more aware that what we are hearing is not an objective narrator, but a slightly filtered account of Emma’s own judgment of herself.

Thus, the novel encourages us, subtly, to distrust our distrust of Emma; it teaches us, perversely, as Mrs. Weston announces early, that there are limits to her foolishness (p. 148).

Frances Ferguson’s assessment of the moral strategy of the novel at large comes to mind:

While [A. Walton Litz and Wayne C. Booth] insist that there is a clearly available narrative position from which to judge Emma, I would argue, by contrast, that the novel is hard on Emma to exactly the same extent that it is committed to her. Moreover, it is hard on her because of this attachment. In reporting Emma’s words and actions but especially in using her memory as the central locus for remorse, the novelist makes Emma’s blameworthiness inseparable from her privileged position (p. 171).

A Fault on the Right Side

Emma opines that a too-flattering portrait is “a fault on the right ride” (vol. 1, ch. 6; p. 28) in a time when the popular and scholarly opinion of portraiture tasked the artist with the job of smoothing over the idiosyncrasies created by nature in order to create a more ‘artistic’ image of universal perfection (Jones, p. 322; Campbell, p. 210).

For Annette LeClair, Isabella Knightley’s reaction to her husband’s portrait is used to comment on the relationship between an artist and their audience:

Isabella, ever her father’s daughter, sees this portrait only in relation to her own preoccupations—in this case, her exaggerated views of her husband’s virtues. She is thus unable to see Emma’s work for what it is. Emma’s frustration at this situation drives the portrait painter in her to despair. For a while, at least, she gives up drawing “‘in disgust’”. From her point of view it must seem that no matter what she attempts, no matter what kind of accommodation she tries to make to her audience, that audience eventually takes over her work for purposes of its own (p. 120).

Ashley Tauchert writes that

The tension between these different receptions of a common representation [Mrs. Weston’s and Mrs. Isabella Knightley’s] marks the incommensurability of perspective as determined by the particularity of relationship between subject and object. Isabella, as the one who has married John Knightley, and borne several children by him, while remaining a ‘devoted wife’, would be expected to perceive him differently to the artist and another party, who find the representation ‘flattering' (p. 120).

Thus John Knightley’s portrait is one in a series of signs that display the contingent nature of perception in Emma.

Footnotes

1. On Emma as genuinely interested in the creation of visual art see LeClair, p. 117.

2. Many interpretations of Emma center around the motif of misunderstanding. For an instructive reading see Tauchert p. 117ff.

Discussion Questions

1. Do either Emma or Mr. Elton strike you as “more” at fault for the pair’s mutual misunderstandings in this section? Are there any places where the signs misinterpreted by each party seem more or less ambiguous than others?

2. What is the significance of the passage in which the trio go through Emma’s portfolio? What is revealed of Emma’s character, or the relationship between the three young people?

3. Who is accusing Emma of a lack of steadiness, and is this a serious fault or (as Claudia Johnson writes) a “minute” one (p. 128)?

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

Booth, Wayne C. “Point of View and the Control of Distance in Emma.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16.2 (September 1961), pp. 95–116. Repr. in The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd Ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1983), pp. 243–66. DOI: 10.2307/2932473.

Campbell, Teri. “‘Not Handsome Enough’: Faces, Pictures, and Language in Pride and Prejudice.” Persuasions 34 (2012), 207–21.

Ferguson, Frances. “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form.” Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (March 2000), pp. 157–80. DOI: 10.1215/00267929-61-1-157.

Johnson, Claudia L. “Emma: Woman, Lovely Woman, Reigns Alone.” In Women, Politics and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1988), pp. 121–43. Excerpted in Austen [1815], pp. 400–13.

Jones, Wendy S. “Emma, Gender, and the Mind-Brain.” ELH 75. 2 (Summer 2008), pp. 315–43.

LeClair, Annette M. “Owning Her Work: Austen, the Artist, and the Audience in Emma.” Persuasions 21 (1999).

Litz, Walton. A. “The Limits of Freedom: Emma.” In Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development. London: Chatto & Windus (1965), pp. 132–49. Excerpted in Austen [1815], pp. 373–80.

Sabiston, Elizabeth Jean. The Prison of Womanhood: Four Provincial Heroines in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987.

Schor, Hilary. “Emma, Interrupted: Speaking Jane Austen in Fiction and Film.” In Jane Austen on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2003), pp. 144–74. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139164702.009.

Tauchert, Ashley. “Emma: ‘The Operation of the Same System in Another Way’.” In Romancing Jane Austen Narrative, Realism, and the Possibility of a Happy Ending. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2005), pp. 111–36. DOI: 10.1057/9780230599697_6.

Emma’s determination that other people accept her conception of reality as accurate is apparent from the first few lines of this section: Harriet is “more sensible than before” of Mr. Elton’s merits (not, for instance, the more subjective “had a higher opinion than before”); Mr. Elton’s “perception,” not “opinion,” “of the striking improvement of Harriet’s manner” is thought of (Austen [1815], vol. 1, ch. 6; pp. 25, 26; emphasis mine).

On the conversation that opens this section, Linda Bree writes that

Because Emma is so confident about her own judgement, and is plainly so much more intelligent than many people around her, the reader is led into accepting her word for what is happening. […] The first directly related speech of Mr Elton to Emma sets the tone. […] [Quotes from “You have given Miss Smith” to “received from nature.”] In the context of her plans for Mr Elton and Harriet, Emma’s evident assumption that Mr Elton’s words relate to his feelings for Harriet rather than herself is natural enough. And so is the reader’s initial acquiescence with this reading (p. 95).

There is an identifiable disconnect, however, between Emma’s interpretation of Mr. Elton’s “perception” and what we can see evidenced in what he actually says. I am struck by the insistent repetition of the pronoun “you” in the aforementioned speech:

“You have given Miss Smith all that she required,” said he; “you have made her graceful and easy. She was a beautiful creature when she came to you, but, in my opinion, the attractions you have added are infinitely superior to what she received from nature" (ibid., p. 26; emphasis mine).

Mr. Elton then begins to object when Emma pretends modesty in attesting Harriet’s manner to nature rather than her own tutelage. He repeats Emma’s phrase “decision of character,” but with a meaningful difference—“superadded decision of character”—and follows it up with the exclamation “Skilful has been the hand” (ibid., emphasis mine). Emma echoes his syntax: “Great has been the pleasure.” This continues a pattern, apparent in Mr. Knightley’s and Mrs. Weston’s conversation in chapter five, for example, of interlocutors echoing each other’s speech—here, however, rather than evidencing maturity and mutual respect, this repetition-with-a-difference suggests a breakdown in communication.

Emma’s subconscious reckoning of these doubt-inducing circumstances (we know that she is a keen observer, for all that she sometimes turns her observations to poor account) may in fact come through in the first paragraph. The repetition of negatives (she “could not feel a doubt,” she “had no hesitation,” she “had no scruple,” she “could not suppose anything wanting,” it “was not one of the least agreeable proofs”; ibid., pp. 25, 26) and the superfluity of adverbs (“decidedly more sensible,” “remarkably handsome,” “pretty confident,” “quite convinced”1; ibid.) combine to create an overwhelming, flurrying sort of diction that, in Austen, never bodes well.2

Speaking by Rule

Consider this speaking em dash: “’If it were admissible to contradict a lady,’ said the gallant Mr. Elton—” (ibid., p. 26). It suggests, not only that Mr. Elton was interrupted before he could complete his speech, but that this is a speech which needed no completion and which he perhaps never meant to complete. His speech here—as many of his speeches are—is purely formulaic (“A lover, according to the code [of courtship], must admire his ladylove in all she does”; McMaster p. 95). Elton has probably assumed that Emma was speaking formulaically as well—that she affects modesty in response to a compliment as a matter of course, rather than in order to promote a high opinion of Harriet.

Scholarship tends to focus on Emma’s misinterpretations of events, and yet the circumstances that lead Mr. Elton to misinterpret these same situations in another direction are also readily discernible. In fact it is part of the skill with which Austen has constructed her cross-purposes that these incidents can be read from multiple perspectives. As Juliet McMaster notes, “Emma entirely mistranslates Mr. Elton’s secret language. But so does he hers” (p. 95).

Footnotes

1. Note that “quite” at this time is likely to have meant “thoroughly,” rather than the modern British English sense of “fairly” (which Harper suggests is attested from the mid-19th century). On the syntax of Emma and “could not feel a doubt” as an example of the fact that “Emma’s misinterpretations are reported with non-factives,” see Dry, p. 97ff.

2. Roger Gard notes that “precise” and “clear speech” serves as a “moral pointer” in Austen (pp. 162, 163).

Discussion Questions

1. How do Emma’s and Mr. Elton’s syntax and diction suggest their perspectives in this section? What kind of relationship do they appear to have with each other? What can we gather of their respective opinions of Harriet?

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

Bree, Linda. “Style, Structure, Language.” In The Cambridge Companion to Emma, ed. Peter Sabor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2015), pp. 88–104.

Campbell, Teri. “‘Not Handsome Enough’: Faces, Pictures, and Language in Pride and Prejudice.” Persuasions 34 (2012), 207–21.

Dry, Helen. “Syntax and Point of View in Jane Austen’s Emma.” Studies in Romanticism 16.1 (Winter 1977), pp. 87–99. DOI: 10.2307/25600065

Gard, Roger. “Emma’s Choices.” In Jane Austen’s Novels: The Art of Clarity. Avon: Yale University Press (1992), pp. 155–81.

Harper, Douglas. “Etymology of quite.” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/quite. Accessed 2 December, 2021.

Jones, Wendy S. “Emma, Gender, and the Mind-Brain.” ELH 75. 2 (Summer 2008), pp. 315–43.

This is the second argument (counting the first chapter’s discussion of Emma’s alleged matchmaking on behalf of Miss Taylor and Mr. Weston as the first) in a novel in which arguments are very important. Arguments characterize the people who have them, clarify their thoughts and opinions about other characters, occurrences, and philosophical questions, and direct the reader’s attention to these questions as they resonate throughout the book. They encourage us to think about why characters believe what they believe, and what it would mean for them to be “right” or “wrong” (do we judge that based on future events, or based on how well-founded we believe their opinions to be at this point in the narrative?). This argument in particular makes explicit intertwined focuses on authority, industriousness, cleverness, matrimony, and physical health that will continue to surface in future events.1 And, since Mrs. Weston and Mr. Knightley represent our “chief witnesses” into Emma’s behaviour before the beginning of  novel, it behooves us to pay their disagreement (and their potential “motives” for it) close attention (Burrows, p. 23).

However thematically important disagreements may be in Emma, they are seldom or never explicitly resolved. According to Patricia McKee, this one is a testament to the “inadequacy of rational debate” in the novel:

[...] [T]here is little real debate [in this scene], and neither character sees the other as reasonable in what there is of it. Mrs. Weston says that Mr. Knightley is not "a fair judge in this case" […] Mr. Knightley, on the other hand, says that Mrs. Weston has a "charm thrown over [her] senses" so that she cannot see Emma as she is. Common terms of reason seem unavailable (p. 54).

Nevertheless, this is, like “many of the disagreements in this novel,” marked by “maturity and candor of opposition” (Johnson p. 128; p. 406 in Austen [1815]); if our witnesses do not agree on the terms under which this debate should be held, they at least disagree civilly and overtly.

Dear Emma’s Little Faults

The rightness or wrongness of Knightley’s criticism of Emma, and the relationship of his judgement to Jane Austen’s (or the narrator’s) own, are questions that have been central to debate about Emma for a century or more. Walton A. Litz, for example, writes in 1965 that this argument “confirms our impression that Knightley is the custodian of Jane Austen's judgment. The opening of the chapter sets its judicial tone: [quotes from ‘I do not know what your opinion may be’ to ‘do the other any good’]” (p. 148; p. 380 in Austen [1815]. See also p. 134; p. 374 in Austen [1815]). For Joseph Wiesenfarth, Knightley’s opinion that Emma “is spoiled by being the cleverest of her family” is substantiated by the fact that “cleverness is a negative aspect of character in the novel” (p. 209).

Michael Giffin, whose central argument in this section likens Knightley to “the LORD” (p. 155), puts entire faith in the correctness of his perspective in this chapter:

Because she has adopted the role of parent, Emma thinks she understands everything there is to understand; but in fact her understanding is quite narrow. This narrowness is due to her untrained mind, from being without the patience to read or the will to subject her fancy to her understanding; her lack of worldliness, from being confined to life at Hartfield; her ego, from being inflated by the constant flattery of everyone except Mr Knightley; and her superiority, from her strong sense that most of the people she could socialise with are inferior to her. Mr Knightley knows that love and marriage are the only things that will transform Emma, but she is too immature to recognise this, as he confides to Mrs Weston: [quotes from “She always declares she will never marry” through to “she goes so seldom from home”] (pp. 167-8).

Other critics argue that Knightley’s perspective is meaningfully different from the (implied) author’s or narrator’s, and thus that his argument here ought not to be taken for fact.2 Claudia Johnson writes that

[...] Knightley has long been accustomed to monitor Emma with ready reproof. True to form, he warns that Emma's association with Harriet is “a bad thing”. But though they proceed from an anxiety for improvement that we can appreciate only later, even the very worst of Knightley's criticisms turn out to be fretfully minute: Emma, he complains, has never finished her reading lists; she has not applied her talents steadily; no one has ever gotten the better of her precocity; her new young friend will harm Emma by flattering her vanity, and Emma in turn will harm her by swelling her silly head. Mrs. Weston does not share Knightley's dire predictions about Emma's projects, because she considers her judgment worth relying on […] Here is no blind dependence on the infallibility of Emma's authority, but instead a confidence in its basic soundness (p. 128; p. 406 in Austen [1815]).

Alison Sulloway is a still harsher critic of Knightley’s arguments, and the language he uses to make them:

Knightley, as always, sees the surface problem, and as always, he offers a kind, yet insufficient remedy. He sees that Emma has trouble concentrating, yet he dismisses her fantasies and her curiously adult awareness that she is buried alive as mere inability to subject “the fancy to the understanding.” […] He sees how serious for Emma was the loss of her mother, but he sees the dead mother as someone who would have dominated Emma in a parental way, as he is trying to do […]. How much good is this man going to be able to do for Emma, a man who considers her cleverness a “misfortune” and her talents almost a crime that require “subjection”? He sees only one solution to her predicament, the classic one: “It would not be a bad thing for her to be very much in love with a proper object” (p. 329).

Similarly, Michele Larrow argues that Knightley fails in exercising sympathy at this point of the narrative, while Mrs. Weston encourages him to employ a sympathetic imagination (“perhaps no man can be a good judge […]”; Austen [1815] vol. 1, ch. 5; p. 22): “In this scene, Austen has staked out two positions on Emma: one of a benevolent, affectionate friend, who has sympathy for her feelings and sees her as an adult; the other of an impartial spectator, who treats her as a child, sees many faults in her behavior, and cannot understand what she feels” (n.p.).3

But if Knightley is indeed being harsher than he ought to be here, what reason does he have? Mary Waldron questions whether Knightley himself knows, arguing that he is not as sure and unruffled in this scene as some scholars assume. She characterizes his argument as an “attack” disguised as “concern,” at the close of which he

actually announces his belief that marriage is the only thing that will subdue her: “I should like to see Emma in love, and in some doubt of a return; it would do her good.” This does not seem like the wish of a kindly benevolent mentor: it is in fact rather savage. It is open to the reader to doubt whether Mr. Knightley here really knows his own mind. He protests that he has had “no . . . charm thrown over [his] senses,” but his very protestation suggests that he has, and that it has set up an uncomfortable conflict in his mind. He ends the conversation abruptly by talking of the weather: a sure sign of disquiet (p. 146).4

The Tribute of Warm Female Friendship

This section continues an uneasiness that will percolate throughout the rest of the novel regarding the possibility and conditions of female friendship. Laura E. Thomason argues that the novel suggests an 18th-century skepticism about the possibility of equal friendship, especially between women. Cultural focuses on rank and hierarchy on the one hand and moral improvement on the other mandated that one friend have utility to another, and it is in this context that “Emma sees herself as able to be [a] morally improving, superior friend” to Harriet (p. 228). Whether women in general have the social power necessary to fulfil this “classical” archetype of friendship (p. 229), however, remains to be seen.5

On Rhetoric

Juliet McMaster points out that the speech of Mr. Knightley that opens this chapter forms a marked contrast with both Emma’s and Harriet’s speech of the chapter before:

While Emma is befuddling Harriet with unspoken assumptions about whether Robert Martin is good enough for Miss Woodhouse's friend, Mr. Knightley can be quite open and outspoken on the delicate matter of female friendship: ‘I do not know what your opinion may be, Mrs. Weston, ... of this great intimacy between Emma and Harriet Smith, but I think it a bad thing.’ No need to translate or interpret that speech. It says what it means and means what it says (pp. 100–1).

She acknowledges, however, that Knightley does use figurative speech. Remarks such as “Perhaps you think I am come on purpose to quarrel with you” and “I will not plague you any more. Emma shall be an angel” reveal (in addition to whatever else they evidence) a dry humor of the kind we saw in the first chapter (Austen [1815] vol. 1, ch. 5; pp. 22, 24).

Mrs. Weston likewise employs humor in this passage, though it is in defence of Emma (“‘I dare say […] that I thought so then;—but since we have parted, I can never remember Emma’s omitting to do any thing I wished‘”; ibid., p. 22). Her style of speaking, though, is different from that of anyone we have met so far. She is more given than Knightley to exclamation, to repetition, and to strings of clauses that mean much the same thing as each other (“‘I hope not that.—It is not likely. No, Mr. Knightley, do not foretell vexation from that quarter’”; p. 23). On a few occasions, she echoes Knightley’s speech and asks him to account for his reasoning (“‘A bad thing! Do you really think it a bad thing?—why so?’”; p. 22). Knightley, by contrast, tends to tell rather than ask Mrs. Weston what she believes and knows (“‘You never could persuade her to read half so much as you wished.—You know you could not‘”; ibid.)—the one question he asks her is a rhetorical one to which he has already assumed the answer (“‘Oh! you would rather talk of her person than her mind, would you? Very well’”; p. 24). Mrs. Weston is also more given to qualifying her arguments, and to acknowledging the correctness of parts of Knightley’s (“’She is not the superior young woman which Emma's friend ought to be. But on the other hand […]’”; p. 22; “‘With all dear Emma’s little faults […]’”; p. 24; “‘she will never lead any one really wrong; she will make no lasting blunder’”; ibid., emphasis mine). The distinctness of Mrs. Weston’s and Mr. Knightley’s personalities and approaches to criticism and to argument come through, not only through their arguments themselves, but also in these details of diction.

Footnotes

1. On Emma’s focus on physical health see Wiltshire.

2. For other critics who more or less equate Knightley’s point of view with the narrator’s, see Booth (“when [Knightley] rebukes Emma […] we have Jane Austen's judgment on Emma, rendered dramatically”; p. 104); Schorer (p. 105); and Shannon (p. 644). For other critics who argue that Knightley’s difference from the narrator’s judgments is structurally significant, see Hagan; and Moffat (especially p. 54ff).

3. On Knightley’s need to improve in sympathy throughout the course of Emma see also Kenney. See Restuccia (p. 461) for another close reading of this scene that is critical of Knightley.

4. On the significance of these last lines see also Burrows: “These closing phrases represent the impersonal narrator’s one real intervention on all this chapter; and when Jane Austen’s narrator suddenly intervenes to distinguish between a saying and a surmising or to remark that someone is “convinced” of something, we should be brought to the alert. Mr Knightley’s unexpected interest in the weather seems, therefore, to imply that Mrs Weston’s conviction is unfounded and that he is left with more to surmise about Hartfield than he cares to say. But such fleeting glimpses of his love for Emma only confirm him, for a long time to come, in his dissatisfaction with her as she is” (pp. 23–4). Burrows’ analysis of this scene begins on p. 22.

5. On women’s friendships in Emma see also Perry.

Discussion Questions

1. For those who have read Emma before--do future events vindicate either Knightley or Mrs. Weston in this argument? Are characters’ ability and inability to predict future events throughout the novel an indicator of knowledge, better perception or reasoning, or merely “lucky guess[es]”? What might be the importance of Mrs. Weston’s qualifier “lasting”?

2. Is Mr. Knightley the mouthpiece of the narrator in Emma? What arguments exist for and against this position? What personal reasons might some readers or critics have for accepting or not accepting Knightley’s judgments as factual?

3. How serious do you think Mr. Knightley is about the idea of wifely submission he presents in this section (and in the first chapter)?

4. What ideas about reading are presented in this section? How can we compare them to the ideas about reading explored in the last section?

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

Booth, Wayne C. “Point of View and the Control of Distance in Emma.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16.2 (September 1961), pp. 95–116. Repr. in The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd Ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1983), pp. 243–66. DOI: 10.2307/2932473.

Burrows, J. F. Jane Austen’s Emma. Sydney: Sydney University Press (1968).

Giffin, Michael. “Emma.” In Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2002), pp. 149–76.

Hagan, John. “The Closure of Emma.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 15.4 (Autumn 1975), pp. 545-561. DOI: 10.2307/450010.

Kenney, Theresa. "’And I Am Changed Also’: Mr. Knightley's Conversion to Amiability,” Persuasions 29 (2007), pp. 110-20.

Larrow, Michele. “‘Could He Even Have Seen into Her Heart’: Mr. Knightley’s Development of Sympathy.” Persuasions On-Line 37.1 (Winter 2016).

Litz, Walton. A. “The Limits of Freedom: Emma.” In Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development. London: Chatto & Windus (1965), pp. 132–49. Excerpted in Austen [1815], pp. 373–80.

Johnson, Claudia L. “Emma: Woman, Lovely Woman, Reigns Alone.” In Women, Politics and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1988), pp. 121–43. Excerpted in Austen [1815], pp. 400–13.

McKee, Patricia. “Productions of Knowledge: Emma and Frankenstein.” In Public and Private: Gender, Class, and the British Novel (1764–1878). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1997), pp. 47–76.

McMaster, Juliet. “The Secret Languages of Emma.” Persuasions 13 (1991), pp. 119–31. Repr. in Jane Austen the Novelist: Essays Past and Present. London: Macmillan Press (1996), pp. 90–105.

Moffat, Wendy. “Identifying with Emma: Some Problems for the Feminist Reader.” College English 53.1 (January 1991), pp. 45–58. DOI: 10.2307/377968.

Perry, Ruth. “Interrupted Friendships in Jane Austen's Emma.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 5.2 (Autumn 1986), pp. 185–202. DOI: 10.2307/463994.

Restuccia, Frances L. “A Black Morning: Kristevan Melancholia in Jane Austen’s Emma.” American Imago 51.4 (Winter 1994), pp. 447–69.

Schorer, Mark. “The Humiliation of Emma Woodhouse.” The Literary Review 2 (1959), p. 552. Repr. in Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt. Englewood Cliffs, N. J: Prentice Hall (1963), pp. 98–111.

Shannon, Edgar F. “Emma: Character and Construction.” PMLA 71.4 (September 1956), pp. 637–50. DOI: 10.2307/460635.

Sulloway, Alison G. “Emma Woodhouse and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” The Wordsworth Circle 7.4 (Autumn 1976), pp. 320–32. DOI: 10.1086/TWC24041892.

Thomason, Laura E. “The Dilemma of Friendship in Austen's Emma.” The Eighteenth Century 56.2, (Summer 2015), pp. 227–41. DOI: 10.1353/ecy.2015.0018.

Waldron, Mary. “Men of Sense and Silly Wives: The Confusions of Mr. Knightley.” Studies in the Novel 28.2 (Summer 1996), pp. 141–57. Repr. in Jane Austen and the Fiction of her Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1999), pp. 112–34. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511484667.006.

Wiesenfarth, Joseph. “Emma: Point Counter Point.” In Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, ed. John Halperin. Cambridge University Press (1975), pp. 207–22.

Emma’s metrics for determining whether Robert Martin is gentleman-like in this and the last section—considering first his reading habits, then his appearance, then his manner—exist in an early 19th-century context when the conception of gentility was divided between an earlier dependence on rank (a gentleman must be from a landed background and have one of a limited number of genteel careers) and a later view that depended more completely on manner and education. This ideological shift occurred in step with the inception of a capitalist economy that moved power away from its agrarian roots and towards unlanded classes (see Morgan, especially pp. 91ff). Michael Kramp notes that

Emma prefigures significant modifications in England’s ancestral economic system, such as the rise of the trade class and the optimism of the yeomanry. The tale also documents the counter-efforts of the gentry to retain a nostalgic conception of English culture, including pastoral power and a manorial economy (p. 148).2

Part of this “nostalgiac conception” comprises the figure of Lady Bountiful, a woman of the landed classes who would minister to the needs of the local poor, tenant farmers, widows, and other ‘dependents’ (see Spratt, especially pp. 195-7)—in this model, paternalistic charity confirms and attests to the beneficence of the system of rank, as well as being one of the only forms of usefulness available to women of the landed classes (see Sabiston, p. 26). Emma’s attitude towards Robert Martin and his position in the hierarchy hints at the degradation of the Lady Bountiful archetype, both in terms of her material usefulness and in terms of her cultural reputation. Per Danielle Spratt:

Highbury’s economic and social fluidity further stymies Emma, making it difficult for her to ascertain her philanthropic role […] Emma rather unconsciously attests to the changing economy of Highbury and her unclear charitable role within it when she tells Harriet that she has no interest in helping the local tenant-farmers, especially the likes of Robert Martin (p. 199).

Through this lens, Martin is “unsettling” to Emma because he has through “hard work” drawn himself “to the very brink of the propertied classes and social recognition” (Finch & Bowen p. 17, FN 19). Martin’s liminal position on the hierarchy of rank is evidenced by his “information,” his singular and communal reading habits, the prosperity of Abbey Mill Farm (see Merrett pp. 730-1), his ability to exert authority over his “shepherd’s son” to procure entertainment for Harriet (Austen [1815], vol. 1, ch. 4; p. 16), and, despite all this, his position as a tenant.3 It is interesting to note that the possibility of Emma meeting Mr. Martin in the sense of being introduced to him never arises; she “walk[s] a few yards forward,” and is “kept waiting” through their discussion rather than participating in it (ibid., p. 19).

Totally Without Air!

What are we to make of Emma’s insistence on the importance of “manner” and “air”? She is, of course, here holding Robert Martin to standards that better apply to the gentry, but how much do these things matter? According to Toby Tanner, not at all:

[Emma’s] defensive, and in many ways willed and fabricated, ‘contempt’ for the farmer class, the yeoman of England, is perhaps one of her most manifestly stupid and unjust attempts to use class position to denigrate and reduce the importance of a class different from hers. She insists on disparaging Martin for his ‘want of gentility’, lack of ‘manners’ and ‘air’. She sees him—or pretends to—as ‘clownish’. But here Emma is the ‘clown’ and the ‘joke’ is on her. As we see in the course of the novel, so-called ‘gentility’ and ‘manners’ are indeed so much ‘air’, if not even emptier—and worse. Martin is something more solid and valuable (p. 195).

Other scholars argue that the importance of “manner” (as in, “air” or bearing) and “manners” (as in, politeness) is in some ways vindicated in Emma. Jonathan Grossman mentions “the serious business of etiquette that occupies every respectable person in Highbury”; “manners matter” for how they “connect[] society and individual” (p. 149), to the extent that the business of politeness can be said to be “the veritable labor of the leisure class” (p. 150). Similarly, Martin Price writes that “[w]hile manners may be a self-sufficient code, more a game than a system of signifiers, still at their most important they imply feelings and beliefs, moral attitudes which stand as their ultimate meaning and warrant” (p. 267).4

Notice, incidentally, that Emma’s insistence on Martin’s clownishness and Harriet’s reaction to it is the only evidence we have about what Martin’s manner is actually like at this point—we have never even heard him speak. He in the ranks, along with Frank Churchill and now Mr. Elton, of men about whom we have been told but have not ‘seen’.

Harriet’s Conversation

My post for the last section mentioned characters as having different styles of conversation. Howard Babb says of Harriet’s speech in this scene:

The conversation of Harriet reveals her as artless and rather ignorant. The staple of her talk is facts, facts which demand more often to be reported than interpreted, as we can see in one of her speeches to Emma about Robert Martin: [quotes from ”He did not think we ever walked this road” through to “Do you think him so very plain?” Austen [1815], vol. 1, ch. 4; p. 19]. Clearly these facts are reported at the pitch of her interest in Robert Martin, and perhaps the even rhythmic units will suggest how far Harriet’s feelings are from being threatened by her mind. Invariably she speaks, as it were, to the beat of her heart (pp. 180–1).

Emma’s speech, by contrast, takes part in generalizations and opinions more than in strings of facts or descriptions of events.

Footnotes

See Barchas on the use of the word “very” in Emma.

On this nostalgia see also Morris: “[Emma’s] use of the already somewhat old-fashioned term ‘yeomanry’ also suggests the backward-looking perspective she is adhering to. It echoes the perspective of those nostalgic for a mythical ‘old England’” (p. 101).

For other views of Martin’s position within Highbury’s hierarchy see Monaghan (p. 125) and Hume (pp. 56-7).

On manners in Jane Austen see also O’Farrell.

Discussion Questions

What ideas of “manner” and “gentility” are put forward in this section? Do Emma’s ideas represent snobbishness or realism?

What can we tell of Harriet’s feelings throughout this section? How does her speech differ from Emma’s?

Why does Emma call Martin “illiterate” after yesterday’s conversation about his reading practices?

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

Babb, Howard S. Jane Austen’s Novels: The Fabric of Dialogue. Columbus: Ohio State University Press (1962).

Barchas, Janine. “Very Austen: Accounting for the Language of Emma.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 62.3 (December 2007), pp. 303–38. DOI: 10.1525/ncl.2007.62.3.303.

Hume, Robert D. “Money and Rank.” In The Cambridge Companion to ‘Emma’ (Cambridge Companions to Literature), ed Peter Sabor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2015), pp. 52–67.

Grossman, Jonathan H. “The Labor of the Leisured in Emma: Class, Manners, and Austen.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 54.2 (Sep., 1999), pp. 143–64. DOI: 10.2307/2903098.

Kramp, Michael. “The Woman, the Gypsies, and England: Harriet Smith’s National Role.” College Literature 31.1 (Winter 2004), pp. 147–68. DOI: DOI: 10.1353/lit.2004.0008.

Merrett, Robert James. “The Gentleman Farmer in Emma: Agrarian Writing and Jane Austen’s Cultural Idealism.” University of Toronto Quarterly 77.2 (Spring 2008), pp. 711–37. DOI: 10.1353/utq.0.0280.

Monaghan, David. “Emma.” In Jane Austen: Structure and Social Vision. London: Macmillan (1980), pp. 115–42. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-04847-2_6.

Morgan, Marjorie. Manners, Morals and Class in England, 1774–1858. London: Palgrave Macmillan (1994).

Morris, Pam. “Emma: A Prospect of England.” In Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Worldly Realism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (2017), pp. 83–106. DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474419130.003.0004.

O’Farrell, Mary Ann. “Meditating Much upon Forks: Manners and Manner in Austen’s Novels.” Persuasions 34 (2012), pp. 99–110.

Price, Martin. “Manners, Morals, and Jane Austen.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30.3 (December 1975), pp. 261–80. DOI: 10.2307/2933070.

Spratt, Danielle. “Denaturalizing Lady Bountiful: Speaking the Silence of Poverty in Mary Brunton’s Discipline and Jane Austen’s Emma.” The Eighteenth Century 56.2 (Summer 2015), pp. 193–208. DOI: 10.1353/ecy.2015.0015.

We are also given information through direct reports of Harriet’s and Emma’s speech, Harriet’s reports of Robert Martin’s speech, and Emma’s indirect reporting of Harriet’s dialogue (as in e.g. “his great good-nature in doing something or other,” possibly indicating the abstraction of Emma’s attention; Austen [1815] vol. 1, ch. 4; p. 16). We are left to piece together information, and the narrator’s and characters’ attitudes towards this information, as it is filtered through these different levels of remove (in the above example: Robert Martin’s action, which action Harriet reports, which report Emma thinks about, which thinking the narrator reports).

Reading On Reading

Critics have differing opinions on the import of the various books that are named in this section. Emma, in assuming that Martin does not read anything outside “the line of his business” (and thus does not possess the shared pool of information, references, and perspectives considered necessary for a gentleman’s education) is, per Rachel Brownstein, “[t]rying to persuade poor Harriet Smith that the farmer Robert Martin isn’t good enough for her” (p. 225). “Harriet struggles to defend her suitor” by detailing his reading habits, but nevertheless “has a flustered sense that there is something wanting in Robert Martin, that is, something that Emma would want.” Brownstein points out that this conversation occurs in a long 18th-century context of debate about how “the self and society could be improved by reading”; some reading might have a “civic value,” given “the idea of the informed citizen whose reading equipped him to function in the public sphere” (p. 228).

Brownstein assumes that the Gothic literature named has such a civic function: Harriet has been introduced to Gothic literature “under Emma’s tutelage,” and Emma feels that “if Robert Martin deserved to be called a man of information he would read fashionable gothic novels for himself, for pleasure”: “a romantic novel by a woman,” such as The Romance of the Forest, “promised to feminize and polish a Robert Martin” (p. 226).

Some scholars have a contrary reading that degrades (or that view Emma or the novel Emma as degrading) Gothic literature as unenlightening reading, or reading that indicates a lack of taste. Paul Fry, for example, argues that when Emma “magnifies Robert Martin’s failure to buy a Gothic novel, she is only thinking of his mercenary preoccupation and not alleging that he has poor taste. In fact, the vagueness of ‘the book you recommended’ may indicate her awareness that The Romance of the Forest is not wholly edifying reading” (p. 135). Corley attributes Harriet’s “rather haphazard taste” in English literature to head-teacher Miss Nash (p.126).1

Per Margaret Doody, the mentioning of these Gothic novels (as they are “stories of abuse and displacement”) has a positive function in troubling the notion of Highbury as a “peaceful, calm world.” She takes issue with views such as Fry’s, lamenting that “[c]ritical readers blithely assume that The Romance of the Forest and The Children of the Abbey […] are inferior books because Harriet Smith likes them. A strange reading of Austen’s dodgy novel, which centers on the fallibility of assumptions!” (p. 395).2

What of what Robert Martin has read? Per Ford, Robert Martin’s study of “Agricultural Reports” (perhaps William Stevenson’s General View of the Agriculture of the County of Surrey) “suggests a commitment not merely to ‘profit and loss’ […] but also to understanding the principles behind agricultural best practices” (n.p.), marking him out as innovative and well-informed.3

Rachel Trickett similarly argues that Martin’s reading choices show him to be a well-informed man and point up Emma’s snobbery towards him:

Jane Austen’s choice of books here is significant. Both were popular literary works she herself enjoyed—Elegant Extracts as a repository or anthology of the most popular pieces of prose and verse of the previous century and The Vicar of Wakefield as Goldsmith’s influential and immensely popular idyllic tale of the 1760s. Emma’s contempt for Robert Martin is […] ill founded in her author’s eyes […] Jane Austen singles out the snobbery and limitation to censure it (p. 298).

Regarding The Vicar of Wakefield: Robert Miles (paraphrasing Cronin & Macmillan) notes that it is a “cautionary tale of a humble maid who nearly comes to ruin by trying to marry above her station,” whereas The Romance of the Forest and The Children of the Abbey “are romances in which orphaned heroines find themselves elevated through marriages attendant upon the discovery of their noble births.” Thus “Robert Martin knows the reality-check, whereas Harriet wants him to read her own obvious wish-fulfillments (Cronin and Macmillan 449)” (Miles, p. 78). This, of course, is another reading that denigrates the Gothic in Emma.4

Discriminating by Degree

What does Emma mean when she says that “yeomanry are precisely the order of people with whom I feel I can have nothing to do”?

“Yeomanry” is a term that is commonly used to refer to freeholding farmers, who own the land on which they work, though Emma here uses it to refer equally to tenant farmers, who pay their landlords (in Robert Martin’s case, Mr. Knightley) for the use of their land. Emma says that she cannot meet Mr. Martin either on terms of charity (as she would if he were “lower”) or on terms of equality (as she could if he were genteel).

Alistair Duckworth attributes Emma’s statement to an unwillingness to interact with inferiors whom she is not able to “patronize” (p. 150). Howard Babb adduces jealousy as another possible motive:

Emma’s generalizations smugly catapult herself to a social elevation almost unapproachable. Her words are informed not only by her desire to appear socially exclusive but also by her irritation with Robert Martin for having attracted Harriet—which is to say that Emma, like her father, unhesitatingly converts private feelings into principles (p. 182).

Paul Pickrel agrees with Babb insofar as jealousy is involved, but argues that Emma’s supposed snobbery is a front to begin with:

Emma is no snob. She sometimes gives snobbish motives for her actions but always, I believe, for one of three reasons: either she does not know her real motives, or she is ashamed of them, or she has some strategic reason for disguising them. It is the last that leads to her snobbish remarks about Robert Martin. Clearly she wants to drive a wedge between him and Harriet in order to have Harriet to herself, and just as clearly there is no very good wedge at hand (p. 301).

Claudia Johnson, however, argues that there is no snobbery even in the sentiment expressed: Emma is here merely being open about the reality of how rank constrains and governs hers and others’ behavior, “describing with unwonted bluntness a mode of social organization which the most attractive of Austen’s heroes—Darcy, for one—thrive on and honor with raising our dander” (p. 126).

Certainly not Clever?

Some gentle fun is perhaps poked at Harriet in this passage—given the effusiveness and starts and stops of her style of speaking, for example, or her feeling that it is “very odd” for two people to have birthdays in the same month (Austen [1815], vol. 1, ch. 4; p. 17).5 Harriet’s flustered assertion that Martin is determined to get the novels that she had recommended “as soon as ever he can” is an example of Martin’s speech as reported by Harriet, but its phrasing is probably more indicative of Harriet’s speech style than Martin’s (ibid.).

Harriet is, however, clever enough to understand the import of Emma’s questioning as she (Emma) asks leading questions designed to cast Martin as less than a “man of information” (ibid.). Harriet understands, as Brownstein puts it, that “there are different kinds of books and different ways of reading,” from “books intended to instruct and to delight” to “useful” books to “books for leisure” (p. 226).

Her assertion, as well, that Robert Martin is “not handsome—not at all handsome. I thought him very plain at first, but I do not think him so plain now. One does not, you know, after a time” (Austen [1815], vol. 1, ch. 4; p. 17) may seem at first blush like a bit of inanity, especially as compared with the sophisticated syntax and crisp efficiency of Emma’s speech. But the sentiment expressed is not necessarily a foolish one: it reminds me of characters’ shifting attitudes towards beauty in others of Austen’s works, notably Pride and Prejudice (where Darcy’s evaluation of Elizabeth changes with familiarity)6 and Northanger Abbey (where Catherine, by no means a confirmed beauty, is one day described as looking “almost pretty”; Austen [1817], vol. 1, ch. 1; p. 6).

Discussion Questions

What parts of this passage are free indirect discourse, and which parts are narratorial? Is it always possible to tell?

How does this passage manage information between giving it to us directly, through Emma’s perspective, through Harriet’s direct dialogue, or through Emma’s indirect reporting of Harriet’s dialogue? Does it matter which information is given to us in which form?

What can we tell from this passage about Emma’s attitude towards Harriet, or towards Robert Martin? What does Emma mean by her aside on the “yeomanry”? Do we find Emma likeable here?

Where did Harriet get her taste in Gothic literature from? What do you think Emma’s opinion of these books is likely to be? What is the function of Gothic literature, or these specific titles, in this scene or the novel at large?

Footnotes

See also Alistair Duckworth: “Whereas Martin reads the Agricultural Reports, Harriet has only read ‘the Romance of the Forest’ and ‘the Children of the Abbey’” (p. 155). Per James Kinsley, the listing of these novels “indicate[s] the limitations of Harriet’s education and taste” (p. 441). Amigoni claims that the point made by mentioning Harriet’s novel-reading “seems to be that Emma had better reform herself before she does any more damage to the already half-ruined and impressionable Harriet, spoiled by the wrong kind of novel” (p. 50).

For a reading that vindicates the Gothic mode in Emma see McInnes.

On Martin's reading The Vicar of Wakefield see also Merrett, p. 716.

On this passage, and reading habits in the long 18th century, see also Simons, pp. 468–71, and Wilson, pp. 39–40.

This, incidentally, strikes me as one of those little details that allows Emma to intuit Harriet and Mr. Martin’s interest in each other from Harriet’s report. Austen’s manner of showing attraction between characters often hides in details such as this—I am put in mind of Mr. Darcy using Elizabeth Bennet’s height as a metric when Caroline Bingley asks about Georgiana Darcy’s, for example (Austen [1813], vol. 1, ch. 8; p. 27).

See Campbell.

Bibliography

Amigoni, David. “The Elements of Narrative Analysis and the Origins of the Novel: Reading Jane Austen’s Emma and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.” In The English Novel and Prose Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000, pp. 17–53.

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1813] 2001.

_____. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

_____. Northanger Abbey (Norton Critical Edition). New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1817] 2004.

Babb, Howard S. Jane Austen’s Novels: The Fabric of Dialogue. Columbus: Ohio State University Press (1962).

Brownstein, Rachel M. “Why We Reread Jane Austen.” In Why Jane Austen? New York: Columbia University Press (2011), pp. 195–236.

Campbell, Teri. “’Not Handsome Enough’: Faces, Pictures, and Language in Pride and Prejudice.” Persuasions 34 (2012), pp. 207–21.

Corley, T. A. B. “Jane Austen’s ‘Real, Honest, Old-Fashioned Boarding-School’: Mrs La Tournelle and Mrs Goddard.” Women’s Writing 5.1 (1998), pp. 113–30. DOI: 10.1080/09699089800200035.

Cronin, Richard and Dorothy McMillan. “Harriet Smith’s Reading.” Notes and Queries 49.4 (December 2002), pp. 449–450. DOI: 10.1093/nq/490449.

Doody, Margaret. Jane Austen’s Names: Riddles, Persons, Places. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2015).

Duckworth, Alistair M. “Emma and the Dangers of Individualism.” In The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels. Baltimore, ML: John Hopkins Press, 1971, pp. 145–78.

Finch, Casey & Peter Bowen. “‘The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury’: Gossip and the Free Indirect Style in Emma.” Representations 31 (1990), pp. 1–18. DOI: 10.2307/2928397.

Ford, Susan Allen. “‘Not What You Would Think Anything Of’: Robert Martin and Harriet Smith.” Persuasions 38 (2016), pp. 137–54.

Fry, George. “Georgic Comedy: The Fictive Territory of Jane Austen’s Emma.” Studies in the Novel 11.2 (Summer 1979), pp. 129–46.

Johnson, Claudia L. “Emma: ‘Woman, Lovely Woman, Reigns Alone’.” In Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 121-43.

Kinsley, James, ed. Emma. By Jane Austen. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1995).

McInnes, Andrew. “Labyrinths of Conjecture: The Gothic Elsewhere in Jane Austen’s Emma.” Gothic Studies 18.1 (2016), pp. 71–84. DOI: 10.7227/GS.0006.

Merrett, Robert James. "The Gentleman Farmer in Emma: Agrarian Writing and Jane Austen's Cultural Idealism." University of Toronto Quarterly 77.2 (Spring 2008), pp. 711–37. DOI: 10.1353/utq.0.0280.

Miles, Robert. “‘A Fall in Bread’: Speculation and the Real in Emma.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 37.1-2 (2004), pp. 66–85. DOI: 10.1215/ddnov.037010066.

Pickrel, Paul. “Lionel Trilling and Emma: A Reconsideration.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40.3 (December 1985), pp. 297–311. DOI: 10.2307/3044759.

Simons, Julie. “Jane Austen and Popular Culture.” In A Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Claudia Johnson and Clara Tuite. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell (2009), pp. 467–77.

Trickett, Rachel. “Manners and Society.” In The Jane Austen Companion, ed. J. David Grey et al. New York: Macmillan (1986), pp. 297–303.

During supper, Emma is attentive to her guests’ “early hours”: rising, dining, supping, and retiring to bed early would have been a marker of ‘unfashionable’ country habits at this time. People who had dined earlier would be more likely to want a substantial supper; this detail potentially gives Mr. Woodhouse’s policing of his guests’ food consumption a class aspect as well as a ‘neurotic’ one.1

Readings and Interpretations

How Sentimental

We are told that Harriet is the “natural daughter of somebody”—which of course means that she is an illegitimate daughter of unknown parentage—and that she has “no visible friends but what had been acquired at Highbury” (ibid.). I get the sense that the term “friends” as used in the early 19th century comprehended more than it does today, including family, party connections, and anyone else who could be expected to be concerned with someone’s welfare. Especially when used of a young woman, it connotatively designates anyone who can be trusted to take responsibility for her, to intercede on her behalf, or to protect her from social ruin (as in Pride and Prejudice, when we are told that a young gentlewoman has “has left all her friends—has eloped”; Austen [1813], vol. 3, ch. 4; p. 179; emphasis mine). Harriet has people who are concerned with her welfare in Highbury, but they are not her original familial connections; she has someone concerned with her welfare in her father, but he is not “visible.” We get the sense of someone set a bit adrift. Barbara Wenner points out that, in a novel in which geography is extremely important, Harriet “is the only outsider […] not identified with a specific location from which she arrives in Highbury” (n.p.).

Many scholars point out that Harriet’s illegitimacy and beauty cause her to resemble the heroine of a sentimental novel, whose genteel parentage must be discovered and acknowledged before her eventual marriage. Per, for example, Barbara Seeber: “Harriet Smith is in a precarious social position typical of eighteenth century heroes and heroines, such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and Frances Burney’s Evelina” (pp. 38–9). This fact influences how Emma “reads” Harriet, but it also draws upon a trope with which contemporary readers would have been familiar, and so may have influenced their expectations as well.

Narratorial Strategies

Harriet’s introduction sees a return to narration that either refers to or relies upon gossip and diffuse knowledge: “This was all that was generally known of her history” (Austen [1815], vol. 1, ch. 3; p. 13; emphasis mine). This provides another possible shade of meaning for the word “visible” in the next sentence—these are the only “friends” who are identifiable by the community of Highbury. Terence Murphy argues that the “uncertainty of the speech forms” in this “initial thumbnail description of Harriet Smith’s class background” indicate that the narrator is

renounc[ing] responsibility for Harriet Smith’s entire previous history […] In sharp contrast to the carefully measured diction used to summarize the previous histor[y] of Emma […], the narrator in introducing Harriet Smith resorts to that peculiar form of monitored speech known as rumour (cf. Finch and [Bowen]) (p. 37).

He attributes this difference to Harriet’s “class background”: “From the elitist standpoint of the novel, she is simply not important enough to save from potential embarrassment” (ibid.).

This section of the novel also displays more fine shading between narratorial commentary and free indirect style:

[Emma] was not struck by any thing remarkably clever in Miss Smith’s conversation, but she found her altogether very engaging—not inconveniently shy, not unwilling to talk—and yet so far from pushing, shewing so proper and becoming a deference, seeming so pleasantly grateful for being admitted to Hartfield, and so artlessly impressed by the appearance of every thing in so superior a style to what she had been used to, that she must have good sense, and deserve encouragement. Encouragement should be given. Those soft blue eyes, and all those natural graces, should not be wasted on the inferior society of Highbury and its connexions (vol. 1, ch. 3; pp. 13–4).

From an ‘external’ description of Emma’s mental state (“She was not struck by,” “she found her”), this paragraph gradually becomes more and more effuse in expressing that mental state in Emma’s own words—though remaining within that same syntactic framing of the dependent clause initiated by “she found her”—before eventually breaking out into sentences that entirely of Emma’s making with “Encouragement should be given.”2

The later description of Emma as having “a spirit which yet was never indifferent to the credit of doing every thing well and attentively” and “the real good-will of a mind delighted with its own ideas” occurs within a paragraph which seems to be a return to narratorial commentary (Austen [1815], vol. 1, ch. 3; p. 14).3 This description, as well as Emma’s usefulness in serving guests whom Mr. Woodhouse is determined to deprive, could serve to rehabilitate Emma to an audience that may be disgusted or amused by the high-handedness she displays in the previous paragraphs (on this textual strategy see Booth).

Admiring Those Soft Blue Eyes

This passage detailing Harriet’s initial attractions for Emma (beauty, gratefulness, tractability) is frequently cited by scholars who argue that Emma’s interest in Harriet is at least partly an erotic one. This tendency dates back at least to Edmund Wilson’s 1944 argument that Emma, “indifferent to men,” is “inclined to infatuations with women” whom she can dominate, and continues with scholars who either argue for a general pattern of erotics between women in the novel that does not necessarily indicate genital lesbianism (e.g. Potter), or argue that Emma is or may be a lesbian (e.g. Korba).

This subject is one that we will doubtless return to in more depth later. For now, it is telling that the “evening” of Harriet’s introduction forms a marked contrast from the “evenings” that have gone before: “She was so busy in admiring those soft blue eyes, in talking and listening, and forming all these schemes in the in-betweens, that the evening flew away at a very unusual rate” (Austen [1815], vol. 1, ch. 3; p. 14).

Discussion Questions

What do you think causes Emma’s fascination with Harriet, and what does this cause you to think of her? Do you like Emma so far?

Conversely, what is Emma’s appeal for Harriet? What ideas about her character can be drawn from this passage?

Do you notice anything else about the narration in this passage? Does it reinforce or change your ideas about narrative authority in Emma?

Footnotes

Lisa Hopkins does not note this detail about timing, but does argue that, because Mr. Woodhouse is hosting his social inferiors, his “actions [are] blatantly conditioned by the class differential between himself and those whose food intake he polices”; he thus reinforces “the idea of food as the mediator and mystifier of relationships between the classes” (p. 64).

On the word “must” in this passage see Boyd, pp. 135–6.

Some scholars interpret the word “real” throughout the novel as a marker of ‘objective’ information meant to carry the weight of narratorial authority (e.g. Burrows, p. 15; Morini, p. 420). Compare for example the earlier “the real evils, indeed, of Emma’s situation”; Austen [1815], vol. 1, ch. 1, p. 1; emphasis mine).

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1813] 2001.

_____. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

Booth, Wayne C. “Point of View and the Control of Distance in Emma.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16.2 (September 1961), pp. 95-116. Repr. in The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd Ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 243-66.

Boyd, Zelda. “Jane Austen’s ‘Must’: The Will and the World.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 39.2 (September 1984), pp. 127–43. DOI: 10.2307/3044635.

Burrows, J. F. Jane Austen’s Emma. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1968.

Corley, T. A. B. “Jane Austen’s ‘Real, Honest, Old-Fashioned Boarding-School’: Mrs La Tournelle and Mrs Goddard.” Women’s Writing 5.1 (1998), pp. 113–30. DOI: 10.1080/09699089800200035.

Finch, Casey & Peter Bowen. “‘The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury’: Gossip and the Free Indirect Style in Emma.” Representations 31 (1990), pp. 1–18. DOI: 10.2307/2928397.

Folsom, Marcia McClintock, ed. Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Emma. New York: MLA (2004).

Hopkins, Lisa. “Food and Growth in Emma.” Women’s Writing 5.1 (1998), pp. 61–70. DOI: 10.1080/09699089800200031.

Korba, Susan M. “‘Improper and Dangerous Distinctions’: Female Relationships and Erotic Domination in Emma,” Studies in the Novel 29.2 (1997), pp. 139-63.

Morini, Massimiliano. “Who Evaluates Whom and What in Jane Austen’s Novels?” Style 41.4 Rhetoric and Cognition (Winter 2007), pp. 409–33.

Murphy, Terence Patrick. “Monitored Speech: The ‘Equivalence’ Relation between Direct and Indirect Speech in Jane Austen and James Joyce.” Narrative 15.1 (January 2007), pp. 24–39. DOI: 10.1353/nar.2007.0006.

Potter, Tiffany F. “‘A Low but Very Feeling Tone’: The Lesbian Continuum and Power Relations in Jane Austen’s Emma.” English Studies in Canada 20.2 (June 1994), pp. 187-203. DOI: 10.1353/esc.1994.0034

Wenner, Barbara. “Exploring the World in Highbury.” Persuasions 29 (2007), pp. 54–66.

This passage divides Highbury, including characters we have already met and some whom we will see ‘on stage’ only later, into “the chosen and the best” and “a second set.” Among this “second set” is Mrs. Bates, who is described as being “considered with all the regard and respect which a harmless old lady, under such untoward circumstances, can excite.” This somewhat sardonic statement is notable to me in that it could mean just anything—however, the idea that Mrs. Bates’s “untoward circumstances” moderate rather than increase her neighbours’ respect is then immediately enforced with the subsequent lines about her daughter, Miss Bates: she “enjoyed a most uncommon degree of popularity for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married” (Austen vol. 1, ch. 3; p. 11).

It is often pointed out that this last string of adjectives more or less reverses the famous “handsome, clever, and rich” that begins the novel. Thus Mary Hong:

The contrast between her possessing no features which would make Hetty Bates a character worthy of the reader's attention [such as intellectual superiority, beauty, or cleverness] and her inclusive tendencies [such as universal good-will] seems to cast her as the exact opposite of the "handsome, clever, and rich" heroine […] Miss Bates plays a secondary or supporting role to the centrality of Emma, as suggested through the similar syntax but oppositional language that introduces both (p. 240).

Louise Flavin follows a similar observation with the point that “[w]hile Miss Bates is unlike Emma Woodhouse in most obvious ways, a comparison is suggested by the fact that she, like Emma, cares for an aging parent and has a happy and contented disposition. This comparison prepares us for Emma’s growing obsession with Miss Bates and ‘her set,’ a rivalry that occupies Emma’s mind” in future installments (n.p.).1

Also in regards to Miss Bates, commenters who view Emma as being in part an indictment of the vulnerability of fortuneless women in Georgian society often read the description of her as standing “in the very worst predicament in the world for having much of the public favour,” having “no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her into outward respect” as containing a particular asperity, or an ominous tone (see for example Harding, p. 350; Smith, p. 137).

The Most Come-at-Able

Some scholars attribute the hierarchisation of potential visitors in this section to Emma (meaning that the description of Miss Bates and company as “come-at-able” must be a demonstration of free indirect style). See for example John Mullan:

Austen, with a refusal of moralism worthy of Flaubert, abandons her protagonist to her snobbery and confidently risks inciting foolish readers to think that the author must be a snob too. Emma’s snobbery pervades the novel, from that moment when we hear Mrs Goddard, the mistress of the little girls’ boarding school, and Mrs and Miss Bates described as “the most come-at-able” denizens of Highbury (meaning that they are at the beck and call of Emma and her hypochondriac father) (n.p.).

Linda Bree, in contrast, considers the phrase “come-at-able” to be a “colloquialism[]” “in the narrative commentary,” rather than a phrase pulled from Emma’s perspective—such colloquialisms on the part of the narrator and the characters all “contribute[] to the sense of ‘ordinary life’ in Highbury” (p. 98). Either way, the phrase is certainly a snappy and evocative one.

A Good Old-Fashioned Boarding-School

Some scholars attribute the sentiments in the passage describing the difference between “a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school” and a “seminary” peddling expensive “nonsense” to Austen herself. In this reading, the outburst on women’s education indicates a rare looseness or break in the general tightness of the novelistic texture of Emma, which usually includes only what is necessary. For example, per Robert Merrett:

The novelist’s respect for traditional eighteenth-century ethical thought and ideas about the mind is very evident in her conduct of Emma. For example, she does not hesitate to drop her usually indirect narrative voice to satirize progressive education which would treat human nature too systematically […] This defence of traditional values on Jane Austen’s part clearly shows how much she enjoys promoting pragmatic, prudent, and rational expectations about human nature (p. 53).

In contrast, Massimiliano Morini argues that the passage represents “the narrator-as-a-character (a figure conflated by many with Austen herself) com[ing] out of impersonal hiding”: “the narrator comes out not by saying ‘I,’ but by expressing in a very direct manner his/her personal opinions on contemporary affairs (in this case, the confusion with the historical Jane Austen is almost inevitable)” (p. 422).

T.A.B. Corley gives some insight into the status of the boarding-school as a “commercial enterprise,” and to Mrs. Goddard’s placement in Highbury’s hierarchy:

Some scholars have had difficulty in deciding on Mrs Goddard’s precise social status in Highbury. She certainly belongs to the second set, and is willing to sit with Mr Woodhouse in the evenings when summoned, while her respectful request to Emma over Harriet Smith indicates a deference towards her social superiors. She is unlikely ever to have been entertained as an equal by Mr Knightley (p. 125).

Nevertheless, “[h]er gross income could have been well over £700 a year, with some being put away for her old age. She is neither depressed nor impoverished. Economically, therefore, Mrs Goddard is a not unimportant personage in Highbury.” Corley attributes the fact that she nevertheless considers herself at the disposal of a summons from the Woodhouses (rather than dining with another family in Highbury on terms of equality or near-equality) in part to the circumstance that “at Hartfield there is the advantage of an early hour of dismissal and a coach ride home” (pp. 125-6).

Footnotes

1. Maaja Stewart likewise compares Emma and Miss Bates on the strength of this passage (pp. 77-8). See also Elizabeth Sabiston, who reads Emma and Miss Bates’s shared care of an ageing parent as a marker of the “feminine plight of dependence and subordination” that recurs throughout the novel: “Emma is no freer, in fact, than the spinsters and widows living in genteel poverty” (p. 24).

Discussion Questions

1. What might cause the emphasis on “evening” (as opposed to morning, or afternoon) as a time of day that is particularly boring, lonely, or necessary to fill?

2. Is the description of “the chosen and the best” versus the “second,” “come-at-able” set focalised through Emma, is it narratorial commentary, or does it shade back and forth between the two? Is it possible for it to be both simultaneously? How does the answer to this question change how we read the book (and its attitude to things such as intelligence, beauty, and rank)?

3. Is the “seminary” passage a transparent outburst of Austen’s own opinions on women’s education, or can we attribute the point of view here to someone or something else? What is the purpose of this passage?

Bibliography

Bree, Linda. “Style, Structure, Language.” In Sabor (2015), pp. 88-104.

Corley, T. A. B. “Jane Austen’s ‘Real, Honest, Old-Fashioned Boarding-School’: Mrs La Tournelle and Mrs Goddard.” Women’s Writing 5.1 (1998), pp. 113-30. DOI: 10.1080/09699089800200035.

Flavin, Louise. “Free Indirect Discourse and the Clever Heroine of Emma.” Persuasions 13 (1991), pp. 50-7.

Harding, D. W. “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen.” Scrutiny 8 (March 1940), pp. 346–62.

Hong, Mary. "‘A Great Talker upon Little Matters’: Trivializing the Everyday in Emma.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 38.2/3 (Spring - Summer 2005), pp. 235–53. DOI: 10.1215/ddnov.038020235.

Hume, Robert D. “Money and Rank.” In Sabor (2015), pp. 52-67.

Martin, Graham. “Austen and Class.” Women's Writing 5.1 (1998), pp. 131–44. DOI: 10.1080/09699089800200028.

Merrett, Robert James. “The Concept of Mind in Emma.” English Studies in Canada 6.1 (Spring 1980), pp. 39–55. DOI: 10.1353/esc.1980.0046.

Morini, Massimiliano. “Who Evaluates Whom and What in Jane Austen’s Novels?” Style 41.4 Rhetoric and Cognition (Winter 2007), pp. 409–33.

Mullan, John. “How Jane Austen’s Emma Changed the Course of Fiction.” The Guardian. 5 December 2015.

Sabiston, Elizabeth Jean. The Prison of Womanhood: Four Provincial Heroines in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987.

Sabor, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to ‘Emma' (Cambridge Companions to Literature). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Smith, LeRoy W. Jane Austen and the Drama of Woman. London: Macmillan (1983).

This “little comic episode” (Wiltshire, p. 126) is an excellent example of how details in Austen are given by implication rather than direct statement. John Wiltshire argues that Mr. Woodhouse’s resistance to the wedding-cake is not merely because it symbolises the loss of Miss Taylor, but also because it symbolises the life of the body from which Mr. Woodhouse is estranged. Emma is nevertheless able to get around her father’s “neurotic prescriptions” and promote the consumption of the cake by “co-opting Mr Perry, the very man Mr Woodhouse thinks is his friend and ally” (p. 127).1 The fact that the evidence that she has done so is submerged is part of the humour:

The sly joke that rounds the chapter off works by suppressing and condensing the connecting information (which would be something like this: 'Dear Mr Perry, as long as this wedding cake remains in the house it will make my father miserable. Do take it home to Mrs Perry and give a slice each to your children') (pp. 127–8).

This episode—which is not described, but which must have happened—indicates for Wiltshire that Emma has qualities “of independence, initiative, resourcefulness [that] can be relied upon for everyone's and her own good” (p. 127). Information, therefore, that has a purpose in characterising our protagonist is visible only by implication—a representative example of the sparse and tightly woven texture of the novel.

The Art of Indirectness

A second joke in this section consists, of course, in the wording of Mr. Perry’s reported speech Mr. Perry is never actually heard to speak directly in Emma—his opinions are solicited, referenced, filtered, and argued over by other characters. In this case, the sentence in which his “opinion” is revealed is a string of qualifications with which he evidently found it necessary to pad his “confirmation” of Mr. Woodhouse’s view:

upon being applied to, he could not but acknowledge (though it seemed rather against the bias of inclination) that wedding-cake might certainly disagree with many—perhaps with most people, unless taken moderately (Austen, vol. 1, ch. 2; p 10; emphasis mine).

This sort of circumlocution must be a valuable skill in a man whose income relies on his ability to “bend[] to the prejudices of his clients” (Mullan, p. 253)!

A Strange Rumour in Highbury

Finch and Bowen point out yet another joke here in Mr. Woodhouse’s refusal to believe in Mr. Perry’s defection:

In order to align public tastes with his own, Mr. Woodhouse must mask his private opinions in the guise of medical authority […] "But still," we are told, "the cake was eaten." And what is more, it was eaten—no doubt not only with relish but with the approval of their father—by the Perry children themselves […] What this novel of rumors clearly satirizes here is not simply Mr. Woodhouse's feeble attempts to justify his private idiosyncrasies by recourse to public (medical) authority but his incredulity toward the authority of rumor itself, his refusal to accept what must clearly be true (p. 15).

We know that the rumour is true, Finch and Bowen claim, precisely because its origins are never named: “the irresistible force of public opinion expresses itself by anonymity” in a novel whose narratorial authority is diffuse, rather than vested solely in the figure of “the narrator” (ibid.).

Discussion Questions

1. What do we think of Mr. Woodhouse so far? Polite old gentleman or selfish tyrant? What might be the source of his neuroses—and does their source matter?2

2. Are there sources of characterisation or humour in these lines that I have missed?

Footnotes

1. On Mr. Perry see also Wiltshire (2004), pp. 169–70.

2. For arguments along these lines see Heydt-Stevenson (2000) (who argues “tertiary syphilis”) and Gullette (2009) (who argues “dementia”).

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

Finch, Casey & Peter Bowen. “‘The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury’: Gossip and the Free Indirect Style in Emma.” Representations 31 (1990), pp. 1–18. DOI: 10.2307/2928397.

Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. “Does Emma Woodhouse's Father Suffer from ‘Dementia’?” Journal of Aging, Humanities, and the Arts 3.1 (2009), pp. 53–8. DOI: 10.1080/19325610802523112.

Heydt-Stevenson, Jillian. “‘Slipping into the Ha-Ha’: Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen's Novels.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 55.3 (December 2000), pp. 309–39. DOI: 10.1525/ncl.2000.55.3.01p01464.

Mullan, John. “Are Ill People Really to Blame for Their Illnesses?” In What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved. New York: Bloomsbury Press (2012), pp. 243–57.

Raffald, Elizabeth. The Experienced English Housekeeper. Manchester: J. Harrop (1769).

Wiltshire, John. “Emma: The Picture of Health.” In Jane Austen and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1992), pp. 110–54.

The Gossips of Highbury

In this section the narrator speaks for the opinions of “Highbury,” as if the town itself had one consciousness (“[Mr. Weston’s] fond report of [Frank] as a very fine young man had made Highbury feel a sort of pride in him too”; Austen, vol. 1, ch. 2; p. 9, emphasis mine). Consider Finch and Bowen’s view, discussed in the last post, that the novel begins with the narrator mediating the opinions of all of Highbury (p. 6).

To my mind, there is no particular reason to doubt that the narrator is faithfully relaying the real contents of Highbury’s citizens’ thoughts and speeches—but there is a sort of comic letdown in these sentences when only a very few actual names are mentioned among this great chorus:

Now, upon his father’s marriage, it was very generally proposed, as a most proper attention, that the visit should take place. There was not a dissentient voice on the subject, either when Mrs. Perry drank tea with Mrs. and Miss Bates, or when Mrs. and Miss Bates returned the visit (Austen, vol, 1, ch. 2; p. 9).

Surely it is no great feat for three people to be in agreement! A logic of metonymy is presumably established (these three women stand for all of Highbury’s gossips) that nevertheless allows the speech that follows to escape specific attribution: “I suppose you have heard of the handsome letter Mr. Frank Churchill has written to Mrs. Weston? I understand it was a very handsome letter, indeed […]” (ibid.).

In Finch and Bowen’s fascinating interpretation, this lack of attribution threatens the narrator’s authority. Daniel Gunn, whose reading I find in some ways more convincing, disagrees: the narrator is capable of containing and passing judgement on the characters’ opinions that it voices. Either way, these lines (and the subsequent insistent repetition of “handsome letter”) stand out to me as being very funny.

Emma and Free Indirect Style

Now is as good a time as any to name that technique of switching from narratorial commentary to a rendering of a character’s consciousness that Austen is often credited with perfecting in Emma. In English, this and related phenomena are variously called “narrated monologue” (Cohn, p. 108), “free indirect discourse,” and “free indirect style.”1 In effect, the narrator “borrows” from or “dips into” a character’s or characters’ mind(s), presenting thoughts from their perspective or using their language, while continuing to use the third person and avoiding quotation marks.

Thus “Now was the time for Mr. Frank Churchill to come among them” is a summary of the speech or thought of Mrs. Perry and the Bateses (or of everyone in Highbury), which we understand perfectly well despite the fact that it is not proceeded by a subordinating conjunction (as in “They thought that…”; Austen, vol. 1, ch. 2; p. 9). In the lines “[Mrs. Weston] knew that at times she must be missed; and could not think, without pain, of Emma’s losing a single pleasure, or suffering an hour’s ennui, from the want of her companionableness: but dear Emma was of no feeble character,” we understand that, though the earlier clauses may come to us directly from the narrator, it is surely Mrs. Weston whose mind we are seeing with the words “dear Emma” (ibid; p. 10).

This is a rewarding thing to continue to pay attention to as the first volume progresses!

A Very Handsome Letter, Indeed

With all of this in mind, the question of whether Frank’s was, indeed, “a handsome letter,” is an open one. Rachel Brownstein is doubtful, pointing to the ambivalent nature of the word “understand” in Emma:

In Emma, as the meanings of the word “understanding” are explored, misunderstandings proliferate. […] What is understood […] is inevitably sometimes misunderstood, or taken to be understood without positive or sufficient knowledge, for instance when all Highbury says, “I suppose you have heard of the handsome letter Mr. Frank Churchill had written to Mrs. Weston? I understand it was a very handsome letter, indeed. Mr. Woodhouse told me of it. Mr. Woodhouse saw the letter, and he says he never saw such a handsome letter in his life.” What we understand on Mr. Woodhouse’s authority we understand only as he understands things, which is to say not very well (p. 208).

Anthony Domestico, in an essay about the reading and writing practices of Highbury, argues that at this early stage in the novel, “reading” can often mean imposing meaning and moral character onto a given text. He points out that a “stable relationship […] between letter and sender” is assumed to exist:

Text and author stand in a synecdochic relation: since the citizens of Highbury have not yet met Frank Churchill, the letter and its virtues stand in for Frank and his supposed virtues. In the next paragraph, the narrator writes, “Mrs. Weston had, of course, formed a very favourable idea of the young man; and such a pleasing attention was an irresistible proof of his great good sense.” The narrator here comments with gentle irony on Mrs. Weston’s predisposition to think well of Frank (“irresistible”) but also shows that, according to Mrs. Weston and her neighbors, there is a clear relation between letter and writer: the great good sense of the letter appears to prove the great good sense of the man. Interestingly, the gossipers do not discuss the content of Frank’s message but rather the style in which it was written, assuming that the one reflects the other (p. 228).

For Linda Bree, the continuous talk about this letter bears a different character, showing Highbury society to be “frequently dull”:

The reception given to the letter from the absent Frank Churchill on the occasion of his father’s marriage […] gives an early flavour of a community with little to occupy its collective mind, the repetition of the words and phrases neatly evoking the endless recycling of material as this very thin story does the rounds (p. 91).

Throughout all of this, of course, we as readers are denied direct access to any of the text of the letter. We can only try to sort out narrator from character, and earnestness from irony, in drawing conclusions about its contents, style, or sender.

Discussion Questions

1. How much authority does the narrator have over our perceptions as readers? Does the frequent use of free indirect style entrench or threaten the narrator’s authority, if it does either? What do we mean when talking about narrative “authority”?

2. Why aren’t we given any text directly from Mr. Frank Churchill’s letter? How would the narrative strategy have to change if we were?

3. What do we think of Frank so far?

Footnotes

1. For some scholars, these terms delimit slightly different phenomena, but this is beyond the bounds of our concerns at the moment. See again Cohn.

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

Bree, Linda. “Style, Structure, Language.” In Sabor, ed. (2015), pp. 88–104.

Brix, Andrew C., et al. "Postal System." Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (2017). Accessed 27 September, 2021.

Brownstein, Rachel M. “Why We Reread Jane Austen.” In Why Jane Austen? New York: Columbia University Press (2011), pp. 195–236.

Cohn, Dorrit. “Narrated Monologue.” In Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press (1978), pp. 99–126.

Domestico, Anthony. “Close Writing and Close Reading in Emma.” Persuasions 37 (2015), pp. 226–36.

Finch, Casey & Peter Bowen. “‘The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury’: Gossip and the Free Indirect Style in Emma.” Representations 31 (1990), pp. 1–18. DOI: 10.2307/2928397.

Gunn, Daniel P. “Free Indirect Discourse and Narrative Authority in Emma.” Narrative 12.1 (January 2004), pp. 35–54. DOI: 10.1353/nar.2003.0023.

Hume, Robert D. “Money and Rank.” In Sabor, ed. (2015), pp. 52–67.

Weddings in the early 19th century were much smaller affairs than they are in Western culture now; relatives weren't likely to travel far for them, it was uncommon to buy a new dress for the day (rather than simply wearing one's Sunday best), and even if one did, it was not be likely to be white (expensive and hard to clean), and one would certainly wear it again. The bride and bridegroom would marry sometime in the morning, between 8 A.M. and noon, before attending their wedding breakfast. The breakfast was presumably hosted at Hartfield, given the wording of "The wedding over and the bride-people gone, her father and herself were left to dine together" (Austen vol. 1, ch. 1; p. 1). Recognising this detail--never explicitly stated but tucked away in a subordinate clause--allows us to realise how stark Emma’s sense of impending isolation must be.

The afternoon or evening after the wedding, Emma and Mr. Woodhouse dine, after which Emma reflects on the loss of Miss Taylor as Mr. Weston naps. Later that night, Mr. Knightley visits, and he and Emma argue about Emma’s claim to have brought about the marriage.

Readings and interpretations

Emma Woodhouse, Handsome, Clever, and Rich

Among all of Austen's novels, the opening sentence of Emma is likely behind only that of Pride and Prejudice in fame. Austen scholars’ close readings of this and the following sentences tend to emphasise how their seeming lightness and contentedness belie their actual foreboding (which foreboding is noticed by readers either on their first reading, or only on subsequent ones--no one can quite agree).

Thus Linda Bree:

This single, solid sentence immediately reassures the reader that we are on conventional fictional ground. The narrator gives us the full name of Emma’s Emma, her age, her social circumstances and something of her character. It is easy to read through the sentence without paying much further attention than this. […] Only when dwelling on the detail of the sentence with more attention than we might be inclined to pay at this stage, will a reader detect slight caveats: ‘seemed to unite’ rather than ‘united’, ‘very little’ rather than ‘nothing’ to distress or vex (pp. 96-7).

David Amigoni, who reads the opening passage for what it can tell us about the novel’s narrative technique, notes this effect as well: “The fact that Emma ‘seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence’ implies a distance between appearance and reality" (p. 22).1

Who is Speaking Here?

The question of to whom Emma “seemed” to unite these blessings also arises. Who is speaking in Emma, and whose point of view are they expressing?

For Amigoni, it is the “implied reader” to whom Emma “seems” to be blessed (said reader is assumed to value “good looks, cleverness, wealth and domestic comfort,” but is being encouraged by the narrator’s “playfulness and irony” to take a broader view); for Finch and Bowen, it is the “gossiping […] community” of Highbury, whose opinions the narrator is revealing without subscribing to (p. 6).

But not all scholars read these first lines as those of an impersonal narrator selectively inhabiting someone else’s point of view. Massimiliano Morini suggests that the narrator themself is unsure, or at least that the reader cannot trust in the narrator’s knowledge:

In the space of a few paragraphs, the narrator shifts from a “negative” to a “positive” mode: in the first sentence, he/she adopts an external point of view which forces him/her to make conjectures about the real state of affairs (Emma “seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence”); whereas in the second, he/she falls back on a positive perspective which allows him/her to establish the “real evils indeed of Emma’s situation.” This kind of oscillation produces epistemological uncertainty, because readers cannot be sure whether the narrator knows or does not know about people’s morals and feelings, about past and future events (p. 420).

However one reads these lines, the uncertainty over who is speaking at any given time is one of the major textual strategies of Emma. The reader not always being able to tell for sure whether the narrator is presumed to be revealing objective truth, or is merely mediating the opinions and the wording of one or more characters, allows for the mystery surrounding the hijinks that follow.

A Worthy Employment for a Young Lady’s Mind!

The tone of this day, to my mind, is one of Emma continually attempting to be cheerful and continually being brought up short (as when she laughingly calls herself “a fanciful, troublesome creature,” only to inadvertently depress her father, who misunderstands; Austen, vol. 1, ch. 1; p. 5). For Marshall Brown--whose thesis is that, though some other critics have tended to read it as idyllic, contended, and optimistic, the central feature of Emma’s atmosphere is depression--“surface hilarity” often covers real doubt (p. 19). On this moment see also Jan Fergus:

Emma undermines Mr. Knightley’s implied criticism of her by saying playfully, “‘Especially when one of those two is such a fanciful, troublesome creature! […]” Mr. Woodhouse, the complete egoist, thinks Emma must mean that he is the fanciful, troublesome creature. She has to explain very quickly that she is the target of her own joke, that Mr. Knightley “‘loves to find fault with me you know—in a joke—it is all a joke’,”), although Emma knows of course that Mr. Knightley really does criticize her. […] Emma has made a joke against herself as a way of pre-empting and containing Mr. Knightley’s criticism (p. 76).

The first scholarly reading of this evening as a whole that comes to my mind is Michele Larrow’s. In an essay whose thesis is that Mr. Knightley must learn to feel sympathy for Emma as the novel progresses, she describes the evening thus:

[N]ow that [Mrs. Weston] is gone, we are told, Emma needs someone to “meet her in conversation, rational or playful.” Mr. Knightley soon enters the story to enliven Emma and her father’s evening and offer her conversation. […] Rather than offer emotional support, Mr. Knightley enumerates for Emma the good reasons for the marriage, which she already knows. When he says that Emma “‘cannot allow herself to feel so much pain as pleasure’,” Mr. Knightley wants her to control her emotions […] Mr. Knightley criticizes Emma’s purported matchmaking when he tells her that Mr. Weston and Miss Taylor “‘may be safely left to manage their own concerns.’” With no sense that he is trying to “manage” Emma’s concerns, Mr. Knightley explains the problems with her matchmaking: “‘You are more likely to have done harm to yourself, than good to them, by interference’.” Thus, in the first chapter we see several themes that will return: Mrs. Weston’s being a model of affection and amiability, Emma’s feelings of loss and loneliness without Mrs. Weston, and Mr. Knightley’s preference to judge and guide Emma rather than to offer her sympathy (n.p.).

Amigoni’s view of Emma and Mr. Knightley’s disagreement in this chapter, and the reader’s probable interpretation of it, is more ambivalent. He writes that, though “Emma asserts her correctness in emphatic terms, the implied reader, reading Emma ironically from the perspective established by the narrator,” may disagree (p. 25). When Mr. Knightley insists that Emma has merely made a lucky guess, his

speech does two things: first, it provides us with an alternative to Emma’s perspective; and, second, it creates an expectation of development, that Emma will move beyond her own perspective. Knightley, who shares the narrator’s attitude to authority, expresses the view that Emma will be completed when she comes to know the ‘worthy employment for a young lady’s mind.’ This sense of proper feminine worth is a recurrent topic of Mr Knightley’s speech about Emma (p. 26).

The question of whether and when Mr. Knightley shares the narrator’s viewpoint is a fraught one that will doubtless be returned to repeatedly in this project. For now, what interests me about this argument is that we’ve come in at the tail end of the events that have led up to it: we have no direct insight at all into what actions Emma actually undertook to “smooth[] many little matters,” or what “little encouragements” she gave (Austen vol. 1, ch. 1; p. 6). Scholars may argue about whether the text leads the abstraction of “the reader” to believe Emma’s assertion, and what this means for the structure and techniques of the novel, but their arguments in that regard are probably based more or less entirely on whether they themselves were inclined to believe Emma at this stage of the novel. The narrator’s irony may cause our suspicion--then again, the demonstrable results of Emma’s putative effort at matchmaking may inspire our confidence, at least at this juncture, in Emma’s future endeavours.

Discussion Questions

1. For those who have read Emma before--does anything come through in the language of this opening section upon rereading that was not apparent on a first reading? For those who have only seen adaptations--does anything about the novel so far surprise you?

2. What kind of atmosphere is conveyed to you by the opening of Emma? Does it seem cozy and comforting to you, or depressed and constricted? As Marshall Brown asks, “Would you like to live in Emma’s surroundings, in a village called Highbury” (p. 5)? And can our personal associations with a novel alter what we think of its tone?

3. Who is speaking in the opening of Emma, and whose point of view are they expressing?

4. What do we think of Emma and Mr. Knightley’s first argument? Who do we think is likely to be “right”? Is the metric of “correctness” a useful one to use?

Footnotes

1. For other close readings of the opening sentence, see Bradbury (for whom it suggests “a disparity between the moral and the social scale,” p. 340); Brownstein (who notes, among other things, its contrasting “worldly” and “religious” registers; p. 218); and Dry (who calls its syntax “formal” and “non-idiosyncratic,” approximating a “rigorously impersonal” style).

Bibliography

Amigoni, David. “The Elements of Narrative Analysis and the Origins of the Novel: Reading Jane Austen’s Emma and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.” In The English Novel and Prose Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. 1753.

Austen, Jane. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

Bradbury, Malcolm. “Jane Austen's Emma.” Critical Quarterly 4 (1962), pp. 335–46. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8705.1962.tb01434.x

Bree, Linda. “Style, Structure, Language.” In The Cambridge Companion to Emma, ed. Peter Sabor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2015), pp. 88–104.

Brown, Marshall. “Emma’s Depression.” Studies in Romanticism 53.1 (Spring 2014), pp. 3–29. DOI: 10.1353/srm.2014.0036.

Brownstein, Rachel M. “Why We Reread Jane Austen.” In Why Jane Austen? New York: Columbia University Press (2011), pp. 195–236.

Dry, Helen. “Syntax and Point of View in Jane Austen's Emma.” Studies in Romanticism 16.1 (Winter 1977), pp. 87–99. DOI: 10.2307/25600065

Fergus, Jan. “‘Rivalry, Treachery between sisters!’ Tensions between Brothers and Sisters in Austen’s Novels.” Persuasions 31 (2009), pp. 69–88.

Finch, Casey & Peter Bowen. “‘The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury’: Gossip and the Free Indirect Style in Emma.” Representations 31 (1990), pp. 1–18. DOI: 10.2307/2928397

Larrow, Michele. “‘Could He Even Have Seen into Her Heart’: Mr. Knightley’s Development of Sympathy.” Persuasions On-Line 37.1 (Winter 2016).

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