The anxiety of Emma.
EMMA IS A DANGEROUS NOVEL: it threatens to despise the reader. Who has not feared she would be the not-quite-proper Mrs. Elton if she had to move to Highbury? That her grammar wouldn't be correct, her Italian in case disagreement like Augusta Elton's, her words "non-U," in Nancy Mitford's famous 1950s phrase, which taught many of us Britons that we were not socially of the class that we culturally intended to inhabit. And yet it was Emma that made Walter Scott call Jane Austen middle-class. Of course, the phrase means different things to different people.When Mr. Knightley proposes to Emma in Jane Austen's novel, the narrator comments: "What did she say?--Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does" (470). But the sly author does not tell us what that is. She is teasing us--how does she know that we can think the right words--if she has not told us them--how can we know we know them--or even more to the point, how can we copy them when we too receive--or dream we receive--a marriage proposal from the major landowner of the district? It is one thing to be told, as we sometimes are by Jane Austen, to make our own visual image of the handsomest man to have a notion of a hero; it is another to be made to supply the proper class-inflected genteel and elegant words a lady must have spoken.
Some readers do not feel the anxiety in Emma. Mark Schorer remarked of it, that the reader is allowed to take "only as much as [he] wishe[s] to take" from it (178), under the happy illusion that, as Katherine Mansfield wrote, "he, alone, reading between the lines has become the secret friend of [the] author" (304). Clearly he has avoided the shadow of that "poker" Jane Austen--upright and judgmental--that Mary Mitford remembered or misremembered encountering by her fireplace--a sort of female Mr. Darcy in Pemberley on a wet Sunday evening before softened by the raillery of his new wife. What if we, however, feel the shadow and the anxiety? What if we can imagine ourselves in the pretty frocks and frilly bonnets cavorting barefoot down mirrored corridors, as they do repeatedly in recent film transformations, but like those films don't really know the right words and tone?
In that case we align ourselves with the butts of Jane Austen. The wonderfully silly James Stanier Clarke, librarian to the Prince Regent, failed to persuade his new acquaintance to write a novel essentially about himself, a "demurely sad" clergyman who was, as he put it in one of his resounding cliches, caught between "the metropolis & the Country" (16 November 1815). Noting the approaching marriage of the Regent's daughter Charlotte to the German Prince Leopold, he then suggested that Austen write, instead of more Emmas, a "Romance illustrative of the History of the august house of Cobourg" (27 March 1816). As we all know, she declared she would die laughing if she tried, and persisted in trying, such a thing. She was laughing at the genre of historical romance, so resplendently and recently employed by Walter Scott, and at the idea of novels praising the despised royal family. She was also laughing at James Stanier Clarke and his appalling lack of perspicuity, his total failure to realize what her novels were about and what he should be saying to that particular lady author.
He had of course followed his master in admiration--it would be something to know exactly what the Prince Regent thought of Emma when he received the novel in its handsome red morocco and gilt binding, properly and coercively dedicated to himself. Did this most reprobate of the Hanoverians, regarded by so many native bluebloods as not quite the thing, himself know what a lady would say? Mrs. Fitzherbert and Mary Robinson, to name only a couple of his mistresses, were after all not quite comme il faut, and neither, despite Jane Austen's high-spirited support of her, was his wife Caroline of Brunswick.
Clarke's inept response amused but also irritated Jane Austen. For it was being called forth by her masterpieces, the final, later novels on which a lifetime of writing had matured. The irritation and amusement are palpable in a spoof she made on the kind of work Clarke wanted her to write--though elevated into princely realms--the sort composed by her fellow novelist Mary Brunton, an author who, Jane Austen must have noticed, was more popular than herself, and better paid.
In 1813 Jane Austen described Mary Brunton's moralistic, high-adventure novel Self-Control, in which the persecuted heroine is spirited away from Scotland to the American wilderness, as an "excellently-meant, elegantly-written Work, without anything of Nature or Probability in it" (11 October 1813). She told her niece Anna Austen (now Lefroy) that she intended to write "a close Imitation" as soon as she could. "I will improve upon it;--my Heroine shall not merely be waited down an American river in a boat by herself, she shall cross the Atlantic in the same way, & never stop till she reaches Gravesent" (24 November 1814). Funny, a bit bitter perhaps.
However, one resemblance between Self-Control and Emma is the proposal scene. Mary Brunton's uniting takes place in the garden by the shrubbery and is hidden in the sentence, "it was an hour before the lovers reached the house" (406). But Mary Brunton does not taunt us with the need to imagine precisely what was said, and the eclaircissement occurs after two volumes of melodrama and exclamatory prose. It would be pretty easy to write the scene if she demanded that we mentally do so.
Interestingly in Jane Austen's next book, the more upfront Romantic Persuasion, Anne Elliot openly, though obliquely, states her passion in the love scene with the hero, for it is undoubtedly she who is supposed to love longest when life and hope are gone. This is the kind of passionate speech Emma certainly did not make to Mr. Knightley, and which, had she done so, her creator would not have reported. Indeed it has opened Jane Austen herself to the charge of vulgarity from several modern critics who find this sort of thing both sentimental and indelicate. Here, in this operatic scene in Persuasion, the silence, the anxiety-provoking silence of Emma, is rejected as the book flamboyantly descends from the stylistic heights of ladylike reserve to the depths of middle-class, expressed, unanxious emotion.
To return to Emma, beyond the effect on the reader of a lady's silence, another kind of linguistic uneasiness occurs within the book, at the Box Hill outing. Box Hill is a national tourist spot mapped out for mass enjoyment, especially for Londoners. Yet it fails to delight the Highbury villagers, who feel a "languor, a want of spirits, a want of union, which could not be got over" (390). Finally they sink into "downright dulness." The dullness expresses itself in unsocial silence. Then the whispering begins, from the outsider, Frank Churchill--"'Our companions are excessively stupid,'" he remarks. "'What shall we do to rouse them? Any nonsense will serve.'" In desperation, he makes a proposal, that each person tells his or her real thoughts. "'They shall talk. Ladies and gentlemen, I am ordered by Miss Woodhouse (who, wherever she is, presides,) to say, that she desires to know what you are all thinking of'" (401-02).
The response is diverse and diverting:
Some laughed, and answered good-humouredly. Miss Bates said a great deal; Mrs. Elton swelled at the idea of Miss Woodhouse's presiding; Mr. Knightley's answer was the most distinct.
"Is Miss Woodhouse sure that she would like to hear what we are all thinking of?"
"Oh! no, no"--cried Emma, laughing as carelessly as she could--"Upon no account in the world. It is the very last thing I would stand the brunt of just now. Let me hear any thing rather than what you are all thinking of." (402)
The expression on the faces of her fellow villagers has told her too much, and she wants to avoid the wounding of words. But, though she largely silences them, she fails of course to silence herself.
So, here on Box Hill, Emma too feels the anxiety of expression, and it is something more than class uneasiness. Community would be shattered if Frank Churchill's proposal were truly followed in the way only Emma allows herself to do. Jane Austen may claim in a letter that she imagined "Candour & Comfort & Coffee & Cribbage" in Manydown House (9 February 1813), but she knows that complete candor does not coexist with comfort and cribbage, not even in Manydown, or perhaps least in Manydown where she famously accepted her only documented proposal of marriage, then speedily revoked her words, probably without recourse to candor.
I want now to turn to the strawberry-picking party at Donwell Abbey which displays Mrs. Elton as Emma's dark shadow and delivers another kind of social anxiety. This inimitable lady does not intend to leave things to chance as they do at Box Hill, until Frank's unhappy intervention. Instead, she has an entire plan worked out, a blue-skies strategy in modern university parlance, or rather a series of imaginative scenarios. It is, she says, to be a gypsy party on the lawn. Two of its components are strawberries, inert till she names them, and donkeys, entirely her fantasy.
"It is to be a morning scheme, you know, Knightley; quite a simple thing. I shall wear a large bonnet, and bring one of my little baskets hanging on my arm. Here,--probably this basket with pink ribbon. Nothing can be more simple, you see. And Jane will have such another. There is to be no form or parade--a sort of gipsy party.--We are to walk about your gardens, and gather the strawberries ourselves, and sit under trees;--and whatever else you may like to provide, it is to be all out of doors--a table spread in the shade, you know. Every thing as natural and simple as possible." (385-86)
Then she exclaims, "'I wish we had a donkey. The thing would be for us all to come on donkies, Jane, Miss Bates, and me--and my caro sposo walking by'" (386).
"Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did," said Dr. William Butler in the seventeenth century of the strawberry, that quintessential English fruit. And yet Mrs. Elton uses some originally French terms for her berries when she names them, and there is an aura of Frenchness about them: "'hautboy infinitely superior'" (389). Madame Tallien, a prominent beauty at the court of Napoleon, was famous for bathing in the juice of fresh strawberries, using twenty-two pounds per basin. Her scandalous doings were much reported in England.
And donkeys: they were not so comic and lovable to Jane Austen as they appear to us--two were kept in Chawton for the trap, and a few months before her death Jane Austen planned to end the long "run of luxurious idleness" of one of them by riding it (24 January 1817). But Mrs. Elton's donkeys are not Jane Austen's serviceable beasts; they are part of her pastoral kitsch. She has led up to them through her variety of props, her floppy hats, baskets and pink ribbons; the donkeys come in with the "caro sposo."
Mr Knightley's response is cold,
"My idea of the simple and the natural will be to have the table spread in the dining-room. The nature and the simplicity of gentlemen and ladies, with their servants and furniture, I think is best observed by meals within doors." (386)
The Englishman dislikes the pastoral, associated as it was with the doomed French Marie Antoinette and her play-acting as shepherdess at the Trianon hameau with her perfumed sheep, but also with his own royal pair. For, unlike stolid George Knightley, his King and Queen, before madness irrevocably descended on George III, had also enjoyed farming near Windsor with decorated pitchforks and floppy hats. Furthermore, the proposed alfresco "gypsy party" imagined by Mrs. Elton resonated with the recent birthday celebrations for the Prince Regent in Bexhill, on 12 August 1811, and recorded in the Sussex Weekly Advertiser; this was also a "gipsey party" with big hats, baskets, donkeys and "an elegant cold PIC NIC collation ... on the grass" (qtd. in Sheehan). And the Prince Regent loved strawberries.
Mr. Knightley dislikes this frivolous, perhaps aristocratic, perhaps French falsity. He fears an outdoor lapse of civility if they move from the ordered space of the civilizing dining room with ladies, gentlemen and servants, to a less controlled but equally owned outside arena. But Mr. Knightley himself falls short of another standard, the gentlemanly civility of a less socially anxious age than his own. The cynical Lord Chesterfield, symbol of everything a new working man like Mr. Knightley despised, saw courteous language as the mark of an eighteenth-century gentleman. Not so Mr. Knightley, who could have echoed the American Mercy Otis Warren when she called Lord Chesterfield's emphasis on elegant diction and harmony of manners "honey'd poison." For in this scene, Mr. Knightley becomes just as rude as Mrs. Elton--and more intentionally so. Indeed it is a recurring aspect of this landowner's character: he fails often to converse as he ought; he snaps at Miss Bates about Jane's excessive singing: "'[A]re you mad, to let your niece sing herself hoarse in this manner?'" he cries and then talks loudly over her (247). The "English" manner of greeting between the equally abrupt Knightley brothers, which Emma appreciates, draws on the French caricature of English pride in taciturnity and bluntness. In opposition to the French, the English liked to associate themselves, with bluff sincerity or, as Shakespeare put it in King Lear two hundred years earlier, with an honest "saucy roughness." Mrs. Elton calls Mr. Knightley a humorist; in fact, he is at times simply boorish and insularly proud of being so.
Why should he be so rude to his guest, Mrs. Elton? After all, what is she doing but, in her middle-class way, what Emma does in the drawing room of Hartfield, where she tries to make a silly father and bullying brother-in-law into some sort of social unity. Unlike Emma, Mrs. Elton knows one must work outside the home as well as in it if society is to cohere and oneself have a central place within it.
And yet, when blame has been apportioned to Mr. Knightley and due given to Mrs. Elton, the tactless, tasteless usurper of power in Highbury, one is left with the fact that the play-acting in the strawberry beds, if it came off, would not be entirely genteel. In its non-royal version, it partakes of the anxiety, the uneasy make-believe of the tourist who is not at home in the real world of the country house and who cannot know enough of what she is seeing wherever she goes. For the tourist, the world has to be remade as a caricature of itself so that it can be easily understood and assimilated. Just after the moment when Jane Austen wrote Emma, there were tourist trips to the battlefield of Waterloo, for example, begun before the bodies of the dead had decomposed. The tourists were much criticized by the more refined, including the patrician duke of Wellington, who saw them reducing this great and defining battle to a public spectacle.
Vulgar though tourism might seem, Mrs. Elton and the battlefield scavengers represent the future. In less than thirty years, Thomas Cook would begin his tours to beauty spots and national monuments in Britain and on the Continent, allowing the middle and lower classes to see what their betters had long been seeing, and to buy in replica what they had long been buying, on their Grand Tours. When death duties began to pinch, the British aristocracy joined this activity and became part of Cook's industry, making their houses into theme parks, helped immeasurably by Jane Austen, supreme patroness of the National Trust.
Mrs. Elton, the maker of events, who has travelled from Bristol to Bath to Surrey sight unseen, is a projector in her way, quite as much as Mr. Parker in Sanditon, though, being a woman, she is without his possibilities: she can dream only of a musical society, not of a whole new town. But she too knows that a place has to be constructed for public enjoyment, as Mr. Parker makes clear in his praise of his new resort Sanditon, all freshness, spirits and sea breeze, delivered in the kind of languages used for nineteenth-century "putting" and twenty-first-century advertising. For both Mr. Parker and Mrs. Elton, the world has begun its unstoppable shrinkage into a series of described and packaged tourist spots complete with artificial, designated activities. Mr. Knightley's putdown to Mrs. Elton is the putdown of a whole new manner of being and seeing, which is, despite his momentary power, about to triumph. Mrs. Elton tries to make the strawberry party a tripper's day out, where Mr. Knightley insists on its being an old-fashioned visit to his country property. In this attempt, she is the opposite of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, who is profoundly relieved when, fearing she and her trading Cheapside relatives will be taken for what they are--middle class tourists at the stately home of Pemberley--, Mr. Darcy; owner of the acres, rescues them and turns them into guests by giving Mr. Gardiner fishing rights and inviting them all into the house for tea with the family.
Mrs. Elton has tried to stand out against this backward transformation. But she cannot win--yet. Mr. Knightley is against tourism, and his land is closed to sightseers. Village folk can have a right of way across it--and he insists that they do even when he has to move his path to avoid damage to the home meadows--,but he makes no effort to provide vistas for them. He is unperturbed by his house's "old neglect of prospect" (389) and in no rush to "improve" the pleasure grounds; his avenue of limes leads to a wall and pillars framing neither house nor view.
It is only fair that Jane Austen, creator of such verbal and social anxieties, should feel some herself. Knowing that what she was doing in Emma was truly innovative, she kept a brief record of what some of her friends and relatives thought of the novel. It was the style and manner that raised most objection, she found. The vacuous Mrs. Digweed, possibly a model for the garrulous Miss Bates, declared that "if she had not known the Author, [she] could hardly have got through [the book]" (qtd. in Le Faye 232). The Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth, to whom Austen had sent a complimentary copy, read only the first volume and commented,
[T]here was no story in it, except that Miss Emma found that the man whom she designed for Harriets lover was an admirer of her own--& he was affronted at being refused by Emma & Harriet wore the willow--and smooth, thin water-gruel is according to Emma's father's opinion a very good thing.... (qtd. in Butler 445)
So, the first readers, with some famous exceptions like Walter Scott, were on the whole unimpressed. Even Jane Austen's publisher John Murray, who had commissioned Scott to be polite, disloyally admitted that the book lacked "incident and Romance" (qtd. in Le Faye 232).
Jane Austen's anxiety, reasonable enough in the light of these comments, was that Emma would bore her readers. She might and did feel superior to a person who did not know what ladies say--she takes her writing niece to task for getting etiquette wrong: "I have also scratched out the Introduction between Lord R & his Brother, & Mr Griffin," she wrote to Anna Austen; "A Country Surgeon ... would not be introduced to Men of their rank" (17 August 1814)--but she could not stand superior to an entire readership which did not appreciate what she was about. She had written to James Stanier Clarke, "My greatest anxiety at present is that this 4th work shd not disgrace what was good in the others.... I am very strongly haunted by the idea that to those Readers who have preferred P&P. it will appear inferior in Wit, & to those who have preferred MR very inferior in good Sense" (11 December 1815). She was anxious that people would not understand what she was about.
Which brings me back to a final linked but readerly anxiety. What if we too fear we are not quite the proper reader, that we are now the Mrs. Elton of literary consumers? What if Emma bores us at times, and we prefer simpler romances like Pride and Prejudice or a book where something happens, like Mansfield Park, just as Jane Austen feared--and just as James Stanier Clarke clearly did? In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne is sure that her lover estimates the beauties of William Cowper as he ought and admires Pope "'no more than is proper'" (57). Consonance in literary opinion can be a treacherous seduction, as she finds out when she understands Willoughby has echoed, not shared, her sentiments, and that her sister's suitor, Edward Ferrars, who recites poetry badly, is a worthier lover. But, still, judgment and understanding are measures of a person. So do we notice--and are we speaking of the beauties of Emma as we ought? The genius of the work is again, I believe, commensurate with the uneasiness it causes.
This final conjoined anxiety of author and readers is appropriate, for, in the last resort, Emma is not about anything so much as it is about boredom--although the word had not yet been invented. It had to wait for Charles Dickens's Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, who found herself "in the desolation of Boredom and the clutch of Giant Despair" (139). By stressing silence at moments, as at Box Hill, and allowing full reign to garrulity most of the time, as in the strawberry party, Emma treats head-on the banality of most words strung together, the mediocrity of society and its intercourse. The novel is about people caught in community, stuck with each other to such an extent that thoughts and conversation flow through the divergent, perceiving consciousnesses like a familiar dithering stream, unconcerned where it is going and by what banks it travels--a sort of ur-cyberspace-chatroom. Emma and her companions do not inhabit the equivalent nineteenth-century American novel, where characters can always find a world elsewhere when they have run out of the little conversation they appear to master. The hyperbolic, unnecessarily informative verbiage of Mrs. Elton and of course Miss Bates, just extreme versions of all conversation, together with the embarrassing and tedious moments they generate, must, like the occasional vulgar scenario, be endured.
For all of it serves to keep community together; social words and ordinary boring phrases circulate and are unrefusable, unlike the material gifts which serve some of the same function--hurt by Emma's incivility, Jane Fairfax rejects her gift of arrowroot, for example. Jane Austen conveys both the necessity and the absurdity of social words in her telescoped, condensed conversations, her social talk that is simply interrupted monologue.
"3 or 4 Families in a Country Village" were, Jane Austen remarked, just the thing for her sort of fiction (9 September 1814). And the subject served her genius. But if true for Austen's fiction, perhaps this is less so for life--her contemporary, the essayist William Hazlitt, wrote that "[a]ll country people hate each other" (226), and Jane Austen's letters prove that she escaped from Steventon or Chawton more or less whenever she could. Emma, who has never even seen the sea though living so near it--perhaps because she was so blooming and most seaside trips were to improve health--endearingly shared her author's fictional response in the famous passage where she looks down the road from the Highbury shop while Harriet buys her ribbons: it begins, "Much could not be hoped from the traffic of even tire busiest part of Highbury," and ends with "two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker's little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread." Emma's response is, "she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer" (251).
It is difficult to think of another literary heroine before Emma who has had to learn--for it is learned in the way she cannot learn music or regular reading--to appreciate two curs quarrelling over a bone. If one needs to go outside, to contemporary Romantic literature, then the analogy must be to the moment when Coleridge's Ancient Mariner learns what Emma knows, that everything "answers," even water snakes on a slimy ocean. And so if there is a moral to the tale--or rather any antidote to boredom--it must be this skill, which even overtops the ability to talk like a lady. The story of Emma concerns its heroine's busybody imaginings with Mrs. Weston, with Harriet, and Jane Fairfax; her triumph is to use her imaginative ability to wrest contentment from a potentially boring community that has to be endured. She may say, "'Oh! I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up with any other'" (517). But actually she has to put up with a great deal.
The sadness which some people get from Emma is perhaps related to the embarrassment of language. Most of the time we don't know exactly what to say, and what we do say is inconsequential, the novel seems to argue. Emma reveals the normal human condition--silence and verbiage, the constant flow of commonplace social intercourse covering just bearable loneliness and perennial inadequacy. Emma is ultimately not pastoral nor romance nor anti-romance nor anti-pastoral, then, but something closer to life, full of boredom but, because a great novel, not boring.
WORKS CITED
Austen, Jane. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen. Gen. Ed. Janet Todd. Cambridge: CUP, 2006-08. (Emma. Ed. Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan.)
--. Jane Austen's Letters. Ed. Deirdre Le Faye. 3rd cd. Oxford: OUP, 1997.
Brunton, Mary. Self-Control. 1811. Aberdeen, 1847.
Butler, Marilyn. Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography. Oxford: OUP, 1972.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Ed. George Ford and Sylvere Monod. 1853. New York: Norton, 1977.
Hazlitt, William. Lectures on the English Comic Writers. New York, 1845.
Le Faye, Deirdre. Jane Austen: A Family Record. 2nd ed. Cambridge: CUP, 2004.
Mansfield, Katherine. Novels and Novelists. Ed. J. Middleton Murry. 1930. Boston: Beacon, 1959.
Schorer, Mark. "The Humiliation of Emma Woodhouse." 1959. Jane Austen: Emma. Ed. David Lodge. London: Macmillan, 1969. 170-87.
Sheehan, Colleen A. "Jane Austen's 'Tribute' to the Prince Regent: A Gentleman Riddled with Difficulty." Persuasions On-Line 27.1 (2006).
Janet Todd, JASNA's 2007 Carol Medine Moss Keynote Lecturer, is Head of the Centre for the Novel and Herbert J. C. Grierson Professor of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen. The author of many ground-breaking books about women writers, she is the general editor of the new Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen. Her most recent books are The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen (2006) and Death and the Maidens (Counterpoint 2007). In September 2008 she will become President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge.
 Printer friendly
 Cite/link
 Email
 Feedback
| |
| Author: | Todd, Janet |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal |
| Article Type: | Critical essay |
| Geographic Code: | 4EUUS |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2007 |
| Words: | 4549 |
| Previous Article: | Editor's note. |
| Next Article: | Emma: the geography of a mind. |
| Topics: | |