“Emma” by Jane Austen

Of all the novels of Austen, the plot of Emma is perhaps the most difficult to summarise. This is not because it doesn’t have a plot, but because the principal events that shape the plot are internal rather than external. Here, a character perceiving reality in a certain way is a major plot development, a character beginning to perceive things in a new way a dramatic climax. This is not to say that there aren’t external events: there are accepted proposals, declined proposals, people falling in and out of love, people thinking they’re in love – all those various events that populate all Austen novels. But what gives these external events significance here, to a greater extent, I think, than in Austen’s other works, are the internal events: that is where the drama of the novel principally lies. As a consequence, the scale of the drama is here reduced: we are certainly in a very different fictional world from the sombre and dramatic Mansfield Park, which seems at times to stray even towards the oppressive world of Richardson’s Clarissa. But just as Austen had seemed determined to remove Mansfield Park as far as possible from its bright and sunny predecessor, Pride and Prejudice, so she seems here equally determined to remove Emma into a fictional world as far removed as possible from Mansfield Park. It’s not that there is no plot here; it’s not even that there’s no drama. But to find either, to see this novel as more than a mere pleasant sunlit idyll in which everything rambles on agreeably and nothing much really happens, we have to look closely at the nuances and at the fine detail. For in Emma, it’s the smallest points, the tiniest gestures, that contain the drama.

Take for instance the point that may, I think, be considered the turning point of the entire novel – the picnic at Box Hill: Emma can’t resist cracking a rather mild joke at the expense of the tiresome Miss Bates, and Miss Bates is hurt. The joke itself is not particularly malicious, and the hurt is not so grievous that Miss Bates cannot quite happily welcome Emma to her house the very next day. A minor event, one might have thought, in the unremarkable lives of a set of unremarkable characters. And yet, Austen, with the most delicate and understated of artistry, makes this seemingly trivial event the turning point of a novel of over 400 pages.

The scene is worth examining in some detail. On the surface, nothing much happens. Miss Bates has not been involved in the “plot”, insofar as there has been a plot at all: she has not been involved in any way in any of Emma’s matchmaking schemes, and nor has Emma ever speculated on her feelings or thoughts, as she has on the feelings and thoughts of others. Miss Bates is simply a tiresome chatterbox, who natters on and on endlessly without ever even in error communicating anything of the slightest interest. Emma finds her absurd and tiresome, and she is not the only one: we, the reader, can hardly fail to find her absurd and tiresome also. So when Miss Bates says that she is sure to say three dull things as soon as she opens her mouth, Emma can’t resist a rejoinder:

“Ah! ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me – but you will be limited in number – only three at once.”

It takes the slow-witted Miss Bates some time to realise that the joke is at her expense, but once she does, her reaction, far from being angry, is sad and humble: she recognises how disagreeable she must be to others. There is something curiously dignified in her realisation, and also, even in a matter so slight as this, something almost infinitely sad. The matter is so slight indeed that Emma doesn’t even notice; but Mr Knightley notices, as Miss Bates confides to him her perception of her own disagreeableness; and we, the readers, notice. And since we, the readers, have so often regarded Miss Bates as Emma has done, as tedious and disagreeable, this sudden realisation of her humanity, of the vulnerability of her feelings, comes to us as a sort of admonishment. The scale of the drama may be reduced in this novel, but, once one has adjusted one’s receptivity to that small scale, even so apparently slight an incident as this takes on a tremendous dramatic weight.

Later, Mr Knightley remonstrates with Emma on her thoughtlessness, and she is as admonished as we, the readers, have been. The next day, Emma makes a point of visiting Miss Bates, possibly with a half-formed intent of apologising. In most other novels, we would have had here a scene of overt acknowledgement of guilt, and of redemption, but here, with the scale of the drama reduced, such a scene would be out of place. Miss Bates seems unaware that Emma has anything to apologise for, and the conversation never even touches on the previous day’s excursion to Box Hill. But the slightest gestures are important here: that Emma has made the gesture at all of visiting Miss Bates is sufficiently significant to restore her into Mr Knightley’s good opinion.

And from this point on, the plot unravels. Not so much, perhaps, in terms of external events – although the death of Frank Churchill’s aunt does open the door for various matters to be happily resolved – but, more importantly in a novel in which the principal focus of interest is internal rather than external, the plot unravels in terms of what goes on in Emma’s mind: the understanding that she has been needlessly cruel to a harmless old lady who had not deserved such cruelty is the first step towards the unravelling of various internal matters – of various misperceptions and delusions that Emma had harboured in her own mind, both about others and about herself. Emma begins for the first time to understand her own self. The novel may seem superficially to be a gently rambling idyll, but this is what it has all been leading towards. In Austen’s previous novel, Mansfield Park, the protagonist Fanny Price is rewarded because, throughout, she, and only she, has perceived clearly; here, in contrast, Emma has misperceived everything all along; but, since this novel is, unlike its predecessor, a comedy, the clouds of her misperceptions lift by the end one by one, leaving only the clearest of blue skies. Austen doesn’t often use the weather as anything other than plot devices, but when, as we approach the end of this novel, we are presented with a rain that plays no part at all in furthering the plot, we should sense its wider significance:

The weather continued much the same all the following morning; and the same loneliness, and the same melancholy, seemed to reign at Hartfield–but in the afternoon it cleared; the wind changed into a softer quarter; the clouds were carried off; the sun appeared; it was summer again.

– from Chapter 49

Not, it must be conceded, that the clouds in Emma had ever been darkly threatening. If Austen had indeed set out to write a novel as far removed from its predecessor as possible, she must remove even the possibility of tragedy. In Mansfield Park, the clouds had been threatening indeed, and a happy ending for the protagonist Fanny could only be achieved by the unhappiness of others around her: the final pages there depict a very uncertain heaven. But from the very first lines of Emma, we know that we are in an idyll, a delightful comedy of manners; and comedies of manners, we know, do not end in tragedy, or even in uncertain heavens. The interest lies in seeing not if the clouds will lift, but in how they lift. And we know that as and when they do lift, they will lift for all, and that not even the deplorable Eltons will be excluded from universal happiness; for, deplorable though they both are, they do seem rather to like each other. There is no Malvolio or Jaques by the end who cannot or will not be reconciled.

With this assurance offered, the dramatic immediacy that had informed Mansfield Park is conspicuous here by its absence: even when things go disastrously wrong – even when, thanks to Emma’s meddling, a possible happy marriage for Harriet Smith is turned down – we don’t worry: we rest contented in the assurance that it’ll all and end up right by the end, and that the very worthy Mr Martin, who had proposed to Harriet and on whom Emma had so snobbishly looked down, will not languish too long under the pain of rejection. Indeed, whatever pain of rejection he suffers is not even depicted, as that would have broken up the happy and genial surface of the work.

But this happy and genial surface should not blind us to the dangers of Emma’s misperceptions, nor, indeed, to their unpleasantness. Mr Martin appears only as an incidental character, but even from what we discern of him incidentally, we perceive a genuinely worthy man, a man possessing nobility of nature if not of social status. For Emma to look down upon such a person cannot be seen as anything other than unpleasant. And her persuading Harriet to turn down Mr Martin’s proposal on the ground that he, given his social status, ranks far below her in terms of human worth, is as absurd as it is reprehensible. Not only does this rejection cause the worthy Mr Martin pain (a pain we may easily infer even though it is not depicted), it jeopardises also the future of Harriet, a sweet but empty-headed young lady whose future is indeed most uncertain.  Emma is, as all readers acknowledge, a flawed character, but I am not sure it is often acknowledged just how deeply flawed she is: Austen has, indeed, to use all the considerable art at her disposal not to alienate the reader from her heroine.

Indeed, she goes further: she ensures that Emma charms us. Before writing the novel, Austen had referred to Emma as “a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like”, a remark that inclines me to think that Austen employed irony as liberally outside her novels as she did in them. For she lavished on Emma as much natural charm as she could, making all her flaws appear as consequence not of an ill nature, but of a certain lack of understanding; and we are convinced that once that understanding does come, these flaws will vanish. Quite how Austen manages to persuade the reader of this, it is hard to say. Perhaps it is in the presentation of Emma’s refined manners; or of her patient forbearance of her hypochondriac father; or, perhaps, of the obvious affection that the knightly Mr Knightley has for her. More importantly than any of these, I think, Emma is capable of introspection: it is this quality, above all, that sets her apart from the odious Mrs Elton, who, mean-spirited and objectionable though she is, is a sort of image of Emma as seen in a grotesquely distorting mirror. Emma takes a strong dislike to Mrs Elton, and with good reason: Mrs Elton is snobbish, self-centred, patronising, and self-aggrandising. She takes Jane Fairfax under her wing purely for the purpose of self-aggrandisement, to demonstrate both to herself and to everyone else her own superiority over her protégé. And Emma herself is guilty of every one of these faults that she can see so clearly in Mrs Elton: for Emma too is snobbish, and self-centred; and Emma, too, takes another person –  Harriet Smith – under her wing purely for the purposes of self-aggrandisement. What raises Emma above Mrs Elton is partly Emma’s refinement of manners, and partly a certain personal charm – a quality that eludes analysis, but which Austen depicts unerringly; but mainly, I think, Emma is raised above Mrs Elton by her ability to look into herself, and to examine what she finds. Until the final section of the novel, this ability is, admittedly, but partly used, but we are left in no doubt that it is present; and so, when she does come to look into herself fully, and acknowledge her many errors, the reader is not taken by surprise. Indeed, if anything, the reader warms to her even more.

For this is among the sunniest and warmest of novels. The small-town life that Austen so often depicted – those few families living close together, and, despite incidental absurdities which are mainly to be laughed away rather than grieved over, bound together by ties of mutual acquaintance and of friendship – is here celebrated. The pace is leisurely: Austen seems to relish depicting the measured pace at which everyday life proceeds. There is a genuine affection in her depiction of the small town of Highbury:

 …while she was still hanging over muslins and changing her mind, Emma went to the door for amusement. Much could not be hoped from the traffic of even the busiest part of Highbury; — Mr. Perry walking hastily by, Mr. William Cox letting himself in at the office door, Mr. Cole’s carriage horses returning from exercise, or a stray letter-boy on an obstinate mule, were the liveliest objects she could presume to expect; and when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, 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.

– from Chapter 27

Here, it seems to me, is Austen’s rationale for lack of overt drama: a “mind lively and at ease” does not require overt drama, as it can see “nothing that does not answer”.  What overt drama is inherent in the story Austen actually suppresses: we do not witness Robert Martin’s pain of rejection, and neither do we know of the extent or the reason of Jane Fairfax’ sufferings until it is all over. The setting is idyllic, and whatever clouds are present we know will lift.

The tale set in this most idyllic of settings is a tale of transgression and redemption – of crime and punishment, if one wishes to be fanciful about it: except there is no real punishment here. Emma transgresses, recognises the nature of her transgression, and redeems herself; there is no punishment involved, for her transgression is a common one, one that we are all guilty of, and not really worth punishing. This transgression of Emma’s is a favourite theme of Austen’s – that of perceiving wrongly: Catherine Morland, Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth and Darcy, just about everyone in Mansfield Park except Fanny – they all perceive wrongly. But Austen proves far from censorious about this: not understanding fully, or understanding imperfectly, this world we live in, is a common affliction, and while not understanding adequately one’s self or the world one inhabits has tragic potential, Austen, unlike Hardy, preferred to see it as comedy: the remedy for misperceiving the world is to learn to perceive it better. And that it is possible to do so is cause for rejoicing.

This is a very different vision of life from that presented in Mansfield Park, or, from what I remember from my previous reading some years ago, that presented in her last completed novel, Persuasion. But in each new novel, Austen seems intent on not repeating herself: although the themes may be similar, she is determined to see these themes from as many different perspectives as possible. Here, her perspective is forbearing, optimistic, and, despite her naturally waspish wit, gentle. While, by temperament, I find myself drawn more towards the sombre drama and passion of Mansfield Park, it’s easy to see why Emma has so many devoted admirers: it is a work of optimism and of geniality, while in terms of artistry, it ranks with her finest work.