From my first JASNA AGM in 2005, when I heard Elaine Bander present
a breakout session (about parallels among three 1814 novels: Austen’s Mansfield Park, Burney’s The Wanderer, and Edgeworth’s Patronage), I’ve been a major fan of Elaine.
She and Juliet McMaster have long epitomized for me the very best of mainstream
Austen scholarship. Elaine unfailingly writes with great insight, clarity, and
tact about aspects of Jane Austen’s fiction and biography which go to the heart
of what makes Austen great, helping to illuminate
the unending delights of reading JA two centuries after her death. Best of all,
never does even a hint of litcrit jargon creep into Elaine’s lucid, witty
prose.
So, even though Elaine and I approach Austen from very different
points of view (she invariably focuses on what I call Jane Austen’s “overt
stories”, whereas I am almost always delving into JA’s “shadow stories”), I
always learn a great deal from, and find my critical imagination sharply
stimulated by, pretty much everything Elaine writes about JA. That is partly because
Elaine has a nose for what matters most in the fictional worlds of the novels; but
it’s also what I realized in 2005—i.e., that Jane Austen intended both Elaine’s and my (seemingly irreconcilable) interpretations to be valid! The
remainder of this post will be my attempt to transcend that apparent paradox,
by articulating how closely linked Elaine’s deep interpretation of the overt
story of Emma is to my interpretation
of its shadow story.
But I will keep Emma
cooling its heels another moment at the “door” of this post, and first present the
most notable example to date of how Elaine’s mainstream interpretations inform
my shadowy ones. It was her talk at the 2012 JASNA AGM about the allusive
presence of Burney’s Cecilia (Elaine
is as much a Burney, as an Austen, expert) beneath the light, bright, and
sparkling surface of Pride & Prejudice.
Through her close reading of numerous
significant parallels between Burney’s novel and Austen’s (as the latter is normatively
read), Elaine enabled me to see a crucial new strand of the shadow story of P&P (that which
involves Elizabeth Bennet as the unwitting heiress of Pemberley, and which I
posted about here in 2013: http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/12/you-cannot-have-been-always-at.html) through that same Burney
prism. Jane Austen is great (in both
senses) enough to comfortably encompass both of our seemingly irreconcilable
viewpoints, because Jane Austen never meant for them to be reconciled, only to
be separately appreciated for their very different, yet related, beauties and
insights.
And that finally brings me to my main subject today, which is Elaine’s
latest Austenian scholarly production: her article entitled “ ‘Liking’ Emma
Woodhouse” in the recently published 2016 print Persuasions (it fittingly takes pride of place as the first article in the volume). In it,
Elaine takes on two main subjects, and the one I will respond to in this post is
her extended explanation of “why Austen
would deliberately create a disagreeable heroine” like Emma. My modus operandi will be to cherry pick three
specific statements made by Elaine, and then respond to each from my alternative
perspective, and to show how they each function as a funhouse mirror for the
other. However, I urge you to read her article in full when you get a chance, because it is Elaine at the top of
her game, and only a complete reading by itself will do her own thesis justice.
Elaine: “[Emma] treats most of the people around her (although
never her father nor Mr. Knightley) as though they were characters in a novel
that she is writing. Granted, it’s a bad novel, full of the very novel clichés
that Austen set about to undermine, but, nevertheless, Emma’s creative
temperament appears akin in many ways to Austen’s own.”
I’ve long argued that the supreme genius of JA’s dual construction
of Emma is that, in the shadow story,
Emma is not completely clueless in
the sense of having no idea of what is really happening, most of all with respect
to the shadow heroine, Jane Fairfax (as to whom the key questions which absorb
Emma are about why Jane returns to Highbury in the first place, who is wooing Jane,
to whom does Jane return her affections (in particular who might be the engaged
man Emma is convinced Jane loves). Rather,
Emma is often almost correct in her guesses.
It’s as if the aim of Emma’s intuitive bow is initially perfect, and she
identifies the key points that really do matter; but then, when her arrow of
insight is only inches from the bulls-eye, suddenly a gust of fairy dust (sent
by Puck aka Jane Austen) blows the arrow sideways at the last instant. And so,
what seem like novel clichés to Elaine become, in the shadow story, poignant twists
torn from the often tragically realistic life of a woman like Jane in the Regency Era – a
gifted, good young woman, who endures an unwed pregnancy, genteel but desperate
poverty in the home of her aunt, to the point of actual hunger, and the
fickleness of John Knightley, the married man I say Jane was actually involved
with in London (i.e., not Mr. Dixon). Jane suffers these and other ills at the
hands of the hypocritical, patriarchal power structure, led by the Great Whale
of Highbury, the Machiavellian Mr. George Knightley.
And so Elaine’s point that Emma’s creative temperament appears
akin to Austen’s own is very much spot-on from my alternative point of view as
well. I claim that JA deliberately hid the poignant, all-too-realistic,
radically feminist shadow story of Jane Fairfax behind the smokescreen of Emma’s
comically self absorbed “novel clichés”. But unlike her unlikable heroine Emma,
the aim of Jane Austen’s storytelling archery never misses. I.e., creatively speaking, she has the sure hand of a
literary Ulysses: just as he shot his arrow through 12 axe heads in a row, JA achieved
the comparably miraculous feat of shooting two different arrows (stories), in
two opposite directions, with a single pull of her bow (i.e., with the
identical words contained in a single text)!
Elaine also wrote: “Early reviewer Walter Scott shrewdly observed
that in Emma, despite the absence of
romance elements associated with older novels, ’there are cross purposes enough
for cutting half the men’s throats and breaking all the women’s hearts’. Janet
Todd notes that both publisher John Murray and novelist Maria Edgeworth found
the novel lacking in ‘incident’, even though, as Todd says, ‘The lack of story
is in part the subject of Emma.”
Once again, I find that Elaine’s valid point from a mainstream
perspective on Emma takes on a
startling, opposite meaning when filtered through my own heretical lens. I.e.,
there is a great deal of incident (as I see it) in the shadow story of Emma, which is narrated, however,
obliquely, by Miss Bates’s torrent of words, which Emma consistently zones out
on, but which (I am not the first to point out) is a fertile source of clues to
what is happening offstage, which Emma subconsciously absorbs, but then unwittingly
misinterprets.
And, again, there is the metafictional parallel (as Adena Rosmarin
wrote about in her pioneering 1986 article “Misreading Emma”) to the reader of Emma who, like Emma, tunes out the
“nothing” that is recounted in the many words of JA’s longest novel, and
thereby never correctly understands what happens in its shadow story. And just
as Emma never fully understands, neither does the reader whose focus is only on
the overt story, and who therefore, like Emma, accepts Frank Churchill’s
lengthy explanation of his relationship with Jane as truth, rather than a
carefully manufactured cover story dictated to Frank by George Knightley (the
same way the latter dictated Robert Martin’s proposal letter to Harriet 45
chapters earlier) in order to provide a coherent, but false, explanation for
all that transpired during the novel.
Elaine: “Unlike the other flawed Good Girls, [Emma] is
deliberately endowed with unpleasant character traits like snobbery and
smugness…she does not earn sympathy for being snubbed, oppressed, or neglected.
Instead, her unattractive qualities are compounded by her affluence and social
status…As Emma says of Robert Martin, she can need none of our help.”
In the overt story, Elaine’s above analysis is once again spot-on.
But I read Emma in the shadow story as being perhaps the biggest unwitting victim
of all, because she trusts the wrong people. How so? Because I see Knightley as
setting his sights, from the very beginning of the novel, on Emma not as the
object of a sincere love, but as a target to bail him out of his desperate
financial straits, which he has meticulously concealed from Emma. And so, very
much as I have frequently articulated how Darcy does the same to Elizabeth in
the second half of P&P, I see Knightley as systematically destroying Emma’s
complacent, comfortable life at Highbury with her father, in order to make her
so desperate that Emma will, when Harriet shocks Emma by taking off her mask of
pretended silliness and claims Knightley for herself, “suddenly discover” that
she loved Knightley all along.
And that is a good place for me to stop, and to remind you to read
Elaine’s article when you get a chance—and when you do, perhaps you will keep
in the back of your mind what you read in this post, so that you will then be
ready, in your next rereading of Emma, to
hold Elaine’s and my opposing viewpoints in mind at the same time, as if we
were each providing one lens to a very special pair of spectacles for
understanding the doubleness of both Emma and Emma.
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode on Twitter
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