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Wednesday
As yesterday was the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, I am reposting one of my past Austen essays, this one explaining why I find Emma to be the author’s most interesting character study. It was difficult to choose only one essay as I have written about Austen over 100 times while mention her in almost 150 other essays–more than any author other than Shakespeare. I am, to borrow Rudyard Kipling’s label for Austen fanatics, an unapologetic Janeite.
First published Oct. 30, 2014, slightly revised
My Jane Austen seminar has been thoroughly enjoying Emma. Yesterday, as we talked about how Mrs. Elton functions as Emma’s dark double, I came to understand why the novel has become my favorite Austen.
Before we launched into the multiple ways that the rector’s wife functions as Emma’s shadow side, I asked the class whether they could identify doubles in previous Austen novels. For a character to function as a double, I said that he or she must represent a dark direction that the character could go. We identified doubles for all the heroines.
Catherine Morland – Isabella Thorpe
Elinor Dashwood – Lucy Steele
Marianne Dashwood – Eliza (Col. Brandon’s ward)
Elizabeth Bennet – Caroline Bingley
Fanny Price – Mary Crawford
Emma Woodhouse –Mrs. Elton
Isabella Thorpe is, as my students call her, the BFF (Best Friend Forever) who threatens to lead Catherine astray. Luckily a combination of sound moral principles and mature guidance (from Henry Tilney) saves Catherine from Isabella’s devious ways. The same principles save Marianne but only barely as her sensibility almost leads her to Eliza’s fate.
With Catherine, Elinor and Elizabeth, the question is how to win the hero without trying to. “Trying” is the operative word: it is considered bad form for a woman to set her cap at a man (to use Sir John’s expression, which offends Marianne) since this transforms a lady into a scheming seductress. To be sure, a major point of dressing up, playing the piano, singing, and talking prettily is to land a man. (Bingley notes delightedly that all the young ladies are accomplished, not realizing that men like himself are the target of these accomplishments.) By creating doubles who are nakedly ambitious, Austen absolves her heroines from the charge of seduction.
Elinor, for instance, could not be the heroine if she were as calculating as Lucy Steele. Whereas the latter deliberately angles for Edward, Elinor is unconscious of how she attracts him (even though Fanny Dashwood accuses her of “draw[ing] him in”). Likewise, whereas Caroline Bingley practically throws herself at Darcy, Elizabeth gains his attention despite herself. It is only at Caroline’s suggestion that she parades about the room to be admired by Darcy and only by accident that she ends up at Pemberley while he is there, an encounter that is critical to their reconciliation. Elizabeth escapes the charge of gold-digging by (1) rejecting his initial marriage offer and (2) being dramatically different from Caroline. When she tells Jane that her opinion of Darcy changed after she saw Pemberley, it’s not because of his wealth but because of his responsible stewardship.
Austen complicates the issue, however, by having one heroine put too little effort in landing a husband. I’m thinking of Jane here, whom the calculating Charlotte Lucas accurately predicts will lose her man if she doesn’t make more open displays of affection. It’s a thin line, then, that heroines must walk: they must somehow attract men without trying too hard to attract them. Fanny Price is the ultimate example, winning Edmund in the end simply by being principled and not contemptuous of the clergy.
I asked my women students whether they still feel a stigma attached to initiating relationships. Their answers were mixed but more said yes than no. Some traditions die hard.
The doubling in Emma involves class (as does Sense and Sensibility) but is more interesting because Emma is not as virtuous as Elinor and Elizabeth. “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,” Austen wrote. Mrs. Elton may be a social climber but, more importantly, she is the double who most resembles the heroine. If Emma finds Mrs. Elton so distasteful, it is because she sees so much of herself in her. Emma is a social snob who reacts badly to Mrs. Elton’s snobbery, and while she is appalled at the way that Mrs. Elton wants to control Jane Fairfax, it is unlike how she herself directs Harriet’s life. Her insult of Miss Bates at the picnic, meanwhile, is not qualitatively different from the way Mrs. Elton sneers at Harriet.
The drama of the book is whether Emma can resist her dark side. In no other Austen novel do we see quite such an internal conflict, making Emma the most interesting character study of all the novels. In the end, fortunately, Emma shows she has more substance than Mrs. Elton by making a heroic sacrifice that the latter would not make: she surrenders Knightley to Harriet (or so she thinks), accepting this as a consequence of her meddling in the lives of others. Her reward is to discover that Knightley loves only her. But Emma has had to dig more deeply into herself than any other Austen heroine to avoid becoming her double.
