William Deresiewicz Read online

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  path to the alternative outcome I discussed in the previous chapter, one that Austen gazes down several times but ultimately declines to follow. As such, it is related, though not obviously, to the novel’s final substitutions. The most conspicuous, but by no means the only one of these final substitutions is Edmund’s acceptance of Fanny in place of Mary—reminiscent of Marianne’s “acceptance” of Colonel Brandon at the end of Sense and Sensibility, but different in the precise degree to which substitution differs from coercion. For Marianne does not so much accept Colonel Brandon as have him forced on her, and while she eventually seems to adjust to the disappointment, that is a very different matter from the psychic mechanism at work here.39 Substitution, as I have said, is a voluntary process, which is precisely what makes it so effective and so chilling. Edmund actually persuades himself to believe that he is happier with what he gets than with what he wanted in the first place, that “a very different kind of woman might … do just as well—or a great deal better” (387). Austen’s reference on this occasion to “the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments” is every bit as cynical as her initial glance at Miss Ward’s obligation to be attached to Rev. Norris. Indeed, she is even consciously mendacious in suggesting that Edmund need only “learn to prefer soft light eyes to sparkling dark ones”—as much a trivialization of the difference between the two women, and of Edmund’s attachment to Mary, as it would have been to describe an analogous shift from Edmund to Henry on Fanny’s part as merely a matter of learning to prefer short men to tall. But of course, the entire novel has been about “the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments.” True, Austen goes on to do all she can to persuade us as to the naturalness and rightness of the substitution, but her deep ambivalence about the outcome she has chosen continues right through the novel’s final paragraphs. For the shift of Edmund’s affections is far from the novel’s final substitution, and those that follow it, in their very swiftness and thoroughness and even casualness, ironize any protestations Austen makes as to his acceptance of Fanny being anything more than a matter of taking what you can get. Fanny herself returns from Portsmouth with her own replacement, in the person of her younger sister. In less than a paragraph, Susan supplants in Lady Bertram’s heart the niece who has been her dutiful companion and servant for eight years, functioning “[f]irst as a comfort to Fanny, then as an auxiliary, and last as her substitute” (389; this is the passage from which I have taken my key term). About Sir Thomas, we read this: “In [Susan’s] usefulness, in Fanny’s excellence, in William’s continued good conduct, and ris84 Mansfield Park

  ing fame, and in the general well-doing and success of the other members of the family, all assisting to advance each other, and doing credit to his countenance and aid, Sir Thomas saw repeated, and forever repeated reason to rejoice in what he had done for them all.” The narrator mordantly mimics Sir Thomas’s own mental and emotional operation. Maria, Julia, and Tom are forgotten; Susan, Fanny, and William are installed in their place. Sir Thomas has bought himself a new set of children. It is not for nothing that they are named “Price.” But even this is not the novel’s final substitution, because as powerful as Sir Thomas is, as able to determine the destinies of his children and stepchildren, he is not the ultimate possessor of Mansfield Park. That figure reappears at the start of the final chapter: “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest” (380). But whose happiness does Austen really control? Finally, ours. All along she has manipulated us into desiring the marriages of Edmund to Mary and Fanny to Henry, making us believe, with her talk of the Crawfords’ reformation, in the inevitability of that happy occurrence. And then she teaches us exactly what it feels like to be deprived of what one most wants, and what one has to do in order to deal with it. One has to teach oneself to desire, in retrospect, a different outcome, and the critical record is replete with examples of readers making ingenious efforts to do just that. I take Lionel Trilling’s celebrated essay as representative: “although on a first reading of Mansfield Park Mary Crawford’s speeches are all delightful, they diminish in charm as we read the novel a second time.“40 Pleasure, that is, on second thought, is not really so pleasurable. This is a reader publicly reeducating his desires, and seeking to do the same to our own. And if we are to live happily in the world of the novel, we had better take his direction. That is the deeper meaning behind the game Austen plays with us as to the time it takes for Edmund to shift his desires from Mary to Fanny. “I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion,” she writes, “that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people.” Those unconquerable passions and unchanging attachments are ours, for and to the outcome that has been stolen away. The end of the story of Mansfield Park does indeed vary in time from reader to reader, because the substitution that completes it is the one that Austen at last requires of us.

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  c h a p t e r

  f o u r

  Emma

  Ambiguous Relationships

  “[Y]ou know we are not really so much brother and sister as to make it at all improper.” “Brother and sister! no, indeed.”

  lthough Emma alludes to “Tintern Abbey,” as I noted in chapter 1, in connection with one of its central themes, that of the imagination, it is neither that allusion nor that theme that I will be discussing here. For while Wordsworthian ideas about the imagination as a cognitive faculty clearly inform the novel, Emma’s greatest debt to the British Romantic poets lies elsewhere. From Wordsworth in particular, but also from Coleridge and Byron, Austen drew ideas here about new possibilities for intimate relationships—their complexity and depth, their freedom from conventional social hierarchies and categories, their transformative potential. Indeed, the novel initiates its exploration of such ambiguous relationships in its very first lines. For the opening of Emma is strangely proportioned. A single sentence characterizes the heroine, a second her relationship with her father, then fully four more her relationship with her governess. That last passage is itself strange, and worth quoting in full: [Emma’s] mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses, and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection. Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in Mr. Woodhouse’s family, less

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  as a governess than a friend, very fond of both daughters, but particularly of Emma. Between them it was more the intimacy of sisters. Even before Miss Taylor had ceased to hold the nominal office of governess, the mildness of her temper had hardly allowed her to impose any restraint; and the shadow of authority being now long passed away, they had been living together as friend and friend very mutually attached, and Emma doing just what she liked; highly esteeming Miss Taylor’s judgment, but directed chiefly by her own. (7; emphasis in the original) “Governess,” “mother,” “friend,” “sister”—what, after all that, was Miss Taylor’s relationship to Emma? The more labels the narrator deploys, the farther she seems to get from finding the right one. Not only do these terms keep displacing and thus mutually qualifying one another, each is itself qualified as it makes its appearance, its adequacy undermined even before it can be enunciated: “little short of a mother,” “less as a governess,” “more the intimacy of sisters.” “Friend” does seem to win out by the end of the passage— a circumstance to which I will return—but before we put too much stock in that alternative, we should note that the “friend” of “friend and friend,” the phrase that marks the final stage of Emma and Miss Taylor’s relationship, clearly means something different from the “friend” of “less as a governess than a f
riend,” one of the competing definitions of the earlier stages. These different stages, however, do give us a way of making sense of this profusion of relational terms. We can conjecture that Miss Taylor, hired as a governess, was first something like a mother to the orphaned five-year-old, then, as Emma matured, became a kind of friend, then finally, after further maturation on Emma’s part, achieved something of the intimacy of a sister. But however accurate this conjectural narrative might be, the text gives us no reason to believe that these relational modes displaced one another; rather, it suggests a layering process, one in which maternal and amicable and sororal feelings and ways of interacting accumulated over time in an ever-denser affective palimpsest. No wonder that opening description is so long: it must be, to capture a relationship of such complexity—of such ambiguity. And no wonder that each of the relational terms it employs must be so hedged by qualification. For it is precisely Austen’s purpose here, at the very start of the novel, to expose the inadequacy of such labels to characterize the kinds of relationships she will be concerned to explore, relationships that, in their fruitful, liberating ambiguity, continually push beyond conventional categories, conventional boundaries, conventional roles. Emma’s relationship with Miss Taylor is the only one whose ambiguity is

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  made explicit, but all her major ties, with one exception I will discuss below, are similarly complex, even if, with the others, Austen leaves us to try to supply the labels ourselves. To her widowed and childish father she is at once daughter, wife, and mother, in addition to being what the novel’s second sentence calls her, the “mistress of his house.“1 Knightley is not only her neighbor, but what the narrator calls “a very old and intimate friend of the family”: a term, “friend of the family,” the familiarity of which conceals its own complexity, for it seems to imply both a close connection between the Donwell and Hartfield households—we see how easily he drops in for a visit—and also the existence of friendships, of different sorts, between him and each member of the Hartfield family, not excluding the erstwhile Miss Taylor (10). Knightley has also been Emma’s brother-in-law for the previous seven years—more ambiguity-within-ambiguity, for as this chapter’s epigraph reminds us, Austen’s society made no verbal distinction between such a relationship and that of a brother pure and simple, even while recognizing important differences between them. Of course, he has also been for far longer a kind of elder-brother- or father-figure to Emma, and he will eventually become, without dropping any of these other roles, her lover and husband.2 The ambiguous relationship Emma develops with Frank we will consider later, but we may take this opportunity to note, with respect to Miss Taylor, that in addition to the four relationships approximated in the novel’s opening, she has also been for Emma a kind of wife.3 Such relationships, however, are in no way peculiar to the heroine. What Frank is to Mrs. Weston, who “stand[s] in a mother’s place” to him, “but without a mother’s affection,” and even what he is to his father, to whom he is practically a stranger, are not to be specified by a simple label—certainly not “son”—as his interactions with each testify (124). Indeed, we can scarcely find a significant relationship within the novel that could be so specified. Even Mrs. Goddard, the schoolmistress, is referred to as “motherly” (20). And the novel also shows us important relationships that may be thought of less as ambiguous, with regard to conventional relational terminology, than as indeterminate. Knightley and Mrs. Weston, John Knightley and Jane (who have an extended conversation toward the end of volume II that exhibits a surprising degree of intimacy)—it is not so much that these relationships attract too many labels, as that they do not attract any. Like the other ties we have been surveying, they reveal the same inadequacy of conventional relational terms that Austen takes pains to expose at the novel’s outset, and thus prompt the same questions: What kinds of relationships become possible once those conventional roles and categories have been

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  transcended? What kinds of feelings lie—or rather, grow—at the interstices of received emotions? What happens when people are brought together and left to find their own way toward each other, free of traditional expectations? We have never seen anything like this before in Austen’s work.4 The world of the early novels is one of clearly defined roles—daughter, father, neighbor, suitor. (Elizabeth Bennet’s relationship with her father may be light-hearted, but it is unmistakably a father-daughter relationship nonetheless.) This lack of ambiguity is not oppressive, but rather allows characters to understand how they are situated relative to one another and to respond accordingly. Indeed, it is part of what makes for the simplicity and clarity of emotions in Austen’s early work. In the authoritarian world of Mansfield Park, however, the lack of relational ambiguity is oppressive. Their rigidly prescribed roles as Sir Thomas’s sons and daughters (different roles for each sex, and for the older son as distinct from the younger) are exactly what three of his children rebel against. As for Fanny, her position does entail some initial ambiguity, but that very uncertainty about her role and her relationships makes for a debilitating anxiety, and in any case the Bertrams soon obligingly imprison her in her long-term position as “the lowest and last” (184). Of course, the issue of substitution, as explored in the previous chapter, complicates the picture relative to her relationship with Edmund. But there is an important distinction to be made. Fanny, having partly substituted Edmund for William, feels emotions for him that hover ambiguously among those of a cousin, a sister, and a lover, but precisely because she knows that one in her position must conceal those last two forms of feeling, her relationship with Edmund itself, her actual behavior toward him, is, for the great bulk of the novel, well defined, stable, and conventional. That is exactly why Edmund is completely unaware, once he finally develops amorous feelings of his own toward her, that those feelings have long been reciprocated. For some nine years, he is the kind, patronizing older cousin, she the adoring, obedient younger one. We might think of them as closer to brother and sister, but they do not; in Mansfield, everyone knows their place. Only toward the end of the novel does Edmund call Fanny “sister” (367), and only at the very end, after the close of the dramatized part of the narrative, do the cousin-siblings also become lovers and spouses. Still, Austen’s exploration of substitution and its culmination in this most disturbingly ambiguous of relationships clearly gave her ideas. The suggestion with which Mansfield Park ends becomes the one with which Emma, a novel so different in most every other respect, begins. But the discoveries of the earlier novel were not the only thing that gave Austen ideas about

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  ambiguous relationships. Once again, she would have found them already explored and elaborated in Wordsworth. Ambiguous relationships can be found throughout British Romantic literature, and are by no means confined to that most celebrated of species, those that “incestuously” blend fraternal and erotic impulses.5 Among the poems she had available to her, Austen would have found such relationships in “The Mad Mother,” with the mingling of maternal and erotic passions I noted in the previous chapter (“Thy father cares not for my breast … But thou wilt live with me in love” [ll. 6167]); in “Lines written at a small distance … ,” which alternately refers to its addressee as “My sister! … my Friend … my Sister!” (ll. 9, 19, 37); and, echoing this last but with redoubled emotional force, in—once again—“Tintern Abbey,” with its passionate call to “thou my dearest Friend, / My dear, dear Friend,” a figure who only after some delay is also revealed to be “My dear, dear Sister!” (ll. 115116, 121). But to see the passions expressed in these last two poems as incestuous or quasi-incestuous distorts Wordsworth by reading him through the lens of Romanticism as a whole—or perhaps more to the point, of Freud. Rather, Wordsworth means us to understand that such heights of passion can be reached outside the realm of the erotic, that one can feel fraternal or amicable feelings with an erotic intensity. And he also wants us to understand that a large part of what conduces to such intensities is p
recisely a blending of different kinds of feelings, a dynamic ambiguity of relationship. Such notions are indispensable to Wordsworth’s most extensive exploration of ambiguous relationships, at least among the works published during Austen’s lifetime, the Matthew poems. Teacher, friend, brother, father— in a series of lyrics that beautifully unfolds the relationship between the two men, Wordsworth gradually develops the idea that Matthew was all of these at once to him—or even, as the narrator of Emma might say, more than a teacher, a special friend, almost a brother, little short of a father. The placement of the poems is itself significant, for they constitute, with the Lucy poems, one of the two foci of the second volume of the two-volume Lyrical Ballads. The volume thus centers on two triptychs that lament the loss of an intensely beloved figure, one loved in a straightforwardly sexual fashion, the other in a highly complex but nonsexual one. At the same time, the 1800 expansion rearranges the order of the first, 1798, volume to highlight “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned” by placing them at the head of the entire compilation. Those, too, must be seen as Matthew poems, Wordsworth’s intention being to have us

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  recall that “good friend Matthew”—about whom all we know at first is that he is a good friend—when we arrive at the Matthew poems proper those many lyrics later (“Expostulation and Reply,” l. 15). It comes as a shock to discover in “Lines written on a tablet … ” (“Matthew”) that “Matthew”— so familiarly named, as an equal and intimate—is in fact the poet’s former schoolmaster, even more of a shock to learn in “The Fountain” that of this “pair of friends,” one is “young,” the other “seventy-two” (ll. 34)—and that it is the latter who is the man of “glee,” “frolics,” and “fun and madness” (l. 20; “Lines,” ll. 17, 22). As in Emma, as we will see, more than one kind of conventional boundary is being crossed here, more than one conventional verbal usage discarded. “The Two April Mornings,” the most complex of these poems, is also the most complex link in their exposition of the two men’s relationship. Matthew, recalling an April morning just like the one he is now sharing with the poet, recalls a highly charged double-encounter he experienced then— an encounter with the grave of his daughter and, at the next moment, with her living image tripping by. But though the experience happened on that distant day, he seems to understand and fully digest it—“The will of God be done!” (l. 4)—only now, because only now does he have someone intimate enough to share it with, and thus to share it with himself with. The two mornings are “brother[s],” and so, this poem of doubles urges us to see, are the two men (l. 28). Finally, in “The Fountain,” the third of the Matthew poems proper, the poet proposes a final link: “Matthew, for thy children dead,” he declares, “I’ll be a son to thee!” (ll. 6162). Matthew refuses, but his refusal signals not a rejection of ambiguous relationships—the very refusal is accompanied by a spontaneous affirmation of intimacy (“At this he grasped my hand, and said, / `Alas! that cannot be’ ” [ll. 6364])—but an understanding of them that far exceeds that of the “young” and, as he paints himself here, emotionally callow poet (l. 3). Austen would not have known “Address to the Scholars of the Village School of —,” one of the Matthew poems not published until long after her death, but she would not have needed to read it to understand that Matthew was, for the poet and his fellow schoolchildren, “Our common Friend and Father” (l. 4). The paternal dimension of the relationship hovers over all three of the poems published in Lyrical Ballads; the poet’s faux pas in “The Fountain” lies in trying to make it too literal, too explicit. For doing so would destroy the very ambiguity that keeps all those relational options in play, allowing the two men to move from one to another—from teacherly reproof to friendly discourse to fraternal empathy to paternal counsel—as