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  circumstances and feeling prompt them to do, but more importantly, allowing them finally to create an intermediate zone of relatedness that blends all these modes together into a connection that is richer, deeper, and freer than any conventional one, at any moment, could be. We see this same enriching, productive flexibility in the ambiguous relationships in Emma, and especially in the most important of them, the one that ultimately emerges as the novel’s ideal relationship, that between Emma and Knightley. Thinking of Matthew and his young friend, we may note that theirs is also an intergenerational tie. And thinking of the interactions between Sir Thomas Bertram and his eldest son and daughter that we glanced at in the second chapter of this study, we may note that Emma and Knightley’s characteristic encounter involves the delivery of some kind of counsel or reproof on his part. But what a difference between the way such advice is given and received here and those analogous interactions in Mansfield Park, where father and children are locked into stereotyped patterns of behavior and emotion. Two scenes in Emma’s first half develop these intricacies particularly well—the first in chapter 1, on the evening after the Weston wedding, the second in chapter 21, when Knightley drops in to congratulate Emma on having treated Jane so handsomely the previous evening at Hartfield—and as such are representative of the strengths and subtleties characteristic of all of the novel’s ambiguous relationships. It is therefore worth examining at least one of these scenes in detail. The first part of the later one reads as follows: Mr. Knightley … was expressing the next morning … his approbation of the whole; not so openly as he might have done had her father been out of the room, but speaking plain enough to be very intelligible to Emma. He had been used to think her unjust to Jane, and now had great pleasure in marking an improvement. “A very pleasant evening … particularly pleasant. You and Miss Fairfax gave us some very good music. I do not know a more luxurious state, sir, than sitting at one’s ease to be entertained a whole evening by two such young women; sometimes with music and sometimes with conversation. I am sure Miss Fairfax must have found the evening pleasant, Emma. You left nothing undone … ” “I am happy you approved,” said Emma, smiling; “but I hope I am not often deficient in what is due to guests at Hartfield.” “No, my dear,” said her father instantly; “that I am sure you are not. There is nobody half so attentive and civil as you are. If any thing, you

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  are too attentive. The muffin last night—if it had been handed round once, I think it would have been enough.” “No,” said Mr. Knightley, nearly at the same time; “you are not often deficient; not often deficient either in manner or comprehension. I think you understand me, therefore.” An arch look expressed—“I understand you well enough;” but she said only, “Miss Fairfax is reserved.” “I always told you she was—a little; but you will soon overcome all that part of her reserve which ought to be overcome, all that has its foundation in diffidence. What arises from discretion must be honoured.” “You think her diffident. I do not see it.” “My dear Emma,” said he, moving from his chair into one close by her, “you are not going to tell me, I hope, that you had not a pleasant evening.” (142; emphasis in the original) The complicating presence of Emma’s father makes the interactions here especially intricate. “[N]ot so openly as he might have done had her father been out of the room”—both Emma and Knightley recognize that there is something potentially disturbing to Mr. Woodhouse about the full nature of their relationship, something that goes beyond his need to maintain his belief in Emma’s perfection. Emma’s father finds anything new, anything he cannot immediately recognize and comprehend, deeply threatening. He may unwittingly participate in an ambiguous relationship with his daughter, but he would never consciously assent to one, never be anything but extremely uncomfortable at the sight of people stepping out of their conventional relational roles. Here and elsewhere, Knightley accordingly employs a particularly obvious, stagy kind of condescension in speaking to him about Emma—“I do not know a more luxurious state, sir, than sitting at one’s ease to be entertained a whole evening by two such young women”—a one-elder-to-another tone that pacifies the old man by performing the attitude he expects Knightley to adopt toward his daughter. But having thrown him this bone, Knightley can turn to Emma and address her directly in far different accents: “I am sure Miss Fairfax must have found the evening pleasant, Emma … ” The tone is familiar, all traces of condescension having dropped out of it, and Emma is addressed as “Emma,” not as “Miss Woodhouse,” a rare and important mark of intimacy. Still, Emma invariably finds Knightley’s supervision, whether expressed in approval or rebuke, damaging to her self-love, so here, as usual, she responds to it as no

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  child ever could, with a playful and even mocking parry-and-thrust: “I am happy you approved … but I hope I am not often deficient in what is due to guests at Hartfield.” Her father instantly leaps to her defense, but no one is paying attention to him anymore—Knightley essentially talks over him—as something much more important goes forward outside his range of perception. “No … you are not often deficient; not often deficient either in manner or comprehension. I think you understand me, therefore.” Brought up short by Emma’s response, Knightley’s tone hardens here, becoming clipped and almost stern, much less that of an equal. But Emma again defends herself, this time even more playfully, while following Knightley in veiling the full purport of their exchange from her father: “An arch look expressed—`I understand you well enough;’ but she said only, `Miss Fairfax is reserved.’ ” A further exchange, in which Knightley maintains essentially the same tone, then finally: ” `My dear Emma,’ said he, moving from his chair into one close by her, `you are not going to tell me, I hope … ‘ ” “My dear Emma”: his language, like his body, suddenly moves in close. Four distinct registers of discourse on Knightley’s part in as many utterances, ranging from pompously formal all the way to warmly intimate, four different implicit relationships or modes of relatedness. There are other things to note here as well. First, how the complexity of their relationship has tuned Emma and Knightley’s sensibilities to be able to perceive the subtlest communicative inflections—small tonal shifts, facial expressions, body language—sometimes (like Matthew’s simultaneous rejection of the poet’s desire to stand in as a son and his warm grasping of the young man’s hand) operating on more than one level at once. Second, because of this mutual attunement, how intricate a scene Austen is able to construct here, one that essentially keeps three conversations going at the same time: the one Mr. Woodhouse thinks he is having, the one Emma and Knightley are having out loud, and the one they are having silently. Emma is Austen’s supreme achievement in precise and nuanced communication— both among characters and between author and reader—and we get a little better sense here of why. Third, because Emma and Knightley’s relationship leaves so much room for negotiation—for disagreement, for face-saving, for new kinds of appeal—how much more effective a way it is for Emma to receive guidance than would be any sort of paternal dictate. Sir Thomas wants to correct his children; Knightley wants Emma to grow. If Mansfield Park so often seems to be about right and wrong, its heroine the character who is ultimately vindicated, Emma is about growth, its heroine the character with the greatest potential for development and change.

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  Fourth, how important to Emma and Knightley’s relationship is Emma’s playfulness—how it allows them to make the transitions between levels of discourse and lubricate the frictions between their ideas of what their relationship ought to be.6 (Indeed, her very first words to him are uttered “playfully” [11].) The notion may be extended: in Emma, playfulness or play— room for improvisation, space for the exercise of freedom—is exactly what Austen introduces into the normally strict and well-defined system of social roles. Playing is exactly what she does with those roles, seeing how far they can stretch, how fully they can blend, what they can be made into. Both Emma’s play and Austen’s
are directed toward a serious purpose; like Wordsworth’s Matthew, they are capable of uniting the most giddy and most sober responses to experience. And finally, as do the Matthew poems, the scene demonstrates that a fully realized ambiguous relationship involves not so much an alteration between stable relational modes as the achievement of a permanently ambiguous one in which all tones and attitudes are continuously available. I attempted to enumerate before the different relationships in which Knightley stands to Emma, but we would be very hard pressed to name, at any moment in the scene just examined, exactly which of those roles he is occupying, whether that of neighbor or friend of the family or father figure or any other. The lines between those roles or modes, then, do not so much get crossed and recrossed as effaced. Knightley is not finally all of those things to Emma at once, any more than Miss Taylor was at once a mother, a sister, and a governess. He is, as she was, something else altogether. What he is is what he and Emma and the novel all eventually agree to call him: a “friend.” And it is friendship, as typified by Emma and Knightley’s relationship, that ultimately steps forth as the novel’s new relational ideal, the ambiguous relationship par excellence. Now we have already encountered the term “friend” as one of the narrator’s alternative, and thus inadequate, ways of naming Miss Taylor’s relationship to Emma. “Friend” in that sense—a fixed and well-defined, and therefore stereotyped and imprisoning, form of connection—would be no more appropriate than any other label in characterizing this new kind of relationship. But something happens to the term during the course of the narrative: it gets worked and reworked, discussed and debated, used by so many different people to mean so many different things, that by the end, friendship emerges as a new idea.7 Or rather, a whole constellation of ideas. Friendship becomes the novel’s supremely important relationship because it becomes

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  its supremely flexible one, “friend” the one term able to denote the fruitful imprecision and rich complexity of ambiguous relationships. Just as that long opening description of Emma’s relationship with Miss Taylor comes to rest on the term “friend”—and already there we see its relative flexibility, even as a conventional term—so too does the novel’s entire exploration of ambiguous relationships. Friendship becomes the name for relationships for which there is no name. But it also becomes far more than that. Because nearly every important relationship in the novel is ambiguous, nearly every one gets rewritten as a friendship. Friendship not only becomes the novel’s most important kind of relationship—finally, it becomes virtually its only one. And in thus extending and apotheosizing the idea of friendship, Austen does nothing less than anticipate—and help create—the meaning and role that friendship has come to assume in the modern world. To quote Robert Brain, the leading scholar of friendship: In contemporary Western society the boundaries of friendship, kinship, and loving are disintegrating … Roles which were more exclusive in other societies have broken down. A wife is her husband’s “best friend” and fathers and sons call themselves by Christian names—like friends … [T]here seems to be little difference between the love felt between kin and that between friends; sentiments found in the family are based almost completely on ties of love felt between unrelated friends … One chooses this or that uncle, this or that cousin, even this or that brother and sister to be friendly with.8 And even, as Brain suggests, this or that parent, as well as this or that coworker, neighbor, teacher, student. Friendship has become the relationship in terms of which all others are understood, against which they are all measured, into which they have all dissolved. It has become, in other words, the characteristically modern form of relationship. As Brain says, “We are friends with everyone” now.9 And while it is clear that Austen has not fully arrived at this state of affairs—however ambiguous Emma’s relationship with her father, the novel in no way regards it as a friendship—it is equally clear that she sets us down the road that has led to it, a state of affairs in which, for example, the notion of being friends with one’s father is commonplace and unremarkable. Why has friendship risen to such preeminence in modern imagination and practice? For one thing, its new status is clearly part of the larger reorientations of modernity toward individualism and egalitarianism, away from

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  vertical ties and toward horizontal ones, and away from strong, stable social structures toward looser, more ephemeral ones.10 But that is only part of the explanation. Another has to do with the concept’s very flexibility, the flexibility that, as we said, is the key to its ability to function as the universal relationship, to mean so many different things in so many different situations— for while we may be friends with everyone now, we are not friends with everyone in the same way. To regard that flexibility as inherent in the concept itself, however, is to beg the question of how it developed—to speak from our late point in the very historical process we are trying to trace. Friendship appears to us to have a complex semantic nature because it has a complex semantic history. Many different ideas have fed into it, and in particular, many different ideas were feeding into it in Austen’s day; its complex history was never more complex than at the time she was writing.11 The concept of friendship, the word “friend,” was the site then of vigorous semantic contestation and rapid semantic change, as new social and existential ideas—ideas about the nature of the individual and his or her relationships with others—came into being and struggled with each other and with existing ideas. Nor was Austen the only writer to be inspired by this ferment, to seize on the possibilities it opened up to explore and elaborate meanings of her own. So too, as we will see, did the British Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Byron. Indeed, their innovations were crucial in inspiring hers. In short, Emma’s exploration of friendship takes place within a highly complex historical context. It is to that history that I now turn. To begin with, one important sense of the words “friend” and “friends” was just on the verge of dying out in Austen’s day, and may in fact have taken its last large breath in one of her earlier novels. For while I am claiming that in Emma, under the influence of Wordsworth and Byron, Austen engages the idea of friendship more deeply and complexly than ever before, an intense investment in the idea, as has long been recognized, pervades her entire body of work.12 In Sense and Sensibility, in particular, “friend” is frequently and pointedly used in a way now obsolete but once integral to what Lawrence Stone calls the Open Lineage Family, the kind of extended kinship group that, he argues, dominated the upper reaches of English society through the early seventeenth century.13 While Stone’s chronology has been criticized as too rigid, and even he acknowledges that various family types coexisted at different times during the three centuries covered by his study, those types remain valuable as categories of analysis.14 Indeed, while Sense and Sensibility itself bears witness to the persistent strength of the Open

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  Lineage Family through at least the late eighteenth century, it also shows how Stone’s different family types were struggling (or still struggling) for allegiance among the upper classes. The Open Lineage Family, according to Stone, consisted not only of parents and children but also of what were known as ” `friends’—that group of influential advisers who usually included most of the senior members of the kin.“15 The influence of such “friends”—who, as Stone’s language makes clear, were not limited to blood relations, but included a family’s “advisers,” patrons, and important associates—was particularly important when it came to the question of marriage: “It was `friends’ who were the key advisers in the critical decision of marriage, not only among the nobility and gentry, but down to the lower middle classes.“16 How long did this meaning persist? Until Austen’s very age: “[a]s late as the 1820s,” according to Stone, though, as noted, he underestimates the continuing force that the usage, along with its attendant ideas about familial relations and personal identity, had at that late date.17 What is for Stone, by the turn of the nineteenth century, the semantic vestige of an old order is for A
usten the sign of a dragon that still needs to be slain. The usage figures so prominently in Sense and Sensibility precisely because it is in that novel that Austen wages her most passionate battle against the hard-dying values and prerogatives of the Open Lineage Family, and in particular against the assumed right of its senior members to override a young person’s desires in determining the marriage choice. Sense and Sensibility may satirize sensibility’s excesses, but it is squarely on the side of what Stone calls “affective individualism”—the new valorization of individual affection in the governance of personal relations—and against the old allegiance to family interest.18 The old and new values face off in the struggle between, on the one hand, the Dashwood women, Colonel Brandon, and Edward Ferrars, and on the other, John Dashwood and the rest of the Ferrars family. And the linguistic ground on which that struggle is fought is exactly that of the word in question. While characters on the “good” side of the divide use “friend” both in Stone’s old sense—it is an inescapable part of their world—and in what he calls the modern one—“one who supports you and comforts you while others do not, someone with whom to compare minds and cherish private virtues”19—John Dashwood, the novel’s leading spokesperson for the old values, only ever uses it in its older denotation. Friendship in any other, warmer sense is alien to him. Here he is urging Elinor to secure Colonel Brandon (” `a kind of [match] that’—lowering his voice to an important whisper—`will be exceedingly welcome to all parties’ “): ” `Perhaps … the smallness of your fortune may make him hang back;