William Deresiewicz Read online

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  his friends may all advise him against it. But some of those little attentions and encouragements which ladies can so easily give, will fix him, in spite of himself’ ” (189; emphasis in the original). Again, later in the same conversation, he congratulates Elinor on “having such a friend as Mrs. Jennings. `She seems a most valuable woman indeed.—Her house, her stile of living … ‘ ” (191). Mrs. Dashwood’s way of thinking could not be more different, and she announces as much in a declaration that deliberately seizes control of our key word. Taking leave of Norland—having been more or less evicted by John Dashwood and his wife, in part out of their anxiety at Edward’s growing attachment to Elinor—she makes her invitations to Barton Cottage: “It is but a cottage … but I hope to see many of my friends in it. A room or two can easily be added; and if my friends find no difficulty in traveling so far to see me, I’m sure I’ll find none in accommodating them.” She concluded with a very kind invitation to Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood … and to Edward she gave one with still greater affection. (SS 21) The repetition of “my friends” is especially pointed, given the circumstances; the word’s meaning, in effect, splits before our eyes. Two different kinds of invitations, for two different kinds of friends: friends as kin, whatever one feels about them, and friends as those for whom one feels affection, whether they be kin or not. The signal gesture with which the novel affirms the second of these meanings is Colonel Brandon’s presentation of the living to Edward free of charge, an act of kindness that John Dashwood finds simply incomprehensible. The novel, recognizing the moment at which it stands in the history of language and personal life, enacts the victory of affective individualism over the imperatives of lineage, of friend-as-intimate over friend-as-benefactor.20 Although Stone undertakes no separate discussion of friendship as such— indeed, histories of friendship are quite sparse21—he touches on it again in his discussion of “companionate marriage,” the ideal of marriage in which husband and wife stand together as “companions and equals.“22 While Stone is wrong to believe that companionate marriage arose only in the eighteenth century (Alan Macfarlane traces it back as far as the Middle Ages23), he is not wrong to suggest that it was acquiring a new ideological importance, a new literary and political emphasis, during that period. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, invested the ideal with new political significance when she argued in A Vindication of the Rights of Women that marriage should be based on the lasting ties of friendship rather than the transient bonds of erotic attraction.24

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  Again, this is a dimension of friendship on which Austen’s imagination had gone to work long before Emma. For if she did not invent the idea of marriage as friendship, she revolutionized it. Stone remarks that the “literary apotheosis” of companionate marriage in the eighteenth century “has to be found in Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield.“25 But to compare Parson Primrose’s relationship with his wife to that of any of Austen’s heroines with the man she will marry is to see what an immeasurable advance the latter represents in intimacy, mutual respect, and depth of communication. Goldsmith’s couple live on easy and familiar terms and run their family as equals, but they are also constantly at cross-purposes, have little regard for each other’s abilities and opinions, and don’t so much talk with as jab at each other. Of the kind of intricate mutual knowledge and responsiveness we have already seen between Emma and Knightley, or even that which we find between Elizabeth and Darcy, there is not the shadow of a suggestion. And there is a further difference between Stone’s “conjugal friendship” and the kind of relationships we find in Austen. Austen’s lovers become friends before they get married. According to Lillian Faderman, women in eighteenth-century England “were encouraged to live in an essentially homosocial environment, to distrust men, and to form close relationships only with other women outside of marriage.“26 As a result, “[w]hen genuine communication occurred between a man and woman … people had difficulty believing that the pair were not contemplating marriage.” Faderman goes on to cite evidence from Austen herself, namely the assumption aroused by Elinor’s friendship with Colonel Brandon that the two are courting, for “what had a man and woman to say to each other, after all?” The main point, however, is not just that Austen so vastly improved on the ideal of companionate marriage as that she had something to improve on. Both the newly important notion of marriage as friendship and Austen’s own previous expansion and deepening of that notion constitute additional strands in the history that she had available to her when she came to write Emma. Stone follows his discussion of companionate marriage with a brief account of foreign reaction that makes it clear how peculiarly English that ideal was: “The Duc de La Rochefoucauld noted with surprise in 1784 that: `Husband and wife are always together and share the same society. [ … ] It would be more ridiculous to do otherwise in England than to go everywhere with your wife in Paris.’ “27 As Margery Sabin notes in her discussion of the differences between Rousseau’s handling of the terminology of love in The Confessions and Wordsworth’s handling of it in The Prelude, French thinking of the time tended to draw very careful and sharp distinctions between the

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  different kinds of love, while English thinking allowed them to blend together.28 At the very time the English were giving new importance to their longstanding idea of spouses as friends, Rousseau was insisting that his unique feeling for Mme. de Warens, while not what people commonly call love, either, was certainly not friendship: “I have known friendship, at least, if ever a man has, and I have never had this feeling for any of my friends.“29 And though Rousseau describes this unique feeling in language that sounds, on its face, like Wordsworthian-Austenian ambiguity, it is really its opposite: “She was to me more than a sister, more than a mother, more than a friend, more even than a mistress.“30 Their relationship does not hover ambiguously between categories, it transcends them all. Where Wordsworth and Austen say “all of the above,” Rousseau says “none of the above.” In his novels, meanwhile, according to Allan Bloom, Rousseau trivializes friendship, at least between men, as a mere parasite of sexual love: asserting in Emile that it arises only in the wake of “puberty and sexual awareness”—for “[o]ne must have a friend with whom to discuss one’s mistress”—and embodying that assertion in La Nouvelle Héloďse.31 Rousseau’s strict separation of friendship from sexual love is scarcely surprising, coming as it does within a cultural tradition that, as Sabin shows, set the two so firmly at odds,32 and his denigration of the former is no more surprising in a culture so exclusively focused on sexual relations—if not in actual fact, then certainly, as we are about to see, in the perception of Austen’s England. The relevance to Emma of these distinctions between the French and English ideas of friendship, sex, and marriage is connected, of course, to Knightley’s polemical distinction between “amiable” and “aimable,” a passage to which I will return below (124). There are further complexities to consider. According to A History of Private Life, “Friendship is difficult to analyze because it can be viewed in two extreme and contradictory ways. On the one hand it is often confused with everyday social relations, while on the other hand it is seen as something exalted, which, like love, has only an individual history.“33 Of course, we have already seen that it can be viewed in other ways as well, but the passage points us both to a meaning of “friend” that sets it roughly equivalent to “neighbor”—a usage prominent in Emma—and to the classical tradition of friendship as articulated by Aristotle, Cicero, Montaigne, and others and reworked by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and then still further by the Romantic poets.34 The classical ideal sees friendship as a rare and exquisite relationship rooted in virtue and dedicated to the pursuit of goodness and

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  truth. It can thus arise only between men—only they, in the classical conception, can possess the requisite loftiness of soul—only between equals, and only between adults, men of wisdom whose worth has been tested by the world, or at
the very least, between an adult and an unusually virtuous and gifted youth.35 Aristotle, with characteristic thoroughness, defines three species of friendship, the useful, the pleasant, and the good, the second characteristic especially of youth and only the last corresponding to the foregoing description.36 As for friendship between husbands and wives, Aristotle allows for it but classes it among the more limited kinds of friendship that subsist between unequals. Cicero waxes warmer in his characterization of the friendship of good men, speaking of a true friend as “a second self … For man not only loves himself, but seeks another whose spirit he may so blend with his own as almost to make one being of two.“37 Here we see a characteristic feature of the classical discourse of friendship, its tendency to parallel the rhetoric of erotic love, with the implication that true friendship constitutes a higher alternative to the sexual love of women, both the love and its object being of a higher nature. Bloom, thinking especially of the friendship of Socrates and Alcibiades—one from which, as represented in Plato’s Symposium, Socrates insists on excluding sexual contact—speaks of an eros of souls rather than bodies.38 But surely the most fervent and extreme of the great classical expressions of male friendship is Montaigne’s evocation of his bond with Etienne de La Boétie, “so entire and so perfect that certainly you’ll hardly read of the like.“39 Montaigne contrasts such friendship to filial, fraternal, and erotic love, to marriage, and to homosexual love, and like Cicero, he regards it as available only to the mature man.40 This, then, is the “exalted” union of which A History of Private Life speaks, something, to its exponents, far finer and rarer even than erotic love: “So many coincidences are needed to build up such a friendship that it is a lot if fortune can do it once in three centuries.“41 But despite Aristotle and company’s exclusion of women from this tradition, its revival during the Renaissance, as typified by Montaigne, soon spread to women and women writers, especially those of the upper classes.42 Faderman traces the description and celebration of intense female friendships, both fictional and actual, across the literature of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century England and France. Like such “romantic friendships” between men, as they became known,43 these involved mature and highly refined adults, were every bit as exclusive and all-consuming as erotic

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  attachments, and employed the rhetoric of sexual love, though with no suggestion that they were, in fact, genital. By the second half of the eighteenth century, Faderman notes, romantic friendship had become a popular theme in English fiction,44 a fact that suggests both a diffusion of the ideal and its corresponding dilution. That it often degenerated into an overused and overblown cliché we learn from Austen herself.45 Among the conventions of the novel of sensibility she so gleefully attacks in both the juvenilia and Northanger Abbey is that of the passionate and undying attachment that instantly springs up between young heroines of appropriately heightened sensibilities. The satire is most broad, as we might expect, in “Love and Freindship”: “We flew into each other’s arms, and after having exchanged vows of mutual friendship for the rest of our lives, instantly unfolded to each other the most inward secrets of our hearts.“46 The romantic-sentimental tradition is thus another element within friendship’s rich history that Austen had engaged during the first half of her career, adding her own earlier imaginings and valuations to the store of material she had available to her in Emma. Nor did the evolution of this tradition cease with the novel of sensibility, for it was taken up in yet new forms by the British Romantic poets. Most of the expressions that Romantic friendship found in the works and lives of these authors would have been unknown to Austen, but she would have encountered one of the period’s most impassioned engagements with the theme in Byron’s Hours of Idleness as well as in quite a number of the early lyrics not included in that collection. It is scarcely too much to say that the young poet was obsessed with the experience of friendship, and in setting down that experience in verse he added a uniquely Romantic dimension to the classical or classical-romantic ideal.47 That he had absorbed that ideal by a young age some of his earliest surviving poems make clear. “To E—,” written at age fourteen, celebrates a friendship rooted in “Virtue” (3). “To D—,” composed a few months later, employs an extreme and frankly erotic rhetoric (“On thy dear breast I’ll lay my head— / Without thee! where would be my Heaven?” [ll. 1112; emphasis in the original]). “Childish Recollections,” a somewhat later production, proclaims the superiority of friendship to heterosexual love (“The smiles of Beauty, though those smiles were dear / Could hardly charm me, when that friend was near … and Friendship’s feelings triumphed over Love” [ll. 201202, 206]).48 But Byron stands the classical tradition on its head by making friendship the exclusive province of youth.49 Again, from “Childish Recollections”:

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  Hours of my youth! when, nurtur’d in my breast, To Love a stranger, Friendship made me blessed,— Friendship, the dear peculiar bond of youth, When every artless bosom throbs with truth; Untaught by worldly wisdom how to feign, And check each impulse with prudential rein; When, all we feel, our honest souls disclose, In love to friends, in open hate to foes. (ll. 5562) Byron’s conception of friendship, as the passage makes clear, is of a piece with the general Romantic revaluation of experience. Youth is elevated over adulthood, innocence over maturity, candor over prudence, spontaneity over self-restraint. “Youth” is rhymed with “truth”: as in Wordsworth, youth is truth, the time of genuine feeling and perception before the corruptions of the social world take hold.50 And “the dear peculiar bond of youth,” associated with all its purity and frankness and artless innocence, is friendship. If youth is the Romantic Eden, Byron effectively says, then its Eve, or Eves, is one’s beloved childhood companions.51 “Childish Recollections” is largely an extended encomium to those companions, one that ends with a paraphrase of the French proverb that seems to have seized hold of Byron’s imagination around this time, late in 1806, “l’Amitié est l’Amour sans ailes” (“Friendship is Love without wings”): “Friendship bow’d before the shrine of Truth, / and Love, without his pinion, smil’d on Youth” (ll. 411412).52 Again, though Byron celebrates sexual love as frequently and as fervently in his early lyrics as he does male friendship, friendship is the higher relation: purer, more innocent, more constant.53 But already in the poems of the first half of 1807, those that make their first appearance in Hours of Idleness, he is discovering that friendship does indeed have wings, does fly away—“For Friendship can vary her gentle dominion … like Love, too, she moves on a swift-waving pinion”—for the simple reason that youth does, as well: “Youth has flown on rosy pinion, / and Manhood claims his stern Dominion” (“To George, Earl Delawarr,” ll. 57; “To Edward Noel Long, Esq.,” ll. 2324). If youth is Byron’s Eden, the poems of 18071809 are a long lament over Paradise lost. Those addressed to individual friends (“To George, Earl Delawarr,” “To the Earl of Clare,” “To a Youthful Friend”) are no longer erotic or celebratory, but elegiac, even—for some of his old companions have embraced the corruptions of court and society— bitterly accusatory. It is on this disillusioned note—the revealed transience of

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  the friendship of men as well as of the love of women—that Byron turns his back on England.54 But if Byron and Wordsworth both idealize youth, their response to its loss is very different.55 For Byron, what is gone is gone, but Wordsworth’s entire poetic project—“Tintern Abbey,” the Intimations Ode—centers on the attempt to carry the energies and feelings of youth into adulthood. While his most important vessel for doing so is poetry itself, another essential one, as the poems we have already looked at in this chapter make clear, is friendship. Wordsworth turns to his sister in the last verse paragraph of “Tintern Abbey” and, evoking her as “my dearest Friend, / My dear, dear Friend,” embraces her as the living image and repository of the youth the loss of which he has spent the first two-thirds of the poem lamenting (ll. 115116). The kind of vicarious access to his “past exi
stence” that she offers him is clearly predicated on the nature and intensity of their connection (ll. 149). Her role in his emotional life—as “dearest Friend”—and in his psychic life—as the living record of his past—are not to be distinguished. The bond of youth, friendship, keeps him in touch with the energies of youth. It is no different in the Matthew poems. Notwithstanding their darker notes of melancholy and loss, they portray a man who, though old, has cheated time by retaining the spirit of youth, that inextinguishable spirit imaged in the title of “The Fountain.” Matthew has stayed so young at heart because he has lived his life among schoolchildren, and ignoring differences of age, befriended them as equals. But youth is not the gift only of the young. Matthew’s friendship with the poet has allowed both men to stay in touch with youthful energies: Matthew, because the poet is the far younger man, but the poet himself, because Matthew has remained so much younger at heart. Note the seeming paradox: the poet remains young through his friendship with his younger sister, but also through his friendship with his much older schoolteacher. As in Byron, friendship is “the dear peculiar bond of youth,” but for Wordsworth, it doesn’t matter how old you are. Everyone is young who is still committed to the special intimacies and intensities of Romantic friendship. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge invest the word “friend” with special sanctity, utter it with special urgency and passion.56 Of particular note is the way it is repositioned within the two-volume Lyrical Ballads. The reordered first volume features it in four of its first five poems, as if Wordsworth, like Austen in Emma, were seeking to redefine and resituate it as a cardinal element of his social imagination. The forsaken Indian woman repeatedly and pathetically calls out to her clan as “My friends …