William Deresiewicz Read online

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  often been painted.66 Emma, which stands between Mansfield Park and Persuasion—a novel oppressed by hierarchical distinctions and another novel that essentially disinherits the aristocracy in favor of a professional class figured as a band of brothers—is an insistently egalitarian work. Everywhere we see class lines being disregarded and crossed: the impoverished Bates visiting Hartfield; Knightley befriending his farmer; “gentlemen and half-gentlemen” playing whist together. One of Emma’s most reprehensible faults is her insistence on petty distinctions of class, her fixation on “gradations of rank” (113). Emma may not seek to overthrow hierarchical distinctions, but it does seek to ignore them. And this egalitarian impulse is squarely in line with the novel’s general interest in the erasure of socially and emotionally confining distinctions. As with the lines drawn by relational terms like “mother and “sister,” the novel blurs the boundaries of class, overriding conventional social categories, creating an egalitarian space in which as wide as possible a range of classes can mix freely. Friendship in Emma, then, as in Wordsworth’s poetry, is a democratizing or leveling relationship. Horizontal ties supersede vertical ones, and the old neighborliness becomes the foundation of an envisioned community of equals. The idea is underscored by Mrs. Elton’s contribution to the scene we have been looking at. While Mr. Woodhouse and Mrs. Weston hope to persuade Jane not to go out again in the rain, Mrs. Elton intends to compel her not to: “Oh! she shall not do such a thing again … We will not allow her to do such a thing again” (242; emphasis in the original). Her attitude toward other people and their stories is about as far from wise passiveness as can be imagined. Indeed, her whole relationship to Jane is that of a self-appointed “friend” in the John Dashwood sense of the word—a patron who orders destinies by means of the social and financial power at her disposal. “You are extremely kind,” Jane responds here, but the word is mere politeness in her use of it—she preserves the forms of neighborliness even if Mrs. Elton does not—and bitterly ironic in the novel’s. Mrs. Elton’s own understanding of the word, and her own attitude about class, emerges a few paragraphs later, in connection with the fetching of Jane’s letters, when she declares that it would be “a kindness to employ our men.” In other words, she will be doing one of her servants a favor by having him go out of his way every day to deliver another household’s letters. Which servant? “The man who fetches our letters every morning (one of our men, I forget his name).” Such negligence is a moral lapse of which Mr. Woodhouse, for all his inadequacies, would never be guilty. The “style of

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  sensitivity,” narcissistic as it finally is, bespeaks an essential disregard for the common humanity—the kindness—of others. The villain in this egalitarian novel is that character most insistent on exercising hierarchical power, most careless and unfeeling in its exercise. To say that friendship forms the basis of an egalitarian community is not, again, to say that all friendships are equal. Indeed, an emphasis on horizontal connections—the rewriting of all relationships as friendships—gives rise, here, to a need for horizontal differentiation. The word “friend” thus attracts, over the course of the novel, a whole host of qualifiers. We’re all friends now, so the question is, what kind of friends are you and I? We have already come across “old friends” and “very old friends,” “steady friend,” “true friend,” and “good friend,” and we also find “intimate friend” (54), “very warm friend” (55), “very good friend” (94), “but half a friend” (114), “particular friends” (286), “very particular friend” (168), “excellent friend” (182), “best friend” (220), “dear friends” (263), “kind friends” (314), “thorough friends” (318), and “intimate friends” (346). I noted before that the freedom that Austen introduces into the ordinarily strict system of social roles—creating flexible, ambiguous relationships that make room for improvisation and growth—can be thought of as a form of playfulness or play. So it is here with friendship, the apotheosis of ambiguous relationships. A world in which everyone is a friend rather than a landlord or patron or dependent is one in which relationships are endlessly adjustable and imagination a more important force than convention. That is exactly what we see in the Matthew poems, but while Wordsworth is not normally thought of as a playful poet, everyone recognizes that Emma is an exuberantly playful novel, full of riddles and puzzles and games—the most important of which, as I noted in chapter 1, being the game Austen plays with her readers, setting us in search of the clues that will solve her narrative puzzle.67 As the Wordsworthian allusion I also noted in chapter 1 makes clear, Emma does not condemn the imagination, it only condemns its misuse by the heroine. In fact, it celebrates the imagination, and for the same reason as does Don Quixote, another novel that at first appears to condemn it: because the imagination is the faculty that enables us to rejuvenate ourselves, our world, and our relationships with others. So where is Emma in all of this? It is telling that she is silent throughout most of the scene we were just looking at, speaking up only when the conversation turns to Frank, a subject that flatters her vanity, and even then

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  addressing herself only to Mrs. Weston and Knightley, her particular intimates. With the kind of friendship that binds the community together she has as little to do as possible, holding herself aloof from the likes of the Bateses and the Coles, begrudging them her every expression of kindness. It is no wonder that loneliness so threatens her as the novel opens, as it threatens no other Austenian heroine.68 The idea, pressed on Emma by her environment, that she ought, as a young person, to cultivate a serious friendship or two—the idea that friendship is “the dear peculiar bond of youth”—reflects Austen’s absorption of the Byronic revaluation of the classical-romantic tradition. For despite our general sense that Austen valued friendship very highly, the same-sex friendships that we see in the early novels and in Mansfield Park almost always involve disappointment and even betrayal: Elizabeth and Charlotte Lucas, Elinor and Lucy Steele, Catherine and Isabella Thorpe, Fanny and Mary Crawford. But here it is part of what marks Emma as psychically misshapen, part of the disabling legacy of her overindulged childhood, that she seems never to have had a true Byronic friend, an equal with whom to share genuine intimacy. Of course, the friendship she does soon choose to cultivate perfectly accords with her exalted sense of her place in the world and the splendid isolation in which it keeps her. But Emma was looking for a friendship neither equal nor intimate: Harriet, we are told, is not “exactly the friend Emma wanted,” but “exactly the young friend she wanted” (24).69 And not only is Harriet younger—all of four years younger, a difference Emma stresses at every turn—she is also far less worldly, very less wealthy, and— this seems especially important to Emma—far shorter. She is invariably, not Emma’s “friend,” but her “little friend” (239) or “poor little friend” (25) or “sweet little friend” (47). If we need any further evidence that this is not a friendship of equals, even to its participants, we may note that while Emma calls Harriet “Harriet,” Harriet calls Emma “Miss Woodhouse” (e.g., 220). In fact, we can see exactly what kind of friend Emma thinks she is to Harriet. As in so many respects, Mrs. Elton holds the mirror up to the heroine’s worst qualities; Emma plays for Harriet the self-appointed role of benefactor, of “friend” in the John Dashwood sense—patronizing, overbearing, controlling, and just as misguided and destructive as Mrs. Elton is with respect to Jane. Notwithstanding the observation that she treats Harriet in ways analogous to a wife,70 there is nothing at all ambiguous about this relationship, nothing playful or flexible or spontaneous. Emma may participate

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  in ambiguous relationships, but in this one of her own devising, she establishes strict roles from the moment she takes Harriet under her patronage and never permits the slightest deviation from her script. On this score, as on all others, her reformation is a path of many steps. She partly realizes the inappropriateness of her friendship with Harriet by the end of volume I, a
nd it is at this point that the novel first becomes selfconscious about the theme of friendship, its characters first openly struggling over its meaning. Knightley works his own changes on the word in admonishing Emma for trying to raise Harriet out of Mrs. Goddard’s set: “Her friends evidently thought this good enough for her; and it was good enough … Till you chose to turn her into a friend, her mind had no distaste for her own set … You have been no friend to Harriet Smith” (54; emphasis in the original). Emma’s idea of “friendship,” in other words—one in which she falsely tries to substitute for Harriet’s real “friends” or benefactors—does not deserve the name. Emma resists Knightley’s admonition, but after the Elton fiasco, in a soliloquy that clearly echoes this exchange, she comes to concur at least in part: “I have been but half a friend to her” (114). The assessment is still half-wrong—she hasn’t been any kind of friend to her, not in the sense she should have been—but it shows that Emma has begun to think about what friendship ought to mean. She also eventually realizes, of course, that the friendship she should have been cultivating is with Jane Fairfax.71 Although she faults Jane for her lack of candor, she is threatened by the prospect of a relationship with her not just because of its inevitable equality, but also because of its inevitable intimacy. For while Emma has never known the intimacy of an equal, Jane has, having been brought up since the age of nine with the daughter of her adoptive parents. It is no surprise that Jane “ha[s] never been quite well since the time of [Miss Campbell’s] marriage” (138)—not, as Emma suspects, because of a secret love between her and Miss Campbell’s new husband, but rather, we may conclude, because of the loss of so very dear a friend, one who has been, as the narrator of Emma might say, almost a sister. (The absence of such closeness between Emma and her own sister is conspicuous.) Indeed, in Emma’s malicious fantasy of a secret affair between Jane and Dixon, there seems more than a little need to denigrate that friendship. Responding to Emma’s surprise that Dixon could prefer Jane’s playing to that of his fiancée, and to her insinuation that Miss Campbell could not have liked that very much, Frank reminds Emma that Jane is Miss Campbell’s “very particular friend.” Emma seizes upon the phrase as if it were a snake that had to be crushed: “Poor comfort! … One would rather have a stranger

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  preferred than one’s very particular friend—with a stranger it might not occur again—but the misery of having a very particular friend always at hand, to do every thing better than one does oneself” (168). Emma does not have a very particular friend and does not like hearing that anyone else does, especially not the woman with whom she is always being unfavorably compared. Not only does she find Jane’s friendship with Miss Campbell threatening, she also finds it incomprehensible, and the first perhaps because of the second. She knows that the two women share something she has never experienced, and she also knows that her inability to understand it, or experience it, reflects the weaknesses of her own character—just as she knows that her resistance to befriending Jane does as well. Her vanity bars her not only from participating in such a friendship of equals, but also from comprehending the nature of its equality—so evidently unrelated to any superficial equality of accomplishment—or of its intimacy—so evidently unthreatened by the inequality of accomplishment that actually exists. But even while Emma is failing to develop her long-promised friendship with Jane, she is quite unintentionally developing a different one, one that represents the freest and most farreaching aspect of the novel’s experiment in friendship, as well as Austen’s fullest exploration of a kind of relationship of which, as we saw, she was the great pioneer: the friendship of men and women outside the boundaries of marriage. It is Emma’s friendship with Frank, one that has been greatly if understandably undervalued in the critical literature. Frank’s advance billing is admittedly not good, especially with respect to his qualities as a friend. It is of him that Knightley is speaking—he is arguing with Emma about the likely character of the as-yet-unknown young man—when he makes his distinction between the English “amiable” and the French “aimable” (124). The first he defines as having an “English delicacy towards the feelings of other people,” the second as merely “hav[ing] very good manners, and be[ing] very agreeable,” and behind this distinction we can hear the national differences, or at least national stereotypes, we looked at above. In their own perception, at least, the English valued friendship over sexual love—indeed, dissolved the second into the first, rewriting marriage as friendship—while the French valued love over friendship, keeping the two rigorously separate. To be amiable, in this understanding, is to behave as a true friend, to be aimable to make oneself desirable, lovable in the sense of sexual love. In other words, we might say, if “amiable” means “amis-able,” “aimable” means “aimer-able,” and pointing to the fact that two etymologically identical words have such different meanings is Austen’s way of underscoring the difference between national styles of intimacy.72

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  In fact, Knightley’s definitions do accurately anticipate Frank’s character as it first appears—he is very agreeable, but his pretense with Emma and Jane does show a lack of delicacy toward the feelings of other people. And yet, by the end of the novel, his character has modulated, as a greater delicacy, a greater sensitivity, has gradually emerged; Frank the “Frank” has become Frank the “frank.” And in the meantime, a relationship has developed between him and Emma that, while it begins because she finds him so aimable, so desirable, a feeling he does everything he can to incite, continues and grows stronger precisely because they come to find each other so amiable. In other words, a very “English” dissolving of love into friendship is exactly what ends up taking place between them—without their having planned it, and perhaps even without Austen having fully planned it, for some of their most significant encounters have an especially improvisatory feeling. Austen is allowing herself to experiment with the possibilities of friendship between an unmarried young man and young woman, and so are they. The most important of these encounters is Frank’s leavetaking at Hartfield right around the middle of the novel. His pretend courtship has not only led Emma to mistake his feelings for her, as he intended, it has led them both into depths of feeling he did not foresee. Emma is wrong to think he is in love with her, but she is not wrong to think that he feels for her very deeply. The misunderstanding is concentrated in a single moment: “He hesitated, got up, walked to a window. `In short,’ said he, `perhaps Miss Woodhouse—I think you can hardly be quite without suspicion’—” (215). She expects a proposal of marriage, of course, while what he really wishes to divulge—out of a sense of trust and a desire for frankness that are almost enough to make him breech an inviolable secrecy—is his understanding with Jane. Still, with his nervous movements and broken speech, Emma does not mistake the strength of his feelings. Precisely because he has so involved Emma, albeit unbeknownst to her, in his deepest emotions and concerns, his feelings toward her have become those of an intimate friend. It is no wonder that Emma is so confused, after he leaves, about her own feelings. She thinks that she, too, is in love—or rather, thinks “that she must be” (216; emphasis in the original). Frank’s scheme of obfuscation has caused her to misread her own emotions as well, but again, not their depth. As her continued reflections lead her to see—Emma’s emotional honesty always eventually saves her from her worst errors of imagination—the feelings she is feeling and groping to express are also those of an intimate friend. In every scenario she spins