William Deresiewicz Read online

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  out about her future with Frank, “[t]heir affection was always to subside into friendship,” “true disinterested friendship” (217, 219). And that is just what happens, even while Frank maintains his charade of pretend-flirtation, and especially afterward. For we must remember that most of the negative judgments passed on Frank, both before and after the revelation of his true attachment, come from Knightley, who is a far from disinterested witness. In a novel in which even the “good” characters almost all come with large admixtures of negative qualities, Frank is very far from being all bad, and the best thing about him is the relationship he develops and maintains with Emma, unconsciously cooperating with her to move it from the pretend-love in which it begins to the “true disinterested friendship” in which it ends. And it is precisely the ambiguity of the word “friendship” at that time, the flexibility of the relationship in the contemporaneous English practice of it, that allows them to make the necessary imaginative and emotional transitions. A rigorously “French” segregation of erotic and amicable feelings and bonds would have made that process impossible. Instead, Austen develops potentialities latent in her culture’s evolving social practices, especially the practice of the companionate marriage. And yet her development was so farreaching as to result in a radically innovative type of relationship, the malefemale friendship—before, after, or entirely apart from the existence of erotic impulses and possibilities—one that remained otherwise virtually unexampled in the literary record for many years after Austen’s day but that is a commonplace of social practice in our own.73 The scene of Frank’s leavetaking closes with a characteristically English gesture that, as much as the word we have been looking at and in conjunction with the occurrence of one of its forms, encapsulates the ambiguities and possibilities of Emma and Frank’s relationship at that moment. The two take their leave with “[a] very friendly shake of the hand.” It is remarkable that such different understandings and differently understood emotions are able to meet and find expression in one gesture, and it is also remarkable that the same gesture, with some of the same accompanying language, recurs later in the novel under very different circumstances. Visiting Jane after the revelation of her engagement, and hearing that Mrs. Elton is about to interrupt them, Emma “compress[es] all her friendly and all her congratulatory sensations into a very, very earnest shake of the hand” (371). Austen has created a physical analogue to the language of friendship, a gestural shorthand, so to speak. That gesture is poignant here in that it is vir—

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  tually all the friendship that Emma and Jane will ever have, but the retrospective light it throws on that earlier handshake suggests that instead of getting her equal, intimate, flexible, mutually respectful friendship with Jane (and in a devious manner, because of that loss), Emma gets it with Frank. The latter may not be quite as rich and satisfactory as the former would have been, but as we have said, it is far more revolutionary. With it, the novel and its characters cross yet another boundary (that of gender), blur yet another set of socially and emotionally confining distinctions. And again, just as with their crossing of the boundaries of class, the vehicle is friendship. So while Mrs. Elton brings a deplorable new form of friendship to Highbury, Frank, the novel’s other bearer of modern tidings, helps create one that Austen means us to value very much. Among other things, it becomes one of the chief constituents of the novel’s crowning ambiguous relationship, its crowning friendship. That relationship, of course, is Emma’s with Knightley.74 We know precisely when she realizes that she loves him, but when does he realize that he loves her? He gives two completely different answers, each time with evident sincerity: “He had been in love with Emma, and jealous of Frank Churchill, from about the same period, one sentiment having probably enlightened him as to the other” (355; the statement is Knightley’s, rendered through indirect discourse, not the narrator’s), and “I … have been in love with you ever since you were thirteen at least” (379). Which account is true? They both are, of course, because Emma and Knightley’s sexual attraction is an outgrowth of all the other feelings, all the other modes of relatedness, they share, and so its origin is necessarily obscure. Even more, as Knightley’s apparent confusion suggests, its nature keeps changing. Frank’s arrival raises Knightley’s desire to a sexual boil, but his feelings for Emma had had an erotic component long before that. How else can we explain his otherwise paradoxical statement, very early in the novel, when forced by Mrs. Weston to acknowledge Emma’s beauty: “I confess that I have seldom seen a face or figure more pleasing to me than her’s. But I am a partial old friend” (34). The avowal borders on the shocking: an “old friend,” a “friend of the family” nearly twice her age, taking great “pleasure” from the contemplation of a young woman’s figure. But then, with Knightley’s “I … have been in love with you ever since you were thirteen at least,” Austen flirts with outright pedophilia. Like the “incest” in Mansfield Park—and indeed, the incest here, in this same relationship—her point is precisely to challenge us into rethinking our conventional compartmentalizations of the different forms of intense affection.75

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  We may be forgiven our obtuseness, however, because these same conventional understandings blind Emma and Knightley themselves, for a long time, to all that they feel for each other. Indeed, one of the novel’s pleasures lies in watching both parties come to a full awareness of just what their relationship contains. The ball marks one important stage. After another display of the extraordinary mutual sensitivity that their long and rich history has made possible—“her eyes invited him irresistibly to come to her and be thanked,” “[h]e looked with smiling penetration,” etc.—Emma asks him to join her in the set: “You have shown that you can dance, and you know we are not really so much brother and sister as to make it at all improper” (273274). “[N]ot really so much brother and sister” is, of course, exactly the kind of ambiguity the narrator employs in the opening description of Emma’s relationship with Miss Taylor. Emma and Knightley are not brother and sister, but then again, in the language of the day, they are. Emma, still oblivious to her sexual feelings, is undisturbed by the ambiguity. But Knightley, already alive to his, is very much disturbed. “Brother and sister! no, indeed,” he exclaims—to which the novel ultimately replies, “Brother and sister! yes, indeed.” The exchange concludes a chapter—concludes, indeed the whole long episode of the ball—and the effect of this pregnant placement is to make it into a signpost that points us toward Emma and Knightley’s climactic encounters. The physical gesture that accompanies that exchange is again as significant as its play with language, for what do Emma and Knightley do as they prepare to dance, but, as the text tells us, take hands? Emma’s handshake with Frank anticipates more than one, indeed more than two subsequent moments of intimacy, but before we can look at the others, we must glance at the scene that precipitates Emma’s final recognitions, the outing at Box Hill. To Emma’s humiliating witticism there, Miss Bates responds, “I must make myself very disagreeable, or she would not have said such a thing to an old friend” (306). “Old friend,” again: Emma’s great sin is to have violated, more flagrantly than ever and in the glow of her more intimate connection with Frank, the kind of friendship that binds the community together, that basic sense of equality that expresses itself in an acknowledgment of every person’s dignity and without which, as Wordsworth understood, the more exalted reaches of friendship risk becoming no more than a mutual narcissism. In delivering his rebuke, Knightley also speaks as a “friend,” even though by doing so, as he knows, he risks alienating the woman he loves (310). Friendship, he implies, means sacrificing oneself for one’s friend’s sake. His attempt to educate Emma into friendship’s responsibilities has

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  thus come full circle, for his reproof here echoes and completes the one he had delivered near the start of the novel, when he told her that she had been “no friend to Har
riet Smith” (54). Austen’s rendering of the scene in which Knightley becomes aware that Emma has atoned for her sin strikes all the chords with which we are by now familiar. The information that she has visited the Bateses is communicated indirectly (by Mr. Woodhouse, in fact), and the interchange that follows between Emma and Knightley is both highly complex and entirely silent; in fact, the two do not speak again for the rest of the scene. Emma blushes, looks at him, and it seems “as if his eyes received the truth from her’s, and all that had passed of good in her feelings were at once caught and honoured” (317). And then comes “a little movement of more than common friendliness on his part.—He took her hand.” Or is it rather that Emma herself makes the first motion? She isn’t sure. “More than common friendliness”—their bodies are speaking a language of their own, saying things their possessors do not fully understand: “He took her hand, pressed it, and certainly was on the point of carrying it to his lips—when, from some fancy or other, he suddenly let it go.” The gesture that Austen established those many chapters earlier as a physical sign of friendship’s ambiguities she is now, like the word “friend” itself, playing with, stretching, manipulating, making ever more complex and ambiguous. Here the handshake is on the point of turning into a kiss of the hand, a gesture Knightley forswears for a reason the converse of that for which he abjured the label of “brother and sister.” That had seemed to preclude eros, this too clearly to speak it. But Emma does not think so; to her it would have spoken “perfect amity” (318). As I discussed in chapter 2, the word “perfect” is ironized nearly every time it appears in the novel, and this instance is no exception. Here, though, the irony points to a state in excess of the indicated perfection, not one that falls short of it. “Perfect amity” is not nearly amity enough; there is more to Emma and Knightley’s friendship than mere friendship. The novel’s climactic scene, the marriage proposal, includes yet another variation on the handshake motif, as Emma, walking with Knightley in the shrubbery, suddenly finds “her arm drawn within his, and pressed against his heart” (349). We might recognize by now that all of these takings of hands point to and in a manner pun on the novel’s final, implicit one, Emma and Knightley’s “joining of hands” in matrimony.76 But this echoing of gestures is not the only way in which Emma’s most important scene with Knightley recalls that earlier one with Frank. There she forestalled a man’s

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  avowal of his love for another woman in the mistaken belief that it was to have been a proposal of marriage. Here she forestalls a proposal of marriage in the mistaken belief that it was to have been a man’s avowal of his love for another woman. But here she relents the next minute, and precisely out of a sense of what it means to be a friend—indeed, the very sense that Knightley had displayed at Box Hill: “I stopped you ungraciously, just now, Mr. Knightley, and, I am afraid, gave you pain.—But if you have any wish to speak openly to me as a friend … as a friend, indeed, you may command me” (352). Given what she thinks he is going to say and what she has already discovered about her own feelings, it is the most self-sacrificing thing she can do. With it, and with Knightley’s response, Austen places the word “friend” at the novel’s very fulcrum, reimagining it one final time as the characters reimagine it for themselves, discovering the full significance with which she would have them invest it. Knightley at first recoils from the word: ” `As a friend!’—repeated Mr. Knightley.—`Emma, that I fear is a word—No, I have no wish—’.” As with his earlier recoil from “brother and sister,” he still believes that one kind of relationship, one set of feelings, precludes another. It is precisely the same blindness that had kept Emma from recognizing her own sexual feelings all along. But then a light dawns: “Stay, yes, but why should I hesitate? … Emma, I accept your offer—Extraordinary as it may seem, I accept it, and refer myself to you as a friend.” The basis of the love he hopes they will have, he finally sees, is friendship. Loving each other sexually, as husband and wife, would not preclude loving each other as friends in all the ways they always have. Marriage would be not the end of their friendship, but its fulfillment. And so it is as a friend that he is willing to speak, just as it is as a friend that she is willing to listen. Austen constructs the encounter so that friendship becomes the path to its own transfiguration. It is as friends that Emma and Knightley avow their love, and as friends that they will live it. As in Wordsworth, friendship thus makes possible the transgression of yet another conventional social boundary, that of age. Emma, who had made so much of the four-year difference between herself and Harriet Smith, will marry a man sixteen years her senior. At thirty-seven, Knightley is old enough to be her father, but in contrast to the comparable disparity between Marianne Dashwood and Colonel Brandon, this one is deemphasized as the lovers draw together. Emma herself, at the ball at which Knightley splutters his “no, indeed,” laments his “classing himself with the husbands, and fathers … so young as he looked! … His tall, firm,

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  upright figure … there was not one among the whole row of young men who could be compared with him” (269). Youth and age are not to be determined, Austen is telling us, by the calendar. This is a novel, after all, in which the elderly Mr. Woodhouse, “a much older man in ways than in years,” is babied by his young daughter (8). Emma and Knightley’s marriage is a union, like that of Matthew and the poet, of two young people of very different ages. Indeed, like Matthew and the poet, the two keep each other young, Knightley by releasing Emma from the frozen certainties— including the certainty that she will never marry—that threaten to make her (as Elizabeth Elliot will be of Sir Walter) a carbon copy of her father, Emma precisely by retrieving Knightley from the class of husbands and fathers and drawing him back into the mating dance. The circumstance suggests an addendum to Brain’s dictum about modern friendship: we are friends with everyone now because, while friendship in modernity is the special province of youth, we are all young now, too. Ever becoming, mind ever growing (like Emma, like Wordsworth): the modern individual—or at least the contemporary individual, for Austen is very far ahead of her own time here—is ever young, his or her intimacies always cast in terms of youth’s “dear peculiar bond.“77 To put it another way—for youth and adulthood, as we have been saying, are no longer mutually exclusive categories here—Emma and Knightley’s relationship, like that of Matthew and the poet or the poet and his sister in “Tintern Abbey,” carries friendship over into adulthood. That friendship can be so carried over is, in fact, exactly the theme of Jane Fairfax and John Knightley’s discussion of friendship in the scene we looked at earlier. John Knightley claims, or pretends to claim, that friendship is exclusively an affair of the young, that husbands and fathers can no longer be bothered with it. But as Jane recognizes perfectly well, the very conversation they are having belies his selfconsciously world-weary pose (241). Austen is well known for her commitment to maturity,78 but she is also— less obviously but quite as much as Wordsworth or Byron—a lover of youth and its ardor. It is a matter, in the sense I developed in chapter 1, of esteeming “Elinor” but loving “Marianne.” Adults do not tend to come off very well in Austen’s novels, and the young people she likes least—Collins, Mr. and Mrs. Elton—are precisely those who lack true passion. Those she loves most, though—Catherine; Marianne; Elizabeth Bennet, with her bright eyes; Fanny and Anne, with their quiet but powerful feelings; and finally Emma herself—conspicuously display it. Austen believed in growing up, but she also believed in carrying what is most valuable in youth over into

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  adulthood. Here, where youth and adulthood join hands under the aegis of friendship, the distinction between the two is blurred altogether. And like Emma and Frank, but even more importantly so, Emma and Knightley also blur the boundaries of gender.79 Just as Austen seeks to level the hierarchy of classes here, so too the hierarchy of husband and wife. That Knightley takes the extraordinary step of moving in to his bride’s home is itself quite significant, but there is far more
to their equality than that. For equality in friendship, as the relationship between Jane and Miss Campbell has taught us, is not a matter of equal abilities and accomplishments. In that superficial sense, Emma does indeed make an unequal marriage. It is rather a matter of a mutual esteem so deep that it can ignore such differences. By rewriting marriage as friendship, Austen replaces an institutional, legal, hierarchical relationship, one ultimately based on the power of coercion, with an informal, egalitarian, loosely structured one that is ultimately based on autonomy, affection, and trust. Of course, we must ask by now, of the idea that Austen rewrites marriage as friendship, friendship in what sense? The answer is: in as many senses as possible. As hard as Austen works to create the possibility of pre-or extramarital friendship between men and women through her development of the relationship between Emma and Frank, she knows that such a relationship, by excluding sex, is necessarily limited. By making that relationship a long prelude to Emma and Knightley’s, she incorporates this new form of friendship into the sexual union of husband and wife. It is important to emphasize, again, that this does not entail a replacement of sexual love by friendship. It has been said that Austen preferred friendship to sexual love, and in this particular case, that the love of Emma and Knightley is nonerotic.80 But such judgments proceed from precisely the cultural prejudice that Austen was seeking to overthrow. As Brain points out, it is only in the West that we draw a sharp distinction between eros and friendship at all.81 Other cultures do not make that distinction, and neither—and this is part of what is so revolutionary about her—did Austen. Indeed, incorporating friendship into the sexual union of marriage allows her to bring the intensity of same-sex classical-romantic friendship—which is patterned, after all, on the erotic bond—into the kind of malefemale friendship she pioneered. But while she is interested in classical-romantic intensity, as we have seen, she has no interest in classical-romantic exclusivity. Emma and Knightley’s marriage will honor the ties of neighborly friendship as well, as the novel’s closing reference to “the small band of true friends” who witness their wedding suggests (396). The result is a kind of