Yet there is an obvious case to be made against Emma. She adopts Harriet Smith because it would be `highly becoming her own situation in life, her leisure, and powers' (54): that is, in order to fill up a vacancy in her days, and to enjoy her ability to mould a protegee -- to influence `the formation of every sentence' (81) of Harriet's letter rejecting Robert Martin's proposal of marriage, or to adjust her height in the portrait. She looks forward to an invitation to the Coles' dinner party so that she may decline it, and remind them of their inferior social standing. She is `unfeeling' and `insolent' to Miss Bates at Box Hill (367), forgetful that others might be guided by her example. Worst of all, she imagines a scandal for Jane Fairfax, and confides her suspicions to Frank Churchill: which is irresponsible towards Jane (even Mrs Elton could not have found a place as a governess for a young woman connected with such a rumour), and recklessly forward to him, whom she is meeting for only the fourth time. `Handsome, clever, and rich' (37), with nothing to do except tend her valetudinarian father and endure the `quiet prosing' of Miss Bates and her mother (53), Emma is only too ready to surrender to `that very dear part' of her, `her fancy' (224), to her own harm and to the danger of those about her.
This way of putting the case against Emma perhaps suggests a possible line of defence. Freud notes in Civilisation and its Discontents that work keeps us attached to reality:
No other technique for the conduct of life attaches the individual so firmly to reality as laying emphasis on work; for his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, the human community.[6]
Jane Austen might have found similar thoughts nearer to home in the work of her favourite author, Dr Johnson. Gazing at the pyramids in Rasselas , Imlac reflects on `that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life, and must be always appeased by some employment' -- and never more urgently, perhaps, than when one is confronted, as Emma is, with `the satiety of dominion and tastelessness of pleasures'.[6] Johnson opposes `employment' to `imagination', recommending the former as a means to control the latter; in the same vein Mr Knightley warns Emma against match-making, dismissing it as the kind of planning and guessing which might fill an `idle day' rather than a `worthy employment for a young lady's mind'. But with so little to do it is no wonder if Emma confuses the two. Emma makes her decision to take up Harriet during `the in-betweens' of `talking and listening' to her father, Mrs and Miss Bates and Mrs Goddard, and the phrase is revealing; however attentive she is to her father and his guests, such duties as these cannot attach her to reality, or set limits to the activities of her `fancy'. The condition of her life is to live in a series of in-betweens. That sentence about the `real evils' of Emma's situation being the power of having too much her own way is only partly ironic.
Nonetheless, critical attention has quite properly turned to the question of how Jane Austen persuades us that Emma deserves our kindness. Wayne Booth has explored one of the ways in which Emma is protected from too harsh a judgment in his The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). Because the world of the novel is seen primarily through Emma's own eyes, we as readers often fail to see those things Emma chooses not to see, or simply cannot know; while we know her experience intimately, we are denied any extended inside view of the other characters. Mr Knightley tells us that Robert Martin is bitterly disappointed when Harriet rejects him -- `a man cannot be more so' -- but we do not see his pain directly, and he is never allowed to speak in the novel. Harriet's tears fall `abundantly' when she learns that Mr Elton is not for her, but her grief is registered in indirect speech. More importantly, the inner life of Jane Fairfax, together with the fact of her engagement to Frank Churchill, is completely hidden from us, as it is from Emma; by the time the necessary disclosures are made in Chapter 50, Jane's happiness is secure, and whatever distress Emma has caused her is safely in the past. We have no access to what might be Jane's opinion of Emma, except what is implicit in the way she twice declines her overtures immediately after the Box Hill visit. And we can hardly reproach Emma for missing clues which we have ourselves overlooked.
Because we see the events of the novel through Emma's eyes, we inevitably share some though not all of her blind spots. But there is of course another sense in which we are invited to `see through' Emma. Chapter 17, in which she has to disappoint Harriet's hopes with regard to Mr Elton, is characteristic. The opening paragraph, reporting the departure from Hartfield of Mr and Mrs John Knightley, includes some irony at the expense of Mr Woodhouse, as ever lamenting the fate of `poor Isabella', and at Isabella herself, `innocently busy' with her husband and children and doatingly `blind to their faults'. This is presumably not Emma's voice -- she is too loyal to mock her family in this way -- but at the same time it implies judgments she is acute enough to make, and would be spirited enough to express were she not constrained by family feeling. If the narrator's voice and Emma's are distinct, they also share common features, and the opening paragraph of the chapter prepares us to enter Emma's frame of mind. The next includes a quasi-quotation from Mr Elton's `long, civil, ceremonious note' of leavetaking, rendered in the free indirect speech used so resourcefully, and elusively, throughout the novel. Generally, of course, it is Emma's mind that is opened to us by this means; here it is Elton's, and Emma's response, identifying the real incivility of the letter, provides a kind of model of how we are to read the rest of the chapter, which continues in free indirect speech. We are, in effect, being invited to explore Emma's mind in something of Emma's own spirit. Consider the following sentences:
She now resolved to keep Harriet no longer in the dark. She had reason to believe her nearly recovered from her cold, and it was desirable that she should have as much time as possible for getting the better of her other complaint before the gentleman's return.
To whom should we attribute the hint that Harriet's grief is to be likened to her cold, as a complaint to be got over? Perhaps to the narrator, but evidently also to Emma, who expects -- needs -- Harriet to recover speedily. Even as Emma prepares to undergo `the necessary penance of communication', to acknowledge herself `grossly mistaken and mis-judging', she is minimising her fault. The effect is repeated a few paragraphs on:
Her tears fell abundantly -- but her grief was so truly artless, that no dignity could have made it more respectable in Emma's eyes -- and she listened to her and tried to console her with all her heart and understanding -- really for the time convinced that Harriet was the superior creature of the two -- and that to resemble her would be more for her own welfare and happiness than all that genius or intelligence could do.
While Emma and the narrator might equally judge Harriet's grief as `truly' artless, it is not clear whose voice tells us that Emma was for a time `really' convinced of Harriet's moral superiority. (The adverb `really', at first glance a synonym for `truly', generally invites scare quotation marks, drawing attention to the objections it's designed to overcome.) The reader is, briefly, allowed to be as unsure about Emma's response as she herself is, but the next paragraph shows her brisk return to common sense: `It was rather too late in the day to set about being simple-minded and ignorant.' This effectively re-defines `ingenuousness of disposition', `simplicity and modesty' and the artlessness of a grief that cares nothing for dignity. Emma may applaud Harriet's virtues, but in the end she prefers her own and cannot long pretend otherwise, even to herself. The rest of the chapter shows her neither simple nor ingenuous, but resilient, and practical, on Harriet's behalf.
To `see through' Emma in this sense has long been recognised as one of the chief pleasures of the novel, in confirmation of what Elizabeth Bennett tells Bingley in Pride and Prejudice: that while `deep, intricate characters' may not be the `most estimable', they are at least `the most amusing' (Chapter 9). The condition of our enjoyment is generally taken to be our assurance that Emma will be made to recognise her errors, so that to some extent they can be seen as merely provisional. Jane Austen's most effective means of protecting her from a degree of censure which would interrupt our enjoyment of the spectacle is to construct the book as a comic drama of moral enlightenment: Emma (Fancy) gradually yields to Mr Knightley (Understanding). This is clearly part of the design of the novel. The first volume is centred on Emma's delusions about Elton and Harriet, and her partial admission of fault. The second shows her falling into deeper error, with her `animating' suspicion about Jane Fairfax, but at the same time sets her off against two ficelles: Mrs Elton, whose patronage of Jane parallels but is also coarser than Emma's treatment of Harriet, and Frank Churchill, who is more than a match for Emma's irresponsible fondness for games and deception. In the third volume, the sequence of events beginning at Box Hill reveals to Emma both the degree of her own misconduct and the true nature of her feelings for Knightley, and just briefly fulfils the promise held out to us in Chapter 5, that we should see Emma in love and in some doubt of a return, before Jane Austen unravels all the mysteries and signs off with three marriages -- the two that Emma had put at risk, and the one that she had never imagined. The novel is a kind of moral assault course, and, with help from Mr Knightley, Emma scrambles to the finish line more or less unscathed.
On this account, Emma's increasing moral awareness, preparing for her self-accusation in Chapter 47, is to be seen as a solution to the formal problem of how to preserve sympathy for the heroine, and not as the goal or purpose of the novel. But the solution brings with it its own set of problems. Wayne Booth, applauding the unity of the novel, suggests that Jane Austen -- Jane Austen the implied author, rather than the woman bearing that name whose biography we could read if we wished -- must have achieved a similar integrity: `She is, in short, a perfect human being, within the concept of perfection established by the book she writes.'[7] I am not entirely persuaded: there are rifts or fissures in the novel, unnoticed by Booth, which require some attention. Jane Austen's strategy for protecting Emma is a triple one: first, we are denied access to those whose suffer most from her actions; second, we are invited to take pleasure in what Lionel Trilling describes as the `unusual intimacy' of our relationship with the heroine; and third, we are assured that she is following a path of moral growth, fitted to her innate intelligence and goodwill.[8] I want to consider one or two moments where our access to Emma's mind seems to me more problematic than Booth and Trilling allow.
Near the end of the novel, Harriet is revealed as the daughter of a tradesman:
Such was the blood of gentility which Emma had formerly been so ready to vouch for! -- It was likely to be as untainted, perhaps, as the blood of many a gentleman: but what a connection she had been preparing for Mr Knightley -- or for the Churchills -- or even for Mr Elton! -- The stain of illegitimacy, unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed. [emphasis added]
Is this Emma's voice? If so, we must recognise that her moral education reaches only so far: not far enough to silence the crassest prejudices of her society. In what sense might a man so morally coarse as Mr Elton have been stained by a connection with Harriet? And how much money, what level of nobility, we might ask, is needed to bleach out this particular stain? It might be argued that Jane Austen is writing here as the satirist of her society, and that Emma's blindness is merely a vehicle for her critique. On this reading, the text concedes that these are the terms of the world in which Emma has to live, while at the same time drawing attention to the moral incoherence of those terms. But, here as elsewhere, it is tantalisingly difficult to establish where Jane Austen's voice and Emma's are to be distinguished. It is Jane Austen's voice which tells us that Harriet's father was `rich enough to afford her ... comfortable maintenance ... and decent enough to have always wished for concealment': but what are we to make of a decency which has for so long disavowed a daughter? And does not Jane Austen underwrite these concealments and decencies by granting Harriet this token respectability before placing her with Robert Martin?
The language used in connection with Harriet echoes Emma's famous meditation on the splendours of Mr Knightley's estate at Donwell Abbey:
It was just what it ought to be, and it looked what it was. -- And Emma felt an increasing respect for it, as the residence of a family of such true gentility, untainted in blood and understanding. Some faults of temper John Knightley had; but Isabella had connected herself unexceptionably. She had given them neither men, nor names, nor places that could raise a blush. [emphasis added]
I can see no place for irony here. But how ought we to understand `untainted in blood and understanding'? Given that the phrasing parallels `unbleached by nobility or wealth', it is hard not to take the two phrases together. Is the Knightley blood `untainted' because there is wealth enough here to bleach out any stains? The echo surely disrupts the serious impulse behind the passage, which is (I take it) to give sanction to the structures of Jane Austen's society, and to `English verdure, English culture, English comfort'. Few readers, perhaps, will respond quite so warmly as Lionel Trilling to this construction of `Englishness' -- it is after all in harmony with these ideas that Emma and Harriet visit `sickness and poverty' rather than sick people and poor people, and that Robert Martin and his family may appear on the margins, or in a distant view from Box Hill, but not nearer -- but there is no reason to suppose that Jane Austen had any such reservations. Irony here would be as much out of place as it would have been in Ben Jonson's address `To Penshurst', or indeed in Elizabeth Bennett's praise of Mr Darcy's estate at Pemberley. And yet it has crept into the text.
There are other ways in which to develop this point, and other occasions where the language of the novel opens up similar, and similarly irreconcilable ironies. For example, when the Churchills throw off their daughter with `due decorum' after she marries Mr Weston for love, we are surely encouraged to question what is `due'; but when in the same chapter we hear that the Westons have been rising into `property and gentility', the coupling of the two terms does not seem to invite comment. There is no need to extend the list of examples. The point is, I hope, clear enough: that in inhabiting Emma's mind, and in relishing its play of irony, Jane Austen seems to have licensed a whole range of ironies, which cannot be incorporated into that ideal unity admired by Wayne Booth, but which cannot be excluded from our reading. The text, we might say, like Emma herself at Box Hill, `could not resist'.
It was suggested earlier that the novel is constructed as a kind of moral assault course, which Emma eventually completes satisfactorily, in that it follows Emma's education as she learns to respect the autonomy of others -- Harriet, Jane, Miss Bates -- and to subject her Fancy to her Understanding. Here too there are difficulties, which come into focus at Box Hill (Chapter 43). It is a wonderfully plotted episode, in which Frank and Jane break off their engagement without Emma or anyone else -- including the first-time reader -- noticing what is taking place. It is at Box Hill that Emma wounds Miss Bates, is rebuked by Mr Knightley, and at once repents. In flirting with Frank, she has of course wounded Jane far more deeply, but neither she nor we can know this, and her unfeigned regret at the hurt caused to Miss Bates covers this fault too. Frank is more to blame than Emma, and we are only allowed to see what Jane's pain must have been after the crisis is past.
The episode has been described in this way in numerous critical studies, and no doubt this account corresponds to Jane Austen's intentions. But it is not quite sufficient. What it fails to recognise is that Emma ought in any case not to have been flirting with Frank because at this stage of the novel she is convinced that Harriet is in love with him, and in some hope of a return. Emma never worries about the possible hurt to Harriet because she never notices it; and Emma never notices because, surely, Jane Austen has for the moment forgotten that Harriet is also present at Box Hill. For Jane Austen, as for Emma, Harriet is `little Harriet', `the natural daughter of somebody', whose good-nature can at times serve as a foil to show up the faults of others, but whose very existence can occasionally be forgotten. Emma completes her moral assault course, but only because the trackside judge, Jane Austen herself, was not doing her job properly, and failed to notice the missed hurdle. Pace Wayne Booth, even `within the concept of perfection established by the book she writes' -- since this concept includes a due awareness of the autonomy of others -- Jane Austen is not `a perfect human being'.
It was suggested earlier that another way to describe Emma's education is in terms of the subjection of Fancy to Understanding -- the latter, of course, represented by Mr Knightley. Here too there are some awkward and presumably unwanted ironies. That Knightley is ungenerous towards Frank is evidently part of an attempt to humanise him, but even earlier he seems an inadequate moral touchstone. He tells Emma that `Elton may talk sentimentally, but he will act rationally', a view apparently justified when Elton rejects Harriet in favour of a financially better match with the dreadful Augusta Hawkins. Is this to be seen as an example of rational behaviour? It is so, surely, only in the same way that John Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility is able to construe selfishness as sense: Elton's behaviour is not so much rational as calculating. So much of the moral awareness of Jane Austen's fiction depends on attaching the correct moral labels -- decorum, ease, elegance, and so on -- that it is disconcerting to find Mr Knightley choosing a wrong one. But Knightley's role as the embodiment of Understanding is puzzling in a more important way: if it became general, it would silence the novel. He dislikes games and concealments of all kinds; `openness' is the key term in his moral vocabulary. If Mr Woodhouse would have been too feeble to write Emma, Mr Weston too undiscerning, and Miss Bates too voluble, Mr Knightley would have been too high-minded. We can admire his ethical soundness, but it is at odds with the movement of the novel. Ostensibly its moral centre, Mr Knightley is rather its moral antithesis.
This paper has been addressed to some of the ways in which `liking Emma' is more problematic than is usually allowed. It seems clear that Jane Austen nodded over the plotting of the Box Hill episode, and that the nature of the slip calls into question the moral seriousness of the novel. There is another aspect of the plot, connected this time with the strawberry-picking at Donwell Abbey, which seems to have escaped Jane Austen's attention, but in this case one which would, I think, have pleased her. Mr Knightley uses the opportunity to lead Harriet to the place from which Robert Martin's Abbey-Mill Farm can be seen to the best advantage, hoping to reconcile her to the marriage he has always encouraged. He is, for the moment, playing Emma's role of match-maker. What seems not to have been noticed is the pleasing irony that his efforts meet with precisely the same result as hers. Harriet supposes herself in love with the match-maker: as Emma was to Mr Elton, so Mr Knightley now is to Harriet. If we are serious about his role in advancing Emma's moral education, we ought to be dismayed to find Understanding as helpless as Fancy. But it is hard to imagine a reader who does not enjoy the irony of the situation: and no easier to imagine that Jane Austen herself would have wished it otherwise. What this suggests is that we are not, as readers, seriously engaged with the moral beauty of openness; our moral engagement is in fact a kind of cover, just real enough to allow us to enjoy the amoral playfulness which we pretend to rebuke. So far from being the embodiment of an ideal integrity, as Wayne Booth has it, the novel is built on an implicit contradiction between our moral sense and our delight in fiction. Not even the author of Emma, though surely a great novelist, was quite a perfect human being.