A Miracle Called Emma

by Bertil Falk

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

Similar currents exist in her other novels, but they are out in the open. It is only in Emma that Jane Austen puts them so to speak under the skin of the text. And that makes Emma even more a special case. And the only “dead bodies” in her other novels are no mysterious pianos but, for example, the rather simple skeletons rattling in the wardrobe of the unreliable Wickham in Pride and Prejudice.

The piano in Emma is a unique phenomenon in the history of literature. Jane Austen was ahead of her time in many respects. All this considered, Emma is not only a unique novel among her novels but a unique novel in the history of literature.

In England, where Jane Austen is loved beyond all sense and sensibility, her novels, not the least Emma, are considered to be comedies. And for sure, they are a kind of comedies, even though one does not actually roar with laughter when reading them. They have that very English intellectual wit and esprit.

But above all, the novels of Jane Austen are exciting romantic thrillers. They are filled with misleading events, as when a certain Mr Ferrars in Sense and Sensibilty has been married, or story-stretching misunderstandings, as when just about every person in Bath thinks that Anne Elliott in Persuasion will marry her cousin.

And there are dramatic pinnacles as when the misled heroine Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice in an ill-tempered way rejects her extremely rich suitor Mr Darcy. Or when Emma Woodhouse has an encounter with Mr Knightley about Mr Martin’s suitability as the husband of Harriet Smith.

These two exchanges of opinions are as skilfully formulated as the altercation between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Miss Bennet, and they have also been transmitted to the screens without too much interference. Thus, when Jane Austen is adapted for the screens, the dramaturgists who want to put their fingerprints on other people’s work, are forced (by the producers?) to toe the line, even if their fingers itch. They only have to interfere when Jane Austen, instead of writing a dialogue, describes the action.

When it comes to a novel like Mansfield Park, the comedy easily gets stuck in the throat, for that novel is lined with dramatic catastrophes and tragedies. That Fanny and Edmund ultimately get each other does not compensate for all these misfortunes. It goes against the grain for me to call Mansfield Park a comedy. Great novel, yes! Comedy, no, no!

And I am not the only one. Harold Bloom in The Western Canon, writes about Persuasion that “each time I finish a rereading of this perfect novel, I feel very sad. This does not appear to be my personal vagary; when I ask my friends and students about their experience of the book, they frequently mention a sadness which they also associate with Persuasion, more even than with Mansfield Park.”

Jane Austen captivates her readers, keeping them on tenterhooks up to the decisive moment, when in all her books, the principal female character after all the entanglements and misunderstandings gets the man she deserves, whether he is super-rich like Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, fairly well-off like Mr Knightley in Emma or disinherited as Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibilty or Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey.

Since Jane Austen is so enormously popular and loved by a perpetual stream of new generations of readers, she ought to have had followers. But unlike e.g. Charlotte Brontë, whose Jane Eyre has seen so many copycats, the very best of them most certainly Rebecca by Dame Daphne Du Maurier, Jane Austen has had hardly any followers, and those who tried have fallen short of reaching the height of her ankles.

Maybe the genius of Jane Austen is inimitable. Her secret is her superior ability to create completeness and structure intrigues mated with an excellent capacity for describing situations and shaping dialogues.

If we compare her novels (with the exception of Northanger Abbey) with those of the Brontë sisters, we find that the plots in their outstanding stories are comparatively simple, not the least as compared to the complex Emma.

Jane Austen’s theme, the arrangement of marriage, is not something that can be called a big deal in today’s modern society. In spite of this, or perhaps thanks to this, Jane Austen speaks to us in a perfectly understandable and captivating way over a time-span of two hundred years, a period that has involved the greatest changes in the history of mankind, not only technologically but also mentally.

And by all means. Even though the contrast between poor and rich no longer prevents women and men from marrying, whatever their families say, there are still “matchmakers” who poke their noses into everything. And outside the Western sphere of culture, states of marriage affairs still exist, which are related to the customs in Bath two hundred years ago. Emma Woodhouse’s efforts as a matchmaker are, in other words, not an extinct phenomenon in our time.

Since I have spent some of the finest years of my life in India, I have seen first-hand the problems my dear friends have had in connection with social and religious matchmaking, and I have seen the dramatic situations that can arise when the demand for the right social match clashes with the parties’ desire for compatibility in marriage. I have close-up strange dramas where different kinds of marriage catastrophes have thankfully ended happily after many trials and tribulations.

Someone has said, I do not remember who it was, that the language never fails Jane Austen when she writes her dialogues, only when she writes her monologues. Jane Austen’s big talker in Emma is the poor Miss Bates. This talkative woman is the daughter of a deceased clergyman. She is steadily left on the shelf, living with her mother on the second floor above a shop in Highbury. They live in reduced circumstances, and Miss Bates is below Emma on the social ladder.

There are readers who skip Miss Bates’ harangues in Emma, as she emits an incessant stream of apparently uninteresting and dull yackety-yak. It is possible that the aforementioned critic considers these monologues as showing where language fails Jane Austen.

The truth is the other way around. The litanies of Miss Bates prove what a skillful writer Jane Austen is. The language does not fail her at all! The flow of words is put there to characterize Miss Bates and at the same time to provide Emma with a chance and reason to misbehave towards her during a picnic, which in its turn has consequences for Emma’s relations with Mr. Knightley and for her own development.

But that is not all. In the same way that Jane Austen under the cover of Mrs Elton distributes clues, even the drivel of Miss Bates slips in some unnoticed clues. The flow of words of Miss Bates is underestimated. Her role is worth more attention and importance than the admirers of Jane Austen commonly attach to her. For sure, Jane Austen’s novels are about romance, but they are also about individuals.

If you question my estimation of the importance of Miss Bates, let me refer to an expert on Emma, who is not a university graduate but someone even more competent: the actress Prunella Scales. She, if anyone, should know what she is talking about, for she has recorded Emma twice for audio casette and once for radio. Moreover, she was Miss Bates in the 1996 BBC-TV version of Emma.

She states that when she “jumped at the chance of playing Miss Bates,” she “was terribly disappointed to find that the part had been savagely cut to about a tenth of its original content. Despite the verbal extravagance of the character, Jane Austen did use her to drop clues about the plot. However, in an adaptation that must reduce the book to 100 minutes of screen time, garrulousness must be sacrificed to function.”

Thus, Mrs Elton as well as Miss Bates serve functions in Emma that most readers do not pay attention to. The attentive and careful reader, who takes an interest in the two “subordinate parts” may find these slipped-in clues.

Now, Emma is a skillfully structured whole, where Jane Austen, seemingly without really exerting herself, uses these manipulative tricks, among which the deepening of the characters, the “stiff” in the guise of a piano, and the undercurrents beside the perfect structure, are a few of her own contributions to the development and perfection of the modern novel. She was an early bird and writers of latter days in different genres have not hesitated to use her methods, though they seldom, as I said, have reached her level, except for a couple of very clever mystery writers.

One may ask how it was possible for a woman who lived in a country village for most of her life to create the stories that in fact were a coming of age of the novel. But if we disregard her brilliant ability to express herself, everything she needed was actually within sight and earshot.

We know that she was a devoted bookworm. She read not only Fanny Burney but novels by other writers, including Gothic yarns that were the big thing of the day before they were overshadowed by the social novel. She saw the shortcomings of the Gothic genre and parodied its effects on an easily affected mind in her portrait of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, the plotwisely thinnest of Jane Austen’s novels.

Thus, the novels of Jane Austen did not come about in a vacuum. She knew what happened in the cultural life. She was well acquainted with literature and the theatre. She not only read comedies and plays but went to theatres in both London and Bath, where she spent some years. Reading aloud was common in her home.

Furthermore, she loved moving in society, appreciated its concerts, dances, and theatrical performances. Piano playing and backgammon as well as card playing were pleasures at home and in her social life. As a teenager, she wrote a hilarious and bizarre theatre parody that caused someone on Internet to exclaim: “Eugène Ionesco, eat your heart out!”

In her stories, we find that reading aloud is common and in Mansfield Park a theatrical performance is arranged when the master of the house is away in the West Indies, where he has slaves. Long walks as well as excursions with carriage and pair were common, and the men around her sometimes devoted themselves to hunting. Shooting birds and fishing occur in her books and falconry was still a well-liked sport in her days, let alone that it was an aristocratic diversion.

Jane Austen remained unmarried but experienced an early romance that came to nothing. And she received a proposal of marriage, which she accepted but fled from a few hours later. And ultimately there was a man she would have married, but he died, as it is said, “before he spoke,” an euphemism for not proposing in time. In short, she was well equipped for her mission.

I cannot escape a certain sense of sadness when thinking that she never experienced how enormously loved her books have been and still are and that she never was to see the row of fine adaptations of her novels for the silver screen and other screens that have been produced two hundred years later.

Emma Thompson, who wrote the manuscript for one of the adaptations of Sense and Sensibility, may have had something similar in mind, when she received a Golden Globe for her manuscript. She permits Jane Austen to be at the gala performance and comment on the event. It was quite reassuring. In the version of Ms Thompson, Jane Austen received the success with stoic composure and the wit that were hers.

In any case, Jane Austen experienced that four of her novels were printed before her untimely death, when she was only 41 years old. Sense and sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and the miracle called Emma (1816). She died in 1817 and the next year Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published with a foreword by her brother Henry Austen. Unfortunately, her novel Sanditon was begun but never completed. The three finished chapters are appetizers that will never satisfy us Jane Austen lovers.