Emma, chapters 10-12

We come now to a run of chapters that show the range of Austen’s comic mastery, from the physical to what I might even call the burlesque.
We begin with Harriet accompanying Emma on an errand in the neighborhood which takes them past the vicarage, that “blessed abode of Mr. Elton,” which is a not terribly remarkable house sandwiched in among a few others of even lesser quality. But given the role Mr. Elton plays in their mutual psychodrama, “there could be no possibility of the two friends passing it without a slackened pace and observing eyes.” Emma even elbows Harriet and says, “There go you and your riddle-book one of these days.”
Harriet twitters and chirps and flits around the perimeter like a bluejay with salt on its tail, and “her curiosity to see it was so extreme, that…Emma could only class it, as a proof of love, with Mr. Elton’s seeing ready wit in her.” Emma laments that she can’t think of any way to get Harriet inside for a look.
As they walk on, Harriet finally says—having stumbled on a thought you might’ve imagine she’d have had fifty pages earlier—“I do so wonder, Miss Woodhouse, that you should not be married, or going to be married—so charming as you are.” Which prompts Emma to go off on a little self-infatuated rant, beginning with, “My being charming, Harriet, is not quite enough to induce me to marry; I must find other people charming—one other person at least.” And even that might be insufficient, because what possible benefit could marriage bring to Emma Woodhouse?
“Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want; consequence I do not want. I believe few married women are half as much mistress of their husband’s house as I am of Hartfield; and never, never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man’s eyes as I am in my father’s.”
Harriet bleats and whinnies some more, about how awful it would be, though, “to be an old maid at last, like Miss Bates!” And Emma admits that “(I)f I thought I should ever be like Miss Bates—so silly, so satisfied, so smiling, so prosing, so undistinguishing and unfastidious, and so apt to tell every thing relative to every body about me, I would marry to-morrow.” But there’s no chance of that happening, because Emma is already a paragon of womanly perfection—sort of the Virgin Mary cross-bred with Margaret Thatcher. And that’s not all.
“(I)t is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public! A single woman with a very narrow income must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls…for a very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind, and sour the temper. Those who can barely live, and who live perforce in a very small, and generally very inferior, society, may well be illiberal and cross.”
What I find most remarkable about this outburst is that it’s one of the rare examples of Austen making fun of herself. Because who else is Emma describing here, but her own creator? I can picture Austen penning these words, snorting impishly to herself, while her sister Cassandra peers over her shoulder and says, “Illiberal and cross…yes, indeed.”
And then they throw spools of thread at each other or something.
Emma goes blithely and arrogantly on, declaring that she sees no reason “why I should be more in want of employment at forty or fifty than one-and-twenty…If I draw less, I shall read more; if I give up music, I shall take to carpet-work.” You’ve got to imagine Lady Catherine de Bourgh was no less sure of the course of her life at seventeen, than Emma is here. She’s a monster in the making, but we’re already seen that she’s also her own worst enemy—she just doesn’t know it yet. We’re going to enjoy seeing her find out.
Emma concludes her little diatribe by declaring she doesn’t need children, she has her nieces and nephews, and declares “I shall often have a niece with me”, which leads Harriet to note that Miss Bates has a niece, doesn’t she? What’s her name again? The one everyone’s just super extra crazy about?...Oh yes, Jane Fairfax.
At this mention of Jane Fairfax, all the wind goes out of Emma’s sails. Jane Fairfax is her bugbear, her bête noir; a girl exactly her own age with whom she is always compared, and to whom she’s always proposed as an ideal friend. Except Emma doesn’t like being compared to anybody, and would rather choose her own friends, thanks, and you quickly get the impression that if Jane Fairfax fell down a hole, Emma would just quietly fill it in.
It turns out Jane Fairfax has gone off to be the paid companion of a rich couple’s daughter, so you’d think Emma would be sitting pretty, having her rival out of the way and all of Highbury to herself. Unfortunately, Jane’s physical absence doesn’t mean her tiresome effect isn’t still felt.
“Every letter from her is read forty times over: her compliments to all friends go round and round again; and if she does but send her aunt the pattern of a stomacher, or knit a pair of garters for her grandmother, one hears of nothing else for a month. I wish Jane Fairfax very well; but she tires me to death.”
It grates on Emma that Jane Fairfax’s miserable little achievements are trumpeted by everyone, at the expense of her own much more Herculean accomplishments. Do they think it’s easy arranging marriages for everyone in her immediate vicinity? She’s not Rev. Moon, you know—she just can’t point to two people on a football field and make it so. She has to work.
Fortunately she and Harriet now arrive at their destination, which is the cottage of a sick villager, so all talk of Jane Fairfax ceases as Emma goes into Angel Of Mercy mode. Which, we’re told, she does surprisingly well, though there’s an element of noblesse oblige in her manner that doesn’t entirely recommend her to modern readers.
She understood (the poor’s) ways, could allow for their ignorance and their temptations, had no romantic expectations of extraordinary virtue from those for whom education had done so little, entered into their troubles with ready sympathy, and always gave her assistance with as much intelligence as good will.
And then, back outside, she enthuses about how much wonderful perspective the visit has given her. “I feel now as if I could think of nothing but these poor creatures all the rest of the day; and yet who can say how soon it may vanish from my mind?”
Um. We can, sugar.
(I shouldn’t be too hard on her; I certainly prefer Emma’s brand of pragmatic condescension to, say, the Victorian inclination to breast-beating empathy, which seems even more self-centered at its core.)
As if to prove the evanescence of Emma’s social consciousness, Mr. Elton appears around the bend, and Emma pretends to steel herself against this sudden onslaught of charm.
“Ah, Harriet, here comes a very sudden trial of our stability in good thoughts. Well (smiling), I hope it may be allowed that if compassion has produced exertion and relief to the sufferers, it has done all that is truly important. If we feel for the wretched, enough to do all we can for them, the rest is empty sympathy, only distressing to ourselves.”
Harriet could just answer, “Oh dear, yes,” before the gentleman joined them.
I love that last bit; as though it was just Mr. Elton’s arrival that prevented Harriet from saying something weightier. When as we know by now, “Oh dear, yes,” is about as profound a response as she ever makes to anything.
But as to what precedes it—Emma’s rationalizing away her waning thoughts of her ailing beneficiaries—this, again, might be thought almost Lady Catherine-like, except for that small, masterful, parenthetic insertion that lets us know Emma is aware of her own pomposity, and is able to smile at it. If Emma is truly to become a monster, this is the element of her character—her self-awareness; her genial acceptance of whims aswhims—that has to go.
But of course, Austen has other plans for her.
It turns out that Elton was on his way to visit the same sick parishioner; but now that Emma’s already been there, he needn’t bother, so he’s free to join them in their amble back—at least as far as his house. Emma is immediately alive to the opportunities now presented, to get Harriet and Elton alone together. “I should not wonder if it were to bring on the declaration.” In fact, she doesn’t wonder, she’s certain of it. The only impediment is her own presence.
And so we get a masterful set piece that progresses over several pages, of Emma scheming to get herself out of the picture so that the presumed lovers can be alone. She falls behind and takes a small footpath off the main road; but “Harriet’s habits of dependence and imitation” prompt her to follow as soon as she notices this, and Mr. Elton tags dutifully behind. Then Emma pretends to have some problem with her shoe, stoops down to fix it, and waves them both on, saying she’ll catch up in a moment. This almost works, but Emma is then “overtaken by a child from the cottage, setting out, according to orders, with her pitcher, to fetch broth from Hartfield,” so Emma is compelled to walk alongside her, and as the child walks very fast and Harriet and Elton very slowly, they soon all catch up again.
Emma sends the child on ahead and listens in to Elton’s conversation, hoping at least to find him speaking on some subject suitably amorous; but he’s raving about a lunch party he attended the day before—braying about Stilton and beet-root and whatever. Emma is a touch crestfallen, but convinced that “This would soon have led to something better,” though God only knows how. Is there anything in the world less erotic than Stilton and beet-root?
Now they’re coming hard on the Vicarage, so time is of the essence. Emma actually now bends down and surreptitiously snaps her boot-lace, so that she’s hobbled; she begs Mr. Elton’s pardon, but she’ll have to avail herself of his hospitality “and ask your housekeeper for a bit of riband or string, or any thing just to keep my boot on.”
Elton of course could not be more delighted to be of assistance. If he and Emma were Victorians, he might even pick her right up and carry her into the house—during which her bonnet would fall off and her hair come tumbling gorgeously down. Possibly it might also rain. But fortunately we’re still in the Regency, a good three or four decades from that kind of thing.
Emma goes off with the housekeeper, leaving her two protégés alone together, and “by engaging the housekeeper in incessant conversation she hoped to make it practicable for (Elton) to choose his own subject in the adjoining room.” Meaning, for Elton to choose her own subject. Meaning, my sweet Miss Smith—may I call you Harriet—allow me to proclaim how entirely you have bewitched me.
Emma allows plenty of time for these syllables to be uttered, with additional time for the ensuing Oh my yes indeeds and Goodness how agreeables from Harriet. Then she reenters the room to find the two of them at the window, looking very intimate—but alas, exchanging nothing but chit-chat. “(H)e told Harriet that he had seen them go by, and had purposely followed them; other little gallantries and allusions had been dropped, but nothing serious.”
“Cautious, very cautious,” thought Emma; “he advances inch by inch, and will hazard nothing till he believes himself secure.”
And so she convinces herself that while she hasn’t actually sealed the deal between them, “she could not but flatter herself that it had been the occasion of much present enjoyment to both, and must be leading them forward to the great event.”
And they’ll have to lead themselves from this point on, because Emma’s distracted by a much greater event, which is the arrival of her sister Isabella and her brother-in-law Mr. John Knightley. Oh, and their five (yes, five) children, plus “a competent number of nursery-maids,” which in my opinion qualifies less as a visit than an occupation. Why not throw in a band of minstrels and a circus aerial act while you’re at it?
It’s been a long while since the John Knightleys have been seen at Hartfield. Emma’s eagerness to see them is about on par with her father’s anxieties on their behalf, because the journey is sixteen miles, during which he imagines pretty much anything might beset them—foul weather, attacks by bears, leprosy, you name it. Of course they arrive unscathed, unleashing “a noise and confusion which (Mr. Woodhouse’s) nerves could not have borne under any other cause, nor have endured much longer even for this”.
Isabella is “a pretty, elegant little woman” whom Austen at first seems to dismiss with all the praise she usually portions out to those females who don’t interest her. She’s dutiful, quiet, devoted, etc. Accordingly we don’t have much hope of her, until we hear this:
She was not a woman of strong understanding or any quickness; and with this resemblance of her father, she inherited also much of his constitution; was delicate in her own health, over-careful of that of her children, had many fears and many nerves, and was as fond of her own Mr. Wingfield in town as her father could be of Mr. Perry.
All right, then: there are now two of them under one roof. And—as we know from many misspent hours in our youth watching Godzilla vs. Mothraand the like—the rule for these situations is, There can be only one.
John Knightley, on the other hand, is in every way the opposite of his father-in-law: robust, confident, ambitious and “rising in his profession,” and apt to be impatient and bad-tempered and speak his mind in ways that mortify the paterfamilias. Accordingly he is “not a great favourite with his sister-in-law. Nothing wrong in him escaped her. She was quick in feeling the little injuries to Isabella, which Isabella never felt herself.” What’s worse, knowing that he’s liable to blurt out some snide remark to her father, Emma is always on red alert when they’re in a room together, which forces on her “all the pain of apprehension frequently to be endured, though the offence came not.”
In short, the house is now filled with a riot of people and possibilities entirely out of Emma’s control. And the one thing we’ve learned for certain about her is that she’s someone who relishes, and has managed to exercise, the kind of control usually only accorded to Russian autocrats.
As the family catch up on events, it’s only natural that the marriage of “poor Miss Taylor” should be covered in depth, capped by another review of the letter Frank Churchill wrote to congratulate his new stepmother—the letter that seems to have so deranged everyone in Highbury that if the sun were five degrees hotter they might just run mad and start eating human flesh. Mr. Woodhouse can barely contain his admiration for the letter’s excellence, which he recounts with all the fervor of someone who hasn’t yet had his morning Thorazine.
“…(I)t was an exceeding good, pretty letter, and gave Mr. and Mrs. Weston a great deal of pleasure, I remember it was written from Weymouth, and dated Sept. 28th, and began ‘My dear Madam,’ but I forget how it went on; and it was signed ‘F.C. Weston Churchill.’ I remember that perfectly.”
Really, if Frank Churchill had only included a mention of Kitty, a fair but frozen maid, Mr. Woodhouse might just burst like a tomato.
Isabella, tender-hearted thing that she is, can’t help wallowing in the awfulness of Mr. Weston having had to farm out his excellent letter-writing son to rich relations. “To give up one’s child! I really could never think well of any body who proposed such a thing to any body else.” Which sets her husband off on a long delineation of Mr. Weston’s character, which in his opinion is of the easygoing sort that depends more for contentment on a decent meal and a nice game of Yahtzee than upon family attachments. Emma doesn’t like this one bit, “and had half a mind to take it up; but she struggled, and let it pass. She would keep the peace if possible”.
And keeping the peace is basically what she spends the next chapter striving to do, though it turns out she might have set an easier task for herself, like hopping on one foot around the grounds while carrying a piano on her back.
The occasion is the first dinner with the new guests, when Mr. Knightley joins the party. Emma has secured his invitation (Mr. Woodhouse having at first been reluctant to let anyone else share his longed-for pets) because she’s decided that the time has come for them to be friends again. Though her conciliatory nature doesn’t extend all that bloody far:
She thought it time to make up. Making-up, indeed, would not do. She certainly had not been in the wrong, and he would never own that he had. Concession must be out of the question: but it was time to appear to forget that they had ever quarreled; and she hoped it might rather assist the restoration of friendship, that when he came into the room she had one of the children with her,—the youngest, a nice little girl about eight months old, who was making her first visit to Hartfield, and very happy to be danced about in her aunt’s arms.
The crafty vixen. She’s aiming to get back in Knightley’s good graces without stepping anywhere near an apology, and she’s doing it by staging a ravishing tableaux vivant for him to swoon over.
And swoon he does, the big sap, so that amity and accord are restored. But not without a full page of final pokes and jabs and stings, just for the sake of closure. Really, Knightley and Emma are just wonderful together; neither one of them can bear to give the other the last word.
“If you were as much guided by nature in your estimate of men and women, and as little under the power of fancy and whim in your dealings with them, as you are where these children are concerned, we might always think alike.”
“To be sure—our discordances must always arise from my being wrong.”
“Yes,” said he, smiling, “and reason good. I was sixteen years old when you were born.”
“A material difference, then,” she replied; “and no doubt you were much my superior in judgment at that period of our lives; but does not the lapse of one-and-twenty years bring our understandings a good deal nearer?”
“Yes, a good deal nearer.”
I could listen this business all the day long.
After the meal “the little party made two natural divisions: on one side (Mr. Woodhouse) and his daughter; on the other the two Mr. Knightleys; their subjects totally distinct, or very rarely mixing, and Emma only occasionally joining in one or the other.”
Emma’s principal job here is to prevent her father and sister’s mutually assured destruction, as they fall into immediate contention over the expertise of their respective physicians. Whatever advice is professed by one, the other’s must be known to abhor.
“Mr. Wingfield most strenuously recommended (South End), sir, or we should not have gone. He recommended it for all the children, but particularly for the weakness in little Bella’s throat,—both sea air and bathing.”
“Ah, my dear, but Perry had many doubts about the sea doing her any good; and as to myself, I have never been perfectly convinced, though perhaps I never told you so before, that the sea is very rarely of use to any body. I am sure it almost killed me once.”
Emma basically has to hover nearby with a fire hose, to turn on them when the volleying gets too heated. This keeps her hopping, because they go at it hammer and tong for pages. And it’s all completely hilarious.
Eventually Isabella’s tender-hearted inquiries after everyone in the village and their wives and children and maiden aunts and dogs and chickens and, God only knows, their head lice probably, leads her to “That sweet, amiable Jane Fairfax!” and for once Emma doesn’t do a “Jane Fairfax! Slllowwwly I turned…” number on hearing her name, because Isabella praising Jane Fairfax is better than Isabella battling Mr. Woodhouse over which of their sawbones has the best remedy for pinkeye.
Isabella says, “I always regret excessively, on dear Emma’s account, that (Jane) cannot be more at Highbury…She would be such a delightful companion for Emma.” Mr. Woodhouse rides to the rescue by saying that Emma has a perfectly wonderful companion these days in Harriet Smith, to which Isabella replies, “I am most happy to hear it; but only Jane Fairfax one knows to be so very accomplished and superior, and exactly Emma’s age.”
So even when Isabella and Mr. Woodhouse are diverted from pitting Mr. Wingfield against Mr. Perry, they can’t help themselves—they take up Jane Fairfax vs. Harriet Smith. I really wish Emma would just let them be, because it’s funny to hear them constantly one-upping (or rather one-lowering) each other, and clearly they both enjoy the hell out of it; it’s possibly the one sport either of them ever gets.
After working up an appetite in their combat, they now join each other in a restorative bowl of “nice, smooth thin gruel”, which they invite Emma to share; she all but jumps out a window in declining in.
The smooth thin gruel does the trick, and catapults Mr. Woodhouse back to attack-dog mode. Before you know it he’s lamenting, “I shall always sorry that you went to the sea this autumn, instead of coming here…And, moreover, if you must go to the sea, it had better not have been to South End. South End is an unhealthy place. Perry was surprised you had fixed upon South End.”
On he goes in this vein, trampling over Isabella’s objections (she’s obviously been too fastidious with her gruel), till finally John Knightley, from across the room, can’t take it anymore, and swivels in his chair to say so.
“Mr. Perry,” said he, in a voice of very strong displeasure, “would do as well to keep his opinion till it is asked for. Why does he make it any business of his to wonder at what I do?—at my taking my family to one part of the coast or another? I may be allowed, I hope, the use of my judgment as well as Mr. Perry. I want his directions no more than his drugs.”
This is exactly the outburst Emma has been turning somersaults to prevent. But it does provide us with an absolutely brilliant punch-line to end the chapter—“Mr. Woodhouse was rather agitated by such harsh reflections on his friend Perry, to whom he had, in fact, though unconsciously, been attributing many of his own feelings and expressions”—so for our part we’re more than willing to forgive Mr. John Knightley his rudeness.
And in fact to ask for more, please.