Emma, chapters 13-15

We now jump ahead a few days into the visit of the John Knightleys to Highbury, which is filled with incident and activity, and has one other crucial ingredient. “It was a delightful visit,” Austen cheekily tells us; “—perfect, in being much too short.”
Only a true misanthrope could pen those words. Of course prickly, difficult people everywhere love her.
The Knightleys dine each night en famille at Hartfield, but can’t escape an invitation from Randalls, the Westons’ house—Mrs. Weston having been Isabella’s governess as much as Emma’s—and Christmas Eve is the night chosen for this “great event”, to which Mr. Elton and Harriet Smith are invited along with the family. But on the day itself Harriet has to cancel due to a bad sore throat, “though she could not speak of her loss without many tears.”
Emma, dedicated as ever to fixing everything for everybody, is convinced that Harriet’s absence will ruin the party for Mr. Elton; and furthermore that freeing him from having to attend will give him the opportunity to linger by the sickbed and tend lovingly to the patient and say things like Live, live, o sweetest angel, or by your demise my life becomes a ruin, and other similar inducements for Harriet to feel better.
And in fact he does seem a little wound up by Harriet’s condition, as Emma discovers when she meets him by chance, just after she’s left Mrs. Goddard’s, and tells him the news.
“A sore throat!—I hope not infectious. I hope not of a putrid infectious sort. Has Perry seen her? Indeed you should take care of yourself as well as your friend. Let me entreat you to run no risks. Why does Perry not see her?”
Emma is, of course, “not really at all frightened herself,” because dammit she’s Emma Woodhouse and those bacteria wouldn’t dare. Also she doesn’t think Harriet’s illness requires any treatment beyond what Mrs. Goddard can supply. But she’s diabolical; she doesn’t say so, preferring that Mr. Elton suffer “a degree of uneasiness which she could not wish to reason away, which she would rather feed and assist than not”. And onto this she lards some additional heavy-handed manipulation.
“It is so cold, so very cold, and looks and feels so very much like snow, that if it were to any other place or with any other party, I should really try not to go out to-day…But upon my word, Mr. Elton, in your case, I should certainly excuse myself. You appear to me a little hoarse already; and when you consider what demand of voice and what fatigues to-morrow will bring, I think it would be no more than common prudence to stay at home and take care of yourself to-night.”
But Mr. Elton couldn’t give a good goddamn about his Christmas sermon. If his voice goes, fine, he’ll just pantomime, or stage an interpretive dance. And when John Knightley offers him a seat in his carriage even that threat is removed, so there it is, he’s Randalls-bound…”and never had his broad, handsome expressed more pleasure than at this moment”—completely perplexing Emma. How can he think of enjoying himself in company when his beloved languishes elsewhere—as Harriet would surely be doing, if she knew what “languishes” means? Eventually she decides that many men—“especially single men”—just can’t pass up a dinner engagement. It’s “so high in the class of their pleasures, their employments, their dignities, almost their duties, that any thing gives way to it”. (Obviously this was written before the arrival of cable sports.)
After he’s gone, John Knightley, whose favorite hobby is sizing up everyone’s character—sizing it up if only to tear it down—has a go at this one:
“I never in my life saw a man more intent on being agreeable than Mr. Elton. It is downright labour to him where ladies are concerned. With men he can be rational and unaffected, but when he has ladies to please every feature works.”
Emma admits he can be rough going, but counters that there is “such perfect good temper and good will in Mr. Elton as one cannot but value.” To which Mr. Knightley says, good will towards you that’s for sure, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, knowhumsayin’.
Emma is shocked, shocked by the idea—I mean really, you can tell by her reaction that it has absolutely never occurred to her before. She’s really been that much of an idiot the whole novel. She’s young, beautiful, rich, and vivacious, and she knows it—not only knows it, but glories in it—yet it’s never occurred to her that some hot-blooded young turk might look at her and think, “I’m’a get me summadat.”
“Mr. Elton in love with me! What an idea!”
“I do not say it is so; but you will do well to consider whether it is so or not, and to regulate your behavior accordingly. I think your manners to him encouraging. I speak as a friend, Emma. You had better look about you, and ascertain what you do, and what you mean to do.”
But Emma utterly refuses to consider it. Instead, like Republicans un-skewing polls, she frames his advice in the way most concordant with her own point of which, which after all she knows is the correct one, and amuses herself “in the consideration of the blunders which often arise from a partial knowledge of circumstances, of the mistakes which people of high pretensions to judgment are for ever falling into”, and once again, you’re tempted to say, Well, honey, you’d know.
Austen cuts directly to the hour of departure, and find Mr. Woodhouse “too full of the wonder of his own going, and the pleasure it was to afford at Randalls to see that it was cold, and too well wrapt up to feel it.” But it is cold, and the skies are heavy, and in fact the first few flakes are even now wafting down, and everyone is very, very busy getting out the door while pretending they’re not heading into a real whopper of a winter storm.
All, that is, except Mr. John Knightley, who now reveals himself to be a spectacular sourpuss and killjoy, and who can—not—be—lieve everybody is actually going through with this ridiculous romp to Randalls, and who grumbles and groans and snarls about it with amazing energy and brio.
“A man,” said he, “must have a very good opinion of himself when he asks people to leave their own fire-side, and encounter such a day as this, for the sake of coming to see him. He must think himself a most agreeable fellow; I could not do such a thing. It is the greatest absurdity—actually snowing at this moment! The folly of not allowing people to be comfortable at home—and the folly of people not staying comfortably at home when they can! If we were obliged to go out such an evening as this, by any call of duty or business, what a hardship we should deem it;—and here we are, probably with rather thinner clothing than usual, setting forward voluntarily, without excuse, in defiance of the voice of nature, which tells man, in every thing given to his view or his feelings, to stay at home himself, and keep all under shelter that he can…”
It doesn’t even end there; he just go goes on and on, and you get the impression that Mr. John Knightley is actually Jane Austen’s revenge on some blowhard who ruined a perfectly good evening for her by bitching incessantly about its inconvenience to himself. She’s just gone and immortalized him, so there you go, how’s that for an inconvenience, asshat. The only trouble is, Austen’s comic genius transforms this revenge into a hilarious comic turn; you can almost picture Emma—his sole carriage-mate—crawling halfway out the window to get away from him, but he’s only saying what everyone else is thinking. In this chapter, John Knightley is definitely our favorite. We’ve loved many of Austen’s epic talkers; here’s her first epic complainer.
They pull up at the vicarage, and Mr. Elton, “spruce, black, and smiling, was with them instantly”, leaping into the carriage like some kind of demented Christmas elf. He’s “all obligation and cheerfulness”—in fact “so very cheerful in his civilities indeed, that (Emma) began to think he must have received a different account of Harriet from what had reached her”—which is that she is sadly no better.
Emma launches right into the subject of poor, poor Harriet, and Mr. Elton immediately gratifies her by letting his face droop in dismay and echoing and even trumping her own feelings of loss at Harriet not being here. “Dreadful! Exactly so, indeed. She will be missed every moment.”
This was very proper; the sigh which accompanied it was really estimable; but it should have lasted longer. Emma was rather in dismay when only half a minute afterwards he began to speak of other things, and in a voice of the greatest alacrity and enjoyment.
This is a sure sign of a writer at the height of her powers. Austen’s party scenes are always her most sparklingly funny set pieces, and here we are having the time of our life, and we haven’t even left the carriage yet. For one thing, we’ve got John Knightley, determined to be annoyed and put out by everything around him, and Mr. Elton, equally determined to be the most gleeful living being in the entire kingdom if not the solar system. So of course everything that Mr. Elton says is going to jab John Knightley’s already bad humor like a porcupine quill. And Mr. Elton starts off at a roar, delivering a very long and very perky monologue about how cozy he is, which prompts a lazy snarl from his coach-mate; he continues, seemingly unable to shut up for a moment, to barrel on about the snowy weather being ideal, do you hear me ideal, then segues into contemplating the happy happy happy time awaiting them all, and Austen doesn’t say so but I’m pretty sure he claps his hands.
“This is quite the season, indeed, for friendly meetings. At Christmas every body invites their friends about them, and people think little of even the worst weather. I was snowed up at a friend’s house once for a week. Nothing could be pleasanter. I went for only one night, and could not get away till that very day se’nnight.”
Mr. John Knightley looked as if he did not comprehend the pleasure, but said only, coolly,—
“I cannot wish to be snowed up a week at Randalls.”
Austen tells us Emma “might have been amused” by the way John Knightley so efficiently bites Mr. Elton’s head off, but for her astonishment at Mr. Elton’s raging high spirits: “Harriet seemed quite forgotten in the expectation of a pleasant party.” Her loss, because the hilarity continues, Mr. Elton gibbering on like a bliss ninny and John Knightley taking an occasional swipe at him, like a sulking lion annoyed by a monkey that keeps capering too close. Miss Bates is remembered as Emma’s nonstop natterer, but she’s going to have to be really on her game to beat Mr. Elton in this chapter.
Unfortunately they soon arrive at Randalls, where “Mr. Elton must smile less, and Mr. John Knightley more, to fit them for the place.” But it’s academic to Emma, because she bolts from the both of them to bask in the confidences of her hostess, who’s basically her totes bestie. “…[T]he very sight of Mrs. Weston, her smile, her touch, her voice, was grateful to Emma, and she determined to think as little as possible of Mr. Elton’s oddities, or of any thing else unpleasant, and enjoy all that was enjoyable to the utmost.”
Alas for Emma, her “project of forgetting Mr. Elton for a while made her rather sorry to find, when they had all taken their places, that he was close to her.” And close as he is, he acts even closer, constantly hovering over her and winking at her and tossing her little bon mots; he may as well be sitting in her lap. And Harriet may as well be on a slow boat to China. Emma is forced to consider the unthinkable: “Can it really be as my brother imagined? Can it be possible for this man to be beginning to transfer his affections from Harriet to me?—Absurd and insufferable.” Notice, please, that she can only just bring herself to believe this is a new infatuation—she can’t conceive that she’s been getting it wrong all along…that Harriet was never the object of his particularly oily affections.
Mr. Elton’s incessant sallies into personal space makes her almost miss something “which she particularly wished to listen to” across the room—that being news of Mr. Weston’s son, Frank Churchill. Because, “in spite of Emma’s resolution of never marrying, there was something in the name, in the idea, of Mr. Frank Churchill, which always interested her.”
He seemed, by this connection between the families, quite to belong to her…and though not meaning to be induced by him, or by any body else, to give up a situation which she believed more replete with good than any she could change it for, she had a great curiosity to see him, a decided intention of finding him pleasant, of being liked by him to a certain degree, and a sort of pleasure in the idea of their being coupled in their friends’ imaginations.
That’s our Emma. She’s got no intention of ever marrying anybody, yet she’s already got a potential fiancé picked out—if only for the satisfaction of being talked about. She’s pretty much decided that she owns Frank Churchill, but she’ll have to have a good look at him and run him through his paces before she decides whether she actually wants him. Aren’t we going to relish seeing this blow up in her face? Not that we don’t love her; but we love her best when she’s reeling from an unexpected right hook.
Fortunately, Frank’s name comes up again—Mr. Western reintroduces it in “the very first leisure from the saddle of mutton,” which I include just to remind you that we’re dealing with a goddamn writerhere (you think phrases that simple and euphonious are easy to toss off? Listen to my caustic laughter)—and Emma learns to her delight that Frank Churchill is expected soon to come a-callin’.
“He has those to please who must be pleased, and who (between ourselves) are sometimes to be pleased only by a good many sacrifices. But now I have no doubt of seeing him here about the second week in January.”
This titanic news is processed over the next several pages by many of the cast, who minutely discuss their various anticipations and trepidations of the visit, and what might yet occur to put it off, except that Mr. Weston says such eventualities won’t occur, though Mrs. Weston quietly fears they will, and yadda yadda yadda. This is one of the only sections in which Emma lags a bit. We get the impression Austen is already a little girl crazy for Frank Churchill herself, and we wish she’d get back to the serious business of torpedoing the party already.
Which she will…but we have to be patient.
Mr. Woodhouse, we’re told, “was soon ready for his tea; and when he had drank his tea he was quite ready to go home”—but “Mr. Weston was chatty and convivial, and no friend to early separations of any sort;” so no one’s going anywhere, though we’ve got John Knightley looking meaningfully at the hall clock and tapping his foot, and making little tsk-y noises whenever anyone says something especially trivial that really doesn’t need to be expressed at all and certainly not right now. I can almost see everybody just slowly inching away from him, as from a bad smell.
Mr. Elton launches himself into the space between Mrs. Weston and Emma—possibly it’s not quite big enough and he has to elbow in a bit, to the point of Mrs. Weston almost falling off the couch—but then gratifies Emma by beginning again to pity poor, poor, poor, sick, sad, lonely, at-death’s-door Harriet, so that soon “Emma was quite in charity with him.” Except…he seems more anxious about Emma escaping infection than he is about Harriet recovering from it, and keeps asking Emma to promise she won’t put herself at risk. This is very embarrassing for Emma, because Mr. Elton is presuming some kind of proprietorship of her (who does he think he is, Emma with Frank Churchill?).
…[T]hough she tried to laugh it off and bring the subject back into its proper course, there was no putting an end to his extreme solicitude about her. She was vexed. It did appear—there was no concealing it—exactly like the pretence of being in love with her, instead of Harriet; an inconstancy, if real, the most contemptible and abominable!
Even now Emma can’t quite accept the evidence of her own eyes and ears. It’s like a “pretence” of love…it’s a contemptible thing, “if real.” And once again, she sees it purely in terms of “inconstancy”—of Mr. Elton having switched from Harriet to Emma in mid-courtship; the notion that it’s been Emma he’s been paddling for all along, has never crossed her mind. Her cluelessness is really Olympian. (It wasn’t by whim that Amy Heckerling titled her modern-day film adaptation of the story Clueless.)
Mr. Elton now pushes the envelope by trying to enlist Mrs. Weston in his crusade to bar Emma from putting her superfine self at any further risk.
“So scrupulous for others,” he continued, “and yet so careless for herself! She wanted me to nurse my cold by staying at home to-day, and yet will not promise to avoid the danger of catching an ulcerated throat herself. Is this fair, Mrs. Weston? Judge between us. Have not I some right to complain?”
Mrs. Weston is too surprised to answer, or possibly she just can’t figure out a polite way to say, “The only right you have is to shut your goddamn pie-hole.” As for Emma, she’s too furious to speak, and can “only give him a look; but it was such a look as she thought must restore him to his senses”, not realizing that this doesn’t work with people who have no senses to be restored to.
Emma’s let us down by taking this silently; we need a good, solid explosion of tumult right about now, for this to be a standard-bearing Jane Austen party. Fortunately, John Knightley is happy to supply it. He’s been off at the window monitoring the weather, just waiting for it to get bad enough so that he can return to the others and crow about it. His basic message is, I was right and you were wrong, and now we’re all screwed because you didn’t listen to me, so there, and I hope you’re happy.
Everyone’s thrown into a tizzy, especially Mr. Woodhouse, for whom this is just confirmation of the essential malevolence of everything beyond his own front door. Mrs. Weston and Emma try to distract him from panic, possibly by making hand-shadows on the wall, or engaging in a tumbling routine—anything to “turn his attention from his son-in-law, who was pursuing his triumph rather unfeelingly.” Yes, rather unfeelingly, in the same way you could say that the Mongols under Genghis Khan were rather harsh.
“I admired your resolution very much, sir,” said (John Knightley), “in venturing out in such weather, for of course you saw there would be snow very soon. Every body must have seen the snow coming on. I admired your spirit; and I dare say we shall get home very well. Another hour or two’s snow can hardly make the road impassable; and we are two carriages; if one is blown over in the bleak part of the common field there will be the other at hand.”
This is about the worst thing you could say to Mr. Woodhouse. You might as well tell him, “There’s a tsunami cresting straight for us—but never mind, the giant asteroid will probably vaporize it.”
Mr. Weston now, “with a triumph of a different sort,” admits that he’s known all along that it’s been snowing like a sonuvabitch, but didn’t say anything because it would be such fun to keep everyone at Randalls for the night (why he’s so hot on this idea remains a mystery; you’d think he was a vampire squaring away his midnight snacks or something). He then calls on his wife to back him up, “that, with a little contrivance, every body might be lodged, which she hardly knew how to do, from the consciousness of there being but two spare rooms in the house.”
So now we have it—the complete dissolution of the party, as everyone runs around like headless chickens, particularly Isabella, who’s nearly deranged by the “horror of being blocked up at Randalls, while her children were at Hartfield”. Emma and Mr. Woodhouse can stay at Randalls if they like, but she’s bound and determined to brave the snow to get back to her babies, who you’d think she left in the care of itinerant gypsies instead of her own small army of nursery staff. And if the carriage gets stuck, why she’ll just tear across the snowy fields herself, and possibly perish in the attempt, leaving the poor Romantics of the Victorian era no new literary genre to invent.
Her husband scoffs at the idea of her going on foot—especially her claim that “it is not the sort of thing that gives me cold”, which he counters by pointing out that everything gives her cold. She’s Mr. Woodhouse’s daughter, after all; a single lazy breeze on a sweltering summer day might lay her flat with pneumonia.
In the midst of all this hysteria, Mr. Knightley arrives like the cavalry to save the day. He’s just gone outside and walked all the way down the Highbury road and back, and can vouch for there being no difficulty in anybody getting anywhere they want to go tonight, the snow is just a dusting, no impediment at all. His brother John, who after all has had his fun and got to upset everybody and spoil the party, doesn’t object to being thus debunked. Possibly he’s even gratified, because now he can leave—in fact everyone rushes to leave, because they’ve been so keyed up to do so for twenty minutes, they can’t wind back down again. Poor Mrs. Weston has probably been upstairs madly having all the beds made up, and she’ll come down in half an hour and no one will be here.
They pile into the two carriages—Mr. Woodhouse and Isabella in the first, and “John Knightley, forgetting that he did not belong to their party, stept in after his wife very naturally,” so that Emma finds herself stuck in the second carriage with Mr. Elton. And you can just imagine the look of leering satisfaction on his face when that door shuts behind them and they’re alone together. He might even rub his hands and mutter, Haha! And now you are mine! Even worse, Emma suspects that “he had been drinking too much of Mr. Weston’s good wine; and felt sure that he would want to be talking nonsense.”
And not just talking, either. Emma has barely begun “to speak with exquisite calmness and gravity of the weather and the night” when he seizes her hand and begins “making violent love to her: availing himself of the precious opportunity, declaring sentiments which must be already well known, hoping—fearing—adoring—ready to die if she refused him”—well, that last bit’s a load of crap, as we learn almost immediately, because Emma does refuse him, reminding him that, ahem, this is Emma-land, and the role he’s been assigned in Emma-land is Lover of Miss Smith, so would he please stop this silly pretending that he lives in a world where he can decide his own destiny and just do as he’s told?
Now it’s Mr. Elton’s turn to be astonished. He spits out the name “Miss Smith!” as though it’s something foul-tasting he’s just dislodged from his teeth. He’s “drunk enough wine to elevate his spirits, not at all to confuse his intellects”, and Harriet Smith is nothing more to him than the friend of Miss Woodhouse, in which capacity he has no more regard for her than he would the maiden aunt of Miss Woodhouse, or the pet King Charles spaniel of Miss Woodhouse, or the breakfast-table chair of Miss Woodhouse. It’s Miss Woodhouse that’s the galvanizing factor here, and he “resumed the subject of his own passion, and was very urgent for a favorable answer.”
“Every thing that I have said or done, for many weeks past, has been with the sole view of marking my adoration of yourself. You cannot really, seriously doubt it. No! (in an accent meant to be insinuating) I am sure you have seen and understood me.”
Emma’s stunned into silence by this. The boozy Mr. Elton takes this for admission; he has another grab at her hand and crows in triumph, forcing Emma to recoil into the corner—unfortunately, this being Regency England, she hasn’t thought to carry pepper-spray in her pocket book—and repeats that no, no, no, no, no, you love Miss Smith, remember? Miss Smith—as if saying it often enough will make it so. Which prompts Mr. Elton to once again express his disgust at the idea.
“Every body has their level; but as for myself, I am not, I think, quite so much at a loss. I need not so totally despair of an equal alliance as to be addressing myself to Miss Smith! No, madam, my visits to Hartfield have been for yourself only; and the encouragement I received—”
This word “encouragement” throws Emma into a little fit of indignation, not only for its own sake, but probably—I’m willing to bet principally—because it’s exactly what John Knightley warned her of. John Knightley was right, and his brother was right too, and Emma now realizes she’s been spectacularly, magnificently, cataclysmically wrong, and this is a young woman who’s entire self-image is built on the foundation that it is she, after God, who orders all reality.
She’s mad as a wet hen at Mr. Elton for bringing down her house of cards, and she puts him in his place with bitter crispness, as though he were a bad puppy whose snout she has to swat with a rolled-up newspaper.
“Encouragement! I give you encouragement!—sir, you have been entirely mistaken in supposing it. I have seen you only as the admirer of my friend. In no other light could you have been more to me than a common acquaintance. I am exceedingly sorry; but it as well that the mistake ends where it does.”
The mistake may end where it does, but the carriage ride continues for many minutes more. Awwwkward, as they say. Emma and Mr. Elton sit in a “state of swelling resentment, and mutually deep mortification,” not saying a word. Finally the coach turns into Vicarage Lane, Mr. Elton flings open the door to depart, and “Emma then felt it indispensable to wish him a good night. The compliment was just returned, coldly and proudly; and under indescribable irritation of spirits, she was then conveyed to Hartfield.”
As if to mock her, when she gets home she finds everybody serenely happy—the reverse of the fractious, contentious crew who’d departed so noisily from Randalls—with Mr. John Knightley so penitent for his earlier rabble-rousing that he’s actually consented to join Mr. Woodhouse in a basin of gruel. Order is restored, just as Emma would’ve wished; but now there’s chaos in her heart, and in her head.
Will she learn from this calamity, and curb her arrogance and presumption in the future? Bugger will she.