Emma, chapters 49-51

The weather’s lousy, to match Emma’s mood; but she’s young, and resilient, and when the sky clears she “resolved to be out of doors as soon as possible” and to give that shrubbery another go. She’s immersed in its foliage, enjoying whatever therapeutic vapors it give off (maybe it’s a cannabis plant in full flower), when she spots you-know-who striding manfully toward her. “It was the first intimation of his being returned from London…There was time only for the quickest arrangement of mind. She must be collected and calm. In half a minute they were together.”
She’s startled to find him looking like high holy hell. She supposes this is because he’s told his brother of his plans to marry Harriet Smith, and it didn’t go well. Maybe John Knightley laughed at him. Or accused him of tarnishing the family name and threw an inkwell at him, or something.
They walked together. He was silent. She thought he was often looking at her, and trying for a fuller view of her face than it suited her to give. And this belief produced another dread. Perhaps he wanted to speak to her of his attachment to Harriet; he might be watching for encouragement to begin.
In which case, he’ll be watching till about a week after the crack of doom, because Emma is totally not going there. She’d rather ditch him by the dogwood and just hide out on the grounds till the urge to speak leaves him…living on berries and nuts, if comes to it.
Instead she chooses the perhaps more expedient tack of simply changing the subject. “You have some news to hear, now you are come back, that will rather surprise you.” Actually, she’s the one who’s surprised, because he shoots back, “If you mean Miss Fairfax and Frank Churchill, I have heard that already.” Turns out he’s had “a few lines on parish business” from Mr. Weston, which included the happy news as a postscript. Emma’s relieved, and also a little abashed.
“Youprobably have been less surprised than any of us, for you have had your suspicions. I have not forgotten that you once tried to give me a caution. I wish I had attended to it—but (with a sinking voice and a heavy sigh) I seem to have been doomed to blindness.”
This is a refreshing admission, if a tad melodramatic (“doomed to blindness”—sweet creepin’ Jesus), but it has an entirely unexpected effect on Mr. Knightley, who draws Emma’s arm to him and presses it against his heart, and speaks “in a tone of great sensibility”, which in Austen means he speaks like one of those tunes where Johnny Cash talks instead of sings.
“Time, my dearest Emma, time will heal the wound…I know you will not allow yourself—“ Her arm was pressed again, as he added, in a more broken and subdued accent, “The feelings of the warmest friendship—indignation—abominable scoundrel!” And in a louder, steadier tone, he concluded with, “He will soon be gone. They will soon be in Yorkshire. I am sorry for her. She deserves a better fate.”
Emma quickly realizes what’s behind this—or rather, she thinks she does; she actually only gets about half of it. (We, of course, get the other half; but we’ve been about six miles ahead of her the entire length of the novel. Maybe “doomed to blindness” isn’t so far a reach. She could pretty much have it tattooed on her forehead.) And “as soon as she could recover from the flutter of pleasure, excited by such tender consideration,” she puts his mind at rest, reassuring him that while she regrets the way she let herself behave when Frank Churchill was around, and “was very foolishly tempted to say and do many things which may well lay me open to unpleasant conjectures,” she has no regret about learning the news of his engagement to someone else.
Mr. Knightley’s so happy, he does his version of the Snoopy dance, which is basically to stutter over a few sentences and then stoically regain control of himself. He admits he could never be entirely sure how much Emma’s feelings were invested in Frank; “I could only be certain that there was a preference—and a preference which I never believed him to deserve. He is a disgrace to the name of man.” Whoa, Big K.—take a deep breath, already. Count to ten. Heal.
Emma is confused by his vehemence, because hello?—everything’s fine now, remember?—so she reiterates, possibly speaking verrry slloooowly and with PRECISE ARTICULATION the way we do to small children or service people on I.T. help lines, that “I never have been at all attached to the person we are speaking of”. Possibly she writes Frank’s name in the dirt with a stick, then jumps up and down on it to illustrate her point.
Mr. Knightley still looks at her with an unreadable expression, so that she supposes she really has to bite the bullet and “lower herself” even further in his opinion, by explaining exactly what drove her peculiar relationship with Frank—which, as we know, is basically a combination of convenience, boredom, and I-am-queen-of-everything.
“…He was the son of Mr. Weston—he was continually here—I always found him very pleasant—and, in short, for (with a sigh) he let me swell out the causes ever so ingeniously, they all centre in this at last—my vanity was flattered, and I allowed his attentions…I thought them a habit, a trick, nothing that called for seriousness on my side. He has imposed on me, but he has not injured me.”
That’s what was behind her part in the performance; and now she finally understands what was behind his. “He never wished to attach me. It was merely a blind to conceal his real situation with another.”
Some time passes while all this sinks in. Then Knightley finally speaks, and it’s not the most charitable of outbursts.
“Frank Churchill is, indeed, the favourite of fortune. Every thing turns out for his good. He meets with a young woman at a watering-place, gains her affection, cannot even weary her by negligent treatment—and had he and all his family sought round the world for a more perfect wife for him, they could not have found her superior. His aunt is in the way. His aunt dies. He has only to speak. His friends are eager to promote his happiness. He has used every body—and they are all delighted to forgive him.”
Well, of course everyone forgives him. He’s a rogue and a liar, a creature of impulse, all appetite—but dayum, dude’s got charm. And besides, he doesn’t really mean any harm; he’s the scoundrel with a heart of gold, to borrow my terminology for Henry Crawford of Mansfield Park (itself borrowed from Robert Graves). Frank Churchill is Henry Crawford reincarnated—and this time given the proper ending. He gets his Fanny Price, to the inestimable advantage of both.
Emma takes note of the hint of snark in Knightley’s tone, and says, “You speak as if you envied him.” He replies, “And I do envy him, Emma. In one respect he is the object of my envy.” We all know where this is headed. We’d know it if we were reading it through the wrong end of a telescope. We’d know it if we were reading it in pig Latin. We’d know it is Austen dropped every third word and deleted the vowels from all the rest. We’ve known it since the first chapter, and seen it barreling towards us ever since.
But Emma, God love her, still doesn’t. The way she sees it, “They seemed to be within half a sentence of Harriet,” so she again tries to change the subject, but before she can ask about Isabella’s children, or the coach ride from London, or what did you have for breakfast or what’s your favorite Adam Sandler movie, he blurts out:
“You will not ask me what is the point of envy. You are determined, I see, to have no curiosity. You are wise—but I cannot be wise. I must tell what you will not ask, though I may wish it unsaid the next moment.”
Aaaaaand still Emma doesn’t get it. Apparently Knightley will have to write I LOVE YOU, MORON on a cricket bat and then kneecap her with it, before she’ll twig. As it is, still thinking this is all about Harriet, she begs him not to speak—“take a little time, consider, do not commit yourself.”
He thanks her in “an accent of deep mortification,” and looks so puppy-dog hurt that Emma changes her mind, and decides she’ll hear whatever he has to say, no matter how much it distresses her. So when they reach the house she proposes another hit off the shrubbery and they turn back the way they came. After a few steps she says, “I stopped you ungraciously, just now, Mr. Knightley, and, I am afraid, gave you pain”, and she offers this time really, no kidding, to hear what he has to say, as a friend.
“As a friend!” he replies, again mortified, and Emma is probably wondering why she can’t seem to say one bloody thing right today. Then it all comes gushing out: it isn’t as a friend that he wants to confide in her at all. What he wants to say—wants to ask—is something quite different. “Tell me, then,” he pleads, “have I no chance of ever succeeding?”
Knowing Emma, she probably wonders, succeeding at what? Is he building a ship in a bottle or something? Because she’s heard those can be really tough. Then he makes it crystal goddam clear.
“My dearest Emma,” said he, “for dearest you will always be, whatever the event of this hour’s conversation, my dearest, most beloved Emma—tell me at once. Say ‘No,’ if it is to be said.”
Maybe not trusting herself after batting zero all afternoon, she clams up; and Knightley figures well, okay, it’s not a no, so he’s encouraged to go on. “I cannot make speeches, Emma,” he says, before launching into a pretty decent speech. “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more,” he continues, as a preamble to talking about it more. “God knows, I have been a very indifferent lover. But you understand me,” he adds, before explaining himself anyway.
All the time he’s speaking, Emma’s “mind was most busy” with a “wonderful velocity of thought”, which is pretty much what she’s like on any given day, so it’s not that big a deal. But it turns out her first thoughts aren’t just of her own ecstatic, somersaults-and-cartwheels happiness, but of the inevitable let-down to Harriet, who seems to be well on her way to a career of not getting married to every man in Highbury, one at a time. But Emma can’t seem to summon up any regret that, where Knightley’s concerned, “Harriet was nothing; that she was every thing herself;” quite the contrary.
…[A]s to any of that heroism of sentiment which might have prompted her to entreat [Mr. Knightley] to transfer his affection from herself to Harriet, as infinitely the most worthy of the two—or even the more simple sublimity of resolving to refuse him at once and for ever, without vouchsafing any motive, because he could not marry them both, Emma had it not. She felt for Harriet, with pain and with contrition; but no flight of generosity run mad, opposing all that could be probable or reasonable, entered her brain.
And thank God for it. A few decades later, the Victorians would develop a thing for weepy, self-sacrificing heroines, but not yet. Here, we get to enjoy the sunny self-interest of one of literature’s most enchanting pragmatists, as she now happily consents to take receipt of everything she’s ever wanted.
What did she say? Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does. She said enough to show there need not be despair—and to invite him to say more himself.
Why do people love Jane Austen?...There it is, right there. Of the tortuous, calamitous, hilarious path to conjugal harmony, she’s indispensible. Her sparring, self-deluding, self-immolating lovers are the stuff of legend. But when they finally get to the point where they can look at each other across the blasted landscape of their battlefields, and see, finally see, that they were meant for each other all along…Austen loses interest. She proceeds in short, swift strokes. In accepting her true love’s proposal, Emma says “just what she ought.” Because “a lady always does.”
Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may not be very material. Mr. Knightley could not impute to Emma a more relenting heart than she possessed, or a heart more disposed to accept his.
This is why Hollywood has to mutilate her, when they adapt her. The clear-headedness, the sobriety, of her take on male-female relations, is so at odds with the vulgar appetite for oceans of feeling and hailstorms of exclamation points, that filmmakers feel compelled to put all that in—swamping the sparkling spareness of her prose with rapturous orchestral gravy, burdening the clarity of her vision with pealing bells, swooping camera angles, and sumptuous art direction.
But we cognoscenti, who have experienced her undiluted, on the page, know the real Austen, and we revere her for all the things Hollywood chooses to jettison: her astringency, her sly sense of subversion, her bracing lack of sentimentality. They’ll never get her; but it’s okay. We do.
From this point in the novel, Mr. Knightley and Emma are in complete accord. The differences between them are retroactively resolved, to the satisfaction of each. Knightley had been in love with Emma and jealous of Frank Churchill, and after the Box Hill nightmare had gone to London to try to forget her.
But he had gone to a wrong place. There was too much domestic happiness in his brother’s house; woman wore too amiable a form in it; Isabella was too much like Emma—differing only in those striking inferiorities which always brought the other in brilliancy before him, for much to have been done, even had his time been longer.
Note the things that sustain his love for Emma here: not passion; not desire; not desperate yearning; but amiability…affinity…”domestic happiness.” Our only hint of capital-R Romance—of the collision of primal personal feeling with the chaos of the natural world—is in the single line relating that he had “ridden home in the rain” to comfort her after hearing of Frank Churchill’s engagement. But on arriving he “heard her declare that she had never loved him…She was his own Emma, by hand and word, when they returned into the house; and if he could have thought of Frank Churchill then, he might have deemed him a very good sort of fellow.”
There’s no great thundering romance in any of this; just the sublimity of a comedy concluded—serenely, harmoniously. “[Emma] was now in an exquisite flutter of happiness, and such happiness, moreover, as she believed must still be greater when the flutter should have passed away.” We’ve laughed our fill; now we smile. Jane Austen, ladies and gentlemen; Jane Austen.
Of course, there are still more than a few narrative strands to tie up. First among them is Mr. Woodhouse. Emma’s resolution never to leave him hasn’t been abandoned; so she tearfully concludes that she and Mr. Knightley will have to have a very looooong engagement, concluding in matrimony only when Mr. Woodhouse is no longer there to give away the bride (which is just as well, as there are probably innumerable drafts in the church; if he were alive to do his duty, it would kill him).
Then there’s Harriet; which is, fortunately, a matter that can be settled more quickly. (Though the Mr. Woodhouse matter might be settled quickly, as well, if Mr. Knightley only had it in him to sneak into Hartfield one brisk autumn night and open all the windows.) Emma decides it’s best not to see her “little friend” for a while, and writes to tell her why; and then, to make up for the blow, vows to try to get her invited to Brunswick Square. “Isabella had been pleased with Harriet; and a few weeks spent in London must give her some amusement.” Maybe the novelty and variety of town will help Harriet get over her disappointment. Or something. Whatever. We’re not really worried about Harriet. We know a long-term memory is about the same as a gerbil’s.
Then there’s Frank Churchill. His promised letter to Mrs. Weston arrives, and that lady dutifully forwards it on to Hartfield…not realizing that anything to do with Frank and Jane Fairfax is now of zero interest to Emma.
She was in now in perfect charity with Frank Churchill; she wanted no explanations, she wanted only to have her thoughts to herself—and as for understanding any thing he wrote, she was sure she was incapable of it. It must be waded through, however.
So she opens the envelope and plunges in. The letter is, as might be expected, equal parts swagger and humility. He begs Mrs. Weston for forgiveness, but is already sure she’ll forgive him, because after all, he’s “been forgiven by one who had still more to resent.” And speaking of Jane, he goes on to explain that had she refused his offer of a secret engagement, “I should have gone mad.” (What madness would look like in Frank Churchill is an interesting question; he’s already as headstrong as a stallion, and as impulsive as a gibbon.) And what, he presumes Mrs. Weston to be wondering, did he think he had to gain in committing to this kind of subterfuge? “To any thing, every thing”, he replies. In other words, he wasn’t really thinkingat all; he was feeling. He adds:
If you need farther explanation, I have the honour, dear madam, of being your husband’s son, and the advantage of inheriting a disposition to hope for good, which no inheritance of houses or lands can ever equal the value of.
Hard to get more charming than that. Though it’s also pretty much the dictionary definition of “cheeky.” Frank in a nutshell. Undaunted, he jumps right into yet another humble set-up, with another charmingly arrogant payoff:
You will look back and see that I did not come [to Randalls] until Miss Fairfax was in Highbury; and as you were the person slighted, you will forgive me instantly: but I must work on my father’s compassion by reminding him, that so long as I absented myself from his house, so long I lost the blessing of knowing you.
Frank Churchill’s amazing silver tongue, ladies and gentlemen. He’s here all week. Try the Swedish meatballs.
As for his sins against Emma herself (and here you can imagine Emma, despite her initial resistance to reading the letter, sitting up in her seat a little), he acquits himself by insisting that “had I not been convinced of her indifference, I would not have been induced by any selfish views to go on.”
Amiable and delightful as Miss Woodhouse is, she never gave me the idea of a young woman likely to be attached; and that she was perfectly free from any tendency to being attached to me, was as much my conviction as my wish. She received my attentions with an easy, friendly, good-humored playfulness, which exactly suited me. We seemed to understand each other.
The fact that he’s right doesn’t make him any less wrong, if you know what I mean. Still, it’s hard not to like him. Even as you’re fantasizing about kicking him to the curb.
Frank also says, of his first fortnight’s visit, “[W]hen I called to take leave of [Emma], I remember that I was within a moment of confessing the truth, and I then fancied she was not without suspicion…She may not have surmised the whole, but her quickness must have penetrated a part. I cannot doubt it.” You have to wonder how Emma feels, this that; because of course her take-away from that encounter was that Frank had been preparing to confess his love for her. Her “quickness” isn’t anything of the kind; next to it, your average glacier seems full of pep.
Frank also ‘fesses up that he was the one who sent the pianoforte; then he spends a page or so rhapsodizing Jane, to the point you start to suspect he’s at least as much in love with the sound of his own voice as he is with her. When he comes to Jane’s “hasty engagement” with “that woman”—meaning Mrs. Smallridge—he halts in mid-sentence, then resumes with, “Here, my dear madam, I was obliged to leave off abruptly, to recall and compose myself”, and reveals he’s been “walking over the country,” no doubt with the wind in his hair and the setting sun behind him, and regretting that movies haven’t been invented yet because damn it look at me.
He then details the crises that led up to the Mrs. Smallridge brouhaha. Jane didn’t like Frank’s attentions to Emma; for which he thought her “unnecessarily scrupulous and even cold.” On the morning of the strawberry expedition to Donwell Abbey, “every little dissatisfaction that had occurred before came to a crisis.”
I was late; I met her walking home by herself, and wanted to walk with her, but she would not suffer it. She absolutely refused to allow me, which I then thought most unreasonable. Now, however, I see nothing in it but a very natural and consistent degree of discretion.
And the next day, at Box Hill, when Frank fawned over Emma in a way even Emma started to get sick off, Jane “spoke her resentment in a form of words perfectly intelligible to me. In short, my dear madam, it was a quarrel blameless on her side, abominable on mine, and I returned the same evening to Richmond,” convinced that “I was the injured person, injured by her coldness, and I went away, determined that she should make the first advances.” Which she did…to Mrs. Smallridge. Whoops.
Frank had known of the offer, and of how pressured Jane was to take it by Mrs. Elton, “the whole system of whose treatment of her, by the by, has filled me with indignation and hatred.”
“Jane,” indeed! You will observe that I have not yet indulged myself in calling her by that name, even to you. Think, then what I must have endured in hearing it bandied between the Eltons, with all the vulgarity of needless repetition, and all the insolence of imaginary superiority.
Oh, snap. We’ve been waiting for someone to call out the Eltons, and this is a very satisfying passage. Anyway, Frank received a letter from Jane—received on the very morning of his aunt’s death—dissolving their engagement and saying they were never to meet again. He immediately wrote back to calm and reassure her of his devotion, but in all the confusion surrounding the bereavement the letter never got sent; it remained locked up in the charming idiot’s desk. He wondered why he didn’t hear from her “speedily; but I made excuses for her, and was too busy, and—may I add?—too cheerful in my views to be captious.” His candor really is disarming; that it’s meant to disarm is a little troublesome, but let’s not cavil.
When he finally did her from Jane, he was shocked; because it was in the form of a parcel containing all his letters to her. She asked that hers to him be similarly returned, and gave Mrs. Smallridge’s address—the first indication Frank had that this was her new plan for her future.
Imagine the shock; imagine how, till I had actually detected my own blunder, I raved at the blunders of the post. What was to be done? One thing only. I must speak to my uncle. Without his sanction I could not hope to be listened to again.
And we all know how happily that worked out…except for Frank arriving in Highbury filled with the good news, only to find Jane physically a wreck. And a wreck not wildly inclined to hear anything he had to say. “A great deal of very reasonable, very just displeasure I had to persuade away.” Well, after this letter, we know he’s the guy for the job.
Emma finishes reading with a little sigh of contentment; of course “every line relating to herself was interesting, and every line agreeable”, because hey, that’s Emma. But beyond that she thinks Frank’s done just a super job of making a case for himself, and “though it was impossible not to feel that he had been wrong, yet he had been less wrong than she supposed,” and if he entered the room right now, “she must have shaken hands with him as heartily as ever.”
But that’s Emma’s reaction, and she’s a comparatively soft touch. Her fiancé is a different story, and when he comes in Emma sits him down and makes him read Frank’s letter right then and there, despite his plea that he take it home and read it later (and return the next morning, no doubt, apologizing that before he could get to it, the dog ate it).
“It will be natural for me,” he says as he begins, “to speak my opinion aloud as I read. By doing it, I shall feel that I am near you,” which is a little mysterious, because, hey, he is near her. Any nearer and she’d be in his lap. But these are young lovers, fresh from their first oh-baby-you’re-mine’s, so maybe anywhere but the lap does seem like a distant shore. Anyway, Emma approves his proposal, and so do we, because we want to hear his running commentary. Which is replete with the usual Knightley snorts and grunts and harrumphs.
“Very bad—though it might have been worse. Playing a most dangerous game. Too much indebted to the event for his acquittal. No judge of his own manners by you. Always deceived, in fact, by his own wishes, and regardless of little besides his own convenience. Fancying you to have fathomed his secret! Natural enough! his own mind full of intrigue, that he should suspect it in others. Mystery—finesse—how they pervert the understanding! My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?”
Emma, who has…umm…neglected to tell him how she’s inadvertently whipped Harriet into an erotic fever over him, isn’t too keen about that last bit, so she just flaps her hands and says, “You had better go on”.
When he gets to the part about the pianoforte, he says, “A boyish scheme, indeed! I cannot comprehend a man’s wishing to give a woman any proof of his affection which he knows she would rather dispense with”. (That made me blink. Would Jane really rather have dispensed with the piano? Why? Maybe because it made her vulnerable to gossip. Or possibly because it was about three-and-a-half inches wider than any room in the Bates apartment.)
There are, however, some grudging admissions along the way, as when Knightley says, “I perfectly agree with you, sir…You did behave very shamefully. You never wrote a truer line.” And, “There is no saying much for the delicacy of our good friends, the Eltons”. Though in general, wading through the epic missive page by page by page by page—possibly he needs a shave by the time he finishes it—gradually wears him down. “What a letter the man writes!” he sighs as he flips over to page fourteen. When he’s finally finished, he just plain doesn’t have the energy left for moral outrage. He sets the letter aside with the observation that Frank, as cretinous as he is, appears “beyond a doubt, really attached to Miss Fairfax, and will soon, it may be hoped, have the advantage of being constantly with her, [thus] I am very ready to believe his character will improve”.
And that’s all the time he can spare for Frank Churchill (possibly ever again—Frank can live to a ripe old age and die surrounded by grandchildren, and Mr. Knightley will have no comment), because someone else is on Knightley’s mind: Mr. Woodhouse. He knows Emma will never leave her father, and if by some chance he were able to persuade her to, Mr. Woodhouse would likely go right round the bend, walling himself up in Hartfield and luring in small children at night who would never be seen again come light of day.
So his plan is simple: instead of a long engagement (because, *ahem*, the gentleman is ready now), and instead of relocating Emma to Donwell, Knightley himself will come and live at Hartfield, and what does Emma think of that scheme?
She was sensible of all the affection it evinced. She felt that, in quitting Donwell, he must be sacrificing a great deal of independence of hours and habits; that in living constantly with her father, and in no house of his own, there would be much, very much, to be borne with.
So yeah, she’s fine with it.
Actually, she promises “to think of it more;” but there’s never any real doubt she’ll gracefully allow it. It involves someone else making all the compensations for her own comfort and ease, so what’s the problem?...Similarly, she even has to laugh at herself as her former, vehement defense of her nephew Henry’s right to inherit Donwell now evaporates like beer foam.
Think she must of the possible difference [her marriage would make] to the poor little boy; and yet she only gave herself a saucy conscious smile about it, and found amusement in detecting the real cause of that violent dislike of Mr. Knightley’s marrying Jane Fairfax, or any body else…
So, there you go, little Henry. Off to the army with you. Or possibly the church. If there’s going to be an heir to Donwell Abbey, Emma will supply him. You can come and visit, though. Seriously, anytime. But…write first.
So everything’s settled. Or rather, almost everything. Because flitting at the margins there’s still…Harriet Smith. Emma’s most spectacular failure. She plucked the girl from nothing and promised her everything, and now everything she promised has gone to other women—including Emma herself. And Emma can’t even issue her any more pity invitations to Hartfield, because Mr. Knightley will be there, blaring a big red “rejection” light.
Of course Harriet will eventually get over him; “but this could not be expected to happen very early. Mr. Knightley himself would be doing nothing to assist the cure; not like Mr. Elton.” No, Knightley is unlikely to become a sneering villain to help turn Harriet’s love sour. Emma’s only hope is that Knightley is somehow supplanted. Though “really it was too much to hope even of Harriet, that she could be in love with more than threemen in one year.”
Notice that Emma doesn’t have anyone in mind for number four, or an active plan for bringing them together. We’re on page 430, for God’s sake, but at least she’s finally learned that lesson.