Jane Austen’s most dramatic moments emmaAnd, arguably, in his entire oeuvre, there is nothing to do with romance. After all, Emma Woodhouse’s reaction to George Knightley’s proposal occupies little space. The scene in the gardens outside Hartfield becomes hilarious when Knightley talks to Emma about her desperate, unquenchable longing, and then Austin writes “What did (Emma) say? Exactly what she should do, of course, a woman always does.” Hmm.
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in the last five years emma’s Publication, Austen had mapped out some wholesome serpentine paths to a happy ending: Elinor and Marianne Dashwood were rescued from poverty by the respective loves of a cleric and a retired military man; Similarly Elizabeth and Jane Bennet were able to overcome financial uncertainty and family embarrassment through the central aisle; And even the well-meaning Fanny Price eventually fell into the soft but healthy arms of Edmund Bertram. (Mansfield Park In fact, it was Austen’s highest-grossing novel during her lifetime, perhaps because it looked so much like the novels of writers who preceded her.) One gets the feeling that even before she took Emma and George to that garden together, Austen had mastered the field and was looking to explore further.
This exploration, not coincidentally, occurs in the only instance when Emma leaves the confines of Highbury during the course of the novel. In Box Hill, Austen goes where she has not gone before, bringing two apparently unmarried women together in a painful encounter that commands all our attention. Having read the book once, who can look at this scene again, whether on the page or the screen, without a feeling of dread, almost like a horror film, without squinting the eyes against the quiet and inevitable violence of Emma’s cruel remark to Henrietta Bates?
The seed of Emma’s words is planted when we first hear her response to her friend Harriet comparing the unmarried Miss Woodhouse to the unmarried Miss Bates:
Never mind, Harriet, I won’t be a poor old maid; And it is poverty that makes celibacy contemptible for the liberal masses! A single woman, with very little income, must be a ridiculous, obnoxious old maid! Fair game boys and girls, but a single woman, with good fortune, is always respectable, and can be as sensible and pleasant as any other.
He contemptHe ridiculousHe fair play; Emma is drawing a line, or more precisely, she is emptying a can of gasoline, between an unmarried woman and her version of Henrietta Bates. At Box Hill, Emma sets it on fire. In response to Miss Bates’s scandalous little comment about how she would choose to say three dull things instead of one funny thing in Emma and Frank’s party game, Emma said in a sharp voice, “Ah, madam, but there may be a difficulty. Excuse me, but you will be limited in number – only three at a time.” Even sketching that scene in an essay centuries later causes a shudder on the keyboard. It’s a shock that gives us the power to delve deeper into both single women, complicating and deepening our understanding of these two sides of a coin.
Of course, Austen herself was a deliberately celibate woman who turned down at least one eligible proposal of marriage. She may have been sketching a bit of her heroine’s self-portrait, which she was famously worried no one would like. Reading an early letter written to her sister in 1796, you can almost hear Emma talking to Knightley:
You scolded me so much… that I’m almost afraid to tell you how I and my Irish friend behaved. Imagine yourself doing everything most extravagant and shocking in the way you dance and sit together. However, I can expose myself only once more, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, the day we are to dance in Ash.
In these letters, Jane Austen, beloved daughter, sister and aunt, is revealed as a woman who enjoyed her social life, observing and mocking the dynamics of being out in the world with the acerbic fun of high spirits and a little misbehavior, a great specimen of human nature. She had opinions, intelligence, and a desire to see people interact, just like Emma. And like Emma, she loved the ball.
And yet, from a socio-economic perspective, Austen was like the other spinster (to use the book’s language) on that hill. Their father was a respected but poor clergyman, and with his death, like the Bates women, the Austin women began a bumpy journey down the social ladder, renting draft rooms in Bath and Southampton, relying on brothers in the family for their livelihood, and always waiting for someone to offer them a ride in his carriage. Austin was familiar with the gesture of gratitude. Here, in a letter written shortly after Emma was published, the author speaks positively of Batesianism:
How to do justice to the kindness of my entire family during this illness is simply beyond me! – Every dear brother so affectionate and so concerned! -And as for my sister! – Words will fail in any attempt to describe what a nurse she has been to me. Thank God! She doesn’t seem that bad about it, and since there was never any need to get up and down, I’d like to hope she doesn’t have any fatigue afterward. I have many reliefs and luxuries to bless the Almighty – my head was always clear, and I had almost no pain; My main suffering was feverish nights, weakness and lethargy.
Which brings us back to Box Hill, where the pain is immense. The romantic heroine challenges the conventions of the genre that Austen herself brought into existence and reveals herself to be less than heroic, to say and do things that cannot be taken back, to, in fact, be a real and interesting person. And also, this is a scene in which the comic supporting character, Miss Bates, walks to the center of the stage, revealing His Full humanity as a person who has dignity and an inner life that accepts suffering and humiliation.
There is a very modern realism to this scene that has nothing to do with the much-loved later Regency romance. Austen portrayed two sides of her life as a woman living outside the protection of patriarchy, and put them in conflict with each other as if to say that women are powerful subjects in their own right, they are fascinating and multifaceted. In short, Austen on Box Hill passed the Bechdel test long before it was set. And she did this at the very moment she was creating the third model of spinsterhood, a female artist who could make a living from the income of her work.
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Miss Bates: Emma Revisited Written by Katherine Cliff is available from Pegasus Books.
