“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” So begins ‘Emma,’ the story hailed by critics as Jane Austen’s revolutionary novel.
Perhaps it is not quite correct to call Austen a “revolutionary” novelist. John Mullan, points out in his book,’What Matters in Jane Austen?’ a few of the other great pioneers in the history of the English novel would have agreed to describe Austen as a rebel. From Charlotte Brontë, who found only “neat borders” and elegant confinement in her fiction, to DH Lawrence, who called her “English in the bad, mean, snobbish sense of the word”, many thought her limited to the small world and small concerns of her characters. So were the great writers of modern fiction. “What is all this about Jane Austen?” Joseph Conrad asked HG Wells. “What is there in her? What is it all about?” “I dislike Jane … Could never see anything in Pride and Prejudice,” Vladimir Nabokov told the critic Edmund Wilson.”
Mullan concedes, there have been scattered exceptions. The year after he published ‘More Pricks than Kicks’ the young Samuel Beckett told his friend Thomas McGreevy, “Now I am reading the divine Jane. I think she has much to teach me.” Contemporary novelists have been readier to acknowledge her genius and influence. Janeites felt a frisson of satisfaction to see that the most formally ingenious British postmodern novel of recent years, Ian McEwan’s Atonement, opens with a lengthy epigraph from Northanger Abbey. McEwan alerts the reader to the fact that his own novel learns its tricks – about a character who turns fictional imaginings into disastrous fact – from the genteel and supposedly conservative Austen.
Mullen explains, Austen’s Emma was revolutionary not because of its subject matter: Austen’s jesting description to Anna of the perfect subject for a novel – “Three or four families in a country village” – fits it well. “It was certainly not revolutionary because of any intellectual or political content. But it was revolutionary in its form and technique. Its heroine is a self-deluded young woman with the leisure and power to meddle in the lives of her neighbours. The narrative was radically experimental because it was designed to share her delusions. The novel bent narration through the distorting lens of its protagonist’s mind. Though little noticed by most of the pioneers of fiction for the next century and more, it belongs with the great experimental novels of Flaubert or Joyce or Woolf. Woolf wrote that if Austen had lived longer and written more, “She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust”. In Emma, she is.”
To measure the audacity of the book, Mullan examines a simple sentence that no novelist before her could have written. “Our privileged heroine has befriended a sweet, open, deeply naive girl of 17 called Harriet Smith. It is a wholly unequal relationship: Emma is the richest and cleverest woman in Highbury; Harriet is the “natural daughter of someone”, left as a permanent resident of the genteel girls’ boarding school in the town. While cultivating their relationship, Emma knows very well that Harriet is her inferior. “But in every respect as she saw more of her, she was confirmed in all her kind designs.”
The sentence is in the third person, yet we are not exactly being told something by the author. “Kind designs” is Emma’s complacent judgment of herself. Even the rhyme in the phrase makes it sound better to herself. In fact, kindness is all in the mind of the beholder. Emma has set out to mould Harriet. Emma’s former companion, Miss Taylor, has got married and become Mrs Weston, leaving her solitary and at a loose end. Harriet will be her project. Her plans are kind, she tells herself, because she will improve this uninstructed and wide-eyed young woman. We should be able to hear, however, that her designs are utterly self-serving. Soon she is persuading Harriet to refuse a marriage proposal from a farmer who loves her, and beguiling her with the wholly illusory prospect of marriage to the smooth young vicar, Mr Elton.
Take another little sentence from much later in the novel. By now Emma is convinced that Harriet, scorned by Mr Elton, can be paired off with the highly eligible Frank Churchill. The only impediment seems to be the inflexible Mrs Churchill, Frank’s adoptive mother, who expects him to find a much grander wife. Then news arrives of Mrs Churchill’s sudden death. Emma meets Harriet, who has also heard. “Harriet behaved extremely well on the occasion, with great self-command.” Obviously she is learning self-possession from her patron. “Emma was gratified to observe such a proof in her strengthened character.”
“Except that this is all twaddle,” says Mullan. Harriet does not give a fig for Frank and never has. Emma has elaborately deluded herself again. The narration follows the path of Emma’s errors. Indeed, the first-time reader will sometimes follow this path too, and then share the heroine’s surprise when the truth rushes upon her. Yet it is still a third-person narrative; Emma is not telling her own story. We share her judgments and watch her making them.
Mullen observes Austen was the first novelist to manage this alchemy. She was perfecting a technique that she had begun developing in her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility. It was only in the early 20th century that critics began agreeing on a name for it: free indirect style (a translation from the original French: style indirect libre). It describes the way in which a writer imbues a third-person narration with the habits of thought or expression of a fictional character. Before Austen, novelists chose between first-person narrative (letting us into the mind of a character, but limiting us to his or her understanding) and third-person narrative (allowing us a God-like view of all the characters, but making them pieces in an authorial game). Austen miraculously combined the internal and the external.
None of Austen’s novels is as full of tricks as Emma, and many of them are carefully concealed to reward the rereader. Mullan suggests by rereading ‘Emma’ we will see what she was doing with Mr Perry, the apothecary. Everyone is always quoting him, especially Emma’s valetudinarian father Mr Woodhouse: “as Perry says…”; “… This is just what Perry said”; “Ah! my dear, but Perry had many doubts about the sea doing her any good.” Mr Perry is always being spotted passing by (all those lucrative house calls) and his views are always being reported. Yet not a single word that he ever says is actually given us in the novel. Of course not! He is the echo to every person’s existing prejudices; no wonder he is so successful.
Mullan suggests this is a joke buried by Austen for posterity to discover. As she told her sister Cassandra, she only wrote for those who had “a great deal of ingenuity themselves”.
Here’s hoping you will reread ‘Emma’ and discover Austen’s hidden genius.
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