 |
Born in 1775, the second daughter and seventh child of a country clergyman, farmer and teacher, Austen began writing around the age of ten and never stopped until her death at 41. She lived in a time of colonial turmoil and imperial warfare; her male characters include swashbuckling naval officers, a slave-owning patriarch, and various members of parliament. But her scenes are set in the quiet English countryside, and her focus is inward, and female.
Austen revolutionized the art of fiction — turning it inside out with a deceptively informal technique that became known as free indirect discourse. From a perch within her characters’ sense and sensibilities, she chronicled and commented on their thoughts and feelings, creating a dialectic between narrator and character. She knew not only what they knew but also what they didn’t know about themselves, i.e. their unconscious drives and motives. And among these was sexual desire — a subject out of bounds for a female writer of Austen’s day, but as ubiquitous in a 19th-Century English village as anywhere in the world.
Little is known about Austen’s private life; her sister Cassandra burned most of her letters. However, one can hardly grow up with naval officers — her brothers — and share a bedroom with a sophisticated elder sister, without learning the ways of the world. And the world of Regency England was a school for scandal. While still a young woman, Austen spent five years in the urbane society of Bath, and displayed a keen knowledge of its dancing rooms and dating rituals in Northanger Abbey. She returned to the countryside a woman in full, and the novels of her mature period, beginning with Mansfield Park and Emma, reflect not just literary brilliance but depth of emotional experience.
In keeping with literary conventions of her time, Austen never describes sexual acts or feelings. Her characters touch, but only in socially acceptable ways, such as a lady taking a gentleman’s arm as they walk together. No one hugs or kisses, or even talks about such things. Still, no adult reader could mistake the appeal of Austen’s one and only femme fatale, Mary Crawford, in Mansfield Park. She comes on to the strait-laced hero, Edmund, with a filthy pun about buggery in the Royal Navy ("rears, and vices" Ch. 6), and finally exits, defeated but undaunted, with a saucy smile that haunts Edmund even as he weds the virtuous Fanny Price (Ch 47ff).
Mansfield Park may be read as a moral tale of temptation overcome. But no such meaning could be contrived for Austen’s next and sexiest novel, Emma. Even the most innocent reader would be hard-pressed to deny Fiona Stafford’s sense of “a perpetual undercurrent of sexual excitement” in Emma. (Intro to the Penguin Edition, 2015.)
Austen generates and sustains this current with her choice of words. The novel's lexicon stands out for nouns with sexual and particularly phallic connotations — erection, cockade, column, pillar, penetration — the last attributed directly to the brothers Knightley, George and John. George Knightley, the heroine’s mentor and friend, is repeatedly described as “upright,” in body as well as mind. This adjective appears seven times in Emma — as many as in all the other complete novels combined. “Pleasure” comes up 120 times, with the others in double figures. Only in Emma is sexual intercourse acknowledged -- by the vulgar Augusta Elton, who boasts that she and her reverend husband were the first to throw on "Hymen's saffron robe." Only in Emma is a baby born, and the word “flesh” used in conversation. Only in Emma does an illegitimate child, Harriet Smith, play a key role in the plot. And it is the only Austen narrative invaded by “gipsies,” and in which a henhouse is robbed — likely by those same archetypal transgressors. Though she always leaves herself an out — a literal or innocent interpretation for the squeamish --- in Emma Austen’s prose is peppered and salted with sexual suggestions, signs and symbols, some overt, but most disguised as in dreams.
The subject of dreaming comes up only once in Austen’s ouevre, and then, it seems, only by accident. In Chapter 41 of Emma, Frank Churchill lets loose a piece of information he could only have learned from the family circle of his secret love, Jane Fairfax. He then scrambles to cover his blunder, telling a large company at Emma’s house that it must have been a dream. “I am a great dreamer,” says he. His father, Mr. Weston, then wonders at the nature of dreams. “What an air of probability sometimes runs through a dream. And at others, what a heap of absurdities it is!” The chattering Miss Bates adds that she has sometimes “the oddest dreams in the world.”
Emma is Jane Austen’s most dreamlike creation. Patterned after Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is a mating ritual and fertility rite in which the course of true love runs through a heap of absurdities to a multiple wedding feast. It is so dreamlike that in the climactic scene between Emma and Mr. Knightley, the heroine’s greatest fear is that she will wake up.
While Emma harks back to Shakespeare, it also looks ahead to the 20th-Century psychoanalytic insights of Sigmund Freud — the unconscious mind, the primacy of the instincts, the pleasure principle, infantile sexuality, and the interpretation of dreams. For Freud, every dream begins with a wish — e.g. an instinctive drive to be discharged, a goal to be attained, a doubt to be resolved. The “dream-work” is to convert these drives and conflicts into dream-objects acceptable to the socially conditioned ego. Like an erotic dream, the text of Emma is rife with sexual allusions concealed in the form of everyday objects, words and phrases.
The story traverses the four seasons of a year, beginning in the bleak midwinter. Emma’s father sets the tone with a riddle he can’t quite remember, about “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid.” It’s a well-known sexual joke about a woman who needs a chimney-sweep, and in one of Miss Bates’s fragmented monologues, we learn that her servant Patty feels this is just what Miss Bates needs.
Leaving aside archetypes with fixed meanings, in Freudian analysis the significance of a dream-object can only be discovered by means of the dreamer’s associations. In the same way, a literary symbol can only be identified by its associations, i.e. its narrative context. In Chapter Six, the context is ardent but errant courtship — when Emma points to an overt phallic symbol, a cockade on the cap of a baby boy. (This is a rosette or knot of ribbons signifying the infant’s sex, round for a boy, oval for a girl.) Emma is promoting the joys of wedlock to her protégée Harriet Smith and the Reverend Mr. Elton, willfully unaware that Elton’s desires are all for Emma herself, and Harriet has a far more suitable suitor in the farmer Robert Martin. Seeking to flatter Emma, Elton persuades her to paint Harriet’s “likeness,” and the three then peruse her collection of sketches. Emma’s favorite is a sleeping infant, little George Knightley, nephew and namesake of her sister’s brother-in-law, Mr. Knightley. Harriet and Mr. Elton fade into silence as Emma regards her work with relish:
“I took him as he was sleeping on the sofa, and it is as strong a likeness of his cockade as you would wish to see. He had nestled down his head most conveniently. That’s very like. I am rather proud of little George. The corner of the sofa is very good.”
A sleeping baby boy, “taken” on a sofa with his cockade nestled in a comfy corner, is a picture of sexual satisfaction. Austen knows it — she grew up with little boys and their plain manifestations of sexual feeling, beginning soon after birth. Though Freud began the scientific exploration of this territory at the turn of the next century, infantile sexuality is as old as humanity, and Austen is clearly familiar with it.
She is also familiar with the unconscious mind. She mentions it almost casually in chapter twelve: Mr. Woodhouse had “unconsciously, been attributing many of his own feelings and expressions” to his doctor, lending Perry’s authority to his own fears (115).
In chapter 44, Emma’s unconscious mind attacks the chief riddle of the plot, the anonymous gift of a pianoforte to Jane Fairfax. The morning after the picnic disaster at Box Hill where she humiliates Miss Bates, Emma is making her penitential visit to the Bates household. There she learns that Frank Churchill has abruptly left Highbury to attend to his rich, imperious aunt, and Jane Fairfax is about to flee in an opposite direction, having accepted a position as a governess. Half-listening to Miss Bates’s meandering account of these events, Emma falls into a reverie, thinking about Mrs. Churchill and Jane Fairfax, “musing on the difference of woman’s destiny, quite unconscious on what her eyes were fixed, till roused by Miss Bates saying ‘Ay, I see what you are thinking of, the pianoforte. What is to become of that?’” (italics mine)
Emma was not thinking of the piano, rather staring at it while musing about women’s destinies. But somehow she emerges from this reverie ashamed of “all her former fanciful and unfair conjectures,” that Jane was involved with a married man. Whether Emma realizes the gift was Churchill’s is conjecture; she never admits a suspicion. But something happens as she contemplates the instrument; her silence conceals the turning point of the plot. Her career as an “imaginist” is over, her supposed romance with Churchill is dead, and she can begin to live her own life
Immediately in the next chapter, Mr. Knightley learns of Emma’s visit to Miss Bates, takes her hand and nearly kisses it — a sign of a long-standing passion that must now be consummated. And a few paragraphs later, suddenly, “The great Mrs. Churchill was no more.” Frank’s aunt dies, freeing him at last to inherit his fortune and wed his Jane. In short order, all the mismatched couples are sorted out, and Emma realizes Mr. Knightley must marry “no one but herself.”
Emma’s path to this realization has been tortuous. Public sentiment in the village of Highbury has long matched her up with Churchill, a widower’s son adopted by a wealthy relative and his tyrannical wife. Emma is the daughter of the village’s richest man; healthy, beautiful, and a charming hostess. Her choice of a mate is strictly limited, though. To satisfy the family and the village, her husband must enhance the status and wealth of each. Frank Churchill fills the bill and looks the part.
The chief rituals of courtship are family visitation, mutual inspection of property, and dancing — tests of social skills, economic status, and physical prowess. In Highbury, the sexual suitability of a prospective husband must be intuited, or felt — from manners, posture, behavior, taste etc. In describing these, Austen is bold with sexual symbols and images. Through them she indicates the sexual attraction of Emma for Knightley, and its absence with Churchill. In every way Knightley is a picture of virility, Churchill of psychic impotence.
Knightley, Emma’s friend and mentor, is a constant visitor at Hartfield, sweeping in through the garden door at his own pleasure. Churchill is invited and expected, but constantly disappoints. The way is open but for one reason or another he cannot come, and on the rare occasions he does, he stays only briefly. Knightley is a horseman who will ride sixteen miles through a rainstorm to see Emma. Churchill’s mare is chronically lame or sick.
At Mr. Weston’s country dance (Ch. 38), Emma dances with the “very handsome” Churchill, but her gaze is on Mr. Knightley. “His tall, firm, upright figure, among the bulky forms and stooping shoulders of the elderly men, was such as Emma felt must draw every body’s eyes.” Later, Knightley looks at Emma with “smiling penetration” as he gently chides her for trying to match Harriet with Elton. Finally, they negotiate to dance together — “not really so much brother and sister as to make it at all improper,” says Emma. His dancing proves to be just what she expected — “extremely good.”
Frank Churchill’s property is unavailable for inspection, far away and controlled by others. Mr. Knightley’s Donwell Abbey is an easy mile’s walk from Highbury. “Come, and eat my strawberries,” says he to Mrs. Elton’s plan for a picnic (Ch. 42). Declining her offer of help with the invitations, he says until there is a Mrs. Knightley in being, he will manage such matters himself.
The event serves as an inspection tour that satisfies Emma’s every taste and appetite. It culminates with a walk, in the “delicious shade… of a broad short avenue of limes … (which) seemed the finish of the pleasure grounds… It led to nothing; nothing but a view of the end over a low stone wall with high pillars, which seemed, in their erection, to give an appearance of an approach to the house, which had never been there.” Meanwhile Mr, Knightley and Harriet are standing apart from the group, looking over the wall to the valley below, and the Abbey-Mill Farm, Robert Martin’s place, “with its rich pastures, spreading flocks, orchard in blossom, and light column of smoke ascending.” There is much ado about “nothing” in this passage, but in its context of associations — pleasure grounds, an erection of pillars, the avenue of fruit trees, the fertile farm in the valley, a well-swept chimney — it suggests nothing so much as the lamentable absence of a Mrs. Knightley at the Abbey, and a Mrs. Martin at the farm.
On this midsummer day, Emma encounters the life she desires: “English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive.” To possess it, though, she needs to live down the evils set out in Chapter One: “the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself.”
Mrs. Elton provides the occasion for Emma’s moral deliverance, insisting on an excursion to Box Hill the very next day after the visit to Donwell (Ch. 43). Everyone is tired of everyone else as they gather; the conscious mind’s layer of politesse is depleted, exposing the irritations, resentments and fears beneath. Emma, whose social style is concealment, loses it and vents her vitriol on the female archetype she fears most, Miss Bates. With the company challenged by Frank to say one interesting thing or three dull things, Emma doubts Miss Bates could stop at three.
Knightley’s penetration is deep and painful to Emma, as the party ends with the insult unresolved. His measured anger is an assault on her moral complacency and inflated self-image. Emma protests her innocence, then gives it up, under his firm, unbending judgment. “She was most forcibly struck. The truth of his representation there was no denying. She felt it at her heart.” Knightley accomplishes his end entirely in words, delivered as they walk toward the carriages that will take them home, ending with Emma silent as he hands her into her carriage. But in the shadows of this conversation a classic sexual drama is played out — a moral conquest ending in a gesture of chivalry. It clears the way for the denouement, following the news of Frank and Jane’s engagement.
That climactic scene literally drips with sexual imagery. Tormented with worry that Emma might be heartbroken over Churchill, Knightley rides through a rainstorm from London to Hartfield, sweeping in through the garden door to find Emma in the shrubbery (Ch. 49). She is walking, trying to control her emotions, fearing that she has lost Knightley forever to Harriet. He “must have had a wet ride. — -Yes,” is their small talk — — followed by one revelation after another that strips away their wrong imaginings and opens the way for Knightley to seize her arm, press it to his heart and ask for the chance to be hers.
“He had followed her into the shrubbery with no idea of trying it… The rest had been the work of the moment… (the) conquest of eagerness over judgment.” Within a half hour, their mutual distress turns to something like “perfect happiness.” This scene is described by editor R.W. Chapman as the “consummation of Jane Austen’s art.” The physicality of Austen’s language conveys the full force of this couple’s attraction, which arose for Knightley, by his own account, when Emma was thirteen, the age of menarche.
One obstacle remains to the actual consummation — Emma’s father, whose life is devoted to preventing bodily pleasure, his own and everyone else’s. Austen makes a sexual joke out of this malaise; while Emma is off dancing with Mr. Knightley, Mr. Woodhouse sups with old Mrs. Bates, and sorely disappoints her by sending back a delicate fricassee of sweetbread and asparagus, “not thinking the asparagus quite boiled enough.” (Freud writes, “I need not interpret asparagus to the initiated.”) In this funny scene, Austen is symbolizing the kind of life Emma faces at home with her father — deprived of pleasure, childless like Miss Bates.
In the end, Austen calls on mysterious causes — -“gipsies,” probably, to effect the marriage of Knightley and Emma. Thieves activate Mr. Woodhouse's anxiety with a wave of henhouse robberies; Mr. Knightley must move in to protect them. This clears the way for the couple’s vows, and their honeymoon at the wild seaside in November. It's a union that promises to bear fruit. Emma at 21 is "the picture of grownup health." And the couple have already rehearsed their role as parents, looking after their mutual nephews, John and Henry.
One question might remain: Is it necessary, or advisable, to interpret asparagus to the uninitiatied? Alternatively — “against interpretation” —one can leave these sexual suggestions in the undercurrent, disguised, approximated, elided or just hinted at, yet still registering somewhere in the cortex. More is happening in Emma than any reader can analyze in the moment. As reggae legend Bob Marley sang, “who feels it knows it.”Copyright 2025 by Tom Phillips
No comments:
Post a Comment