Equally puzzling, albeit for different reasons, is Mr Wood-house’s favourite, ‘Kitty, a fair but frozen maid’. Although this is identified by Emma as the work of David Garrick and has long been decoded to refer to the word ‘chimney-sweeper’, it is nevertheless perplexing, since the original poem plays on sexual innuendo and thus seems a surprising choice for Mr Wood-house. Since he has himself forgotten the rest of the verse, the apparent inappropriateness of the riddle may seem a joke at his expense; but it is equally possible to see it as contributing an extra dimension to Mr Woodhouse’s otherwise somewhat caricatured personality, especially as it is associated in his mind with the memory of his dead wife.
A more clearly comic example of the introduction of sexuality through quotation can be seen in Mrs Elton’s remarkable resort to Gay’s Fables as a parallel to the Jane Fairfax/Frank Churchill romance:
For when a lady’s in the case,
You know all other things give place.
Although Mrs Elton, like Mr Woodhouse, has forgotten the source of her lines, many contemporary readers would have been aware that they are part of the misremembered speech of a ‘stateley bull’, whose business is pressing:
Love calls me hence; a fav’rite cow
Expects me near yon barley mow:
And when a lady’s in the case,
You know, all other things give place.31
Characteristically, the allusion is not spelled out in the text, but the extraordinary juxtaposition of Mrs Elton’s desperate gentility and unwitting coarseness is simply left to amuse and puzzle the reader, even as the plot ostensibly unravels. Indeed, Mrs Elton’s rather clumsy evocation of literature emphasizes, retrospectively, a number of other moments when characters have used the expression ‘in the case’ for unacknowledged romantic attachments. But it is only Mrs Elton who brings the novel’s perpetual undercurrent of sexual excitement to the surface and in doing so, disrupts the subtle flow of understatement, even as she boasts of her own ‘fine flow of spirits’.
Throughout Emma, the possibility of revealing too much is constantly suggested, while the moments of greatest embarrassment are those when a character has overstepped the line of reticence to uncover something that has been hidden. Whether it is Mr Elton declaring his passion in the carriage, or Frank Churchill composing ‘Dixon’inawordgame, the uncomfortable sense of rule-breaking is the same and the text is filled with episodes in which the central characters blush, colour, glow or turn red. Perhaps this is why in the concluding section of the book, where all is supposedly revealed, the narrative retreats behind the various screens of letters and dialogue, leaving the reader guessing as to the exact nature of the ‘misunderstandings’ between Jane and Frank, or the reconciliation between Harriet and Robert Martin. Even at the climactic moment when Emma accepts Mr Knightley, her words are withheld, and left to the imagination:‘What did she say?–Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.’
In a novel that delights in flirtation and embarrassment, the reader is constantly teased into trying to find out exactly what is going on. Just as the central characters, though remarkably prone to misreading situations, seem obsessed with observing each other and establishing the truth of everyone else’s feelings and intentions, so we are drawn into the attempt to resolve individual words, scenes, quotations or actions. But since each reader notices different aspects of the book, and even interprets words subjectively, the end of the novel is really an invitation to return to the beginning and attempt once more to define its meaning.
It is not a straightforward ‘likeness’ of artistic representation and object represented that ‘pleases every body’, but the constant deflection of correspondences from one idea to another, so dazzling in its effect that it is tempting to choose one line of interpretation and ignore any contradictions. To do so, however, is to refuse to play, and although such a reaction avoids the embarrassment of getting things wrong, it also denies the endless enjoyment of Emma’s irrepressible sense of fun.
Fiona Stafford
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
1. The title page of the first edition reads 1816, but notices advertising its publication indicate that it appeared at the end of December, 1815.
2. W. Scott, ‘Emma’, Quarterly Review 14 (1815), 188–201.
3. P. Hickman, A Jane Austen Household Book (London, 1977); O. MacDonagh, Jane Austen: Real and Imagined Worlds, pp. 143–4.
4. Some of the references are discussed by R. W. Chapman in the appendix to his edition of Emma, in The Novels of Jane Austen (3rd edn, 5 vols.; with additional notes by Mary Lascelles, Oxford, 1966), Vol. 4, p. 498. See also P. Piggott, The Innocent Diversion, Ch. 8. Although the exact setting of the story is inconclusive, I have drawn attention to any recognizable dates in the notes.
5. The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. 4, p. 521.
6. Though not informed by the theoretical interests of the 1980s, Alistair Duckworth made an important contribution to the subsequent discussion of Austen’s textual riddles and games in ‘Spillikins, paper ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards: games in Jane Austen’s life and fiction’, Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays, ed. J. Halperin, pp. 279–97. For more recent discussion of the games in Austen’s fiction, see David Selwyn, Jane Austen and Leisure, pp. 261–301.
7. Joseph Litvak, ‘Reading Characters: Self, Society, and Text, in Emma’, PMLA 100 (1985), 763–73.
8. See, e.g., A. Rosmarin, ‘Misreading Emma: The Powers and Perfidies of Interpretive History’, ELH 51 (1984), 315–42. For a representative selection of recent critical essays, see D. Monaghan (ed.), Emma, New Casebook Series.
9. Anne-Marie Edwards, In the Steps of Jane Austen (2nd edn, Southampton, 1985), p. 158. F.W. Bradbrook, however, notes an important literary source for Austen’s description in William Gilpin’s Observations on the Western Parts of England, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (London, 1798), sect. II, pp. 11–12, in Jane Austen and Her Predecessors, pp. 65–6.
10. Twelfth Night, II, v.
11. Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Weston, Elizabeth’; the family tree of the Westons of Sutton is included in O. Manning and H. Bray’s The History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey, 3 vols. (London, 1804–14), Vol. 1, p. 135. R.W. Chapman notes the name Randalls in The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. 4, p. 521.
12. O. Manning and H. Bray, History of Surrey, Vol. 1, p. xli; R.W. Chapman, The Novels of Jane Austen, Vol. 4, p. 521.