Emma - Jane Austen [3]
If readers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw Austen as a proponent of nineteenth-century moral values, recent critics have suggested that her work is ‘subversive’ since, as Joseph Litvak has commented, Emma is a ‘potentially endless circuit of fiction, interpretation and desire’.7 In response, perhaps, to the long-standing critical emphasis on realism, the 1980s saw a tendency to make Emma independent of place, period and even author, an autonomous text to be treated on its own terms irrespective of contemporary context or the ever-inaccessible views of Jane Austen.8
The difficulty is, of course, that both approaches find rewards in Emma, which continually teases the reader with realistic clues and self-reflexive ironies. A key location such as Box Hill, for example, presents no problems for those keen to read the novel as social history. Anne-Marie Edwards has observed that Austen visited her relatives, the Cookes, at Great Bookham Rectory in June 1814, and sees the experience contributing directly to the work at hand:
She had begun writing Emma early in January of the same year. Perhaps it was during this stay that she decided to set one of the most important scenes in the novel, the disastrous picnic when Emma is most unkind to Miss Bates, on nearby Box Hill. This well-known beauty spot was a great attraction then as now and Jane must have joined an ‘exploring party’ (to quote Mrs Elton) to admire its tree-shaded cliffs and stand, as does her Emma, on the open hillside above Dorking in tranquil observation of the beautiful views beneath her.9
The fact that Box Hill is a ‘real’ place, and one known to Jane Austen, however, does not mean that its inclusion is merely an authenticating device, even though it may help to maintain the reader’s belief in the narrative. Emma contains non-fictional and imaginary place names, but the former may be retained as much for some accidental metaphorical significance as for any special biographical reason (Richmond is certainly an appropriate home for Mrs Churchill, while Kingston makes a suitable port of call for those patriotic Englishmen, Robert Martin and George Knightley). Box Hill is itself rich in possibilities, since its name encompasses not only the verbal sparring and considerable damage sustained there by Austen’s characters, but also the sense of claustrophobia – of being boxed in – that is so brilliantly evoked, as the same set of people embark on yet another frivolous excursion. Whether there are further implicit references, for example to the box-tree scene in Twelfth Night (which also extracts rather painful comedy from a situation fraught with in-jokes at the expense of others present), is open to question, but once alert to the persistent mischievous wordplay, anything seems possible, if only momentarily.10
Nor is it the place names alone that seem to blur the real and the metaphorical. Weston, for example, is the name of an old Surrey family and is mentioned in Thomas Fuller’s The Worthies of England, of 1662, while the name Randalls belonged to a house near Leatherhead.11 Knightley, too, may be derived from local history, since a Robert Knightly became Sheriff of Surrey in 1676, while the pulpit of the Leatherhead church was restored by a Mr Knightley in 1761.12 These facts do not, however, diminish the imaginative potential of the names and many readers have attempted to decipher their apparent allegorical meanings.
George Knightley, especially,