• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1112 0

seems to combine ideas of a chivalric past with the reassuring stability of agriculture, making it a perfect name for the perfect English gentleman. Before assuming too readily that Austen must therefore be promoting a safe, feudal ideal, however, it is worth considering the name’s contemporary associations: ‘Farmer’ George III had been declared insane in 1810, while the lifestyle of his successor, the flamboyant Prince Regent (to whom Emma is dedicated), was hardly stable or conservative.13 The characters of Austen’s own ‘knights’ – Sir Thomas Bertram and Sir Walter Elliott – are also seriously flawed and in both Mansfield Park and Persuasion the baronets contrast unfavourably with the naval officers, whose titles derive from personal merit.14 Even in Emma, with its apparent disdain for the upwardly mobile Mrs Elton, there are hints that Knightley’s influence, though thoroughly English, has less positive aspects. The gypsies’ choice of encampment on the road, for example, which is so alarming to Harriet Smith, may reflect a loss of common land as a result of the continuing enclosures that are suggested by Knightley’s discussions of moving footpaths and rotating crops.15 His charitable gestures, too, though admirable in many ways, are nevertheless dependent on the poverty that is quietly emphasized throughout the book. Even the traditional happy ending, where the heroine is united with her ‘knightley’ suitor, facilitates the absorption of the independent land at Hartfield into the patrimonial acres of the Donwell estate.

The completion of Emma in the year of Waterloo has encouraged the discernment of political meanings in the novel, and again the names have seemed significant to many readers. The obvious association between George Knightley and Englishness (apparently endorsed by the eulogy on Donwell Abbey: ‘It was a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure, English culture, English comfort’) has led to the opposing equation of Frank Churchill with France, especially in the light of Knightley’s judgement: ‘No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very ‘‘aimable’’, have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people…’16 Given recent events across the Channel, and the importance of class and inheritance in the novel, it is possible to read political allusions into Frank Churchill’s ‘indifference to a confusion of rank’ or his light-hearted desire to become a ‘true citizen of Highbury’. But although ‘Frank’ may have fairly clear associations with France, there is no obvious explanation for either Churchill or his paternal name, Weston. Equally plausible is the possibility that his name is as ironic as ‘George’, since frankness is not one of the more striking aspects of his character.

The names of the principal characters may represent some buried scheme of political, moral, or social significance, which would indicate that the entire text is an elaborate riddle, capable eventually of solution. But if Austen’s names seem to encourage the pursuit of hidden meanings and codes, they also hint that such readings are as absurd as the behaviour that is gently being ridiculed in the novel itself. Margaret Kirkham’s discovery that some of the principal names in Emma (Knightley, Cole, Campbell, Perry) are to be found in the social columns of the Bath Journal, 1801–2, suggests the possibility of accident rather than design, while the knowledge that the same Christian names occur in several different novels, and often appear to have been drawn from her immediate family, makes any consistent allegorizing seem decidedly doubtful.17 And when faced with the anagrammatical excesses of a reader such as Grant Holly, who argues that Emma signifies ‘Am me’, that wood and house are symbols of female sexuality, and that Knightley is both the ‘chivalric knight, and the nightly visitor Emma would house’, it is difficult not to feel as sceptical as intrigued.18

One of the problems about acknowledging the puns in