Emma - Jane Austen [7]
Austen’s assessment of her own creative endeavours in comparison to those of her nephew, James Edward Austen, has often fuelled the assumption that she aimed at the realistic portrayal of a small, familiar part of contemporary life:
What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of Variety and Glow? – How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour?25
The ‘bit of Ivory’ refers to the popular contemporary art of the miniature, which has seemed to many readers an appropriate parallel for Austen’s meticulous re-creations of upper middle-class society.26 It is worth considering the inherent ironies of her remark, however, not only with regard to the self-deprecatory comparison with her nephew, but also in that her most recently published novel, Emma, had run to some thousand pages in its original, three-volume format.
If Austen’s technique has something in common with that of the miniaturist, however, her work also has analogies with a host of other artistic kinds. Just as Miss Woodhouse displays ‘Miniatures, half-lengths, whole-lengths, pencil, crayon, and water-colours’, so Emma exhibits an extraordinary diversity of styles and voices, often switching from one to another in a single paragraph. Like the portfolio, it is a book full of ‘beginnings’, the imaginative effects often sparking from the contrasts in the prose rather than any sustained narrative position. The implicit parallels with visual art are frequently suggested, through pictorial imagery, specialist language or the arrangement of scenes reminiscent of contemporary paintings:
The appearance of the little sitting-room as they entered, was tranquillity itself; Mrs Bates, deprived of her usual employment, slumbering on one side of the fire, Frank Churchill, at a table near her, most deedily occupied about her spectacles, and Jane Fairfax, standing with her back to them, intent on her pianoforté.
Emma’s carefully composed scenes, evocative of the domestic interiors of the contemporary painter, David Wilkie, frequently occupy no more than a sentence but, as Frank Churchill observes, ‘Miss Woodhouse, you have the art of giving pictures in a few words.’
The novel’s portraiture, too, is similarly succinct, Harriet Smith being described as ‘short, plump and fair, with a fine bloom, blue eyes, light hair, regular features, and a look of great sweetness’, in direct contrast to Jane Fairfax, with her ‘dark eye-lashes and eye-brows’ whose beauty is ‘not regular, but… very pleasing’.
Often, the visual set-pieces are created specifically for comic disruption, as when Harriet’s encounter with the gypsies is introduced in the language of the late-eighteenth-century picturesque:
About half a mile beyond Highbury, making a sudden turn, and deeply shaded by elms on each side, it became for a considerable stretch very retired; and when the young ladies had advanced some way into it, they had suddenly perceived at a small distance before them, on a broader patch of greensward by the side, a party of gipsies. A child on the watch came towards them to beg.
The sentimental landscape is, however, disrupted by the more Rowlandsonian reaction of Harriet’s companion:
Miss Bickerton, excessively frightened, gave a great scream, and calling on Harriet to follow her, ran up