Emma - Jane Austen [8]
Even as the aesthetic advantages of the picturesque are exploited, its falseness is mocked, as a more comic perception of human behaviour intrudes on the ideals of contemporary art.
The fluidity of the novel can embrace, within a paragraph, opposing images and attitudes, deriving comic power from surprise and incongruity.27 If Northanger Abbey had played explicitly with literary convention and parody, Emma similarly, but more subtly, jokes about the nature of art through the introduction and immediate deflation of a particular style. The disruption of the picturesque in this passage may suggest the advocacy of a less idealized view of life, but ironically, the apparent emphasis on comic realism is dependent on the reader appreciating both the convention that is being upset and the alternative with which it is juxtaposed.
The evocations of different artistic styles work in much the same way as the puns – teasing the reader with suggested likenesses which are only to be undermined by contradiction and uncertainty. For no sooner has Harriet’s adventure been interpreted as comic than Emma’s very different reading is presented, which sees the episode not as picturesque or burlesque, but as romantic. For Emma, the gypsies are no more than a device to bring together the hero and heroine – ‘a fine young man and a lovely young woman thrown together in such a way’ – for the self-styled ‘imaginist’ the possibilities are irresistible. And yet, as Emma re-creates the incident for others, it is transformed into yet another literary kind:
In her imagination it maintained its ground, and Henry and John were still asking every day for the story of Harriet and the gipsies, and still tenaciously setting her right if she varied in the slightest particular from the original recital.
The rapid generic shifting is also mirrored in the prose itself, which similarly startles the reader through its protean refusal to maintain a consistent voice or tone. If the visual scenes are disrupted by the sudden introduction of an unexpected element, so the third person narrative is persistently broken by free indirect style, dialogue, quotations and letters. At times dialogue becomes dramatic monologue, the speeches (especially those of Mrs Elton or Miss Bates) running on for more than a page of breathless hyphenated excitement. In other scenes, the more staccato exchanges seem closer to drama, especially in the first edition where the page layout allows only eight words to a line.28 There are even stage directions:
‘Well, Miss Woodhouse, (with a gentle sigh,) what do you think of her? – Is not she very charming?’
There was a little hesitation in Emma’s answer.
‘Oh! yes – very – a very pleasing young woman.’
‘I think her beautiful, quite beautiful.’
‘Very nicely dressed, indeed; a remarkably elegant gown.’
‘I am not at all surprized that he should have fallen in love.’
‘Oh! no – there is nothing, to surprize one at all. – A pretty fortune; and she came in his way.’
Nor are the departures from the linear narrative always as clear cut as this; very often a quasi-Johnsonian aphorism will slide almost imperceptibly into interior monologue (‘Perfect happiness, even in memory, is not common; and there were two points on which she was not quite easy’), while much of the apparently omniscient narration reflects the views and prejudices of the eponymous heroine. Indeed, many of the novel’s minor characters never appear at all, while those who do are not given direct speech. The reader becomes familiar with an extraordinary range of figures – William Larkins, the Miss Coxes, the Campbells and the Dixons, Mrs Hodges, Serle, the Churchills, Miss Nash, the Sucklings, Mr Wingfield, James and Hannah – without any description from the narrator.29 Even Mr Perry, who seems an almost ubiquitous presence in High-bury, lives only in the thoughts and dialogue of the major speaking characters, and when at last he appears in person, he is hardly centre-stage: