Emma - Jane Austen [9]
Throughout the novel, the reader is both comforted with the illusion of a cosy rural community of familiar figures, and unsettled by the realization that these figures have been constructed by the individual imagination, working only with hints from other fictional characters.
The difficulty of connecting the language to a particular source is part of the persistent exploration of the nature of reading, and the gentle exposure of the reader’s limited understanding of the novel. Among the most obvious disruptions to the text (and thus the reader’s complacency) are the riddles and poems that Emma delights in collecting. Mr Elton’s charade, for example, stands out boldly from the preceding paragraphs, and continues to disrupt the pages that follow, as it is quoted and requoted by the baffled Harriet. If the reader is initially puzzled, the answer to the riddle is rapidly supplied by Emma, but this does not, in fact, solve all the questions raised by Mr Elton’s poem. The text offers no indication as to whether the poem has supposedly been composed by the vicar of Highbury, or copied from some miscellany or magazine, or concocted from contemporary verses. For although the sentiment is absurdly inflated, the technical quality is rather better than might be expected and thus invites speculation over its origin.30
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