Emma

[nineveh_uk]

I’ve been re-reading Emma to inaugurate my Christmas-present Kindle, on the grounds that getting used to a new delivery system with an old favourite may be better advised than plunging into something new. I love Emma (and Emma), having done it for A-Level*, but I haven’t read it for several years and there is always something to catch my attention. On this occasion, it is how really, really awful Mr Woodhouse is, how damaging Emma is to Harriet, and as compensation for the second, that Emma, normally the world’s least selfless person, really does suffer for her father’s sake. Whatever his faults, when Darcy and Bingley ride into town, Mr Bennett calls on them. The reader may feel sure that Mr Woodhouse would not.

And then after all the no-holds-barred skewering of the follies, foibles, and sheer self-centredness of the rich, you get Austen’s introductory portrait of Miss Bates, a glorious example of telling over showing**. It starts off as the portrait of a woman utterly without distinction, and ends up as something entirely different.

[Mrs. Bates’s] daughter enjoyed a most uncommon degree of popularity for a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married. Miss Bates stood in the very worst predicament in the world for having much of the public favour; and she had no intellectual superiority to make atonement to herself, or frighten those who might hate her into outward respect. She had never boasted either beauty or cleverness. Her youth had passed without distinction, and her middle of life was devoted to the care of a failing mother, and the endeavour to make a small income go as far as possible. And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good-will. It was her own universal good-will and contented temper which worked such wonders. She loved every body, was interested in every body's happiness, quicksighted to every body's merits; thought herself a most fortunate creature, and surrounded with blessings in such an excellent mother, and so many good neighbours and friends, and a home that wanted for nothing. The simplicity and cheerfulness of her nature, her contented and grateful spirit, were a recommendation to every body, and a mine of felicity to herself.

Miss Bates is that rare creature, an Austen character who is genuinely without side and without agenda. She has simultaneously nothing and everything to recommend her. Poor and silly she may be, but her worth as portrayed here is undeniable.

I’ve just reached Emma and Mr Knightley’s row over Harriet Smith and Robert Martin in chapter 8 in which it strikes me that, in addition to the biases existing on either side,*** surely a substantial part of the disagreement is owed to the fact that Mr Knightley, having heard Martin’s intentions, thinks in the midst of it to the effect that “Emma will be pleased by this”, trots up to Hartfield as soon as he has a moment, gets rid of Mr Woodhouse in preparation for a shared gossip – and finds that his highly-prized news is not only outdated, but disdained. No wonder he sees red; this wasn’t how the conversation was supposed to go, and while he may not yet have recognised the reason that he wants to impress Emma, he suffers all the disappointments of not doing so.

*I had a remarkably fine set of A-level texts, A Winter’s Tale and Howard's End notwithstanding. Even though three of them had also been done by my parents

**Miss Bates is terribly hard done by in adaptations.

***One of the great things about Austen is that, while Emma is absolutely in the wrong in terms of the specific situation, a number of her general points to Mr Knightley are in fact right, and his to her concerning Harriet, wrong.

Comments

[pensnest]

Fathers get a pretty rough time in Jane Austen's books, don't they? Sir Thomas is the best character, and he's not a very successful father. I liked Mr Bennett for a long time... I always detested Mr Woodhouse more than even Sir Walter Elliot, and thought it the foremost of Emma's virtues that she had neither smothered him with a pillow nor put arsenic in his tea. Although, one of the TV adaptations I watched recently—I think it's the one with Jonny Lee Miller as Mr Knightly—presented him far more sympathetically than I had ever seen him before, with actual reason for his terror of the world. Interesting. Even so, I'm on Mr John Knightley's side, totally.

[azdak]

Fathers are, indeed, terribly poor stuff (though I still love Mr Bennet for all his flaws). I think Sir Thomas gets the best overt PR from the narrator, but sub-textually is shown to be a slave owner in the way he treats his daughters and niece.

I rather like the way that particular TV adaptation (you're right, it's the Jonny Lee Miller one) fills in biographical gaps. The scene showing Mrs and Miss Bates sending Jane away from their grand house does an excellent job of showing how far they've come down in the world when the story proper starts and what a genuine emotional attachment they have to Jane. Frank Churchill's really good, too - he captures both the charm and the fundamental amorality of the man - although I'm disappointed that they neglected to show him clutching a little phial of rat poison at any point.

[taelle]

clutching a little phial of rat poison

Why? Do you believe his inheritance from his aunt is problematic, or are you talking about something else?

[azdak]

I'm convinced Frank Churchill murdered his aunt - her death is so extremely convenient for him, and there's been no sign up till then that her sill health is anything more than the usual controlling hypochondria. Not until Frank learns during one of his visits that Jane is about to become a governess and be lost to him - then lo and behold Mrs Churchill has a sudden seizure she's never had before and pops off, leaving Frank free to marry whoever he wants. As Mr Knightley observes: "His aunt is in the way. – His aunt dies. –" He might, of course, just be really, really, really lucky, but I would give top marks to any adaptation that at least leaves open the possibility that he helped her on her way.

[nineveh_uk]

Thinking about it, Austen fathers are pretty dreadful. Among minor characters, I suppose that Mr Musgrove is quite decent, but he's not actually called upon to do anything difficult. I haven't read Northanger Abbey for ages, but I think Mr Morland is a decent father (except for having dozens of children he won't be able to provide for), but Admiral Tilney certainly isn't.

I saw that TV adaptation, but for some reason remember little of the detail. I think because it had stuff I really liked and stuff I really didn't, and there appeared to be a giant stick uup Jonny Lee Miller's bum.

[heliopausa]

Miss Bates is facing a pretty grim, lonely, old age, too, when her mother dies. (Thank goodness for Jane Fairfax! who is the one who'll have to pick up the responsibility there.)

[azdak]

Not if she dies in childbirth, she won't... (apparently that was Austen's head canon, according to her relatives - it would certainly account for the passing mention of Jane's heart problem as "the standing apprehension of the family). Miss Bates is facing a really awful future - and I can't see a widowed Frank Churchill being keen to take responsibiity for her, either.

[heliopausa]

Awkward!
And certainly Frank Churchill's not the man to think anything is his responsibility. On the other hand, he's not a man to stand out against strong expectations and social pressure either - but I won't pin my hopes on those. :(

Well... Jane Fairfax is very clear-sighted and decisive in action; she would surely have realised both her aunt's bleak prospects (do we know the source of the Bates' income? i.e. would it all come to Miss Bates, or would some of it die with her mother?) and the risk she ran in childbirth, and I must hope had made some thoughtful provision, in case of her death. (If not, it'll have to be the Knightleys.)

[azdak]

I'm not sure that Jane would have anything to bequeath? The fortune is all Frank's - she herself is penniless. She might have been able to extract a promise for him to provide for the Bates's if anything happened to her, though, and in the first flush of grief he might even have kept that promise.

[nineveh_uk]

I wonder whether Frank (or Mr Churchill, whose money it actually is at this point) would make a financial settlement on Jane at the time of the marriage (and legally how possible this is in terms of women's rights to hold money/property at the time, but I think if you were rich you could organise it), and whether that might be somthing she could bequeath to her aunt/grandmother in the event of her death, given that the Churchill money will be ample to provide cash for daughters' marriages. Relatively speaking, it probably wouldn't have to be a lot to keep Miss Bates' in the style she currently has.

[legionseagle]

Women could hold property as femmes soles but not femmes couvertes, so prior to marriage the prospective husband makes a settlement on trust for the wife. Depending on the terms of the settlement and how forthcoming the trustees were about it, it ought to have been possible for a wealthy man to settle (say) £10,000 (remember Mr Bennet saying that Wickham would be a fool to take Lydia for a farthing less than £10K?) on his wife for her lifetime, and on the children of the marriage following her death, but with a provision that Mrs and Miss Bates would enjoy the income (but not be able to touch the capital) of a portion of the fortune while they lived.

[nineveh_uk]

Thank you for the explanation! Mr Churchill seems fairly amenable and a bit weak, so no doubt Frank could persuade him.

[legionseagle]

Especially since Mr Weston and Mr Knightley would be the obvious trustees for Jane, and they would very definitely encourage those arrangements.

[nineveh_uk]

That would sort things out nicely.

[heliopausa]

She has "the very few hundred pounds which she inherited from her father", which is still too little to make an independence. If we call it two hundred and fifty at 5%, that's little enough, but maybe added to whatever's keeping the household afloat, it would be enough to see Miss Bates through? I think a lot depends on whether Mrs Bates has an annuity.

[nineveh_uk]

I don't think we do know the source of the Bates' income. I assume, though, that at least some of it will die with Mrs Bates (so perhaps an annuity?) given that Mr Knightley has a line about Miss Bates having sunk from the station she was born to (presumably when her father was alive) "and should she live to be an old woman she will sink further" implying a cut in income.

[heliopausa]

You're right - that does imply an annuity. :( I think a single woman, living very modestly, would need about fifty pounds a year (or about a thousand pounds invested). So there's at the worst thirty-five pounds a year to find (or wring out of Frank Churchill. I wonder if the Dixons could do something? If Mrs Dixon is there at the birth, and hears Jane's anxieties?

[nineveh_uk]

I wonder if the Campbells rather than the Dixons would be more inclined to help out a bit, given that it is the memory of Jane's father that inspires them in the first place. But possibly they would think that they had given enough and didn't care about a dusty old aunt.

[legionseagle]

I think the relatives said Jane lived nine years after her marriage and perhaps that was long enough for her to get Frank to settle something reasonable on the Bates relatives.

[azdak]

I must confess that I get a morbid sort of satisfaction from imagining Jane dying less than a year after her marriage, leaving Frank absolutely distraught. She doesn't deserve it, poor girl, but he could do with not being lucky for once.

[legionseagle]

Oh, but he'll just waltz around with his epic man-pain and snare someone else. Like Benwick.

[nineveh_uk]

Or we could leave Jane alive, and have Frank arrested for murder. After the marriage, of course, so she doesn't have to go back to governessing.

[legionseagle]

I think they were still forfeiting criminals' estates at the relevant date. That wouldn't do.

[antisoppist]

Emma thinking she knew what was better for Harriet better than Harriet did was what put me off it when I first read it. It made me cross and Emma being wrong was embarrassing and I haven't re-read it in twenty or so years. I probably should. We did Persuasion for A-level, which I love. That too is about people persuading other people to do the wrong thing, but it all happened before the book began and we don't have to watch it happening while cringing in agony.

[caulkhead]

It's worth a try. I reread it for the first time in twenty years last year and was glad I did. It'll never be my favourite, but I enjoyed it a lot more than when I was 18, and I seem to have got better at dealing with received embarrassment in the meantime.

Also, I don't think I realised when I read it before just how dreadful Mr Woodhouse is.

[antisoppist]

Oh I definitely got how dreadful Mr Woodhouse is :-)

I will re-read it but I have to finish Mansfield Park for the first time first.

[azdak]

I don't know if it helps with the fremdschämen, the cringing on Emma's behalf, but I think Emma herself is immune to embarrassment. She can feel shame, but it's shame at failing to live up to her own - and Mr Knightley's - standards rather than embarrassment at what anyone else might think. It's why Mr Elton's proposal is my favourite scene in the book - Emma isn't even the tiniest bit embarrassed by the situation, she's merely outraged, and she has no compunction about expressing her outrage. I can't think of any other woman, certainly not a heroine, who wouldn't feel that it must be in some tiny way her fault for misleading him into getting his hopes up, but Emma is so busy being gobsmacked that he had the gall to raise his sights to her that she completely forgets to feel any responsibility for his feelings. And whereas even Elizabeth Bennet can't get rid of an unwanted suitor on her own, Emma makes mincemeat of him. I simply can't imagine Emma cringing about anything, not even being proved wrong.

[legionseagle]

I think she feels actual shame in the scene with Miss Bates on Box Hill, and that in some ways is even worse than embarrassment - sheet-kicking for ever afterwards, to use a Forestian phrase which really resonates.

[nineveh_uk]

I adore the carriage scene beyond measure (perhaps helped by seeing a wonderful version of it in a stage production when I was 17/18), Emma is just so gloriously appalled that Elton can possibly be presuming to raise his hopes to her, and then to say that she encouraged him... It's amazing they can ever look one another in the face afterwards, really.

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

A-hem, what's the matter with The Winter's Tale and Howards End? (Other than the fact that the latter gave me a morbid fear of Death By Bookcase, but I think that was mainly Merchant & Ivory's fault.)

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Nothing as works, but dreadful as A-level texts.There are only three questions that can be asked about TWT (all dull), and Howard's End's whole set-up felt incredibly alien, and the characters totally unsympathetic and uninteresting. I think part of it was that we expected that the worldviews in Chaucer and Austen and Shakespeare to be different, and you could see that they are, but the worldview in Forster is also massively alien to 17 year olds in a suburban city comprehensive school (Mrs Wilcox's "how dreadful not to be able to die in the house you grew up" got the world's greatest eye-rolling you can imagine), but in a way that was much harder to articulate beyond thinking that you disliked the book and everyone in it.

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

Ah, got it. The American equivalent is The Scarlet Letter, a fine book that absolutely should not be inflicted upon sixteen-year-olds under any circumstances, because they'll either hate it or, God help me, end up with a crush on Roger Chillingworth. (Actually, I think I hated it AND had a crush on Chillingworth, although I have no memory of how I managed to do both of these things at once.)

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

I may have been the only sixteen-year-old in my high school who really liked The Scarlet Letter, but that was mostly because watching Dimmesdale's life falling apart was so fascinating. I liked Ethan Frome for the same reason, actually. I can see the potential for a Chillingworth crush, though (and I can't even imagine the fanfic that's been written about those two). The one I was really too young for was The Great Gatsby. My God, those people were annoying.

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

That's funny, I think most of my eleventh-grade class loved The Great Gatsby (it helped that we had a teacher who was really, really into it). Just goes to show how hit-and-miss it all is; I guess people are ready for different books at different ages, and perhaps the best high school teachers can hope to do is throw enough books at everyone for some of them to stick.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I have never actually read The Scarlet Letter (or any Hawthorne at all), and I suspect a sort of osmotic loathing may be at work. Though now maybe I should stick it on the ereader.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Mr Woodhouse is an absolute horror - he and Miss Bates are the main reasons why for years I always emerged from Emma with a sense of profound relief that I had escaped this ghastly, claustrophobic world and could breathe again. Last summer was the first time I actually managed to enjoy reading it, and that was only by saying to myself "I'm going to believe the narrator when she says that Mr Woodhouse's determination to ruin everybody's fun arises from a genuine misconception that it's good for them." That got me through it, although secretly I still felt that he was a monster of selfishness and idleness. It did strike me, though, that he was the kind of character you would call "an old woman" - in a way, a kind of Mrs Churchill, forcing everyone to dance attendance on him through ill health of doubtful veracity and doing his level best to rule everyone's lives, not by overt bossiness but by the martyrdom he goes through when they flout his wishes. Intellectually and conversationally, he and Miss Bates are perfectly matched, but she's a poor woman and he's a rich man, so everyone dances attendance on him while she has to be grateful to be invited to babysit him.

You would like the Miss Bates in the Romula Garai Emma, I think. She's played by Fran from Black Books, not just as a blithering bore but as someone trying desperately to cope with an intolerable situation. There's a sort of blank look that comes into her eyes every so often when she's on the verge of recognising the horror of her existence, and then she'll start gabbling again. But it has to be said that it's not a very funny portrayal and in that sense not very Austenesque.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

The comparison to Mrs Churchill is a striking one. Mr Woodhouse is arguably even better at the role, because he manages the social niceties that make people think him a decent person, in that while everyone bitches about how awful Mrs C is, they defer to Mr Woodhouse and he doesn't end up poisoned. Despite the fact that Mr Woodhouse is in some respects worse. Frank at least gets to see his father in London once a year, travelling from Yorkshire, whereas Emma has never made it the 16 miles to her sister's house. I do wonder what the valuable service Mr Woodhouse did to Mrs Goddard in the past was, as that suggests he may once have been a man of greater activity.

I had mixed feelings about the Garai Emma, but I think I liked Tamsin Grieg - she at least didn't irritate me my seeming to bounce everywhere.

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

I never grasped the full horror of Mr. Woodhouse until I was an adult and started being obliged to host family members of varying degrees who complained as frequently (and with as little awareness) as they breathed. A week was more than enough to make me start wishing I had become an anchorite -- the fact that Emma has been caring for and listening to her father for nine years and has refrained from putting arsenic in his gruel says a lot about her character. And while Miss Bates is a wonderful character it's difficult to be amused by her when she's so obviously hanging on by a thread financially, and how she has to be happy with whatever the people around her choose to give her -- of course, with neighbours like Mr. Knightley (and eventually a nephew like Mr. Churchill) she'll never starve, but so much of that was just luck of the draw.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

He really is ghastly. I found myself wondering this time around how on earth Emma's mother, who is supposed to have been very clever and of strong character, came to marry him.

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's like the reverse of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet -- he was handsome when younger, they didn't know each other very long and she made the mistake of thinking that marriage would clear up his minor complaints. And afterwards, she realized that she was sentenced to experience the grief of being unable to respect her partner in life.

[mrs-redboots.livejournal.com]

I simply cannot read Emma. I have tried and tried, but just simply can't. I did quite enjoy the Kiera Knightley adaptation, mind, but when I then tried to read it - no. Just no.

I don't know why I can't - I enjoy every other Austen novel, but that one just sticks in my craw, for some reason.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I love it, but I did have the help of a teacher who was enormously enthusiastic about it, so the risk of ploughing to a halt in the face of snobbery etc. was minimised.