Edmund
Wilson remarked in 1950 that, despite several revolutions in taste during the
preceding century and a quarter of English literature, perhaps only two
reputations were never affected by shifts of fashion, Shakespeare’s and Jane
Austen’s. We still agree with Walter Scott about Jane Austen just as we still
agree with Ben Jonson about Shakespeare.” Wilson
ranked Austen — with Dickens — as the only English novelists who belong to the
top rank with the great fiction writers of Russia and France. Yet Austen’s tone
is clearly not that of Dickens. “God bless us everyone” is not her note.
Although Wilson never really accounted for Austen’s enduring and intense
popularity —he offered too many contradictory reasons for it — I want to take
seriously his observation that in some sense she seems to offer us the
satisfaction we find also in Shakespeare. We
have her own acknowledgment of influence, though characteristically offered by
the unreliable, even morally shadowy, Henry Crawford: “Shakespeare one gets
acquainted with without knowing how. It’s a part of an English constitution.
His thought and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere.
One is intimate with him by instinct.” Although the last phrase —“intimate with
him by instinct”— from such a speaker arouses misgivings, the observation is
just. Shakespeare is so deeply woven into the fabric of English culture that Austen
could not but have been influenced by him. That this influence was instinctive
one may doubt, given Austen’s sharpness. Wilson drew the parallel oddly: “Emma
is to Jane Austen as Hamlet is to Shakespeare.” It is this perhaps that leads
him to detect tragic notes in Emma. I
want to compare Austen’s sense of comic form with that of Shakespeare and so
will content myself with comparing Emma
and A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Shakespeare’s comic version of Romeo and
Juliet, written just before or just after that tragedy of young love by
that versatile genius, and quite his most complex examination of human love
seen in comic form. I take my cue from Austen’s heroine herself who, early in
the progress of her schemes, lectures Harriet on Shakespeare. There does seem to be something in the air of Hartfield which give love exactly the right direction and sends it into the very channel where it ought to flow. The course of true love never did run smooth.
A Hartfield
edition of Shakespeare would have a long note on that passage. We
find with some surprise that Emma has read
Shakespeare (not all of the books on her list get read, many no more than the
first chapter). The irony and comic foreshadowing in Emma is, in fact, a long
note on that passage, confirming Shakespeare in his wisdom. The
model for the form of comedy comes from Northrup Frye. Using anthropological
knowledge of the sources of comedy in rituals celebrating the death of the old
year and the coming of spring and renewal, Frye analyzes comedy as the form
closely associated with spring, poised between wintry irony and satire, and
summer romance, just where we would locate Austen. She is closer perhaps to
cooler irony than to warmer romance, but using elements of partying, feasting,
dancing, and other celebrations —often in the green world of nature itself
(Donwell Abbey and Box Hill) and ending in many marriages. Frye’s chief example
of this central form is Shakespeare. Austen, like Shakespeare, takes her
characters through an elaborate dance of mismatched couples, intricately
interwoven, and finally unraveled into the form it should have taken from the
beginning. Emma is finally correct: “There is something in the air of Hartfield
which gives love exactly the right direction.” One
great difference between Shakespeare and Austen is of course that Austen is not
a poet, but Emma has, in its heroine,
an imaginist working on un-poetic materials. Another great difference between
the two writers, closely related to the first, is that Shakespeare’s comedies
are worlds of rich fantasy while Austen’s world is the commonplace and
everyday—three or four families in a country village or, as she put it with
characteristic irony, “human nature in the midland counties” — her acknowledged
limitation of material that links her oddly enough to her great contemporary,
the poet Wordsworth, who found sublimity in the simplest things. Her
heroine’s world supplies little for the imagination to work on, so trifles loom
large — Emma’s broken shoelace which insinuates herself and Harriet into
Elton’s home, Harriet’s relics of a court plaster and old pencil stubs. Not
precisely the world of romance but Emma does her best with such limited
materials. Her magical powers, so feared by her father, brought Miss Taylor and
Mr. Weston together in marriage. Elton’s charade was, she tells her father,
“dropped, we suppose, by a fairy.” Emma’s portrait of Harriet is quite magical
—it throws a veil of enchantment over its rather pallid subject and over some
of its viewers at least (Mr. Woodhouse wishes that Harriet were dressed more
warmly in the dangerous out-of-doors). For
Harriet, a girl of blank name and prospects, Emma conjures up an exciting,
gothic mystery and an ideal future. The gypsies who threaten Harriet and allow
Frank Churchill chivalrously to save her seem almost a product of Emma’s eager
fancy. As Shakespeare’s Puck is to the denizens of his woods, Emma is also a
kind of Puck, putting her magic potion in the wrong eyes. Emma has darker fantasies too —the Dixon
story she dreams up for Jane Fairfax. And Mr. Weston, her great admirer — after
Frank has blundered into knowing too much Highbury gossip and waved it away as
“a dream” — says, “Emma, you are a great dreamer, I think.” Like the wood of
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
the air of Highbury is full of voices — many of them Emma’s inventions — that
produce the cross-purposes of the story and the complex course of love. It is that complex view of love that Austen shares with Shakespeare. Her books do not follow an easy course from winter to spring looking to summer. In fact, the pattern of Emma slyly works against the traditional comic form. It begins in cold and rainy October — here I take Woodhouse’s view — as I think we should — of a marriage that mixes joy and sorrow. “Poor Miss Taylor” and poor Emma left alone, with only her father’s backgammon and the looming prospect of “intellectual solitude.” The dangers of the wedding cake are sharply present to Mr. Woodhouse —indigestible, not for children. He hopes there will be no more marriages (and indeed wedding cake is dangerous and indigestible). We are told of Weston’s first marriage and we will later be exposed to the horrors of the Elton marriage. Christmas
is far from a holiday season; it brings the tense visit of John and Isabella,
the Westons’ Christmas party and threatening winter. Around a dangerous corner
in the road, Weston’s good wine provokes the outrageous revelation of Elton’s
purposes in the painful confines of a closed carriage, and Emma’s sharp remorse
for the sickly Harriet. Mr. Woodhouse is right about dangers to health. The
spring in the novel is a false spring — it brings Frank Churchill, an even more
troublesome Puck with a deceitful manner and name (“Frank” indeed!) and a
bride, Mrs. Elton, who arouses the gravest doubts about marriage as a happy
ending. Perhaps
Mr. Woodhouse is right —weddings are funerals in a way. In summer we find the
setting of romance — the teasingly promising Donwell Abbey, the natural
restitution of a simple book into which Mr. Knightley would lead Emma, but also
the disasters of Box Hill where all the promises seem defeated and Emma loses
her magical powers. In fact, the summer season of unconsummated romance brings
instead bad weather —unseemly storms and chill, and the breaking-up of all
circles and alliances. Austen’s novel ends as it began, in a bleak season and
October and November marriages. Austen does not follow any pattern slavishly
but makes her own pattern. As
everyone knows, Emma as a novel tests
its readers even more than its characters. Austen plays upon our conventional
expectations only to disappoint them and then fulfill them in a richer way, as
Shakespeare tests his audience with Pyramus and Thisbe. And Emma, both heroine
and mischief maker, is, as Austen notes in a letter, “a heroine whom no one
will like except (her)self.” Even
if her knightly hero is right about Frank Churchill, it is for the wrong
reason, his jealousy. In his reasonableness he is as foolish as Emma. It is
Knightley in the beginning of the book who described marriage —a rational,
straight-forward, open hearted man and a rational unaffected woman. Reason is
as great a maker of fools in Austen’s work as in Shakespeare’s. And this brings
me to their closest likeness — the generosity and inclusiveness of their comic
view of the world. Hard words for Austen’s lovers, good words for Austen’s
fools —especially Mr. Woodhouse, Miss Bates, and Harriet. Mr.
Woodhouse is, as I have suggested, a voice to listen to — wedding cake is dangerous, weddings imply partings
and change and he, being old, is the enemy of change. After all, it brings him
closer to the end of things, a winter, which in human terms, is eternal. He is
right in some of his fears too — people do fall ill, horses do go lame, weather
does turn treacherous, all change is not for the better. Is the sea of any use
to anyone? Certainly it has its dangers, too. Watering places are sinister.
Bath and Maple Grove, the engagements of Elton, Frank and Jane. He is right
about Frank Churchill. That young man will not do (opens windows and makes
deadly drafts). He is the great test of Emma and of the reader in the face of
the temptations of sweetbreads, oysters, etc. Miss
Bates is an easier fool to come to terms with. She represents Emma’s real
testing at Box Hill, but she also represents the reader’s testing throughout
the book. If we read through her
monologues with impatience, we miss the true setting of the book’s poetry and
also some wicked fun — mixing up the Elton nuptials and a dressed loin of pork.
We are initially tempted to dismiss her as a comic caricature— to be
appreciated intellectually as an object of wit—good and ridiculous mixed; a
walking anticlimax, an empty rattle (Haven’t we, like Emma, seen her this
way?). She subtly draws attention to her poverty —her losses —a poverty which
can only grow worse —her narrowing circumstances. Against
this is her joy in little things, in commonplaces, in the flowering of a joyful
spirit in a barren ground, in her openness and embrace of life, however little
it gives her. Her genial transformation of so little into so much — think what
she did with Knightley’s gift of apples in all forms: pies, dumplings, even Mr.
Woodhouse’s favorite, simple and thoroughly baked. In her we have a spirit very
close to that of Austen’s craft in the robust embrace of limited human
condition. Bottom,
who really sees the truth that the Duke of Athens and the enchanted lovers
miss, is loved by the Queen of the Fairies. Her Bottom-like wisdom is shared in
Shakespeare. And that even more surprising comic reversal occurs when Emma, who
has taught Harriet about love, is finally instructed by her pupil who asks,
“How could anyone be preferred to Mr. Knightley?” revealing to Emma the truth
of her own heart. Harriet’s greatest heroism occurs just because she is a fool
who rushes in where angels fear to tread. So wisdom is revealed as foolish and
folly is wise. And Austen’s comedy, like Shakespeare’s, is surprising and
unconventional and inclusive. After
all the happy pairings of the conclusion — the best is the marriage of true
friends, friends before lovers — as always in Austen —the scene is marred
embarrassingly by Mrs. Elton with a last disapproving comment, “very little
white satin, very few lace veils, a most pitiful business.” As
Miss Bates says: “Such a happiness when good people get together.” This is not
all self-congratulatory — Miss Bates would not be. It is a just observation.
All people are seen to be good when they get together — brought together by
manners and human desire for festivity and community (a touch of “God bless us
everyone”) — but also, as Miss Bates says, “they always do.” We make our life
out of the circumstances life provides — some limited as Mrs. Weston and Miss
Bates remind us — so we must meet and live with Mrs. Elton too, forever: with a
hard-head as well as a genial spirit. Emma
is a model of social inclusiveness and moral realism.
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