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Authors: Jane Austen
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no wonder that Jane’s health begins to break down, her nerves to crack, and her composure to falter. She is rescued from being ground up by the forces of social circumstance, which also propel social change, only through the intervening exigencies of comic conventions, including the comic plot.
In Emma Jane Austen enlarges her social imagination in the direction of downward inclusiveness. When Emma takes Harriet along with her to visit a “poor sick family,” she is on a mission of charitable obligation and behaves with compassion and tact. She gives relief to these poor people in the form of money, along with her “personal attention and kindness.” She enters into “their troubles with ready sympathy” but does not idealize them; she could “allow for their ignorance and their temptations, had no romantic expectations of extraordinary virtue from those for whom education had done so little” (p. 78). As they leave the cottage, she moralizes to Harriet to the effect that such scenes serve to restore one’s sense of moral proportion; they make everything else appear “trifling.” At the moment, her consciousness is flooded with impressions brought about by squalor and misery; and, she goes on, she feels as if she could think about “ ‘these poor creatures all the rest of the day; and yet, who can say how soon it may all vanish from my mind?’ ” This morsel of easily won and easily understood self-critical reflection is parroted by Harriet, and Emma then proceeds to assert that she does not think “ ‘the impression will soon be over.’ ” She offers this self-correction as “she crossed the low hedge, and tottering footstep which ended the narrow, slippery path through the cottage garden.” Emma then repeats herself once again, as she pauses “to look once more at all the outward wretchedness of the place, and recall the still greater within” (p. 78).
As they walk down the lane, Mr. Elton appears, and Emma realizes that her “stability in good thoughts” is about to vanish. But, she resiliently continues, “ ‘If we feel for the wretched, enough to do all we can for them, the rest is empty sympathy, only distressing to ourselves’ ” (pp. 82-83). And she at once resumes her imaginings and matchmaking. In such a passage, Jane Austen directs attention to the incompatibilities and cross-purposes, registered in personal attitudes and responsiveness, that cannot in this historical world be undone. Emma is self-consciously cognizant of the constraints that bind them all, and the narrator is a touch more aware of dissonances and overtones than Emma. These poor are of course among the Nobodies. They remain nameless and are swallowed up in the conventional abstractions of “sickness and poverty.” There is no hint of an imagination of possible social improvement, much less of structural change. It is Jane Austen and not Emma who puts us in the way of inferring such defects and fallings short.
Emma also takes brief notice of those who are external to the context of English society altogether. These are the gypsies, nomadic people who are both homeless and seek no home. They harass and terrify Harriet with their importunate begging, and Frank Churchill’s fortunate appearance turns “the terror” they had been creating in Harriet into “their own portion.” He half-carries the fainting Harriet to Hartfield, where she collapses; and he entrusts Emma to bring “notice of there being such a set of people in the neighbourhood to Mr. Knightley” (p. 303). These “trampers” may reduce Harriet to fear and trembling, but they are no more than a nuisance to individual persons. They represent nothing really dangerous, since they are an alien and external agency and signify no endogenous threat, precisely because they are so utterly exterior. The local magistrate will shoo them off. One of the better-known myths about gypsies was that they inveterately steal babies. Harriet Smith (Smith being the
In Emma Jane Austen enlarges her social imagination in the direction of downward inclusiveness. When Emma takes Harriet along with her to visit a “poor sick family,” she is on a mission of charitable obligation and behaves with compassion and tact. She gives relief to these poor people in the form of money, along with her “personal attention and kindness.” She enters into “their troubles with ready sympathy” but does not idealize them; she could “allow for their ignorance and their temptations, had no romantic expectations of extraordinary virtue from those for whom education had done so little” (p. 78). As they leave the cottage, she moralizes to Harriet to the effect that such scenes serve to restore one’s sense of moral proportion; they make everything else appear “trifling.” At the moment, her consciousness is flooded with impressions brought about by squalor and misery; and, she goes on, she feels as if she could think about “ ‘these poor creatures all the rest of the day; and yet, who can say how soon it may all vanish from my mind?’ ” This morsel of easily won and easily understood self-critical reflection is parroted by Harriet, and Emma then proceeds to assert that she does not think “ ‘the impression will soon be over.’ ” She offers this self-correction as “she crossed the low hedge, and tottering footstep which ended the narrow, slippery path through the cottage garden.” Emma then repeats herself once again, as she pauses “to look once more at all the outward wretchedness of the place, and recall the still greater within” (p. 78).
As they walk down the lane, Mr. Elton appears, and Emma realizes that her “stability in good thoughts” is about to vanish. But, she resiliently continues, “ ‘If we feel for the wretched, enough to do all we can for them, the rest is empty sympathy, only distressing to ourselves’ ” (pp. 82-83). And she at once resumes her imaginings and matchmaking. In such a passage, Jane Austen directs attention to the incompatibilities and cross-purposes, registered in personal attitudes and responsiveness, that cannot in this historical world be undone. Emma is self-consciously cognizant of the constraints that bind them all, and the narrator is a touch more aware of dissonances and overtones than Emma. These poor are of course among the Nobodies. They remain nameless and are swallowed up in the conventional abstractions of “sickness and poverty.” There is no hint of an imagination of possible social improvement, much less of structural change. It is Jane Austen and not Emma who puts us in the way of inferring such defects and fallings short.
Emma also takes brief notice of those who are external to the context of English society altogether. These are the gypsies, nomadic people who are both homeless and seek no home. They harass and terrify Harriet with their importunate begging, and Frank Churchill’s fortunate appearance turns “the terror” they had been creating in Harriet into “their own portion.” He half-carries the fainting Harriet to Hartfield, where she collapses; and he entrusts Emma to bring “notice of there being such a set of people in the neighbourhood to Mr. Knightley” (p. 303). These “trampers” may reduce Harriet to fear and trembling, but they are no more than a nuisance to individual persons. They represent nothing really dangerous, since they are an alien and external agency and signify no endogenous threat, precisely because they are so utterly exterior. The local magistrate will shoo them off. One of the better-known myths about gypsies was that they inveterately steal babies. Harriet Smith (Smith being the
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