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Authors: Jane Austen
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equivalent of X) does not know who her parents are and might be, for all she knows, a changeling as well as a foundling. Perhaps to her terrorized state of mind they were attempting to steal her back! xiv
There is nothing to do about the gypsies but move them on. They are there, inexplicably, outside the boundaries of full social intelligibility. But there are other anomalies as well. In Emma, Jane Austen goes to considerable lengths to name and particularize both outlying members of the respectable Highbury community and the servants who are omnipresent throughout and make comfortable life possible for their masters and mistresses. Among others, we learn about Mr. Perry and Mr. Coxe, whose son and daughter have mysteriously dropped the “e” from the spelling of their surname. We also hear of Mrs. Wallis, who runs the village bakery and who is supposed to be uncivil, and about James the coachman as well as his daughter, and Hannah and Patty and Mrs. Hodges, Knightley’s housekeeper, who frets over apple tart. These are all figures imagined in an effort to flesh out the representation (and our impression) of an actual functioning community, of a textured social world, including specified and individuated minor and subminor characters (as Dickens would shortly do). But this very effort paradoxically serves to bring into sudden relief instances in which the opposite occurs. When Frank Churchill brings Harriet to Hartfield, she is collapsing and leaning on his arm. Emma is outdoors and is surprised “when the great iron sweep-gate opened, and two persons entered” (p. 302). The great iron sweep-gate did not open by itself. Somebody pushed it open and pulled it to. This is a genuine reification in the sense that the servant who opens the gate has become invisible and been absorbed in the gate itself: The gate has been correspondingly endowed with human will and agency. Frank’s chance meeting with Harriet is represented in a similar mode. He has been on his way out of the village, but the “pleasantness of the morning had induced him to walk forward, and leave his horses to meet him by another road, a mile or two beyond Highbury” (p. 303). What has happened, to be sure, is that Frank has left his horse with the mounted servant who has accompanied him and has agreed to meet up with the servant and the horses again later on. But the servant’s identity, his human being, has been eclipsed; he has been erased and banished from the scene and from narrative consciousness, and the horses, intelligent creatures that they are, will no doubt find their way to the appointed meeting all by themselves. xv
Before we jump all over Jane Austen for having committed a false consciousness, we might reflect that such lapses are connected with the endeavor she is making to be more inclusive. She is, I believe, intuitively aware that the course of her own development (as well as that of the novel) requires the progressive and individualized incorporation of the Nobodies and Nothings who largely make up our and her world. These Nobodies include the Eltons and Mrs. Churchill before she was married; they embrace Weston and Frank Churchill as soon as he is compared to Knightley; they explicitly account for everyone in this novel except for the Knightleys and the Woodhouses (and the far-away Yorkshire Churchills). These gentry and lower gentry and less distinguished middling families are the experiential base out of which Jane Austen’s imagination rose, which it neither abandoned nor affirmed uncritically. As she enhanced the social range and creative reach of her novelistic intelligence, she concomitantly opened herself to including the lapses, contradictions, illogicalities, and even inhumanity that were constituent elements of the social and cultural world that she lived in, and of the larger consciousness that she both expressed and worked successfully to alter.
Another realization of how Jane Austen’s impulse to be extensive, exact,
There is nothing to do about the gypsies but move them on. They are there, inexplicably, outside the boundaries of full social intelligibility. But there are other anomalies as well. In Emma, Jane Austen goes to considerable lengths to name and particularize both outlying members of the respectable Highbury community and the servants who are omnipresent throughout and make comfortable life possible for their masters and mistresses. Among others, we learn about Mr. Perry and Mr. Coxe, whose son and daughter have mysteriously dropped the “e” from the spelling of their surname. We also hear of Mrs. Wallis, who runs the village bakery and who is supposed to be uncivil, and about James the coachman as well as his daughter, and Hannah and Patty and Mrs. Hodges, Knightley’s housekeeper, who frets over apple tart. These are all figures imagined in an effort to flesh out the representation (and our impression) of an actual functioning community, of a textured social world, including specified and individuated minor and subminor characters (as Dickens would shortly do). But this very effort paradoxically serves to bring into sudden relief instances in which the opposite occurs. When Frank Churchill brings Harriet to Hartfield, she is collapsing and leaning on his arm. Emma is outdoors and is surprised “when the great iron sweep-gate opened, and two persons entered” (p. 302). The great iron sweep-gate did not open by itself. Somebody pushed it open and pulled it to. This is a genuine reification in the sense that the servant who opens the gate has become invisible and been absorbed in the gate itself: The gate has been correspondingly endowed with human will and agency. Frank’s chance meeting with Harriet is represented in a similar mode. He has been on his way out of the village, but the “pleasantness of the morning had induced him to walk forward, and leave his horses to meet him by another road, a mile or two beyond Highbury” (p. 303). What has happened, to be sure, is that Frank has left his horse with the mounted servant who has accompanied him and has agreed to meet up with the servant and the horses again later on. But the servant’s identity, his human being, has been eclipsed; he has been erased and banished from the scene and from narrative consciousness, and the horses, intelligent creatures that they are, will no doubt find their way to the appointed meeting all by themselves. xv
Before we jump all over Jane Austen for having committed a false consciousness, we might reflect that such lapses are connected with the endeavor she is making to be more inclusive. She is, I believe, intuitively aware that the course of her own development (as well as that of the novel) requires the progressive and individualized incorporation of the Nobodies and Nothings who largely make up our and her world. These Nobodies include the Eltons and Mrs. Churchill before she was married; they embrace Weston and Frank Churchill as soon as he is compared to Knightley; they explicitly account for everyone in this novel except for the Knightleys and the Woodhouses (and the far-away Yorkshire Churchills). These gentry and lower gentry and less distinguished middling families are the experiential base out of which Jane Austen’s imagination rose, which it neither abandoned nor affirmed uncritically. As she enhanced the social range and creative reach of her novelistic intelligence, she concomitantly opened herself to including the lapses, contradictions, illogicalities, and even inhumanity that were constituent elements of the social and cultural world that she lived in, and of the larger consciousness that she both expressed and worked successfully to alter.
Another realization of how Jane Austen’s impulse to be extensive, exact,
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