A Psychological Reading of Emma

Austen names the condition before the plot begins. The real evils of Emma's situation are the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself. Miss Taylor has been in the family sixteen years, less a governess than a sister, and her temper hardly allowed her to impose restraint. Mr Woodhouse is affectionate and frightened of the world. Between a friend who will not govern and a father who needs his daughter to stay, Emma becomes mistress of Hartfield early, and mistress of the interpretation of Hartfield as well.

Mr Knightley says the same fact from outside the charm. Emma is spoiled by being the cleverest of her family. At ten she had the misfortune of being able to answer questions which puzzled her sister at seventeen. She will never submit to anything requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding. A child who is always the one who sees does not learn the feeling of being corrected. Error will not arrive as information. It will arrive as an insult to the person she has been allowed to be.

The first evening after Miss Taylor's wedding is the fantasy in miniature. Emma is lonely, and she answers the loneliness by taking credit. She made the match herself, four years ago, and to have it take place, and be proved right, when so many people said Mr Weston would never marry again, may comfort her for anything. Knightley will not let the boast stand. Two people who wished to marry each other did not require a girl in the next house to invent them. The quarrel is small and it organises the book. Emma needs the marriage to be her work. If the Westons simply chose one another, then affection can happen without her, and the empty chair at Hartfield is only a loss, not a proof of her skill.

She tells Harriet the other half of the same defence. She has very little intention of ever marrying at all. Fortune she does not want. Employment she does not want. Consequence she does not want. She is already mistress of Hartfield. The refusal is sincere and it is useful. A woman who has decided she will not be the subject of a match can spend the novel as its author. Other people's desire becomes the material. Her own stays off the page she is writing.

Harriet Smith is the natural daughter of somebody, a parlour-boarder at Mrs Goddard's, pretty, good-tempered, and not clever. The unknown father is what Emma requires. A blank birth can be filled with a gentleman, and a gentleman makes Robert Martin impossible. Martin is a farmer Emma herself calls sensible, and his proposal is a fact written in a letter. Emma does not answer the letter. She answers the rank she has decided Harriet must have. Knightley has already said the intimacy will do neither of them good. Harriet will gain a little polish and lose the power of being satisfied with a man who would have suited her. Emma hears that as a quarrel about her, not as a description of the harm.

The portrait, the charade, and the carriage are one method. She paints Harriet so Elton can admire the sitting, and she reads his riddle as a message to the sitter. In the carriage from Randalls he proposes to Emma. She is astonished that he takes her for her friend. He is insulted by the idea of Harriet. The error is total, and for a few chapters she feels it. Then the method resumes. It is not a hobby that failed. It is how she stays the person who understands the room. A mind that has not been vexed can confess one mistake and still believe the next story will be the correction.

Jane Fairfax is the figure the method cannot use. She is an orphan, raised by Colonel Campbell above the fortune that will be hers, and she is being returned to Highbury to face the only profession left to a gentlewoman without money. Emma has the leisure to dislike her reserve. Jane is elegant, accomplished, and unwilling to be known on Emma's terms. Where Harriet offers a blank, Jane offers a finished surface and a future Emma does not control. The dislike is not a mystery of taste. It is the irritation of a mind that reads people for a living, meeting a person who will not supply the lines.

The anonymous piano is the temptation. A gift arrives from London, and Emma builds Mr Dixon around it, a married man and a guilty attachment, because a scandal is a story and the true secret is not yet available to her. She is wrong in the fact and exact about the pressure. Something is being hidden. The narration stays so near her inferences that sight and error share a sentence. Frank and Jane have been engaged since Weymouth. The structure withholds the one fact that would make Emma's cleverness ordinary. A comedy of misreading works only if the reader is recruited into the uncontradicted mind, and left there until the letter arrives.

Frank Churchill is the other author in the book, and he is better at it because he has something to hide. He has been adopted into a fortune that is not his father's, and his aunt's temper is the reason he can give for every delay. When he finally comes, he flirts with Emma. She is the most conspicuous young woman in Highbury, and a conspicuous flirtation is the perfect screen for a concealed one. He enjoys the performance. She enjoys being the person it appears to choose. For a while she even considers whether she might love him, and the consideration is light, because it does not threaten the decision never to marry. A romance she can end is still a romance she conducts.

The word games, the piano, the rescue from the gypsies: each invites Emma to interpret and denies her the interpretation that matters. Frank's ease is the manner of a man who must keep two rooms in one conversation. Emma, who has spent her life as the person the room cannot surprise, does not imagine that she is the blind. She is not merely ignorant. She is used, because her confidence is publicly available. A mind that must be right is a useful cover for someone who cannot yet tell the truth.

Box Hill is where the defence becomes the injury. The day is fine and the party will not unite. Frank demands entertainment: one very clever thing, two moderately clever, or three very dull. Miss Bates offers herself. She will be sure to say three dull things as soon as she opens her mouth. Emma answers with mock ceremony. There may be a difficulty. Miss Bates will be limited as to number, only three at once. When the meaning lands, Miss Bates cannot be angry. She can only wonder whether she must make herself disagreeable if that is what the company wants.

Knightley waits until they are nearly at the carriages. It was badly done, indeed. Miss Bates is poor. She has sunk from the comforts she was born to, and if she lives to old age she must probably sink more. Her situation should secure compassion. The rebuke does not argue with Emma's wit. It prices the wit. Used on a woman who cannot answer, and who will go home and feel it, the cleverness is only rank. Emma weeps, and the next day she visits. The visit does not erase the sentence. A person whose errors have been private opinions now has a sentence another person will remember. The mind that had not been vexed is vexed by its own success.

The ball at the Crown is the earlier scene she does not know how to file. Mr Elton, now married, will not dance with Harriet. Knightley does, without a speech about Emma's project and without collecting Harriet as a favour to the matchmaker. Emma feels a pleasure she has not budgeted. She has been so busy deciding who Harriet may love that Knightley has remained only the man who argues and stays. Desire for him would end the authorship. It would make her a character in a match she does not control.

Harriet supplies the ending Emma wrote and did not mean. After the secret engagement is known, Emma assumes Harriet's heart has been Frank's, and she prepares to console a friend for a loss that is really Jane's. Harriet, with the honesty Emma trained her out of and then required, says the man is Knightley. The rescue at the ball, the dancing, the attention: Harriet has read them as Emma once read Elton's charade, which is to say she has read them as a plot. Emma's shock is not only jealousy. It is recognition. The blank page has started a future that includes the one person Emma cannot spare. The method of raising Harriet has produced, as its last gentleman, the man of Donwell. What she displaced onto a friend returns as the fear of having lost him.

In the shrubbery Knightley has come thinking she is grieving Frank. He offers comfort and then the sentence he can barely manage. If he loved her less, he might be able to talk about it more. She hears nothing but truth from him. That is the psychological bargain the book has been preparing. The man who would not flatter the match, the intimacy, or the joke is the man whose love arrives as truth rather than as a story she can improve. She can accept him because acceptance is no longer a loss of rank in her own mind. She has already been wrong in public. Being seen is no longer the catastrophe. It is the condition she has left.

The ending does not dissolve Hartfield. Frank is freed by his aunt's death, not by a change in his courage, and Jane is spared the governess place by that same death. Harriet's father is a respectable tradesman, which makes Robert Martin suitable and Emma's imagined gentleman impossible. Harriet marries Martin. Emma is glad, at last, to have been wrong. Her own wedding waits on her father. Mrs Weston's turkeys are stolen, and Mr Woodhouse, who could not bear to give his daughter away, suddenly wants Knightley's protection in the house. They will live at Hartfield. The marriage resolves the blindness and keeps the original condition. She marries the man who can contradict her, and she does not leave the rooms where she was never contradicted enough.

Readers still know the person who manages other people's lives and calls it perception. In a family or a group of friends there is often one mind allowed to be the quickest, and that mind learns to experience other people's choices as drafts it could improve. The anxiety under that role is the fear of wanting something that cannot be improved from the outside. Emma's matchmaking is an old form of a familiar defence. If you are the one who sees through everyone, you do not have to be seen wanting anyone.

Box Hill is the other recognition. Wit has a direction. It lands on someone, and the someone is rarely the person in the room with the same power to answer. A joke that the company laughs at, or fails to stop, becomes a fact in the life of the person who was cheap to mock. Austen does not treat Emma's remorse as a personality transplant. She treats it as the moment cleverness meets a consequence it cannot edit. That is why the novel still feels close. The dread is not of being unintelligent. It is of discovering that the intelligence was a way of staying unimplicated, until one sentence implicated you anyway.

This reading treats Emma's arrangements as a defence against her own desire, and her cleverness as the habit of an uncontradicted child. Austen writes a social comedy in 1815, and the instruments are rank, money, and who may marry whom. Emma is rich, first in her house, and safe from the governess trade that waits for Jane. To call her a narcissist is to import a diagnosis the book does not use, and to miss the comedy. Knightley's correction is also the voice of a man sixteen years her senior who has been right, and the ending rewards his reading. An account that stops at her growth can flatter that reward.

Other readings hold. One is that meddling is the only authorship available to a woman who refuses marriage and is already running a house. Another is that the novel punishes a woman's intelligence by marrying it to the man who scolds it. The secret engagement can be read as plot machinery rather than as a formal trap for the reader's vanity. Harriet's birth, when it arrives, restores a class order Emma had played with and the book will not finally upset. Box Hill is a moral shock and it is also a rich woman's cruelty to a poor dependent. Any reading that turns that afternoon into a private breakthrough, and forgets Miss Bates going home, has used the psychology to look away from the harm.

Pride and Prejudice is the psychology of a first story that hardens into armour. Elizabeth prices Darcy before she knows him, and the wit protects her from being priced herself. Emma is already the person who prices. Her error is not a stranger's insult at an assembly. It is a plot she invented for a friend and then inhabited until it reached the man she could not spare. Sense and Sensibility asks one sister to carry the feeling the family will not govern, and another to treat volume as the only honest proof. Emma refuses both offices for most of the book. She will not carry her own wanting, and she will not let Harriet's feeling stand in its first, unimproved form. The wanting returns anyway, in Harriet's mouth, with Knightley's name attached.