Peter Galen Massey

I may just be a middle-aged Jane Austen fanboy – but Austen keeps earning my admiration novel after novel, and she’s done it again with Emma.

Since chances are good you already know the book, I’m going to skip the review and serve up random observations. I reveal much of the plot and all of the surprises in Emma, however. So, spoiler alert. Here goes:

Emma is a Comedy

The proper response to this observation is – I realize – “Duh”. But it’s also a remarkable fact because Austen’s other books are romantic dramas (except for Northanger Abbey, which is a parody of Gothic novels).

One of the qualities I admire in Austen is that she rarely writes the same book twice, even though her novels share so many themes and situations.

For example, Elizabeth Bennet and Fanny Price are about as different as two characters can be, and their novels are very different in tone, pacing, and plot. But Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park are both major achievements.

In Emma, Austen gives us a third variation which I think is easily the equal of these novels – and it’s a comedy. How many writers succeed in more than one style?

Emma is a Comedy … with a Conscience

Really, this is just ridiculously difficult to pull off and Austen makes it look easy.

The problem with comedy is that it is almost always based on pain. But you can’t laugh at a character and empathize with her at the same time.

To deal with this problem, writers usually locate their stories in a “comic” world that is largely free of consequences and death OR they reduce, deny, ignore or attack the humanity of their characters.

Austen does neither. Emma Woodhouse is a comic figure, and some of her foolish mistakes are funny, but it is Emma’s good intentions and the deep shame, regret, embarrassment, and pain she feels at her mistakes that make her more than a figure of fun.

And Emma is not alone, of course. Miss Bates is even more of a comic figure. In fact, there may be no greater clown anywhere in Austen’s work, and yet Miss Bates is treated with respect. When Emma insults Miss Bates during the excursion to Box Hill, Mr. Knightley rides to Miss Bates’ defense (“It was badly done indeed!”) and Emma weeps almost all the way home.

This is not comedy that produces belly laughs. It is delicate comedy, designed to make you smile, and possessing a grace and lightness that in its total effect is indistinguishable from wisdom.

Indeed, could we say the definition of wisdom is moral seriousness combined with laughter?

Emma’s only equal in this category I know is Shakespeare’s As You Like It. That’s pretty good company.

Everyone is Mistaken about Love

What a brilliant, delightful, simple conceit around which to construct a novel. Everyone is wrong about everyone else’s feelings, basically all the time. And yet it turns out happy.

Here’s a list of mistakes about love in Emma:

• Emma thinks Mr. Elton loves Harriet Smith

• Mr. Elton thinks Emma loves him

• Emma thinks Mr. Dixon loves Jane Fairfax

• Mrs. Weston thinks Mr. Knightley loves Jane Fairfax

• Emma thinks Frank Churchill loves her

• Mr. Weston, Mrs. Weston, and Mr. Knightley think Emma loves Frank Churchill

• Emma thinks Mr. Knightley loves Harriet Smith

This list doesn’t include Emma’s serial mistakes with Harriet Smith, which are persuading Harriet to fall out of love with Robert Martin; persuading Harriet to fall in love with Mr. Elton; and persuading Harriet to fall in love with Mr. Knightley while thinking she was persuading Harriet to fall in love with Frank Churchill.

It also doesn’t include the biggest mistake of all: no one realizes that Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax are in love.

Emma is the Snob on Top

As I said, I admire Austen for rarely writing the same book twice. Emma is unique in Austen’s work as a comedy. It’s also unique because its major characters sit on top of the novel’s social order.

In Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion, the main characters are all marginalized or dispossessed in their societies or families, and generally opposed by those who rank higher or think more highly of themselves.

In the novel, Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley are the rulers of their set. Emma is aware of her social position, guards it carefully, and is jealous when it is infringed. (For example, part of the offense Emma takes at Mr. Elton’s marriage proposal is his presumption that he was Emma’s social equal … an heiress of 30,000 pounds!)

Mr. Knightley is less particular than Emma about the niceties of his status, but he wields his power with the same sense of entitlement. Mr. Knightley has perfect confidence in his judgment of every situation, and rarely yields to the opinions of other people. He does not give offense wantonly, but he doesn’t worry about offending Mrs. Elton when she presumes to guide his choices or the Westons when he speaks poorly of Frank Churchill.

This is significant because Emma and Knightley would be the villains in other Austen novels. By all rights, Harriet Smith and Robert Martin should resent Emma’s interference in their lives, the way Elizabeth Bennet resents Lady Catherine’s in hers.

But Harriet is very sweet, and not all that bright, and she seems to feel Emma’s hugely mistaken good intentions more than she notices Emma’s mistakes. As for Robert Martin, we don’t know. In the end, he got the woman he loved, and as practical man of good sense, apparently content with his station, perhaps he decided the rest didn’t matter.

From drama to comedy, and from villain to hero, these are two reasons to admire Emma. And now I think I’m done with Jane Austen for a time. On to the next author!

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I’ve been reading Chekhov plays recently (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard), and I’ve been struck by how much they resemble Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – although perhaps it is the other way around, since Chekhov died two years before Beckett was born.

I wouldn’t have thought there would be any similarities between Chekhov’s bourgeoisie and Beckett’s vaudevillians, and yet the plays resemble each other in many ways:

• The dramas are set in empty places – small country estates or provincial towns in Chekhov, a featureless existential limbo in Beckett.

• The characters are frantic and paralyzed. They are largely incapable of making a decision or taking constructive action.

• The characters lack self-knowledge or insight to their lives and situations. As a result, they talk in stale words and trite phrases about trivial subjects.

• Little to nothing happens in the plays. This is perhaps because the characters do not possess meaning, purpose, occupation, or passion.

• The plays are all ostensibly comedies, but the humor is hard to see and it takes especially gifted actors to make the performances funny.

The ultimate effect of all these qualities – in my mind – is to suggest that human beings do not exist: that we have no essence, no objective self, no enduring spark, that we have no souls, and that death will scatter us like the wind scatters dust.

Nabokov in Speak Memory tells the story of visiting one of his governesses in her old age. When Nabokov learns a few years later she has died, he writes:

She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone gave her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity.

What I see Nabokov saying is that we cannot make a durable self without love for someone or something, for a place or a memory, or for consciousness itself. That we must love and choose love to bind ourselves to creation.

I’m not certain characters like Treplev or Uncle Vanya or Vladimir or Estragon have done that. So maybe they are just dust. I’d like to think I’m not.

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Persuasion is half a major Jane Austen novel, spoiled by death. The book starts splendidly, with Austen in full command of her peerless champagne and acid prose style, and serving up reasonably fresh variations on familiar characters and themes, including …

• The oppressive fools preoccupied with social position

• The charming scoundrel who first half-catches the heroines’ fancy

• The problematic suitor eventually revealed as Mr. Right

• The hard reckonings between love and money forced by the entailed estate

Best of all, Persuasion  features an intelligent, interesting heroine in Anne Elliot whose diffidence – like that of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park – creates compositional challenges for Austen by putting at the center of the novel a character who does not naturally command the center of the stage, and drive the plot, the way Elizabeth Bennet, Elinor Dashwood, and Emma Woodhouse all do, in their very different ways.

And yet, Austen handles the first half of Persuasion  beautifully. She keeps the drama low-key and the pacing steady. The story rises naturally from the characters and incidents. And each complication is managed with a light expert hand. As I read, I kept saying, “Wow, Austen is really on her game.”

And then, at what should have been the middle of the novel, Persuasion  slams into two enormous blocks of exposition, comes to a dead stop, and ends.

Exposition is an important tool for novelists and Austen knows how to use it, often at the beginning of a novel, where she is establishing the premise, and at the end, where she is tidying up loose ends and letting us know what happens to the characters after the major action is over.

The problem with the exposition is Persuasion is that it doesn’t supplement the action of the story. Instead, the exposition replaces the action of the story.

In the first instance, Austen dismisses the charming scoundrel through an endless discussion between Anne Elliot and an invalid friend, to whom the scoundrel just happened to have confessed every insulting opinion he ever held toward Anne’s family while he was also busy driving her friend’s husband to bankruptcy and early death.

So informed of the scoundrel’s scoundrelness, Anne Elliot drops him from her thoughts, and his role in the novel is done.

In the second instance, soon after the first, Austen contrives to have Anne Elliot overheard in a conversation about love by the problematic Mr. Right, who immediately sends a letter explaining himself, and re-proposing marriage, which Anne accepts, and which pretty much brings the novel to a close.

It was hard for me to think that a writer with Austen’s talent and experience could suddenly turn into such a duffer halfway through a book. Then my wife reminded me that Persuasion was published after Austen’s death.

Austen began writing Persuasion  in late 1815 and completed it in August 1816. In early 1816, she fell ill with a disease which progressively weakened her until she died in July 1817.

Someone with a better knowledge of Jane Austen’s life than me will have to say whether we can know if Austen felt she was racing death in 1816, although it is a pleasingly theatrical idea.

But we do know she was feeling the effects of poor health, which I think is a good explanation for the problems in Persuasion. I also find it a moving one.

All novels are deeply personal documents, even when the novelist reveals little or nothing about herself in the work, because of the intensity of energy required to write them.

That Persuasion was flawed by the final drama of Austen’s life gives the ending a power the words themselves don’t quite achieve.

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