Marriage and the Marketplace in Jane Austen’s Emma and Mansfield Park (Part III)
Feminine Politics
As both her defenders and detractors observe, Emma is unique among Austen’s heroines as a woman “handsome, clever, and rich” (5).[25] She also differs from her counterparts in that she has a tender love for her father who is dependent upon Emma’s strength and judgment. She has autonomy in her affairs – “I believe few married women are half as much mistress of their husband’s house, as I am of Hartfield” (68). But, unlike other independent women in Austen’s novels, she is young and not a widow: “Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want; consequence I do not want” (68).[26] As Johnson argues, “its willingness to explore positive versions of female power” is what makes both the character and the novel exceptional in Austen’s works.[27]
Because of her privileged position, Emma plays a leading role in the affairs of Highbury. After believing that she has successfully married Miss Taylor to Mr. Weston, she takes up the task to improve Harriet Smith to marry someone better than Robert Martin. Although she is ultimately unsuccessful in her undertaking, Emma’s superintendence of Harriet is noteworthy for befriending an illegitimate girl and ignoring the social stigma attached to it. Because of the social strictures of the period, it would be too much to read Emma’s venture as a reflection of democratic values.[28] But such an attachment is a reflection of her imagination that Harriet is the daughter of the “blood of gentility,” although there is no evidence at this point to make such a claim (379). Within the confines of British class structure, Emma’s imagination permits the possibility of class mobility based not only on wealth but also on merit, character, and other incorporeal values.[29]
Whereas in Mansfield Park Sir Thomas seeks to solidify class structure by reminding Fanny of her inferior status to Maria and Julia, Emma provides opportunities for social mobility if people demonstrate their worth.[30] The fact that Harriet fails in exhibiting good judgment throughout the novel does not negate Emma’s efforts for improving her. By marrying Mr. Martin at the end of the novel, Harriet actually reveals the social and political correctness of Highbury: the appropriate marriage of people with similar character and values in spite of, or because of, the opportunity of class mobility caused by Emma’s imagination.
Emma’s imagination also speculates why Jane Fairfax prefers to spend three months with the Bates as opposed to going to Ireland with Mr. Dixon and his wife. Critics have interpreted this scene as Emma having only too quickly forgotten her mistake of trying to marry Harriet with Mr. Elton.[31] However, what is neglected is the similar situation of both women: although they differ in education and character, both Harriet and Jane are orphans, have modest resources, and possess poor prospects for the future. Emma wishes that she could find a suitable husband for Jane, but “lament that Highbury afforded no young man worthy of giving her independence; nobody that she could wish to scheme about for her” (132). Unlike Harriet, Jane’s elegance, talent, and beauty not only “softens” Emma’s previously tepid feelings towards her but also make Emma realize that there is nobody in Highbury worthy of Jane.
Thus, Emma’s imagination is not the rampant speculation of fantasy that Austen satires in Northanger Abbey but is calibrated to the social and economic realities of her society.[32] Directed at those who are less fortunate than her, Emma’s imagination seeks to provide social mobility if partners are suitable in character and values. Although in the end Emma is mistaken about both Harriet’s and Jane’s love interests, the former partially out of vanity and the latter somewhat out of envy, Emma’s imagination allows her to help those in need when possible.
The one person who matches Jane in character in Highbury is Mr. Knightley. When Emma inquires about Mr. Knightley’s interest in Jane as a potential marital partner, she had “Little Henry” in her thoughts with “a mixture of alarm and delicacy” (224). Emma’s concern about a marriage between Mr. Knightley and Jane Fairfax could leave her nephew, Henry, deprived of Donwell Abbey. This worry undercuts scholars’ criticism that Emma’s imagination is overly-speculative. In this situation, Emma’s imagination exhibits her ability to address material matters, such as her nephew’s inheritance, as well as immaterial ones like character and values. Her imaginative faculty creates a flexibility to address these incommensurate but connected concerns.
Mr. Knightley’s answer about his admiration but not attraction to Jane Fairfax – “She is reserved, more reserved, I think than she used to be – And I love an open temper” – satisfies Emma (226). However, Emma fails to recognize her own love Mr. Knightley until Harriet confesses her aspirations to marry him. This is a shock for Emma, for “Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!” (320). Although Emma’s imagination constructs a flexibility in the social fabric of Highbury, it is guided by matching people of similar characters and values. It is the incongruity of character and values between Mr. Knightley and Harriet, “Was it a new circumstance for a man of first-rate abilities to be captivated by very inferior powers?” that prompts Emma to turn her imagination inward so she can recognize her own love for Mr. Knightley (325).
The eventual marital union between Emma and Mr. Knightley appear to conservative critics to support the established order: it puts an end to Emma’s singular reign and brings her back into the fold of patriarchal society. But, as Johnson notes, Mr. Knightley moves to Hartfield is extraordinary considering his own independence and wealth: “How very few of those men in a rank of life to address Emma would have renounced their own home for Hartfield!” (367).[33] Earlier Mr. Knightley vows, “A man would always wish to give a woman a better home than one he takes her from” (336). But, while Donwell Abbey is a superior home to Hartfield, Mr. Knightley defers to Emma’s wish to stay indefinitely at Hartfield until her father’s death. By sharing in her home, Mr. Knightley is not a superior but an equal with Emma in their governance of Hartfield, Donwell Abbey, and Highbury.
Mr. Knightley’s Education
Whereas Emma possesses an imagination that permits a fluidity in the social relations in Highbury, the men appear to lack this capacity and consequently reinforce rather than reform society’s social structure. For instance, Mr. Knightley is portrayed as the voice of moral probity at various scenes in Highbury: the portrait party at Hartfield, the Cole’s dinner, the Box Hill excursion. He constantly lectures and admonishes Emma in the hope to improve her: “I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it” (338).[34] However, unlike Fanny, Emma is a social equal to Mr. Knightley and often defends her actions as well as ignores Mr. Knightley’s advice.
Unlike Emma’s imagination, Mr. Knightley reinforces the established social order by narrowing rather than enlarging the range of goods required for happiness. He sees the marital union between Harriet and Mr. Martin as one would benefit Harriet who has no claims of “birth, nature, or education” (49). For Mr. Knightley, the marriage between Harriet and Mr. Martin is one of commensurate goods that can be exchanged – Mr. Martin’s economic security for Harriet’s beauty and good temper – and would support the social hierarchy at Highbury. While Emma’s imagination perceives relationships as multifaceted and incommensurate goods, Mr. Knightley flattens these distinctions in order to transact marriages for the sake of preserving the traditional social structure.
Mr. Knightley also errs about his thoughts about Harriet. After claiming that Harriet is “not a sensible girl, nor a girl of any information . . . no experience, and with her little wit, is not very likely ever to have any that can avail her,” Mr. Knightley later changes his evaluation of her, making concession to Emma, “Harriet Smith has some first-rate qualities, which Mrs. Elton is totally without” (49, 260). When it is revealed that Harriet is the daughter of a rich tradesman, Emma’s speculation about Harriet’s heritage of “blood of gentility” is closer to the truth than Mr. Knightley’s claims. Mr. Knightley’s mistaken impression about Harriet is also underscored by his initial rejection of the match between Harriet and Mr. Elton, the latter who “is not her equal indeed, for he is as much her superior in sense as in situation” (49). But, as later is revealed in the novel, Harriet is actually the superior to Mr. Elton in character and values, as he married Miss Hawkins whose ten thousand pounds cannot disguise her and husband’s vanity and vulgarity.
With regards to Frank Churchill, both Emma and Mr. Knightley are unable to see past his machinations to discover his true character. Mr. Knightley originally denounces Frank as an “Abominable scoundrel” only later to call him a “very good sort of fellow,” when he learns that Emma never loved him (334, 340). For her part, Emma believes that Frank was in love with her, although she “for some time past, for at least these three months, cared nothing about him” (312). When it is revealed that Frank has been secretly engaged to Jane, Emma’s immediate reaction is to think about Jane and Harriet. Unlike Mr. Knightley, who thinks about himself, Emma’s mind is directed towards Jane’s ill-judgment of her and Harriet’s distress. While Mr. Knightley accepts Frank’s behavior when it aligns with his self-interest, Emma only tolerates it for the benefit of Jane, for “Emma’s feelings were chiefly with Jane” (377).
The failure of both Emma and Mr. Knightley to discern Frank’s true intentions shows that imagination or self-interest alone cannot allow one to see past appearances. Emma needs irony to balance against her imagination, while Mr. Knightley requires both. Mr. Knightley’s blindness to his own self-interest leads him to denounce Frank as “the trifling, silly fellow” after first meeting him; and his admiration for Jane Fairfax prevents him from considering her of conducting a clandestine affair (162). If Mr. Knightley had possessed imagination and irony, he may not have reached the wrong impression of them.
Emma consequently is not only about the moral education of the heroine but also of her hero, Mr. Knightley. This education about balancing imagination with irony transpires in both of them. For Emma, it is the possibility of Harriet marrying Mr. Knightley that prompts her to reflect seriously upon her own feelings for him; for Mr. Knightley, it is Frank’s attentions to Emma that provoke him to recognize his own love for her. The change in both of them is equal, dramatic, and lasting:
Her change was equal. – This one half hour had given to each the same precious certainty of being beloved, had cleared from each the same degree of ignorance, jealousy, or distrust. – On his side, there had been a long-standing jealousy, old as the arrival, or even the expectation, of Frank Churchill. – He had been in love with Emma and jealous of Frank Churchill, from about the same period, one sentiment having probably enlightened him as to the other” (339-40).
The politics of female authority therefore does not need a Mr. Knightley, as he himself requires both imagination and irony, whereas Emma only lacks the latter.[35] While Mr. Knightley wishes to find matches to reinforce the established social order, Emma’s imagination seeks to reform it with opportunities of social mobility. Although her match-making fails, Emma provides a template of social and political reform while being anchored in the corporeal concerns of wealth. While Mr. Knightley sees both corporeal and incorporeal goods as commensurable and consequently transferable, Emma recognizes the need for both types of goods but retain their distinctiveness. Thus, the marketplace mentality of marriage is modified by Emma’s imagination to make it more humane, open to reform, and access new possibilities.
Conclusion
This need for social and political reform is indirectly addressed by Austen with poverty manifested in the gypsies attack on Harriet, the theft of Mrs. Weston’s turkeys, and the life of hardship as a governess for Jane Fairfax. This theme is more explicitly attended in Mansfield Park with discussion of the slave trade, the poor state of the Price household, and the financial problems of Sir Thomas.[36] In both societies, poverty hovers continually in the background and occasionally looms forward to center stage, showing the need for reform. But this fear of poverty, combined with the introduction of the ideology of the marketplace, creates a condition where relationships turn into a type of commodity based on appearances. In this world people reduce relationships to either corporeal or incorporeal goods, commoditizing them so they can pursue their own self-interest at the expense of care and cooperation.
What Fanny and Emma provide is not only a different understanding of relationships but an alternative form of politics. Fanny’s and Emma’s imagination, irony, and empathy perceive relationships as multifaceted, incommensurate goods with care, cooperation, and social mobility as characteristic of their communities. It invites a politics that is opposed to the self-interest and competition of the marketplace and assumes a different form of action than the scolding of Mr. Knightley, the unaware hypocrisy of Edmund, and coercion of Sir Thomas. Emma employs persuasion to improve Harriet, while Fanny actively resists when her principles are threatened. This form of politics is more encouraging to cultivate a community based on care and cooperation compared to the marketplace where actors are placed in zero-sum game situations.
Although Emma and Fanny are different in their social and economic circumstances, they still are able to discover happiness in their marital lives and in their respective communities. In some sense, they are both orphans, with Fanny abandoned by her immediate family for the austere life of Mansfield Park, and Emma’s mother dying long ago and whose father is more like a younger sibling rather than a parent. The vulnerability of women without husbands or inheritance in early nineteenth-century Britain was enormous, and especially more so for orphans.[37] But instead of adopting a marketplace mentality, both Emma and Fanny look towards imagination, irony, and empathy for a better possible world.[38] By sharing the same character and values, they are able to resist the marketplace of mentality and discover true happiness in their lives.
These lessons should not be lost to us, for in our own world, which has adopted the marketplace mentality, we see friendship reduced to technological “likes” and marital partners traded in for better ones whether out of wealth, beauty, or reputation. What we can learn from Austen’s Emma and Mansfield Park then is not a return to nineteenth-century patriarchal society or to read back into Austen’s novels a type of radical feminism but rather draw upon the protagonists’ imagination, irony, and empathy to shape a better understanding of family, friendship, and marriage. Austen’s novels allow us to reconsider relationships based on a different set of goods and therefore create a different type of politics other than self-interest and competition. This alternative vision recognizes the needs of the corporeal goods and the role the marketplace plays in them but it does not reduce everything to materiality or commoditizes the immaterial. It does not spell out a political program but a personal call for reconsideration of our own relationship to the world as multifaceted rather than monist. Such a vision reminds us of our own human condition and what role the market plays – and does not play – in it.
Notes
[25] All subsequent in-text citations are from Jane Austen, Emma, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). For criticism of Emma because she assumes male authority and therefore poses a threat to the male sexual hierarchy, refer to R. W. Chapman, Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 134; Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Lionel Trilling (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), xxv-xxvi; Sutherland, Memoir of Jane Austen, 157; Paris, Character and Conflict in Jane Austen’s Novels, 69, 73; Duckworth, Improvement of the Estate, 148; Mudrick, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, 181-206; Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, 121-24. For more about the criticism of Emma, refer to Paula Byrne, ed., Jane Austen’s Emma: A Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 2004); and for more about gender roles during Austen’s time, refer to Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London: Longman, 1998).
[26] There are women who have a similar status of Emma in Austen’s novels but they are widows, e.g., Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice. Not being a widow with wealth makes Emma unique among Austen’s female characters. For more about widows, refer to Laura Fairchild Brodie, “Society and the Superfluous Female: Jane Austen’s Treatment of Widowhood,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 34.4 (Autumn 1994): 697-71.
[27] Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, 126.
[28] Walkley argues that Austen supports of democratic values, while Roberts explores how democratic ideology impacts Austen’s fiction, although he does not go as far as to claim that her writing represents them. Arthur Walkley, “Jane’s Prejudices,” in More Prejudice (London: Heinemann, 1923); Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1979).
[29] For more about social mobility in Austen’s other works, refer to Melissa Sodeman, “Mobility in ‘Persuasion’ and ‘Sanditon,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 45.4 (Autumn 2005): 787-812.
[30] It is also worth noting that when compared to Emma’s use of imagination and persuasion to influence people, Sir Thomas relies upon coercion, such as removing Fanny from Mansfield Park so that she will change her mind about Henry Crawford’s marriage proposal. Mansell, The Novels of Jane Austen: An Interpretation, 129; Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, 101-8; Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels, 219; Wallace, Jane Austen and Narrative Authority, 67-72.
[31] Refer to the twenty-fifth endnote for the citations.
[32] Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 178-79; Kenneth L. Moler, Art of Allusion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 38-40; P.J.M. Scott, Jane Austen: A Reassessment (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1982), 37-39.
[33] Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, 143.
[34] My argument that Fanny and Emma morally educates Edmund and Mr. Knightley respectively is consistent with scholars who subscribe to the idea that Austen engages in virtue ethics; but I reverse the roles with the women educating the men.
[35] When compared to Fanny, whose perspective the reader shares for most of the novel, Emma’s viewpoint is limited to what she sees and the reader therefore knows more. This discrepancy in perspective accounts for why Emma does not experience irony but the reader does.
[36] For more about the role of economics in Austen’s works, refer to the first and second endnotes as well as Paula Marantz Cohen, “Stabilizing the Family System at Mansfield Park,” ELH 54.3 (Autumn 1987): 669-93; Edward Said, “Jane Austen and Empire,” in Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, ed. Terry Eagleton (Boston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 150-64; Cy Frost, “Autocracy and the Matrix of Power: Issues of Propriety and Economics in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Harriet Martineau,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 10.2 (Autumn 1991): 253-71; Fraser Easton, “The Political Economy of Mansfield Park: Fanny Price and the Atlantic Working Class,” Textual Practice 12 (1998): 459-88; Jonathan H. Grossman, “The Labor of the Leisured in Emma: Class, Manners, and Austen,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 45.2 (1999): 143-64; You-me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, eds., Austen in the World: Postcolonial Mapping (London: Routledge, 2000); George E. Boulukos, “The Politics of Silence: ‘Mansfield Park’ and the Amelioration of Slavery,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 39.3 (Summer 2006): 361-83; Gabrielle D. V. White Jane Austen in the Context of Abolition (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
[37] The women who are in some sense orphans are numerous in both novels: Fanny and Susan Price, Mary Crawford, Emma, Jane Fairfax, Harriet Smith, and possibly Miss Taylor, who was Emma’s governess. But instead of acting selfishly, Emma willingly seeks to help people, like Harriet Smith. Interesting the orphans in eighteenth-century literature enjoyed affluence at the end of their plotlines, while in the nineteenth century they were depicted more accurately as living in the poorhouse. Cheryl L. Nixon, The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Law and Literature: Estate, Blood, and Body (Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2011). For about Austen’s own life and period, refer to Deidre Le Faye, Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels (London; Frances Lincoln, 2002).
[38] The marriages of Fanny and Emma are unconventional in the sense that Fanny has persuaded Sir Thomas to approve of her nuptials to Edmund while Mr. Knightley agrees to live at Emma’s Hartfield. One can imagine that neither Fanny nor Emma would need marriage to fulfill their lives: they could have a meaningful existence without a marital partner. However, their imagination makes a different type of marriage, as well as an altered form of politics, possible.