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What
was Jane Austen doing
creatively in the first decade of the nineteenth century? As Carol
Shields asserts, the writing lull, “in the middle of a relatively short life,
is bewildering. . . . The silence asks questions about the flow of
Jane Austen’s creative energies” (85). Perhaps she spent the years of presumed
“writer’s block” searching for her own particularized market position, the one
she confirmed with the publication of her third and fourth novels. After
a ten year hiatus in her literary efforts, and having successfully revised and
published two novels, Austen produced two texts that differ from her earlier
works; both rely upon their intertextuality with plays that were immensely
popular around the turn of the century. While all the novels are theatrical,
arguably the open acknowledgment of drama in Mansfield Park (1814) builds upon the submerged dramatic tendencies
of Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1813) that are even
stronger in Emma (1816). Both Mansfield Park and Emma demonstrate Austen’s debt to Augustus von Kotzebue and his
translators. Her adaptation of German drama within her fiction is in fact
integral to her oeuvre’s larger thematic strands. Austen’s use of
Kotzebue’s works in two of her “mature” novels also speaks to her efforts as a
writer trying to address the changing audience of the second decade of the nineteenth
century. Referencing other texts lends her own writer’s status an
authority by linking her work to other popular pieces, and she thus evinces her
awareness of the public’s taste. Austen’s use of contemporary dramas
shows her to be a far more astute literary “player” than has previously been
revealed and highlights the continuity of her novelistic concerns. Glenda
A. Hudson has asserted that “Austen clearly wanted to write what is nowadays
termed a best-seller” (“Consolidated Communities” 104), and her intertextual conversation
with Kotzebue’s dramas enabled her to do just that. Such exchanges affirm
her position as a professional writer in touch with the contemporary market.
We can see Kotzebue’s focus upon matters of the heart and manners as in many
ways subsumed within and extending Austen’s own consistent investigation of
these same social issues within her fiction and also as an aspect of her appeal
to a contemporary audience well versed in German sentimental drama. Both Austen’s mature
novels were successful: Mansfield
Park sold out in four months, and she composed Emma in just fourteen months, giving “evidence of a practised hand”
(Austen-Leigh 296, 306). The Family
Record suggests that Austen “broke new ground in this work” (296), but
Marvin Mudrick sees both works as a necessary progression toward Austen’s true
adoption of her role as writer, concluding that “Emma is a throwing off of chains. The author and her
characters move with a freedom and assurance unparalleled in Jane Austen’s
earlier work” (181). After successfully revising and placing her earlier
novels, Austen unreservedly developed her own style, reassured in her ability
by her proven track record. By integrating ideas central to Kotzebue’s
works into her own texts, Austen appeals to a drama-watching public to read her
texts, certain of the interest of her novels’ plots and issues given their success in
Kotzebue’s plays. Indeed, in Emma,
written from 1814-1815 and published in 1816, Austen certainly seemed to renew
her self-confidence (Austen-Leigh 306). She draws upon a Kotzebue text, Die Versöhnung (1799), but, rather than
openly present it within her novel only to dismiss it as unsuitable for her
novel’s society (as in Mansfield Park),
she makes no direct reference to it. Instead, she adopts elements of it in
Emma and develops these for her own
fictional structure, weaving her thematic concerns with class, conduct, and
correctness within the social constraints of the fictional villages she favors
as her settings. While the
Kotzebue-Austen connection has generated much excellent criticism in relation
to Mansfield Park,1 there has been a lack
of critical discussion of the Kotzebue-Austen intertextuality in Emma. Margaret Kirkham has explored
the two authors’ connection, albeit briefly, in her Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (1983), and Penny Gay
acknowledges Kirkham as she herself explores this and other dramas’
intertextuality with Emma within the
context of her own study of the novel’s “sustained performance, . . .
at once [Austen’s] most dramatic and her least obviously theatrical work” (127).
Kirkham’s central thesis concentrates upon the feminism she detects in Austen’s
texts as a continuation of the thought of late eighteenth-century moralists:
she theorizes Austen’s allusions to Kotzebue “as revealing an underlying
continuity of feminist moral concern” (xii). Kirkham explores Austen’s
use of Kotzebue in light of her feminist agenda, and she presents a convincing
discussion of Austen’s satire of Kotzebue’s attitudes toward women.
Kirkham concludes that Austen’s “obvious scorn for [Kotzebue’s] plays has not
been fully understood as in line with her views as a feminist moralist” (93).
But Austen’s use of Kotzebue deserves yet further consideration both in its
demonstration of Austen’s development as an author and in the ways in which
Austen’s alterations to Kotzebue’s drama continue Austen’s consistent societal
concerns. Austen saw Thomas
Dibdin’s The Birth-Day (a translation
of Kotzebue’s Die Versöhnung) in Bath
in 1799 (19 June 1799),2 and the play “was performed at the Bath Theatre
Royal on 21 May 1803” when Austen was still living in Bath (140). Austen
might have attended the 1803 performance as well as that of 1799, since “the Austen
family had been keen exponents of amateur drama, and Jane Austen herself was a
discerning theatergoer” (Rees 153). F. W. Stokoe pinpoints 1799 as
the year when “the enthusiasm for Kotzebue and all his works reaches its
maniacal climax” (48). At the turn of the century, Kotzebue’s plays were
popular and well received, and in 1799 there were at least twenty-seven
translations or adaptations of his plays (48). In attending The Birth-Day, Austen was actively
participating in the British public’s popular contemporary infatuation with
Kotzebue’s work. But
Kotzebue’s public reception shifted around the turn of the century. In
speaking of his methods of translation at the opening of his version of
Kotzebue’s play, Dibdin points out that “[a]s it was last year the rage to
applaud, it has now become the fashion to decry, the introduction of the German
drama to our theatres” (The Birth-Day
vi). Stokoe asserts that “the . . . ten years [after 1790] witnessed an
outpouring upon England of the dregs of German literature, and towards the end
of that period Kotzebue’s murky star had arisen”—murky because of the radical
actions presented in his works (34). Kotzebue’s popularity declined
sharply after the turn of the century as the British public became fearful that
German moral views might negatively contaminate their own and promote events
similar to the horrors occurring on the Continent. As the wars in Europe
continued and Britain reacted against the radical viewpoints filtering across
the Channel, popular journals of the day reflected the public mood shift:
“The Monthly Review [sic] up to ca. 1802, seems very well disposed towards
German literature, finding . . . even Kotzebue much to its taste. . . .
But towards 1802 its tone changes, and becomes undeniably antagonistic; towards
1814, perhaps a little earlier, it swings round to a more liberal attitude” (Stokoe 43).
Dibdin’s translation intimates that he sensed the change of
public opinion. He defends his choice of a German text in his preface by
appealing to British patriotism for consideration of its content: “a play
which recommends peace, amity, and benevolence will be grateful to the feelings
of an Englishman, whether the offspring of his own or of any other country” (The Birth-Day vi). In view of the
rejection of foreign influence, the opening prologue counters any condemnation
of the German origin of the text by proclaiming that “Our author boasts a truly
British mind,” and indeed, since Dibdin acknowledges his “alteration” of
Kotzebue’s play in order to fit it to the British stage, any objection to the
text on the grounds of its nationality is speedily dispensed with (vii). Dibdin in fact rewrote
Kotzebue’s play in order to suit the English stage, after C. Ludger’s literal
translation of the play, Reconciliation
(1799), was “not very successful” (Nicoll 65). In his preface, Dibdin did
not feel it necessary to explain his alterations since “the play of
‘Reconciliation’ has now been so long published, and the liberties I have taken
with it have already been so ably examined, censured, and applauded, that
further discrimination would be here unnecessary” (The Birth-Day v). With her fondness for the theater, it is
not unreasonable to suggest that Austen was fully cognizant of Ludger’s literal
translation and of Dibdin’s subsequent deviations from Kotzebue’s text.
Dibdin’s own version was successful, being “as well received as my best hopes
could have aspired to” (Reminiscences
1.239). Indeed, The Birth-Day
“was one of the four most successful of Kotzebue’s plays in England, performed
frequently in London and in provincial theatres for a period of about
twenty-five years from 1799, and its plot familiar to theatre-goers” (Kirkham
121). Austen draws upon both Ludger’s literal and Dibdin’s freer translation
of Kotzebue’s work in order to serve her novelistic designs, but she also
suppresses her use of these texts in the face of the public tide turning
against German moral views. She thus responds astutely to the public’s
shifting attitude toward the German dramatist, recognizing and manipulating his
successful plot lines but doing so warily—even secretly—as his reputation
declines. The drama centers upon
the conflict of twin brothers, Mr. Bertram and Captain Lewis Bertram, over a
favorite childhood garden that has been the subject of a lawsuit for fifteen
years. The play presents the brothers on their sixty-third birthday and
quickly reveals that Captain Lewis’s housekeeper, Mrs. Moral, is scheming with
Lawyer Circuit in order to gain the inheritance for herself. Captain
Lewis is faithfully attended by the drinking Jack Junk, just as Mr. Bertram is
attended by their old nurse, Ann, and another old servant, William. Mr. Bertram has one daughter, Emma, whom
Harry Danvers loves. Harry, who—though Emma does not realize it—is in
fact the son of Captain Lewis and so her cousin, is attempting to orchestrate a
reconciliation between the two brothers. With some appropriately dramatic
twists and turns, the dispute is eventually happily resolved: Mrs. Moral
and Lawyer Circuit are exposed and dismissed, the brothers embrace, and Emma
and Harry are free to marry. Austen
incorporates aspects and events of the play into the foundation of her novel
and builds upon this embedded subtext within the larger context of her concern
with society and the rules governing polite conduct. In The Birth-Day, Mr. Bertram is ill from
the very start of the play, which opens with William’s enquiry after his health
and his concern over his master’s “cough”; Mr. Bertram’s brother, Captain
Lewis, is physically afflicted by the gout (1, 14). The resignation and
anger of the Bertram brothers regarding their infirmities are, in Austen’s
version, transformed in Mr. Woodhouse’s character as a man obsessed with and
almost revelling in his preoccupation with disease. Austen introduces him
as “having been a valetudinarian all his life” (7) and consistently treats his obsession with matters of health
and the advice of his apothecary Mr. Perry with irony. Mr. Woodhouse is
never so content as when he can discuss matters of health and liberally
dispense his advice, and Austen manipulates Dibdin’s and Kotzebue’s text in
order to create her own character whose supposedly sensitive constitution
provides moments of great humor. But such illness in both
texts is also an essential component of the love plots. Dibdin’s opening
discourse between Emma and Harry reveals the two characters’ differing
responses to Mr. Bertram’s illness as well as the tension between duty and
desire: Emma: Don’t you think
that my father will live to be very old now? Harry: If he is careful
not to exert himself too much. Emma: That shall be my
care. Harry: And you will
always remain with him? Emma: Always, always. Harry: But if other duties should call upon you?— Emma: Other
duties? What duties can be more sacred? Harry: The duties of a
wife, of a mother. Emma: No—I never intend
to marry. Harry: Never marry? Emma: Not if I should
be obliged to leave my father. Harry: Your husband
would supply the place of a son. Emma: And the son would
take the daughter from the father. Harry: But if a man
could be found who would bestow on your father a quiet old age, free from every
sorrow; who, far from robbing the father of a good daughter, would weave the
garland of love round three hearts, who would live under his roof, and multiply
your joys, by reconciling your father and your uncle— Emma: Such a one, indeed, if I could meet him. (6-7) At this point in the play, Emma does not seem to
detect Harry’s intentions in his line of questioning although the audience is
surely not so naive. Harry’s desire to “obtain my Emma” is included in
the first scene’s closing soliloquy (8). Dibdin’s
play is thus the source for one of Austen’s Emma’s openly-held opinions, one of
which her as yet unacknowledged lover Mr. Knightley is well aware: “‘She
always declares she will never marry’” (41). Emma’s pride—perhaps her
most defining characteristic—is one component in Austen’s version, along with a
strong sense of the duty owed her father and a lack of awareness of Mr.
Knightley’s affection. Though Dibdin’s Emma is accused of being “proud” (The Birth-Day 46), she really is
self-effacing and humble throughout the play. Her resistance to marriage
stems only from her duty to her father. Austen’s Emma, on the other hand,
proudly and forcefully elucidates her own self-satisfied view of marriage: “I am not only, not
going to be married, at present, but have very little intention of ever
marrying at all. . . . I believe few married women are half as much
mistress of their husband’s house, as I am of Hartfield; and never, never could
I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right
in any man’s eyes as I am in my father’s.” (84) Emma’s proclamation rings untrue even at this
early stage, for readers are attuned to her affection for Mr. Knightley from
the novel’s opening chapter. Like Dibdin’s Emma, though, Austen’s Emma is
seemingly unaware of her affection for Mr. Knightley at the story’s start.
Austen’s irony highlights Emma’s proprietary reaction as she protests against
Mrs. Weston’s suspicion of his affection for Jane Fairfax: “‘Mr.
Knightley!—Mr. Knightley must not marry!— . . . I cannot at all
consent to Mr. Knightley’s marrying’” (224). Though she feels that her
relationship with Mr. Knightley is not so intimate as to prevent their dancing—“‘[Y]ou
know we are not really so much brother and sister as to make it at all improper’”—,
Mr. Knightley’s heartfelt response of “‘Brother and sister! no, indeed’” indicates
his distaste for the reference to a relationship that would disallow his love
for Emma (331).3 Emma herself, however, still seems
ignorant of his affection. But both works, while
dancing around the affection between lover and beloved, underscore the
importance of filial love and duty.
In The Birth-Day, Harry does not
hesitate to proclaim his love for Emma. He also suggests that he could
live under Mr. Bertram’s roof in consideration of Emma’s father’s frail health
(35-36). When Mr. Knightley proposes to Emma in the garden after assuring
himself of her lack of affection for any other, she re-enters the house “in an
exquisite flutter of happiness” (434). But her newly discovered happiness
dissolves when she recollects her duty, and “a very short parley with her own
heart produced the most solemn resolution of never quitting her father. . . .
While he lived, it must only be an engagement” (435). Like Dibdin’s Emma,
Austen’s Emma’s first obligation lies with her father, and, knowing Mr.
Woodhouse’s absolute opposition to marriage, she realizes that she cannot leave
him. But just as Dibdin’s
Harry does, Mr. Knightley solves the dilemma by proposing “that [Mr. Knightley]
should be received at Hartfield; that so long as her father’s happiness—in other
words his life—required Hartfield to continue her home, it should be his
likewise” (449). Mr. Knightley’s suggestion certainly opposes the
accepted conventions of marriage regarding domicile, and his sacrifice in
giving up his own home is significant. Austen underscores his willingness
by the phrase in dashes, suggesting that Mr. Knightley will make this move for
Emma’s sake in the knowledge not only that her father will not live forever but
also that he may live for quite some time. In both the play and the
novel, the daughters’ first thoughts are of their fathers’ comfort, and, in
both texts, the unconventional settlement after the marriage is the husband’s
move into the father-in-law’s house. Maintaining the strong commitment of
the daughter to the father evinced in Dibdin’s play, Austen is thus compelled
to maintain the suitor’s concession in order to orchestrate the desirable happy
outcome.4 The
main links between the two texts rest in the marriage plots revolving around
the Emmas, but there are further significant similarities in both plots’
peripheral relationships. Dibdin’s Emma’s mother is dead, and Emma
reflects that “[h]ad she been living, many things wou’d not have happened” (The Birth-Day 47). Austen’s Emma
also does not remember her mother, and Emma chiefly directs her own life and
decisions without any maternal guidance: “Emma doing just what she liked;
highly esteeming Miss Taylor’s judgment, but directed chiefly by her own” (5).
In both texts, maternal absence is vital in order to emphasize both Emmas’ qualities
of strong independence and to demonstrate the necessary closeness of the
relationship between fathers and daughters. The
relationship between brothers is similarly emphasized in both texts. The Birth-Day reveals that while the
Bertram brothers may have been at odds with each other for years, underlying
their relationship is a shared childhood and filial affection. They are
truly delighted to be reunited, and all enmity is ultimately banished, with
stage directions stipulating the heightened joy of the recovered fraternal
relationship: “(The Brothers
embrace); Captain (taking his head
with both his hands, in the greatest emotion)” (76). The Knightley
brothers are not so passionate or effusive, but they meet “in the true English
style, burying under a calmness that seemed all but indifference, the real
attachment which would have led either of them, if requisite, to do every thing
for the good of the other” (99-100). Austen does make the point that
George consults his brother regarding Donwell, which is naturally “interesting
to a brother whose home it had equally been the longest part of his life, and
whose attachments were strong” (100). Perhaps in an ironic glance toward
the pettiness of the brotherly dispute in Dibdin’s play, Austen highlights the
Knightleys’ mutual interest in their family home and George’s sharing his
direction of the land with John. Other
relationships in the play are more directly mirrored in the novel. The
care and solicitude of William for his master Mr. Bertram in The Birth-Day is adopted in William
Larkins’s respectful relationship with Mr. Knightley in Austen’s text.
When Mr. Knightley shifts his attention to his feelings for Emma, Larkins seems
“‘rather out of humour’” to Mr. Elton (458), and Larkins’s strong feelings
toward his master parallel those of the William in Dibdin’s play. The
textual relationship is the source of another verbal echo. At the opening
of The Birth-Day, William is
concerned for Mr. Bertram’s cough but concludes that it is “better [to] lose
all the lungs than only have half a heart” (2). As Kirkham points out,
these opening lines are ironically reintegrated at the end of Austen’s text
(123). When the happy, newly-united couple returns from the garden, Mr.
Woodhouse is solicitous of Mr. Knightley’s health and the narrator wryly
interposes, “Could [Mr. Woodhouse] have seen the heart, he would have cared
very little for the lungs” (434). But the most compelling
intertextual resonance is the way in which Austen uses Kotzebue’s concern with
gentility to underscore her own consistent subject matter: she thus
maintains her focus upon behavior and social
restrictions.
In The Birth-Day, when Captain Lewis
hurts the feelings of his faithful servant, Junk subtly reminds the captain of
the debts owed to him for his loyal service and his constant care until the
Captain, “much moved,” according to
the stage direction, contrives a repentant reconciliation (24).
Throughout Dibdin’s play, concerns about gentility are expressed: Mrs.
Moral and Lawyer Circuit find it “ungenteel” to evaluate others’ behavior, even
though they (of course!) do so consistently, whereas Junk notes that not
everyone can be genteel while he, though of the lower class of characters, has
superior morals and ethics in comparison to the upper classes depicted. Such
concerns are reflected in the minor characters for Kotzebue and Dibdin, but
Austen refocuses those concerns in her heroine. After all, Emma considers
herself the arbiter of all social decorum, even when Mrs. Elton upstages her
dominance by becoming the married lady in a room. But Emma does not, as
we see, always perform within such codes of gentility. On the few
occasions when Mr. Knightley undertakes to correct her behavior, Emma tries to
disguise her own awareness of her wrongdoing; for example, when Mr. Knightley
reprimands her for her cruelty to Miss Bates, “Emma recollected, blushed, was
sorry, but tried to laugh it off” (374). As Austen establishes, although
rather more implicitly than Kotzebue, such behavior will not do. In
Emma, then, Austen takes elements of
Dibdin’s and of Kotzebue’s plays and constructs her own fiction beyond their
dramas. While many of the parallels are minor, there are enough to
confirm more than coincidental similarity. As with much of Austen’s
work, Emma is a novel intimately
concerned with acting. Emma casts herself on her own stage in the role of
lady and her difficulties arise from her own misconceptions: she “obeys
the conventional rules to the letter, but she does so only because she wishes
to appear ladylike and elegant to herself
and others” (Nardin 115). Emma knows how she wishes to be perceived and
compels herself to believe that her own self truly matches the desired
projection. Her lack of true knowledge of herself and her imposition of
her own desires and beliefs on others cause many problems for her: “[t]he
real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much
her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself” (5).
Just as at the end of The Birth-Day
Harry’s true identity as a Bertram is revealed, at the end of Austen’s novel many
masks are removed and characters such as Frank and Jane and Harriet emerge more
openly. While Emma is both actress and director, “all of the characters
are playing exaggerated versions of themselves” or adopting other roles (Hudson,
Sibling Love 44). Frank
Churchill plays the flirt and disguises his own true feelings, and Jane Fairfax,
outwardly so reserved, admits that her restraint was a necessary function of
her secret engagement: “‘So cold and artificial!—I had always a part to
act.—It was a life of deceit!’” (459). As Kotzebue’s drama and Austen’s
novel show, such constraint and deceit neither can be sustained nor are conducive to longterm happiness. In
Emma, Austen apparently heeded
Kotzebue’s astute evaluation of his work: “I am sure that though none of
my plays will be staged in fifty years yet the poets of posterity will use my
plots and more often my situations. . . . Turn the play into a story
and if it still grips it will live” (qtd. in Thompson 47). In taking this
advice, Austen adopted and adjusted the support necessary to write anew. She
drew upon Kotzebue’s plays for both Mansfield
Park and Emma, and, as she gained
confidence, she appears also to have shrugged off this intertextual
reliance. Likened to Shakespeare after her death (Macauley 122),5 Austen successfully
appropriated into novels the vivacity of stage dramas: “the dramatic
element in her works is so strong that for complete enjoyment on a first
acquaintance it is almost indispensable that they should be read aloud by some
person capable of doing them justice” (Austen-Leigh 291). Austen satirized
and sanitized the recent fashions stemming from German drama in accordance with
her oeuvre’s principles. We can see that, whatever personal events may
have occurred in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Austen was paying
close attention to professional developments on stage and in literature across
the English Channel—and situating herself as a writer drawing upon both genres. Notes 1. Much has been written about Austen’s open incorporation into Mansfield Park of Kotzebue’s Das Kind Der Liebe (1799), translated (and, according to Thomas Holcroft, “corrected” [261]) by Elizabeth Inchbald into Lovers’ Vows (1800); Austen’s use of this play is a vital and integral facet of her novel. Ford’s is one of the more recent and is very useful in its detailed history; other helpful discussions include those by Byrne, Conger, Fisher, Litvak, Marshall, Pedley, and Sales. 2. George Holbert Tucker details the Bath Herald and Reporter review of 29 June 1799 (96). Park Honan provides further details in his biography of Austen (361). 3. Although their relationship is one in which Mr. Knightley is an “intimate friend” who has watched Emma grow up (9), they are only related because Emma’s sister is married to Mr. Knightley’s brother. 4. There are differences in the central relationships: distancing her text from Dibdin’s, Austen dispenses with Dibdin’s relationship between cousins (not present in Kotzebue’s play) and maintains the age differential in Kotzebue’s original text (Oulton xviii). 5. Macauley declares Jane Austen “approached nearest to the manner of the great master” (122); with reservation, George Henry Lewes concurs: “her marvellous dramatic power, seems more than any thing . . . akin to the greatest quality in Shakespeare” (125). Works Cited Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd
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