Persuasions #13, 1991 Pages 138-145 The Mystery of
Emma … or the Consummate Case of the Least Likely Heroine CATHERINE KENNEY Park Ridge, IL Why have twentieth-century readers often regarded Emma as a
detective story? In part, it must be
the tendency of modern readers to see everything through the lens of detection,
a tendency no doubt based in the genre’s growing popularity since its inception
in the mid-nineteenth century. The most
extreme form of this proclivity was lampooned by James Thurber in “The Macbeth
Murder Mystery,” a story about mystery-addicts reinterpreting Shakespeare’s
tragedy in the terms of Thirties detective fiction. The mystery story has, in fact, so dominated
not only the popular imagination but also the vocabulary of critics in our
time, that one finds analyses of a novel like Emma permeated with the
language of detection. The words “clue”
and “evidence” come up again and again in critical discussions of Emma’s
experience and her misreading of it.1 This is not surprising, for the novel itself repeatedly uses the
terms “mystery,” “secret,” “detect” and “conceal” in different forms.2 In his 1966 introduction to the ubiquitous Penguin edition of the novel, Ronald Blythe went so far as to call it “the most fiendishly difficult of detective stories,” (37) and quoted Robert Liddell’s earlier statement of this idea: Emma is,
among other things, a detective story, and I believe that the pattern of the
mystery may be thus expressed: Highbury thinks Mr. Knightley is her brother,
but he is her future husband; Highbury thinks Frank Churchill is her future
husband, but he is her brother. Blythe goes on to say that, as “the personification of Highbury,” Emma
shares this misunderstanding, thus creating “the magnificent central action of
the novel, usually referred to as ‘the intrigue.’ ” (Penguin, 22) As we shall see, it is this misunderstanding
within Emma herself that constitutes the novel’s most profound mystery. An even earlier writer, H.F. Ellis, sensed the tone of mystery in this novel and developed a hilarious sequel called “Hartfield and Homicide,” a parody which displays an acute appreciation of Jane Austen’s style in passages like the following, where we meet the Scotland Yard Inspector sent out to investigate a mysterious event in Highbury: The younger
son of a Northumberland draper …. [Inspector Elliott] had inherited little upon
the death of his father but a bolt of blue serge and a strong reluctance to
share it with his brother …. He had
never been handsome, he lacked warmth, attainments, an agreeable walk; and now,
exposed to all the restraints of good society in the drawing-room at Hartfield,
with all the consciousness of inferiority of rank, nothing equal, nothing easy,
every thing vexatious, without clues, no proper foundation laid … [he] acknowledged
himself to be overpowered …. [and yet] He must, would, speak! ‘As
some of you may be aware,’ said he, with a conscious look at Emma, ‘the body of
Mr. Woodhouse was found early this morning transfixed to the ceiling of his
dining-parlour – a decent room enough, though the windows, it ought to be
observed, are full west – by a dagger of curious oriental workmanship.’3 Although this catches something of the Austenian cadence, my own
investigations lead me to conclude that the “dagger of curious oriental
workmanship” is a mistake in literary detection: it is much more likely that
the old man was affixed to the ceiling with a paste of very thin gruel,
splattered there when, in a fit of uncharacteristic excitement, he flung his
basin at Mrs. Elton for suggesting that he remarry and “leave Emma to it.” Mrs. Elton is, of course, rightfully
discerned to be the murderer, for in the classic English mystery, there is no
crime greater than vulgarity. Given her
fatal taste in people, places, and things, it isn’t surprising that the divine
Mrs. “E” might indulge in a spot of murder here and there. At any rate, there is something about both
Mr. Woodhouse and Mrs. Elton which puts many of us in a mind to murder. Beyond delighting in the sublime silliness made
possible by re-reading every text as if it were a mystery story, there are
parallels between Emma and the classical tale of mystery and detection,
especially as it has been practiced in England, which encourage us to compare
the two.4 And, I would
suggest, such comparison may in fact help us better appreciate the richness of
this great novel. “I
was mad enough, however, to resent.” (E) Like a detective story, Emma presents a
concrete, material world for our close inspection. Although the novel does not fully endorse the idea that “manners
were all that could be safely judged of” (E 169), it provides ample
evidence that manners are indeed highly revelatory. Jane Austen did not need Sherlock Holmes to show her the “great
issues that may hang from a bootlace.”
Focusing on human relationships and quirks, her novels share with the
classic English mystery the capacity to imply the wider world from which they
come and are often considered documents of their times. This emphasis on the actual, mundane world
is, of course, a distinguishing characteristic of English fiction generally;
Dorothy L. Sayers has commented that the mystery story is integral to that
tradition because it, too, is “steeped in that unreasonable poetry of things
that informs English narrative literature from Chaucer and Shakespeare to the
present day.”5 The well-defined village of Highbury is a
prototype of the closed society in which most classic murder mysteries take
place, and the climactic scene at Box Hill suggests, even in its place name,
the explosive tension created in such an environment. At Box Hill, a scene which detects the fractures within Emma’s
world, Frank Churchill is at his most treacherous and cruel, while Emma herself
breaks society’s “law” of protecting the weak when she is goaded into using her
superior wit and superior position to humiliate Miss Bates. (Jane Fairfax is similarly vulnerable to
Frank Churchill’s schemes and manipulation, as her “deranged” health following
the Box Hill incident shows.) The rigor
with which Jane Austen calls Emma to account for her behavior toward Miss Bates
– to “upright justice” (E 416) – reminds us of a basic assumption in
both English detective fiction and English law, which holds that victims
deserve fair treatment, no matter who they are. (see E 374-376) The fact that Emma insults rather than murders Miss Bates is a fine point resulting from Austen’s essential realism: it is much more common to lacerate someone with a tongue than with a dagger, although the fabric of community is rent in either case. As the general, intense ill-temper at Box Hill reveals, Highbury is a society threatened by anarchy, just as the apparently tidy world of the English detective story is. This partially explains why order is so highly valued by their creators. Highbury’s inhabitants speak a common language and share common assumptions, and at their most insular, may even imagine that their pork “is not like any other pork” (E 172). Yet “their being fixed, so absolutely fixed, in the same place, was bad for each …. Not one of them had the power of removal, or of effecting any material change of society.” (E 143) For this reason, there is an edginess to Highbury conversation, and a futile, self-destructive quality about much of its activity, including the Box Hill fiasco, the nervous chatter of Miss Bates, the abortive, violent love-making of Mr. Elton, and Emma’s compulsive scheming. Although the novel’s only death occurs far offstage, the inhabitants of Highbury are routinely “mortified” by a look, a suspicion, or a feeling.6 The world outside – typified by London –
presents no refuge, however. It is a
place of disease as well as dis-ease, for “in London it is always a sickly
season.” (E 102) This is
analogous to the picture of the city commonly presented in English detective
fiction, an image perhaps most harshly drawn in Conan Doyle’s Study in
Scarlet, where London is described as “that great cesspool …”7 The fact that it is Mr. Woodhouse,
Highbury’s valetudinarian extraordinaire, who describes London as a
place of contagion suggests that his society is threatened by both rot from
within and attacks from outside. As is the case in most classic detective stories, the mysteries which animate this novel are set in motion when a closed and somewhat brittle society is invaded by outsiders: Frank Churchill, Jane Fairfax, Harriet Smith, and Augusta Hawkins are all outsiders. They each disrupt what has been called, a bit simplistically, “this divine pastoral of English country life” (Penguin 16) by going beyond the boundaries of acceptable behavior: the duplicity and scandal of the secret engagement, the pathetic marital ambitions of Harriet Smith, the screeching vulgarity of the newly minted Mrs. Elton. And they all present a mystery as to their real identity. Frank appears to be the lover of any but his betrothed, a woman who is, in turn, completely “concealed” as a human being. In a society which values highly blood and lineage, Harriet Smith’s parentage is unknown, while Mrs. Elton fabricates a pretentious “background.” Each of these characters plays variations on the novel’s theme of elusive reality and our ability to know it. The obvious villain of the piece, Frank Churchill, is also the one who most calculatingly leads everyone else astray as he perpetrates mystery after mystery. Upon her discovery of Frank’s elaborate deception, Emma’s language is notable for its insistent references to this “invasion” of her world: “What
has it been but a system of hypocrisy and deceit, – espionage, and
treachery? – To come among us with
professions of openness and simplicity; and such a league in secret to judge us
all! – Here have we been … completely
duped, fancying ourselves all on an equal footing of truth and honour, with two
people [she is speaking of both Frank and Jane] in the midst of us …. (E
399) The serpent has been discovered in the very heart of the garden, “in the
midst of us,” and the entire speech is cast in terms of Highbury versus
the rest of the world.8 By showing an unseemly interest in his hair, by
threatening to leave England, and most importantly, by entering into an illicit
engagement with a young lady,9 Frank Churchill has shown himself to
be “not quite the thing.” (E 249)
Even Mr. Woodhouse can perceive Frank’s falsity, a quality which is, in
the terms set by this novel, equivalent to villainy. Conversely, Mr. Knightley, who is the hero, is precisely “the
thing”: “You might not see one in a hundred, with gentleman so plainly
written” on his countenance. (E
33) Even Donwell Abbey, his home, “was
just what it ought to be, and … looked what it was.” If one considers the Churchill-Fairfax sub-plot, it may be said that the piano sent by Frank Churchill to his fiancée is equivalent to the body in a murder mystery: out-sized and outrageous, it is undeniable, mysterious, embarrassing, and compelling. (Penguin, 26) We immediately know that it is important, but like Emma, are confused as to its provenance and meaning: Who sent it? And why? The piano is an example of how Jane Austen
scrupulously “plays fair” with the reader, to use the term coined by Golden Age
English detective novelists. Throughout
Emma, we are given the clues needed to solve each mystery presented, and
as readers, we have all the information any “detective” in the story has. As chief detective, Emma reports everything
to us, but the information is always “bent” according to her own preconceptions
and limited by her range of vision.
(Mr. Knightley, on the other hand, is an intelligent Watson who
interprets the evidence more accurately.)
Focusing on a somewhat confused detective creates a novel of great
subtlety and leads to some of Austen’s most brilliant passages, such as the
tour de force in Chapter 26, where Emma hears what she wants to hear, and Frank
appropriates her fantasies about the piano for his own purposes. (E 214-219) The claustrophobic and highly charged
atmosphere in this scene reminds us of John Cawelti’s observation that the
classical mystery story, “with its focus on the investigation of mystery,
showed a particular fascination with the hidden secrets and guilts that lay
within the family circle.”10
This emphasis is not surprising, since the mystery story is essentially
a sub-genre of the English novel, a form which is preoccupied with domestic
life. (One thinks of Wilkie Collins’s
massive family sagas which were also detective stories.) As Emma says, “nobody, who has not been in
the interior of a family,” can really understand that family, for “there are
secrets in all families.” (E 146, 120)
How many novels would be lost if this were not so, and how many
novel-readers. Yet concealment is regarded as evil in this
book; not being open is the greatest crime.11 While Frank Churchill cultivates mystery,
Mr. Knightley “does nothing mysteriously” (E 226) and finds Jane Fairfax
somewhat unappealing because she does not have an “open temper.” (E
289) It is Mr. Knightley who, in the
novel’s key statement of this theme, admonishes Emma to see that “Mystery;
Finesse – how they pervert the understanding!
My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of
truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?” (E 446) Thus, as Marilyn Butler has commented, it is
Emma’s own openness, her final willingness to accept the evidence before her,
that marks her as an Austen heroine, for the novelist considers it “a moral
virtue to be ready to receive external evidence.”12 This is to say that, while Emma is a failed
detective throughout most of the story, she becomes a better one by the end,
and in the process, becomes a better person. And this brings us to the chief or central
mystery of the novel, which is the mystery of Emma herself. Mr. Knightley, who tends to be more
clear-sighted than most in this story, states this problem early on: “There is
an anxiety, a curiosity in what one feels for Emma … I wonder what will become
of her.” (E 40) And so do we
all. In the same chapter, Mr. Knightley
also identifies the chief obstacle in Emma’s way of becoming whatever it is she
can become: “She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and
patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding.” (E
37) This is the chief flaw in her
ability as a detective, or as a person with superior “penetration,” which is
how she sees herself. During most of
the action, Emma abuses rather than uses her reason as she misinterprets the
steady stream of clues and evidence surrounding her. In the brilliant, almost symphonic elaboration of this novel,
characters are assessed according to the degree of “penetration” they have:
whereas Harriet has none, Emma thinks of herself as having more, and Miss Bates
less, than is true. The Knightley
brothers are described as “having penetration,” but even George Knightley’s
perception is clouded when it comes to that which is most important to him,
letting his jealousy color his reactions to Frank Churchill and declaring about
Emma that he has “no idea that she has yet ever seen a man she cared for.” (E
41) Since the novel is seen from Emma’s
own angle of vision, it is very late in the day indeed when the reader realizes
that Emma Woodhouse has, in fact, seen such a man and his name is
Knightley. (I would say that the reader
should know this by the time Emma admires Knightley’s “tall, firm, upright
figure” before he joins in the dance, and her unabashed pleasure when he does; E
326, 328.) Knightley’s intense feelings
are clear much earlier, when he admits he “loves to look at her” in his
conversation with Mrs. Weston about Emma’s uncertain future (E 39). He must be coming to Hartfield for something
other than Mr. Woodhouse’s company. From the beginning of the narrative, Emma has
been detecting, or attempting to detect, the real nature of those around her,
focusing especially upon them as lovers and potential mates. The fact that she leaves herself out of this
exercise, stating that she will not marry and never stopping to look into her
own heart, generates the richness and complexity of the narrative, for she is
its greatest enigma. Austen’s famous
declaration that in Emma, she was creating a heroine whom no one else would
much like,13 points to Emma’s role as the least likely person. And when Emma finally realizes that it is
she who must marry the hero, that it is, in fact, she who is the
heroine, her recognition scene is similar to the climax of a detective story,
where the detective finally sees all the clues drop into place and solves the
mystery: “A mind like her’s, once opening to suspicion, made rapid
progress. She admitted – she
acknowledged the whole truth …. It
darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry
no one but herself!”14 (E
407-408) Or as Holmes might say,
dearest Emma, “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however
improbable, must be the truth.”
(“The Sign of Four”). The most
obvious clue in the mystery of what will become of Emma is Mr. Knightley’s
omnipresence and overriding importance in her life: like Poe’s purloined
letter, he is so obvious that he eludes Emma’s notice. Emma is, of course, no better at match-making
for others than she is at reading her own heart. Her growing recognition of this is similar to the history of many
detectives who find that, after meddling in others’ lives, their failures do
not amount to nothing, but something worse: “With insufferable vanity had she
believed herself in the secret of everybody’s feelings; with unpardonable
arrogance proposed to arrange everybody’s destiny. She was proved to have been universally mistaken; and she had not
quite done nothing – for she had done mischief.” (E 413) This is an important lesson in her moral
education.15 Emma is so confused partially because she is
without capable companionship. At the
beginning of the action, she is left alone with her father in “intellectual
solitude.” (E 7) Like Sherlock
Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, and other great detectives, Emma attempts to
alleviate boredom and anxiety by prying into others’ lives and problems. This prying, scheming nature is surely part
of what made her creator assume that Emma would be unlikable to many
readers. From the scrupulously fair
narrator, we hear in the novel’s opening passage that Emma “seemed to
unite some of the best blessings of existence.” To readers skilled in detection, the word “seemed” is the point
of the sentence, and we are immediately given notice that Emma’s portrait will
be ambiguous and elusive. The genius of
Jane Austen is revealed in her managing to make a compelling story about such
an unlikely heroine, who is a (somewhat failed) detective, in the context of a
narrative which demands constant clue-solving and cipher-reading on the part of
the reader.16 And it is this
complexity which provides the reader with endless rewards in re-reading this
novel: It is only on second and third reading that we begin to grasp the
novel’s meaning as well as its greatness.
Literally, the detective-reader will never completely solve the mystery
of Emma. Like the classic detective story, Emma
is a tale of ratiocination – but mainly of ratiocination gone wrong. The novel offers not one answer or solution
to the problems set, as is the case in most mysteries, but reenacts the
richness of life itself in all its ambiguity.
For this is the real point of Emma’s story: it is not simply that she
cannot understand reality, but that reality itself is very difficult to know:
“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure;
seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little
mistaken.” (E 431) Because of
its profound ambiguity and its probing of the interior life, Highbury is not
really St. Mary Mead, although it is close to Fenchurch St. Paul.17 And yet these places of mystery all emerge
from the assumption that human beings can and indeed must attempt truth-seeking,
and all celebrate the possibilities of the thinking mind. Perhaps the reason Emma has been called
“the most fiendishly difficult of detective stories” is that it does not
present one clear, definable detective problem to solve – as readers, we must
ferret out what is the mystery, what is the crime, who is the villain, and who
the heroine.18 Who are all
these people and what will become of them?
Who from this field of hearts will commit marriage in Highbury? Spinning mystery within mystery, it is only
at the novel’s end that the detective-heroine finally identifies the problem
she must investigate first, before any other knowledge is possible: “To
understand, thoroughly understand her own heart, was the first endeavour.” (E
412) In Emma, then, we have a mystery not
about murder but about misapprehension; where words and looks can kill, where
nubile young women need rescuing from embarrassment far more than from bandits;
where evil really is banal,19 and it is the detective, our most
unlikely heroine herself, whodunnit. Emma
is a great mystery of the familiar – so familiar, in fact, it’s frightening.
† The color image has replaced the original black and white image for the on-line edition of this essay. – C. Moss, JASNA Web Site Manager NOTES 1 For example, Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her
Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987), p. 362; and Marilyn Butler, Jane
Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 258,
271, 274. 2 Jane Austen, Emma (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 217, 226,
446, 453, 475, 120, 220, 346, 399, 452, 193, 449, 203, 348, 471. This is not an exhaustive list. Further references to the text of Emma
are to this edition. 3 H.F. Ellis, “Hartfield and Homicide,” Punch
(Dec. 14, 1955), pp. 689-90. 4 For the purposes of this discussion, I am using the terms “mystery” and “detective story” as rough synonyms, although mystery is a wider category. My comments are particularly relevant to the English mystery, not the American or “hardboiled” school, and to those authors who have managed to write detective stories which are also genuine novels, including Wilkie Collins, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ruth Rendell, and P.D. James. 5 Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Present Status of the
Mystery Story,” London Mercury (Nov., 1930), p. 49. 6 Emma, pp. 15, 132, 301, 391, for
example. 7 This is indeed the attitude toward the city
expressed in English fiction generally. 8 Marilyn Butler’s comments on Frank Churchill
are interesting in this regard: “Frank Churchill is the latest in the long
anti-jacobin descent of charming, hypocritical seducers who enter a secluded
community from a corrupt wider world,” p. 273. 9 R.W. Chapman discusses the moral significance
of the letter-writing between the two lovers in his notes to the novel’s Oxford
edition, pp. 512-513. 10 John Cawelti, Mystery, Adventure, Romance
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 77. 11 The one exception to this rule of openness
seems to be Harriet Smith’s illegitimacy, pp. 481-482. 12 See also Butler pp. 260, 271, 274; cf. Northanger
Abbey, “the finesse of love,” Oxford ed., p. 36. 13 Henry Austen, “Biographical Notice of the
Author,” in Northanger Abbey (Penguin, 1972), p. 375. 14 Cf. Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body? (New York: Avon, 1961), p. 127: “It happened
suddenly …. He remembered – not one
thing, nor a succession of things – but everything – the whole thing, perfect,
complete …. He knew it.” 15 Cf. Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Quick Work,” in The
Nine Tailors, where Lord Peter Wimsey is deeply troubled about this issue. 16 Even Mr. Woodhouse’s seemingly nonsensical
riddle, “Kitty, a fair but frozen maid,” can be seen on reflection to be
charged with meaning; he does not realize it, but this is a good description
not only of Jane Fairfax, but of Emma herself, until the end. 17 Locales created by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, respectively. 18 It is interesting that, while at work on Emma,
Jane Austen enjoyed responding to a novel manuscript by her niece, Anna, with
the arresting title of “Which Is the Heroine?”
(Honan, p. 351). 19 The word “evil” appears at least two dozen times in this novel, but Austen’s
definition is elusive. It ranges from
meaning something like inconvenience, to embarrassment, to hubris. A full study of this subject would be
enlightening. |