In the first volume of Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), the heroine grapples with Robert Martin’s superior expression. As Emma reads farmer Martin’s proposal to Harriet Smith, she is “surprized” to find that the letter is “much above her expectation” (50). Martin’s language, “though plain, [is] strong and unaffected.” His precise note conveys “good sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feeling,” leading Emma to admit that the composition “would not have disgraced a gentleman” (51). While Austen does not allow readers to peruse Martin’s note, the elements of “very good” (51) expression are elaborated when Mr. Knightley discusses Robert Martin’s proposal with Emma the next day. Praising Martin’s speech, Knightley declares, “‘He always speaks to the purpose; open, straight forward, and very well judging’” (59). In their attitudes to Martin’s speech and writing, Emma and Knightley capture contemporary assumptions about good self-expression. Martin’s letter deserves praise because it is clear and concise or, as Emma and Knightley say, “strong” and “straight forward.” Martin’s epistolary precision recalls Austen’s description of her own writing process: “the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour” (16–17 December 1816). As Austen notes, good expression is difficult to achieve. Elegant writing requires “much labour.”
In Austen’s world, it is far easier to express oneself poorly. Imprecise and repetitive inversions of Martin’s letter populate Highbury: Miss Bates’s rambling, Harriet Smith’s chatter, Mr. Elton’s bluster, and more. Foundational scholarship on Austen’s language by Norman Page, K. C. Phillipps, and Myra Stokes consistently links prolixity and impropriety, with Stokes focusing on vulgarisms. As Janet Sorensen notes, vulgarisms originally meant “common or ordinary expressions,” though the eighteenth century’s increasing concern with proper language shifted this definition to “colloquialism(s) of low or unrefined character” (43). Stokes analyzes vulgarisms within the judgmental register of Austen’s time, classifying gushy adjectives (charming, excessive, shocking, sweet, and vast) as ungenteel items of vocabulary that indiscriminately intensify their referents (17). While not grammatically incorrect, these adjectives often mark silly, coarse characters without social standing such as Mrs. Bennet and the Thorpes.1 All of Emma’s characters (lower class, nouveau riche, and gentry), however, use Stokes’s vulgarisms, muddling sociolinguistic links between gentility and proper vocabulary.2
This paper studies impolite expression through the manageable sample of Stokes’s vulgarisms (charming, excessive, shocking, sweet, and vast) as they occur in Emma. While vulgarisms sometimes indicate injudiciousness, in their most complex formulations, charming and sweet both rebel against and enforce conformity to expected conduct. After all, as Juliet McMaster notes, “talk is action” for Austen’s characters (120). While McMaster and Patricia Howell Michaelson show how characters construct their identities through language, Emma’s high-ranking characters use vulgarisms to prescribe deferential behavior to less advantaged acquaintances and sustain Highbury’s conservative social hierarchy. Though D. A. Miller claims that the “business of the novel” resides beyond its “chatter” (38), the chatter is crucial: casual asides and “vulgar” terms produce the novel’s most important episodes, including my focus: Harriet Smith’s unsuccessful bid at social elevation.3 Though Harriet attempts to transcend her station through her speech, Emma uses similar terms to obstruct Harriet’s social mobility.4 Instead of situating authority in the will of Highbury’s citizens, as Frances Ferguson does in her analysis of Emma’s free indirect discourse, or in gossip, as a classic essay by Casey Finch and Peter Bowen proposes, my analysis locates social sway in Emma. Emma’s desires come to govern the village in ways that seem to naturalize the system of rank—though Austen also represents those dissatisfied with this order. Harriet’s foreclosed social mobility undermines claims that rank is self-evident, instead anticipating what Thomas Keymer calls the “structural antagonism” of class (387). Austen displays how language sustains conservative social hierarchies without championing these processes.
After looking closely at Emma’s vulgarisms, this essay explores how Janeites consider Austen’s own expression by interrogating the widespread linking of Austen and Emma. By consulting Austen’s letters, novels, and accounts of her behavior, I argue that Harriet is an equally valid avatar of the author. I propose that implicit classism may influence the longstanding desire to link Austen with Emma rather than Harriet. In recognizing lexical and social links between Austen and Harriet, we recover another side of Austen, gain new understandings of speech and social sway in Austen’s novels, and amend issues with the way that worth and “proper” expression are adjudicated—both in Austen’s time and our own.
Reading for the chatter
In Emma, many characters use vulgarisms in ways we would expect, with the most conventional uses marking characters as hostile or silly. The garish Eltons, Austen’s caricatures of the nouveau riche, forcefully link vulgarisms with inferior intellect. Despite entering in the second volume, Mrs. Elton uses more of Stokes’s vulgarisms (18) than Miss Bates (13) and Mr. Woodhouse (3) combined, as repeated terms indicate her lack of imagination. She uses vast twice while discussing Jane Fairfax’s dire employment options (283, 299) and describes her as charming twice in one speech before applying the term—for a third time—to poetry by Thomas Gray (282). For Mr. Elton, charming is a trademark term, often used in hollow compliments (while he pursues Emma, her painting is “‘so charming a talent’” [43]; during the hilarious proposal, “‘Charming Miss Woodhouse! allow me to interpret this interesting silence’” [131]). On the other hand, gently foolish characters like Miss Bates and Mr. Woodhouse employ vulgarisms to intensify their speech. Gabby Miss Bates enjoys “‘vast deal[s] of chat’” (329) and is worried by Jane’s small and thus “‘shocking breakfast’” (237). Nervous Mr. Woodhouse laments Knightley’s inevitably shocking walk (due to the “‘vast deal of rain’”), though Knightley finds it mild (his shoes have “‘[n]ot a speck on them’” [10]). Through their naïveté, Miss Bates and Mr. Woodhouse strengthen the connection between vulgarisms and silliness.
Vulgarisms do more, however, than reflect gaudiness and silliness. At the end of Emma’s friendship with Frank Churchill, readers learn that they also sustain the status quo. As Emma and Frank say goodbye, Emma’s perspective is focalized by the narrator, who remarks, “Every thing tender and charming was to mark their parting; but still they were to part” (264). The social function of charming phrases is to smooth over awkward encounters. In seeming to do very little, self-consciously empty platitudes do a great deal. Charming phrases ensure that tense moments, often localized around rank (here, the awkward conjunction of Emma’s attraction to Frank Churchill and his preference for poor Jane Fairfax), do not erupt into conflict or, more disturbing for our landed heroine, social change.
Harriet Smith suggests her own cleverness by using charming as a similarly vacant compliment. In what appears to be modest deference, Harriet often describes Mrs. Elton as charming: “‘Is she not very charming?’” (271); “‘She does seem a charming young woman’” (272); “‘She was not yet quite able to see him [Mr. Elton] and his charming happy wife together, without being uncomfortable’” (291). In the third volume, however, Harriet has had enough, describing Mrs. Elton as “‘very charming, I dare say, and all that, but I think her very ill-tempered and disagreeable’” (337). By speeding from a cursory acknowledgment of her charms into a vague “and all that,” Harriet reveals that her compliments have served their purpose as social convention and allowed Harriet to fit in with Highbury’s polite high society without suggesting that Mrs. Elton is actually admirable. Charming’s quick swing into “ill-tempered and disagreeable” confirms that the term is so vacant as to signify its opposite.
Austen endorses Harriet’s expression by aligning it with the narrator’s first description of Mrs. Elton. In a scathing paragraph, the narrator introduces “[t]he charming Augusta Hawkins” and concludes by emphasizing her marriage’s true motivation: appeasing Mr. Elton’s bottomless “vanity” (181). Like the narrator’s ironic praise, Harriet’s admission reveals the brutal subtext of compliments in Highbury and indicates their social role: these seemingly pleasant terms are conversational filler. They uphold the social hierarchy by saying what is expected rather than what is true. What happens when someone breaks these rules, as Harriet does when she describes Mrs. Elton as “ill-tempered and disagreeable”? It would seem that action follows. After Harriet’s transgressive speech, she pursues a cross-class marriage with Knightley. The ways in which Harriet is made to fail show how language polices behavior that challenges the status quo.
If Harriet uses charming to challenge Highbury’s hierarchy, Emma uses sweet to reinforce the village’s social gradations. Like Harriet’s charming, Emma’s sweet holds a double meaning, seen most clearly when Emma adjudicates the motivations of Mr. Dixon’s intended, Miss Campbell. “‘[B]e it sweetness or be it stupidity’” (202), Emma whispers to Frank Churchill, it is startling that Miss Campbell is unbothered by Mr. Dixon’s apparent attraction to Jane Fairfax. Like charming, which covertly suggests Mrs. Elton’s nastiness, sweet is a gentle synonym for idiocy.5 Early in her friendship with Harriet, Emma consistently connects Harriet’s ignorance to her sweetness. If Harriet acts as Emma wishes (compliant and grateful), she is sweet. If she does not (for example, in pursuing Knightley), this compliment disappears. Emma thus uses sweet not to describe but to prescribe, enforce, and reward behavior befitting Harriet’s station: compliance and deference.
In the fourth chapter, Emma describes Harriet as “not clever, but [having] a sweet, docile, grateful disposition” (26). Emma reiterates this “docile” mode of sweetness throughout the first volume. Harriet has “‘the natural grace of sweetness of temper,’” Emma tells Mr. Elton, attempting to promote a match (42); Harriet presents “a very sweet mixture of youthful expression” when she sits for her portrait (46); she is Emma’s “‘sweet little friend’” (54); she has a “‘sweetness of temper and manner’” (63); Emma admires Harriet’s “blooming sweetness . . . in the midst of the pangs of disappointed affection” (219).
These compliments do not last. Because Harriet’s sweetness is identical to her willingness to act as Emma sees fit, as Harriet pursues opportunities without Emma’s permission, Emma describes her as sweet less and less. Harriet’s sweetness dwindles in the second volume and disappears in the third. The final interpellation occurs when Emma is certain that because she does not desire Churchill, Harriet’s “‘sweet easy temper’” shall substitute for her own and become his new match (364). Once Emma realizes her error and understands that Harriet desires Knightley, she ceases to call her sweet entirely and instead highlights her deficiency. Harriet is now a “dead weight” and “a threatening evil” (450, 409). For Knightley, such a marriage would be “a debasement” and “degrading” (413, 431). Emma wants to improve Harriet’s social standing—but only as Emma sees fit. Emma becomes quite cruel in the third volume, in one venomous aside thinking, “there would be no need of compassion to the girl who believed herself loved by Mr. Knightley” (408).
Emma’s use of sweet tells us a great deal about how the heroine understands social rank (rapidly shifting into the antagonism of class) and proper conduct. Her employment of the term recalls a similar use from a less appealing character: Northanger Abbey’s villainess Isabella Thorpe. In a telling scene, Isabella is “sure her dearest, sweetest Catherine” (98) will comply with the group’s wishes and slight Eleanor Tilney to travel to Clifton. Isabella refers to Catherine’s “‘sweet . . . temper’” (98) throughout her wheedling, though once she realizes that Catherine will not attend, these compliments stop. Isabella switches tactics and harshly criticizes Catherine’s alleged disloyalty. Catherine regards Isabella’s behavior as “equally strange and unkind” as well as “ungenerous and selfish, regardless of every thing but her own gratification” (98). While this unflattering echo cannot overthrow Emma’s good qualities, Emma’s worst behavior deserves Catherine’s reproach. Emma’s greatest failure is her unkind treatment of the lower ranks, seen most clearly in her callousness to Miss Bates on Box Hill and, though less notorious, the barrage of uncharitable descriptions of Harriet.
Critics have long been wary of Emma’s reasons for befriending Harriet. Often categorized as a protégée, Harriet is not Emma’s equal in rank or, for many scholars, intellect. Marilyn Butler finds Harriet “mindless, characterless, [and] indecisi[ve]” (266). Patricia Meyer Spacks cites her “stupidity” (408). Terry Castle describes her as “hapless Harriet,” the “victim of [Emma’s] incomprehension” (41). All agree that Harriet is not Emma’s friend but a make-work project upon Miss Taylor’s departure. While feminist critics of the 1980s and early 1990s, including Claudia L. Johnson, interpreted Emma’s attempts to “improve” Harriet as proto-feminist bids for “authority” (Jane Austen 131), championing Emma’s treatment of Harriet inevitably prioritizes gender over class. Emma’s interference may empower Emma, but lower-born Harriet endures pain and embarrassment only to return to her original suitor, farmer Martin. In acting as the medium through which a landed gentlewoman reaches self-knowledge, a less-advantaged teenager is not empowered but exploited. This unequal dynamic should give all proto-feminist reclamations of Emma some pause.
Emma’s behavior indicts not only herself but Highbury’s hierarchical society at large. As Keymer notes, Emma embodies social stratification; unlike other Austen heroines, she “is not the usual challenger of hierarchy, but rather its staunchest upholder” (393). While Knightley values “practical merit as opposed to technical rank” (393), Emma only experiments with interchanging worthiness and pedigree (experiments that fail throughout her relationship with Harriet). Ultimately, she upholds the status quo so insidiously that her actions represent how rank becomes naturalized. Rank continues to structure society because occasional shows of force (like Emma’s treatment of Harriet) push upstarts back to their so-called rightful place. Emma’s worst behavior exposes the quiet cruelty that fuels Highbury’s social hierarchy.
While Emma stands in for rank, Harriet represents the class system’s discontentment. Harriet strives to move beyond her station and cannot achieve her goals due, at least in part, to Emma’s interference. Through Emma’s and Harriet’s distinct worldviews, Austen depicts the Regency’s shifting social arrangements. As the fine gradations of rank solidify into the hostile friction of class, Austen signals her sympathy with the latter by representing the foibles of the former. As I have shown in this brief discussion of charming and sweet, Harriet is cleverer than we expect. Emma may be crueller. While it is true that vulgarisms sometimes reflect ill manners, they also enforce classed behaviors, rewarding compliant subjects with adjectives that sound complimentary (sweet) but signify obedience. Through vulgarisms, Austen demonstrates Emma’s unsavory traits and links them with the preservation of Highbury’s conservative social structure.
A portrait of the artist as a provincial young woman
Despite Emma’s occasional cruelty and trenchant conservatism, there is a long tradition of aligning Austen with this “handsome, clever, and rich” heroine (5). Emma “comes the closest of any Austen heroine to exhibiting artistic powers,” writes Emily Auerbach, for “what other young woman in Austen is described as an imaginist, a word Austen coins?” (202). Reinforcing Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s foundational assessment of Emma as “an avatar of Austen the artist” (158), Auerbach aligns Emma’s mission to transition Highbury’s singles into united pairs with Austen’s novelistic plotting.
In the second half of this essay, I query this alignment by considering Austen’s personal experiences with expression and propriety. Because it is difficult to unravel Austen’s expression (due to limited evidence and shifting standards of propriety), I experiment with drawing on Austen’s novels and letters; scholarship on her spelling, grammar, and punctuation; and one particular account of her behavior. Building on work by Janine Barchas, Kathryn Sutherland, and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I show how Austen’s “peculiar style” of spelling (as she called it in a letter dated 26 November 1815)—and her overall expression—was not always received positively (not by the editor William Gifford, Austen’s niece Fanny Knight, and even at times Austen herself). While Austen’s artistry may be replicated in Emma, negative responses to Austen’s expression do not recall the heroine but the way that Harriet Smith is treated by Emma. Ultimately, recognizing lexical and social similarities between Austen and Harriet illuminates how tacit classism informs the longstanding desire to read Austen as Emma. Because Austen’s novels consistently explore the injustice of categorizing someone’s moral and intellectual worth according to their social station, it is crucial to ensure that our perception of Austen does not unconsciously replicate the link between superior economic rank and personal worth.
While we cannot hear Austen’s speech, the novels and letters are the closest evidence available, especially texts with what Kathryn Sutherland describes as an “aural and oral” element (9).6 Austen’s letters provide a similar orality in Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s linguistic study, which is fitting given Austen’s link between “the true art of letter-writing” and “word of mouth” (3–5 January 1801). As Tieken-Boon van Ostade shows, Austen guides her reader through the letters’ spoken dimension through quirky elements such as plentiful dashes (requesting pauses) and phonetic spelling (directing pronunciation). Working with the feminist ethos to reclaim women writers’ distinctive expression as avant-garde rather than incorrect, current scholarship often lauds these unconventional elements as signs of an experimental writer (Sutherland argues that Austen’s “ungrammaticality” revels in speech’s “uncertain thresholds” [296–97]) and linguistic innovator (in her essay on Emma, Janine Barchas interprets the novel’s frequent use of very as indicating Austen’s interest in early linguistics). In Austen’s own time, when standardized English reigned, however, unconventional punctuation and excessive repetition were considered not proof of a genius at work but as inappropriate lapses in proper expression. Like Austen’s tendency to use “ei” rather than “ie” (famously seen in “Love and Freindship”), some of Austen’s nonstandard expressions were simply considered incorrect by peers and by Austen herself.
Indeed, the commas praised by Sutherland are eliminated in the second edition of Mansfield Park (1816), which was prepared by the staunch grammarian William Gifford. While Austen did not delete her own commas, cross-outs and superscript amendments occur once or twice per letter, suggesting that even in casual notes, Austen strove to write correctly (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 86). As the slightly haphazard appearance of the manuscripts suggests, perfect sentences did not come “finished from her pen,” as Austen’s brother Henry claimed in the “Biographical Notice of the Author” included in the first edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (8). These traces indicate that Austen negotiated between experimentation and standardization and aspired to fulfil certain orthographic standards. If we pause here, Austen’s “peculiar style” takes on a different tone. Austen is simultaneously a proto-feminist writing against established rules of grammar, an experimental author representing the aural in text, and a woman who considered her writing to require attention before it fulfilled the day’s standards.
With this multifaceted understanding of Austen’s expression in mind, I turn to the most notorious suggestion that Austen, like Harriet Smith, may not have been the most refined communicator of her time. In a controversial account, in 1869 Austen’s niece Fanny Knight (then Lady Knatchbull) remembered Austen’s behavior at Kent, providing a portrait of the artist as a provincial young woman:
[I]t is very true that Aunt Jane from various circumstances was not so refined as she ought to have been from her talent. . . . They were not rich & the people around with whom they chiefly mixed, were not at all high bred, or in short anything more than mediocre & they of course tho’ superior in mental powers & cultivation were on the same level as far as refinement goes. (Le Faye 38–39)
As Claire Tomalin notes, Fanny Knight’s recollection “has upset and angered Jane Austen’s admirers and been taken as an example of disloyalty and the wrongheadedness of mid-Victorian ideas of refinement” (135). While Tomalin concludes that the assessment “suggests how Jane was received at Godmersham” (135) more than her true character, this deferral sidesteps a significant concern in biographical studies of Austen: the extent of her refinement. Like the gasps still provoked by some of Austen’s letters, the idea that Austen may have acted in an unrefined way still scandalizes. Even one of Austen’s most thorough biographers struggles to consider that Austen may have been an informal speaker not only from a Victorian perspective but perhaps within her own time as well.
As Austen’s defenders have correctly insisted, Fanny Knight’s assessment is too distanced from the original episode to recall accurately how Austen’s behavior meshed within its social environment. She wrote many years after Austen’s death, long after the alleged inelegance. Even so, that the longstanding response to this account has been to discredit the niece and insist that Austen was proper is worth considering. This response tacitly supports James Edward Austen-Leigh’s description of Austen as prim Aunt Jane.7 In preferring an Austen who would never act the way Fanny Knight claims, Janeites sustain traditional associations between class, expression, and merit. While Austen belonged to the gentry, she occupied its lower tier (the lower clergy), and her immediate family had very little income, with financial troubles that only increased after Austen’s father’s death in 1805. Along with her mother and sister, Austen depended on her brothers for financial support. It is not a sin to be poor, nor is it a sin to express oneself informally. There is nothing wrong with acting as “unrefined” as people who are “not rich.” Janeites agree that Fanny Knight’s judgment is harsh, though we should re-examine our own rapid denial of her claims. The way to truly denounce that judgment is not to insist that she is incorrect. It is to say that even if she is right, we are not bothered by the suggestion that Austen may have acted improperly because we know that the concept of propriety is profoundly classist.
Instead of overlooking nonstandard expression and erasing inelegant behavior, Janeites could respond differently. For example, while Austen corrects her own letters, in three notes to her nieces between September 1814 and March 1816, she shifts her idiolect and integrates (rather than denigrates) casual terms. As Tieken-Boon van Ostade shows, in these letters Austen uses the same words as giddy characters, specifically fun, a cant term (according to Johnson’s Dictionary [1755]) favored by Lydia Bennet and John Thorpe (14–15). These silly characters show that Austen recognized fun’s low reputation but shifted her idiom for her nieces anyway. In letters to Anna and Caroline Austen, she describes a flurry of post-chaise visits as “a great deal of fun,” compliments two characters in Anna Austen’s novel draft (“I expect high fun about Mrs. Fisher & Sir Thomas”), and, in the famous letter on novel-writing, guides her niece’s writing by advising that “the fun must be imperfect” (154–55).8
Austen’s kind letters to her nieces thus facilitate a useful comparison to Austen’s own textual history. Sutherland has shown that when prescriptive editors (her primary example being R. W. Chapman, who prepared the influential 1923 Oxford edition of Austen’s novels) interact with an uncouth-seeming Austen, they force her into linguistic propriety. In contrast, when Austen interacts with more casual speakers, she switches to their register, promoting mutual respect and facilitating social bonds. The novels also link certain kinds of vulgarity with goodness. Pamela S. Bromberg notes that Miss Bates’s relaxed speech “strengthen[s] the bonds that make up the community” (132), while Joe Bray reminds readers that the “openly vulgar” speech of Sense and Sensibility’s Mrs. Jennings demonstrates her “down-to-earth common sense” (120). While vulgar language can indicate intellectual weakness, it also builds community and signifies good-heartedness.
Importantly, Tieken-Boon van Ostade shows that Austen uses the most vulgarisms in letters to Cassandra, often considered the most faithful displays of Austen’s true self (153). Might this lexical trend support Fanny Knight’s memory of Austen’s relaxed behavior, however uncharitably described? While the self-corrections show that Austen strove to write correctly, traces like the kind letters to her nieces and Fanny’s memory suggest that she was not rigidly proper either, with this relaxed expression provoking occasional censure. In the triangulation between Austen’s efforts to express herself correctly, her clever but relaxed writing and behavior, and the occasionally hostile responses to this nonstandard expression, I am reminded not of Austen’s usual avatar Emma but of Harriet Smith. To build on Barchas’s argument, both share a propensity to intensify their language with very. Harriet’s coy use of charming is also echoed by the narrator, the figure most often aligned with Austen, and is a “natural” term for Austen herself. Writing to Cassandra, she refers to the Huguenot who ran the local paper mill: “Benjamin Portal is here. How charming that is!—I do not exactly know why, but the phrase followed so naturally that I could not help putting it down” (11 June 1799). Like Harriet, Austen attended boarding school (unlike Emma, she did not have a governess) and would have ranked below Emma in Highbury’s social scale. Like Harriet’s revelatory use of charming, Austen’s nonstandard expression subtly critiques lexical and social conventions. And finally, like Harriet’s eventual treatment by Emma, Austen’s nonstandard expression was judged and found to require correction (by Gifford, Knight, Chapman, and occasionally Austen herself).9 Austen’s nonstandard writing is cleansed just as Harriet’s efforts to advance result in her return to a lower position. These links are sometimes small and sometimes broad, but, cumulatively, they suggest that in social rank, expression, and its reception, Austen resembles Harriet more than Emma.
Indeed, the crucial distinction that halts rosy readings of Emma as Austen’s richest, most content heroine is that Emma imposes a conservative social hierarchy while Austen depicts how power functions. Emma concludes with disconcerting symmetry as the marriages of Harriet Smith and Robert Martin, Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill, and Emma Woodhouse and George Knightley reveal the eerie rigidity of Emma’s social order. With couples representing lower, middle, and upper classes, Emma reverses Austen’s tendency to conclude with cross-class marriages and surprises readers who may have expected the underdog victory in prior novels. In departing from her formula, Austen troubles the apparently natural quality of the rank system, emphasizing the impact of class on autonomy. Emma may deploy the term sweet to prescribe Harriet’s behavior, but when Harriet does something similar, she is too authoritative for her station and forced back to her original position.
The intersections between social power and proper expression reveal how classism impacts Janeites’ desire to see Austen as like Emma rather than Harriet. In reconsidering this tendency and aligning Austen with Harriet, Janeites may also supplement current conceptions of the author. While the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries viewed Austen as prim and polished, the twenty-first century has reclaimed her as an experimental proto-feminist writer.10 We might add another dimension by integrating Austen’s social constraint. This neglected side of Austen in turn informs our view of her novels, urging readers to sympathize with unexpected characters such as Austen’s inelegant avatar, Harriet Smith.
NOTES
1Only one of Stokes’s examples is spoken by a character in the gentry (she cites Emma Woodhouse, who says, “‘Oh God!’”). Otherwise, characters who use vulgar terms include the Steele sisters, Mrs. Jennings, Admiral Croft, and Lydia Bennet. See Stokes (15–20).
2Vulgarisms are often considered to depend on use. On its own, vast may not be vulgar. When repeated indiscriminately to describe anything, terms become vulgar. This approach is helpful in treating characters whose coarse speech reflects low morals, such as Miss Steele from Sense and Sensibility (1811). I have resisted interpreting Emma’s vulgarisms in this vein for two reasons. First, as seen in n. 1, there is a tendency to ignore instances when noble characters employ vulgar language. Second, as this paper shows, by charting vulgar terms rather than adjudicating vulgar usage on a case-by-case basis, we may capture vulgarity’s slipperiness as a category and see how it is disproportionately assigned to lower-ranking characters.
3Janet Todd’s “The Anxiety of Emma” proposes an alternative interpretation of Highbury’s chatter: she argues that “the constant flow of commonplace social intercourse cover[s] just bearable loneliness and perennial inadequacy” (25). For Todd, the endless conversation in Emma indicates Austen’s simultaneous recognition and romance of the boredom of village life.
4See Deborah Cameron’s Verbal Hygiene for a wide-ranging treatment of how language is deemed inappropriate and either suppressed or appropriated by those with social power.
5Stupid had two primary definitions in Austen’s lifetime: “having one’s faculties deadened or dulled; in a state of stupor, stupefied, stunned” and, more common today, “slow of mental perception” (OED).
6Sutherland finds these traces in the first edition of Mansfield Park, manuscripts of juvenilia, and the cancelled chapter of Persuasion.
7For a treatment of Austen-Leigh’s characterization of Austen, see Johnson, Cults and Cultures (16–67).
8For a treatment of how Austen pitches her language to her audience, see Burrows. For a broader discussion of code-switching, see Mesthrie and Swann.
9See Sutherland for a thorough discussion of Chapman’s interventionalist editorial practices in his 1923 Oxford edition of Austen’s novels. Chapman tended to draw attention to potential errors and suggest his own corrections with the baseline understanding that seeming incorrectness cannot signal inventiveness or experimentation.
10See Johnson, Cults and Cultures. For a discussion of these visions of Austen and her language, see Hodson.
