Emma (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

Austen completed three more novels
(Mansfield Park, Emma,
and
Persuasion)
in the Chawton sitting room. Productive and discreet, she was not widely known to be the author of her published work. All of her novels were published anonymously, including the posthumous appearance, thanks to her brother Henry, of
Northanger Abbey
and
Persuasion.

The last years of Austen’s life were relatively quiet and comfortable. Her final, unfinished work,
Sanditon,
was put aside in the spring of 1817, when her health sharply declined and she was taken to Winchester for medical treatment of what appears to have been Addison’s disease or a form of lymphoma. Jane Austen died there on July 18, 1817, and is buried in Winchester Cathedral.

Emma,
first published in 1816, is Jane Austen’s masterpiece. It is also one of the greatest novels in the English language. There is, and has been for some time, general agreement on these conclusions, but that consensus has in recent years remained largely tacit and unspoken, since judgments of value and relative merit in literary studies have as a category become contested ground, a site of principled dubiety. Still, it is difficult to deny that Jane Austen is a writer of exceptional interest, perhaps even of singular gifts, and that her writing has been steadily regarded as special and distinctive from the time of its original appearance to the present.

Simple reflection yields the observation that the very conception of judgments—of people making differing and differential estimates of value, of better and worse, or good and bad or better, of right and wrong and neither, of each other and themselves—is a central concern and undeviating activity of and in Austen’s novels. The characters in these narratives are uninterruptedly involved in efforts to discriminate better from worse, and so is Jane Austen as narrator and architect of these fictions. Hence the contemporary student of literature is confronted with a paradox: In order to read Jane Austen appropriately, in order to achieve that willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith and enables us to enter into fictive projections and imagined situations and problems as if they were, for the moment, “real” and we were experiencing them on a plane adjacent to that on which narrator and characters are assumed or proposed to exist—to do this we have to enter fully into the activities of judging, evaluating, and discriminating, as if they were as binding for us as they were for the author and her characters and their perplexities.

Another consideration along these lines has to do with the circumstance that, despite the clarity of line of its narrative, prose, and dialogue,
Emma
is an exceptionally dense and complex novel. So tightly woven is the intertexture of its thematic expressions, images, and representations that one can enter into it at almost any point or juncture in the narrative and begin to take up an analysis of the whole from there. It is almost as if no single strand or theme were exclusive of any of the others; each of them, by a strict economy of expressive means, leads to the center, which is at the same time a differentiated whole or totality. But that totality is equally neither stable nor self-identical but is continually shifting and permutating while we read, changing through each cumulative episode and detail, yet remaining somehow recognizably also itself.

What this complexity and variability require of us as readers, therefore, if we want to grasp what is taking place in this novel, is that we arouse our awareness and perceptiveness as collaborating intelligences to an intensity and subtlety of feeling, and a discrimination of existential distinctions and moral differences more focused and unremitting than most of us bring to our own everyday experience. The dramatic representation of characters in motion, speech, inner reflection, and intercourse, and the judgments of value that are rendered on each—and that we in our turn must also imagine—are simultaneous and inseparable. They take place in the same behavior (whether as narrative, speech, or dialogue) which is by that very token the writing that we read.

This is in part what older literary critics meant when they insisted upon the existence of a moral function or purpose in literature, and in particular in the novel. That function is disclosed to a degree in how—in the cause we undertake of trying fully to understand a story—the novel prompts and even compels us to exercise, more actively and purposefully than we ordinarily do, intellect, feeling, self-conscious reflection, and judgmental discrimination. In reading better we momentarily improve ourselves.

Emma
is an exemplary instantiation of these processes. How and in what ways, for the purposes of explanation, do we locate its achieved originality? We can single out three general categories that will serve to organize discussion.

Most of the almost innumerable critical discussions of
Emma
undertake to explore or analyze one or another of these general areas. But a central part of
Emma’s
greatness has to do with its rendering of all three into interanimated coherence. It does so (to continue for another moment at this pitch of schematic simplicity and abstraction) by dramatically juxtaposing and integrating the interests and questions set out in numbers 1 and 3—the personal and inward with the impingements of social and cultural circumstances. It achieves this interpenetration and transformation of both largely, though not exclusively, by such innovations as are adverted to in number 2. It dramatizes such interfusions through the deployment of original representational means—in prose, in style and idiom, in narrative voice and dialogue, and through the juxtaposition of a range of narrative discourses. That is to say, it represents with unprecedented fullness the interpenetration of these large, stipulated spheres of existence—the domain of individual, reflective consciousness and emotions as it engages, mediates, and is modified by external and public pressures. These pressures are exerted for the most part by other persons—family members, friends, and acquaintances—as well as by the familiar constraints imposed by gender, money, situation, fortune, age, accident, and other circumstances. How this is done and what it suggests about the registration and elaboration of meaning in narrative comprises one side of
Emma’s
extraordinary claim as a novel, an achieved textual totality, and it is the purpose of this introduction to explore how this complex, heterogeneous whole is put together.