Jane Austen's Emma: Where Caricature Leaves Off and Portraiture Begins

The forces at work that accounted for the rise and fall of Napoleon and the Age of Enlightenment that gave rise to American independence were also at work on the social structure of the eighteenth-century European family where a shift from a patriarchal system to an egalitarian one was taking place. This movement profoundly affected the domestic lives of eighteenth-century England. The notions of equality between men and women raised the possibility of real friendship between husbands and wives which in turn lead to the ideal of romantic attachment being elevated over the arrangement of marriages. Domestic practices altered accordingly.

For example, the employment of wet nurses, a practice introduced during the rise of feudal institutions that had the effect of lowering the status of women by implying that they were more wives than mothers, was largely abandoned during the egalitarian movement in favor of mothers nursing their children. Parents began spending more time with their children, children became more attached to the parents, and a new ideal of domesticity was born.

While the causes of the egalitarian movement are obscure and the realization of its principles are far from secure even to this day, it still supplies what exists today of a common modern morality governing how families should behave.

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These changing values are evidenced in Emma in a very significant and poignant way. Although there does not appear to be an effulgence of affection for small children in the work (undoubtedly reflecting Jane's own experiences of having to care for her brother's children, as will be shown later), there is a definite advocacy of parental attachment and familial responsibility. While we understand this in a more meaningful way in the context of the egalitarian movement, the poignancy of the relationships in Emma are brought into full bloom by understanding the familial experiences of Jane Austen herself in those burgeoning egalitarian times.

Jane was seventh in the line of eight children born to the not-very-well-off clergyman, George Austen and his wife, Cassandra. For the first twenty-six years of Jane's life, the family lived in rural Steventon, a small country parish in northeast Hampshire. She received her education primarily from her father as the Austen's ran a small boarding school out of their home for four to five boys and Mr. Austen was its headmaster and sole teacher. Jane did, however, suffer two traumatic experiences, when she was between eight and eleven years old, that were the result of her parent's attempts to ship her and her only sister, Cassandra, off to a boarding school for girls, experiences about which Jane would later write scathingly. Jane was a precocious and outspoken child and, as was her entire family, an avid reader of novels. Jane's eldest brother, James, was a writer of essays and poetry and, at one point, an editor of a weekly magazine called The Loiterer, which was of keen interest to the entire family.

When Jane took up writing, her father encouraged her by providing her with paper (a precious commodity) and a very pretty portable writing desk of mahogany and leather. At one point, Mr. Austen even wrote a query letter to a publisher on his daughter's behalf. Jane began writing short stories and essays at age eleven. Even from the beginning, she did not feel at all secretive about her work; on the contrary, she entertained family and friends by either reading her stories aloud by the fireside, or performing them in family theatricals. Jane's early efforts are full of family jokes and references, and while some of these references are stinging, a primary consideration of hers would always be the necessity for remaining on good terms with her circle of family and friends as she deeply valued their respect and affection.

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As she grew into a keen observer and an intelligent, sensitive novelist, she needed a venue for expressing her judgments, feelings and views without provoking conflict with those in her circle. She discovered that there existed a willful blindness on the part of those in her society in their ability to disconnect themselves from the faults she revealed in her stories as long as the traits were either caricatured or disguised. Jane uses this device in Emma to reveal her suppressed feelings of resentment and betrayal at the hand of her brother Edward. It is the story of Edward Austen - who later became Edward Knight -- that gives a richer understanding to the deep significance of the Frank Churchill subplot.

The Austen home at Stevenson was part of an estate owned by a distant cousin, a wealthy landowner by the name of Thomas Knight. When Thomas married in 1779, the newlyweds went on a "bridal tour" stopping to visit the Austen's at Steventon at which time they met and took a special liking to Edward, the Austen's third son, then twelve years old. Their liking was of such a significant nature, in fact, that they extended the invitation to take Edward along with them for the rest of their honeymoon, in and of itself a very odd arrangement.

The Knights continued their particular attachment to Edward after their return and singled him out for invitations to visit them at their grand estate in Kent. This culminated in the Knight's formally adopting Edward in 1783 and, since the Knights were childless, making Edward their heir. However, Edward was to remain under his father's tutelage for three more years before embarking on a four year Grand Tour of Europe after which he was installed permanently at Godmersham (pictured here), the grandest of their four magnificent estates.

The concept of adopting out the twelve year old child of two parents still living and separating him from his siblings is jarring to modern sensibilities and, put in the context of parental attachment and domesticity of the egalitarian era, this event cannot simply be glossed over as the Austen's good fortune at the hands of a generous benefactor, as many biographers seem to portray it. As was her way, Jane used her pen to give voice to the outrage and hurt she could not openly express.

She created Frank Churchill, also fostered out and eventually adopted by a wealthy aunt and uncle. She reveals her feelings through the voice of Isabella (Woodhouse) Knightly in no uncertain terms:
There is nothing so shocking as a child's being taken away from his parents and natural home! I never could comprehend how Mr. Weston could part with him. To give up one's child! I really never could think well of anybody who proposed such a thing to anybody else.

Notice, too, that she does not chastise the parents of the child in her scenario, but the person who made the proposal. Jane was unwavering in her adoration of her father. On one level, she understood how he could not doom his middle son to a life of mediocrity by refusing the Knight's offer:
Some scruples and some reluctance the widower-father may be supposed to have felt; but as they were overcome by other considerations the child was given up to the care and the wealth of the Churchills, and he had only his own comfort to seek, and his own situation to improve as he could.

However, the consequences of the rest of them being left behind were not lost on Jane either. The disparity in the circumstances of Edward and the rest of the Austen family was an ever escalating source of humiliation for Jane, although she did her best to repress her feelings of resentment and wounded pride.

When Edward married, Jane did not attend his wedding but she did give him and his new bride, Elizabeth, a wedding present: a story she wrote and dedicated to Edward entitled "The Three Sisters." Biographer Claire Tomalin called it a "distinctly brutal story about mercenary matchmaking . . . [that] even the most good-humored bride might have found . . . tactless."

We have evidence of Jane's repressed resentment in her letters as well. During one of her visits to her brother Edward, Jane wrote to her sister Cassandra: "Farmer Clarinbould died this morning, & I fancy Edward means to get some of his Farm if he can cheat Sir Brook [Edward's brother-in-law] enough in the agreement."

Jane was to pay many visits to her brother's vast estate of Godmersham, but the trips were arranged at the convenience of others rather than her own and she was not so much a guest as she was a relation who was sent for in times of need. Although Elizabeth had made it clear that she preferred Cassandra over Jane, Jane nonetheless made many trips Godmersham to help take care of Edward's burgeoning family and his wife who was perpetually pregnant. Although there is evidence that Edward's adopted mother always treated Jane with respect and kindness, it is evident that Jane never got over the sense of being the poor visiting relation.

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There was a nine year silence in the middle of Jane's literary career, when she was between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-three. It began with a great upheaval in her life that shook the very foundation of her happiness. Her father was age seventy, a rather remarkable achievement for the time, and her mother suffered from periodic illnesses. Most of the children had scattered and so Mr. and Mrs. Austen made the monumental decision to retire and move the family to Bath. Jane had been born and raised in Steventon; its rhythms were her own. Whenever she was required to be elsewhere, she always looked forward to going home. "Her creativity, her ability to put pen to paper, flowed from the reality of the familiar." By all accounts, Jane took the news very hard.

Nearly all of their furniture had to be sold or disposed of, including her father's library, which was made up of over five hundred books. What was particularly difficult for Jane to bear was that most of the furniture, paintings and household things went to her brother James and his wife Mary, who were moving in to Steventon as James was taking over his father's ecclesiastical position. Jane's pianoforte, the one she played every morning for her own enjoyment, had to be left behind as well as the old painted sets from the family theatricals in the barn. Everything that was not sold went directly to James. From Jane's letters at the time, it is clear that she felt James and his wife were insensitively pushing them out and hurrying them on their way.

Jane's mother and sister attempted to dictate to Jane how she should make gifts of her possessions to her nieces to which she tartly responded, "You are very kind," she wrote to Cassandra, "in planning presents for me to make, & my Mother has shewn me exactly the same attention - but as I do not chuse to have Generosity dictated to me, I shall not resolve on giving my Cabinet to Anna [her niece] till the first thought of it has been my own."

Her father's retirement further diminished their already meager financial position and turning over the parish to James necessitated their moving, but Jane's parent's decision to move them to Bath was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that cosmopolitan Bath would be better husband-hunting territory for their daughters, a last ditch effort as the fate of spinsterhood was by this time all but certain.

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Thus began years of unsettled roaming about for the Austen's. During the Bath years, the family moved several times, into accommodations that got progressively smaller and less comfortable. Jane's dark state culminated in the death of her father in 1805 after a sudden illness that lasted only two days.

There was not much hope on the horizon for Jane to resume her writing without the positive encouragement and the loving critical eye with which her father had always provided her. What's more, now the Austen women had to survive on the exceedingly meager incomes of Mrs. Austen and Cassandra (Cassandra having the benefit of a small annuity from her fiancé who died of yellow fever before they could be married). But Jane had nothing. She was entirely without means and consequently, without choices.

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So where was Edward in his family's time of need? Jane's other brothers James, Henry and Frank, all of modest means, each made an annual pledge of fifty pounds to their widowed mother. In fact, Frank initially offered one hundred pounds, but their mother, feeling the "magnificence" of his offer, accepted only half. Such a gesture from Frank, whose income came from his military service, could be expected to shame the wealthy Edward into generosity, as Edward enjoyed his extraordinary good fortune through no effort of his own but instead by landing with the Knights, but there is no evidence that he had such sensibilities. One hundred pounds was the sum Edward pledged.

Although Edward, owning not only a very handsome income and the vast estate of Godmersham, but three other large income producing estates including one in Hampshire, as well as the fine houses in his wife's family's possession, left his widowed mother and sisters to eke out an existence, moving from place to place, in near destitution, depending upon the hospitality of others. He certainly would have had houses at his disposal and could very well have provided them with a permanent home but the idea seemed not to have occurred to either him or his wife. What did occur to Elizabeth was to have Cassandra and Jane come with increasing frequency to Godmersham to help care for her and her ever growing brood of children.

By the time Jane was thirty-three, she was reluctantly settling in to her role as maiden aunt, alternately taking care of her brothers' children for extended lengths of time. Her brother Frank and his wife Mary had one child; her brother James had three and Edward and his wife Elizabeth had a huge brood of ten. Jane particularly cherished her visits with her brother Henry and his wife, Eliza, who were childless. They lived near London, often attended the theatre and the opera (Henry even owned his own opera box) and entertained friends at dinner parties.

In 1808, Jane spent two weeks at Manydown House, the home of her friends, the Biggs. She enjoyed herself so much that she invited the Biggs to a reciprocal visit to Southampton in the summer but by the time for the visit came around, she found herself stuck at Godmersham where the family assumed without discussing it with her, that she could stay until her brother Henry was available to come down to escort her home two months hence.

Jane was so distraught by the idea that she would not be able to get back to Southampton in time for the arrival of her guests, she was driven (quite uncharacteristically) to plead with Edward, begging him to see to her transportation home. Ungracious to the end, Edward required her to present him and his wife with a "private reason" to justify her need to keep her engagement with the Biggs before he would agree to take her home. She found this humiliating, writing to Cassandra that "till I have a traveling purse of my own, I must submit to such things."

This was but one of many humiliations she was to suffer from this disparity of circumstance. On one of Jane's visits to Godmersham, a hairdresser came to prepare the ladies for a party one evening. Recognizing Jane as a poor relation and someone to be pitied and accommodated, Jane was offered a discount. There is evidence that her status as a poor relation caused her suffering that injured her self-esteem, contributing to her bitterness and caused her to long for home, humble as it was.

Cassandra replaced her at Godmersham a few months later for Elizabeth's eleventh confinement. Their sister-in-law was to survive less than two weeks after the birth of a son. Although Jane wrote with tender and compassionate concern for her brother and the children, she expressed a very different sentiment when asking Cassandra about her sister-in-law: "I suppose you've seen the Corpse, -- how does it appear?"

It was only after his wife died that Edward finally stepped up and offered to help his widowed mother and sisters. It can be supposed that Elizabeth was a discouraging influence on any generous inclinations that might (or might not) have occurred to her husband in the past with regards to his poor relations, for immediately after her death Edward gave the Austen women a choice of two houses, one in a pretty village near him at Godmersham called Wye and another, nearer to Henry and James at Chawton. Although Mrs. Austen was inclined toward the former, the sisters persuaded her to choose Chawton Cottage.

Cassandra stayed on at Godmersham for several months after Elizabeth's death, including what would have been Edward and Elizabeth's anniversary on December 27, 1808. Jane, on the other hand, was in Southampton in very high spirits, attending balls and the theatre and declaring to Cassandra in a letter that she was as happy as she had been fifteen years ago, when they had both attended balls together. By July 7th, Jane was finally installed at Chawton Cottage. The effect on Jane's happiness and sense of well being was evidenced by the fact that, almost at once, she began to write again, taking out her previously shelved Eleanor and Marianne, re-titling it Sense and Sensibility.

When Jane began writing Emma in 1814, her feelings about Edward's callous treatment of her family was in need of a voice.

Not only is the circumstance of Edward's adoption by the Knight's closely mirrored in the circumstances of Frank's adoption by the Churchill's, as discussed before, but many of Jane's personal feelings and judgments regarding her own experiences during the difficult Bath years are also thinly veiled in the dialog of Emma, down to rather alarming detail.

It is no coincidence that the gift Jane Fairfax receives from her then unknown benefactor is a pianoforte when one recalls that a pianoforte was one of the prized possessions Jane Austen had to give up when being forced from the home she loved. "I suppose I smile for pleasure at Colonel Campbell's being so rich and so liberal. It is a handsome present. . . . I rather wonder that it was never made before." As Jane Austen might have "wondered" why Edward, also so rich and so liberal, failed to make such a gesture so easily within his means.

How on point are Mrs. Cole's comments! barely disguising Jane Austen's judgment on the matter:
It seemed quite a shame, especially considering how many houses there are where fine instruments are absolutely thrown away. This is like giving ourselves a slap, to be sure; and it was but yesterday I was telling Mr. Cole I really was ashamed to look at our new grand pianoforte in the drawing-room, while I do not know one note from another, and our little girls, who are but just beginning, perhaps may never make anything of it; and there is poor Jane Fairfax, who is mistress of music, has not anything of the nature of an instrument, not even the pitifullest old spinet in the world to amuse herself with.

This attitude of moral responsibility and generosity of spirit is indeed something Jane Austen would expect a woman of character to espouse, an attitude in sharp contrast with those expressed over the years by Edward's wife toward Jane and her family. But Jane makes it clear through dialog between Emma and Mr. Knightly, that she holds Edward ultimately responsible for his selfishness and callous neglect. One can only imagine how Edward would have squirmed while reading:
"There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do, if he chooses, and that is, his duty; not by manuvring and finessing, but by vigour and resolution. It is Frank Churchill's duty to pay attention to his father. He knows it to be so, by his promises and messages; but if he wished to do it, it might be done. A man who felt rightly would say at once, simply and resolutely, to Mrs. Churchill. 'Every sacrifice of mere pleasure you will always find me ready to make to your convenience; but I must go see my father immediately. I know he would be hurt by my failing in such a mark of respect to him on the present occasion."

""Mr. Frank Churchill to be making such a speech as that to the uncle and aunt who have brought him up, and are to provide for him! . . . How can you imagine such conduct possible?"

"Depend upon it, Emma, a sensible man would find no difficulty in it. He would feel himself in the right; and the declaration, made, of course, as a man of sense would make it, in a proper manner, would do him more good, raise him higher, fix his interests stronger with the people he depended upon, than all that a line of shifts and expedients can ever do. Respect would be added to affection. They would feel that they could trust him; that a nephew who had done right by his father would do rightly by them; for they know as well as he does, as well as all the world must know, that he ought to pay this visit to his father; and while meanly exerting their power to delay it are in their hearts not thinking the better of him for submitting to their whims. Respect for right conduct is felt by everybody; of he would act in this sort of manner on principle, consistently, regularly, their little minds would bend to his."

Jane Austen reveals her egalitarian view to us through her fiction: that to be irresponsible to one's relations is a sign of moral failing; that material wealth carries with it responsibilities that are essential to a person of character. Hers is not an ethic which endorses the enjoyment of wealth without embracing the responsibility that is a necessary component of it.

Maggie Lane, author of Jane Austen's England writes, "One of the many advances discernable between Jane Austen's early and mature fiction is the usefulness of the male characters, or rather, her emphasis that to be approved a man must be useful. Henry Crawford, Mr. Rushworth, Frank Churchill, Charles Musgrove and Mr. Elliot all are censured for failing to employ their time or exploit their positions for the advantage of others." And Alistair Duckworth, author of The Improvement of the State: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels observed that Jane Austen's view is that in order to be a full human being, one must be "fine, morally serious, totally responsible, entirely involved, and to consider every human action as a crucial, committing act of self-definition."

Jane Austen endured the painful humiliations, whether through stifled debate or enforced silence, for what she saw as the moral failings of her brother Edward. She kept the peace, but she found expression for her pain, as well as her principles, through her fiction. The veil she drew in Emma was so thin, however, that it allowed her to turn the tables on those who knew, but kept quiet; it was now they who had to hold their tongues to keep the peace. She could take some solace in the knowing that she was understood, and feel some vindication in that her feelings were made known. She claimed the last word for herself. "You may say what you choose, but your countenance testifies that your thoughts on this subject are very much like mine."

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