Emma: the National Humanities Center 2003 Seminar: introduction.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer

MRS. ELTON AS PROBLEMATIC FEMINIST! Business marketing as a guide to reading Emma! Teaching Austen to Christian fundamentalists! The varied and unexpected approaches to Austen exemplified in this group of essays remind one of the diverse intellectual trajectories any reading of the novels can initiate.

In this instance, only one novel is primarily at issue, and the experience that stimulated the exploratory excursions here recorded was a communal one. Thirteen of us, from many states, many institutions, and many intellectual backgrounds, came together at the National Humanities Center in the summer of 2003 to spend a week talking about Emma. As nominal leader of the seminar, I set the agenda: to think together about the novel without resort to secondary material of any kind, but with the greatest possible awareness of the assumptions and predispositions we brought to the undertaking.

On the first day, one participant expressed anxiety lest our meetings turn into struggles for control. After all, he pointed out, we were all college and university teachers, used to running our own classes. Wouldn't everyone want to take charge? As it turned out, Emma took charge--even as Emma so much enjoys doing. We found ourselves carried along by the novel's narrative logic, although we vigorously debated the exact nature of that logic. Austen's vocabulary infected (or perhaps purified) ours; Austen's loci of attention focused our sights. And, as one of the essays here included points out, we experienced, not to say addicted, readers of Austen ended with more questions than we'd started with.

This was Jane Austen for and among grown-ups, something I've always dreamed of. Many years ago, I decided that I would never again teach King Lear to twenty-year-olds, a promise to myself that I have kept. The gap between the tragic experience of age and the necessary comparative superficiality of youth felt too painful to me, and unbridgeable. I have made no such resolution about teaching Austen, since even college freshmen can respond richly to some level of her intricate communications, but I have become increasingly aware that, even in her own youth (not in the juvenilia, to be sure, but certainly in Northanger Abbey) Austen wrote for those who had suffered life's demands and acquired the wisdom that meeting them brings. To discuss the novel at length with a group of trained, experienced, adult readers, all of whom knew it well, proved deeply gratifying, even thrilling at times.

But, let me say again, the discussion did not provide definitive answers to any of the hard questions about Emma. This fact, in a sense, provides the best evidence for the seminar's success. By the end, we had arrived at a shared "reading" of the text, a line of interpretation we were all willing to accept. We had also discovered together what perplexing enigmas Austen articulates about such vast matters as the relative claims of autonomy and conformity and such particular issues as the proper assessment of Miss Bates. These essays issue, of course, from the novel's perplexities. They are written in a spirit of inquiry, the spirit that dominated our summer meetings. Their common enterprise is to provoke further inquiry in the reader: to continue, in other words, the undertaking we initiated together.

In this sense--and it's an important sense--the eight essays share a single project and a common spirit, as our seminar did. But I began by calling attention to the diversity of subject matter they engage, and what divides these pieces from one another matters as much as what they share. The differences among its participants energized the seminar and maintained its interest for everyone. The differences among these essays dramatize some of the infinite possible interactions between text and reader that make literary criticism an enthralling and meaningful activity and guarantee that it will never run out of material. And the tension of unity and divergence lends interest to the essays as a group.

Considered individually, the essays call attention to various ways of approaching Austen. Nicholas Mason, taking up the formal question of Austen's satirical procedures as well as the historical issue of her place in satiric tradition, uses the Box Hill episode with Miss Bates to focus his discussion of how Austen differentiates legitimate from illegitimate objects of satire. Form and substance merge as problems for the critic, as they entwine in the novelist's handling of them.

Tita Chico, likewise considering a formal matter--that of narrative technique--locates its connection with narrative content in the foreground of her paper by employing "intimacy" as a term for discussing both form and content (as well as, implicitly, the nature of the seminar). Intimacy, she points out, does not always imply clarity: Emma and Frank Churchill, despite their intimate, playful conversation, don't necessarily understand one another. The narrator's relation with the reader offers comparable possibilities for misunderstanding. Even the intimacy of rereading can deceive us. Exploring the possibilities of" intimacy, Austen shows Emma intimate with a friend whose implicit flattery deceives her, refusing intimacy with a woman who exceeds her in accomplishment, and finally achieving full emotional intimacy with a lover. But she never promises that intimacy will bring insight.

The question of how best to go about reading Austen, which lurks in Chico's exegesis, also preoccupies other critics here. Amy Smith, focusing on the issue of how a reader's predispositions control possible interpretations, invokes self-referentiality as a distorting element by way of a concept from business marketing articulated by a student of hers. She demonstrates how an interpreter's preconceptions determine capacity for understanding--a truth as relevant to judicious Mr. Knightley as to self congratulating Emma. Like Tita Chico, Amy Smith shows how what happens within the text may prophesy what happens between text and reader.

Just this aspect of Emma disturbs Kenneth Morefield, who repeatedly raised in the seminar the issue he ponders in his essay: how can one justify teaching Austen's novels--and, by extension, any works of the imagination--to devout Christians? The problem lies in the possibility that fiction exerts coercive force on its readers. "Emma could not resist" insulting Miss Bates: can readers resist imaginative participation in her thoughtless act? Morehouse finds a way to argue that literature's power is finally neither irresistible nor necessarily negative. Moreover, he demonstrates the degree to which Emma itself asserts the possibility of moral discipline--the discipline, precisely, that enables resistance.

Coercion comes up again, in quite a different key, as George Justice ponders "Must and Ought" as crucial terms in Austen's vocabulary. Both words frequently call attention, in one way or another, to Emma's mistakes, but they also point to Emma's changes over time, to the arduous process of growth that the novel records. Finally, Justice suggests, the union of Emma and Knightley provides a standard by which readers, perhaps, "ought" to assess themselves.

The questions raised by Morehouse and Justice direct the reader's attention to moral issues in Austen's novel, and moral concerns also preoccupy the remaining three essayists. Devoney Looser and Paul Almonte focus on specific figures within the fiction in order to explore larger questions; Barbara Moore takes on the perplexities of "moral imagination" as the center of Emma. Both Looser and Ahnonte consider the implications of characters often passed over in accounts of the novel. Looser, provocatively, reminds us that Mrs. Elton, of all people, speaks frequently for the rights of women, announcing firmly that she always takes the side of her own sex. We may readily assume that we know exactly what to think of Mrs. Elton: she's pushy, self-satisfied, rude, and imperceptive. But what are we to make of her claims to feminism? To be sure, she also appears to support arguments for female subordination. Assessing the two sides, Looser demonstrates how subtle Austen's demands on the reader may prove.

Almonte has more attractive material to work with in the figure of Jane Fairfax, whose role in the novel's moral design is, he argues, crucial. Even Knightley, Almonte maintains, provides a less urgent moral standard for Emma, who learns from Jane what constitutes genuinely ethical behavior. Emma is all too ready to forget what she does not wish to remember, Almonte suggests, but she will not forget--and we as readers should not forget--what Jane has imparted.

Finally, Barbara Moore invokes Martin Buber in her assessment of Emma's moral scheme. Using such a reference point itself suggests the rigor and depth Moore finds in the novel's project, which she compares to that of Much Ado About Nothing. She points out the moral complexity inherent in the fact that Austen renders evil as coming from within--from Emma's thoughtlessness, for instance--rather than from without, as in the case of Shakespeare's Don John. And she shows how Emma's imagination, that dear and dangerous part of her, becomes chastened into a commitment to truth, so that she can, as Buber recommends, finally "imagine the real."

Such brief summary may indicate the range, if not the depth, of these essays, which extend and refine perceptions enunciated in the course of our five-day communal immersion in Emma. Toward the week's end, one participant announced (with the enthusiastic concurrence of others) that the trouble with the seminar was that he now could not imagine teaching Emma in less than fifteen hours. This group of essays suggests that even fifteen hours is not enough, that the matters the book requires us to pay attention to are virtually endless.

But attention is, after all, the point--the starting point and, in a way, the end point as well--of the critical act. I have emphasized in some detail the diversity of the essays and of their writers, but perhaps after all their most important aspect is their unity, which I mentioned at the outset. All these critics have allowed themselves to be led by the novel's text, and by their painstaking attention to that text. Each has pursued an individual form of insight, and together their work adumbrates the many shapes that insight may take. But all splendidly fulfill the aim of the seminar that brought them together: to accept the instruction and discipline of the imagination by giving oneself fully to an imaginative work and granting it the tribute of full attention.

Patricia Meyer Spacks, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author, most recently, of Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth Century Self