How to read and why: Emma's Gothic mirrors.

Ford, Susan Allen

As EMMA TRIES, for the first time of many; to dissuade Harriet Smith from her interest in Robert Martin, she asks--with the certain expectation of a negative--whether he is a "man of information'": "'He does not read?'" Harriet's response, of course, is a muddle as she tries to validate her admiration for him while providing the answer Miss Woodhouse requires: "'Oh, yes!--that is, no--I do not know--but I believe he has read a good deal--but not what you would think any thing of'" (29). Robert Martin does read the Agricultural Reports and some unidentified books that lie in the window seat, as well as "The Vicar of Wakefield and selections from Elegant Extracts. He has not read--"'never heard of'"--Ann Radcliffe's 1791 The Romance of the Forest or Regina Maria Roche's 1796 The Children of the Abbey, works that begin to accrue significance as Emma determines to save Harriet from being "'confined to the society of the illiterate and vulgar all [her] life'" (54).

The Explanatory Notes to the Oxford World Classics edition of the novel dismiss these novels as "indicat[ing] the limitations of Harriet's education and taste" (Kinsley 441). But as Mr. Knightley and Mrs. Weston evaluate the benefits of the friendship between Emma and Harriet in terms of their '"inducement ... to read more'" (36), the novel calls attention not only to the lists that Emma has been making since the age of twelve but also to the list of texts that both connect and divide the inhabitants of Highbury. Mr. Knightley's definition of a "'course of steady reading'" depends on "'industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding'" (37), a task even more onerous than Harold Bloom's quest for "wisdom" through what he calls the "most healing of pleasures" (19). The Gothic novels Harriet defines as central and Mme. de Genlis's 1782 Adelaide and Theodore, which Emma mentions and which contains a Gothic interpolated narrative, represent a kind of imaginative experience that might seem inimical to the world of Highbury, whether defined as pastoral or in terms of social change. Stephen Derry and Margaret Anne Doody have both discussed the relationship between Emma and these two 1790s Gothics in terms of scenes and situations that Austen "revitalized" (Doody 361), and I have elsewhere looked at the connection between Emma and the major educational and narrative components of Genlis's 1782 "Letters on Education." Though Austen does rework characters and scenes from these novels, here I want to consider how these Gothic works function in Emma to highlight the construction and utility of narrative.

These three works feature heroines defined by varying degrees of passivity, but in each case the plot is structured by the tension between confinement and flight, by threats from male power and sexual desire as well as from the uncontrolled desires of the heroine herself. Genlis's "The History of the Duchess of C--, written by herself" comes in the second volume of Adelaide and Theodore. Genlis's framing narrative, a courtship plot within an epistolary discourse on education, emphasizes the inculcation of reason and knowledge through systematic instruction and continual surveillance in order to produce what Ellen Moers calls "the educating heroine" (214), a virtuous and accomplished woman ready to replicate that virtue and those accomplishments in her own children. Within that narrative, presented for Adelaide's benefit, is the story of The Duchess of C--, who escaped the surveillance of her own mother, fell in love with a man not her husband, and was incarcerated by her husband for nine years in a sunless cavern until discovered and redeemed. Although, as Daniel Cottom suggests, Radcliffe's heroines "live and move through the world in a spotlighted circle of consciousness surrounded by a night in which memory and knowledge have no real power" (65), in The Romance of the Forest, Adeline moves her from the forest of Fontanville to Savoy, Nice, and Paris. Her search for family and voice is threatened by the sexual and financial rapacity of a man finally revealed as her uncle. In Regina Maria Roche's The Children of the Abbey, Amanda, in total submission to any paternal authority, progresses around the British Isles, suffering the exclusion from her true inheritance as well as the conventional threats from a sexual predator. Though Emma's history is less crowded with incident, its dimensions more tightly circumscribed, the dangers she faces are at some level no less Gothic. Although she imagines news of her flirtation with Frank Churchill travelling as far as Ireland (368), the stasis of her life in Highbury is relieved only by the excursions to Donwell Abbey and Box Hill, while the overtly Gothic threats of sexual and institutional power are replaced by threats from within, "the real evils ... of Emma's situation." These are interior, psychological actions that nonetheless seem to require Gothic articulations. Emma is confined by "the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself," a "danger" (5) that is, at the novel's beginning, "unperceived" (6).

The Gothic world presented by the novels that Harriet and Emma read is one in which language, in the form of riddling inscriptions, letters, and conversation, is a tool of deception. Its very duplicities declare mystery and invite penetration. In Genlis's "History of the Duchess C--," the carefully coded letter in which Belmire speaks his love and dejection to the Duchess simultaneously invites and resists the Duke's scrutiny (2.204-05), but it also engenders a letter from the Duchess, whose more overt omissions incite and validate the Duke's suspicions and lead directly to her confinement. Radcliffe's Monsieur LaMotte attempts to divert pursuers by leaving a misleading riddle on the door of the abbey but is traced through an earlier inscription (54, 67). In Roche's The Children of the Abbey, forged letters and carefully designed conversations discredit Amanda and her brother: assertion is almost always sufficient since there's no real desire or instinct in any of the characters to look beneath the surfaces presented to them.

This problem of the intelligibility of language in the Gothic world is inscribed in its fragmented texts. In The Romance of the Forest, Adeline's reading of the manuscript is retarded by her expiring light, the paleness of the ink (128), the manuscript's decay and illegibility from damp (131), and the ellipses and rhetorical circumambulations of the unnamed "wretched writer" (132). This manuscript, Robert Miles argues, is the "transcript of her inward searches ..., blurring the distinction between the real and the unreal" (112). As the terror heightened by these blank spaces "gradually subdue[s] reason," Adeline's sense of self is displaced: "she feared to raise her looks towards [the glass], lest some other face than her own should meet her eyes" (134). Adeline's reading of the people around her is similarly impeded. When Theodore fails to meet her in the forest at night, neither passion nor reason provide access to the meaning of his absence (106): "She found it impossible to extricate herself from the labyrinth of conjecture" (107). Indeed, this labyrinth of conjecture is the condition of Radcliffe's illegible world. Not even the world LaLuc beneficently governs, in which Adeline finds sanctuary, is much more intelligible: it cannot reveal Adeline's identity, or Theodore's intimate connections to them all.

Such occluded readings reside not just in the instability of Gothic texts but in the fallibility of their readers. Radcliffe's novel examines the way emotions such as pride or fear affect interpretation. When Adeline overhears a conversation between LaMotte and the Marquis de Montalt, "the fervor of her fears" overwhelms reason so that "her imagination ... fill[s] up the void in the sentences" (121). Recognizing this volatility, however, does not bring her any closer to the truth that threatens her. Although Roche is usually defined as working in the tradition established by Radcliffe, it is not so much the unfathomed psyche of her characters but their unexamined cultural assumptions that direct interpretation. In The Children of the Abbey, the characters read any mystery as a guarantee of guilt: Lord Mortimer, for example, interprets Amanda's use of an alias as a sign that she is "fallen." He "had heard enough: every doubt, every suspicion was realized; and he was equally unable and unwilling to inquire further. It was plain Amanda was unworthy of his esteem" (66). Indeed, the plot of the novel seems an endless series of opportunities for him to explain her mysterious behavior. The men who alternately enshrine and condemn Amanda investigate the assertions against her, look for "proof" (558), only when they imagine her death, and only such an image draws from her accuser a confession--a more credible assertion than any she can make--of her innocence (564-65).

Such explanatory narratives are torturous in their construction and partial in their ability to comprehend the truth. In each case, the design is Providential and the problem of constructing a connected narrative acute. Although Genlis validates the history of the Duchess of C--by asserting in a footnote that it is a true story (2.196), she undermines its verity in terms both of its author's distorted perceptions and the consequent shaping, or misshaping, of the narrative's complex methods of production. The Duchess estimates her imprisonment at fifty years rather than the nine years she actually spent. Those nine years, however, were enough for her to forget how to read and write and calculate (2.251); she must learn again the means of giving shape to experience. She finds her tale too dreadful for oral narration (2.193); it is written, then translated and copied twice before it can be presented to Adelaide and embedded as instructive text in her mother's Letters on Education. The narratives by which Radcliffe's Adeline attempts to make sense of her experience reflect the problem of finding an audience as well as the problem of coherence and comprehensiveness. Adeline tells her history twice, each time to an older woman who appears to be the mother-figure that she's seeking, but in each case the bond created is weak, corroded by sexual jealousy or unexplained absence, and the narrative characterized by misinformation, misleading emphases, significant omissions. Rictor Norton defines The Romance off the Forest as a Kunstlerroman, proceeding by Adeline's "advancement from one library to another, from receptivity to creativity" (85). Her genius, however, is essentially lyric rather than narrative. Even Adeline's dreams, perhaps the truest narrative she constructs, are necessarily characterized by fragmentation and inexplicability, as Norton has it, an instance of" the "unexplained supernatural" (84). In The Children of the Abbey, almost every sympathetic character but Amanda tells her or his story. Amanda, however, is characterized by a resistance to narrative, to explanation. Her heroism is her refusal to speak, to explain, to defend herself. Only to the ghostly figure in the Abbey--the incarcerated Lady Dunreath who authors Amanda's disinheritance--does she explain herself even partially, and then only because Lady Dunreath demands an exchange of written narratives (468). As DeLamotte has it, "here the Fall is equated not with the act of knowledge but with the act of making oneself known, and the heroine resists with noble fortitude, the temptation of speaking 'I'" (17.5).

The Gothic, then, represents a medium through which a female reader suffers a world of male eros coupled with tyranny, of dangerous exile, of male duplicity, of mystery. As Diane Long Hoeveler has noted, "there is in the majority of Female Gothic texts a railing against the physical body and an endorsement instead of the life of the mind, reason, spirit, and the intellect" (10). Emma's project of noticing Harriet and the course of study it hypothesizes are motivated by the loss of" Miss Taylor to marriage, the confinements of the coming winter, and an admiration of Harriet's manners and person. Austen's Gothic parody comically deflates Emma's commitment to reason, spirit, and intellect by linking her plans for Harriet with "the real good-will" with which she satisfies the needs of the body, handing around minced chicken and scalloped oysters (24).

So how and why do Harriet and Emma read? In fact, Emma's intention of reading more is succeeded by "chat," "let[ting] her imagination range and work at Harriet's fortune" (69), and "the collecting and transcribing of all the riddles of every sort that [Harriet] could meet with, into a thin quarto of hot-pressed paper" (69). On the evidence of these Gothic novels, further reading, perhaps, is dangerous. Radcliffe's Adeline fears looking in the mirror lest she confront herself somehow transformed into the suffering author of the fragmented narrative she reads. As Emma's characters, readers, or the author herself look into the mirror these Gothic texts provide, might they confront something beyond the confines of realistic fiction promised by Austen's elegant cadences?

Emma, of course, like the other Gothic heroines, faces language that's meant to deceive. Frank Churchill's language typically carries almost as many meanings as there are listeners. For example, his summation of the intentions of the giver of the pianoforte--"'True affection only could have prompted it'" (242)--points simultaneously to Colonel Campbell, to Mr. Dixon, and to Frank Churchill himself. His language contains contradictory private and public meanings that hold both heroine and anti-heroine in thrall, allowing them the illusion of the power of understanding while rendering them separate and powerless. The alphabet game he organizes at Hartfield works to the same effect, detaching words--blunder, Dixon (348)--from their contexts and allowing them to range freely in search of signification. Like those of his Gothic counterparts, Frank Churchill's carefully coded deceptions produce pain and division within the feminine part of the community while concealing the extent of masculine power.

As a result, Emma, like her Gothic counterparts, lives in a world in which mysteries and Gothic repetitions make meanings and relationships uncertain. For Emma one woman seems easily replaceable by another. Emma is certain that she is only a convenient object to Mr. Elton: "if Miss Woodhouse of Hartfield, the heiress of thirty thousand pounds, were not quite so easily obtained as he had fancied, he would soon try for Miss Somebody else with twenty, or with ten" (135). Emma herself, preparing to relinquish Frank Churchill, plans similar substitutions: "'the coldness of a Jane Fairfax!--Harriet is worth a hundred such.... I mention no names; but happy the man who changes Emma for Harriet!'" (269). But of course, while Emma focuses on replacing the feminine half of the coupling, the masculine half is also in flux: "the man" proves to be an unstable signifier in a grammar out of her control.

Highbury's riddling language, then, is dangerous in that it seems both to invite penetration and to promise, for Emma and for readers alike, easy solution. Mr. Elton's courtship charade, addressed "To Miss--" (71) may be confused, but Emma can read his parade of compliments only in terms of the course she's determined: in response to Harriet's "'Could it really be meant for me?'" Emma asserts, "'I cannot make a question, or listen to a question about that. It is a certainty. Receive it on my judgment'" (74). The mystery of the parentage of" Harriet Smith, "the natural daughter of somebody" (22), is solved by Emma with a confidence born of her reading: "'There can be no doubt of your being a gentleman's daughter, and you must support your claim to that station by every thing within your own power, or there will be plenty of people who would take pleasure in degrading you'" (30).

Emma's certainty and self-interest, of course, chiefly guide her solutions to the mysteries she encounters. But the other side of Emma's confidence in knowing the solution to any riddle is her certainty, like that of Roche's Mortimer, that mystery must hide guilt. So Jane Fairfax's decision to stay with the Bateses in Highbury rather than with the Campbells and Dixons in Ireland raises "an ingenious and animating suspicion" in Emma, leading to "the insidious design of" further discovery" (160) and her invention of" "the highly probable circumstance of an attachment to Mr. Dixon, which she had so naturally started to herself" (168). Even Emma's later exclamation that Jane "'is a riddle, quite a riddle!'" (285) serves only to confirm her speculation: "'She must be under some sort of penance ..." (285).

As Adeline is poet and genius, Emma is an imaginist. Significantly, her greatest humiliation is provoked by her energetic readings of" Frank Churchill's rescue of Harriet from the gipsies, Austen's version of Radcliffe's banditti. It's Austen's joke, perhaps, that Mrs. Elton's idea of" a "'gipsy party'" (355) draws the characters to Donwell Abbey. Emma, however, fails to recognize this abbey's obscuring atmosphere. The narrative voice (mediating between Mr. Knightley and Mr. Woodhouse) specifies that "[n]o lurking horrors were to upbraid" Mr. Woodhouse at Donwell (356), and, as in Northanger Abbey, the descriptive passages deflate Gothic expectations. Emma's view of the Abbey is characterized by adjectives such as "respectable," "suitable," and "becoming," but her judgment that "It was just what it ought to be, and it looked what it was" has perhaps too much "complacency" as she "indulge[s]" in "pleasant feelings" (358). Emma sees Donwell, and by extension Mr. Knightley, as transparent. Just as she's rejoicing in the "sweet" and un-Gothic view of "English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive" (860), she comes upon Mr. Knightley "giving Harriet information as to modes of agriculture, &c." (361). Emma knows how to interpret his smile, this scene, and can fill in that "&c.": "She did not suspect him. It was too old a story" (361). Mr. Knightley here is at his least--and most--transparent: he has, as he later confesses, been leading up to the subject of Robert Martin, inquiring into the state of Harriet's affections, and in doing so has given Harriet the idea that she is his object. Here the presumptuous clarity of Emma's "reasonable" judgements creates a "labyrinth of conjecture" as inextricable as anything Adeline might find herself in.

After Box Hill, Emma's language and the narratives she constructs take on a more overtly Gothic coloration in response to the revelation of the secret engagement, the mystery she has failed to solve. She is "horror-struck" (395) and unconvinced by Mrs. Weston's plea that a letter from Frank Churchill will make things "'intelligible ... which now are not to be understood'" (398). Her anger at "'the system of hypocrisy and deceit,--espionage, and treachery'" (399) is matched only by her anger at herself. Jane Fairfax again fills the role of heroine, one for whom "an airing in the Hartfield carriage would have been the rack, and arrow-root from the Hartfield store-room . . . poison" (403). This horror is succeeded, of course, by a "great terror" (405), Harriet's love for Mr. Knightley, in which "the wonderful story of Jane Fairfax" is "quite sunk and lost" (408). But not quite. Emma in the days that follow re-narrates Jane Fairfhx's story: "She loves him then excessively, I suppose. It must have been from attachment only.... Her affection must have overpowered her judgment'" (419). Indeed, Emma sees her own role as that of the Gothic villain, articulated in high Gothic style: "Of all the sources of evil surrounding [Jane] since she came to Highbury, she was persuaded that she must herself have been the worst. She must have been a perpetual enemy. They never could have been all three together, without her having stabbed Jane Fairfax's peace in a thousand instances; and on Box Hill, perhaps, it had been the agony of a mind that would bear no more" (421, my italics). What remains, she imagines, is the "threatening" "prospect" due the villain: Hartfield "deserted" and happiness "ruined" (422). Maaja Stewart points out that Emma "has become the repository of the secret story of each of the other characters, ... [b]ut she no longer values secrets as an index of power" (150). Despite such reformation, the just suffering due the villain is invoked. Though Mr. Knightley's proposal brings "the exquisite flutter of happiness" (434), Emma is still "haunted" by a "sense of injustice, of guilt, of something most painful" (451) when she must remember Harriet's pain.

Are the new narratives Emma constructs to explain the mystery of Jane Fairfax's behavior any more reliable than her old narratives? Austen would seem to suggest that these old stories, the models provided by the Gothic fiction Emma and Harriet have read, are limited in their usefulness. Harriet has so naturalized these narrative models that the wonder of Mr. Knightley's love would seem too familiar: "'more wonderful things had happened ...; and therefore, it seems as if such a thing even as this, may have occurred before'" (407). Further, Austen squarely sets Emma's response to Mr. Knightley's proposal next to the kind of behavior exhibited by the Duchess of C--and Amanda: "as to any of that heroism of sentiment which might have prompted her to entreat him to transfer his affection from herself to Harriet, as infinitely the most worthy of the two--or even the more simple sublimity of resolving to refuse him at once and forever, without vouchsafing any motive, because he could not marry them both, Emma had it not" (431). The extreme periodicity of Austen's sentence--the meaning isn't revealed until the final word--seems to indicate suspense, but of course the nature of Emma's heroism is never in doubt! Just as it has offered the opportunity to valorize Jane Fairfax as heroic victim, Austen's novel vigorously rejects the female self-imprisonment and self-denial that both the Duchess of C--and Amanda exemplify.

Yet Jane Austen has been validating the Gothic all along, questioning the power of narrative to explain, to cohere. When Mr. Knightley breaks the news that Harriet will marry Robert Martin, he promises that to his "very simple story'" (471) Harriet "'will make a much longer history ... [with] all the minute particulars, which only woman's language can make interesting'" (472). Even when Emma gets the story from Harriet, however, she remains clueless: "But what did such particulars explain?" (481). Such "simple" explanations are merely the fine articulations of the unknowable. Indeed, the novel's technique--its combination of language coded for multiple interpreters and a narrative voice that moves from one partial observer/participant to another without clear demarcation--results in a narrative that remains somehow mysterious. How do we read Mr. Knightley? As Gothic tyrant? As a man of good sense ready for an equal match? As suffering lover willing to risk himself (Wilt 159)? When exactly does his love for Emma--or hers for him--begin? The explanations provided for their feelings and behavior result in paradox: Emma was "'blinded ... [but] not blinded, ... somehow or other safe'" (427); Mr. Knightley defines Emma as "faultless in spite of all her faults" (433). "Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure" (431). As Judith Wilt argues, the ending brings "the return of enchantment in the enchanted Knightley and the resurrection of imagination in the enchantress Emma" (171).

Tara Goshal Wallace has argued convincingly that readers' deference to narrative authority in Emma stops us from noticing the very real contradictions between characters' definition and their words and behavior. In response, she argues, we create either a fictional coherence or dismiss the work with "contemptuous anger" (96). But if there's coherence here, it's the coherence of the Gothic that works not through reason but through its capacity to embrace those very contradictions. Indeed, William Patrick Day defines the Gothic in terms of such contradictions: "Its power over our imaginations comes in part from its double-edged parody and transformation of both romance and realism" (7-8). As Paul Morrison argues in terms of Northanger Abbey, Austen distinguishes her novel "not by disabusing her protagonist of gothic illusions but by releasing her novel from the standards of novelistic probability" (7). The designs of Providence bring to solution the mysteries of Genlis, Radcliffe, and Roche. In Emma, the perfect happiness of the ending celebrates not the providential designs of the Gothic but Austen's authorial design, the design of the imaginist, that acknowledges the unknowable mysteries of the self, of the other, of human relationship, of love.

WORKS CITED

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BLOOM, HAROLD. How to Read and Why. New York: Scribner, 2000.

COTTOM, DANIEL. The Civilized Imagination: A Study of Ann Radcliffe, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott. New York: Cambridge UP 1985.

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DELAMOTTE, EUGENIA C. Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth Century Gothic. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

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GENLIS, STEPHANIE FELICITE DU CREST DE. Adelaide and Theodore; or, Letters on Education. 3rd ed. London, 1788. 3 vols.

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MILES, ROBERT. Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995.

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MORRISON, PAUL. "Enclosed in Openness: Northanger Abbey and the Domestic Carceral." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33 (1991): 1-23.

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STEWART, MAAJA A. Domestic Realities and Imperial Fictions: Jane Austen's Novels in Eighteenth-Century Contexts. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993.

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WILT, JUDITH. Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot and Lawrence. Princeton: PUP, 1980.

Susan Allen Ford is Professor of English and Writing Center Coordinator at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. She has published essays on Jane Austen and her contemporaries, detective fiction, and the Gothic. She is a Life Member of JASNA.