How Jane Austen subverted the romance genre she helped create

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The most dramatic moment in Jane Austen’s Emma , and, arguably, in her whole body of work, has nothing to do with romance. After all, Emma Woodhouse’s reaction to George Knightley’s proposal is a bit of a place holder. The scene in the gardens outside Hartfield swells as Knightley speaks to Emma of his desperate, undeniable longing, and then Austen writes “What did [Emma] say? Just what she ought, of course, a lady always does.” Hmmm.

In the five years preceding Emma’s publication, Austen had mapped a healthy handful of serpentine paths to happy endings: Elinor and Marianne Dashwood had been saved from poverty by the respective loves of a cleric and a retired military man; likewise Elizabeth and Jane Bennet were able to overcome financial uncertainty and family shame by way of the central aisle; and even that goody-good Fanny Price had finally fallen into the bland but wholesome arms of Edmund Bertram. ( Mansfield Park was, in fact, Austen’s best earner during her life, perhaps because it looked the most like the novels of writers who had preceded her.) One feels that even before she has maneuvered Emma and George together in that garden, Austen has mastered this territory and is looking to explore further afield.

That exploration takes place, not incidentally, in the only instance Emma leaves the bounds of Highbury during the course of the novel. At Box Hill, Austen goes where she has not gone before, bringing two conspicuously unmarried women together in an excruciating encounter that commands all our attention. Who, having read the book once, can ever again approach this scene, whether on page or screen, without a sense of dread, an almost horror-movie flinch, a squinting of the eyes against the quiet and inevitable violence of Emma’s cruel remark to Henrietta Bates?

Emma’s words are seeded when we first hear her reply to her friend Harriet’s comparison of an unmarried Miss Woodhouse to an unmarried Miss Bates:

Never mind, Harriet, I shall not be a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public! A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls, but a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as any body else.

That contempt , that ridiculous , that proper sport ; Emma is painting a line, or more, she is emptying a can of gasoline, between her version of an unmarried woman and Henrietta Bates’. Up on Box Hill, Emma lights it on fire. In response to Miss Bates’ deprecating little remark about how she will choose the option of saying three dull things over one witty thing in Emma’s and Frank’s party game, Emma flashes out, switchblade-sharp, with “Ah, ma’am, but there may be a difficulty. Pardon me, but you will be limited as to number–only three at once.” Even to sketch the scene in an essay, centuries later, causes a shiver at the keyboard. It is a sucker punch that knocks us out with the power to bring both unmarried women into greater depth, complicating and deepening our understanding of these two sides of a coin.

Austen was, of course, herself a deliberately unmarried woman who turned down at least one eligible offer of marriage. She might well be sketching a bit of a self-portrait in her heroine whom she famously worried no one would much like. Reading an early letter to her sister is 1796, you can almost hear Emma speaking to Knightley:

You scold me so much … that I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I can expose myself, however, only once more, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we are to have a dance at Ashe after all.

In these letters, Jane Austen, beloved daughter, sister, and aunt, is revealed as a woman who enjoyed her social life, the edgy fun of high spirits and a little misbehavior, the dynamism of being out in the world with a larger sampling of human nature to observe and mock. She had opinions, wit, and a desire to see people interact, just like Emma. And like Emma, she loved a ball.

And yet, from a socio-economic point of view, Austen was much more like the other spinster (to use the language of the book) on that hill. Her father was a respectable but poor vicar, and with his death the Austen women, like the Bates women, began a bumpy journey down the social ladder, renting drafty rooms in Bath and Southampton, reliant on the brothers in the family for their livelihoods, and waiting, always waiting, for someone to offer them a ride in their carriage. Austen was familiar with the currency of gratitude. Here in a letter written not long after Emma was published, the author sounds positively Batesian:

How to do justice to the kindness of all my family during this illness, is quite beyond me! — Every dear Brother so affectionate & so anxious! — And as for my Sister! — Words must fail me in any attempt to describe what a Nurse she has been to me. Thank God! she does not seem the worse for it, & as there was never any Sitting-up necessary, I am willing to hope she has no after-fatigues to suffer from. I have so many alleviations & comforts to bless the Almighty for — My head was always clear, & I had scarcely any pain; my cheif sufferings were from feverish nights, weakness & Languor.

Which brings us back to Box Hill, where pain abounds. The romantic heroine challenges the conventions of the genre Austen herself has brought most fully into being and reveals herself to be less than heroic, to say and do things that can’t be taken back, to be, in effect, a real and interesting person. And at the same time, it is a scene in which the comic supporting character, Miss Bates, rotates at the center of the stage, revealing her full humanity as someone who has dignity and an internal life which admits suffering and humiliation.

There is a very modern realism in this scene which has nothing to do with what would later be the much-imitated regency romance. Austen drew on the two sides of her life as a woman living outside the patriarchy’s protection, and put them into conflict with one another as if to say women on their own are a powerful subject, they are fascinating and multi-faceted. In short, on Box Hill Austen passed the Bechdel test long before it was set. And she did this at the very moment that she was creating a third model of spinsterhood, a woman artist who could live off the proceeds of her work.

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Miss Bates: Emma Revisited by Catherine Cliff is available from Pegasus Books.