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Jane Austen Society of AustraliaEmma and the Battle of Waterlooby Penny Gay Fom: Sensibilities, No.10, June 1995 An extract of a talk delivered to the JASA meeting in August 1994. The ideas uniquely developed here are developed further in Penny Gay's 'Jane Austen's Emma', published in the Horizon Studies in Literature series, Sydney University, 1995. What is the connection between the following sentence from Chapter 1 of Emma and the Battle of Waterloo?'
(The Battle of Waterloo was in 1815 and Jane Austen was writing this novel during 1814-1815. The Battle of Waterloo happens after the novel has been finished but before it has been published.) Mr. Knightley, of course, is the visitor who walks in and the signal that we are offered in the very first chapter, with the first arrival of this major character, is that he makes games unnecessary. Instead he offers 'sensible', `cheerful' conversation which does both Mr. Woodhouse and Emma good. Perhaps by the end of this talk you may yourselves have an answer to this question My major question today is: 'Who is Frank Churchill?' I want to pay some attention to the Donwell picnic and the Box Hill party. They are, I believe, orchestrated by Austen in order to place Frank precisely in the moral scheme. That is to say, I think one of the major intentions of these two chapters is the placing of Frank Churchill, the identifying of this interloper to Highbury society. The Donwell picnic is a game, an entertainment which is forced on Mr. Knightley's gentlemanliness, his chivalrous qualities, by Mrs. Elton in passages which I am sure you all remember:
It is my party. I'll run it. It is my game. I'll play it. She is unstoppable. A couple of paragraphs later:
A couple of pages earlier we are told that Emma dreads 'the bustle and preparation, the regular eating and drinking and picnic parade of the Eltons and the Sucklings.' I found myself puzzling about this word 'picnic', so off I went to my dictionary and found that the word is French, and it was first used in English in 1748, which is not long ago when you are writing a novel in the early 1800s. Mrs. Elton's 'gipsy party' associates her not only with that disruptive rabble whom we met only two chapters earlier frightening poor Harriet, but also - and this is what most interests me - with the French Revolution via the implicit image that Mrs. Elton is entertaining, of herself as a sort of Marie Antoinette. 'I shall wear a large bonnet, and bring one of my little baskets hanging on my arm. Here - probably this basket with pink ribbon.' It is to be 'a sort of gipsy party.' We 'gather the strawberries ourselves.' Now you may remember that one of the things that incensed the French populace against their King and particularly their Queen, was the way Marie Antoinette played at being a peasant woman, played at being a dairymaid with her maids of honour. They had a special little village built in the grounds of Versailles, called the Hameau, the hamlet. You can still see it there in all its pseudo-rusticity. This is clearly behaviour which breaks the decorum of class divisions. You can see how the genuine working French populace would have been insulted by this behaviour on the part of Marie Antoinette and I think Austen is quite clearly associating Mrs. Elton here with the same sort of behaviour. Mrs. Elton is incapable of obeying the decorums of the class to which she belongs and the upshot of that is that she is liable to cause, eventually, social disruption. If people do not behave as they should, then things are going to go wrong with the social order. If Marie Antoinette had behaved properly as Queen, perhaps she would not have had her head chopped off after all. Who knows? Against this aping by Mrs. Elton of disruptive and almost degenerate French ways is Mr. Knightley's controlling and ordered Englishness. He speaks of 'gentlemen and ladies', the 'nature and simplicity of gentlemen and ladies.' He brings our attention back to what are the proper terms of discussion and behaviour here. Gentlemen and ladies should behave as such. And it is the Englishness of Donwell Abbey which contains and controls the various impulses towards social disorder that are already brewing as this novel approaches its climax. A couple of pages further on, still in the same chapter, we are told by the narrator:
The very spirit of the place itself leads the characters into shade. They are feeling hot and bothered and they see this broad short avenue of limes and they are 'insensibly', unconsciously, led to it. They calm down and they continue to behave properly. It is after this paragraph that Austen as narrator makes that amazing remark:
Even the sun in England, in this perfect English place, is under control. This passage in which everybody who's at Donwell Abbey is drawn into this sweet and comforting shade happens before Frank Churchill turns up at the Abbey. He arrives late and extremely hot and bothered. One of the very first things that he says when he encounters Emma in the house is: 'I am sick of England, and would leave it tomorrow if I could.' In the context of what we have just read, this should shock us profoundly. For someone to declare that they are sick of England when England itself has just been apotheosised in Donwell Abbey by the narrator - 'English verdure, English culture, English comfort.' The sun is not 'oppressive' here. Why is Frank sick of England? Because he is sick at heart. There is something wrong with Frank Churchill. Box Hill is where Emma suggests that Frank join them on the following day. She says 'It is not Switzerland, but it will be something for a young man so much in want of a change.' It may not be Switzerland but it certainly is not Donwell Abbey either. Box Hill does not have the moral power, the spiritual power, that Donwell has to contain and to control socially disruptive influences such as Mrs. Elton and Frank Churchill. The reason for this, I suggest, is because Box Hill simply exists in that countryside as a pleasure place, a place for games. It is not a productive place. One of the things we know about Donwell Abbey is that it is productive. We are told over and over again about its crops, its apples, its wheat, its corn, its turnips. We know that the landscape is being properly used and there is a proper harmony between the human beings who work it and the place itself. Box Hill, on the other hand, is simply a place of pleasure-going, unstructured, unproductive, frivolous wanderings. Austen makes this quite clear to us in the opening paragraph of the Box Hill chapter, in case we had not noticed. She tells us, as narrator:
There is not going to be any spiritual power in this landscape to draw them together in the way that Donwell Abbey did. It is here at Box Hill that we are told that 'Mr. Frank Churchill and Miss Woodhouse flirted together excessively.' Box Hill is a place of excessive behaviour. We are being directed to notice a lack of control. Again we are invited to listen to, or to watch, the dialogue between Frank and Emma as though it were a play being acted out for our pleasure. Frank is quite self-consciously play-acting for an audience; he tries to engage the audience and get them to join in and to play various games. But if you examine this flirtatious conversation, you will notice that there is a quality of excess, particularly in the language that Frank himself produces.
He is playing, deliberating drawing on the language of the drama of the period, that exaggerated, hyperbolic language of courtship in order to keep up his game of flirtation which will not only entertain, as Emma thinks, the 'seven silent people' but also, of course, further Frank's secret agenda. Emma, driven perhaps to try and emulate Frank's performance here, uses the poor, innocent Miss Bates, one might say, as bait for her wit. That's a very bad pun, probably worse than Mr. Weston's that I now come to. After Emma has been so appallingly rude to Miss Bates, Mr. Weston tries to join in the game-playing and offers his stunningly inappropriate conundrum:
Terrible, terrible pun and, of course, appallingly inappropriate. It is interesting that it is Mr. Knightley who comments, we are told, 'gravely': 'Perfection should not have come quite so soon.' Mr. Knightley is actually using quite a complex verbal game himself. He is pointing out that perfection in its true sense, the perfection of the individual, is something which happens much later in one's life, after one has learnt a few things. It certainly is not available here and now. He is, as it were, adapting the pun for his own moralising use. I think it is important to notice that Mr. Weston offers such a bad pun because, essentially, he is English. He is a good chap, he is good-hearted; so he is not going to be as smart a game-player as the slippery Frank Churchill. Englishness is being contrasted with something which I am going to have to call 'Frenchness' in this novel. Englishness is honest and sturdy and straightforward and warm-hearted, and the French are everything that is opposite. What we have seen so far is that the novel uses the conventions of the theatre of the period, of acting and playing, in order to criticise playing. It is through the demonstration of Mr. Frank Churchill and Miss Woodhouse's excessive flirtation and the result of it that we see that it is wrong to behave like that. We also see that the novel uses the conventions of romance in order to criticise romanticising or imagining. And, of course, as second-time or umpteenth-time readers, we know that it uses the as yet uninvented conventions of the detective story in order to criticise what Mr. Knightley late in the novel calls 'double dealing.' It uses the conventions of the detective story in that all the clues are there and it is our job as readers to sew them together and to notice, as Mr. Knightley almost thinks he has noticed towards the end, that there is some secret relationship between Jane and Frank. (The detective story itself was not invented until half a century later with the work of Wilkie Collins.) But we still haven't solved the business of 'Who is Frank Churchill?' During Jane Austen's adult life, during her writing life, England was continually at war with France. 'Double dealing', Mr.Knightley's word; 'perfidy', a standard word; even 'treason' ('I am sick of England, and would leave it tomorrow if I could'): this is how English conservatives, among whom Jane Austen numbered herself, constructed the enemy, the French who were perpetually threatening England at this time. And all these qualities are of course characteristic of Frank Churchill. Now, let me play a few more dictionary games. I, too, can play games! Jane Austen encourages us to do so. Frank is of course not 'frank.' He is everything but 'frank.' What he is is French and the two words are cognate. The word 'frank' is in fact etymologically the same word as 'France' or 'French .' The surname, 'Churchill', sounds pretty good. Of course we read into it the great leader of the Second World War, but Austen would be referring us to the hero of the campaigns against the French of the early eighteenth century led by the Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill. But, stop a bit: it is not Frank's real name. His real name is Weston. He goes under the name of Churchill. He has adopted the name of an English hero, of a proper English gentleman. But it is a false name, it is not his real name. So we are right to be very dubious about Frank Churchill as any sort of suitor for Emma or, indeed, even for Jane Fairfax. In the Box Hill chapter, the beginning of that phrase about the excessive flirtation is that 'no English word but flirtation could very well describe' it. Austen is just reminding us that there is a difference between Englishness and that which is not Englishness. She is not going to come right out, not just yet (that would be too obvious a clue) and say that it is French but it is there, all through the novel. The word 'picnic', as I said, which is associated with the Eltons and the Sucklings comes into the English language from French in 1748. The word 'charade', that game which takes up a good deal of the first volume, comes into the English language from French in 1776. In Volume 3, Chapter 15, (p. 404), we have Mr. Knightley and Emma discussing Frank's behaviour which is now all out in the open and Mr. Knightley remarks:
This moral may be ironised to a certain extent in the novel but it is also offered to us as an extremely important insight, as an alternative to things like 'intrigue', 'mystery' and 'finesse.' 'Finesse' also is a French word which enters English in 1746 as a verb. It has one other use in the novel in Volume 1, Chapter 18 (p.132). Again Mr. Knightley and Emma are discussing the character of Frank Churchill whom they have not yet met:
So there you have two French words, 'manoeuvring' and 'finessing' contrasted with two words which have an older heritage in English, 'vigour' and 'resolution', very Johnsonian words, those two. 'Manoeuvring' and 'finessing' come into English from French in 1746 and 1748. As a noun, which is how Mr. Knightley uses 'finesse' later in the novel, it comes in in 1789, a significant date - the beginning of the French Revolution. There are a few more of these interesting French words. I am sure that you as readers can probably find more too. In Volume 3, Chapter 10 (p.362):
Do you know what the date of the first use of 'espionage' was in English? - 1793. We are getting very, very close to the writing of Emma. Austen is picking up these words which are made available by the behaviour of the French over the previous half-century. There are no English words to describe this behaviour. You have to have the French nation's own words to describe their despicable behaviour and she is applying them directly to Frank Churchill. There are other French words which I have not mentioned that are in the book, like 'carte-blanche' for instance. It is Mrs. Elton who says 'only give me a carte blanche.' Automatically she gravitates towards the vulgar French expression. Another one is in that episode of Harriet and the gipsies, when Emma, as I suggested, is thinking in a very linguistically poverty-stricken way: she actually remarks no such 'rencontre' had happened. So again her mind at that point goes towards a French word. You will all, of course, be dying to remind me of the most obvious example: in Volume 1, Chapter 18, yet another discussion between Emma and Mr. Knightley. Emma is trying to support the notion that Frank Churchill might be a nice young chap; she has not met him yet. Mr. Knightley knows that his behaviour cannot be that of a nice young chap, not of a nice young English chap, at any rate:
Austen is laying it on the line here. She is absolutely consistent throughout this novel in distinguishing between proper English behaviour which has a sound moral basis and the slippery, 'manoeuvring', 'finessing', 'espionage' and misbehaviour of the French with whom she associates Mr. Frank (French) Churchill. What about poor Jane Fairfax? She has very little to say for herself regarding her relationship with Frank, about which she is rather ashamed. I think the most interesting comment that she makes is very late in the novel, Volume 3, Chapter 16, where she says to Emma:
Strong words - 'deceit', 'disgust' and placed in the middle of that, 'I had always a part to act.' You'll remember from the immediately preceding novel, Mansfield Park, how very ambivalent that novel, and Fanny in particular, is about the notion of acting a part - that it is somehow denying one's true personality. It is Jane here who thinks of her behaviour throughout the novel as having been acting a part which, of course, is being dictated to her by Frank who begins to assume the form of some sort of Svengali, in my mind. Can we really feel confident about that marriage? Will it always be tainted - I think it will - by Frank's 'unEnglishness'? Towards the end of the novel, Emma and Frank recognise what Emma calls 'a little likeness between us', (Vol. 3, Chapter 18, p.435):
We have seen that there is, because Emma has been playing games with Harriet, has been acting as a sort of female Svengali towards her. The way Emma writes both Harriet and Jane into her imagined romance is not nearly as pernicious as what Frank is doing in the real world, but it is a dangerous tendency. Emma has been more lucky because there is a controlling game or genre of this novel. Very much more like Mansfield Park than most people are inclined to think, the controlling genre of this novel is that of the moral tale or allegory. In this sort of narrative, which is ultimately structured according to spiritual truths, even game-playing has a place. Hence we have Austen's own puns on 'Knightley' and 'Donwell' - the place you go when you have done well; on 'Hartfield' - the place of battle for Emma's heart and, of course, that wonderfully funny one on 'Woodhouse.' This habit of naming which Austen uses quite consistently throughout her oeuvre derives from a very English writing tradition, that which is perhaps most notable in the works of the great 17th century writer, John Bunyan. If you know The Pilgrim's Progress you will know that all his characters and his places have allegorised names. They are called things like 'Christian' and 'Vanity Fair' and so on. This 'Bunyanesque' practice of writing, of imagining, is English and Protestant. It is hard-working, it aspires to truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other. Though, of course, Austen allows herself a game with the reader, whom she has apparently taken into her confidence throughout the novel. She has constructed from the very beginning a second-time reader. She has assumed that this novel will be read again and again and again and that each time the reader will find more of the delicious clues and fictional games that she has placed into it in order to give us this morality tale. So, we can say that, as Mr. Knightley remarks, 'perfection' does not 'come quite so soon', does not come even with the final paragraph of the novel. Mrs. Elton noses her way in, complaining loudly about 'Very little white satin, very few lace veils.' Perfection of romance, such as you find at the end of Pride and Prejudice, is not to be found here and now. Pemberley or Donwell are not to be obtained here and now. We live, after all, in a constant state of ironic tension between what we desire, what we wish, what we imagine and what we know to be true. What Austen is offering us is the observation that what is true is often also extremely ordinary. Finally, are you all quite clear about the connection between the backgammon table and the Battle of Waterloo? Mr. Knightley, the hero, makes the backgammon table unnecessary because, after all, it is the French who are playing games, just as the Battle of Waterloo makes further engagements with the French unnecessary. But that perfection hadn't arrived either when Austen finished this novel. NOTE. All quotations are from the World's Classics edition of Emma, edited by James Kinsley, Oxford University Press, 1990. (For further discussion, see my Jane Austen's Emma, Horizon Studies in Literature, Sydney University Press, 1995.)
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