Associationism and the Dialogue in Emma

Associationísm and the Dialogue in EmmaMarjorie Garson Responding with vivifying warmth to the moribund Petrarchisms of Mr Elton's charade, Harriet Smith, who thinks it is meant for her, attempts a solution to its riddle: Can it be woman? And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone. Can it be Neptune? Behold him there, the monarch of the seas. Or a trident? or a mermaid? or a shark?1 There is something slightly overheated as well as schoolgirlish about Harriet 's response to Elton's banal metaphors, and Austen's original readers would have been as ready as we are to link associative thought with unrestrained sensibility and unruly desire. The dominant psychological model at the time Emma was written (and indeed for a century thereafter) was associationism, which distinguished sharply between "natural" and arbitrary—hence delusory—associations. Harriet's conjectures are notably arbitrary: her mind moves among concrete images, and slides from one to the other in dubiously motivated ways. She would have encoun1 Jane Austen, Emma, vol. 4 in The Novels ofJane Austen, ed. R.W. Chapman, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 71. References are to this edition. The reader may wish to be reminded of Mr Elton's charade: "My first displays the wealth and pomp of kings, / Lord of the earth! their luxury and ease. / Another view of man, my second brings, / Behold him there, the monarch of the seas! // But ah! united, what reverse we have! / Man's boasted power and freedom, all are flown; / Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave, / And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone." EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 10, Number 1, October 1997 80 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION tered Neptune and his trident at school:2 her ready association of the god with his weapon suggests that she has been studying the iconographical accoutrements of the principal mythological figures, probably with the aid of an illustrated dictionary, where she would also have found mermaids or "syrenes" and their association with seduction and disaster.3 Images of sharks, on the other hand, would turn up in less pedagogically respectable material—probably in sensationalist accounts of gory marine accidents—though Austen's readers' own associations might rather be with John Singleton Copley's famous painting of Watson and the Shark, featuring the ferocious predator in the right foreground and Watson , improbably and spectacularly nude, on the left.4 Unaware of the conventional nature of Petrarchan compliment, Harriet, it seems, is overstimulated by its images of sexual conflict; inexperienced in word-games, she has no strategy for solving the riddle. The episode serves as an elegant model of the way "free" association has to be repressed in light of a particular social and linguistic context, and of the utter inability of free-associators like Harriet to do such repressing. It also exemplifies the way Austen associates mental dullness and vulgarity with social class. Skill at charades is no doubt enhanced by a childhood of word games in an affectionate, competitive, educated family (a family like Austen's, for example); an instinct for how they are used in courtship depends upon sustained exposure to literate, sentimental mediocrities like Elton. Harriet has had no such experiences, yet we are invited to construe her ineptness in the face of the puzzle as a mark of her essential inferiority to quick-witted, charade-literate Emma. Sympathetic readers may want to defend not only Harriet but the way she talks. Maaja Stewart, for example, argues persuasively that when Harriet tells Emma 2 Young ladies were taught "To know the names and principal offices of the gods and goddesses, with some idea of their moral meaning" as "requisite to the understanding of almost any poetical composition": see Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement ofthe Mind (London: H. and G. Mozley, 1800), p. 154. 3 Erasmus Darwin recommends such richly illustrated texts as Spence's Polymetis and Bell's Pantheon, pointing out that "These emblems ... are not so easily acquired by descriptions alone, nor so easily remembered by young pupils; as when prints of antique statues, or medallions, or when cameos, or impressions of antique gems, are at the same time shewn and explained to them." A...