Ethos in Jane Austen’s Emma

HEATHER M. KLEMANN Ethos inJane Austen’s ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGF E m m a i. Introduction F o r e a r l y r e a d e r s, t h e r e a l is m o f ja n e a u s t e n ’s e m m a (1815) w a s both the making and undoing ofE m m a s didacticism. At first, Walter Scott in his 1816 review celebrates the novel for the “spirit and originality” of its sketches of everyday life, which replace the thrill of extraordinary events and Ic beau ideal of sentiment.1 “The substitute for these excite­ ments,” he explains, “was the art ofcopying from nature as she really exists in the common walks oflife, and presenting to the reader ... a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him.”2 For Scott and also for reviewer Richard Whately, Austen’s realism contributes to the immersion of the reader and thus to morally instructive and, in Wil­ liam Galperin’s words, hegemonic and controlling ends.3 Scott’s enthusi­ asm for E m m a 's didactic realism, however, diminishes over time. A decade later and after repeated readings, his once “overbearing” attitude towards Austen’s novels softens into a more humble, “less decidable”4 regard for her “exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and charac­ ters interesting.”5 Galperin argues that Scott eventually seems to grasp, though he fails to articulate, what other early readers notice: that the “vivid i. Walter Scott, unsigned review of E m m a , Q u a rterly R eview , March 1816, inJ a n e A u sten : T h e C ritica l H erita g e, ed. B. C. Southam (London: Routledge, 1968), 63. Southam’s collec­ tion of early reviews and commentary hereafter cited as BCS. 2. Scott, BCS, 63. 3. See William Galperin, T h e H isto rica l A u ste n (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 58. Building on Scott’s review, Richard Whately, in his unsigned review of N o rth a n g er A b b ey and P ersu a sio n , Q u a rterly R eview , January 1821, makes the Aristotelian argu­ ment that a novel like E m m a that gives “a perfectly correct picture of common life, becomes a far more in stru ctive work . . . guid[ing] the judgment, and supplying] a kind ofartificial ex­ perience” (BCS, 88). Concerns over the persuasiveness of realism in the novel appear over half a century earlier in Samuel Johnson, T h e R a m b ler 4 (Saturday, 31 March 1750): 19. See Clifford Siskin, “Jane Austen and the Engendering of Disciplinarity” in Ja n e A u ste n a n d the D iscourses o f F em in ism , ed. Devoney Looser (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 60-61, on Austen’s address to her contemporaries’ fears about realism’s impact on the behavior of readers. 4. Galperin, H isto rica l A u ste n , 74. 5. Walter Scott, entry for Tuesday, March 14, 1826, T h e Jo u rn a l o f S ir W a lter S co tt, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 132. S iR , 51 (Winter 2012) 503 504 HEATHER M. KLEMANN details [of ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA E m ilia 's prose| seemed . . . strangely ungoverned by didactic aims,” they “strike” and “flash” upon the reader with uncanniness that op­ poses the “hegemony” of realism.6 Scott may have miscalculated the regulatory effect of E m m a s realism, not because E m m a is not an instructional text, but because E m m a ’s didacti­ cism extends beyond the purview of realism and its controls.7 Despite the detail and precision with which Austen creates the illusion of “copying from nature,” Austen, like all novelists, does not describe “lived experience . . . but the conventions for organizing and interpreting that experience. ”s As the reviewer for the C h a m p io n (March 1816) notes, the “force of na­ ture” in...