Emma’s Depression (review)

MARSHALL BROWN Emmas Depression W HAT IS THERE TO BE DEPRESSED ABOUT? ADOLESCENCE IS TURBULENT, to be sure, and Emma’s emotions can be pretty free-wheeling. Anxi­ ety, yes; embarrassment, sure; folly, much; boredom, chronic. But all comes out right in the end in what Terry Castle calls “this most humane and joyful of novels.”1 According to Lionel Trilling, Austen’s novel is an idyllic vision ofthe nation, situated in a community in which “there are no bad people,” with a heroine who, for all her faults, is “directed to a very engaging end, a very right purpose.”2 In finding a “rare hope” in the con­ clusion, Trilling is in line with Stuart Tave, for whom the novel finally confirms “simple truth” and presages what Austen’s narrator calls a union of “perfect happiness.”3 As Alistair Duckworth says, the novel is a “comedy of errors” that “succeeds in achieving, in the end, a positive vision of soci­ ety.”4 Harriet returns to her destined spouse, the Eltons find satisfaction in one another, Jane and Frank come into the open, and Emma discovers her true feelings and makes good on them. At that point, “roughly a hundred pages before the novel’s conclusion,” says Patricia Meyer Spacks, boredom is “accept[ed] ... as a condition ofwomen’s experience” and consequently “disappears as an issue.”5 Austen, says William Deresiewicz, “rewrites mar­ riage as friendship” to arrive at a moment of Wordsworthian democratic social sympathy.6 And any shortcomings remaining in the characters, ac­ cording to Wayne Booth, are made up by the narrator, who “can give us I. Castle, “Austen’s Emma” Boss Ladies, Watch Out! Essays on Women, Sex, and Writing (New York: Routledge, 2002), 39. 2. Trilling, Beyond Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 52, 40. 3. Trilling, Beyond Culture, 49; Tave, Some Words ofJane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 252> 2554 . Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study ofJane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 162, 177. 5. Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History ofa State ofMind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 172. An earlier essay premised on Emma’s boredom is David Lee Minter, “Aes­ thetic Vision in Emma,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 20, no. 1 (June 1966): 49—59, concluding that Emma’s “drive points to more than the vital energy of youth, even to more than pro­ found love of life,” for her “struggle gives expression to perennial human aspiration and to eternal human longing” (59). 6. Deresiewicz,Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 125. SiR, 53 (Spring 2014) 3 4 MARSHALL BROWN clarity without oversimplification, sympathy and romance without senti­ mentality, and biting irony without cynicism.”7 Emma, says John Wiltshire, “is an optimistic book”; its style, which is its heroine’s style, is “youthful, confident, presumptive, witty, dogmatic, commanding, assured,” except on the rare occasions when “the voice of an older, sadder woman” such as Mrs. Weston takes over.8 Without flaws there could be no story, but the outcome is a successful learning experience. Austen’s heroines, says Spacks in another book, “all have or develop self-command, self-knowledge, con­ sideration of others, right principle which converts politeness to an expres­ sion of feeling rather than duty.”9 10 * More recently, Mona Scheuermann fo­ cuses on doing right with no separate consideration of right feeling, arriving at this heartwarming conclusion: “The charm ofAusten’s novel, of her fictional world, is that the moral code is so warmly encompassing. Just as her characters do, we feel safe in Emma’s world.”"’ In The Way of the World Franco Moretti calls such an outcome “the magic moment of‘im­ provement,’” ideally exemplified in Pride and Prejudice. Still, in his eyes, the synthesis is “too perfect” and begins to fall apart already in Mansfield Park." Where does that leave Emma? It all comes down to how we weigh factors in this longest and weightiest of Austen’s novels. What are follies or blunders, what are character flaws? What pertains to individuals, what to environment? And how fundamental are the changes wrought by time and experience? Are we given the...