The
other day, I had one of those rare epiphanies which bring a major aspect of one of her novels into startling new focus.
Although I am still researching all the implications of my Aha! Moment, I want
to reveal the bare bones of my insight now.
I
have known since 2005 that the novel Emma
is riddled, from one end to the other, with subliminal imagery pointing to
pregnancy--but I have always believed that the sole purpose of that imagery was
to point to Jane Fairfax's concealed pregnancy. Last week, it occurred to me
that Jane Austen (in her typical Mrs. Norris-like fashion) would have made thrifty
double use of that concealed pregnancy imagery--and the way she did it is,
simply, breathtaking.
In a
nutshell, as my punning Subject Line hints, there is a whole network of textual
winks and hints in Emma which deliberately
create a subliminal portrait of the heroine Emma Woodhouse as an EMBRYO!
I
could write 10 pages detailing all the dozen ways in which Jane Austen accomplishes
this masterful feat, and at some point I will, but not today. For now, I will
merely point out one crucial allusive source that inspired Jane Austen to
attempt (and pull off) such an extraordinary authorial stunt---the highly
influential 18th century novel which I have previously identified, in a very
different context, as a key allusive source for Jane Austen's fiction,
including Emma----Laurence Sterne's Tristram
Shandy! In that (so to speak)
seminal novel, as a hundred literary scholars have explored during the past century,
Sterne plays metafictionally way outside the box with the conceit of his
protagonist as a fetus and baby. And so his naming his novel for his
protagonist is especially fitting, given that he is both the narrator AND his
own birth and infancy are at the heart of that narration.
And
that is exactly what JA does in Emma (right
down to naming the novel for her heroine, the only one of the six novels to be
so titled), but of course in a completely original way which I find vastly
superior to Sterne's heavy handed tactics.
The nine months chronology of the novel not only corresponds to the term
of Jane Fairfax's concealed pregnancy, it also corresponds to the forced metaphorical
expulsion of embryonic Emma from her safe, insulated womb at Hartfield into the
cold hard reality of marriage to a pedophile greedy to put his hands on her
fortune. No wonder Emma cries like a newborn after Knightley castigates her for
her mockery of Miss Bates at Box Hill:
“There
was only Harriet, who seemed not IN SPIRITS, fagged, and very willing to be
silent; and Emma felt the TEARS running down her cheeks almost all the way
home, without being at any trouble to check them, extraordinary as they were.”
Extraordinary
tears indeed—but Emma is being born into another form of confinement and
imprisonment- the institution of marriage in Regency Era England.
And I
leave you with the Shandyesque suggestion that you think in a startling new way
about Mr. Woodhouse's fear of open windows........ ;)
Cheers, ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment