As I
hoped and expected, yesterday I received an excellent, thought provoking
response from Andrew Shields to my post… http://tinyurl.com/h2w9qr2 …in which I took up the friendly
challenge of answering Andrew’s question as to how to interpret the “to be
sure” usages in Emma, and I’d like to
respond to the first, and for my purposes, most important, paragraph of his
response:
Andrew
wrote: “You sum up your thorough and helpful
reading of Harriet's early uses of "to be sure" as follows:
"fawning on Emma by playing on her pride". I can see that element in
her responses, but I also read her "to be sure" as a marker of her
struggle with herself as she tries to understand Emma's take on Robert Martin.
Harriet wants to accept his offer, after all, and is quite surprised to
discover that Emma thinks she should reject it. At the same time, she wants to
agree with Emma. She is "mortified" by this conflict between her two
desires, and "to be sure" is the phrase that marks that conflict.”
Andrew, your excellent further development of my idea has in
turn led me to a deeper understanding of Harriet Smith’s “to be sures” on even
more levels, and to now see even more clearly how that phrase resonates at the
deepest levels of Emma, the greatest of all novels, as I will now explain.
First, your above reading is spot-on vis a vis the naïve,
impulsive, deferential Harriet Smith of the overt
story – Harriet does indeed articulate, in detail, her grappling with Emma’s
pontifications, trying to find a way to act on her desire to say yes to Mr.
Martin, but finding Emma’s counterarguments too strong to overcome. And those
repeated “too be sures” are indeed the marker and mantra of Harriet’s conflict.
It is equally clear, I suggest, that Harriet’s articulation
of her ongoing struggles also prompts Emma to repeatedly press and elaborate
her advice (that Emma repeatedly tries to mask, and pretend she is not really
giving advice). This process makes Emma feel like Perry Mason: a clever expert—in
her own mind---in the study of human character. Emma is pushed to work harder
to achieve the result of convincing Harriet to make the “right” choice, without
Emma having had to be explicit in her directives. A job well done, is clearly how
Emma feels about her own campaign of subtle persuasion, precisely because she
had to work so hard to achieve her goal, it did not come easy. That which must
be fought for is all the more satisfying.
But, as you may have already guessed where I was going with
that last paragraph, Andrew, your reading is also spot-on vis a vis the worldly
wise, calculating, faux-deferential Harriet Smith I see in the shadow story! I.e., Harriet’s seeming to put up a struggle, and seeming to keep struggling over and
over again in different ways, all makes for far more satisfying flattery of
Emma’s bloated vanity than a few simple “Yes, Miss Woodhouse” replies could ever
have produced---and Harriet knows it! Emma’s excessive pride is stroked by
every twist and turn in Harriet’s apparent struggle. If you don’t believe me,
just ask Mr. Knightley, who puts it (or should I better say, predicts it) to a tee one chapter laterr, in Chapter 5, as he confidentially vents his spleen to Mrs. Weston:
“But
Harriet Smith—I have not half done about Harriet Smith. I think her the very
worst sort of companion that Emma could possibly have. She knows nothing
herself, and looks upon Emma as knowing every thing. She is a flatterer in all
her ways; and so much the worse, because undesigned. Her ignorance is hourly
flattery. How can Emma imagine she has any thing to learn herself, while
Harriet is presenting such a delightful inferiority?”
By the way, I was just kidding about Knightley as prophet.
That Knightley can so accurately describe the effect
of Harriet’s slavish orientation toward Emma in the previous Chapter 4, in a tete-a-tete at which he was not present, is actually telling
evidence that Harriet has not just started flattering Emma in this way at that
moment. No, she must have started doing it, both in and out of Knightley’s presence, from the first minute Harriet showed
up at Hartfield! Indeed, besides her alluringly plump blond beauty, perhaps the
most essential part of what makes Harriet’s company so attractive and necessary
to Emma is precisely that Harriet is such a continual flatterer in so many
ways.
So, as I said, the threshold question, for purposes of
interpreting these scenes, is whether Harriet’s flattery via “delightful
inferiority” is, as Knightley refers to it, “undersigned” –that is the Harriet
of the overt story---or designed, in
which alternative reading of the novel it is Emma who is from start to finish Harriet’s
“delightful inferior”---or, to be more specific, it is Emma who is a foolish
narcissist who is easily led around by the nose via Harriet’s flattery!
I’m reminded very strongly of that episode in the original
Star Trek TV series, the one when Kirk, McCoy and other members of the Enterprise
crew beam down on a planet where their deepest desires and fantastical wishes
are satisfyingly gratified (and by the way, wow, is it an eye-opener to see the
crude blatant sexism that permeates this 1969 episode---how far we’ve come in
47 years!):
Just as
the advanced race that created the “amusement park” that so dazzles Kirk, McCoy
et al, have the power to provide satisfying wish fulfilment experiences---perhaps
most perfectly symbolized by Kirk’s getting the chance to brawl with, and after
a mighty struggle vanquish, the classmate at the Starfleet Academy who
tormented him in his youth, so too does the scheming Harriet of the shadow
story provide a satisfying but completely ersatz “victory” experience to Emma---who
is so clueless she never realizes how
she has been so easily manipulated—or, to put it more accurately, how she has
been Satanically tricked by Harriet into fooling herself!
The
above extended peek behind the curtain at Harriet the Wizard of Highbury, and
how she performs her magic on Emma in Chapter 4 is (I only realized while
writing this post) symbolized and heightened by the satisfying flattery of
Emma’s ego in the very next chapter, Chapter 9, in which Emma (seems to) solve
Mr. Elton’s charade by finding what Emma blithely assumes to be its only
answer, “courtship”.
As
Colleen Sheehan brilliantly showed in her 2007 article here… http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol27no1/sheehan2.htm
….Harriet’s “wrong” guesses about the superficially correct answer to
Mr. Elton’s charade turn out to be 100% spot-on vis a vis the covertly correct second answer to the charade, “the
Prince of Whales”. Sheehan brilliantly elaborates:
“…Emma
quickly and confidently dismisses Harriet Smith’s guesses to the charade and
readily offers the solution: court and ship,
or courtship. While this is a perfectly credible solution to the
riddle, I do not think it is the only one. Harriet’s more literal guesses
to the charade include kingdom, Neptune, trident,
mermaid, and shark. If unlike Emma we are not so
quick to reject the more literal approach to solving the charade, then “Lords
of the earth” could be princes or, in the singular, prince. (Since
in later lines “Lords” becomes “Lord,” we are encouraged to change plurals to singulars,
and vice versa.) And the “monarch of the seas” is certainly whale or,
in the plural, whales. United? Well, you have it: Prince
[of] Whales! On 15 March 1812 a satirical poem about the Prince was
published in the Examiner, the English periodical edited by James
Henry Leigh Hunt and his brother John Hunt. The poem was entitled
“THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHALE,” replete with kings, sharks, mermaids, and a Regent
to boot…”
END
QUOTE FROM SHEEHAN
But the
ultimate triumph of Jane Austen’s genius in her subtle depiction of Harriet’s
ambiguous undesigned/designed flattery of Emma is, I suggest, the following passage
in Chapter 47 (only a few paragraphs before Harriet springs her trap on Emma
and reveals, with her utterly
unflattering “to be sure”, that she has her sights on Mr. Knightley, to
Emma’s utter horror):
"Harriet, poor Harriet!"—Those were the words; in them
lay the tormenting ideas which Emma could not get rid of, and which constituted
the real misery of the business to her. Frank Churchill had behaved very ill by
herself—very ill in many ways,—but it was not so much his behaviour as her own, which made her so angry
with him. It was the scrape which he had drawn her into on Harriet's account,
that gave the deepest hue to his offence.—Poor Harriet! to be a second time the
dupe of her misconceptions and flattery. Mr. Knightley had spoken
prophetically, when he once said, "Emma, you have been no friend to
Harriet Smith."—She was afraid she had done her nothing but disservice.—It
was true that she had not to charge herself, in this instance as in the former,
with being the sole and original author of the mischief; with having suggested
such feelings as might otherwise never have entered Harriet's imagination; for
Harriet had acknowledged her admiration and preference of Frank Churchill
before she had ever given her a hint on the subject; but she felt completely
guilty of having encouraged what she might have repressed. She might have
prevented the indulgence and increase of such sentiments. Her influence would
have been enough. And now she was very conscious that she ought to have
prevented them.—She felt that she had been risking her friend's happiness on
most insufficient grounds. Common sense would have directed her to tell
Harriet, that she must not allow herself to think of him, and that there were
five hundred chances to one against his ever caring for her.—"But, with
common sense," she added, "I am afraid I have had little to do."
END QUOTE FROM EMMA
Could
Knightley have read Emma’s mind at the moment she thought “Poor Harriet! to be a second time the dupe of her
misconceptions and flattery”, he might’ve wittily responded (as he did
back in Chapter 1 when Mr. Woodhouse pitied “poor Miss Taylor”), “Not poor
Harriet, but poor Emma to be a second time the dupe of her misconceptions and Harriet’s flattery”!
I.e.,
everything Emma cluelessly and mistakenly thinks at this moment, in that fleeting
intervals when Emma believes that Harriet will be crushed by the shocking news
that Frank Churchill is not free to marry Harriet, is clearly designed by Jane
Austen to actually be applicable to Emma, when Harriet drops her shattering
courtship bombshell on Emma minutes later.
I
suggest to you that there is no more elegant, decisive, brilliant, and mind-blowing
example than the above, of Jane Austen’s mastery of anamorphism by the time she
was writing Emma at the height of her
powers—the creation of a double story that works with equal, extraordinary
power in two completely different interpretations of the same novel.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
Unlike some of your readers, I have nothing very clever to say, nor even two moderately clever things. But I do have a rather dull and silly observation. In the font that I see, the two Rs in "Harriet" look like an M, and the lower-case I looks like an L, and I've been reading the entire article reminding myself that it is not, indeed, Hamlet who is flattering Emma. I have the Bard on the brain, it appears.
ReplyDeleteOne problem for me with this reading of the two Harriets (the overt and the covert): the Harriet in what you call the overt story is much more interesting. She first struggles with a conflict what she wants to do and what she is told to do by someone whose authority she accepts, and later she makes the mistake of thinking that there is no such conflict anymore between her desire for Mr. Knightley and what she concludes that same authority figure wants her to do.
ReplyDeleteBut the Harriet of your covert story is a conniving manipulator throughout. No development, no change, no ambiguity. In this case, in my eyes, the overt story wins in terms of complexity and psychological subtlety.