The View from Ford’s: The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour of Perry Lane & Strawberry Fields For Emma

In my last post, about the mysterious horsemen of Emma, I claimed that in each case, Emma is deliberately misled by others as to the identity of a horseman passing by just far enough away not to be clearly identifiable, such deception in both instances being necessary in order to conceal crucial facts that bear on the mysterious circumstances of Mrs. Churchill’s death.

As I was working on that post, I suddenly glimmered on a third, earlier passage in the novel, where Emma again observes people passing by at a distance, sees someone who is not supposed to be there, but again, doesn’t realize who it really is. Here it is, from Chapter 27:

"Emma went to the door for amusement.—Much could not be hoped from the traffic of even the busiest part of Highbury;—Mr. Perry walking hastily by, Mr. William Cox letting himself in at the office-door, Mr. Cole's carriage-horses returning from exercise, or a stray letter-boy on an obstinate mule, were the liveliest objects she could presume to expect; and when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker's little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door. A MIND lively and at ease, can do with SEEING NOTHING, and CAN SEE NOTHING that does not answer."

As Diane has pointed out, Emma expects to see Mr. Perry, Mr. Cox, and Mr. Cole's carriage horses, and many reading too quickly infer that she does see Mr. Perry. But instead, what she ACTUALLY sees is a butcher, some children, and..."a tidy old  woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket".

That last bit made me wonder, who is this “tidy old woman”, and how would knowing her identity be significant? The fact that Emma expects to see Mr. Perry, who is such a key part of the mystery of the Chapter 41 horseman, is a signal that SOMETHING is going on in this street scene that Emma is failing to pick up on in some way. But  what was it?

THE IDENTITY OF THE TIDY OLD WOMAN

Then it hit me! I have since 2005 believed that The Magic Flute, of course Mozart’s sublime opera, was an important allusive source for Emma. Indeed, long ago I tracked down a performance of that opera that took place in London in 1814, just when JA was in London visiting Henry and beginning to write Emma, which I suspected she would have attended.

Here’s what  Wikipedia  says about this: “Mozart belonged to a group of Freemasons. The Magic Flute is full of Masonic symbols. For example: the number three is an important number in masonry and there are lot of things in the opera that happen in threes: there are three long chords at the beginning of the overture, and the three chords appear again in the scene in the temple. Even the key is E flat major which has a key signature of three flats. There are three ladies, three young boys and three trials.”

To that list, I add my personal favorite, which is when, in a classic Mozartean combination of the sublime and the ridiculous, Papageno musically counts “Ein, zwei, drei” interspersed with his tripling leitmotif on his pipe, before getting ready to hang himself before the 3 boys stop him.

And in Emma, there are the three come-atable ladies who regularly visit Mr. Woodhouse, the three teachers whom Mrs. Goddard  invites to sup with her, the three turns that Mr. Woodhouse takes during his winter constitutionals, the three times Mr. Woodhouse insists on baking apples, the three months Jane plans to spend in Highbury and the Campbells to spend in Ireland, the three months passed since Mrs. Weston supposedly wrote to Frank about Mr. Perry’s carriage, to say nothing of the three months duration of each of Emma’s three volumes, and finally the three things very dull at Box Hill—I think you get the point, the number 3 is every bit as important in Emma as it is in The Magic Flute!

Well, with all that in mind, which pretty clearly establishes Jane Austen’s special focus on The Magic Flute, now check out this bit from early in Act Two of Mozart’s masterpiece, which was written, by the way, when Jane Austen was 15 years old:

Papageno: [An old woman enters] Is that for me?

Old Papagena: [carrying a tray of drinks] Yes, my angel!

Papageno: [drinks] Water! Ugh! How old are you, my dear?

Old Papagena: I'm eighteen years and - two minutes.

Papageno: [bursts into laughter] I see! Do you have a boyfriend?

Old Papagena: Oh, yes!

Papageno: What's his name?

Old Papagena: Papageno!

Papageno: Papa - Hey, that's me! Wait! What's your name?

Old Papagena:  Wouldn’t you like to know!

You must see what I am driving at---I’m suggesting that the “tidy old woman” whom Emma idly observes from Ford’s, is none other than Jane Fairfax in disguise as an old woman, precisely so that she can, even in her advanced state of pregnancy, pass freely in public without risk of detection!  

And this fits perfectly with (fittingly) three interpretations I have long espoused:  

ONE: I claim that Jane attempted to trick Frank into marrying her, by making him believe he was the father of her illegitimate child. In the end, Frank gets out of marrying her, but the price of freedom for him is the Churchill family jewels, which (as when Elinor Dashwood attempts to sell some of her mother’s jewelry for cash at Gray’s in London) will be Jane’s ticket to financial independence, so that she will not have to marry any man she doesn’t love, in order to achieve same. So Frank is in that sense, Papageno, a happy-go-lucky dupe who doesn’t really decide his own fate, but is under the control of a Sarastro (Knightley) who decides for him. Papageno’s fantastical suicidal thoughts are echoed with the finest  edge of witty irony in Frank’s profound angst  at Box Hill, when all seems lost to him.

TWO: If you read Chapter 27 all the way through, with the idea in mind that Jane is in disguise in the marketplace, you can quickly deduce the real reason why, in very short order, first Harriet takes forever to buy not one but two parcels at Ford’s; and then second, Miss Bates shows up and proceeds to inundate Emma with a flood of words. These two events, which Emma, clueless as always, sees as Harriet’s being high maintenance, and Miss Bates being a verbose fool, actually have the very predictable effect (and purpose) of delaying Emma’s ultimate arrival at the Bates residence. I suggest to you that when Emma walks in and finds Jane and Frank together, Jane has herself just walked in a minute before, after pretending to be there the entire time!

How unfortunate if Emma had already been at the Bates residence, and then Jane walked in wearing her “old woman” disguise. Just recall the climactic scene from Mrs. Doubtfire, when Robin Williams’s disguise comes loose, and suddenly his entire family realizes that it has been him all along.

THREE: And finally, that fits perfectly with my prior notion that Robert Ferrars’s endless shopping for toothpick cases, which delays Elinor’s being able to leave Gray’s, is itself also a covert  delaying  tactic, designed for that identical purpose as Harriet’s and Miss Bates’s delaying tactics at Ford’s. So we can see the parallel scene at Ford’s as JA’s characteristic echoing between her novels, such that if you realize the trick behind one of them, you have a better chance of realizing the trick behind the other!

Now, if that were all I had, it would be enough, as we recite at the Seder, but there’s more—in honor of the 50^th anniversary of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, I give you….

THE BEATLES ARE PART OF THIS, TOO!

I saw the Beatles connection to Emma’s musings at Ford’s, when I noticed how that last sentence      takes on a whole new meaning if we think of Emma as chronically misinterpreting all she sees---she can "do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing”, and that brought me right back to my post of 2 years ago, in which I first claimed that John Lennon's famous line from Strawberry (as in Donwell Abbey strawberries) Fields Forever:  “Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see”. I wrote about this then…

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/12/living-is-easy-with-eyes-closed.html

…but now it seems even more likely that John Lennon was also thinking of that passage of Emma watching the passing parade in Highbury, as well as the strawberry scene, when he wrote the lyrics of Strawberry Fields.

And…for that matter, now that I think about it, I bet Paul McCartney also was thinking about that SAME market scene when he wrote about a modern market scene, with quick snapshots of the passing parade on Penny Lane:

In Penny Lane there is a barber showing photographs of every head he's had the pleasure to know
And all the people that come and go stop and say hello

On the corner is a banker with a motorcar, the little children laugh at him behind his back.
And the banker never wears a mac in the pouring rain, very strange

In Penny Lane there is a fireman with an hourglass, and in his pocket is a portrait of the Queen
He likes to keep his fire engine clean, it's a clean machine

Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes, a four of fish and finger pies in summer.

Meanwhile back behind the shelter in the middle of a roundabout, a pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray, and though she feels as if she's in a play, she is anyway

Meanwhile back in Penny Lane, the barber shaves another customer, we see the banker sitting waiting for a trim, and the fireman rushes in from the pouring rain, very strange

Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes, there beneath the blue suburban skies

Instead of a butcher, we have a barber and a banker; instead of gingerbread, we have finger pies; instead of little children laughing at the banker behind his back, we have a string of dawdling children; instead of a butcher’s tray, we have a poppies  tray. So I suggest to you that ‘the play’ the pretty nurse feels she’s in is, in fact, that street scene in Emma where Emma expected to see Mr. Perry coming and going! Which makes it, if you will, PERRY Lane!

So we see the very different personalities of John Lennon & Paul McCartney captured in their  very different  reactions to Emma: Lennon characteristically responds to Jane Austen’s mystical, epistemological bent, with Zen comments about human perception. Whereas McCartney characterically responds to Jane Austen’s hiding strangeness under a light bright and sparkling surface. And, what a perfect illustration of Jane Austen’s protean genius, that they’re both spot-on!

Which maybe also sheds fresh light on why Beatlemania has barely waned a half century after they invaded, and conquered, the United States, then the world. Lennon/McCartney, combined in popular music, was something like Jane Austen in literature. So we had Beatlemania a half century ago, and we have Austenmania today. Here’s to British invasions, past and present!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

The Two Mysterious Horsemen of Emma & Their Startling Connection to the Death of Mrs. Churchill

Diane wrote: "…That is not objective narration. Nor, I think is the  statement: "after a pretty long speech from Miss Bates, which few  persons listened to--" The "few persons listened to" is classic Emma  editorial, meaning she didn't listen ( and probably missed something important). Thus when get "Mr. Perry passed on horseback," that almost certainly is a continuation of the conversation as subjectively received by Emma. It is not (necessarily) what has happened, anymore than Frank and Jane meeting "by accident" is what happened." END QUOTE

No one couldn't have said it better, Diane, brilliant! I only add that my post yesterday about "The lovers were standing together at one of the windows"  really nails it, because, per the standard understanding of Emma, Harriet and Mr. Elton are not lovers, yet the narrator says they are. That sort of passage is a wormhole straight into the shadows of Emma.

Some readers never entertain the possibility that JA might have deliberately avoided debriefing all that happens of importance in the novels—disregarding hundreds of coordinated textual hints in each novel that point toward alternative readings of every major character except the heroine. That’s the ultimate begging of the question of whether JA wrote shadow stories. A reader waiting for Jane Austen to confirm their existence explicitly, is a reader waiting for a literary Godot.

THE CHAPTER 46 HORSEMAN: DIANE’S INTERPRETATION

Diane: "As for the parallel passage, my interpretation would be that is IS in fact Frank that Mr. Weston sees--but he doesn't want Emma to know that, so he says it is Mr. Otway. He lies, in other words, and the reader is supposed to know that because of the repetition of the denial--"Not Frank;—it is not Frank, I assure you."  Emma, of course believes him."

That is brilliant, Diane, it has just the ring of topsy-turvy ironic reversal of meaning, which was JA’s trademark--finding them has provided the peak moments of my research, when suddenly realizing (with the speed of an arrow) why JA inserted a particular hint or mystery.

The narrative context provides considerable support for your claim:  "...something just come to light, of a disagreeable nature in the circumstances of the family,—something which the late event at Richmond had brought forward. Her fancy was very active. Half a dozen natural children, perhaps—and poor Frank cut off!—This, though very undesirable, would be no matter of agony to her. It inspired little more than an animating curiosity.

"Who is that gentleman on horseback?" said she, as they proceeded—speaking more to assist Mr. Weston in keeping his secret, than with any other view.

"I do not know.—One of the Otways.—Not Frank;—it is not Frank, I assure you. You will not see him. He is half way to Windsor by this time."

"Has your son been with you, then?"

"Oh! yes—did not you know?—Well, well, never mind."

For a moment he was silent; and then added, in a tone much more guarded and demure, "Yes, Frank came over this morning, just to ask us how we did."

So Frank is in Emma’s thoughts right then, which would make her seeing, but not recognizing,  him a brilliant example of JA’s depiction of unconscious experience. I.e., Emma subliminally recognizes Frank, hence her thoughts turn to him at that instant. Plus, there’s the  exquisite irony, in your reading, that Emma speaks “more to assist Mr.Weston in keeping his secret” and yet what she does is precisely the opposite—by her noticing the rider, whom Mr. Weston sees is Frank, that is a sudden, huge obstacle to his keeping a secret! That forces Mr. Weston to divert Emma’s attention and tell her a quick lie. But he’s a bad liar, he’s not sure what Emma knows or not, so he gets confused and changes his story when he sees Frank riding by, exactly where Frank is not supposed to be. Then we read "For a moment he was silent"—and that is JA telling us that Mr. Weston needs a moment to compose himself, and figure out exactly what to say to Emma about Frank, so that he won't get caught in a lie when Emma starts talking to Mrs. Weston. And what he comes up with, in his nervousness, is too much information. He says  that Frank came back from Windsor (where he went in Chapter  43) “just to ask how [the Westons]  did”, and already was back on his way to Windsor yet again! Very fishy, indeed! Just the sort of lie that people, throughout  human history, have made up under pressure, not really thinking their cover story all the way through.

So, Diane, I suggest you’ve given a compelling explanation as to why Mr. Weston would be protesting too much about it’s not being Frank on that horse in Chapter 46. He’s scrambling to cover up, because the whole plan to deceive Emma about what's really going on might fall apart if Emma realizes that Frank never left town. But as usual Emma is so clueless, she doesn't realize! The secrets held from Emma are never disclosed to her, and that is why the straight-ahead reader also never knows.

THE DEATH OF MRS.CHURCHILL REVISITED:

But what are those secrets that Mr. Weston had to work so hard to preserve? What was really at stake? Diane, let me now return you the favor you just did for me, all in mutual service to our greater cause of insight into the mysteries of Emma, and  in turn extend your extension. I now see that it being Frank on that horse in Chapter 46 is not just a literary parlor trick, it is significant. And the significance of Frank still being there in Highbury at that moment in Chapter 46 would be that FRANK NEVER LEFT HIGHBURY when he was supposed to have left in Chapter 43. And that goes to the heart of the shadow story of Emma!

Until today, I was long been a subscriber to Leland Monk’s 1990 theory that Frank Churchill murdered his aunt. But today I changed my mind---because today I realized that if Frank never left Highbury as was reported by Miss Bates to Emma (third) hand!) in Chapter 43, then it couldn’t have been Frank who smothered Mrs. Churchill!

But then who could it have been? The JA I know would not have gone to all the trouble of hinting so broadly at Mrs. Churchill being murdered, only to have it turn out to be a mere red herring without significance. That would be authorial bad faith, breaking the cardinal rule of crime mystery writing (which I believe is a “natural” law of such writing). So we must ask, whodunit?

We merely have to ask the question to realize who it is who leaves Highbury—suddenly—in Chapter 45, i.e., right before Mrs. Churchill dies:

“Mr. Knightley immediately got up, and in a manner decidedly graver than usual, said, "I would not go away without seeing you, but I have no time to spare, and therefore must now be gone directly. I am going to London, to spend a few days with John and Isabella. Have you any thing to send or say, besides the 'love,' which nobody carries?"

"Nothing at all. But is not this a sudden scheme?"

"Yes—rather—I have been thinking of it some little time."

Now we finally know why Knightley was “decidedly graver than usual”, and had “no time to spare”, and had to be “gone directly”. He had decided he was going to murder Mrs. Churchill, and he had to move very fast. So that’s why he at first indiscreetly acknowledges this to be “a sudden scheme”, but then immediately covers his tracks in claiming he had “been thinking of it some little time.”

If you think this is all completely crazy, just go read Chapter 45 as if I am correct, and you will see, it fits so perfectly, it now seems completely obvious. Knightley has just enough time to get to Windsor and do in Mrs. Churchill before proceeding on to London.

And why would Knightley do this? Because it would vest Frank’s inheritance immediately, and set the stage for the final grand bargain, under which Jane receives the Churchill family jewels, Frank gets Enscombe, and neither of them has to actually marry the other, since neither really loves the other!  

THE CHAPTER 41 HORSEMAN: MY INTERPRETATION

Diane: "So in the Mr. Perry passage, if it is not Mr. Perry on horseback, who is it?"

Brilliant question once again, Diane! That is precisely the question that we should be asking--JA loved giving hints by having these kinds of scenes repeated. I pointed out that the two horseback sightings are connected, and you have now extended that point in a very interesting direction! 

My answer to your question—just  as Frank is a man who is significant in the story who is NOT supposed to be in Highbury in Chapter 46, there is another man significant in the story who is NOT supposed to be in Highbury in Chapter 41---and that man is John Knightley, who has come back to Highbury to be there while Jane gives birth to their baby!

In my 2009 et seq. presentations about Emma, I have claimed that John returns to Highbury (a fact obviously concealed from Emma), and it’s he who is there at the Bates residence when Emma shows up unexpectedly in Chapter 43, because she feels guilty for how she humiliated Miss Bates at Box Hill. That accounts for at least part of the frantic scrambling that Emma hears, which occurs before the door is opened to Emma. So, it would fit perfectly with that reading for him to be spotted on a horse by Mr. Weston even earlier than even I realized.  

And that reading would also better explain Frank's bizarre dream-story about Mr. Perry. My initial explanation was that Frank was just being a provocateur, deliberately mentioning Mr. Perry because he wanted to stir the pot, and make the Perry Squad squirm. But now I see that in addition to that, he had a serious motive as well. I.e., if Frank does indeed spot John Knightley riding by, it would make sense for Frank, who thinks very fast on his feet, to take advantage of the fact that Emma is the only one present who does not know Mr. Perry is not alive, so that he may therefore safely speak about John Knightley IN CODE without Emma ever suspecting!

And why would Frank do that? Because he wants to inform the others present that HE knows that John Knightley is the father of Jane’s baby, and that Frank is now fully onto the scheme to trap him into marrying Jane. Seeing John there would have been the last clue Frank needed in order to fit all the puzzle pieces together (echoed by the jumble word game at Box Hill), and make sense of Jane’s behavior toward him since their first encounter in Weymouth. She was looking for a husband/dupe to be the official father for her otherwise illegitimate child, because her lover was a married man who could not therefore marry her.

And that in turn would explain why it is right after that, at Box Hill, that Frank tells Jane he is not going to marry her after all. He’s not a jerk, he just refuses to be a dupe! Now it all makes perfect sense!

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Jane Austen's Emma: An Encyclopedia of Literary Fantasy Allusions from Oedipus to 1,001 Nights

In response to my recent claims about all sorts of veiled allusions in Emma, centered on my claim that Mr. Perry is Mr. Woodhouse’s imaginary friend, a delusion fostered by everyone in his circle of friends other than Emma, who is just clueless about this, Diane Reynolds wrote:

Diane: “I have been thinking more about Arabian Nights as a source for Emma. I   wish we could know that Austen read these stories, though her (miss Bates's) Aladdin's lamp reference indicates that JA was aware of these  or similar "Orientalist" stories.”

Diane, it’s not just Miss Bates knowing about Aladdin’s Lamp, or about JA’s striking use of the same cluster of symbols (lenses, apples, transportation vehicles) as are central in the tale of Peri Banou, as I laid out in my recent post on this subject.  JA’s knowledge of 1,0001 Nights

is even more clearly demonstrated by the explicit reference to Scheherazde in Persuasion, as I outlined thoroughly here:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2012/02/answer-to-my-best-austen-quiz-yet-jane.html

Plus, again, Arabian Nights two centuries ago was like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Star Trek & Star Wars today. It was the definitive European cultural matrix for fantasy literature. So do you really think that JA, who read so widely in both the highest and the lowest forms of literature, would have Miss Bates (her alter ego) and Anne Elliot (whom many also think is her alter ego)

make explicit references to that compendium of tales by accident?

I just this morning realized that JA also winks at Arabian Nights in Chapter 9 of Emma:

“In this age of literature, such COLLECTIONS ON A VERY GRAND SCALE are not uncommon. Miss Nash, head-teacher at Mrs. Goddard's, had written out AT LEAST THREE HUNDRED; and Harriet, who had taken the first hint of it from her, hoped, with Miss Woodhouse's help, to get A GREAT MANY MORE.  Emma assisted with her invention, memory and taste; and as Harriet wrote a very pretty hand, it was likely to be an arrangement of the first order, in form as well as QUANTITY.”

Of course the superficial reference is to a book of riddles and charades, but the all caps verbiage makes it clear, to me at least, that JA is winking at the most famous literary collection on a very grand scale of a great many more than 300 entries. Isn’t it obvious, once you put it in context?

Diane also wrote: “I have also, as some know, long  puzzled over Miss Bates's long speeches in chapter 27, so if they are  pointing to her specifically as one of Emma's "fairies," that makes a 

certain sense. “

So reread them again and focus on Miss Bates’s obsessive and otherwise nonsensical focus on those three symbols from Peri Banou (spectacles for telescope, apples, and carriage for magic carpet), at the very same moment she refers to Aladdin’s Lamp, and suddenly it all makes startlingly good sense!  

Diane also wrote: “But what really causes me to pay attention to this motif is how well it meshes with the fantasia of A Midsummer's Night  Dream, an overt source for this novel.”

Yes, of course, but it’s not just the fantasy of AMND and Arabian Nights, it’s also, even more strikingly and disturbingly, Pericles, Prince of Tyre….

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-shakespeare-play-hiding-in-plain.html

…with its riddle about sex with a virgin which is so parallel to Garrick’s Riddle that Mr. Woodhouse tries to fully recall.

And it’s also The Tempest, as to which I will be posting an update on my interpretation of that allusion in Emma later today.  And….

Diane also wrote: “Another support is the "as you like it" phrase that Arnie pointed out years ago--a stretch, but not a  stretch once you start layering allusions. As Rene Girard points out  in his essay on As You Like It, the play is a  pastoral fantasy--and  Girard contends that the title refers to the audience: As YOU  (audience) like it: I will give you a complete fantasy along with  

happy endings that has little to do with reality. Girard contends that Shakespeare wrote this play, perhaps angrily, as a sop to audiences.  It's hardly considered one of his masterworks, and I have seen a  production of it that went over the top to liken it to a Watteau painting with its similarly fantastic universe of satin clad maidens  on swings in trees--Mrs. Elton's clueless strawberry picking is of a  piece with this in one of the most dreamlike chapters in the novel.”

Diane, you didn’t realize, I gave a detailed interpretation of the allusion to As You Like It in Emma almost exactly one year ago:

http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-complex-hidden-allusion-to.html

The wordplay in Mrs. Elton’s speech is just the tip of the iceberg. And there’s also the allusions to AYLI in P&P, S&S, the list goes on endlessly.

And…it’s not just Shakespeare’s fantasy worlds and Arabian Nights, it’s dozens of other literary antecedents, from Bluebeard to The Heroine, to The Female Quixote, to Don Quixote itself, all the way back to Oedipus Rex, and The Bible, etc etc etc.  Emma is an encyclopedia of veiled literary allusions with a particular focus on the universal human problem of cluelessness—how can we know if what we see is real?

Diane also wrote: “What Austen does is juxtapose a deeply realistically rendered novel in 

terms of time, place (Highbury can be mapped minutely) and detail with  a fantasia, a dream.”

An excellent summing up, you know I totally agree, indeed, I’ve been saying this for a decade.

Cheers, ARNIE

@JaneAustenCode on Twitter

Mr. Perry & Mr. Otway: (Mis)identification of Horsemen Outside Hartfield in Chapters 41 & 45 of Emma

In Janeites, Rita Lamb wrote, in response to my claims that Mr. Perry is not the horseman identified in Chapter 41 of Emma:  

“You say that any ingenious analyst could make a plausible case for interpreting this EITHER as a true, objective statement, OR as broadly meaning ‘it was the gentlemen who said he passed by’. But the text gives no room for interpretation. The author might, had she wished, have phrased it more doubtfully: ’The gentlemen noticed Mr Perry riding by, and spoke of his horse.’ In that case your ingenious analyst would have material to work on. Here, there are only three bald statements.  The narrator tells us: 
 1) ‘As they were turning into the grounds,’
 2) ‘Mr Perry passed by on horseback.’
  and then
 3) ‘The gentlemen spoke of his horse.
So I come back to my main problem.  How exactly do you know JA was hinting at unreliability in statement 2, but not in statements 1 and 3?  And what, other than the reader’s subjective decision, is to guide us in deciding when the narrator means just what she says?”  END QUOTE

Rita, I can dispose of your last point most easily. We know they were turning into the grounds because we have a great deal of additional corroborative narrative data in that same short passage that substantiates it.  Unless Emma is herself an active hallucinator of perceptual events, they all really must be there.  I have never claimed that Emma is  psychotic, only clueless—there’s s a huge difference.  Mr. Woodhouse, on the other hand, is psychotic.

And we also know that the gentlemen spoke, because we have a great deal of actual dialog spoken by them immediately following that bit of narration.

But the only evidence that it is actually Mr. Perry who is sighted are the words spoken by Emma’s companions. The former is reliable, the latter is (potentially) unreliable.

Mr. Perry the alleged horseman may be dead, and I don’t want to beat a dead horse (sorry…), but I fear I must extend my reply a bit longer.

I first reiterate that JA plays with the boundary between objective and subjective narration throughout all her novels, but by far the most in Emma.  My theory as to why Emma is different in that way is that by the time she was writing Emma, she had three years of experience, being continually and genuinely surprised by how little of her winking and hinting in her first 3 published novels had been noticed, even by some of her sharp readers. She realized, I believe, that she had been a little too subtle in her hints (like Lucy Ferrars = = > Lucifer) , so, in Emma, she upped the ante significantly—which is exactly why it is Emma, and not any of the other 5 novels, which is credited by so many literary scholars and ordinary Janeites alike as one of the earliest detective stories in literature. All of her novels actually are detective stories, but in Emma, she underscores that aspect considerably.

For now, I would also like to give you one other example of where the narration is filtered through Emma’s point of view, even though the sequence of sentences does not in itself make that clear. This is from Chapter 10 and describes Harriet and Mr. Elton.

“The lovers were standing together at one of the windows. It had a most favourable aspect; and, for half a minute, Emma felt the glory of having schemed successfully.”

Now, objectively speaking, were Harriet and Mr. Elton really “lovers”? When first reading Emma, it would be reasonable to infer that the narrator was telling us that they were, but of course upon rereading, the conventional interpretation is that they are only lovers in Emma’s imagination, and thus this context leads the reader to conclude that this is subjective and inaccurate information, generated solely by Emma.

But note that the first sentence in that short paragraph taken alone, sounds objective, as to Harriet and Elton being lovers. It is only in the next sentence that we read “Emma felt” and relate that BACK to the description of the “lovers”.  We use the context of a bit of narration in order to decide if it is objective, subjective, or ambiguous.

That is very similar to what JA does with Mr. Perry supposedly passing by on horseback. Emma is there in both cases observing, but I claim that these are also the same in that Emma is making an inaccurate inference about what she thinks she sees.

The only difference is that nowhere else in the novel do you find any explicit statement debriefing you that it really wasn’t Mr. Perry on horseback in Chapter 41, whereas you do find out after Chapter 10 that Harriet and Mr. Elton were not lovers……

…..OR DO YOU??? I’ve laid a trap there, because it is also my interpretation of the shadows of Emma that Harriet and Mr. Elton HAVE already been lovers (in the carnal sense) before that scene in Chapter 10! I will not even try to list all the reasons why I make that interpretation, I only point it out, because there is NO objective narration whatsoever that establishes that Harriet and Elton were not intimate during the first third of the novel. You show it to me if you think it exists.

Yes, we can be reasonably sure that Mr. Elton does not ever plan to marry Harriet, but that is not the same as saying that the two of them did not engage in some fully mutually consensual sexual acts without a thought of marrying each other, while each of them really had their marital plans focused much higher (Harriet on Mr. Knightley, Elton of course on Emma).

So, we have irony within irony within irony--- i.e., on first reading, Elton and Harriet do seem to be lovers; on second reading, they seem not to be lovers, but on my sort of third reading, they seem to be lovers once again, but this time in a much different sense of the word “lovers”.

And….I am also very glad that you pressed your point further, because in rereading some parts of Emma getting ready to respond to you, I stumbled upon another of JA’s master touches, which even more directly supports my claim that it was not Mr. Perry who rode by on horseback.

First, here is the fuller context of the passage in Chapter 41 when Mr. Perry seems to be sighted:

“[Knightley] had walked up one day after dinner, as he very often did, to spend his evening at Hartfield. Emma and Harriet were going to walk; he joined them; and, on returning, they fell in with a larger party, who, like themselves, judged it wisest to take their exercise early, as the weather threatened rain; Mr. and Mrs. Weston and their son, Miss Bates and her niece, who had accidentally met. They all united; and, on reaching Hartfield gates, Emma, who knew it was exactly the sort of visiting that would be welcome to her father, pressed them all to go in and drink tea with him. The Randalls party agreed to it immediately; and after a pretty long speech from Miss Bates, which few persons listened to, she also found it possible to accept dear Miss Woodhouse's most obliging invitation.
As they were turning into the grounds, Mr. Perry passed by on horseback. The gentlemen spoke of his horse.
"By the bye," said Frank Churchill to Mrs. Weston presently, "what became of Mr. Perry's plan of setting up his carriage?"

So, Emma and her walking companions are all standing just inside the Hartfield sweep gate when the horseman riding by is spotted and identified as Mr. Perry, which prompts the long group discussion of Mr. Perry’s carriage.

Now, take a look at the following parallel passage four chapters later in Chapter 45:

“…settling it with her father, that she would take her walk now, she and Mr. Weston were soon out of the house together and on their way at a quick pace for Randalls.
"Now,"—said Emma, when they were fairly beyond the sweep gates,—"now Mr. Weston, do let me know what has happened."
[Emma and Mr. Weston speak for a moment while walking, then…]
…"Who is that gentleman on horseback?" said she, as they proceeded—speaking more to assist Mr. Weston in keeping his secret, than with any other view.
"I do not know.—One of the Otways.—Not Frank;—it is not Frank, I assure you. You will not see him. He is half way to Windsor by this time."

I call it a parallel passage because in both instances, a man on horseback is identified by sight. And not only that, this identification in Chapter 45 occurs when Emma and Mr. Weston are both standing at almost the identical spot they were standing in Chapter 41!

In Chapter 41, the group was just turning into the Hartfield grounds at the sweep gate. In Chapter 45, Emma and Mr. Weston exchange a few very short speeches that lasts about 10 seconds just outside the Hartfield sweep gate.

So….if Mr. Weston couldn’t accurately identify with certainty a man passing by on horseback in Chapter 45, why should we assume that he would be able to perform exactly that same perceptual judgment accurately from the same spot a few weeks later?

Note also that the visibility would have been better in Chapter 45 than in Chapter 41, because in the former, it is morning and the weather is, as far as we know, clear, whereas in Chapter 41, it was after dinner and there were threatening rain clouds---therefore less illumination.  

I suggest that the difference is simply that in Chapter 41, Mr. Weston (and indeed all the others present except the impish Frank) intend to deceive Emma, whereas the identity of the horseman is not important, so Mr. Weston has no reason to conceal that he really can’t tell who it is on horseback from that distance.

(Which is not to say that this passing mention of Mr. Otway is not significant for some other reason—because I believe it is. But that is a topic for another discussion)

Now, I invite you to reread both of the above quoted passages one more time with all of these points in mind. Then you can believe, if you want to, that JA inserted this brief exchange about the identity of a horseman between Emma and Mr. Weston, only four chapters after the “sighting” of Mr. Perry at virtually the same spot, and provided all these details as I’ve described, for no particular purpose. I choose to attribute to Jane Austen, the unbelievably meticulous and economical literary artist, the full intent to wink repeatedly, in a variety of subtle ways designed to be detected by sharp elves, at Mr. Perry’s not really being the man who rode by Hartfield in Chapter 41.

Cheers, ARNIE
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