The riddles of emma. (Miscellany). (Critical Essay) Colleen A. Sheehan.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2000 Jane Austen Society of North America
Colleen A. Sheehan is Associate Professor of Political Science at Villanova University. Her publications include articles on the American founding and the co-edited volume Friends of the Constitution. She has been an avid reader of Jane Austen since she was fourteen.
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THERE IS NO DENYING IT, the prim and proper Jane Austen is a bit of a rakish trickster, In the very midst of her most earnest teachings the tinge of mischief is in her ink. Despite Mr. Knightley's censure of mystery and finesse, neither he nor Austen is more able to resist the pleasures of irony than some of her villains. "'Now, do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat,'" (MP 60) could have as easily been professed by Miss Austen as Miss Crawford, with equal power of persuasion.
Puns, riddles, and acrostics; charades, conundrums, anagrams, and double entendres. These are the playful arts of Jane Austen, most manifestly displayed in Emma. Austen's propensity for word play in this novel falls little short of Emma's propensity for matchmaking. Austen is at her ironic best in Emma when she has her heroine declare that "'there does seem to be something in the air of Hartfield which gives love exactly the right direction, and sends it into the very channel where it ought to flow'" (75). Emma then quotes Shakespeare, "'The course of true love never did run smooth,'" adding that "'A Hartfield edition of Shakespeare would have a long note on that passage.'" The quotation is from A Midsummer Night's Dream, conjuring up a juxtaposition of Miss Wood-house's abode to the play's "wood" near Athens. Unlike the erratic twists and turns in the latter locale, Emma would have us suppose that at Hartfield, under her guidance, love is perfectly understood and deftly directed. But of course Emma's antics and attempts at matchmaking turn out to be as droll and amusing as Puck's.
The effect of Emma's unrestrained fancy on the course of love gives the novel its comic character. First she schemes to break the attachment between Robert Martin and Harriet Smith and to make a match instead between Harriet and Mr. Elton. Having made Harriet fall in love with Elton, while Martin is still in love with Harriet, Emma discovers that Elton's passions are directed toward herself Foiled in this stratagem, Emma then encourages Harriet to imagine herself in love with Frank Churchill, but Churchill is secretly engaged to Jane Fairfax, whom Mrs. Weston imagines is being sought after by Mr. Knightley. But Harriet misunderstands Emma's hints, thinking she meant to encourage her in an attachment to Knightley. Harriet thus finds herself in love with Mr. Knightley, whom Emma finally realizes she is in love with herself
Just as in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in Emma the plot revolves around three couples and their ultimate marriages (or four, if one counts Pyramus and Thisbe in the former, and the Eltons in the latter). Indeed, Austen plays on the Shakespearean play throughout her novel, with Emma cast in multiple parts. Like Hermia, the "wrong" man is in love with her, and she protests against his courtship and in favor of her friendship for Harriet (Helena). Subsequently, again like Hermia, she fears that the "right" man for her may be in love with Harriet (Helena), and though it may appear to be so, in truth it is not. (1) Ultimately, like Hippolyta, the queen of the feral wood of the Amazon, Emma is united with the classical hero who, portentously, tenders reason, truth, and duty as the cool antidote to the seething imagination.
Before love can run smooth, however, that which turned it from its proper course must be corrected. Shakespeare's culprit is of course Puck, while Austen's Puck is Emma. And though in neither case are the errors intentional, neither are they accompanied by prodigious regret when detected. In fact, in both cases the impish characters continue their meddling unabated for some time. In attempting to manage the passion of love and order all things properly, Puck steals the power of the senses from one after another of the lovers. Emma, in true Puckish form, follows suit, or at least tries to.
Anointed with the magical potion of the wild pansy, Puck's victims can no longer see clearly what is before them. The unfortunate Titania, for example, falls madly in love with Bottom, an ass; in Emma, Harriet becomes smitten with Mr. Elton, a perfectly apt parallel, I think. It is Bottom, however, perhaps because of his unique line of vision, who is able to see the upside-down world clearly and identify the problem: in truth, "reason and love keep little company together nowadays," and it is a pity that "some honest neighbors will not make them friends" (MSND 76). The mist of midsummer's flower is the theatrical allegory for "fancy's images" (109) which, when misapplied, has the power to turn love away from its proper object. Rather than setting things right, it often has the effect of a "true love turned, and not a false turned true" (82). Just as Puck abuses the mist of the midsummer pansy, Emma abuses the power of her imagination; both steal from reason its natural authority over the passions. There is w afting in the air of the wood, or in the airy imagination, the "thief of love" (89).
The inversion of the proper order of things, illustrated by true love turned false, is thematic throughout Midsummer Night's Dream, as "Bottom's Dream" so vividly depicts. Even the seasons, in mockery, "change their wonted liveries" (59). Summer days seem like winter ones, at least until nature reasserts itself and resolves the paradox of appearances. In Emma too the seasons are inversed (347, 372, 421, 424). Summer days are treated as winter ones and, as one of Austen's brothers cheekily pointed out to her, Mr. Martin's apple orchard blossoms out of season (360). (2) Pluming his feathers, Edward was sure he had caught his clever sister in an error. Indulgently, she never corrected him.
In Emma English turns to French (or Latin) and day becomes night, with dreamers conjuring up shadowy images in the bright glare of the sun. Emma's "amiable" young man Frank Churchill, Knightley tells her, cannot be amiable in English, but in French only. Inverting the letters of the English word, Knightley transforms the meaning of the word into its French and distinctly cosmetic meaning. "'Your amiable young man,'" he tells Emma, "'may be very 'aimable,' have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people: nothing really amiable about him"' (149). Frank Churchill inverts the very essence of patriotism, expressing his love of country in a foreign language (200). Moreover, his self-professed "dream" propitiously occurs just prior to midsummer's day (343-57) When Frank commits the blunder of referring to Mr. Perry's plan to set up his carriage, surprise runs through the little group assembled, for hardly anyone knew of Mr. Perry's plan--"'it w as quite a secret'" (346). But of the few in on the secret, the Bateses were included, and via them Jane Fairfax. To cover his slip and prevent exposure of the intimacy between himself and Jane, Frank proclaims that he "'must have dreamt it'" and that, alas, he is "'a great dreamer.'" In turn Mr. Weston comments, "'Emma, you [too] are a great dreamer, I think?"' (345). While Frank dissembles and treats reality as a dream, Emma treats her dreams as reality. Her lively imagination is but a waking dream.
The purloining power of fitful dreaming and overwrought imagination is brought to a fervent climax at Box Hill. The heat of the day and the tempers of the party assembled become unbearable. Emma and Frank insist on playing games to relieve their restlessness and increase the discomfort of the others. Subsequent to Emma's remark to Miss Bates, which goes beyond folly and borders on wickedness, Mr. Weston introduces a new game and leads off with a conundrum. "'What two letters of the alphabet are there,"' he asks, "'that express perfection?"' Turning to Emma he says, "'You ... will never guess.--I will tell you.--M. and A.--Em--ma.--Do you understand?"' (371).
As Mark Loveridge has astutely pointed out, Mr. Weston's little piece of wit is a play on Francis Hutcheson's theory of moral goodness as set forth in his first edition of An Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Loveridge 214-16). Hutcheson derived his novel theory of moral virtue by applying a mathematical calculation to the field of ethics. Whereas M = the "moment of good" and A = the ability or agent, Hutcheson taught, and since
Benevolence, or Virtue in any Agent, is as M/A, or M+1/A, and no Being can act above his natural Ability; that must be the Perfection of Virtue where M=A, or when Being acts to the utmost of his Power for the public Good; and hence the Perfection of Virtue in this Case, or M/A, is as Unity.
For Hutcheson, virtue is the result of an innate and autonomous moral sentiment that does not involve reasoning. The instinct of the imagination is in itself sufficient to produce goodness (Hutcheson 195). Thus, where M = A there must be perfect virtue, or--Emma equals moral perfection. Considering that this is the first conundrum presented, plus given all of Emma's faults, Mr. Knightley's response is a double entendre: "'Perfection should not have come quite so soon"' (371). Indeed, the title of the novel itself has a double meaning: Emma is a riddle within a riddle.
"'If you were as much guided by nature in your judgment of men and women,"' Knightley scolds Emma, rather than "'under the power of fancy and whim in your dealings with them... we might always think alike"' (98-99). Responding to Emma's claim that men think beauty and temper, rather than well-informed minds, the highest claims women can possess, Knightley ironically comments that her abuse of reason is almost enough to make him agree. "'Better be without sense,"' he says, "'than misapply it as you do"' (64). Emma's problem is not Harriet's problem, as Kinghtley perfectly understands. She is neither simple nor without sense, nor is she "'often deficient in ... comprehension"' (170-71). On the contrary, she is extremely clever.--Sometimes too quick and too clever, in fact, rushing to conclusions produced by an unassisted and unrestrained imagination. Analogous to the effects of the misapplied dew of the wild pansy, Emma's wild imagination causes her to abuse and misapply the reasoning power she has (64).
Ironically, it is Emma who cautions Harriet not to be "'too quick"' to jump to conclusions and random guesses (77). In chapter nine of the first volume, Mr. Elton offers to Emma and Harriet the charade he composes, encapsulating within it a clue to his affections and intentions. This is the second charade proffered; prior to this one is presented which Austen says was "well known." (3) However, she offers no hint as to where it might be found, and she does not explicitly furnish a solution to it. The charade reads:
My first doth affliction denote,
Which my second is destin'd to feel
And my whole is the best antidote
That affliction to soften and heal.--(70)
Analogous to the charade Elton gives Emma, it is "'a motto to the chapter'" and "'a sort of prologue to the play"' (74). What is said about the second charade may be applied to the first. It too is a pretty and enchanting piece of wit, perhaps dropped by a fairy Since Harriet is cautioned not to "'refine too much"' upon it, or "'to affix more meaning, or even quite all the meaning which may be affixed to it"' (77), we are of course led to wonder what the full meaning of the charade is.
On one level the answer to the first charade is one of the six guesses ventured by Harriet in respect to the second. This is certainly a fitting solution to the charade, but even Harriet recognizes that her guesses are insufficiently clever. As Emma tells her, there is a purpose to the composition, one which subtly indicates the deeper meaning of the author's intent. The author of Emma likewise challenges her readers to discern the intent of her composition; we are included in the warning not to be "too quick" or insufficiently clever in our conclusions. Guessing is but a random game of the imagination; cleverness that is more than knavery requires wit tempered by reason and exercised by practical application.
If we are to uncover the further meaning of the charade we must first discover the technique for doing so. It is provided to us in this, the middle chapter of volume one, and in the volume's final chapter. We are told here that fairies drop charades, and we also know from this chapter that Emma is Austen's playful footnote on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. We recall that the enchanted dew dropped here and there by the fairy Puck turned everything backwards and bottom-up, and that indeed throughout Emma this Shakespearean technique of reversal/inversion is employed. In the final chapter of volume one of Emma we saw how Austen uses this technique to play on the different connotations of English and French words, i.e., some words mean one thing in English but quite another in French.
If the denotation of affliction is "fiel," which in French means a painful swelling, though in eighteenth-century English usage it meant comfortable or at ease; and that which feels this is the "heart," then, following Bottom's rule, the charade's solution is "heartfiel." "Heartfiel" is of course a play on "Hartfield," the home of the mischievous fairy Emma and her all too lively and unrestrained fancy; it is "where the wound had been given" and where "the cure [must] be found" (143). Quite literally, "heartfiel" is at once the heart's pain and that which eases the pain, or the heart's ease. Clearly Austen is having a sporting good time at her readers' expense. Like her heroine, as serious as she is about the lessons of this novel, "yet there was no preventing a laugh, sometimes in the very midst" of her earnestness (476).
Emma is indeed a "sophisticated fictional game," as J. M. Q. Davies has pointed out (234). As Austen herself commented, her novels are not written for "such dull elves / As have not a great deal of ingenuity themselves" (Davies 231). More than any of her other works, Emma is the incomparable portrayal of Austen's art of high wit through paradox, with diversions and twists, dilemmas and tangles at every turn. In Emma the audience is as much a part of the cast of "the play" as the dramatis personnae. We are invited into the game as full and equal participants and, like Emma, we must not only have sense, but apply it to what is literally before us. We the audience are asked to double round and to apply what we have learned from the novel to the novel itself.
Just as an answer to the first charade is "heartfiel" or the heart's ease, "heart's-ease" is also the name of the hypnotic flower in Shakespeare's play Another name for this magical flower is "love-in-idleness." In this same chapter or Austen's "prologue" to her play on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Mr. Woodhouse repeatedly tries in vain to make his contribution to the collection Emma and Harriet are compiling, but he can only remember the first stanza of his favorite riddle:
Kitty, a fair but frozen maid,
Kindled a flame I yet deplore,
The hood-wink'd boy I called to aid,
Though of his near approach afraid,
So fatal to my suit before. (78)
Although Mr. Woodhouse cannot recollect the remainder, he is certain that the riddle "'is very clever all the way through"' (78-79). The curious reader who searches out this little poem finds that it is from "A Riddle" by the renowned eighteenth-century poet and Shakespearean actor, David Garrick. Garrick's limerick continues:
At length, propitious to my pray'r,
The little urchin came;
At once he sought the midway air,
And soon he clear'd, with dextrous care,
The bitter relicks of my flame.
To Kitty, Fanny now succeeds,
She kindles slow, but lasting fires:
With care my appetite she feeds;
Each day some willing victim bleeds,
To satisfy my strange desires.
Say, by what title, or what name,
Must I this youth address?
Cupid and he are not the same,
Tho' both can raise, or quench a flame--
I'll kiss you, if you guess. (Garrick 507)
The solution to Garrick's riddle is generally thought to be "chimney sweep." Given that the novel is packed with double meanings, though, one is tempted to ask if this was the only solution Austen had in mind. What was Austen's motivation in having Mr. Wood-house recite this particular word puzzle, or at least attempt to recite it twice or thrice? The poem is about the flames of love, and the urchin who can fan the flame, but who can also clear the relics of an old flame and thus enable a new, perhaps even a slow and lasting fire, to succeed the torrid one that literally burned itself out. This "hood-wink'd" or blindfolded urchin, however, demands something in return for his labors: "some willing victim" must bleed to satisfy his "strange desires."
An obvious fit for this description is Cupid, who manipulates the flames of love by piercing the skin of would-be lovers with his poison arrows, thereby blinding them with love's powers. But we are told that the answer is not Cupid, though it is something that possesses Cupid's magical powers of kindling or quenching love. Classical mythology offers us perhaps another clue. On one occasion, when Cupid misshot his arrow, it hit a small, white wild pansy, piercing it and causing it "to bleed," thereby becoming purple in color. As a result of Cupid's hit, the dew of this flower acquired magical powers, and when dropped on the eyelids of humans it had the same potency to kindle the flames of love as Cupid's arrow. That flower is the heart's-ease or love-in-idleness, later made well-known to English-speaking peoples by Shakespeare and his inimitable, hoodwinking Puck.
As Shakespeare was wont to do in his plays, the clue to a riddle may often be discovered in the riddle itself "Tell me where is fancy bred, In the heart or in the head?" is the song in Merchant of Venice permeating the background when Bassanio is about to make his choice among the gold, silver and lead caskets, in the hope of making the right choice and thus achieving the hand of Portia in marriage. The correct answer to the riddle of the caskets is "lead," which becomes obvious when one attends to the rhyme of the song. It is possible that the same kind of clue characterizes the last stanza of Garrick's riddle:
Say, by what title, or what name,
Must I this youth address?
Cupid and he are not the same,
Tho' both can raise, or quench a flame-
I'll kiss you, if you guess.
Following this clue pattern, the answer to the riddle is "Love-in-idleness." On those occasions when Puck applies the dew of this bleeding, wild pansy with "dextrous care," he eases the relics of heartache and kindles the lasting fires of love. Passion and reason are thus linked via the midway imagination, creating the basis for true friendship and love.
Emma's imagination, however, has not been temperate or the midway link between reason and passion. Rather, seduced by vanity, it caused a separation of the passions from their proper objects; it stole from reason its rightful sway over the passions, causing varying degrees of blindness and vice. Even more than the crime or attempted crime of theft by the gypsies and the poultry-house robber, Emma's imagination has thieved; it has stolen love from its proper channel. As in A Midsummer Night's Dream, misdirected fancy is the "thief of love" (89). In Emma the explicit thefts in this otherwise realistic work seem melodramatic and out of place until we see that they are meant to point us to the more serious theft that is taking place right before our eyes. If we are willing to play along with Austen, and continue the game of anagrams played in Volume Three, applying it to the charade we have unlocked, we discover the core of the danger lurking at Hartfield. The anagram of "Heartfiel" is "Real Thief."
Emma's imagination, fanned and fueled by an intemperate and fiery spiritedness, made her vain, unjust, and incapable of forming genuine friendships or a true or lasting love. More than any of Austen's other heroes or heroines, Emma was in need of a degree of humbling which would temper her vanity and transform it into proper pride. Ultimately, this is accomplished in Volume Three, chapter seven of the novel, at Box Hill, a location seven miles from Highbury where, excluding the obstreperous Emma and Frank, a party of seven silent people (we are twice told) spent the afternoon picknicking. Box Hill, the author reveals, is a location within shouting distance of Dorking on the one side and Mickleham on the other (369). Ironically under the cooler shades of this hill, (4) where Emma's vanity receives its ultimate and conclusive blow or boxing, is still today nestled a little village by the name of "West Humble." (5)
It would be impossible for Austen to protest too much against our accusation that she is a bit of a trickster; she is no less a mischievous prankster than her dear Emma or Puck. We are on our guard; we have a right to suspect her of puns and pranks. And so, what of Knightley's censure of "'Mystery"' and "'Finesse"' as perversions of the understanding?--Of those minds so "'full of intrigue, that [they] should suspect it in others"'? "'My Emma,"' he says, "'does not every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?"' (446). It is shortly after this statement, however, that knightley is not fully truthful and open, for in his commentary on past events he deliberately "forgets" the Box Hill incident. The remembrance would only have pained Emma. For reasons of delicacy, prudence, or the value of self-discovery, some things are better left unsaid. As Bottom remarks when he is about "to discourse wonders: but ask me not what; for if I tell you, I am no t rue Athenian" (MSND 106). Austen's truthfulness is neither completely open nor entirely closed; she is not brutally candid as is Mr. John Knightley at times, nor does she fail "to say a word," as is Mr. Weston's wont (E 126). Rather, about some things she gives only a hint, allowing the inattentive reader to pass over the remark, but inviting the discerning student to understand her meaning more fully. Without parade or concealed hypocrisy, Austen masterfully practices the art of setting the mean between witless openness and unsociable secrecy, fixing the proper mark of the imagination at a point that is neither too quick and untempered, nor dull and insufferable.
The field of the heart and of "fancy's images" is Emma's home. Surely at Hartfield the wound had been given, but is it truly there that the cure can be found? The transformation of Emma that takes place towards the close of the novel is accompanied by an alteration in the map of Highbury. Before this change, Hartfield is the only property in Highbury that does not belong to the Donwell Abbey estate. It is a "sort of notch" in the estate, with separate lawn, shrubberies and name (7, 136). But just as the wall that stands between Thisbe's father's ground and the estate of Pyramus goes down at the end of Midsummer Night's Dream, the boundary that separated Mr. Woodhouse's property from Mr. Knightley's is eradicated upon the marriage of Emma and Knightley. The union of fancy or love and reason is accomplished when what is "heartfelt" is married to that which is "done well." For this rather obvious piece of wit, and for the many pranks she has played on her readers throughout the course of the novel, Austen might well have implored us,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
If you pardon, we will mend. (MSND 124)
And indeed, of the third set of letters to be anagrammed in the novel but swept away by Jane Fairfax and left unexamined, Austen later told her nephews and nieces that they spelled the word "pardon." Surely we will pardon both Puck and Jane Austen, who have made their amends, for they have taught us how reason and love can keep company now-a-days. Some good neighbors have made them friends.
The author wishes to thank Professor John A. Doody and Professor Hugh Ormsby-Lennon of Villanova University for their helpful comments on this essay.
NOTES
(1.) According to Jocelyn Harris, Jane represents Helena; see Chapter six of her work, Jane Austen's Art of Memory. The comedic confusion of Emma certainly allows for such variations on the theme of Midsummer Night's Dream, though the main role adopted by Emma, I believe, is that of the impish Puck.
(2.) Jane Austen's brother Edward, in discovering this "error" in the novel, chided her: "I wish you would tell me where you get those apple-trees of yours that come into bloom in July." See Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life, 378.
(3.) In fact this charade is suggested twice, the first time Emma and Harriet select it for the collection, and then Mr. Elton recommends it, only to discover that they have already transcribed it.
(4.) It is surely being much too suspicious to cast our eyes at the town at the foot of or "under Box Hill," by having imagined that we were partially led to this location by re-arranging the letters of the anagrams of two chapters earlier. If we did play such a game, however, eliminating the duplicate letters (since a letter box with only one of each letter was being used) and taking
into consideration the English propensity to drop their "aches," and rearrange the letters composing "blunder" and "Dixon," we might form the phrase, 'under Box 'il[1]."
(5.) Professor Edwin Goff the Honors Program at Villanova was kind enough, and curious enough too, to assist me in locating Box Hill.
WORKS CITED
AUSTEN, JANE. The Novels of Jane Austen. Ed. R. W. Chapman, 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1933-1969.
DAVIES, J. M. Q. "Emma as Charade and the Education of the Reader." Philological Quarterly 65:825 (Winter-Fall 1986) 234.
GARRICK, DAVID. The Poetical Works of David Garrick. Bronx, NY: Benjamin Bloom, 1968.
HARRIS, JOCELYN. Jane Austen's Art of Memory. Cambridge: CUP, 1989.
HONAN, PARK. Jane Austen: Her Life. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1987.
HUTCHESON, FRANCIS. An Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. London: J & J Knapton, et al., 1729.
LOVERIDGE, MARK. Notes and Queries, 30:3 (June 1983) 214-216.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM. Midsummer Night's Dream. New York: Signet Classic, 1963.