Read Emma (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) for Free Online Page A

going was most prompt and successful.” The final ironic rub is delivered in the Coles’ explanation for the delayed arrival of the invitation. They had been “waiting the arrival of a folding-screen from London, which they hoped might keep Mr. Woodhouse from any draught of air, and therefore induce him the more readily to give them the honour of his company” (p. 189). Emma is obliged to admit that the Coles have “expressed themselves so properly,” that there was “so much real attention in the manner” of their explanation and “so much consideration for her father,” that she allows the Westons to “persuade” her of what she has already decided to do. And it is unmistakably not the Coles’ prose (let alone the Westons’ eloquence) that has done it, but Emma’s desire not to high-hat herself out of a pleasant, sociable, and even possibly exciting evening.
    There is an unpleasantly tough, hard, and callous streak running through Emma’s character; that hardness is expressed in her snobbery and in a number of her other social responses. But it is expressed as well in her attitudes toward marriage. As Knightley first observes, Emma has never been in love: Despite her matchmaking impulsion, she has no experience of romantic or sexual love and hence can know little about it. Emma concurs, but takes the account one step further: “ ‘I never have been in love: it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall’ ” (p. 76). This is another of her declarative certitudes that is bound to be falsified. What is implied in this utterance, among much else, is that Emma has thus far in her young life only been in love with herself; or to rotate the formulation slightly, she has never yet fallen out of favor with herself. She has still to experience that abrupt precipitation into passionate dependency that is one of the genuine markers of sexual, romantic love. She conflates the economic dependency (and humiliation) of Miss Bates and her family with dependency in general and claims that her own, Emma’s, immunity from poverty will be sufficient to keep or preserve her “ ‘as sensible and pleasant as any body else’ ” (p. 77).
    But Emma is “clever” and knows that as an unmarried woman she will not have “objects for the affections” that only marriage can supply. One thinks, almost naturally, of a husband, a mate, and an intimate companion, and then of children. But Emma makes it quite clear that she has isolated and distanced the idea of a husband and is thinking only about babies and children when she refers to objects of interest and objects for the affections. Moreover, she has prepared a line of defense against that deprivation. She will be the loving aunt of her sister’s children.
    “There will be enough of them, in all probability, to supply every sort of sensation that declining life can need. There will be enough for every hope and every fear; and though my attachment to none can equal that of a parent, it suits my ideas of comfort better than what is warmer and blinder” (p. 77).
    As it frequently happens with Emma, smugness and self-conceit consort with genuine, telling insight into herself. At the age of twenty, Emma is speaking with fatuous confidence about “declining life” and referring with gnomic compression to “every fear.” But she also brings forward the notion of comfort, which refers in this novel to a broad range of meanings—in this instance, to an inner state, a state of the emotions in which ease, equilibrium, and relaxation are foregrounded. “Warmer” will figure with increasingly manifest sense in the latter part of the narrative. And “blinder” also refers to another matrix of ideas. Emma will repeatedly indict herself for blindness, meaning self-deception, misreading, and misinterpreting. But she will also accuse Frank Churchill of using his extended flirtation with her as
    “merely a blind to conceal his real situation with another. It was his