Emma (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page B

herself and deflecting them onto Harriet—Harriet figuring here as the clearest instance of Emma’s constructing an imaginary and unconscious sexual life by proxy. Then there is Emma, Harriet, and Robert Martin—something unambiguously actual and ready, which Emma heads off, blocks, and tries to destroy. She behaves in this instance out of several motives: She enlists her always-handy snobbery to lower Martin in Harriet’s estimation; she absurdly elevates Harriet’s status simply by virtue of Emma’s having taken her up—that is, by her patronage. In effect, she keeps Harriet for herself by pursuing a fantastic and impossible object (Elton) and rejecting a plausible and logical one (Martin). The fantasticated triangle of Emma, Frank Churchill, and Jane Fairfax is a parody of Emma-Elton-Harriet. The symmetry in this second instance is to be found in Emma’s mistaken belief that Frank is in love with her, while he is all along secretly engaged to Jane. Indeed Emma never once suspects that anything at all exists between the two lovers. Emma’s fantasies are additionally and understandably set going full blast by the highly attractive Jane, and Emma rapidly cooks up another imaginary three-sided figure involving Jane and the invisible Mr. and Mrs. Dixon, which includes illicit love and a possibly adulterous affair. Then there are Emma’s off-the-wall fabrications about Harriet and Frank and, at the end, Harriet and Knightley, this latter helped along by Harriet herself. Finally there is the climactic triangle of Emma, her father, and Knightley, a fantasy that is also an actuality which will be resolved by extraordinary and even slightly magical measures.
    These triangles represent among other things the classic unconscious fantasies of children about both familial and parental relations and the familiar sexual patterns or scenarios that such imaginations both trace out and figure forth. Their unpremeditated self-referential nature is to be observed in the manner in which the child is always the central figure in the pattern and also in the ways in which the child is both included in and walled out of the sexual activities of the parental figures. Emma’s lively curiosity about the affairs of others combines her impulse to be “first,” to be always centrally in on the action (in both fantasy and intellectual activity), with her actual repudiation and denial of personal, sexual desire.
    This repudiation is brought forward in a number of passages in which Emma is prompted (mostly by herself) to enlarge upon her early arrived-at decision never to marry. When the innocent and slightly airheaded Harriet asks her in alarm: “ ‘Dear me! but what shall you do? how shall you employ yourself when you grow old?’ ” Emma begins her reply as follows:
    “If I know myself, Harriet, mine is an active, busy mind, with a great many independent resources; and I do not perceive why I should be more in want of employment at forty or fifty than one-and-twenty. Women’s usual occupations of eye, and hand, and mind will be as open to me then as they are now; or with no important variation. If I draw less, I shall read more; if I give up music, I shall take to carpet-work” (p. 77).
    Of course she does not know herself in any acceptable sense, and the parody fuses high comedy with pathos. The lameness of her protestations about self-sufficiency is accentuated by the circumstance that the detestable Mrs. Elton is also given to prating about her “resources,” both mental and otherwise. Mrs. Elton is one of several fractionated and split-off representations of parts of Emma. She is in genuine degree a caricature and parody of Emma, and some degree of our understanding of Emma and Emma is derived from our reading off from these subsidiary characters back onto Emma herself. The pathos of Emma’s reply is disclosed in the limp alternatives and vague specifications of her legion of independent resources.
    Emma’s rejection of the idea