Ethos in Jane Austen’s Emma

Abstract

HEATHER M. KLEMANN Ethos inJane Austen’s Emma i. Introduction F or early readers, the realism of jane austen’s emma (1815) was both the making and undoing ofEmmas didacticism. At first, Walter Scott in his 1816 review celebrates the novel for the “spirit and originality” of its sketches of everyday life, which replace the thrill of extraordinary events and Ic beau ideal of sentiment.1 “The substitute for these excite­ ments,” he explains, “was the art ofcopying from nature as she really exists in the common walks oflife, and presenting to the reader ... a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him.”2 For Scott and also for reviewer Richard Whately, Austen’s realism contributes to the immersion of the reader and thus to morally instructive and, in Wil­ liam Galperin’s words, hegemonic and controlling ends.3 Scott’s enthusi­ asm for Emma's didactic realism, however, diminishes over time. A decade later and after repeated readings, his once “overbearing” attitude towards Austen’s novels softens into a more humble, “less decidable”4 regard for her “exquisite touch which renders ordinary common-place things and charac­ ters interesting.”5 Galperin argues that Scott eventually seems to grasp, though he fails to articulate, what other early readers notice: that the “vivid i. Walter Scott, unsigned review of Emma, Quarterly Review, March 1816, inJane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B. C. Southam (London: Routledge, 1968), 63. Southam’s collec­ tion of early reviews and commentary hereafter cited as BCS. 2. Scott, BCS, 63. 3. See William Galperin, The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 58. Building on Scott’s review, Richard Whately, in his unsigned review of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, Quarterly Review, January 1821, makes the Aristotelian argu­ ment that a novel like Emma that gives “a perfectly correct picture of common life, becomes a far more instructive work . . . guid[ing] the judgment, and supplying] a kind ofartificial ex­ perience” (BCS, 88). Concerns over the persuasiveness of realism in the novel appear over half a century earlier in Samuel Johnson, The Rambler 4 (Saturday, 31 March 1750): 19. See Clifford Siskin, “Jane Austen and the Engendering of Disciplinarity” in Jane Austen and the Discourses of Feminism, ed. Devoney Looser (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 60-61, on Austen’s address to her contemporaries’ fears about realism’s impact on the behavior of readers. 4. Galperin, Historical Austen, 74. 5. Walter Scott, entry for Tuesday, March 14, 1826, The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 132. SiR, 51 (Winter 2012) 503 504 HEATHER M. KLEMANN details [of Emilia's prose| seemed . . . strangely ungoverned by didactic aims,” they “strike” and “flash” upon the reader with uncanniness that op­ poses the “hegemony” of realism.6 Scott may have miscalculated the regulatory effect of Emmas realism, not because Emma is not an instructional text, but because Emma’s didacti­ cism extends beyond the purview of realism and its controls.7 Despite the detail and precision with which Austen creates the illusion of “copying from nature,” Austen, like all novelists, does not describe “lived experience . . . but the conventions for organizing and interpreting that experience. ”s As the reviewer for the Champion (March 1816) notes, the “force of na­ ture” in Emma is “so strong” that readers find “a rational pleasure in the recognitions which . . . flash upon them of the modes of thinking and feel­ ing which experience every day presents in real life.”9 What shocks, strikes, or flashes upon the reader is also the recognition of the paradigms through which he or she makes sense of the world beyond the page. I suggest that the parody of literary form, in addition to a fealty to “real life,” constitutes the didactic in Emma. Austen is not just a precision copier oflived context, but also, and as importantly, a deft manipulator of genre. Part of the “les­ son” of Emma, like that of Sense and Sensibility (i 81 r) and Northanger Abbey (1817), consists ofattentiveness to generic conventions and the affective re­ sponses they elicit. In short, Emma is made up much more of the stuff of romantic...