Emma: the geography of a mind.

McMaster, Juliet

LET ME START WITH THAT WONDERFUL PASSAGE near the center of the novel, where Emma observes the street scene in Highbury. For her it is a moment of still water, as it were, between the Harriet-Elton debacle and the Frank-Jane affair; between the dinner at the Coles and the visit to hear Jane Fairfax play on her new piano. Here we see Emma briefly at leisure, waiting outside Ford's shop while Harriet dithers over a purchase, and we learn something of Highbury as a community:

 Much could not he hoped from the traffic of even the busiest part
 of Highbury; ... 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.... A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing,
 and can see nothing that does not answer. (233)

Emma's mind, we know, is always "lively," but not so often "at ease." But for now she is well entertained. Her mind can "do with seeing nothing"--nothing of major import, that is, or nothing she needs to take over the management of; and it "can see nothing that does not answer"--for her present purpose of being amused. We could explore the last phrase further: Emma's hyperactive mind, with her habit of eager over-interpretation, can always make something out of nothing. Making something out of nothing, some might claim, is an activity we see her busy at throughout the novel.

"The mind is its own place," wrote Milton, in a wonderfully resonant passage:

 The mind is its own place, and in itself
 Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
 (Paradise Lost 1.254-55)

Of course Milton isn't the only writer who has envisaged the mind spatially, as a place where things happen, as a space populated by ideas and stocked with furniture, as a country with its own government and physical features. "My mind to me a kingdom is," wrote Edward Dyer--the most memorable line he ever penned. Jane Austen's favorite poet Cowper suggests social geography when he writes of "His mind his kingdom and his will his law"--endowing the mind with a political constitution and a legal system. Gerard Manley Hopkins invokes physical geography when he exclaims, "O the mind, mind has mountains,/Cliffs of fall...." Wordsworth sends the mind to sea when he contemplates Newton's "mind for ever/Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone." (1) Milton's Belial, a fiend in hell who might well choose annihilation, nevertheless clings to the life of the mind, a place that extends all limitations:

 For who would lose,
 Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
 Those thoughts that wander through eternity?
 (Paradise Lost 2.146-48)

Of an entity so complex, so incomprehensible as the human mind, we feel the need to provide "a local habitation and a name," to envisage it as something familiar and definable: a country, a mansion, a castle in a landscape. Nineteenth-century phrenologists mapped the brain, assigning physical locations, or bumps on the skull, to such mental attributes as conscience and benevolence. Freud too had to people the mind with dramatis personae, the godlike Superego, the everyman Ego, the lurking subterranean Id--reminding us of the mediaeval stage set-up, with an upper floor for God and his angels, a middle stage for the human drama, a pit below for the devil and all his demons.

Such figurings of the mind often expand to allegory, as the human psyche becomes the field of action in which conflicting principles do battle. "Let me be nothing," declares Sir Thomas Browne, who may be called the first autobiographer, "if within the compass of my self I find not the battail of Lepanto, Passion against Reason, Reason against Faith, Faith against the Devil, and my Conscience against all" (Browne 96). That wide compass of the Self provides a field for the exploration of the human spirit. Allegory as a form, so natural a means of exploring the mind in the Renaissance, may seem quaint and outmoded in the twenty-first century. But I suggest to you that it is a mode not altogether alien to Austen, even though she is first and foremost a writer of realistic fiction. The wide compass of the Self, and the intricate operation of the mind, is indeed her territory.

Is the novel Emma an allegory, then? I certainly wouldn't claim so much. But I suggest that parts of it can be read allegorically, and that a somewhat allegorical reading will lead us to places in Emma's mind that we want to take note of. We've all noticed that Mr. Knightley lives at Done-Well Abbey, and that Emma the matchmaker lives in the Field of the Heart, Hartfield. And Austen uses those abstract nouns of mental attributes--such terms as temper, imagination, fancy, conscience--with the kind of precision and fine discrimination that belongs to allegory. Sometimes she even introduces her own little fleeting mini-allegories. After the ball at the Crown, Mr. Knightley guesses that Emma had tried to match Elton with Harriet, and she admits he is right:

"I shall not scold you [he smiles indulgently]. I leave you to your own reflections."

"Can you trust me with such flatterers?--Does nay vain spirit ever tell me I am wrong?"

"Not your vain spirit, but your serious spirit.--If one leads you wrong, I am sure the other tells you of it." (330)

Momentarily we view Emma as holding court among her own mental attributes, her reflections as flatterers, her vain spirit congratulating her for her behavior, her serious spirit reminding her of her errors--like Doctor Faustus beset by his Good Angel and Evil Angel. And in fact Mr. Knightley himself recurrently enacts the role of Emma's "serious spirit"--"'proving [him]self [her] friend by very faithful counsel'" when her vain spirit leads her wrong (375).

As an analogy, let me remind you of a classic allegory that Austen is very likely to have known, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. (2) In Canto 9 of Book Two, Spenser embeds an allegory of the human body and the human mind in the larger allegory that is the poem as a whole. Sir Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, visits a castle that is run by Alma, the Soul. The castle represents the body: the mouth becomes the gate, the stomach a cauldron, the lungs a huge bellows, the heart a parlor where Cupid plays, and so on. But the part that concerns me is the "stately turret," the mind, which is lit by two beacons, the eyes. Here in the mind dwell Alma's three sage counselors: one, the first and youngest, tells Alma of things to come; the second advises her on the present; the third and oldest records the past. We can call them Imagination, Judgment, and Memory.

Imagination doesn't come off very well in Spenser's allegory. His chamber is decorated with mythological beasts and monsters, and filled with buzzing flies:

 All those were idle thoughts and fantasies,
 Devices, dreames, opinions unsound ...
 And all that fained is, as leasings, tales, and lies. (2.9.51)

We could consider this as a hostile view of Emma in her "state of schemes, and hopes, and connivance" (343). Emma is the "imaginist" and "'great dreamer'" (335, 345).

The second sage, Judgment, fares much better. He is "a man of ripe and perfect age, ... goodly reason and grave personage"; and in his chamber are pictures "Of Magistrates, of courts, of tribunals .../Of lawes, of judgements" (2.9.54, 53): surely a model for Mr. Knightley, the magistrate!

And what of the third sage, Memory, described as "an old oldman, halfe blind,/And all decrepit in his feeble corse" (2.9.55)? Mr. Woodhouse, shall we say? But I don't want to labor the analogy.

It's revealing, I think, to envisage Emma's mind as a place. We as readers certainly spend a lot of time there, seeing what she sees, interpreting as she interprets (until we learn better), responding as she does to what feel like changes in the weather: little gusts of passion, moments of damp discomfort when she is out of sympathy with Mr. Knightley, gleams of delight at fair prospects. Though as informed readers, on the dozenth reading of the novel, we may be able to stand back, looking at Emma from outside her, and recognize how terribly she is blundering, and shake our fingers at her in reproof, I ask you for a moment to suspend judgment and look about you. Here we are, tourists in Emma's mind. Let's check out the scenery. "'[V]ouchsafe to let your imagination wander,'" as she tells Mr. Knightley (350).

It is not a crowded place. Human company is rather scarce, in fact, for there are few people admitted to genuine intimacy. On the departure of Miss Taylor--and there are many reasons for the novel's beginning at that first deprivation of Emma's experience--she is now "in great danger.., of intellectual solitude," we hear, for her father is "no companion for her" (7). For all her vigorous social activity, at the outset Emma is lonely in the mind. She needs to fill the empty spaces with activity, projects, connivings.

Nevertheless, here in Emma's mind we find ourselves in a sunny land, bright, healthy, prosperous. We might see her mind like the grounds of Donwell Abbey, "sweet to the eye and the mind. English verdure ... seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive" (360). (I'll come back later to the sun in Emma's mind.) Despite her father's and sister's obsession with ailments, Emma is never ill; she is in fact "'the picture of health'" (39). No disasters have scourged this land, no earthquakes or floods have scarred it or laid it waste. At age twenty-one, apart from the loss of her mother, which she does not remember, she has had "very little to distress or vex her" (5). Imagine how happy and pleasant that life must be in which your first conscious sorrow has been the marriage and removal--and not very far at that--of your best friend. Only that is the event that has "first brought grief" (6). And the sunshine and good cheer of Emma's mind are not just a passive contentment, but an active and conscious condition. We often see Emma looking about her at her situation, taking stock, and congratulating herself on the pleasant prospect: "Harriet rational, Frank Churchill not too much in love, and Mr. Knightley not wanting to quarrel with her, how very happy a summer must be before her!" (332).

This country of Emma's mind is a very busy place, too. A lot is going on, and very briskly. When Emma watches that tidy old woman with her basket, and the dawdling children eyeing the gingerbread at the baker's, she is on the threshold of making a story about them. And in the case of the people closer to her, she does make the story about them, and she takes energetic steps to make the story happen. If her thoughts don't "wander through eternity," in Milton's haunting phrase, they are much more active and purposeful. The thoughts that people her mind are marshaled into action. Mr. Knightley imagines her

 "saying to [her]self one idle day, 'I think it would be a very good
 thing for Miss Taylor if Mr. Weston were to marry her.'"

But Emma's days are seldom idle. Her body may be at leisure, but the thought is spurred to vigorous performance. As she claims proudly, she "'promoted Mr. Weston's visits here, and [gave] many little encouragements, and smoothed many little matters'"; and her efforts are crowned with "success" (12-13). In this novel, the action that counts happens in the mind. As my lost friend and colleague Bruce Stovel wrote, "the primary change ... is internal."

Inside Emma's mind, things are going on all the time, and very fast. Amid her father's desultory maunderings, and the "quiet prosings" of Mrs. Goddard and Mrs. and Miss Bates, Emma as hostess is alert: "With an alacrity beyond the common impulse of a spirit which yet was never indifferent to the credit of doing every thing well and attentively, with the real goodwill of a mind delighted with its own ideas, did she then do all the honours of the meal" (22, 24). "Alacrity" is typical of Emma's mental operations. With "the rapidity of half a moment's thought" she translates the news of Frank Churchill's arrival into an alleviation of Harriet's love pangs (188). "It darted through her, with the speed of an arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself" (408). In the crucial proposal scene near the end of the novel, "with all the wonderful velocity of thought" (430), Emma is able to comprehend a whole new landscape around her: that Mr. Knightley is not in love with Harriet; that he is in love with her; that he has believed her in love with Frank Churchill; and that she had better find a way to accept him without sounding too wildly inconsistent. With alacrity, rapidity, velocity, the speed of an arrow: that's the way things move in the country of this mind.

And Emma is stimulatingly aware of her own mental operations; she spends time in the mind, rearranging the furniture, as it were, or tending the garden. She often takes mental stock, for instance of Harriet's state of heart: "[h]aving arranged all these matters, looked them through, and put them all to rights," she returns with spirits refreshed to the demands of her nephews and her father (332). Seeing Mr. Knightley approaching her in the shrubbery, when she had thought him sixteen miles away, she has "time only for the quickest arrangement of mind" (424). And she is able to pull off the rearrangement of mind without dropping a stitch (to mix the metaphor)!

I want to remind you how invigorating it is to be in a mind so active, supple, suggestible, rapid. Yes, we know how seriously Emma can go wrong; we are privy to her most embarrassing and most damaging mistakes. But this location in a mind delighted with its own ideas, this power of tracking the wonderful velocity of thought, these are the privileges that make us return to re-read the novel with fresh delight, time after time.

And as we look around ourselves in this kingdom that is Emma's mind, we can also recognize that it's a place where the government may not always be just or wise, but it will be thorough and self-regarding, and the records will be kept scrupulously up-to-date. At one point, advising Harriet in a crisis, Emma reflects, "[I]t would be safer for both, to have the judicious law of her own brain laid down with speed" (341)--and it's amusing to find her recognizing that she does lay down the law, for Harriet as well as herself. But she polices her own operations, and honestly keeps tally. After the Elton disaster, she finds herself "obliged in common honesty to stop and admit that her own behaviour to him had been ... complaisant" (136). When she undergoes the painful process of enlightenment, she is quick to blame herself for her "insufferable vanity" in having "believed herself in the secret of everybody's feelings" (412-13)--trespassing in the minds of others, that is; and she blames herself accordingly, and makes it her business "[t]o understand, thoroughly understand her own heart" (412). (It is typical of Emma that she has to bring her brain to bear on the analysis of her heart.) And in her strenuous effort to recognize her own errors, she contrasts with that other fortunate, happy spirit, Frank Churchill. When he considers whether he had any right to bind Jane Fairfax in a secret engagement, he writes breezily: "'For my temptation to think it a right, I refer every caviller to a brick house ... in High-bury'" where Jane lives (437); that is, he cheerfully assumes that his love justifies his deceptions. Emma is much more exacting in the moral standards that she applies to herself.

In this busy, sunny, fully-regulated land that is Emma's mind, can we distinguish features in the landscape? Let's call the Imagination a cloud-capped mountain: for the tourist-reader the most prominent scenic feature, and for Emma herself an eminence from which she can descry and predict the busy activities of her neighbors. Johnson defines Imagination as "the power of forming ideal pictures; the power of representing things absent to one's self or others." "Ideal pictures" for Johnson relates to the Platonic Idea, which is more real than the passing images of it that we encounter in our transient lives. "The power of representing things absent to one's self or others," the creative power of the poet, is likewise positively viewed, for the "things absent" have their own reality. Emma's imagination is among her strengths, even if it can also lead her wrong. It is her "imagination" that produces the belief that Jane Fairfax is in love with Mr. Dixon (168). And when she imagines that Mr. Elton is in love with Harriet, she does serious damage, and makes a resolution of "repressing imagination all the rest of her life" (142). But it is also her imagination that creates her sympathy for Jane Fairfax in her governess troubles and enables her sympathy for Harriet.

Moreover, Emma is able to observe her own imaginings, and to learn from them. When she has imagined herself in love with Frank, she moves into novelist's mode, "forming a thousand amusing schemes for the progress and close of their attachment, fancying interesting dialogues, and inventing elegant letters" (264). Having created this elaborate mental fiction, she can nevertheless stand back and judge the effect: "[t]he conclusion of every imaginary declaration on his side was that she refused him" (264). So we have, within the large fabric of Jane Austen's fiction, this mini-romance, complete with letters and dialogue and declaration. And from the outcome of this little fiction she invents, Emma is able to learn the real state of her feelings--that she is not in fact very far gone in love with Frank Churchill. Imagination fares much better here, for all Emma's faults, than in the future-searching sage of Spenser's allegory, with his "Devices, dreames, [and] opinions unsound." For Emma, imagination can be a means of discovering the truth.

What shall we do with "[t]hat very dear part of Emma, her fancy" (214)? I shall call it her garden, which she cultivates with devotion, elaborating it with bowers, arbors, trellises and fountains, and introducing rare and exotic blooms! Remember when Mr. Weston withholds the disturbing information concerning Frank's engagement: "Her fancy was very active. Half a dozen natural children, perhaps--and poor Frank cut off!" (393). Her fancy is fertile indeed!

The distinction between imagination and fancy has occupied bigger brains than mine. But Shakespeare is a help.

 Tell me where is fancy bred,
 Or in the heart or in the head?

runs a song in The Merchant of Venice (3.2.63-64). Emma's fancies are indeed a product of the mind, but they pertain to the heart, as they typically relate to love and romance. Let's pause for a moment, and watch her fancy at work. Frank Churchill has just delivered a scared Harriet back to Hartfield after her encounter with the gipsies.

 Such an adventure as this,--a fine young man and a lovely young
 woman thrown together in such a way, could hardly fail of
 suggesting certain ideas to the coldest heart and the steadiest
 brain. So Emma thought, at least. [For a moment we are outside of
 Emma's mind and looking dispassionately at it with an enlightened
 author; but we're soon back inside.] Could a linguist, could a
 grammarian, could even a mathematician have seen what she did, have
 witnessed their appearance together, and heard their history of it,
 without feeling that circumstances had been at work to make them
 peculiarly interesting to each other?--How much more must an
 imaginist, like herself, be on fire with speculation and
 foresight!--especially with such a ground-work of anticipation as
 her mind had already made. (334-35)

It is engaging to watch Emma, who thinks herself so cautious after her previous errors, taking off with such confidence on her next flight of fancy.

First she reclassifies the incident as "an adventure," thus wrapping it in literary associations. Then she invests the personnel of the story with an aura of romance: no longer "Frank Churchill" and "Harriet," but "a fine young man and a lovely young woman." Next she justifies her construction of events by invoking "the coldest heart and the steadiest brain" (Where is fancy bred? In the heart or in the head?): even they could not fail to be moved by the fateful "throw[ing] together" of this hero and heroine. Nov," she marshals a hierarchy of the dullest, most down-to-earth and coldly unimaginative thinkers: a linguist, a grammarian, "even a mathematician"!--even such plodders could not have witnessed the scene without concluding that the couple must have become "peculiarly interesting to each other." And if these conveniently imagined unimaginative beings are convinced, of course she is right to be convinced too. Emma has rounded up the opposition, all those least likely to agree with her--linguists, grammarians, mathematicians, and all--and brought them all over to vote on her side.

She has created her own little allegory to justify herself in leaping to a conclusion. Now she can proclaim her own title with pride rather than humility: "how much more must an imaginist, like herself, be on fire with speculation and foresight!" Notice that "must." She convinces herself there can be no other outcome. And notice too how quickly "imagination"--the possible reality-moves to "foresight"--the foreknowledge of something actual. By such means does Emma the imaginist convince herself that her imaginings must be true.

As she continues in this line of belief, Austen offers us reminders of how limited Emma's knowledge actually is. The coincidence of Frank's being there at just the right moment has to be a stroke of Fate: "It certainly was very extraordinary!--And knowing, as she did, the favourable state of mind of each at this period, it struck her the more" (335). Wait a minute! "[K]nowing, as she did, the favourable state of mind of each at this period"? Let's remind ourselves just how much, or how little, she does know. She believes Harriet has just got over Elton, Mr. Wrong, and is in just the right state of mind to fall for Mr. Right; and that Frank needs to get over her, Emma, and finding Miss Right in such circumstances will do the trick We know better: Harriet has just fallen for Mr. Knightley when he rescued her at the dance, and Frank is already deeply in love and even engaged to someone else altogether. And yet Emma's fanciful imaginings have such an air of plausibility, as we sit in her mind looking about us, that we are in danger of being convinced all over again. "It was not possible that the occurrence should not be strongly recommending each to the other," she concludes (335). Note the use of the double negative as a means of convincing herself: she doesn't tell herself, "It was possible they might be in love," but "It was not possible that they should not be in love." These are the operations of fancy and imagination in Emma's highly suggestible mind.

There's an enjoyable appropriateness to the end of this chapter, where we hear that "the story of Harriet and the gipsies" has become a favorite yarn for Emma's young nephews, who clamor for her to tell it to them, word for word, every day. J. K. Rowling, move over!

I will pause over one more mental operation: "interest." It is a word that has to a large extent lost its force with us: we may consider "interest" as not much more than mild curiosity. But in Emma "Interest" is where the heart is: it is home. When you are interested in someone, in some sense you identify with her. When Emma is moved to compassion for Jane Fairfax's suffering, she is "most sincerely interested" (379)--and the "sincerely" shows that her self is really engaged with the other. Frank Churchill professes himself "to have always felt the sort of interest in the country which none but one's own country gives" (191). To use the spatial terms I have adopted, the person in whom you are "interested" dwells in your mind; in a sense she becomes part of you.

Egoist that she is, however, Emma most rejoices in occupying other people's minds. You may consider that she virtually colonizes Harriet's mind, taking over her loves and opinions. Miss Taylor was a warmly appreciated friend because she was "knowing [in] all the ways of the family, interested in all its concerns, and peculiarly interested in herself, in every pleasure, every scheme of her's" (6). Frank's letter, "[a]s soon as she came to her own name.... was irresistible; every line relating to herself was interesting" (444). Emma loves to be the center of other people's universes, as she is of her own.

When Emma has her awakening, and recognizes her love for Mr. Knightley, the discovery takes the form of her realizing "how much of her happiness depended on being first with Mr. Knightley, first in interest and affection" (415). Subconsciously, she sees herself enthroned in his mind, just as (she discovers) he is enthroned in hers. And here, very late in the novel, we learn the secret of Emma's high spirits and active happiness, the reason that her own mind is the sunny and prosperous place it is. "Satisfied that it was so"--that is, that she has always been "first in ['his'] interest and affection"--she has lived that fortunate and blessed existence of which she is so happily conscious. Like Donwell Abbey, she has flourished under "a sun bright, without being oppressive" (360). All along her mind has basked and grown verdant in the sunshine of his attention, his warming interest that is so short a step from love.

When she believes that Mr. Knightley loves Harriet, then, that sunny fertile land at last feels the blast of a devastating storm. "[H]er mind was in all the perturbation that such a developement of self, such a burst of threatening evil, such a confusion of sudden and perplexing emotions, must create" (409). It's an ecological disaster, like a tsunami, or a blotting out of the sun that will wither the land. And she contemplates a future from which the sustaining light and warmth have been withdrawn. "The prospect before her now, was threatening to a degree that could not be entirely dispelled--that might not be even partially brightened.... Hartfield must be comparatively deserted; and she left to cheer her father with the spirits only of ruined happiness" (422). Emma's prospect is of a waste land. And in the best manner of allegory, the internal storm is echoed by the actual weather, as "'a cold stormy rain set in," and July dresses itself as December (421). She faces the withdrawal of sunshine that has for so long been so salient an influence on the health and vitality of her mind.

But this is romantic comedy, after all, not a bitter investigation of the disintegration of faith and creativity like Eliot's The Waste Land. Though briefly faced with the devastating possibility of the withdrawal of Mr. Knightley's interest and affection, Emma is soon reassured of its steady continuity. But the threatened storm has indeed left her "more rational, [and] more acquainted with herself" (423). Hartfield, the Field of the Heart, will be governed more wisely and rationally now.

To return to my initial quotation from Milton:

 The mind is its own place, and in itself
 Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

It is an exciting proposition, and we feel that it applies to Emma too. She too can live an exciting life in this place we call the mind; she too can create beautiful fictions and believe in them. And we have all experienced the delight of dwelling in that lively place that is Emma's mind, and the invigorating belief that her mind is self-sufficient. But Milton's lines, let me remind you, are spoken by Satan. And though Satan does work hard at making a Heaven of Hell, he succeeds only in creating a diabolical inversion of Heaven. Similarly, Emma's dreams and schemes, so beguiling and so plausible, not only fail, but do damage.

As with everything in Jane Austen, it's a matter of a fine balance. Yes, with Emma we enjoy being located in a mind delighted with its own ideas. But we too need reminding that Emma's mind, for all her facility in creating something out of nothing, and seeing nothing that does not answer, is not self-sufficient and omnipotent.

Can one connect the figurative geography of Emma's mind with the literal geography in the novel? I think so.

That "mind lively and at ease" that we find so congenial a location has its severe limitations. Austen knows that you don't have to travel widely to gather the experience that matters. "Provincial" was never a bad concept for her. She is rather scornful of Frank Churchill's restless desire to go to "'Swisserland'" (365), which is clearly only an expression of his dissatisfaction with his current lot. But the mind which can find so much that is entertaining in a quiet street scene in Highbury deserves further stimulation. Emma doesn't yearn, like Tennyson's Ulysses,

 To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
 Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
 ("Ulysses" 31-32)

But in her state of "intellectual solitude" she does need and deserve company more stimulating than her father's; and she does need and deserve horizons wider than those in Highbury, or even Box Hill. In the hypochondriac talk between her father and her sister, Mr. Woodhouse denounces the John Knightleys' trip to South End and insists that "'the sea is rarely of use to any body'"--a peculiarly closed-minded position. Emma interjects, "'I must beg you not to talk of the sea. It makes me envious and miserable;--I who have never seen it!'" (101). At the time she is acting the good hostess and avoiding a quarrel. But the cry rings true. Never to have seen the sea is indeed a deprivation to her. For all her gregarious nature and social activity, there are moments when she feels the need to expand her mind by wider prospects. After the tense and unsatisfactory sociabilities of the Box Hill outing, she wishes she were "sitting almost alone, and quite unattended to, in tranquil observation of the beautiful views beneath her" (374). She would enjoy the experience that is available to Anne Elliot, who at Lyme can find "the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation ... [of] green chasms between romantic rocks" (Persuasion 95). The sea represents change and passionate fulfillment--Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax fall in love at Weymouth. But given her father's intransigent position, Emma while single is unlikely to see the sea. The man who fears a half-mile carriage ride to Randalls isn't likely to take her anywhere more remote, let alone to the health-threatening seaside.

I like to think that Emma's excessive fantasizing, her busy-bodying and restless management of other people's lives, are to some extent an expression of a sense of confinement. Her mind must be active, and if she can't turn her attention to the wider scene of nature and humanity, she must get busily to work on what's going on in the minds and hearts of her immediate neighbors. When Mr. Knightley moves into the Field of the Heart, Emma will suffer no more from "intellectual solitude" (7). Moreover, as you will all remember, their marriage is immediately followed by a "fortnight's absence in a tour to the sea-side" (483). Hooray! That interior landscape that is Emma's mind is to be refreshed by sea breezes, and expanded to new and far horizons. And we who are gathered here by the great Pacific, like Emma herself, can rejoice in our own access of knowledge, and our own widening horizons.

WORKS CITED

Austen, Jane. The Novels of Jane Austen. Ed. R.W. Chapman. 3rd ed. Oxford: OUP, 1933-69.

Browne, Sir Thomas. Religio Medici. The Works of Sir Thomas Browne. Ed. Charles Soyle. Vol. 1. Edinburgh: Grant, 1912. 7-112.

Gilson, David. A Bibliography of Jane Austen. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 1977.

Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. London, 1822.

Stovel, Bruce. "The New Emma in Emma." New Windows on a Woman's World: Essays for Jocelyn Harris. Ed. Colin Gibson and Lisa Marr. Vol. 2. Dunedin, NZ: Department of English, University of Otago, 2005. 104-15. Rpt. in Persuasions On-Line 28.1 (2007).

NOTES

(1.) I here cluster the references for my brief quotations: Edward Dyer, the lyric beginning with this line; William Cowper, "Truth"; Gerard Manley Hopkins, the sonnet beginning "No worst, there is none"; William Wordsworth, The Prelude 3.63-64.

(2.) Her brother James Austen owned a 1758 edition of The Faerie Queene, which may well have come from her father's library of 500 books that seem to have been sold to James when his parents and sisters moved to Bath in 1801. See Gilson (433,435). I am grateful to Susan Allen Ford, editor of Persuasions, for alerting me to this connection.

(3.) Bruce Stovel's paper, published in New Windows on a Woman's World, was read at this conference in lieu of the paper he would have given but for his untimely death on January 12, 2007.

Juliet McMaster, a founding member of JASNA, has addressed the Society many a time, most recently as JASNA's 2007 North American Scholar. She is the author of Jane Austen on Love and Jane Austen the Novelist, as well as of books on Thackeray, Trollope, Dickens, and the eighteenth-century novel, and coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen.