The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (24 page)

Finally Harriet hits on the answer that Emma has been hinting at so broadly: “Miss Woodhouse, as you will not give me your opinion, I must do as well as I can by myself; and I have now quite determined, and really
almost made up my mind—to refuse Mr. Martin. Do you think I am right?” To which Emma quickly answers, “Perfectly, perfectly right my dear Harriet. You are doing just what you ought. While you were at all in suspense I kept my feelings to myself, but now that you are so completely decided I have no hesitation in approving.”
¹⁰

Okay, so we can see why Jane Austen called Emma “a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like.” Her manipulations are almost too painful to watch. Emma talking Harriet into refusing the “warm attachment” of this worthy young man—he’s really
too
good for her—and, almost worse, persuading Harriet to drop her friendship with his sister, is even more appalling than Emma busily (and vainly) scheming to make Harriet a great match with Mr. Elton or Frank Churchill. True, Harriet will suffer painful disappointments as a result of Emma’s having talked her into daydreaming about men who never give her a second thought. But in giving up Robert Martin and his family, she’s losing love and happiness that are actually within her grasp.

Emma is “no friend to Harriet Smith,” as Emma herself eventually comes to see. But Emma is not an Isabella Thorpe or a Lucy Steele. She’s not scheming to use Harriet for her own ends. Far from it! It’s all in aid of Harriet’s own betterment. Eventually, Emma will see how stupid and wrong it was for her to stop Harriet from marrying Robert Martin. But how did Emma’s good intentions get her into so much trouble in the first place?

Before Emma has even begun to interfere in Harriet Smith’s life, Mr. Knightley guesses that their friendship is a very bad idea. In another one of those conversations between Jane Austen’s ladies and gentlemen, he and Mrs. Weston discuss the budding friendship between Emma and Harriet. Mr. Knightley explains why he’s concerned, and Mrs. Weston defends Emma. How can he guess so early that the friendship will be disastrous? As usual with Jane Austen’s heroes and heroines, he’s applying universal principles about relationships to observations of his own friends and acquaintances.

Mr. Knightley is afraid that Harriet will end up like Eliza Doolittle at the end of
My Fair Lady
, too much the lady to be happy as a flower girl any
longer, but not able to find a place for herself in the more sophisticated world she’s been taught to pine for.
¹¹
That’s easy for us to understand, I think. What may be harder for us to grasp is how the friendship is so obviously
¹²
bad for
Emma
: “I think [Harriet] the very worst sort of companion that Emma could possibly have. She knows nothing herself, and she looks on Emma as knowing every thing. She is a flatterer in all her ways; and so much the worse, because undesigned. Her ignorance is hourly flattery. How can Emma imagine she has any thing to learn herself, while Harriet is presenting such delightful inferiority?”

When he calls Harriet’s ignorance “hourly flattery,” Mr. Knightley is pointing to the dangers of inequality in friendship. Jane Austen gives us several pictures of unequal friendships—relationships that are about mutual manipulation, instead of mutual respect. We sometimes fall into the mistake of thinking that Jane Austen is all about money and class.
¹³
But when Jane Austen says about the Elliots’ disappointment when Mrs. Clay runs off with Mr. Elliot, “They still had their great cousins, to be sure, to resort to for comfort; but they must long feel that to flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment,” she’s putting her finger on a feature of human nature that doesn’t depend on money or titles of nobility. It can just as easily be about other things, like intelligence or looks or strength of personality. Basically it’s a preference for mutual manipulation over mutual respect. It’s the same reason Lady Susan, world-champion devious manipulator of other people, prefers the flattery of her married lover to the honest love of Reginald de Courcy.
¹⁴

Relationships that involve flattery are always about manipulation. Sometimes it starts with good intentions, like Emma’s toward Harriet. And sometimes the whole point from the beginning is to use other people for your own profit and convenience, as the Mrs. Clays, Lucy Steeles, and Lady Susans of this world do. Equal relationships, on the other hand, are about respect and
what Jane Austen calls “delicacy” toward the other person. In a real friendship you have enough respect for your friend not to just roll up your sleeves and start reorganizing her life.

Harriet calls Emma “Miss Woodhouse”; Emma calls her “Harriet.” All the things that made Emma want to pick Harriet for a friend in the first place are ways that Harriet is inferior to herself.
¹⁵
Emma is excited about Harriet as a grand improvement project, with herself as the impresario. The tell-tale sign that Emma likes Harriet mostly because the friendship makes Emma look good to herself is that Emma carefully avoids getting close to the one other person she
would
be friends with if she weren’t running away from a real friendship of equals.

That person is Jane Fairfax, “so very accomplished and superior!—and exactly Emma’s age.” Both their friends and family have been expecting Emma and Jane to make friends all their lives,
¹⁶
but Jane Fairfax bores Emma stiff.
¹⁷
Jane is an orphan who has been raised by a Colonel Campbell, a superior officer of her father, who died in combat. Throughout her adolescence Jane comes to visit her grandmother and aunt in Highbury, where she’s to a degree forced on Emma’s society. But for reasons that Emma can’t exactly explain, the acquaintance has never progressed into a friendship. Jane is beautiful. She’s even tall. She’s had a superior education. She’s accomplished. She plays the piano, in fact, much better than Emma. In other words, she’s “the really accomplished young woman, that [Emma] wanted to be thought herself.”
¹⁸

So what’s wrong with flattery (whether it’s designed or undesigned)? It spoils people. It makes them more self-satisfied, and increasingly impatient of any kind of challenge to that self-satisfaction. That includes even the mild challenge that comes from the company of people who are in any sense better than yourself—people smarter or more together than you are, people whose standards are higher than yours. If you’re used to flattery, you won’t want to get close to those people. Flattery unfits you for “equal society”—it’s the very opposite of what friendship ought to be. But it’s a very tempting
substitute for a real friendship, when we’re not up for the challenge of being close to another person on an equal basis.

And think of the implications for your love life. Do you want to be training yourself to avoid people who challenge you in any way? Will you be happy if you get yourself into a state of mind in which you expect everyone closest to you—including your boyfriend—to cater to your ego, instead of sharing an equal relationship? That’s what Emma is doing to herself. It’s no accident: the longer she’s friends with Harriet, the less Emma pays attention to anything Mr. Knightley has to say. And notice that her one experiment in romantic love during this period is a flirtation with Frank Churchill, who encourages Emma in all her worst habits. Frank listens to Emma’s nasty gossip about Jane Fairfax being in love with a friend’s husband.
¹⁹
He even eggs Emma on by teasing Jane about it. He flatters Emma’s ego with the most outrageous public gallantry—“Ladies and gentlemen, I am ordered by Miss Woodhouse (who, wherever she is, presides)....”

Ask yourself. What kind of man is likely to treat you this way? Possibly a guy who isn’t living up to very high standards
himself
. Or else a man who doesn’t have much respect for—or any serious interest in—
you
. Both things are true about Frank Churchill. He’s a pretty weak character. And he’s flirting with Emma, it turns out, only to hide the fact that he’s secretly engaged to Jane Fairfax. All the time Emma has spent with Harriet Smith is time she has been practicing screwing up her love life in advance—
not
being ready to take the man who really loves her seriously, and setting herself up to be used by the man who doesn’t, instead.