What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (28 page)

Pleasing blunde
r
: it is a kind of oxymoron. A foolish mistake, an instance of clumsiness, opens up his feelings to her and gives her more pleasure than any successful compliment. Having misunderstood him for much of the book, Anne for a moment understands him better than he understands himself. A blunder is a way into truly knowing a person. It is the first time that the word is used in the novel, but it is used for a second time in the very next paragraph, which reports Captain Wentworth recalling his time at his brother’s home in Shropshire, spent ‘lamenting the blindness of his own pride, and the blunders of his own calculations’. It is as if he has caught the word from Anne, even though it was a word only in her thoughts. He is thinking of his attempt, out of ‘angry pride’, to attach himself to Louisa Musgrove, which could have led him into a wholly unwanted engagement. When he thought he was being manipulative he was, in fact, making the clumsiest of mistakes. For a blunder is not just an error, it is an error that another person has noticed. So it serves an oddly powerful double purpose in Austen’s fiction: it can embarrass or mortify, but it also reveals a person’s true feelings.

In
Emma
, the word ‘blunder’, used fifteen times in the novel, is like a guide to the plot. In a famous episode of coded revelation (understood by the reader, glimpsed by Mr Knightley, missed by Emma), it is made the word at the heart of the game that is itself at the heart of the novel. Having made his mistake of showing the other characters that he knows about Mr Perry’s planned purchase of a carriage, and therefore showing the reader that he has been in secret communication with Jane Fairfax, Frank Churchill uses the silly diversion of anagram making with children’s spelling letters around the table at Hartfield to signal to his lover. Foolish Harriet seizes on the letters that he has put in front of Jane Fairfax and, with Mr Knightley’s help, finds the answer. ‘The word was
blunde
r
; and as Harriet exultingly proclaimed it, there was a blush on Jane’s cheek which gave it a meaning not otherwise ostensible’ (III. v). We see all this through Mr Knightley’s eyes; he knows that the word means something hidden, but does not know what. ‘These letters were but the vehicle for gallantry and trick.’ ‘Blunder’ signifies Frank Churchill’s covert communication with Jane Fairfax. ‘Blunder’ is the word for the stupid mistake made by the clever person, a mistake that might have allowed a really ingenious interpreter to understand just what has been going on.

Frank Churchill, the cleverest character in
Emma
, seems to have alighted on a word that has been on others’ lips and in the heroine’s thoughts. In the work of a less skilful writer, the novel’s insistence on the word might seem an authorial insertion, an advertisement of her consciously contrived theme. Not in
Emma
. Here the coincidence of its use tells us of the conditions of life in this little world, where polite social exchanges have to cover unspoken desires, and where characters are made to guess, often wrongly, at each other’s true feelings. Sometimes you can hear Austen pursuing a word like this through one of her novels, as Shakespeare does, testing its powers. And as in Shakespeare, the word will often turn up in the speech or thoughts of different characters, as they all come across the same knot in the language. Though
blunder
is most often used when recounting Emma’s thoughts, its first appearance in the novel is in a remark made by Mrs Weston, out of Emma’s hearing, in a conversation she has with Mr Knightley. She is vindicating Emma from Mr Knightley’s premonition that she will do ‘harm’ through her friendship with Harriet Smith. ‘No, no; she has qualities which may be trusted; she will never lead any one really wrong; she will make no lasting blunder; where Emma errs once, she is in the right a hundred times’ (I. v). Her attempted exoneration is more like a warning. What Mrs Weston says about Emma’s mistakes is itself mistaken: we know that Emma is already leading Harriet Smith very ‘wrong’. Yet more than this, her use of that peculiar phrase ‘no lasting blunder’ sensitises us to the mix of comedy and potential disaster in the errors that follow. For what is to prevent a blunder being ‘lasting’? Why might not Emma’s misperception about Mr Elton’s intentions lead to the ruin of Harriet’s and Robert Martin’s chance of happiness together? We recall Elinor Dashwood’s thought about Mr Palmer’s marrying foolish Charlotte Jennings: ‘his kind of blunder was too common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it’ (I. xx). Common – and irreparable. The results of some blunders last for the rest of a person’s life.

Emma, the great blunderer, fancies herself alive to the blunders of others. When Mr John Knightley suggests to her that Mr Elton might be courting her, and that she might seem to him to be ‘encouraging’, she confidently contradicts him: ‘she walked on, amusing herself in the consideration of the blunders which often arise from a partial knowledge of circumstances, of the mistakes which people of high pretensions to judgment are for ever falling into’ (I. xiii). We are fully inhabiting Emma’s thoughts and therefore her delusions, and we can hear how the word
blunder
is like a little trap for her. The person who lives by cleverly intuiting the motives of others, of knowing a blunder when she encounters it, is doomed to blunder herself. She almost recognises this as she sits down ‘to think and be miserable’ after the embarrassing disaster of Mr Elton’s proposal, and that word inserts itself into her thoughts. ‘She would gladly have submitted to feel yet more mistaken—more in error—more disgraced by mis-judgment, than she actually was, could the effects of her blunders have been confined to herself’ (I. xvi). The narrative subtlety of this is that we can hear her capacity for self-delusion beginning to reassert itself even in the train of apparent self-condemnation: ‘gladly have submitted’ is her turn of phrase or turn of thought, as she tells herself that she would be happy to be ‘disgraced’ if only Harriet were to escape the consequences of her errors. She acknowledges to herself that she has ‘blundered most dreadfully’, yet she does so in a passage where most of her delusions remain intact (I. xvi). She sleeps well and awakes the next day with her ‘spirits’ restored.

By naming her mistakes Emma trivialises and rises above them. As in that first use of the word by Mrs Weston,
blunder
has become a term for a foolish little error, an embarrassing tripping up. When Emma and Harriet later make their necessary visit to the vicarage to meet the new Mrs Elton, our heroine is conscious of irksome recollections, rather than truly mortified. ‘A thousand vexatious thoughts would recur. Compliments, charades, and horrible blunders’ (I. xiv). Those ‘vexatious thoughts’ do not yet comprehend any acknowledgement of her own manipulativeness. The word that she uses when she thinks about getting things wrong seems to have been overheard by others, even though Emma has never spoken it, only thought it. When Jane Fairfax fends off Mrs Elton’s highly unwanted offer to send one of her own servants to collect her letters, she tries to change the subject, veering off into praise of the post office. ‘So seldom that any negligence or blunder appears! So seldom that a letter, among the thousands that are constantly passing about the kingdom, is ever carried wrong’ (II. xvi). In this novel of blunders, of motives misunderstood and secret attachments almost betrayed, the word comes naturally. By the time that Frank Churchill uses
blunder
in the word game at Hartfield, there is a moment’s illusion that, like Captain Wentworth being passed the word by Anne Elliot, he has intuited it from Emma herself. When he later writes his long letter accounting for his conduct to Mrs Weston, passed by her to Emma and Mr Knightley, he curses the post in a sentence that uses the word ‘blunder’ twice. ‘Imagine the shock; imagine how, till I had actually detected my own blunder, I raved at the blunders of the post’ (III. xiv). You might think that he was picking up on what Jane Fairfax said earlier, except that he was not actually present to hear her words. He is expressing his feelings on finding that his letter of explanation never reached his lover, and then finding the mistake is his, not the post’s. (He absent-mindedly placed his letter to Jane Fairfax in his desk.) This sophisticated plotter is almost undone by the simplest of blunders.

Eventually, as a half-confession to Mr Knightley, Emma herself actually speaks the word when discussing the behaviour of Mr Elton. ‘I was fully convinced of his being in love with Harriet. It was through a series of strange blunders!’ (II. ii). The secret engagement between Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax means that everyone in this novel gets things wrong, but Emma tells Mrs Weston that at least her error has been confined to a passing comment in confidence. ‘Your only blunder was confined to my ear, when you imagined a certain friend of our’s in love with the lady’ (III. x). She refers to Mrs Weston’s thought that Mr Knightley might have a
tendresse
for Jane Fairfax. Mrs Weston seizes on Emma’s special word when she replies, ‘True. But as I have always had a thoroughly good opinion of Miss Fairfax, I never could, under any blunder, have spoken ill of her.’ The exchange demonstrates why foolish mistakes are made not just narratively but even morally interesting by Austen. Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax have ensured that everyone will make mistakes, but some people’s mistakes, like Mrs Weston’s, are inert and harmless. Blunders show people up, and Mrs Weston, keeping her matchmaking ideas almost to herself, will do no damage with hers. A careful speaker, she is confident that she was never at risk of saying something derogatory about Jane Fairfax to her son-in-law. If she blundered, it was safely.

Emma’s mistakes are different and dangerous – dangerous to herself. Her realisation of this comes when Harriet tells her that she believes that Mr Knightley will propose to her. Emma is forced to see that it is she who has inadvertently encouraged her protégée towards Mr Knightley. ‘“Good God!” cried Emma, “this has been a most unfortunate—most deplorable mistake!—What is to be done?”’ But nothing is to be done. Like Frankenstein, it seems, Emma has created the being who will take what she loves and destroy her happiness. It is all her own doing. ‘How to understand it all! How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practising on herself, and living under!—The blunders, the blindness of her own head and heart!’ (III. xi) Blunders indeed – no longer just embarrassing mistakes, but disastrous errors, born, as she now acknowledges, of her own skills of self-deception. For the moment it appears that her blunders have built a plot that will end most unhappily for her. But at least her blunders,
felix culpa
, have shown her what she truly feels about Mr Knightley, if only by making it likely that she will lose him. Her stupid mistakes have shown her and us the way to her heart. Luckily Harriet is wrong about Mr Knightley; she too has misunderstood, and Emma is to be saved from a life as her father’s nurse and backgammon companion. It is naturally that other great causer of blunders, Frank Churchill, who finally waves the word away. He jestingly asks Emma to look at Jane Fairfax and see her remembering his error over knowing about Mr Perry getting a carriage. ‘Do not you see that, at this instant, the very passage of her own letter, which sent me the report, is passing under her eye—that the whole blunder is spread before her’ (III. xviii). Even in his state of grateful happiness, Frank Churchill is characteristically flippant about the painful mistakes of the past.

Not all Austen’s heroines blunder. Tony Tanner identifies just what it is that has always made Fanny Price a hard heroine to like. ‘She is never, ever, wrong.’
¹
This is not a matter of morality; it is a matter of fact. There are other Austen heroines whose moral judgement is impeccable: Elinor Dashwood and Anne Elliot can be trusted to be ‘right’ in their principles and moral sentiments. Yet both of them are mistaken about certain matters of fact. Fanny is not just morally unimpeachable, she is also right in her factual judgements. It is the novel’s great psychologist, Mary Crawford, who blunders. It is mostly Fanny whom she misunderstands, but not only her. Early on in her insertion of herself into the favours of the Bertram family, things go badly wrong on the visit to Sotherton, when, in the chapel, she launches into mockery of any family practice of religion. Imagine how tedious it was when attendance was mandatory for those young ladies and their servants, ‘especially if the poor chaplain were not worth looking at’ (I. ix). Edmund gently disputes her caricature, before she finds out from Julia that he is himself destined to become a clergyman. ‘Miss Crawford’s countenance, as Julia spoke, might have amused a disinterested observer. She looked almost aghast under the new idea she was receiving.’ She has put her foot in it. She is so taken aback that Fanny pities her, though soon enough she is ‘rallying her spirits, and recovering her complexion’.

Mary Crawford’s ‘lively mind’, as Edmund calls it, sometimes leads her into tactless sallies. Yet when she applies herself she can find how to please anybody – except Fanny. The Mansfield Park ball is a cameo of her psychological canniness, as she supplies each principal character with the lines they want to hear. To Sir Thomas, who has arranged the ball to honour Fanny, she speaks in warm praise of his niece. To Lady Bertram she gives the opportunity of boasting that Fanny’s elegant appearance is the creation of her own lady’s maid. To Mrs Norris she exclaims, with wonderful dishonesty, ‘Ah! Ma’am, how much we want dear Mrs. Rushworth and Julia tonight!’ (II. x). But Fanny she gets wrong. ‘Miss Crawford blundered most towards Fanny herself, in her attentions to please.’ She tries to gives her heart ‘a happy flutter’ by talking to her confidentially of her brother’s mysterious mission to London the next day. She has been ‘misinterpreting Fanny’s blushes’; Fanny is pained, not pleased. She does not relish Henry Crawford’s attentions. Her secret, fiercely guarded, keeps her safe from Mary Crawford’s knowing remarks. She loves Edmund. Mary Crawford never divines this, and so she will always misinterpret her. Her failure to see Fanny’s secret, and the blunders to which this failure leads, immunise Fanny against her charms.