What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (9 page)

 

All this, like much of the novel, is in free indirect style, where the narrative takes on the habits of thought and the vocabulary of the character. That opening repetition – ‘very elegant, remarkably elegant' – lets us hear Emma thinking to herself, complimenting Jane Fairfax but also her known judgement. For a moment she can admire Jane Fairfax, whom she does not like, as a compliment to her own discernment. She likes to see ‘elegance' because of its rarity, and because, by implication, so few in Highbury are qualified, like her, to recognise it.

The habit of one character looking at another with disinterested aesthetic regard is the more peculiar as looking can be charged with such significant feeling in Austen's fiction. Rarely is this sense stronger than in the scene at the concert in Bath in
Persuasion
, staged as Anne has begun to believe that Captain Wentworth still loves her. The singers sing, or Mr Elliot talks on, while in every interval of the two Anne looks for Wentworth, and tries to catch a look from him. For nothing more is possible. When speech is difficult, characters become so sensitive to looks that they feel them without looking themselves. Or they think they do so. In
Emma
, Frank Churchill takes his leave of Highbury after having stopped short of giving Emma a proper explanation of the state of his feelings. ‘I think you can hardly be without suspicion,' he says, and she naturally misunderstands (II. xii). He is on the point of confessing his attachment to Jane Fairfax; Emma believes he is about to declare his love for her. ‘She believed he was looking at her; probably reflecting on what she had said, and trying to understand the manner. She heard him sigh.' Most important of all are the occasions when characters will not look back when looked at. Thus the peculiar passage in
Emma
, shortly after Frank Churchill has blunderingly revealed his knowledge of Mr Perry's coach, where the narrative unfolds from Mr Knightley's perspective. ‘Mr. Knightley's eyes had preceded Miss Bates's in a glance at Jane. From Frank Churchill's face, where he thought he saw confusion suppressed or laughed away, he had involuntarily turned to her's; but she was indeed behind, and too busy with her shawl' (III. v). Jane Fairfax is adept at turning her looks from others.

In
Persuasion
, it is the heroine who avoids meeting another's eyes. When Anne Elliot encounters Wentworth again after almost eight years the narrative mimics her own looking aside.

 

Her eye half met Captain Wentworth's, a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice; he talked to Mary, said all that was right; said something to the Miss Musgroves, enough to mark an easy footing; the room seemed full, full of persons and voices, but a few minutes ended it. Charles shewed himself at the window, all was ready, their visitor had bowed and was gone. (I. vii)

 

She looks down and away, only confusedly sensing what is happening. She sees only enough to mortify her the more, to notice that the years have given him ‘a more glowing, manly, open look'. When she plays the piano as he dances with the Musgrove and Hayter girls she can look at the music or the keys, though not without an acute sensitivity to his glances. ‘
Once
she felt that he was looking at herself – observing her altered features, perhaps, trying to trace in them the ruins of the face which had once charmed him.' Only in the crisis of Louisa Musgrove's fall at Lyme is such painful restraint abandoned. In desperation, Wentworth does look at – and look for – Anne. ‘Captain Wentworth's eyes were also turned towards her' (I. xii). The manoeuvres of looking and not looking are set aside. And then when, in Bath, she senses that his feelings for her are fully re-awakened, she and we discover a different kind of not-looking, seeing Wentworth in the street and looking and then ‘not daring to look again' (I. vii).

This emotionally charged evasion of looks contrasts with the strange licensed looking that we have seen with Mr Darcy's inspection of Elizabeth Bennet or Emma's of Jane Fairfax. When Emma Woodhouse visits Jane Fairfax after the latter's two-year absence from Highbury, we are told first of her ‘dislike' of the woman, and second of her admiration of her person. She looks at her with a ‘sense of pleasure'. The next day she tells Mr Knightley, ‘She is a sort of elegant creature that one cannot keep one's eyes from. I am always watching her to admire' (II. iii). This is not a confession, but a declaration that is supposed to exhibit her good taste. When Frank Churchill attempts to pre-empt suspicions of his relationship with Jane by commenting on her ‘most deplorable want of complexion', Emma enters into the debate with ‘a warm defence of Miss Fairfax's complexion' – as if the matter were not charged with significance. Emma says, ‘there is no disputing about taste'. Even more cunningly, Frank Churchill confidentially mocks Jane's hairstyle:

 

she saw Frank Churchill looking intently across the room at Miss Fairfax, who was sitting exactly opposite.

‘What is the matter?' said she.

He started. ‘Thank you for rousing me,' he replied. ‘I believe I have been very rude; but really Miss Fairfax has done her hair in so odd a way—so very odd a way—that I cannot keep my eyes from her. I never saw any thing so outré! Those curls! This must be a fancy of her own. I see nobody else looking like her! I must go and ask her whether it is an Irish fashion. Shall I? Yes, I will—I declare I will— and you shall see how she takes it;— whether she colours.'

He was gone immediately; and Emma soon saw him standing before Miss Fairfax, and talking to her; but as to its effect on the young lady, as he had improvidently placed himself exactly between them, exactly in front of Miss Fairfax, she could absolutely distinguish nothing. (II. viii)

 

Frank Churchill's
sotto voce
comments to Emma are an improvised excuse for being caught in a lover's gaze. When he goes to speak to Jane he naturally (‘improvidently', Emma mistakenly thinks) blocks Emma's view of Jane's face.

It still surprises some readers to find that looks in Austen's novels can so openly express what we might call sexual attraction.

Mr Darcy's aesthetic appreciation of Elizabeth Bennet's eyes is amusing self-delusion, but this way of looking at women can be more uncertain in its effects on us. For the modern reader, there is, I think, something disconcerting about Mr Knightley's appreciative discussion of Emma's ‘person' in the fifth chapter of
Emma
. ‘How well she looked last night!' exclaims Mrs Weston.

 

‘Oh! you would rather talk of her person than her mind, would you? Very well; I shall not attempt to deny Emma's being pretty.'

‘Pretty! say beautiful rather. Can you imagine any thing nearer perfect beauty than Emma altogether—face and figure?'

‘I do not know what I could imagine, but I confess that I have seldom seen a face or figure more pleasing to me than her's. But I am a partial old friend.' (I. v)

 

We may detect here something more than the language of an ‘old friend'. He is sizing up her body as well as appreciating her features. It is important, however, that Mrs Weston does not immediately detect anything in his relish of Emma's ‘face and figure'. Such relish is allowed, even of a young woman's figure, which means nothing less than the shape of her body as revealed and concealed by her dress. The aesthetic appreciation of a woman's shape, or shapeliness, seems, in
Sense and Sensibility
, to have been shared by the author herself. Elinor Dashwood, we are told, has ‘a delicate complexion, regular features, and a remarkably pretty figure'. Her sister is ‘still handsomer'. ‘Her form, though not so correct as her sister's, in having the advantage of height, was more striking' (I. x). The use of ‘correct' here, which is surely the author's judgement, is strange to us, implying that there is some culturally agreed standard for body-shape, by which observers would reasonably judge actual women.

Egged on by Mrs Weston (‘She is loveliness itself. Mr. Knightley, is not she?') Mr Knightley actually agrees with her superlatives. ‘“I have not a fault to find with her person,” he replied. “I think her all you describe. I love to look at her.”' These two characters could not have this conversation if either were conscious that Mr Knightley was a possible partner for Emma. He is indeed Emma's ‘old friend' – and we might remember this when ‘friend' becomes the word that prods him into proposing to her some nine months later: ‘as a friend, indeed, you may command me,' she says to him. ‘“As a friend!” repeated Mr. Knightley. “Emma, that I fear is a word—No, I have no wish—Stay, yes, why should I hesitate?”' (III. xiii)

There is a kind of appreciative looking at a young woman – and not at her face only – that is a quite proper exercise in taste. It can be done foolishly or wrongly. We should note that Sir Walter Elliot greatly fancies himself a connoisseur of female beauty. And there is something wrong with Mr Darcy's first expression of what he sees in Elizabeth: ‘Catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said, “She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt
me
.”' (I. iii) He is fancying himself an imperturbable judge. ‘Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing.' Elizabeth does not please his taste, having ‘hardly a good feature in her face', but then ‘her dark eyes' correct his judgement. Everyone knows about the tingling dialogue between the two of them, but the complexity of feeling between them is truly expressed in a drama of looking. It is through looks that the impression of something between them has been given.

Famously, it is really set in motion by Elizabeth's walk across the fields, and Mr Darcy's ‘admiration of the brilliancy which exercise had given to her complexion'.

 

Elizabeth could not help observing, as she turned over some music books that lay on the instrument, how frequently Mr. Darcy's eyes were fixed on her. She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great a man; and yet that he should look at her because he disliked her was still more strange. (I. x)

 

She supposes it is all about taste or distaste, as when Miss Bingley invites her to walk up and down the room with her – perhaps, Mr Darcy suggests, ‘because you are conscious that your figures appear to the greatest advantage in walking'. Yet it is about more than taste.

Even Mr Darcy senses that something is happening: on Elizabeth's last day at Netherfield, he ‘would not even look at her'; when they meet in Meryton we find him ‘beginning to determine not to fix his eyes on Elizabeth' (I. xv). Looks are risky. His looks escape his intentions. His looking indeed becomes so attentive that it make others observant. A great watcher of others' looks, Charlotte Lucas (now Collins) wonders explicitly if he is in love with her friend.

 

She watched him whenever they were at Rosings, and whenever he came to Hunsford; but without much success. He certainly looked at her friend a great deal, but the expression of that look was disputable. It was an earnest, steadfast gaze, but she often doubted whether there were much admiration in it, and sometimes it seemed nothing but absence of mind. (II. ix)

 

It still surprises some readers to find that looks in Austen's novels can so openly express what we might call sexual attraction. Just such is the look that Anne gets from the unknown gentleman on the steps to the beach in Lyme: ‘he looked at her with a degree of earnest admiration, which she could not be insensible of' (I. xii). She has had ‘the bloom and freshness of youth restored', ‘the animation of eye', and she knows just how she is being looked at by this stranger in a public place. It is a look that is open enough to be seen and interpreted by Captain Wentworth too.

 

It was evident that the gentleman (completely a gentleman in manner) admired her exceedingly. Captain Wentworth looked round at her instantly in a way which shewed his noticing of it. He gave her a momentary glance, a glance of brightness, which seemed to say, ‘That man is struck with you, and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again.' (I. xii)

 

It is a look of admiration that Mr Elliot later admits to, though when he does so Anne remembers ‘another person's look also'. These looks keep coming back, as when Mr Elliot enters the confectioner's shop in Bath.

 

Captain Wentworth recollected him perfectly. There was no difference between him and the man who had stood on the steps at Lyme, admiring Anne as she passed, except in the air and look and manner of the privileged relation and friend. He came in with eagerness, appeared to see and think only of her. (II. vii)

 

Mr Elliot fusses away, unaware that his own role in the novel is to spark Captain Wentworth's jealousy.

This idea of a man appreciating a woman, expressed in the wordless encounter between Anne and Mr Elliot in Lyme, is put to unsettling use in
Mansfield Park
, when Edmund reports to Fanny his father's appreciation of her looks.