Jane Austen's Emma is a revolutionary novel, I think.
But it may seem odd to use that adjective, revolutionary, for a
book, which, clearly, in terms of its content, is not radical
at all, a courtship story is set in an English village. But in
terms of its narrative technique, it really is a
revolutionary, audacious, experimental; like nothing
except, perhaps, Jane Austen's own novels that have gone before
it. Because what it does is that, is, is it tells a story in
the third person, but bends it through the lens of its
heroine's consciousness. So everything we are told in Emma,
outside two particular chapters, which are not narrated from her
point of view, is shaped by Emma's prejudices, her wishes,
her false assumptions. So it's a novel which actually perfects
what we have come to call free indirect style, where a third
person narrative is told through the consciousness of one or
other of the characters involved. And actually, that
very term, free indirect style, wasn't invented until the early
20th century; Jane Austen didn't have a sort of terminology for
what she was doing, but, clearly, she was very, very
conscious of it, because she makes us share her protagonist's
mistakes in a very calculated way. And she writes sentences,
therefore, which although very simple in terms of their diction
sometimes, has sentences which no other novelist could have
written before her.
Take a simple example. Early in the novel, in Chapter 10, Emma
is trying to manufacture a one to one encounter between Mr.
Elton, the rather oily and insinuating vicar of Highbury, a
single man, and Harriet Smith, who is Emma's 17-year-old rather
pretty, but foolish protege. A stooge, really. And Emma wants
to make a match between these two. And, as as any discerning
reader will know, this is, she's, she's intending a match
which is not very likely. Mr. Elton is clearly more interested
in Emma, and is nice to her friend only for Emma's sake, but
Emma doesn't see this at all. Anyway, they're, they're out
walking, Emma and Harriet Smith. They bump into Mr. Elton in the
lane. Emma breaks her own lace of her boot in order to have to
go into Mr. Elton's house, the parsonage, to repair it. And
while she goes off with the housekeeper to do this, she
leaves Mr. Elton and Harriet alone together. And she fondly
imagines this will be an opportunity for Mr. Elton to pop
the question. Because they've never been alone together
before. And she, she makes as much noise as possible, so that
it's clear that she won't overhear what they're saying,
and she stays away as long as possible. Eventually, she has to
go back into the room.
And she goes back into the room, and the novel says, "the lovers
were standing together at one of the windows," full stop. It's a
very simple sentence. But, of course, it's, it's, it's a mad
sentence. They're not lovers at all, Mr. Elton and Harriet
Smith. But the narrative behaves as if it can only see things
through Emma's eyes. So Austen says the lovers were standing
together at one of the windows. In fact, we will find out that
not only are they not lovers, but it turns out that Mr. Elton
actually despises Harriet Smith, who was a nobody, who, as far as
he's concerned, far, is far below him. It's, and it's a very
simple little example, of a technique used brilliantly and
in an extraordinary way throughout the novel, where we
cannot escape the grip of the heroine's view of the world, and
novelists ever since have exploited free indirect style
for all sorts, in all sorts of ways. But really, Jane Austen
was the first one to discover its potential.
I think one of the most audacious and experimental
aspects of Emma is the novel's representation of speech. In
fact, of monologue as much as of dialogue. There's one
extraordinary example of this that comes from the mouth of
Mrs. Elton, all of whose speech is, I think, delicious, although
a torture to Emma when she has to listen to it, but a pleasure
for the reader. And at the Donwell Abbey strawberry picking
party dictated by Mrs. Elton but, but arranged by Mr.
Knightley in whose garden it all takes place at high summer,
there's an extraordinary paragraph of direct speech where
Mrs. Elton is speaking and punctuated only by dashes, we're
given a paragraph of her, a monologue of hers, where she is
taken, in the course of a bit, a bit of speech, which takes
perhaps 30 or 40 seconds to read, from initial enthusiasm
for strawberry picking to sun struck exhaustion at the end of
the paragraph.
And we're told that this bit of speech lasts, in fact, about
half an hour, but it's given as a sort of capsule, capsule
monologue in the, in the novel, and I was thinking if it came in
a bit of, in a book by, by, I don't know, James Joyce, people
would look at the extraordinary narrative technique which allows
us to experience half an hour's trajectory of speech in such a
short period, but because it's Jane Austen, it's as if nobody
really notices how audacious the technique is. And it's a
technique which is elsewhere applied, most memorably, to the
speech of Miss Bates, I think Miss Bache is an extraordinary
character or rather, her speech habits are extraordinary. She
speaks in monologues punctuated by dashes. And it's a torment to
those who listen, particularly to Emma, but if the reader pays
attention, you can hear all sorts of extraordinary, telling
information about what's really going on in the novel, what's
really going on in the village, what's really going on in the
romantic lives of some of the characters in the clues given in
Miss Bates' monologues.
And early on in the novel, Miss Bates' monologues are,
literally, monologues. But Jane Austen very, very cleverly does
this thing where you've got used to the idea that Miss Bates
speaks without interruption, without giving pause for anybody
else to intervene, but, actually, as the novel goes on,
her monologues turn into representations of something
more extraordinary. And, particularly, when you get to
one of the great episodes in, in Emma, the ball at the crown,
Miss Bates' monologues, if you look carefully, you realize are
representations of exchanges that are going on around her
between other characters and you never hear other, other
interjections, other speakers, but those have, as it were,
being faded out by Austen, so all you can hear is Miss Bates.
And you have to infer what exchanges she's having with
other people in the room. And, as ever, Austen's expecting the
reader to be thoroughly ingenious in the way that he or
she does that.