The ‘bit of Ivory’ refers to the popular contemporary art of the miniature, which has seemed to many readers an appropriate parallel for Austen’s meticulous re-creations of upper middle-class society.26 It is worth considering the inherent ironies of her remark, however, not only with regard to the self-deprecatory comparison with her nephew, but also in that her most recently published novel, Emma, had run to some thousand pages in its original, three-volume format.
If Austen’s technique has something in common with that of the miniaturist, however, her work also has analogies with a host of other artistic kinds. Just as Miss Woodhouse displays ‘Miniatures, half-lengths, whole-lengths, pencil, crayon, and water-colours’, so Emma exhibits an extraordinary diversity of styles and voices, often switching from one to another in a single paragraph. Like the portfolio, it is a book full of ‘beginnings’, the imaginative effects often sparking from the contrasts in the prose rather than any sustained narrative position. The implicit parallels with visual art are frequently suggested, through pictorial imagery, specialist language or the arrangement of scenes reminiscent of contemporary paintings:
The appearance of the little sitting-room as they entered, was tranquillity itself; Mrs Bates, deprived of her usual employment, slumbering on one side of the fire, Frank Churchill, at a table near her, most deedily occupied about her spectacles, and Jane Fairfax, standing with her back to them, intent on her pianoforté.
Emma’s carefully composed scenes, evocative of the domestic interiors of the contemporary painter, David Wilkie, frequently occupy no more than a sentence but, as Frank Churchill observes, ‘Miss Woodhouse, you have the art of giving pictures in a few words.’
The novel’s portraiture, too, is similarly succinct, Harriet Smith being described as ‘short, plump and fair, with a fine bloom, blue eyes, light hair, regular features, and a look of great sweetness’, in direct contrast to Jane Fairfax, with her ‘dark eye-lashes and eye-brows’ whose beauty is ‘not regular, but… very pleasing’.
Often, the visual set-pieces are created specifically for comic disruption, as when Harriet’s encounter with the gypsies is introduced in the language of the late-eighteenth-century picturesque:
About half a mile beyond Highbury, making a sudden turn, and deeply shaded by elms on each side, it became for a considerable stretch very retired; and when the young ladies had advanced some way into it, they had suddenly perceived at a small distance before them, on a broader patch of greensward by the side, a party of gipsies. A child on the watch came towards them to beg.
The sentimental landscape is, however, disrupted by the more Rowlandsonian reaction of Harriet’s companion:
Miss Bickerton, excessively frightened, gave a great scream, and calling on Harriet to follow her, ran up a steep bank, cleared a slight hedge at the top, and made the best of her way by a short cut back to Highbury.
Even as the aesthetic advantages of the picturesque are exploited, its falseness is mocked, as a more comic perception of human behaviour intrudes on the ideals of contemporary art.
The fluidity of the novel can embrace, within a paragraph, opposing images and attitudes, deriving comic power from surprise and incongruity.27 If Northanger Abbey had played explicitly with literary convention and parody, Emma similarly, but more subtly, jokes about the nature of art through the introduction and immediate deflation of a particular style. The disruption of the picturesque in this passage may suggest the advocacy of a less idealized view of life, but ironically, the apparent emphasis on comic realism is dependent on the reader appreciating both the convention that is being upset and the alternative with which it is juxtaposed.
The evocations of different artistic styles work in much the same way as the puns – teasing the reader with suggested likenesses which are only to be undermined by contradiction and uncertainty. For no sooner has Harriet’s adventure been interpreted as comic than Emma’s very different reading is presented, which sees the episode not as picturesque or burlesque, but as romantic. For Emma, the gypsies are no more than a device to bring together the hero and heroine – ‘a fine young man and a lovely young woman thrown together in such a way’ – for the self-styled ‘imaginist’ the possibilities are irresistible. And yet, as Emma re-creates the incident for others, it is transformed into yet another literary kind:
In her imagination it maintained its ground, and Henry and John were still asking every day for the story of Harriet and the gipsies, and still tenaciously setting her right if she varied in the slightest particular from the original recital.
The rapid generic shifting is also mirrored in the prose itself, which similarly startles the reader through its protean refusal to maintain a consistent voice or tone. If the visual scenes are disrupted by the sudden introduction of an unexpected element, so the third person narrative is persistently broken by free indirect style, dialogue, quotations and letters. At times dialogue becomes dramatic monologue, the speeches (especially those of Mrs Elton or Miss Bates) running on for more than a page of breathless hyphenated excitement. In other scenes, the more staccato exchanges seem closer to drama, especially in the first edition where the page layout allows only eight words to a line.28 There are even stage directions:
‘Well, Miss Woodhouse, (with a gentle sigh,) what do you think of her? – Is not she very charming?’
There was a little hesitation in Emma’s answer.
‘Oh! yes – very – a very pleasing young woman.’
‘I think her beautiful, quite beautiful.’
‘Very nicely dressed, indeed; a remarkably elegant gown.’
‘I am not at all surprized that he should have fallen in love.’
‘Oh! no – there is nothing, to surprize one at all. – A pretty fortune; and she came in his way.’
Nor are the departures from the linear narrative always as clear cut as this; very often a quasi-Johnsonian aphorism will slide almost imperceptibly into interior monologue (‘Perfect happiness, even in memory, is not common; and there were two points on which she was not quite easy’), while much of the apparently omniscient narration reflects the views and prejudices of the eponymous heroine. Indeed, many of the novel’s minor characters never appear at all, while those who do are not given direct speech. The reader becomes familiar with an extraordinary range of figures – William Larkins, the Miss Coxes, the Campbells and the Dixons, Mrs Hodges, Serle, the Churchills, Miss Nash, the Sucklings, Mr Wingfield, James and Hannah – without any description from the narrator.29 Even Mr Perry, who seems an almost ubiquitous presence in High-bury, lives only in the thoughts and dialogue of the major speaking characters, and when at last he appears in person, he is hardly centre-stage: ‘As they were turning into the grounds, Mr Perry passed by on horseback. The gentlemen spoke of his horse.’
Throughout the novel, the reader is both comforted with the illusion of a cosy rural community of familiar figures, and unsettled by the realization that these figures have been constructed by the individual imagination, working only with hints from other fictional characters.
The difficulty of connecting the language to a particular source is part of the persistent exploration of the nature of reading, and the gentle exposure of the reader’s limited understanding of the novel. Among the most obvious disruptions to the text (and thus the reader’s complacency) are the riddles and poems that Emma delights in collecting. Mr Elton’s charade, for example, stands out boldly from the preceding paragraphs, and continues to disrupt the pages that follow, as it is quoted and requoted by the baffled Harriet. If the reader is initially puzzled, the answer to the riddle is rapidly supplied by Emma, but this does not, in fact, solve all the questions raised by Mr Elton’s poem. The text offers no indication as to whether the poem has supposedly been composed by the vicar of Highbury, or copied from some miscellany or magazine, or concocted from contemporary verses. For although the sentiment is absurdly inflated, the technical quality is rather better than might be expected and thus invites speculation over its origin.30