What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (19 page)

The other important example of speechlessness in
Emma
is equally carefully arranged by the novelist, though not such a source of mischievous pleasure. It is Robert Martin, loving suitor and (despite Emma’s stupid endeavours) destined husband of Harriet Smith. Soon after we and Emma have first been told about Robert Martin by the obviously enamoured Harriet, he meets Emma and Harriet out walking in Highbury. He is himself on foot, so there is the opportunity for conversation. The novel imitates Emma’s own unfriendly distance from him, as she walks a few yards ahead ‘while they talked together’ (I. iv). The exchange between himself and Harriet has to be brief, ‘as Miss Woodhouse must not be kept waiting’ – unwilling to allow their intimacy to prosper, Emma has made it evident that her friend must leave. Having curtailed their conversation, which was clearly a pleasure to both of them, she embarks on her critique, which includes a slur on ‘the uncouthness of a voice, which I heard to be unmodulated as I stood there’. What is this ‘uncouthness’? Is there anything real in Emma’s description? Are we to guess that Robert Martin might have a regional accent? We cannot know. Emma compares his manner ‘of speaking; of being silent’ unfavourably with Mr Weston and Mr Elton. Harriet accepts the implied denigration, but a reader who knows Mr Weston’s tactless geniality and Mr Elton’s hypocritical
politesse
will doubt that he so obviously comes off second best.

What he says remains for us to guess at. Austen cannot let us hear him, just as Emma cannot allow truth or goodwill to enter her estimate. The silencing of both Robert Martin and one of his sisters, whom we also later meet, is a consequence of seeing the people and events of the novel so much through Emma’s eyes. Emma does not want to hear them as the people they are, rather than the characters she has invented. The Martins as a family remain deprived of speech by the novel because Austen is wryly loyal to Emma’s determination that they be considered unworthy of her companion’s attention. Naturally Austen is not following her heroine’s prejudices, but exposing them. The technique allows her to expose these prejudices not just to the reader but to the heroine herself. The perfection of this is when Austen has Harriet report her first encounter with Robert Martin and his sister Elizabeth after she has rejected his offer of marriage (II. iii). Arriving highly ‘agitated’ at Hartfield, she tells Emma that she was taking shelter in Ford’s shop when the Martins entered. In her longest speech of the whole novel, Harriet describes, ‘unchecked’ by Emma, the confusing encounter, in which both sister and brother speak to her, hesitantly but kindly. All of the speech is Harriet’s: flustered, foolish, inarticulate, yet entirely truthful. We cannot know what Robert Martin has said – ‘so he came and spoke and I answered’ – but even Emma, listening, recognises the signs of ‘real feeling’. Harriet adds that as she set off he came out of the shop to warn her that the likeliest route back to Hartfield was half-flooded. It is a subtle touch, demonstrating a kind of awkward tenderness, especially given his awareness that Harriet must be returning to the house of her manipulator.

Mr Knightley reports his conversations with Robert Martin in reliable detail but he never quotes him. Marilyn Butler calls Robert Martin Mr Knightley’s ‘wholly silent alter ego’ – silent because he ‘acts, and simply is, with the solidity that comes from well-defined involvement with a physical world’.
³
Yet he is not really silent; it is the novel that keeps him so, in compliance with its heroine’s inclination. Finally, with Emma engaged to Mr Knightley, she accepts Harriet’s forthcoming marriage to Robert Martin with thankful relief. ‘It would be a great pleasure to know Robert Martin’ (III. xviii). He has not been allowed to speak because Emma has excluded him from social acceptance. He has been unknowable because Emma has foolishly preferred him that way. But in the future she will be able to hear him and speak to him.

Declining to quote a character is a kind of diminution of him or her.

Speechlessness is not always as complete as Robert Martin’s or Mr Perry’s. Mrs Philips in
Pride and Prejudice
, Mrs Bennet’s sister, looks as though she will be another such, until she belatedly and farcically struggles into the novel’s dialogue. Until very late in the proceedings, Austen relishes her speechless garrulousness. For two chapters of the first volume of the novel, when she entertains the Bennet girls at her house in Meryton on two consecutive days, with Mr Collins, Mr Wickham and Mr Denny, she is present throughout, and constantly talking, but nothing she says is quoted (I. xv–xvi). The paradox is delicious, for she makes quite a noise. On the first occasion, Mr Denny and Mr Wickham decline to accompany the Bennet
filles
into Mr Philips’s house when invited by Lydia, ‘in spite of Mrs Philips throwing up the parlour window, and loudly seconding the invitation’. She is very loud, but has nothing to say. On the second occasion, what she talks about is reported to us, but not a word quoted. The joke of Mrs Philips’s absence from the novel’s dialogue is that she is a dedicated talker (she is, after all, Mrs Bennet’s sister). Listening to Mr Collins’s endless description of ‘the grandeur of Lady Catherine and her mansion’ (I. xvi) – which we are mercifully spared – we see her ‘resolving to retail it all among her neighbours as soon as she could’. She is a specialiser in gossip. After Lydia’s fall from virtue, she visits the Bennets frequently, ostensibly to cheer them up, but in fact to report ‘some fresh instance of Wickham’s extravagance or irregularity’ (III. vi). Once her sister has told her of Jane’s engagement to Mr Bingley, ‘
she
ventured, without any permission, to do the same by all her neighbours in Meryton’ (III. xiii).

But then Austen springs a little surprise. Having barred Mrs Philips from direct speech for so long, she finally lets her enter the novel’s dialogue. She is allowed to tell her sister a piece of gossip that she has heard from Mrs Nicholls, the housekeeper at Netherfield, when she spots her in the street in Meryton and goes out of her house to accost her (III. xi). Mrs Bennet has just reminded her sister that ‘we agreed long ago never to mention a word about it’ (‘it’ being Mr Bingley’s relationship with Jane Bennet). The reminder is quite enough to loosen Mrs Philips’s tongue: ‘You may depend upon it . . .’ What follows is a choice morsel of news about the number of ducks that Mrs Nicholls has ordered from the butcher for her impending house guests. This is the quintessence of Mrs Philips’s contribution to conversation. In order to get this comic effect, Austen has made her one of the special family of her characters allowed to speak in our hearing just once. She belongs with her opposite, Mrs Bates in
Emma
, who does sometimes speak but whose actual words always have to give way to the flow of speech from ‘her more active, talking daughter’ (I. i). Just once she is forced to speak so that we too can hear her. When Emma penitently visits the Bates household after the disastrous Box Hill trip, Miss Bates, to whom she has spoken so cruelly, has bustled into the adjoining room with Jane Fairfax (III. viii). We imagine that she is trying to calm her niece, who has just agreed to a position as governess and is certainly in no frame of mind to be entertaining such a visitor. So Mrs Bates speaks because she has to, hardly covering the painful confusion of family affairs. ‘I am afraid Jane is not very well . . . but I do not know; they
tell
me she is well. I dare say my daughter will be here presently . . .’

The sour, mean Mrs Ferrars in
Sense and Sensibility
is ‘not a woman of many words; for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas’ (II. xii). Disdainful of Elinor, she says nothing to her and Austen repays the compliment by declining to quote her. Only at the end of Mrs John Dashwood’s London dinner party, where we first meet her, do we get a couple of utterances that epitomise her. Shown the screen that Elinor has painted she manages a neglectful ‘Hum . . . very pretty’, and when Marianne asks why her hostess is celebrating Miss Morton’s painting skills over Elinor’s, she retorts ‘Miss Morton is Lord Morton’s daughter.’ As if this were to say everything necessary about the regard one should have for such a person. Declining to quote a character is a kind of diminution of him or her. We and Elizabeth spend many hours in the company of Mr Bingley’s brother-in-law Mr Hurst in
Pride and Prejudice
, without there being any word of his worth transcribing. Yet Austen cannot quite leave him silent. He manages one whole sentence and then a couple of words. When Elizabeth, staying at Netherfield, prefers a book to joining in a game of loo he is provoked to utterance. ‘Do you prefer reading to cards? . . . that is rather singular’ (I. viii). At last he is roused to real feeling. Later, when Jane is sufficiently recovered to appear in the drawing room to be greeted by everyone, he manages a throttled ‘very glad’ (I. xi). It is the merest semblance of politeness.

More complicated and unsettling is the speechlessness of Dr Grant for much of
Mansfield Park
. He is often present, and he is often talking. He likes to do so. He is a man of the world who is pleased to discourse on politics with Mr Crawford, or money with Edmund Bertram (II. v). When Tom Bertram wants to cover for a conversational faux pas, he relies on Dr Grant’s readiness to opine on momentous matters. ‘A strange business this in America, Dr. Grant! What is your opinion?’ (I. xii) He is invariably described as involved in conversation. ‘Dr. Grant laughingly congratulated Miss Crawford . . . Dr. Grant was in the vestibule, and as they stopt to speak to him . . . leaving Dr. Grant and Mrs. Norris to dispute over their last play . . . observed by Sir Thomas, who was standing in chat with Dr. Grant . . .’ Yet his actual words are carefully avoided, even on occasions when every other character present has some of his or her speech quoted. Slowly we gain the impression of a man who is not worth quoting, not because he is dull and stupid, like Mr Hurst, but because his self-concern excludes him from the plot.
Mansfield Park
is a novel where so much conversation, thanks to the Crawfords, is a matter of manoeuvre and manipulation. Dr Grant’s absence from direct speech confirms his unconcern about the flirtation and amorous rivalry being staged around him. We have this confirmed on the two occasions when we are allowed to hear his actual words, for when he is quoted it is on food. Early in the novel he tells Mrs Norris over dinner that the apricot tree that she planted in the Parsonage garden (which she remembers cost seven shillings) produces worthless fruit. They no more have the flavour of ‘a moor park apricot’ than ‘these potatoes’ (I. vi). Mrs Grant must quickly placate the outraged Mrs Norris. He speaks directly again for the only time, to his wife, on the subject of what Edmund and Fanny might have to eat for dinner with them. ‘A friendly meeting, and not a fine dinner, is all we have in view. A turkey, or a goose, or a leg of mutton, or whatever you and your cook chuse to give us’ (II. iv). It is the
faux
carelessness of a man who always thinks keenly of food.

Austen enjoys the effect of making a speechless character speak, but she does the opposite too: she silences a character who once had plenty to say, Fanny Price’s younger sister Susan in
Mansfield Park
. When Fanny returns to her family home in Portsmouth, she finds it, as has often been noticed, a place of cacophony. One of the voices belongs to Susan, whom Fanny first hears answering back when admonished by her mother. ‘“I was upstairs, mama, moving my things,” said Susan, in a fearless, self-defending tone, which startled Fanny. “You know you had but just settled that my sister Fanny and I should have the other room; and I could not get Rebecca to give me any help”’ (III. vii). Fanny finds her sister quite ready to defend her corner, later arguing over the possession of a knife left to her by another sister who died. But then Fanny and Susan become intimate and something peculiar happens: Susan never speaks again. She is absorbed into quietness. One of Austen’s greatest skills is the fashioning of appropriate habits of speech for her characters; one of her nicest tricks is to stop her characters from speaking.

TEN

What Games Do Characters Play?

‘What shall I do, Sir Thomas? Whist and speculation; which will amuse me most?’

Mansfield Park
, II. vii

Jane Austen makes her characters play games because, we might say, this was one aspect of the social world she knew. She made her characters play the games – especially the card games – that she played herself. Yet she is up to something else as well. Her books do not just feature games because, in her day, these filled the long evenings in provincial England. In her novels, games serve a novelist’s purposes. Because most of her first readers would have been able to recognise the particular games that are mentioned, they would have been able to see the arrangements of space and the conversational groupings that the games produced. For the first purpose of games in her novels is to divide and dispose her characters. Card playing joins people and separates them. Describing a sociable evening in Kent to her sister, Austen reported that ‘. . . one Card Table was formed, the rest of us sat & talked’ (
Letters
, 55). Some play cards, and some do not; or some play one game, and some another. In a different letter, Austen describes how fourteen sat down to dinner at Ashe Rectory, home of the Lefroy family, in November 1800. After the meal ‘There was a whist & casino table, & six outsiders’ (the whist and casino games each taking four players) (
Letters
, 27). The outsiders have to entertain themselves. ‘Rice & Lucy made love, Mat: Robinson fell asleep, James and Mrs Augusta alternately read Dr Jenner’s pamphlet on the cow pox, & I bestowed my company by turns on all’.