Relationship Spotlight: Emma Woodhouse & George Knightley (Emma)

How do you like that – this is the third of seven major Jane Austen romances I’ve reviewed, and I’ve yet to get around to Lizzie and Darcy.  That just speaks to how many fantastic relationships she cultivated in her works, and Emma/Knightley is one I’ve always appreciated.  Not as fun as Catherine/Tilney or as searing as Anne/Wentworth, perhaps, but of all of Austen’s pairings, these may be the two who do one another the most good.

I really like how often Austen’s romances show the characters as friends before they’re lovers.  Emma and Knightley are a particularly great example – their families have been close since before Emma was born, and Knightley has always been a fixture in her life as a friend and neighbor.  There’s attraction, of course – buried so deep that neither is aware of it for most of the book – but more than that, there’s a sense of companionship, of familiarity.  These are two people who can speak the absolute truth with one another.

Not that Emma is always crazy about that.  She spends a good portion of the story as a doted-upon, well-meaning but misguided young woman, and there aren’t many who can recognize her faults like Knightley.  She resents his chiding on the grounds that he doesn’t pay enough attention to important things like position and perception, but she values his opinion more than she can say:  Knightley’s words can get under her skin like no one else’s, can prick at her conscious and make her realize how shallow or foolish or insensitive she’s been.  For Knightley’s part, Emma challenges him, and it’s more than just her stubbornness or pride propelling her.  More than once, she opens his eyes to something he’d dismissed or failed to recognize, and he’s a better person for it.

This facet of their relationship is good for them both, but especially for Emma.  She’s spent much of her life being the little lady of the house, and she’s both used to flattery and unused to being denied.  Essentially, she’s been raised to think the sun rises and sets by her flashes of brilliance, and though she’s a bright woman well positioned to do good in her community, this indulgence threatens to spoil her.  With Knightley there to remind her she’s as fallible as anyone, she can mature and learn to be her best self.

It’s a little thing, but I also love the way Knightly demonstrates so much care toward Emma’s father, a fussbudget hypochondriac whom she clearly adores.  Unlike many in town, who desire Mr. Woodhouse’s society but fail to consider his delicacies or try to accommodate him, Knightley seeks to put him at ease in potentially stressful situations.  He regularly visits, knowing Mr. Woodhouse enjoys company but rarely ventures out, and when an excursion is held at Knightley’s estate, he prepares a selection of knickknacks and curiosities to occupy Mr. Woodhouse while the others are out, all from the comfort of Knightley’s finest chair.  That scene, to me, tells so much about Knightley, and it’s obvious that Emma could never be with a man who doesn’t regard her father like she does.  It’s funny; maybe it’s just my aceness talking, but stuff like that makes me root for a relationship much faster than heat or chemistry.  They can making longing eyes at one another as long as they want, but if they connect on a personal level and cherish the same loved ones, values, or even hobbies?  I am allover that.

Relationship Spotlight: Capt. Frederick Wentworth & Anne Elliot (Persuasion)

 

Anne and Wentworth are unusual for a Jane Austen couple in that they’re two people who have a romantic history beforethe start of the story.  It’s actually the only time we see such a dynamic in one of her books’ main pairings.  A girl-meets-boy scenario is far more frequent, and we also get a couple of gradual couples who’ve known one another for a good chunk of their lives before developing romantic feelings for each other.  But exes?  That’s something different for Austen.  It serves them well, though.  Anne and Wentworth aren’t my favorite Austen pairing (that would be Catherine and Mr. Tilney from Northanger Abbey followed pretty closely by Emma and Mr. Knightley from Emma,) but they’re perhaps the most interesting to me.  Theirs is a sadder, more wistful story; it’s tinged with a regret that many scholars link to Austen herself, especially since this book was written toward the end of her life.

 

But I digress.  Anne and Wentworth’s story together begins when they’re both young, deeply in love, and mostly heedless to their different statuses – Anne is the daughter of a wealthy baronet, while Wentworth’s position in society is decidedly lower.  Unfortunately for both, they’re not yet grown in the ways of the world.  Lady Russell, Anna’s older and shrewder friend, convinces her to go against her heart and break the “imprudent” engagement she’s formed with Wentworth.  Chastened and despondent, Wentworth retreats to nurse his wounds.  Fast forward nearly a decade.  The more advantageous matches Anne’s family and Lady Russell anticipated for her haven’t panned out, and while Wentworth has risen in means and social standing through his military service, Anne’s father has spent the Elliots out of house and home.  It’s under wildly different, humbled circumstances that Anne meets Wentworth again, and he loudly telegraphs his satisfaction with young women who, chiefly, aren’t Anne.

 

It’s such a messy, painful situation.  Anne is now 27 and regarded as a faded beauty (due equally to her age, her continued maidhood, and her unhappiness born of lost love,) and Wentworth is celebrated, successful, and sought after.  She can hardly bear for him to see her so diminished – I don’t really mean her reduced fortunes, but her overall feeling of being past the point of anyone’s desirability – and he seems to parade his flirtations in front of her.  It’s a reflection of how hurt he continues to feel about what happened between them and, unbeknownst perhaps to both of them, it’s a sign of how much she still weighs on his mind.

 

With this inauspicious foundation, their story becomes a matter of knowing and understanding one another anew, slowly peeling back their own presumptions, and lowering their defenses.  It’s about proving to each other how much they’ve grown for the better and how much the other’s pull on their heart remains unchanged.  It’s a story of second chances, not just of regaining a love thought lost, but of reopening entire chapters of life thought closed.  Because of this, Anne and Wentworth have some of the most searing, gripping scenes of any Austen couple.  The letter-writing scene, as it’s known among Austenites, was, for me, actual edge-of-my-seat reading.  There’s the letter itself, obviously – a positively gorgeous moment in literature – but I also adore Anne’s discussion with Capt. Harville that happens in the same chapter, her defense against the alleged fickleness of women.  “All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one:  you need not covet it),” she tells him, “is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!”  If you’ve ever wondered what a human heart looks like, read Anne’s words in that chapter, followed by Wentworth’s.

In Defense of Fanny Price (Mansfield Park)

 

I’ve brought up Fanny before – the bad rap she gets among Austen heroines, the difficulty adaptations have in presenting her in a compelling way, and my own assertion that she’s actually a deceptively strong young woman.  Since most of the digital audiobooks I can readily get from my library are classics, I just finished an unabridged reading of the book, and I’m reminded that Fanny is even tougher than I tend to give her credit for.

 

I’m in the habit of focusing on Fanny’s natural shyness and her reticence around her wealthier cousins.  For someone who likes to stay in the background and is loath to disappoint anyone, it takes a good deal of fortitude to stand up to Sir Thomas, and even more to hold her ground.  Fanny goes through a lot over the course of the book, and she wouldn’t be able to do it if she weren’t as strong as she is.  However, adjectives like “timid,” “meek,” and “quiet” don’t cover her circumstances.

 

Fanny is brought to Mansfield Park at age 10, plucked without ceremony from her family in Portsmouth, no indication of when she’ll see them again and no gentle introduction to the finer life of the country.  She comes of age alongside cousins who are considered inherently better than her, not simply because they’re the children of her biased guardians, but because they’re of “better blood.”  They’re the children of an aristocrat, and in Fanny’s world, that has far-reaching consequences.  Before Fanny is brought to them, Sir Thomas puzzles over how they’ll raise Fanny and his children, especially his daughters, to understand the difference in their rank.

 

It turns out there’s no difficulty there.  As soon as Fanny comes under the tutelage of Maria and Julia’s governess, the girls start laughing over their cousin’s ignorance, mistaking her lack of knowledge and education for stupidity.  In nearly every aspect, they find her wanting compared to them, and their Aunt Norris is always pleased to encourage and magnify these distinctions.

 

Additionally, Aunt Norris is the chief offender when it comes to treating Fanny like a glorified servant.  While Maria and Julia are expected to be accomplished and lovely with few other responsibilities, Fanny is the gofer, the seamstress, the gardener, and whatever else she’s needed to be.  There’s an ugly, unspoken implication that Fanny must earn her keep for the Bertrams’ charity of taking her in, and Aunt Norris maintains a steady stream of derogatory insinuations about Fanny’s alleged ungratefulness while at the same time believing anything that benefits Fanny (which Fanny herself never asks for) to be an unnecessary expense or hardship.

 

This is everything that’s been coloring Fanny’s opinion of herself and her place in the family.  In a way, it reminds me a little of Dido in Belle, in that she’s held to different rules than others in the household, and she has a close proximity to privilege without being able to really access it.  Now, when Fanny’s shyness is added to this mind-warping soup of inequality, is it any wonder that she’s demure and reluctant to speak her mind?  This is a young woman who’s been systematically beaten down throughout many of her formative years.  How much more amazing, then, that she still braves Sir Thomas’s disapproval, that she makes a stand and says, “No – I will not be dictated on this point.”  On the surface, she may seem weaker than Elizabeth Bennet, for example, but if she doesn’t reach as high, it’s only because she’s reaching from so much lower down.