#ch: edward larkin

[coredrill]

Lynne: Let me ask you, are they intelligent? Edward: It's hard to say. Uh, as you can see, they--they don't have a face. But they're very slow-moving, so they would be easy to hunt. Actually, one fell of my desk the other day and it--it just died instantly, so there's that. So even if they were intelligent, I feel like they would be very easy to capture and then eat. Lynne: No, I was more concerned with the moral implications. Edward: For the tribble? Well, sure. I could, uh, genetically manipulate the DNA to make them all brain-damaged.

STAR TREK: SHORT TREKS S2E2: “The Trouble with Edward”

[synchronousemma]

24th July: John Knightley writes

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Read: Vol. 3, ch. 17; pp. 305–306 (“Emma grieved that she could not” to “‘always tired now’”).

Context

Emma thinks about her declining friendship with Harriet. Isabella has been sending news of Harriet; now she writes to say that her visit will be extended. John Knightley has responded to Mr. George Knightley’s news of his engagement; his letter was likely packaged with his wife’s.

This probably occurs a bit less than a fortnight after Harriet’s arrival in Brunswick Square, and before the beginning of “August” (p. 305).

Readings and Interpretations

A Serious Smile

J. F. Burrows writes that If the conversation about “spoilt children” in the previous section “exhibits Mr Knightley’s new understanding of spoilt children, the next exhibits Emma’s new understanding of plain speaking”:

For, as is implied by Mr Knightley’s intercessions, his brother is “‘rather cool’” in Emma’s praise. But Mr Knightley’s efforts are not needed. Emma now recognises that sincerity, even so outspoken and untimely a sincerity as this, is more servicable than all the amiable flourishes of a Frank Churchill, much less a Philip Elton: when she declares, “‘He writes like a sensible man…. I honour his sincerity’”, she is announcing one of the chief discoveries of her twenty-second year. So, too, when she accepts John Knightley’s wish that she may eventually become worthy of his brother. With these remarks, moreover, she brings us back to our original point of departure. In the Introduction to this study, I suggested that this passage is a paradigm of the novel as it has usually been read; but that, while Emma does well to regard herself so humbly, the novel does not really accede to her assessment of her relationship with Mr Knightley; and that, while Emma needed to learn more respect for “sensible men”, we need not regard “sensible” as Jane Austen’s epithet for absolute virtue.

In these closing episodes, Jane Austen still writes with the “sort of serious smile” that she attributes to Emma. Even a passing sally can cut deep into the novel, as when Emma urges Mr Knightley to ask William Larkins’ consent before removing to Hartfield or as when she forsees her father’s reception of their news: “‘I wish I may not sink into “poor Emma” with him at once’”. For a profounder humour, however, one turns to longer passages: to the whole discussion of spoilt children […]; and, ultimately, to the novel as a whole, a novel whose riches seem inexhaustible. (p. 126–7)

Anatomy of Melancholy

Michael Suk-Young Chwe argues that “Austen is centrally concerned with strategic thinking,” and the “most specific ‘smoking gun’ evidence” thereof is “how she employs children: when a child appears, it is almost always in a strategic context” (p. 180). Children are frequently “brought in as students of strategic thinking”:

When Mr. Knightley is engaged to Emma, Mr. Knightley wonders why his brother does not seem entirely surprised, and guesses, “I dare say there was a difference when I was staying with them the other day. I believe I did not play with the children quite so much as usual. I remember one evening the poor boys saying, ‘Uncle seems always tired now.’” Thus the task of sensing engagements is imputed to children. (p. 181)

Juliet McMaster writes of this passage in the context of symptoms of love, arguing that Austen both “made fun of the love convention” that she inherited from Renaissance writers “and used it” (p. 117). She notes that while “the women are more definitely debilitated,” “[m]en who are crossed in love, like Edward Ferrars, Colonel Brandon, and Captain Benwick, generally give themselves away by showing ‘oppression of spirits’ (SS, 50, 90; P, 97). Even Mr. Knightley loses his physical vigour when he supposes Emma is about to marry Frank Churchill, and prompts the sad comment from his nieces and nephews, ‘Uncle seems always tired now’” (p. 125). Thus the “Renaissance conception of love as a physical state […] is still perceptible, even if only in a vestigial form,” in Austen’s novels. And the “read[ing] for symptoms” that these oblique descriptions of love inspire “is one of the great pleasures of reading the novels — much more fun than combing for clues in a detective novel” (p. 122).

Discussion Questions

Is Emma correct in her avowed opinion of her and Mr. Knightley’s relative merits in this section? Does the novel ‘agree’ with her? Does she believe what she is saying?

Did John Knightley in fact anticipate “something of the kind” of Mr. George Knightley’s news, or is this merely an assertion made in hindsight? How would such a prediction affect the novel’s working out of the themes of perception and observation?

Bibliography

Austen, Jane. Emma (Norton Critical Edition). 3rd ed. Ed. Stephen M. Parrish. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1815] 2000.

Burrows, J. F. Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’. Sydney: Sydney University Press (1968).

Chwe, Michael Suk-Young. Jane Austen, Game Theorist. Princeton: Princeton University Press (2013).

McMaster, Juliet. Jane Austen the Novelist: Essays Past and Present. London: Macmillan Press (1996).