Jane Fairfax Drops the Mic
Jane Fairfax Drops the Mic
Is the story of 'Emma' really the story of Jane Fairfax?
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Hello friends,
I hope wherever you are you are enjoying sunshine, peace, and the lengthening shadows and softening lights of autumn. My week has involved stomping between classrooms, newsrooms, and conference and “pitch” sessions, as a semester on campus roars to life.
And that faraway quiet, snow-fallen dreariness of the pandemic winter feels very far away. But it was back in that stillness and quiet that I revisited the story of Emma and contemplated one of Jane Austen’s dreariest characters: Jane Fairfax.
In the screen adaptations, you may have noticed that Jane Fairfax is always quiet, studious, “accomplished.” She’s everyone’s favorite goody-goody.
This is the way Emma feels about her, and in this, unlike in other things, we are happy to oblige Emma, because we all love to hate good-goodies who are reserved and over-accomplished. They bring out our insecurities big time. Jane can be the stand-in for all those accomplished, straight-A girls who seemed enigmatic and hard to read and whom we wanted to be but couldn’t - so instead we dislike them, or crush on them.
But, but, but: Back in those dreary winter days when I re-read the book, yet again, I discovered something amazing: This story might well be about Jane Fairfax and her character as much as it’s about Emma and her evolution as a character. (Or was the lockdown getting to me, friends? Is that far-fetched? Let me know what you think - you can comment below!)
Bear with me here!
In the book, Jane Fairfax’s big secret is not only revealed at the end, as it is in the films, but also Jane’s layers are peeled off, slowly and remarkably and dramatically - as are Frank Churchill’s. And there might be much more to the story.
Most importantly, the friendship in the book (but not in the films) between Emma and Jane is, it seems to me, super-complicated - nearly tragic! - and is then resolved, and evolves, into something Very Important. More important than her friendship with Harriet Smith (always the key friendship in the adaptations) and even more important than her relationship with Mr. Knightley.
Knightley is Knightley - he doesn’t change. In fact his constancy is the point. Constancy, and loyalty, and depth of character, is what Austen is celebrating in Emma; and artifice, deceit and style-over-substance is what she is denigrating.
She is serious about this, people. Jane Austen had a big problem with shallow, popular types, and she had a big problem with deceit - in future posts, we can unpack the impact that deceit and frivolity might have had on Jane Austen’s life, that perhaps inspired these intense feelings. But for now let’s just say that deceptions and shams were a source not just of annoyance but for real stress and trauma in Regency England. And in Emma, the second to last novel she wrote, she worked herself and all of us into a frenzy involving a secret engagement and its reverberations that we are still enjoying getting worked up over 206 years later.
Because, as it turns out, while the comedy and the romance of this story lies with Emma and Knightley, perhaps much of the complexity and depth of this story lie with Jane.
Regency-Era Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
You know the Box Hill picnic scene is always a turning point in the story of Emma. It’s where Emma insults Miss Bates, sparking off Knightley’s anger and disappointment and leading him to tell her the uncomfortable “truths while I can … proving myself your friend” in the hopes that she’ll see how arrogant, manipulative and plain wrong she’s been.
In the book, Jane Fairfax’s big secret is not only revealed at the end, as it is in the films, but also Jane’s layers are peeled off, slowly and remarkably and dramatically, as are Frank Churchill’s. And there is much more to the story.
But when you re-read the book, you might find that this is not even close to the most important thing happening on Box Hill. What’s also happening is that Emma is shamelessly flirting with the gallant, stylish Frank Churchill whom we are about to learn is engaged to … Jane Fairfax, who is also witnessing this performance at Box Hill.
The result of the Box Hill picnic is not only Knightley’s “badly done indeed” to Emma that provides a turning point for her character; much more importantly, the result is also a proper Regency-style nervous breakdown, by Jane Fairfax.
In case you think I’m exaggerating - because I really had not remembered this until my most recent re-reading - Jane is immediately, just two pages later, described as “extremely ill” and presenting a “picture of her present sufferings.” When Emma visits Miss Bates with an apology, in the screen stories we see Jane making herself scarce.
But there is so much more going on here - and I think it’s fascinating to look more closely. Emma’s change of heart, her acknowledgement that she can cause unnecessary pain to vulnerable women, leads her to reevaluate the situation not only of Miss Bates but of Miss Bates’s niece, of Jane Fairfax. And this happens just as Jane - having seen her secret fiance act irresponsibly and hurt her - has taken the nuclear option for her relationship with Frank Churchill, and decided to go into service as a governess.
The result of the Box Hill picnic is not only Knightley’s “badly done indeed” to Emma that provides a turning point for her character; much more importantly, the result is also a proper Regency-style nervous breakdown, by Jane Fairfax.
Let’s look at Jane’s situation for a minute: Jane is - yes - smart, beautiful, and accomplished. To Emma, she is enviable - but as our friend Professor George Justice, editor of the Norton Critical Edition of the novel points out, Emma is falsely evaluating the status of those around her, and the entire point is that Emma is forced to recalibrate (Justice’s word) those evaluations.
Is it possible that too often, we as readers and viewers of this story unthinkingly adopt Emma’s mistaken attitude toward Jane Fairfax? Look closely, and we can see that unlike Emma, and like many women in this era including Austen herself - Jane is without any resources that would provide not only independence, but even mere stability and comfort. She is orphaned, and has been educated by a friend of the family. But now that she is of age, that shelter is ending and Jane, throughout the book, has been staring down an inevitable future in domestic service.
So when Frank Churchill is sitting on a picnic blanket flirting with Emma at Box Hill, he is not just being cheeky. He’s inflicting real harm on a woman very much his superior in character but who nevertheless is relying on him for what might be the only chance of stability, comfort and independence (if it can be called that) she might ever know.
Knightley doesn’t even go there in his speech, because he isn’t really aware of any of this. But Emma is aware. And so is the reader, just pages after the Box Hill scene.
And what’s most extraordinary is what happens next in this story.
What happens next - Jane ghosts Emma! And refuses the arrow-root!
What happen next is that Emma realizes not only her insult to Miss Bates, but more importantly she realizes that she has missed a valuable opportunity for a true, equal friendship of like minds that she might have had with Jane (as Knightley, the book’s voice of reason, has repeatedly urged her toward … that’s the recalibration).
And so Emma, with new-found self-knowledge of sorts, sets about winning Jane the way she sets about everything else. She, quite dramatically and not at all subtly, chases after Jane, deploying all the vigor that she’s previously deployed and “misapplied,” as Knightley says - and Jane refuses to see her! She visits the Bates house, and Jane ignites a hustle-bustle of avoidance and declines. Emma then ignores Jane’s rebuffs and writes a note offering to take Jane out in the carriage. Jane declines the offer plainly, but Emma then goes anyway - taking a carriage to the Bates’ house to take Jane out, and Jane still refuses to see her. Basically, Emma is friend-stalking Jane.
Finally, Emma sends Jane her garden’s best arrow-root, and even that is returned.
At this point Emma realizes that Jane is not refusing everyone; Jane is refusing Emma. Yes, friends, Emma Woodhouse is chasing, pursuing and pointedly being turned down - perhaps as Knightley wished for her all along. (And yes, perhaps this has overtones of an LGBT relationship - is this the basis for a retelling? Maybe this is already out there - if so please let me know!) Jane is absolutely ghosting Emma - not only declining her friendship and person, but also declining anything that even comes from her.
Jane meanwhile is suffering “headaches, and a nervous fever,” she is “deranged - appetite quite gone,” and is “confined to her room” with a “nervous disorder.”
As Frank’s powerful, rich aunt dies and he goes running to her - Emma now reflects. And she thinks about two women in her world who have never met but are intricately connected, that of Mrs. Churchill the rich aunt, and Jane, the poor orphan: “One was every thing, the other nothing - and she sat musing on the difference of woman’s destiny …”
Jane, Jane, you will be a miserable creature
This is where the declaration of love comes in, and from Knightley, he who has “in general so little gallantry,” unlike Frank Churchill - as Austen shows us plainly that plain talk and truths are safer, sturdier and maybe even more romantic than frivolous gallantry and going all the way to London for a haircut.
But while much is made of the Knightley vs Emma dialectic, maybe - just maybe, friends - the more important dialectic going on is the Jane-Emma one. While the screen stories end with Frank and Jane buttoned up and destined for misery, and Knightley and Emma on their way down the aisle, the book just keeps on and keeps on with more revelations for Jane and Emma.
Frank sends a verbose, apologetic letter, that is well-designed to completely take the reader in as he expresses serious pain on reflection of what he had done to Jane and how she was so dependent on him and yet at once so superior to him, as is Emma.
And I, dear reader, am almost taken in by this letter. (Were you or are you almost taken in by this letter, friends?)
But Knightley of course is not. In fact, Knightley comically annotates the letter, which Emma shows to him, with Knightley-like utterings: “Bad,” “Very bad,” “Natural enough!”
Which means that Austen also is not taken in by Frank Churchill’s apology.
The letter is, after all, words. Let’s judge Frank by his actions, and judge we will.
Nevertheless, Frank is suitably contrite, and I love it that as soon as he, Jane, Knightley and Emma are all in a room together, happily resolved, Emma and Frank have a candid post-game discussion where they declare rightly that each has married their superior.
Here’s the bit where she drops the mic
And here’s the biggest thing that we lose from Jane’s story in the screen versions that end Jane’s story as Knightley’s “miserable creature”: Jane’s own agency.
Austen takes back the power here, people: She shows us that a smart, accomplished, poor and of-no-consequence woman who is mistreated by a gallant, soon-to-be-wealthy fop has a choice in the matter.
As precarious and dangerous as her situation is, she can choose the instabilities and ignominy of domestic service and she can bloody-well choose not to submit to an unworthy man.
That’s what Jane Fairfax does. She takes it back, folks. And as a result, Frank Churchill not only comes running to her, but he undergoes a possible transformation. He learns something. He might be better. (And he might not - but there’s a glimmer of hope.)
But it’s not that simple. She can take it back here, because it’s fiction. It’s story. Austen all but bangs us on the head with this distinction between art and life. She shows us the reality, and then - sometimes rather last-minute - she gives us the escape, and sometimes, as in Mansfield Park’s ending, in a way that boldly points to the writing process. So Austen is showing us that this is not Jane Austen’s Guide to Real Life. Taking back the power that Jane Fairfax achieves cannot happen in real life, necessarily, and Austen has gone to great pains and many pages to show us the dreariness of the reality; and that the power comes through a skillful revisioning that Jane Austen achieves through writing, telling and retelling this story - that’s why we’re still telling it today.
Through her stories, she time-travels to where we are and urges us to revision our futures as well.
And so it’s through story and story only, Jane Farifax achieves a sudden, solid, determined choice. She takes back her power. Frank Churchill responds. Even though maybe it hasn’t yet been highlighted in the screen adaptations, Jane will get the man and with him she is to become mistress of the illustrious, much-discussed Enscombe estate.
Jane Fairfax drops the mic.
Jane & Emma, A Love Story
But wait! Before all of this is resolved, Emma goes back yet again to visit Jane. This time, now that Frank has come around, and Emma has come around, to admit their superficial, careless, frivolous ways and the pain they have inflicted needlessly, now and only now is Emma admitted back to the Bates residence.
And now, only now, do we see Jane looking well. And I like to think it’s not because of Frank - because let’s face it, Frank’s not gonna change.
But maybe it’s because of Emma. A true friendship has begun, very belatedly, and it’s about time.
“Emma had never seen her look so well,” Austen writes, when Emma is finally admitted back into Jane’s life, in this truly climactic friend-love scene, “so lovely, so engaging. There was consciousness, animation, and warmth; there was everything which her countenance or manner could ever have wanted. She came forward with an offered hand …”
Austen takes back the power here, people: She shows us that a smart, accomplished, poor and of-no-consequence woman who is mistreated by a gallant, soon-to-be-wealthy fop has a choice in the matter.
Because this is Austen, this Jane-Emma love story is punctuated by the self-important, clueless, overpowering fatuousness of Mrs. Elton, sitting in the drawing room. And that’s funny. But underneath the dialogue, Jane and Emma see each other, and understand each other.
Dearest readers, please let me know what you think of the friendship between Emma and Jane in the book as opposed to the screens. What is your favorite friendship in Austen?
Why do the screen adaptations prefer the friendship between Emma and Harriet Smith, which Jane Austen unfortunately and problematically calls an “unequal” one? I’m glad Harriet gets her due in the films, but I think one could do an entire film on Jane, her backstory (which we haven’t even talked about here), and her uncertain, though enriched, future with the likes of Frank Churchill.
Let me know your thoughts!
And stay tuned for more Emma conversations coming - including a wonderful conversation with professor George Justice where he helpfully sifted through all of Austen’s leading men as either “worthy’ or “unworthy” - that was fun! Podcast episode, coming up soon! And, we’ll also in an upcoming post break down all those Knightleys from the Emma adaptations, and what each performance contributes to our thinking about this complicated story.
Meanwhile, have a safe, wonderful, sunny week, friends,
Most affectionately yours,
Plain Jane
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Dear Plain Jane,
Thank you for your entertaining and insightful analysis of Jane Fairfax and Emma Woodhouse. I would like to respond to a few of your questions.
My favorite friendship in all of Austen’s writing is that between Elizabeth and Jane Bennett: it mirrors Austen’s close relationship between herself and Cassandra Austen. Could such close friendships in Austen’s stories—including the story of her own life—be lesbian? Of course they could, but we will never know for sure. Austen’s pun that she put in Mary Crawford’s mouth in Mansfield Park (in speaking of all the admirals she has met, Mary says ‘Of Rears and Vices I saw enough’ (vol. I, ch. 6)—indicating Austen’s awareness of homosexual behaviour in the navy (Lt. Frank Austen actually saw men hanged in one of his ships for sodomy). Austen also had a gay neighbor, a Mr. Chute, owner of The Vyne, who had been Horace Walpole’s lover. Unlike Chute, Austen and her family were not rich enough to ignore social conventions—especially given the Rev. George Austen’s role as a priest in the Church of England. Consequently, if Jane and Cassandra were lovers, they could never admit it to anyone. As Park Honan, one of Austen’s better biographers, points out, we in our own time can never fully understand the relationships between and among women in Regency England. Yet, women frequently shared beds. As Reader Response Theory goes, your belief in a real love between Emma and Jane Fairfax is certainly a valid interpretation of what Austen has written.
As for a second question of yours, Was I taken in my Frank Churchill on my first reading of Emma? Yes, because the novel is told from Emma’s point of view, and she is almost always wrong. Miss Bates, on the other hand, sees and tells everything; but I skimmed over her speeches on a first reading. Forcing myself to slow down and re-read Miss Bates’s monologues, I realized that Austen put all the clues to what was going on, into Miss Bates’s mouth. One of my favorite mystery writers, P. D. James, was the keynote speaker at a Jane Austen Society (UK) annual general meeting (in, I think, the 1980s) where she spoke of Emma as a detective novel. Unlike P. D. James’s novels, there is no murder in Emma—but there is a mystery; and like all good mystery writers Austen plays fair with the reader by giving all the necessary clues to solve the mystery, but she gives them as ‘red herrings’ by putting them in the mouth of a character even the readers ignore. There is always a lot going on in any Austen novel, but Emma takes the blue ribbon for being the most complex.
Finally, a further comment on Frank Churchill: Jane Fairfax’s story is a tragedy because she marries a man who is not worthy of her. I convinced a friend of mine that Frank is a real villain, and she concurred. She wrote me, “[I]t put me in mind of that scene toward the end of Emma, after all has been revealed, when Frank and Emma are discussing his past behavior, and he draws her attention to Jane Fairfax's beauty. (Jane is within earshot.) Frank praises Jane's neck, for example, and her complexion. In light of your argument, I couldn't help but think of Frank as a kind of slave auctioneer highlighting the valuable features of his human goods. I never cared for Frank Churchill; now I find him sinister as well as selfish.” Supposedly, Austen told one of her nieces that Jane Fairfax dies in childbirth after about a year of marriage. Austen always knows more about her characters than she tells in her novels—it is part of why her characters seem so real.
Thank you for a wonderful, thought-provoking blog post.
Pat McGraw