afloat through an endless stream of talk, gossip, and scattered recollections. Her uninterrupted and harmless monologues form her chief defense against the poverty, emptiness, and subordination into which the family has descended.
The Bateses live in Highbury itself, in a house belonging to “people in business.” They rent two rooms up a flight of stairs, and “love to be called on” and included in almost any social occasion. They are dependent on Knightley and the Woodhouses for little luxuries of meat and fruit. Although they are in constant danger of falling through the cracks in the economic floor, their secure and well-cared-for neighbors undertake to support them through marginal assistance and by involving them in communal life by means of steady invitations and visits. Emma has been negligent in her attentions to them, and she is aware that she has behaved grudgingly and as “not contributing what she ought to the stock of their scanty comforts” (p. 139). Both Knightley, her external conscience, and “her own heart” have tweaked her over such “deficiency,” but Emma cannot overcome her distaste for applying herself to what is self-evidently her duty (the performance of what used to be called duty was unvaryingly unpleasant). It was to her all “very disagreeable,—a waste of time—tiresome women—and all the horror of being in danger of falling in with the second rate and third rate of Highbury, who were calling on them for ever, and therefore she seldom went near them” (p. 139). Emma regards genteel poverty as spiritually sordid and even contaminating. She also forgets that as the family of a clergyman, the Bateses were perforce well acquainted with the fourth and fifth rate as well, though perhaps not as friendly callers. The point is that there is no social safety net strung beneath the Bates women (or anyone else). They are the dependent objects of charity administered personally by members of their own social rank and local neighborhood; and Miss Bates’ Christian denials and self-denials as well as her mother’s fortuitous insensibility act as buffers against the perpetual abradings of their middle-class sensibilities that poverty and dependency remorselessly inflict. Jane Fairfax, by contrast, handsome, clever, and poor, is rubbed raw by these circumstances. And it is no surprise that Emma’s surpassing act of thoughtless cruelty, hardness, and irresponsibility should be dramatized in the personal insult she delivers, in the form of a witty remark, to Miss Bates in public, and within the hearing of others.
The Bates women are, then, illustrations of counter-tendencies in the inclusive representation of the social world in Emma. They are casualties of the larger circumstances of change and accident that move almost everyone in this novel around. The arc of Jane Fairfax’s life and fortune traces out one of the social movements taken by these underlying forces of inscrutable complexity. She is the orphaned niece and granddaughter of her two surviving relatives. Her father was a lieutenant of infantry who died “in action abroad.” Her mother sank “under consumption and grief soon afterwards” (p. 147). She has inherited from her mother a disposition that is easily upset and susceptible to suffering, as well as a delicate and unstable physical constitution (unlike Emma) . She became at the age of three “the fondling of her grandmother and aunt,” and in their reduced and straitened situation there appeared to be “every possibility of her being permanently fixed there,” with scanty means and no advantages of “connection or improvement.” A former fellow officer of her dead father, Colonel Campbell, who felt much indebted to him, returned eventually to England and sought out the orphaned girl. Married and with one daughter Jane’s age, he took Jane up and assumed responsibility for her education. She became part of his family and “had lived with them entirely, only
The Bateses live in Highbury itself, in a house belonging to “people in business.” They rent two rooms up a flight of stairs, and “love to be called on” and included in almost any social occasion. They are dependent on Knightley and the Woodhouses for little luxuries of meat and fruit. Although they are in constant danger of falling through the cracks in the economic floor, their secure and well-cared-for neighbors undertake to support them through marginal assistance and by involving them in communal life by means of steady invitations and visits. Emma has been negligent in her attentions to them, and she is aware that she has behaved grudgingly and as “not contributing what she ought to the stock of their scanty comforts” (p. 139). Both Knightley, her external conscience, and “her own heart” have tweaked her over such “deficiency,” but Emma cannot overcome her distaste for applying herself to what is self-evidently her duty (the performance of what used to be called duty was unvaryingly unpleasant). It was to her all “very disagreeable,—a waste of time—tiresome women—and all the horror of being in danger of falling in with the second rate and third rate of Highbury, who were calling on them for ever, and therefore she seldom went near them” (p. 139). Emma regards genteel poverty as spiritually sordid and even contaminating. She also forgets that as the family of a clergyman, the Bateses were perforce well acquainted with the fourth and fifth rate as well, though perhaps not as friendly callers. The point is that there is no social safety net strung beneath the Bates women (or anyone else). They are the dependent objects of charity administered personally by members of their own social rank and local neighborhood; and Miss Bates’ Christian denials and self-denials as well as her mother’s fortuitous insensibility act as buffers against the perpetual abradings of their middle-class sensibilities that poverty and dependency remorselessly inflict. Jane Fairfax, by contrast, handsome, clever, and poor, is rubbed raw by these circumstances. And it is no surprise that Emma’s surpassing act of thoughtless cruelty, hardness, and irresponsibility should be dramatized in the personal insult she delivers, in the form of a witty remark, to Miss Bates in public, and within the hearing of others.
The Bates women are, then, illustrations of counter-tendencies in the inclusive representation of the social world in Emma. They are casualties of the larger circumstances of change and accident that move almost everyone in this novel around. The arc of Jane Fairfax’s life and fortune traces out one of the social movements taken by these underlying forces of inscrutable complexity. She is the orphaned niece and granddaughter of her two surviving relatives. Her father was a lieutenant of infantry who died “in action abroad.” Her mother sank “under consumption and grief soon afterwards” (p. 147). She has inherited from her mother a disposition that is easily upset and susceptible to suffering, as well as a delicate and unstable physical constitution (unlike Emma) . She became at the age of three “the fondling of her grandmother and aunt,” and in their reduced and straitened situation there appeared to be “every possibility of her being permanently fixed there,” with scanty means and no advantages of “connection or improvement.” A former fellow officer of her dead father, Colonel Campbell, who felt much indebted to him, returned eventually to England and sought out the orphaned girl. Married and with one daughter Jane’s age, he took Jane up and assumed responsibility for her education. She became part of his family and “had lived with them entirely, only
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