Emma: in on the secret

We have, indeed, been unjust to Frank Weston Churchill. And to Jane Austen, herself. We left her child half-buried, and because of that, we hated him. But he’s just like Emma, his sister child-of-good-fortune. We should have known Jane Austen loved him when she gave him Mrs. Weston as a mother. And when she named him Frank. The only “Frank” in any of her writing. A guy who can’t keep a secret.

The single most important thing to know about Emma is that you must factor in that Frank suspects Emma knows that he and Jane are in love when he leaves Highbury the first time, and that Frank is certain Emma knows they’re in love after the ball.

Then the trick is figuring out what Jane thinks, when. But it can be done.

There is a whole other story in there that can only be seen when you factor this in, as Miss Austen wrote specifically so that certain scenes flip to read differently from another character’s point of view. (Like chapters 32 and 33 in Pride and Prejudice.) Reading Emma with this one, singular change, it becomes quickly apparent that Jane thinks Emma knows too, that Emma should have known, and—perhaps most importantly—it makes “Dixon” past tense, since if Emma knows Jane loves Frank, she cannot also love her best friend’s husband. It also means that both Jane and Frank think Emma, in on the secret, was playing along. At the ABC Game, (after the ball, the ball where Frank throws caution to the wind and escorts his beautiful fiancee and her talkative aunt to the second-best seats in the room) Frank—the only character Austen ever named “Frank”—in his increased embarrassment at Harriet calling out “BLUNDER”—made a stupid reference to Emma’s old blunder, “DIXON,” which he then handed directly to Jane. (Whom it turns out he had likely just told about the blunder in the days they’d been spending together since he’d been in Richmond. Since four months had passed the idiot probably thought it was funny that Emma once thought that ridiculous thing, but of course, Jane didn’t think it was. Jane is proper. But from Jane and Frank’s point of view it was a blunder—and a secret—known only to the three of them.)

Jane’s extreme reaction after Box Hill is fully justified, and not at all about jealousy. Why would calm, measured Jane be mad—especially “send-the-arrowroot-back-and-tell-her-not-to-send-anything-else”-mad—about Emma flirting with a man she didn’t know it was bad to flirt with? Doesn’t that seem a little extreme? A little out of character? If not for Jane Fairfax, for Jane Austen? Her characters make sense, always. They are whole and cohesive. (As Frank becomes, after this change. Finally.) Jane’s reaction was to a betrayal. A betrayal by someone she had begun to trust and open up to. Emma—who Jane had started to look to as a friend ever since Emma hinted to her at the dinner party that she knew who the letters were from by bringing up Frank’s handwriting and then taking her arm. The woman who just the day before Jane had been seeking and who helped her flee Mrs. Elton at Donwell Abbey, entering into her feelings and “watching her off with the zeal of a friend.” That woman had who had now gone and first humiliated her aunt and then joked with Frank that she would look for him a wife while he went to Switzerland. And all that after Frank insulted Jane in the worst way, basically saying, “I thought I knew you when you looked like a queen in London and Weymouth, but now that I see you “in your own set” and in your own home I can see who you really are.”

(She’s only there because of you! Sorry, but although Frank is mostly exonerated in the other scenes, but I hate him anew every time Box Hill comes up.)

Mostly, Frank is just like Emma, his universe-created sister. As I started to see the Frank Jane Austen wrote—the “very, very young man” she wrote for us to see in those brilliantly flipped scenes—I realized that Austen must have loved him, just as she loved Emma, his mirror image. She named him Frank and then gave the motherless child who grew up alone in a castle with a hypochondriac guardian—probably reading the big, dramatic, costume-drama romances in his musty library—Mrs. Weston as a mother.)

Jane took Emma’s attentions as an apology, and it was an apology she would not accept. Frank had no idea that Emma didn’t actually know until after his lovely, adopted mother responded to his letter. And once you remove Emma’s smokescreen and look at the facts, it’s ludicrous that Emma didn’t know. I mean, just for a start, did she really think he liked hanging out with Miss Bates that much?

A story in puzzle form

This is not a novel, it’s a whole new thing. It’s a story in puzzle form. Austen must have known that there was too much in there to catch when just reading. Like the gloves bought at Ford’s. I’d caught that they were for Jane last year, but until last month I had never thought about the fact that as Frank was in Ford’s telling Emma that nothing suited him so well as telling the truth—after which he told the truth, saying they were very much in the same set at Weymouth, and continued to tell the truth and talk about Jane after “the gloves were bought and they had quitted the shop again”—Frank Weston Churchill, son of the man who can’t keep a secret, had been telling his secret the whole time. Those gloves showed his intentions. He bought Jane gloves in front of Emma. He was dying to tell her and on the way to telling her. (And then she told him she thought Jane was involved in some indiscretion with her best friend’s husband and said she could never be friends with her.)

But that also shows why the just the dinner invitation from Emma to Jane by itself would confirm all Frank’s suspicions of Emma knowing. And then Jane gets bombarded with attention over her persistence in getting her mail, and Emma responds to by bringing up Frank’s handwriting and then taking Jane’s arm and giving her the great honor of personally escorting her into the supper.

I didn’t mean to do all this here, now, but we have been unjust to Austen’s beloved child for 210 years, and all because we didn’t follow Jane Austen’s very explicit instructions.

“But is it possible that you had no suspicion? — I mean of late. Early, I know, you had none.”
“I never had the smallest, I assure you.”
“That appears quite wonderful.”

Emma ❦ chapter 54