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Nathaniel SchwartzENGL 20602

6/12/2015

“Questions must be answered, and surprises be explained”: Sociality, Rationality, and a Theory of Narrative Explanation in Emma

I. Introduction

One notable feature of Emma is that, speaking purely on the level of plot, not much

happens. Walter Scott writes, after summarizing the plots of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and

Prejudice in a paragraph each, that “Emma has even les story than either of the preceding

novels” (195); rather, the novel is a kind of protracted character study, with the narrative

functioning principally as the means by which “the author displays her peculiar powers of

humour and knowledge of human life” (196). This is Scott’s line on Emma, anyway. And this

description is for the most part correct—but there is at least one incident in the novel that this

description fails to capture. The day after a ball arranged by Mr. Weston, “something

extraordinary” (261) happens: walking “[a]bout half a mile beyond Highbury” (261), Harriet is

accosted by a menacing “party of gipsies” (261), and is saved only by the quick heroism of Frank

Churchill; this incident is so traumatic that Harriet faints immediately after being returned to

safety.

What exactly are those gypsies doing in Emma? In his discussion of the novel, Scott

distinguishes Austen’s brand of realism from an earlier romantic style, which operates by

“alarming our credulity [and] amusing our imagination by wild variety of incident” (192-3). The

gypsies in Emma seem like the stuff of that anti-realistic romance—and yet here they are in

Emma, a novel that is supposed to triumphantly offer a “substitute for these excitements” by

doing nothing more than “copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life”

(193). Moreover, although the gypsy episode supports further plot developments, none of the

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novel’s prior incidents make necessary or probable the gypsies’ appearance. The gypsy episode

thus strikes the reader as curiously out of place in Emma. We feel the need for some kind of

explanation for the gypsy episode, and until we get one, we’re not satisfied.

Critics have paid much attention to the gypsy episode, sometimes explicitly framing their

analyses as attempts to offer an explanation of a problem that must be solved. Laura Mooneyham

White, for instance, says this in her conclusion to a paper on the gypsies (325):

In teaching Emma, I have often found that students initially judge the gypsy episode as an

improbable and clumsy exercise of narrative intervention. Ultimately, it becomes apparent that the

gypsies' intervention in Emma is much more than a device by which the world of romance

intrudes upon Highbury, but rather a concise critique and refiguring of the romantic tradition of

the gypsy narrative as a whole.

Later in this paper I’ll consider some of the content of White’s analysis, but for now I just want

to call attention to two features of her presentation here. First, she describes a kind of first-glance

impression of the gypsy episode: “initially” it seems out of place, like “narrative intervention,”

an “intru[sion] upon Highbury.” And second, she describes a correction of that initial

impression: the savvy reader must see the gypsy episode as “more” than a bizarre intrusion, as

playing some intelligible role within the novel as a whole, rather than as disrupting the workings

of the novel. This “more” that the critic must identify is an explanation. Though presumably

White is recalling the genuine response of her students to the gypsy episode, the

uncomprehending students still serve as a rhetorical mass-figure here, a collection of naïve

readers equipped to register what is strange about the gypsy episode, but unequipped to resolve

that strangeness through an explanation. Offering explanations where they are needed, then,

seems to be the key task of the critic, the work that distinguishes good readers from bad.

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So some scenes in Emma, critics agree, demand explanations. But of course not all scenes

do. If someone tilted her head in confusion and said, “I just don’t get why those gypsies appear,”

we could try to give her an answer, as White does (along with other critics)—but if she instead

said “I just don’t get why Emma and Mr. Knightley get married,” it’s not at all clear whether

there’s anything we could tell her that would count as an answer. That’s just the story of the

novel: we can recount the plot of Emma to explain how the events of the book lead up to the

marriage at the end, but nothing we say will do any work to render their marriage explicable,

because there’s no confusion that needs to be overcome, and hence nothing for an explanation to

succeed at.

In this paper I’ll consider the questions of which moments in Emma demand

explanations, which moments do not, and what kinds of explanations are called for when they

are indeed called for. I will take these questions up by examining the text of Emma with the aim

of identifying those features of the text that mark the gypsy episode (for example) as demanding

a certain kind of explanation, but mark the marriage of Emma and Mr. Knightley (again, for

example) as refusing explanation, or as explanatorily “basic” or foundational in the text. I will

argue that Austen constructs social unity as a kind of fundamental grounds of explanation in

Emma. We can understand unity as the telos of the novel, both in the narrative sense of

characters joining together and artificial distinctions being overcome, and in the structural sense

of putative “intrusions,” as White would put it, really being of a piece with the novel they appear

to interrupt.

I suspect that at this early stage, this thesis may seem worryingly empty—you might

think if we ask for an explanation of the presence of scene x in novel y, all we’re asking is how

scene x hangs together with novel y as a whole, how it is like the rest of the novel and not unlike

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it; and if this is the case, then saying that to explain scene x is to reveal its structural concordance

with the rest of the novel amounts to saying that to explain scene x is to explain scene x—which

of course leaves us having made no progress on the question of what counts as an explanation for

scene x. But I think this suspicion is misguided—I take myself to be offering not a universal

account of what explanation (or narrative explanation in particular) is, but an account of what the

specific textual features of Emma determine to be an acceptable mode of explanation. To diffuse

this suspicion, I will spend much of this paper arguing that there are other possible modes of

explanation not captured by my description of “unity”—especially purely causal, non-

teleological modes—and that we can only appeal to that particular mode of explanation because

of Austen’s choices as a writer.

Because the gypsy episode is so obviously demanding of an explanation, and because

there is such a wealth of criticism attempting to offer an explanation for it, I’ll use that episode as

my principal case study of explanation in this paper. But toward this paper’s end I’ll also turn to

other moments which might or might not need to be explained, paying attention to the death of

Frank Churchill’s aunt and the poultry-thieving incident at the novel’s end. I’ll begin, however,

with a reading of the gypsy episode.

II. The gypsies introduced

The gypsy episode is not just an episode in Emma that demands explanation. It is also an

episode the subject of which is explanation, an episode that teaches the reader what to want and

expect from explanations in the world of Emma. For all I’ve said so far about identifying salient

features of the text that clue us in to the need for a certain kind of explanation, there’s one very

simple feature of the gypsy episode that forces us to consider explanation: Austen’s use of the

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very word “explanation” in framing the gypsy episode. The first line of the chapter featuring the

gypsy episode (volume three, chapter three) reads “This little explanation with Mr. Knightley

gave Emma considerable pleasure” (260); and on the next page, when Emma observes Harriet

“faint[ing] away” after some apparently traumatic incident (not yet revealed to be the work of

gypsies), the narrator interjects this comment: “A young lady who faints, must be recovered;

questions must be answered, and surprises be explained” (261). So even before we work to form

some specific theory of narrative explanation in Emma, it should be pre-theoretically clear to us

that there is a question of explanation here, and hence some productive work for a theory of

narrative explanation to do.

By way into offering such a theory, let me linger for a moment on the first quotation cited

in the paragraph above: “This little explanation with Mr. Knightley gave Emma considerable

pleasure.” Exactly what explanation is being referred to here? In the last scene between Emma

and Mr. Knightley, the two characters agree that Mr. Elton’s snubbing of Harriet at Mr.

Weston’s ball is “unpardonable rudeness” (259); Emma admits that her efforts to match Harriet

with Mr. Elton were misguided; and the two share a dance, agreeing that they are “not really so

much brother and sister as to make it at all improper” (260). The two characters find themselves

closer together and less at odds than they have been at any point in the novel so far—but no part

of this process involves offering an account of some phenomenon, explaining why something is

the case. So what makes “this little explanation with Mr. Knightley” an explanation at all?

The answer is that the word “explanation” takes on another meaning as used by Austen in

this context. The Oxford English Dictionary offers this definition of “explanation”: “A mutual

declaration of the sense of spoken words, motives of actions, etc., with a view to adjust a

misunderstanding and reconcile differences; hence, a mutual understanding or reconciliation of

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parties who have been at variance.” Explanation in this sense consists not in the production of

new knowledge, not in answering some previously unanswered question, but in two (or more)

people getting the content of their beliefs and attitudes to match up. The narrator, commenting on

the “pleasure” of Emma’s “explanation with Mr. Knightley,” says “She was extremely glad that

they had come to so good an understanding respecting the Eltons, and that their opinions of both

husband wife were so much alike” (260). The kind of explanation that frames the opening of the

gypsy episode, then, is not the theoretical object of rational inquiry, or something like that, but a

necessarily social union between two parties previously in conflict. The substance of my

argument will be that kind of social union is in fact the grounds of explanation in the other sense

in Emma.

At this point the skeptic can still comfortably deny that that there’s any interesting

connection between the two senses of the word “explanation” in Emma. “Okay,” she might say,

“the word explanation has two different meanings in this text. So what? We normally recognize

the existence of homonyms without attaching to them any earth-shattering significance. Must we

further conclude that because Austen uses the word ‘object’ sometimes as a noun meaning

‘thing’ and sometimes as a verb meaning ‘raise an objection,’ she is actually the architect of an

arcane system of metaphysics according to which the identity of things bears some important

relation to interpersonal disagreement?” And of course such a conclusion would be unfounded.

So we might think that there are just two concepts at issue in Emma here—“explanation-for,” in

which we offer an account of some phenomenon, and “explanation-with,” in which two parties

reconcile their disparate attitudes—and hence that any attempt to offer some unified theory of the

two together will simply involve a lot of changing the subject back and forth from one to the

other.

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But closer examination of the text will reveal that this is not the case. It is not just that

Austen uses a single world for explanation-for and explanation-with: explanation-for and

explanation-with turn out to blend into each other, leaving us no choice but to understand

explanation-for in the terms of explanation-with. Consider again the line “questions must be

answered, and surprises be explained,” this time in the context of the passage in which it occurs

(261):

[T]he great iron sweepgate opened, and two persons entered whom she had never less expected to

see together—Frank Churchill, with Harriet leaning on his arm—actually Harriet!—A moment

sufficed to convince her that something extraordinary had happened…[T]hey were all three soon

in the hall, and Harriet immediately sinking into a chair fainted away.

A young lady who faints, must be recovered; questions must be answered, and surprises

be explained. Such events are very interesting, but the suspense of them cannot last long. A few

minutes made Emma acquainted with the whole.

Notice that what immediately strikes Emma as “extraordinary” here is not Harriet’s injured state,

but Harriet’s being accompanied by Frank Churchill. It’s evident that the union of Harriet and

Frank is precisely what keys Emma (and hence the reader) into seeing the need for an

explanation, pointing toward the grounding of narrative explanation in Emma on social

togetherness.

Once more, the committed skeptic might insist that this is just a kind of coincidence:

“Fine,” she’ll say, “sometimes two people being together is surprising, and therefore demands an

explanation. But that just shows that togetherness is an example of something to be explained—

not that we need to understand explanation generally in terms of togetherness.” Notice further,

though, that Harriet’s being accompanied by Frank is not itself the extraordinary phenomenon in

need of explanation, but rather that which “suffice[s] to convince [Emma] that something

extraordinary has happened.” Harriet’s being accompanied by Frank is not just any incident we

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can explain, but the key into Emma’s seeing that explanation is now at issue. Similarly, by

telling us that “surprises [must] be explained” immediately after declaring that “[a] young lady

who faints, must be recovered,” the narrator suggests that the fainting, and not the pairing of

Harriet and Frank, is the phenomenon to be explained. It’s not just that Harriet’s being together

with Frank demands an explanation; it’s that Harriet’s being together with Frank, in signalling

that some explanation-with has occurred, signals that so too has something occurred that

demands its own explanation-for. In Emma, the coming together that constitutes an explanation-

with is what grounds our ability to offer an explanation-for, to count something as warranting an

explanation in the first place.

Austen’s strategy in the text is to represent what is in fact a social process of unifying and

reconciling as a socially neutral practice, mandated by pure reason alone. Much turns on the

“must” in the quotation “A young lady who faints, must be recovered; questions must be

answered, and surprises be explained.” Must they really? There is no contradiction in a young

lady who faints, falls into a coma, and dies, nor in a question that we never answer or surprise we

never explain. Insofar as these “must”s are genuine, they are the musts of social (and perhaps

literary) conventions, not of logic—the fulfillment of those musts are what it will take to satisfy

observers and readers. But coming from the ostensibly impartial, impersonal narrator typical of

Austen, we are inclined to read those musts as the musts of true logical necessity. By

representing the social process of giving questions and answers as asocial and purely rational,

Austen dissolves the gap between explanation-with and explanation-for, such that what counts as

explaining a phenomenon is decided by specific social, communal standards.

We should not forget that there are two phenomena to be explained here: first, we must

explain what has happened to Harriet (it was gypsies); and then, having procured that

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explanation, we must explain what the gypsies are doing in the novel to begin with. But

strikingly, Emma concerns herself with both questions, taking up the role of critic, and not just of

character. Reflecting on the story told by Harriet and Frank, Emma reasons thus to herself (263):

Such an adventure as this,—a fine young man and a lovely young woman thrown together in such

a way, could hardly fail of suggesting certain ideas to the coldest heart, and the steadiest brain. So

Emma thought, at least. Could a linguist, could a grammarian, could even a mathematician have

seen what she did, have witnessed their appearance together, and heard their history of it, without

feeling that circumstances had been at work to make the peculiarly interesting to each other?

Here, Harriet’s being together with Frank is not what needs to be explained; rather, it is what

provides the explanation for the gypsy episode. The social union that consists in making Harriet

and Frank “peculiarly interesting to each other” is taken to be the final end of the gypsies’

appearance; but this explanation is taken not to follow from any pre-existing social

considerations, but from a neutral, rational examination of the circumstances. A “linguist,”

“grammarian,” or “even a mathematician,” bearing even “the coldest heart, and the steadiest

brain” would reach the same conclusion. For Emma, the social, value-laden connection forged

between Harriet and Frank comes to constitute the thoroughly asocial, value-neutral explanation

for the gypsies’ “extraordinary” presence near Highbury. This speaks further to the constitution

in Emma of social union (explanation-with) as a kind of natural telos, and hence to grounding of

purely rational explanation-for in such considerations of social unity.

Crucially, these considerations are not just “internal” to the characters of Emma: Austen’s

critics too have upheld this picture of explanation as union in their work. Michael Kramp, for

instance, offers an explanation of the gypsy episode oriented around its power in integrating

Harriet into the community of Highbury. Kramp identifies a tension in Harriet’s initial depiction:

though she is white and English, and hence a figure of continuity within the homogenously white

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and English Highbury, she is also illegitimate and of unknown origin, positioning her as a

potential external threat to the community’s cohesion. The gypsy episode resolves this tension

(148):

Austen's use of the alien dark-skinned gypsies in juxtaposition to the native White woman allows

the novelist to accentuate the Englishness of the latter by stressing the foreignness of the former.

As an illegitimate and orphaned member of the "large and populous village" of Highbury, Harriet

initially appears similar to the nomadic outsiders, but as a young, White, and anonymous female

resident of this neighborhood, she also represents the future promise of her local and national

community.

By Kramp’s reading, the gypsy episode is explained by its power to group with like with

like, to reveal Harriet’s true affinity with the racially and culturally homogeneous Highbury. And

indeed, Frank, at least, seems to take the gypsy episode to reveal just that. Consider the account

of Frank’s saving Harriet (262):

The terror which the woman and boy had been creating in Harriet was then their own portion. He

had left them completely frightened; and Harriet eagerly clinging to him, and hardly able to speak,

had just strength enough to reach Hartfield, before her spirits were quite overcome. It was his idea

to bring her to Hartfield: he had thought of no other place.

Notice the emphasis on reciprocity and homogeneity in this passage: the crisis of the gypsies

terrifying Harriet is resolved by that “terror” being returned to them in “their own portion”: the

gypsies thus get to stand as a kind of terror class, isolated from the safe, placid whiteness of

Highbury, of which Harriet is now unambiguously a member. Frank’s thinking of “no other

place” but Hartfield to bring Harriet speaks to her having been thoroughly integrated into the

community by means of this incident.

At the risk of reducing Kramp’s cogent analysis to the level of Emma’s speculative

“imaginis[m]” (263), it appears that Kramp’s strategy for explaining the gypsy episode is just

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like Emma’s. Where Emma sees Harriet’s specific union with Frank as the telos of the incident,

Kramp takes a wider view, seeing the telos as Harriet’s integration into the community of

Highbury at large, “uphold[ing] Harriet as a source of ‘natural’ Whiteness, while the Romani

become vilified as mysterious Black outsiders” (151). While literary critics are hardly the

dispassionate linguists and grammarians Emma imagines as accepting her social-teleological

explanation for the gypsy episode, it’s clear that even using the most analytical, steady-brained

methods, we still need to couch our explanations of mysterious phenomena in Emma in terms of

the ends of social unity that they serve.

III. Theories of Explanation

At this point I will pause to address a possible concern. Perhaps all the talk of explanation

I’ve offered so far has been confused. I’ve already introduced an imagined interlocutor in this

paper whom I’ve termed “the skeptic,” so let me now introduce another interlocutor, whom I’ll

call the causal purist. According to the causal purist, the business of explaining some

phenomenon is always offering a series of causes. We begin with some event that we can all

agree occurred, and we demonstrate that as a result of that event, some further event had to

occur, and from that event yet another event, until we reach the phenomenon the explanation of

which was at issue. If the causal purist is right, virtually all of the material in the above section

falls short of reaching the status of real explanation—neither Emma nor Michael Kramp nor I

have offered anything like an explanation of the gypsies’ presence in Emma, because while

we’ve offered an end that those gypsies serve, we haven’t articulated any causal mechanism that

entails their presence in the novel. (To be very clear, if you are sufficiently Aristotelian, you

might accept teleology as just one more kind of cause, in which case you’d say that Emma,

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Kramp, and I have all offered versions of final causes for the gypsies, as opposed to material,

formal, or efficient causes. But if you want to use the word “cause” like that, the causal purist

will merely insist that efficient causation, and not final causation or any other kind, is the kind of

causation upon which explanation depends.)

Much of the work of J. David Velleman’s “Narrative Explanation” is to provide an

answer to the causal purist, represented in that paper by Noël Carrol. Following Velleman, I will

argue that there is no reason to be a causal purist, and that our ordinary conception of explanation

is perfectly amenable to all sorts of non-causal modes of explanation, and hence to the kinds of

explanation already offered in the above section of this paper. Velleman points out that we

frequently encounter narratives that satisfy us completely, and that still can’t be recast in purely

casual terms—that is, we are satisfied by narratives the explanations of which, if they exist,

cannot be purely causal.

Velleman, citing Aristotle, offers the example of a story in which a man murders another

man, and then is later crushed by a statue erected in the honor of his victim.

This sequence of events, says, Velleman, even if causally unrelated (6),

completes an emotional cadence in the audience. When a murder is followed by a fitting

comeuppance, we feel indignation gratified. Although these events follow no causal sequence,

they provide an emotional resolution, and so they have a meaning for the audience, despite lacking

any causal or probabilistic connection.

The point is not merely that the story can be good without featuring causal connections between

its events; it is rather that, if we are to explain any key moment in this story (be it the initial

murder or the subsequent death-by-statue), we will have to do without those kinds of causal

connections, and instead explain the events in terms of the “emotional cadences” they effect in

the audience of the story. Although we could explain the murderer’s death in terms of “an

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avenging spirit, or some other force of cosmic justice, behind the falling statue” (6), we don’t

need to: an “absurdist reading, which takes the murderer’s death for an accident” (6) is no less

satisfying, because we can explain that death not only in terms of the causal mechanisms that

produce it, but also in terms of the emotions that they events of the story lead us to feel when

presented chronologically.

Citing Frank Kermode, Velleman offers a metaphor of a ticking clock, which we hear as

producing the sounds tick-tock, tick-tock (11). It need not be a feature of the physics of those

noises that we hear the first as “tick” and the second as “tock”—in fact, it may be the case that

the “tick” and “tock” make identical noises, and that we only hear them differently because we

take the first to be establishing a tension, and the second to be resolving it. Just as a murder in no

way leads to the murderer being crushed by the statue of his victim, the noise “tick” in no way

leads to the noise “tock”—but even so, we hear the narrative of the murderer and his death as a

bona fide, explicable story, just as we hear a buildup of tension and a resolution in the noises

tick-tock: “The cycle of tension and relaxation is built in to the very nature of muscle,” says

Velleman, “and it's what leads us to perceive tick as the beginning and tock as the end. In much

the same way, we understand the cadence of a story with the natural cycles of our emotional

sensibility” (13). The tock works to explain the tick, even though the two noises bear no causal

connection.

We can thus understand explanation in Emma, and of the gypsy episode in particular, not

in terms of a sequence of events making the appearance of the gypsies necessary or probable, but

in terms of a sequence of events making the gypsies’ presence emotionally satisfying.

In the introduction of this paper I cited Laura Mooneyham White as providing a clear statement

of the need for explanation in the gypsy episode: we initially feel the gypsies’ presence as an

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“intrusion” into Highbury, and hence as something that doesn’t fit, and demands a kind of

justification; and we then find something “more” in the narrative, which alerts us to the way in

which the gypsies in fact belong in the story, satisfying us that that putative intrusion was no

intrusion at all. Conjoining Velleman’s analysis to the analysis of the above section of this paper,

we can advance two theses here:

(1) In Emma, the threat of social separation is constructed as a tick, against which is

demanded the resolution of a tock in the form of social unity; and

(2) It is only in virtue of the gypsy episode producing that tick feeling, which White

describes as making us feel the need for something “more,” that the gypsy episode

counts as a bona fide narrative for which we can offer an explanation.

This second thesis especially should strike us as surprising. By White’s formulation, that

original feeling of intrusion produced by the gypsy episode looked like a kind of possible

misstep, the explanation of which would consist in the savvy critic’s showing it in fact not to be

a misstep, and in doing so, showing us that our initial evaluation of it as a misstep was

misguided. But now it appears that, if the gypsy episode didn’t produce that feeling of being a

misstep, of not belonging, there would be no story, and nothing to explain. The savvy reader is

not the reader who accepts every plot development with a cool, unfazed air, saying “Of course,

that makes sense”; rather, the savvy reader is the reader who lets herself be shaken by events that

seem to make no sense at all, only to resolve that feeling of being shaken by procuring for herself

an explanation.

Recall once more the sentence that opens the chapter in Emma featuring the gypsy

episode: “This little explanation with Mr. Knightley gave Emma considerable pleasure.”

Explanation, as discussed above, is not merely the theoretical object of rational inquiry: it is

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rather, or at least also, a particular social process that occurs over time. Had Emma never been

victim to any kind of misunderstanding, she would have been denied the pleasure of correcting

it. This kind of social separation, either in the form of Emma’s sometimes estrangement with Mr.

Knightley, or in the form of the alien gypsies intruding on the world of Highbury, is not just an

imperfection that needs to be corrected: in Emma, which features social union as its telos,

movement toward that telos will be possible only if we begin away from it. A teleological

explanation is possible only in cases where the event to be explained is not coextensive with its

own end. It is only in making us feel the presence of the gypsies as intrusive, that is, that Austen

lets us understand Emma as an explicable text.

One function for the gypsy episode that some critics have proposed is a reading lesson for

Emma. Just as in Northanger Abbey, Catherine must learn to read the threats of the real world

not as gothic tropes, but as petty and banal human meanness, Emma must learn that the more

lasting relief in life is not being saved from the romantic threat of gypsies, but from the banal,

real-life threat of being snubbed at a ball—and hence that Harriet has fallen in love not with

Frank, but with Mr. Knightley. (White makes a version of this point [309], citing Deborah

Epstein Nord as an influence on that line of thought.) What I mean to bring out by my analysis is

that this kind of understanding goes both ways: yes, we can understand Emma’s “pleasure” in

explanation in terms of the pleasure of a reader coming to understand a novel that was once

obscure (or rather, seeming to understand it, failing to understand it, and then coming to

genuinely understand it); but so too can we understand our progress as readers of Emma in terms

of Emma’s “pleasure” in explanation, in forging a social connection where that was once

disconnect, in gleefully filling in the gaps that once troubled us.

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IV. Conclusion: Frank’s aunt, and the gypsies once more?

A longer paper could spend many pages examining various incidents from Emma in light

of the discussion above. That kind of examination will be the work of this final section, though it

will have to go somewhat more quickly than might be desirable. I will consider two episodes

here: the death of Frank Churchill’s aunt and the outbreak of robberies of poultry of the

Woodhouses’ neighbors.

These two episodes resemble the gypsy episode in one important respect: like the

gypsies’ sudden appearance outside Highbury, neither the death of Frank’s aunt nor the outbreak

of robberies is identifiable as the consequence of prior events in the novel. It should be striking,

then, that—at least if my intuitions as a reader are widely shared—neither of these episodes do

seem to demand explanation in the manner of the gypsy episode. As I have argued in the above

sections, (efficient) causal explanations are not the only kind of explanations we can give, and

are frequently not the kind of explanation warranted by causally mysterious episodes in a text.

But beyond that, there is no reason to suppose that every narrative episode can or should be

explained: as long as we want to make Emma itself—what the novel achieves as a creatively

unified work of fiction— the ultimate explanatory grounds of the surprising episodes featured in

Emma, we’d better hope we can treat some kinds of moments as explanatorily basic, as offering

the grounds for other moments’ explanations without demanding explanations themselves. For

this reason I propose that we can read both of these two moments as participating in a kind of

explanatory order without demanding explanation.

I will begin with the death of Frank’s aunt. The first thing to say here is that this death is

a necessary condition of the engagement between Frank and Jane Fairfax coming to light.

“Surprises [must] be explained,” we’ve been told, and there could be no explanation—in the

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“explanation-with” sense of all concerned parties coming together in belief and attitude—were it

not for the death of Frank’s aunt. Even before the revelation of Frank and Jane’s engagement has

come out, we are immediately made to focus on the unanimity of the reaction to Frank’s aunt’s

death (304):

It was felt as such things must be felt. Every body had a degree of gravity and sorrow; tenderness

towards the departed, solicitude for the surviving friends; and, in a reasonable time, curiosity to

know where she would be buried.

Just as the many musts of “A young lady who faints, must be recovered,” etc., served to

represent specific social expectations as due merely from pure rationality, the “must” of “It was

felt as such things must be felt” depersonalizes the reactions to be had to Frank’s aunt’s death: no

one has to search her own soul for the proper reaction, but it “must be felt” as “such things must

be felt,” and so it is felt by everyone. The enumerated series of concerns and emotions attributed

to “[e]very body” serves further to signal this death as a moment of uniformity and reconciliation

in individual attitudes. Before the death can even serve its major narrative function, then, in

allowing the engagement between Frank and Jane to become public knowledge, Austen has

already clued us in on the importance of this moment for the many explanations-with that the

ending of Emma will demand.

It must be noted, though, that even as the death of Frank’s aunt signals forth a mass

consensus of opinion within Highbury, it also alerts us to the dangers of consensus. Commenting

on the generally shabby opinion held of Frank’s aunt in her lifetime, the narrator offers the

consolation that “In one point she was fully justified. She had never been admitted before to be

seriously ill. The event acquitted her of all the fancifulness, and all the selfishness of imaginary

complaints” (305). The suggestion is that the people of Highbury had failed Frank’s aunt in her

18

lifetime in one important respect: they got their heads into a perfect consensus concerning her

“fancifulness,” but even with this consensus at hand, they were wrong.

Following (in some sense) William Galperin, we might say that this false consensus is a

kind of damning critique of the hiddenness of Frank and Jane’s relationship, which is taken to be

a contributing factor to that consensus. Against a conventionally didactic reading of the novel,

Galperin defends an “oppositional” reading of Emma, according to which readers are unusually

free to make their own judgments of the text, unrestricted by the constraints of an authoritative

narrative voice (22):

[D]espite all that Emma provides the readers by way of understanding the world it represents, it

does not extend or govern that understanding sufficiently to contain the oppositional practices of

characters who are plainly less reconciled to society than are other characters...Thus, in the very

way that Frank Churchill is free to roam the prison-house of the language of this novel, it is

equally Austen's purpose to make the experience or consumption of the text a practice as

potentially oppositional and no more controllable than either Frank's or, by extension, the

novelist's own.

On many levels Galperin must disagree with the kind of reading I’ve been offering in this paper

—arguing that a novel is committed to a certain telos seems hardly compatible with Galperin’s

insistence on the novel’s inability to control the reader’s experience of it—but his attention to the

way in which a character like Frank is “less reconciled to society” than other characters has

obvious affinities with the attention I’ve paid to explanations-with in Emma. Frank refuses to

engage in those explanations-with, or waits far too long to engage in them, and society suffers

for it. Galperin may oppose didactic readings of Emma on principle, but it seems to me that if he

were forced to read the episode of Frank’s aunt’s death didactically, this is the reading he would

produce.

19

I turn now to the incidents of poultry-thieving. This episode, even more than the episode

of Frank’s aunt’s death, really seems to demand no explanation at all—or if it demands an

explanation, it is an explanation so obvious that it hardly deserves the label. At first Mr.

Woodhouse resists Emma’s marriage to Mr. Knightley, but then the couple is “befriended” by a

series of robberies which leads Mr. Woodhouse to change his mind. There is no explanatory

work for the critic to do here: the narrator tells us without obscurity precisely what functional

role the incidents of thieving serve.

This might serve as an opportunity to reflect once more on the interplay between

(efficient) causal explanations and teleological explanations: if we wanted to offer a purely

causal explanation of something, we could say that Emma’s marriage to Mr. Knightley is

explained (caused) by those incidents of poultry-thieving. But this explanation is quite obviously

screwed on backwards: had there been no poultry-thieving, Emma and Mr. Knightley might just

have easily have succeeded in marrying had, say, Mr. Woodhouse suddenly and unexpectedly

fallen in love, leading to a dramatic shift in personality and a new desire that everyone should get

married and live together; but had Emma and Mr. Woodhouse not gotten married, what we’re

left with can hardly be called a version of Emma. Emma is a novel that is always leading to the

marriage of Emma and Mr. Knightley, and if some incident works to that end, that not much

more about it needs to be said.

In concluding, I’ll point out that there is one more notable feature of that episode to

remark on: one that comes not from the text of Emma, but from the wealth of criticism attached

to it. Multiple critics have found particular amusement in offering their own explanations of the

thieving: the thieving, they say, is the work of none other than the gypsies. Galperin, for

instance, writes, with apparently supreme confidence, that the “pilferings…are the work of

20

gypsies (for there are no other suspects in the novel so far as I can tell” (21); and White, seeming

to embrace imaginism without restriction, writes that, instead of seeing the thieves as anonymous

plot devices, (324-5):

I have always preferred to believe, however, that the gypsies came back for a spell to Highbury, to

make the happy ending possible, just as fairies return at the end of Act V in A Midsummer’s Night

Dream (a play the novel references at another point) to give their blessing to the multiple nuptial

beds of Theseus’s household. The gypsies have done so much for the plot already that their

presence here as the last instigators of a comic ending seems appropriate.

This marvel at the ability to give explanations, this delight in attributing phenomena to sameness

and not to difference: all this, I think, is symptomatic of the values Emma works to impose on its

reader. To understand Emma, we must participate in explanations, not just to solve pressing

problems (there really isn’t one here), but because it’s good to bring things together, to

consolidate our knowledge. This is what I have argued Emma tells us—and if these critics’

reaction are any evidence, they seem to agree.

21

Works cited

Austen, Jane. Emma. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. Oxford World's Classics.

"explanation, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 5 June 2015.

Galperin, William. "The Picturesque, the Real, and the Consumption of Jane Austen." The

Wordsworth Circle 28.1 (1997): 19-27. ProQuest. Web. 23 May 2015.

Kramp, Michael. "The Woman, the Gypsies, and England: Harriet Smith's National

Role." College Literature 31.1 (2004): 147-68. Project MUSE [Johns Hopkins UP].

Web. 23 May 2015.

Scott, Walter. "Emma; a Novel. By the Author of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice,

&c." Rev. of Emma, by Jane Austen. Quarterly Review Jan. 1816: 188-201. Print.

Velleman, J. David. "Narrative Explanation." The Philosophical Review 112.1 (2003): 1-

25. JSTOR. Web. 23 May 2015.

White, Laura Mooneyham. "Beyond the Romantic Gypsy: Narrative Disruptions and Ironies in

Austen's Emma." Papers on Language and Literature 44.3 (2008): 305-27. Academic

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