Emma’s Moral Imagination

Jane Austen’s Emma is centrally concerned with character formation and guidance. Rich, beautiful, independent, Emma Woodhouse has no one to shepherd her. Her father is too frail, and everyone else in Hughbury too intimidated. She doesn’t think she needs to be shepherded, and instead spends her time meddling with other peoples’ lives. 

What needs guidance in Emma’s case is particularly her imagination, and in depicting a character who needs her imagination educated, guided, shaped, and disciplined, Austen enters into an issue that is at the heart of much 18^th century thought. Imagination was put on the front burner by the Romantic movement. In his Biographia literaria (1817, published the year Austen died), Coleridge offered imagination as a counter to Descartes’s subject-object distinction and to Locke’s notion that human minds are tabula rasa. Coleridge distinguishes “primary” and “secondary” imagination: “The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.” 

French thinkers were also preoccupied with the imagination, which treated imagination as an unbounded power. Pessimistic Augustinian that he is, Pascal is often read as an enemy of imagination. And so he is: For Pascal, imagination dominates reason and even conscience, makes truth and falsehood indistinguishable, and sustains pride, the Deadliest of the Seven Deadlies.

But Matthew Maguire (Conversion of Imagination) convincingly shows that Pascal has a more exalted understanding of the power of imagination than more “modern” thinkers like Hobbes and Spinoza. Pascal claims that imagination “gives respect and veneration to people, to works, to laws, to the great,” so that all the “riches of the world” are “inadequate” unless endorsed by imagination. Pascalian imagination possesses what Maguire calls a “demiurgic” power to shape experience. Impelled by imagination, Pascal says, we seek happiness in illusory diversions, hoping to forget our mortality. 

Pascal is suspicious of this power, describing imagination as a “deceitful” power and a “mistress of error and falsity”: “she would be an infallible rule of truth, if she were an infallible rule of falsehood. But being most generally false, she gives no sign of her nature, impressing the same character on the true and the false.” Pascal’s only solution to this is a radical renunciation of the world and of imagination, in order to seek true happiness in God. Having let imagination out of the bottle, Pascal finds no way to contain or redeem it, and as a result, contrary to his overtly apologetic aims, Pensees, read by Rousseau who was read by Tocqueville, provides the impetus for an expansion of imagination’s scope that may still be in progress.

 Rousseau read Pascal on the imagination, and sees it as having the same power as Pascal. Instead of renouncing imagination, Rousseau revels in its unlimited powers. As Rousseau himself put it, “the real world has its limits, the imaginary world is infinite; not being able to enlarge the one we shrink the other; for all the troubles that make us truly unhappy are only born from their differences.” How can we creatures of infinite imagination be happy in a world whose hard edges don’t yield to our desires? That’s a driving question for Rousseau, and he eventually decides that only a virtual reality can achieve what imagination urges us to want to achieve. Rousseau renounces the need for limiting illusions because he renounces the need to realize his desires in reality. He renounces perfectibility and instead delights in the purity of untouched nature. He withdraws to a world of pure imagination, where he can, for instance, indulge sexual fantasies while remaining “pure” in the flesh. He aspires to float on an ocean of pure imagination, transcending self and his world in flights of infinite fantasy.

We seem a long ways from Austen, but it’s possible that, widely read as she was, Austen was aware of the French discussion, and likely that she knew of the earlier work of the English Romantics. And she presents her own outlook on imagination in her depiction of Emma. Emma’s imagination is undisciplined. This is partly because of her social position, her isolation and prominence, which makes it easy for her to manipulate, softly intimidate, and control. The limited possibilities afforded by Highbury encourage her flights of fancy. She is bored with the life of her town, and tries to find amusement in her imagination. During one shopping trip to town, while Harriet is busy shopping (“tempted by everything, and swayed by half a word”) Emma moves to the window to amuse herself:

“Much could not be hoped for from the traffic of even the busiest part of Highbury: — Mr. Perry walking hastily by; Mr. William Cox letting himself in at the office-door; Mr. Cole’s carriage horses returning from exercise; or a stray letter-boy on an obstinate mule, were the liveliest objects she could presume to expect; and when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman traveling homewards from shop with a full basket, two curs quarreling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little bow-window eyeing the ginger bread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough to still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.”

Some of her fancies are less innocuous. Emma’s mind is nothing if not lively, and if she finds nothing to amuse her, she will create her own amusements. It is no accident that the main thing that occupies Emma’s time is “play,” for she has no serious business to attend to. She invents out of thin air a romanticized past for Harriet: The narrator tells us that Harriet is the natural daughter of “somebody,” but Emma turns this somebody into a “gentleman’s daughter,” (p. 27). Later, she takes a few random clues from Jane Fairfax and invents a scandalous relationship with Mr Dixon, again out of thin air. She can’t paint Harriet accurately; she draws her as she sees her, shaped by imagination. Emma is in the grip of the urge to perfectibility that Rousseau talks about. She wants to shape the world to her whims, and this expresses a basic egoism. 

The romantic progress of the book is directly connected to Emma’s moral development. Isolated and superior, she has no guides. her one guide, Miss Taylor, had gone off to get married. If her imagination is to be disciplined, she has to be drawn into a community and brought under some sort of authority. She has to have her imagination checked, has to go through a sometimes painful experience of self-denial and contrition. Knightley of course becomes the guide of her conscience and imagination, provoking her self-examination and confession. Knightly leads this lost sheep back to the fold, and in so doing trains her imagination to pursue moral ends, ends that serve the best interests of her neighbors. Imagination comes to be an instrument of charity rather than egoism, but only when it guided imagination.

Austen’s poetics might be described in the same terms. Austen presents herself as a shepherd of imagination. She wants to evoke imagination, but also to guide it. She is the literary legislator who shapes imagination to moral ends.