The place of rank & money in Jane Austen's world
In Jane Austen's Emma, one of the author's best known novels beside Pride & Predjudice, the homonymous main female character is described as "handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition". It is not by chance that Emma's wealth is mentioned in the very heart of the description, among natural personal qualities such as beauty, intelligence, generosity and pleasant temper: amusingly implanted in the middle of the list of conventional moral and physical attributes, Emma's fortune immediately suggests the social dimension, or perspective, of both the novel character and the novel itself. Austen's world is one of more or less financially self-sufficient middle class provincials, successors probably of the mediaeval feudalists, or otherwise liberal professionals having acquired a certain economic sufficiency through hard work, like the naval officers in Persuasion.
It is inside this kind of world that the characters of both Emma and Persuasion act, react, meditate, misunderstand, fall in love and, finally, happily get married. Despite the apparent order which determines it, it is a world of invisible, interior dynamics where negative elements such as social and economic inferiority, on one hand, and annoying vanity and ambition on the other - brilliant examples of which constitute Miss Bates, Jane Fairfax and maybe even Harriett Smith (from Emma) in the first case and Augusta Hawkins-Elliot (from Emma) and Sir Walter Elliot with his daughter Elisabeth (from Persuasion) in the second - come to break the exterior calmness and become sources of mobility in the plot as well as objects of social criticism and sometimes merciless satire (as in the case of Augusta Hawkins and Sir Walter Elliot).
What has to prevail, nevertheless (and finally does), is a portrait of infallible construction and consistency, combining the desirable credentials of good birth with the moral integrity which is indispensable for them to be sustained. Emma's principal male character, Mr. Knightley, constitutes the most perfect accomplishment of 19th century middle class, a masterpiece society and Jane Austen have every right in the world to be proud of. He is fair with the right, enemy of the wrong, with an admirable insight and a wonderful generosity to those who are in any sense inferior to him, like Miss Bates whose poverty he is capable of justifying and whose lack of quick mind he is ready to forgive. The diametrical opposite to him is Anne Elliot's father, Sir Walter, in Persuasion: cold, narcissistic and affected ad nauseam, with a weakness for beauty which touches the limits of the ridiculous, he reduces himself to the utmost misery because of his obsessional vanity. Though deprived of all material possession and every kind of decency, he still pretends to be worthy of respect and even feels proud of his decline. Augusta Hawkins, for her part, one of Emma's most strikingly negative portraits, is the very incarnation of absurd vanity and foolish ambition, outrageously pretentious, with an extreme love for luxury which surpasses the potentiality of her own social position and ends up being unbearable not only to Emma, but to the reader as well.
For the socially and financially underprivileged one possible way out could be a good marriage. Mr. Elliot from Emma, though not particularly underprivileged himself, is quite qmbitious and approaches Emma in order to acquire, by making her his wife, an improved status in society and a considerable dowery too. Jane Fairfax, whose exceptional musical talent cannot make up for a lack of financial resources, condescends to marry her mentally and morally inferior Frank Churchill in order to avoid working as a governess. Marriage thus becomes a means of social establishment, if not accomplishment. In Persuasion, Mrs. Clay attempts to win the romantic interest of Sir Walter Elliot in order to become owner of his (supposed) fortune. Harriett Smith, in Emma, seeks to make up for her illegitimacy through a decent marriage - an affair in which Emma will be involved with destructive results. As for Emma herself, she marries not for money - because, as she herself remarks, "fortune I don't want; employment I don't want", but because her matching with the perfect Mr. Knightley is the ideal form of social accomplishment, she having been perfected through her continual intellectual contact with him. Because, as critic David Cecil remarks, it is not a morally correct thing to marry for money, but to marry without having ensured an elementary economic comfort is certainly not a very intelligent thing to do.
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