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...interesting to how a contemporary audience would have read Jane Fairfax, attitudes that Emma herself to some extent shares but also, at bottom, rejects--and in doing so, Emma speaks, I believe, for her author, opting for comedy over tragedy.
We begin with Emma's thoughts about Jane before she arrives in Highbury, a mixed attitude of irritation and pity:
"One is sick of the very name of Jane Fairfax. Every letter from her is read forty times over; her compliments to all friends go round and round again; and if she does but send her aunt the pattern of a stomacher, or knit a pair of garters for her grandmother, one hears of nothing else for a month. I wish Jane Fairfax very well; but she tires me to death." (86)
After Jane's arrival in Highbury and the first evening visit at Hartfield, Emma reflects, "'She is a sort of elegant creature that one cannot keep one's eyes from. I am always watching her to admire; and I do pity her from my heart'" (171).
What is it about Jane Fairfax that causes such ambivalent responses in Emma? Admiration--she draws the eye; pity; but also irritation. I want to suggest that at some level Emma knows that she herself is the heroine of a comedy; and she resents, in classic eighteenth-century fashion, the counterclaims of tragedy. Jane Fairfax, I will argue, is modeled on, and to a certain extent consciously models her own behavior on, the heroines of the popular "she-tragedies" of the eighteenth-century stage. In terms of the star actresses whom Austen probably saw, we might read Emma as the charming, witty, bossy Dorothy Jordan but Jane as a potential Sarah Siddons.
SIDDONS AND SHE-TRAGEDIES
That Mrs. Siddons was considered the greatest actress of the last quarter of the eighteenth century was largely due to her affective power in the performance of what were known as "she-tragedies," plays in which--in contrast to the traditional but often tedious narratives of the falls of great men--the focus was on a woman caught in a situation not of her own making, the only exit from which was madness and/or death. Sir Joshua Reynolds famously painted Siddons as the Tragic Muse as early as 1784 (the painting is in the Huntington Library Collections). Austen might have seen Sarah Siddons in her prime during her occasional visits to London or Bath as a young woman; in April 1811 she had hoped to see Siddons, now in the twilight of her career, as Constance in Shakespeare's King John at Covent Garden, but she was frustrated in her plans by inaccurate information that Siddons had cancelled: "I should particularly have liked seeing her in Constance, & could swear at her with little effort for disappointing me" (25 April 1811). At this point, during Siddons's second-last season in London, she was stout and rather weak of voice, but she remained a performer of unequalled effectiveness: "every limb of her body shewed the tumult of passion with an accuracy and at the same time a force equally impressive upon the critical and feeling spectator" (Henry Crabb Robinson, qtd. in "Siddons").
Constance is a very fine role; her passionate eloquence...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
have been removed from this article.
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