Paragraphs of four words are rare in the works of Jane Austen, and those without dialogue vanishingly few. I don’t mean to dilate on the elegant arrangement of the action in the final third of Emma, but I point to this singular instance (in Chapter 43) because it emphasizes what is to me the truly pivotal character of this slight authorial comment, which is followed by the purposively witty remark with which Emma tips the story into a new and much less pleasant world. Until this point, Emma has never been other than the young lady described on the first page, for good —

handsome, clever and rich…with very little to distress her

— and ill —

having rather too much her own way and a disposition to think a little too well of herself.

But with this jest about Miss Bates’ tendency to ramble, Emma tumbles, or perhaps hurls herself, into a rather purgatorial climate, in which she will continue to make her characteristic mistakes, only now at her own expense.

Here is another remark that “Emma could not resist” making:

“Good God!” cried Emma. “This has been a most unfortunate — most deplorable mistake! What is to be done?”

What is to be done, indeed, now that Emma has shown her hand to her ostensible protégée? Unlike the insult so lightly tossed at Miss Bates, this involuntary outburst marks Emma’s no less deplorable loss of self-control.

This change of weather is very familiar to me. I don’t know how many times in my life I have yielded to the irresistible urge to be clever only to find that I have been hurtful and anything but funny, and with most of Emma’s excuses and explanations. I was born a fortunate person with a disposition to think a little too well of myself. The consequence of conceited misjudgment has quite often been an almost equally conceited despair, in which the expectation of getting what’s coming to me rivals Dante’s inventive menu of torments; and, because I am, after all, special, I do not come to rest in any one hellhole but must give them all a try. My self-esteem is ready for anything.

Emma is able to keep a further outburst to herself:

“Oh God! That I had never seen her!”

And I, too, have once or twice focused my attention on someone whose fortune was so inferior to my own that I allowed myself to shrug off — always with the best intentions — the obligation to respect the autonomous humanity of another person, under the pretense of doing my the object of my bounty a favor; only to discover, as Emma does at the climax of her misadventure with Mr Elton, that the mellow joint that I thought I was smoking was actually an exploding cigar.

After Mr Knightly’s scolding forces her to stop scrambling for self-exoneration, Emma finds herself plunged into a very unflattering light. Without this aura of disgrace, it is unlikely that she would take Harriet Smith’s understanding of Mr Knightly’s intentions as anything but the ludicrous mistake that it is. Newly abased, there is no limit to the penance that Emma is prepared to heap upon herself — including the prospect of union between the man with whom she has always, albeit with a lazy half-consciousness, preened herself on being first [italics Austen’s] with a woman of no importance whatsoever. In fact it is only now that she is forced to conclude that Mr Knightly must marry no one but herself. Sinking reflexively into complacency on this point, she assures herself that his marrying no one else will suffice. I don’t intend to be sidelined by the unhealthy mutual dependency that binds Emma to her father, which reconciles her to the comfortable asymmetry of her father’s being first to her. (Despite critics’ most energetic attempts to demonize self-centered Mr Woodhouse, it is indisputable that our author regards him as an amiably comic figure.) But Harriet’s fantasy has sprouted a seed: Mr Knightly had probably better be pinned down, lest there be further occasions to doubt, even for a moment, his fidelity. Thus Austen resolves her one comedy of a girl who doesn’t actually need to get married, and provides her answer to the question whether girls would want husbands if their material well-being weren’t at stake.

I think we can assume that Box Hill is not the only scene in Emma’s career of zingers, but her crack there is possibly her only egregious one, inspired by Frank Churchill, rather the worse for being her playmate rather than plaything. Frank has already lured Emma into sketching lurid and even salacious explanations for the surprising appearance of the piano chez Bates. Emma’s propensity to amuse herself misleads her into supposing that a man who would not qualify as an appealing mate might serve as an amusing pal. Frank Churchill may, conceivably, make Jane Fairfax a good husband, but he is and never would be anything but a bad influence on Emma. This, I think is what alarms Mr Knightly into realizing that no one must marry Emma but himself.

Notwithstanding the great wretchedness that Emma endures all the way from the middle of Chapter 47 all the way to the middle of Chapter 49, I think we must conclude that her good fortune persists undented.