The want of proper families in the place, and the conviction that none beyond the place and its immediate environs could be tempted to attend, were mentioned; but he was not satisfied. He could not be persuaded that so many good-looking houses as he saw around him, could not furnish numbers enough for such a meeting; and even when particulars were given and families described, he was still unwilling to admit that the inconvenience of such a mixture would be any thing, or that there would be the smallest difficulty in every body's returning into their proper place the next morning. (209-10)Emma does have occasional doubts about Frank's decorum--"his indifference to a confusion of rank, bordered too much on inelegance of mind"--but, like most of her principles, Emma's standards of acceptable behavior are inconsistently and subjectively applied.
In fact, Frank is, as Mr. Woodhouse puts it, "not quite the thing," and Emma should have recognized it when, "with most becoming gallantry," he secured her as partner in an "irresistable waltz," one night at the home of the Coles. The narrator tells us that "not more than five couple could be mustered" for this dance, "but the rarity and the suddenness of it made it very delightful" (237). Frank's having chosen the waltz to dance with Emma, and the scarcity of people willing or able to accompany the pair should have revealed certain "truths" about the young man.
The choice of a waltz is fascinating for what it tells us about Frank. Ruth Katz, in her "The Egalitarian Waltz," describes the dance as "one of the earliest manifestations of individualism and escape" and associates it with the "values of liberty, equality and uncertainty which followed upon the French Revolution" (128). That Frank embodies the shifting values and demeanors of a transitional era cannot be denied. His own family origins are humble, yet by virtue of his adoptive family, he freely mingles with social superiors. His comings and goings from the scene are mysterious, and his behavior towards Jane Fairfax, the woman to whom he is secretly betrothed, demonstrate an uncertainty, an unconventionality and an escapism that make the waltz an appropriate choice for him. Unlike the more decorous minuet or the extended and winding country-dance, the waltz permits very little exchange of conversation between partners. While Orville and Evelina, and Darcy and Elizabeth maintain at least a fiction of social interchange as they dance together, Frank and Emma are joined in close physical proximity--without talking about it.
In fact, Frank's waltz must have seemed somewhat unorthodox. According to Frances Rust, the waltz had first been introduced at Almack's in 1812, probably by some aristocrats who had caught on to the European craze for the dance. But the dance, with its closely held partnering position, scandalized Regency England. So great was the outcry against the dance that The Times protested its indecency and Lord Byron--no prude himself--wrote a satirical poem about its indelicacies. Byron, under the pseudonym Horace Hornem, alludes to the loose morality which is suggested by the "Seductive Waltz,"
Waltz--Waltz alone--both legs and arms demand,Rust goes on to say, however, that on July 12, 1816, when the waltz was included in a ball given by the Prince Regent, the Royal Family appeared to sanction the dance officially, and from that point on, the shocking waltz had to be admitted to polite circles. Since Emma was not published until 1816--the same year the waltz apparently received its stamp of Royal approval--Frank, in introducing the dance at the Coles's, must have seemed quite in advance of the social circles in rural Highbury.
Liberal of feet, and lavish of her hands;
Hands which may freely range in public sight
Where ne'er before--but--pray "put out the light." (113-116)
The waltz reflected a social organization and a time period dramatically different from that which had produced the minuet in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Katz points out, the ballroom minuet was executed with strict adherence to the rules of social status. While the actual dance steps of the minuet were relatively uniform, the progression of the dance was always based on the intricacies of rank and precedence. Great care needed to be exercised, for instance, to determine who should open the minuet, what should be its order of hierarchy, and who should close it. "Not so the waltz," writes Katz, since it
emphasized not uniformity, but individual expression; there are no rules to be studied, save for a few basic steps; the individual is encouraged to introduce his own variations and interpretations. Here, the dancers surrender their wordly identities upon entering the "society of the dance" where individuals take on new rules and where recognition is accorded not by virtue of one's performance in the dance. (524)Frank does not play by the rules. He comes and goes from Highbury and environs as if by whim and, at times, one must question his devotion to both birth and adoptive families. When his betrothal to Jane Fairfax is finally revealed, the extent of his prior secrecy and doubletalk becomes apparent. How right it is, then, that Frank should engage Emma in a waltz, which, as Daniel Pool has written, is a dance which is far more "socially isolating" than either the minuet or the country dance. In the post-revolutionary world which the waltz evoked, the individual, says Katz, "became an object of importance and interest to himself at the expense of his commitment to other social roles" (528). Frank's cruel "joke" in not acknowledging his ties to Jane and in overtly flirting with Emma clearly demonstrate that his social commitments are sacrificed to his "individuality."
Emma, though, is not passive in the flirtation, and when Frank invites her to dance she is not averse to what Katz calls the "'escape' from reality," which the waltz affords. She is willing to engage in the "thrilling dizziness of whirling [her] way in a private world of sensuality,"(528) though she is sufficiently aware of spectators to recognize that she and Frank made a "couple worth looking at" (238). Part of the problem is that for both these dancers, charm and energy can--at least temporarily--hide a multitude of sins.
In spite of herself, however, Emma learns by fits and starts, that it is Mr. Knightley--not her partner, Frank Churchill--who most engages her interest at each dancing opportunity. The self-consciousness she exhibits in her waltz with Frank is a clue that he is not at the center of her attention. The night of the Crown ball, as the dance set formed, the one truly disturbing feature, for Emma, was that Mr. Knightley did not dance:
She was more disturbed by Mr. Knightley's not dancing, than by any thing else.--There he was, among the standers-by, where he ought not to be; he ought to be dancing...so young as he looked!--He could not have appeared to greater advantage perhaps any where, than where he had placed himself. His tall, firm, upright figure, among the bulky forms and stooping shoulders of the elderly men, was such as Emma felt must draw every body's eyes; and, excepting her own partner, there was not one among the whole row of young men who could be compared with him.--He moved a few steps nearer, and those few steps were enough to prove in how gentlemanlike a manner, with what natural grace, he must have danced, would he but take the trouble....She wished he could love a ballroom better. (343)Mr. Knightley's refusal to dance irritates Emma, but as the narrator communicates, this does not prevent her from taking more than a fleeting notice of his youthful good looks. Emma is physically drawn to Mr. Knightley: she assumes that as he is, from her viewpoint, the central figure at the ball, so must he be in the eyes of all the others. She is also aware that Mr. Knightley "seemed often observing her," a recognition which suggests that she rendered a less-than-whole-hearted attention to her dance partner, Frank.
Knightley's physique is not the only thing that draws and keeps Emma's attention focused on him. When Mr. Elton callously rejects Harriet Smith as his dance partner, Emma "never had...been more surprised, seldom more delighted" than she was in seeing Mr. Knightley nobly escort Harriet into the dance. Emma is delighted at this evidence of his dignity and compassion and she longs "to be thanking him; and though too distant for speech, her countenance said as much, as soon as she could catch his eye again." Much as she suspected, "his dancing proved to be just what she had believed it, extremely good" (325). And, as is only possible between those who share an intimacy, Mr. Knightley and Emma exchange non-verbal messages.
No promptings from the narrator are required to reveal to us that Emma and Mr. Knightley, who are not dancing together, remain intensely conscious of one another. And the climax to the ball comes, of course, when Emma offers herself to Mr. Knightley as the most suitable partner to share both his life and the dance:
I am ready," said Emma, "whenever I am wanted."The central "truth" of the novel might be buried in Mr. Knightley's response to Emma's invitation that he attend and enjoy the Crown ball: "Pleasure in seeing dancing!--not I, indeed," he says, "I never look at it--I do not know who does." And he continues, uttering a small point of wisdom: "Fine dancing, I belive, like virtue, must be its own reward. Those who are standing by are usually thinking of something very different" (262).
"Whom are you going to dance with?" asked Mr. Knightley.
She hesitated a moment, and then replied, "With you, if you will ask me."
"Will you?" said he, offering his hand.
"Indeed I will. You have shown that you can dance, and you know we are not really so much brother and sister as to make it at all improper."
"Brother and sister! no, indeed." (327-28)
According to the world view of eighteenth-century writers like dancing-master Gennaro Magri or poet Soame Jenyns, dancing is an activity which involves the spectator almost as much as it does the participant. The minuet, and even the eighteenth-century country dance, ideally are spectacles of harmony: they are pleasing to dance and to watch because they are structured, because they are ordered according to notions of symmetry and balance. They function by virtue of rules which dancing-masters establish and notate, and which dancers learn. In the nineteeth century, however, the new dance comes to reflect a shift in the dynamics between the individual and the old rules of propriety, for Austen introduces us to a collection of individuals whose "truths" do not always concur. If the men and women of Austen's ballrooms are held together in a social compact which has a firm moral center, that center is not always immediately apparent, and there is room in that social compact for variations in interpretation.
In particular, the main stumbing block in Emma's advancement toward maturity (and marriage) seems to be her unwillingness to admit the validity of others' perspectives; Emma's world takes on the colors of her own imaginative powers. And, if, as Mr. Knightley claims, only those who are dancing can truly take pleasure in the dance, so it goes that only the individual can truly experience his or her own internal landscape. As non-dancers standing outside the dance, we stand outside of the lives of others, and are powerless to create or shape others' lives and opinions; other people and other points of views remain external to us and external to our imaginings. Emma has difficulty in accepting the idea that others inhabit different worlds, that she cannot, in some ways, supervise or choreograph the private dances of others. Susan Morgan has written: "Truth, in this novel, is that individuals have an inner life apart from other people's wishes for them, an inner life that cannot immediately be experienced by someone else but must be honored nonetheless" (Charms 79). Because we cannot experience another person's dance--another person's inner reality--so we must, to continue in Morgan's words, discover "the powers of sympathy and imagination," and we must also find out "how these powers can find their proper objects in the world outside the mind" (79).
Much changed over the course of the eighteenth century in the English ballrooms. Much altered too, within the range of English perceptions about dance. While early post-Restoration writers like Defoe pictured dance as an emblem of luxury and decadence, for Wycherley, skill in dance was part of the assumed equipment of a courtly gentleman or of a lady of upper class. Throughout the eighteenth century, however, dance served to measure and indicate the relative class status of others. People long assumed that dance leads to, under the most prurient circumstances, illicit sexuality, and at the best, to matrimony and social opportunity. Novelist Laurence Sterne, and at times, poet Soame Jenyns, demonstrate that they share Austen's sense of the joy achievable in the dance. In his chapter entitled "The Grace," from the 1768 A Sentimental Journey, Sterne pictures an old peasant who, along with his family, dances each night after supper in order to "rejoice," believing, says the peasant that "a chearful and contented mind [is] the best sort of thanks to heaven that an illiterate peasant could pay" (57).
Dance represents a trauma for Burney. For Austen, however, the dance floor is an arena in which men and women approach each other on virtually equal terms. Here they deduce the "truths" of class, compatability, and moral virtue of their respective partners. And, more often than not, Austen's heroines begin to learn, first in the ballrooms, that "seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure" (Emma 418).
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