Jane Austen is a Conservative. That is not because she espouses Conservative ideology, as do Doestoevski and Tolstoy, nor as Thomas Mann endorsed Liberal ideology. It is not because she seems to have sided with the Conservative side in the Hastings trial or did not decry Sir Thomas Bertram in “Mansfield Park” for owning land in slave holding Jamaica. Rather, it is because she shares the complicated view of human nature and what we would now call the human condition that was also held by Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke just a generation before and was carried on a generation later by Thomas Carlyle and John Henry Newman. This line of thinkers and writers were opposed to the Enlightenment, as that was practiced by the French philosophes, as well as by such writers as Wordsworth and Shelley and Hazlitt in England, all of whom favored the ideas of universal human rights and the equality of man. Jane Austen saw those ideas as hopelessly superficial and expressions of the enthusiasm she identified with Methodism. Her Conservatism is not to be confused with present day Conservatism because it was still humanitarian and progressive in that Austen and other Conservatives were in favor of mitigating the conditions of the poor and modernizing agriculture. It is just that they thought the Enlightenment and Liberalism turned the mind and heart away from the complexities of life.
“Emma” clearly reflects that point of view. The novel has a clear and simple scheme to it, even though “Emma” is usually read as a character study of the heroine, how she matures over time to become worthy of the man, Mr. Knightly, who has been in love with her for years, however ambiguous it may be as to when he discovers his own passion. By that reading, the job of matchmaker which Emma appropriates as her own is just an excuse to help move a comedy of character along. But, instead, read the novel more directly to be about what it claims to be about, which is how Emma is indeed the matchmaker, an important role in a society where eligible people are few and far between and a little bit of nudging would certainly seem helpful. So judge Emma by her matchmaking skills.
The first two matches she arranges are between Mr. Knightly’s brother and her own sister and between her governess and a local gentleman, both of them beyond their prime. Mr. Knightly makes light of Emma’s role in all of this. She had noticed what was going on anyway and so had no reason to think she had caused it, which is a nice philosophical distinction between description and causation. It is, however, just the kind of fudging that now ubiquitous dating services engage in, they playing the role of modern matchmakers. Their questionnaires find similar characteristics between applicants and match those who have affinities, which is what Emma is doing in these two cases, the difference being that dating services provide for affinities between a host of people who don’t know one another and so can take some responsibility for connecting up this particular male with this particular female, even if sooner or later the applicants would probably have matched up with someone who shared their social background and other personality characteristics. Emma just sees her powers of observation as showing what people should marry when she is just noticing the obvious, she treating that as a talent because she has very few talents other than gossip because she is not particularly interested in books or other forms of culture.
Emma moves beyond obvious pairings when she introduces Harriet Smith, who attends the local school as an orphan, to the local preacher, Mr. Elton, thinking that such a match would be more appropriate than one with a local farmer, to whom Emma is condescending. Here Emma abandons the matchmaker role as one of finding similarities to imposing relationships on social unequals, which is something Jane Austen thinks is always problematic. Here Austen is decidedly very different from the novelists of the previous century and later in the Nineteenth Century, where a poor girl marrying up is considered an intriguing and satisfying possibility and outcome. Austen, to the contrary, thinks that marriage between unequals, such as the one beyond good sense between Darcy and Elizabeth in “Pride and Prejudice” is bound to produce problems. Austen’s profoundly Conservative view is that it is just inhumane to foist members of one class upon members of another. It is to neglect difficulties and violate the principle that people ought by right associate with people with whom they feel comfortable, not having to make excuses or allowances for them. That was the view William F. Buckley took towards integrating the races in the Fifties. It is not that Black people were not worthy of respect, but that respect meant respecting their differences and giving them their own space, which was in defiance of the Liberal idea that formal equality would necessarily require and so result in the mingling of the races in the workplace and in social settings and eventually even in miscegenation.
Now, it might seem that history has vindicated the Liberal view, what with Blacks in boardrooms and one in the White House and miscegenation no longer an issue. But Conservatives cling to the idea that there remain profound racial differences as that is measured by low Black test scores and low Black wealth. What accounts for that? Liberals look to circumstances while Conservatives look to the character of an ethnic group. Character, to them, counts more than opportunity. For Jane Austen, the character of the social classes are sufficiently fixed that one risks great moral wrong by challenging it.
Part of this Conservative mind set that makes it feel itself to be liberated is that Jane does not disapprove of the farmer who proposes to Harriet Smith even if Emma does disapprove of that match. To the contrary, Austen presents him as an industrious fellow who wants to better himself, though she gives little if any consideration to the disheveled who do not seem present in the towns and villages she describes. There is nothing wrong with being a striver so long as you don’t push yourself too hard into higher ranks of society. This is perhaps why, today, Conservatives are so taken with the notion of the independent farmer who wishes to be free of government interference however much such fellows, today, are dependant on farm subsidies of one sort or another.
A good question is why Mr. Knightly waits for Emma to grow up so that he can husband her with the fatherly wisdom she needs but cannot get from her own father, with whom she is in a codependent relationship, the two of them fussing about one another rather than dealing with more important things. Knightly sees clearly that Emma is a busybody with a weak appreciation of human character who nevertheless means well and is strong willed even if her nascent feminism is an excuse so that she herself can avoid having to deal with men. The reason may be that the heart has its reasons, a recognition that goes back to that original Conservative, Blaise Pascal, and so Knightly’s relation to Emma needs either no explaining or no sufficient explanation. That is the way it is with romance. Also, Emma needs a tryout of her very lately found romantic feelings. She is briefly interested in Frank Churchill, something that would go further in our time, Frank serving as what nowadays would be called her “first boyfriend”. That would have prepared her to deal in a more mature way with Mr. Knightly.
It may also be that Knightly is himself backward with women and so prefers to deal with Emma in the easier manner that befits friends who can therefore tease and challenge one another rather than in the delicacies by which courtship is conducted. It may also be that Knightly, having known her all his life, will find it easier to love someone with whom he is so familiar, just as it is easier for Fanny Price to find her sort of step brother Edmund the more appealing catch in “Mansfield Park”, though those two also share a similarity of character, in that both are silent and remote, while Knightly is gallant and cordial while his love is much more forward and liable to have her tongue get her into trouble, a tendency she comes to learn to discipline, though not too much, and Knightly admits to liking intrusive and garrulous women long before he finally gets around to proposing.
It might be said that Emma means well, even if she is not always wise, but that would be contrary to the sturdy and lasting Conservative sentiment that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and so we must beware most of the well meaning who do not understand the complexities of life. That is the sentiment of those who believe that big government intrudes in the life of citizens out of good intentions and winds up making people miserable, however that may be contrary to what happens in real life, where government is a boon to those on Social Security and who eat inspected meat and where it is the lack of regulation that leads to airline disasters and where the lack of regulation of social media leads to inflammatory fake news rather than to help in informing the citizenry of what is going on in social and political life. The Conservative sentiment not to trust meddlars long outlives its usefulness even though there are, of course, occasions when social engineering went awry, as happened when building too many dams and levees led to more flooding along the Mississippi. Planners think you have to be very careful in your calculations while Conservatives are skeptical of all social planning, just treating successful planning as something to be taken for granted, so Trump supporters claimed they didn’t want the government to take away their Medicare when it was the government that created the program in the first place three generations ago. The Conservative sentiment runs very deep and goes back to the Seventeenth Century. It is to be found in Leibniz and Malebranche and in the statism of Louis XVII, just as Liberalism, which traces its roots back to the Levellers and Spinoza, is to be found in the evolving British Constitution. We will probably see some permutations on one and the other of these two political philosophies for centuries to come.