to several characters in Emma: Austen’s heroine herself, Harriet, Jane, even Frank. I want to focus on how her responses to other characters also connect her to her fictional sisters in Emma. Retelling her story to Madame La Motte, Adeline admits to being ‘lost in a labyrinth of conjecture’ about the behaviour of the men imprisoning her. Later, when she is warned by her admirer Theodore La Luc about the conspiracy between her libidinous (and therefore accidentally quasi-incestuous) uncle and the La Mottes, she again admits to being unable ‘to extricate herself from the labyrinth of conjecture’. This suggestive phrase characterises not only Adeline’s attempts to explain the mysterious actions of the man she thinks of as her father; her actual but mutually unrecognised uncle; protectors and friends, but also the stories other characters tell themselves about others. For example, Madame La Motte becomes jealous of Adeline, explaining her husband’s increasingly erratic behaviour – caused, in fact, because his impending penury led him to assault and rob the Marquis de Montalt, before he realised he was squatting in the Marquis’s abbey – by conjecturing that he is secretly conducting an affair with his ward. Madame deliberately offends Adeline at dinner, leading to the girl’s hurt and confused withdrawal and La Motte’s uncomprehending exasperation at his wife’s rudeness. These reactions simply feed her suspicions: ‘The behaviour of Adeline… she considered as a refined piece of art; and the indifference of La Motte as affected… [S]o ingenious was she ‘to twist the true cause the wrong way’. Radcliffe’s misquotation from Henry VI Part 2, ‘I am well acquainted with your manner of wrenching the true cause the false way’, alongside the other labyrinths of conjecture the characters in her Romance find themselves in, speak to the nature of Emma’s conjectures in Austen’s novel: muddling her unusual insightfulness with wilful wishful thinking.
manly rival to the weak, ailing, suffering Jane, Emma echoes the femme fatale figure from Gothic fiction, from Rosa Matilda in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, contrasted as she is with the victimised Antonia, to, more pertinently, the anti-heroine of Zofloya; or, the Moor by Charlotte Dacre, who wrote under the pseudonym Rosa Matilda. Victoria de Loredani, a spoilt daughter, whose mother absconds with a well-known adulterer, leaving her to dominate a weak-willed father, is described as the picture of health compared to her love rival, the pale, fragile, nervous Lilla. Over the course of Dacre’s novel, Victoria cons, poisons, and murders her way through life, helped by her loyal servant – actually the devil – Zofloya, who concludes the novel by claiming her immortal soul and casting her into hell. Austen strips the Gothic femme fatale of her histrionics in Emma – although, from a certain perspective, Frank’s equivocations resemble Zofloya’s – reformulating Gothic tropes in comic vein with her protagonist. Emma retains the autonomy, agency and acerbity of Lewis and Dacre’s femme fatales, without sharing either their demonic aspect or violent demise. Emma shifts its Gothic propensities to the margins of the text – poison drips in gossipy conjecture, murder becomes veiled character assassination, violence a tendency towards cruelty – harnessing its energies and freedoms elsewhere.