Beyond the Romantic Gypsy: Narrative Disruptions and Ironies in Austen's Emma

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2008 by White, Laura Mooneyham

But Mr. Knightley has a reason ultimately to be grateful to the gypsies. At the very end of the novel, it is unclear how Emma and Mr. Knightley are to wed, given Mr. Woodhouse's objection to any change in his or his daughter's life. But poultry-thieves come into the neighborhood, and Mr. Woodhouse with his fear of "housebreakers" is glad to have a strong son-in-law in the house; thus Mr. Knightley and Emma can marry. Austen does not identify the poultry-diieves directly with the gypsies, though she calls the turkey thefts "pilfering" conducted "by the ingenuity of man" (483).21 I have always preferred to believe, however, that the gypsies came back for a spell to Highbury, to make the happy ending possible, just as fairies return at the end of Act V in A Midsummer Night's Dream (a play the novel references at another point) to give their blessing to the multiple nuptial beds of Theseus's household.22 The gypsies have done so much for the plot already that their presence here as the last instigators of a comic ending seems appropriate.

In teaching Emma, I have often found that students initially judge the gypsy episode as an improbable and clumsy exercise of narrative intervention. Ultimately, it becomes apparent that the gypsies' intervention in Emma is much more than a device by which the world of the romance intrudes upon Highbury, but rather a concise critique and refiguring of the romantic tradition of the gypsy narrative as a whole. Though they inhabit the shady verges of the novel, by implication the gypsies tell us much about the central characters, themes, and issues of the novel, underscoring the dangers inherent in marginality and in romantic imagination. Theirpresence and their warnings linger even after they have roamed on.

1 We most remember Eliot's gypsies from this episode in The MUl in the Floss, but gypsies were also the subject of one of her most popular poems in her lifetime, now rarely read, "The Spanish Gypsy" (1868).

2 Accounts from Grellmann, Hoyland, Borrow, and others all stressed the gypsy's racial apartness, including the strong gypsy disinclination for marriage outside the clan. One member of a clan of "very well known Gypsies in Shropshire" explains that "the most dreaded thing of all Romany parents is that a son or daughter may prostra y frew romeo du gorgio-run away and marry a house dweller" (Locke 19). Darwin assumed that gypsies never intermarry when he argued in his The Descent of Man (1871) that the gypsies stand as evidence to refute the idea that skin color follows from climate:

Of all the differences between the races of man, the colour of the skin is the most conspicuous and one of the best marked. Differences of this kind, it was formerly thought, could be accounted for by long exposure under different climates [. . .]. The view has been rejected chiefly because the distribution of the variously coloured races, most of whom must have long inhabited dieir present homes, does not coincide with corresponding differences of climate. [. . .] The uniform appearance in various parts of the world of gypsies and Jews, though the uniformity of the latter has been somewhat exaggerated, is likewise an argument on the same side. (242)