August
August in Jane Austen's Emma is the month of culmination, the season in which the novel's long-sustained misunderstandings, secret engagements, and misdirected affections are finally resolved. It is during this month that Mr. Knightley and Emma Woodhouse confess their love, that Harriet Smith's parentage is revealed, and that the futures of all three central couples are secured. The month transforms the social landscape of Highbury, bringing clarity to relationships that had been obscured by pride, vanity, and self-deception throughout the preceding spring and summer.
August as the Season of Resolution
The narrative's decisive turn toward resolution occurs in August. It is the month in which Mr. Knightley, having returned from London after learning of Frank Churchill's engagement to Jane Fairfax, walks with Emma in the Hartfield shrubbery and, in a scene of extraordinary emotional intensity, declares his love. The conversation that begins with Mr. Knightley's mistaken assumption that Emma is heartbroken over Frank Churchill ends with the revelation that she has never loved anyone but him. "Emma, I must tell you what you will not ask," he says, and within half an hour both have passed "from a thoroughly distressed state of mind, to something so like perfect happiness, that it could bear no other name." This August afternoon undoes the elaborate structure of error that has governed the novel's plot.
Harriet Smith's True Parentage and Marriage
August also brings the disclosure of Harriet Smith's origins. She proves to be "the daughter of a tradesman, rich enough to afford her the comfortable maintenance which had ever been hers, and decent enough to have always wished for concealment." The revelation is a sharp rebuke to Emma's earlier confident assertions that Harriet must be a gentleman's daughter—assertions that had justified Emma's ambitious matchmaking schemes. The stain of illegitimacy, Emma now recognizes, "unbleached by nobility or wealth, would have been a stain indeed" had she succeeded in her plans for Harriet to marry Mr. Knightley or Frank Churchill. Instead, Harriet's marriage to Robert Martin, which takes place before the end of September, is presented as the truly fortunate outcome. Emma attends the wedding and sees "her hand bestowed on Robert Martin with so complete a satisfaction, as no remembrances, even connected with Mr. Elton as he stood before them, could impair."
The Consolidation of the Three Couples
By August, all three couples are firmly established. Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax, their secret engagement now public and sanctioned by Mr. Churchill, are waiting only for November to marry. Jane has already left Highbury to rejoin the Campbells, restored to "the comforts of her beloved home." Emma and Mr. Knightley fix their own wedding for the intermediate month, planning a fortnight's tour to the seaside while John and Isabella Knightley are still at Hartfield. The only obstacle is Mr. Woodhouse, whose distress at the prospect of change is so acute that Emma's courage nearly fails. But a poultry-house robbery—Mrs. Weston's turkeys are stolen—so frightens Mr. Woodhouse that he comes to depend on the protection of the Mr. Knightleys, and this fear finally induces him to give "a much more voluntary, cheerful consent than his daughter had ever presumed to hope for."
The Wedding and Its Aftermath
The wedding of Mr. Knightley and Emma Woodhouse takes place within a month of Harriet and Robert Martin's marriage, with Mr. Elton officiating. Mrs. Elton, learning the details from her husband, pronounces the ceremony "extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own"—a judgment that only underscores the genuine happiness of the union. The novel closes with the observation that "the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union." August, then, is the month in which the novel's moral and emotional accounts are settled, and the season of error gives way to the season of truth.
