"I Am Not Helpless": Miss Bates as the Hidden Queen of Highbury

Within the space marked by the ellipses in the quotation above, those gathered at the Woodhouses' are regaled with seemingly every thought going through Miss Bates's head: we hear of her bonnet and spencer, of her needing to speak to Patty about the hindquarter of the suckling pig that the Woodhouses have sent, of Jane's offer to talk to Patty instead, of the Cole note arriving, then a profusion of thanks to the Woodhouses for the gift of the pork. In creating Miss Bates as an intelligent character beneath a silly façade, Austen points both to the way older single women in her society were stereotyped and dismissed and to the stratagems an older woman of limited means might adopt to survive. In volume 1 of the novel, Austen tries to educate us to distrust Emma's narrative voice by demonstrating, in obvious ways, Emma's misinterpretation of Mr. Elton's courtship aims. Because we as readers know that Mr. Elton is not interested in Emma's new friend, the illegitimate and dowerless Harriet Smith, the comedy-and anxiety-in volume 1 arises from Emma's blindness to what is really going on. To see this dimension of Miss Bates, however, means revisioning how to read this novel, employing a perspective that continually frames Emma not as a reliable source of information but as an obstacle to what is hiding in plain sight.