Emma by Jane Austen Essay

Lionel trills essay on Emma begins with the starling observation that in the case of Jane Austen, the opinions which be held of her work argon al to the highest degree as evoke and al or so as strategic to speculate or so, as the work itself (47). The color is especially surprising in view of the essays origination as an introduction to the Riverside edition of Emma rather than take readers slap-up into the sassy, Trilling ponders the impossibility of approaching it in simple literary innocence, because of the aright feeling generated by the name Jane Austen.Al nigh half a ascorbic acid later, opinions of Austen have multiplied as fresh consequents have arisen to divert and assign subsequent generations of readers. Literature Review Austens skill in opus lies in her ability to describe the life of her characters and their surroundings in spacious detail she is able to write of the world in microcosm. It is a gambol of her elbow room that on that point atomic numb er 18 a few(prenominal) references to populate or events out of doors the village in which her stories are set. This speculates the lifestyle of the day when transport was arduous and communication limited.Austen frequently writes nearly marriage and, in particular, the position of women in marriage. Genteel women did non work and they rarely acquired their own money finished marriage or inheritance. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was expected that marriage was for life. Austens gentle and voidly style reflects the caller she often describes a society in which walking out for a minor shopping tour was a major highlight. Austen skillfully uses these events to explore the values of society in a satirical way. T here are a number of slipway in which Austen communicates with her audience.The majority of her work is written in third-person narrative, with the narrator eyesight the story from all perspectives. This is to a fault known as the omniscient n arrator. She also reveals her views through the intrusive narrator, or through her characters dialogue. At other measure her characters pull up stakes unintentionally condemn themselves through their own dialogue. It is in these situations particularly that the reader experiences some of the best Austens satire. The majority of dialogue in Emma comes from the fe male characters of the text, in particular Emma.This is an important feature of Jane Austens style as she is to a greater extent comfortable with the speech of women than men. The women are the chatterers, full or small talk, while some of the men, especially the hero, Mr Knightley, are people of few words and discuss more undecomposed matters. Modern readers may amaze m whatsoever an(prenominal) an(prenominal) of the attitudes and customs of Emma surprising or, at times, unbelievable. The bracing does, however, accurately reflect the nature of English society during the early nineteenth century. Although Austen refl ects the values of nineteenth-century. England, she does non always agree with these values.It is her depiction and evaluation of this society that presents us with the acute satire that is part of her charm and success. The Irony of Emma The Ameri canister critic Marvin Mudrick followed two Harding and Wilson in his views of Austen as a subversive writer. He argued that irony was her way of defense and discovery and, resembling Wilson he found intimation of homosexual desire in Emmas infatuation with Harriet. Mudrick suggests that Emma is an unpleasant heroine who is incapable of committing herself humanity. He contentiously argues that Emmas supposed reformation is the ultimate irony of a novel that is steeped in irony (Mudrick 181).The irony of Emma is multiple and ultimate aspect is that at that place is no happy ending. Emma observes Harriets beauty with far more love than anyone else, she was so busy in admiring chose soft blue eyes, in talking and listening, and formi ng all these schemes in the in- amid that the evening flew away at a very unusual rate. The irony of Emma is multiple and its ultimate aspect is that there is no happy ending, easy equilibrium, if we care to project confirmed exploiters like Emma and Churchill into the future of their marriages.The influential American critic Lionel Trilling gives a bragging(a) humanist reading of Emma which bears some resemblances to Leaviss example reflection, albeit in a more relaxed and urbane tone To prevent the possibility of controlling the in the flesh(predicate) life, of becoming acquainted with ourselves, of creating a fraternity of intelligent love this is thus to take for an extraordinary promise and to hold out a rare. Trilling sees the novel as a pastoral idyll to be considered by from the real world, with Mr. Woodhouse and lady friend Bates as Holy fools.But paradoxically, he argues that this most English of novels is touched by theme feeling. Emmas gravest demerit is to se parate Harriet Smith from Robert Martin, a mistake of nonhing less of national import. Some of Trinllings assumptions are distinctive of his age and order (liberal, well-to-do Manhattan intellectual life of the immediate post-war era) the extract begins with an assumption that many later twentieth-century critics would regard as cringingly sexist but his good astuteness and intelligence as a reader, together with his unbending commitment to the serious importance of literature shine through ( 31).The extraordinary thing about Emma is that she has a moralistic life as a man has a moral life. And she doesnt have it as a special instance, as an example of a new kind of woman, which is the way George Eliots Dorothea Brooke has her moral life, but quite as a matter of course, as a condition quality of her nature. Inevitably we are drawn to Emma. But ineluctably we hold her to be deeply at fault. Her self-love leads her to be a self-deceiver. She can be unkind. She is a dreadful s nob. Mark Schorer considers the novel by closely analyzing its verbal and linguistic patterns.He argues that Austens voice communication is steeped in metaphors drawn from commerce and property, and that she depicts a world of peculiarly literal values, which is ironically juxtaposed with her depiction of moral propriety. Austens moral realism is implicated with the adjustments made between material and moral values. Emma must drop in the social scale to rise in the moral scale. Schorers contention that Emma must be punished and low-toned has been condemned by later feminist critics as representative of the Girl world taught a lesson mode of Austenian criticism.(98) Jane Austens Emma, 1816, stands at the head of her achievements, and, even though she herself spoke of Emma as a heroine whom no one but me ordain much like, discriminating readers have thought the novel her greatest. Her business offices here are at their fullest, her control at its most certain. As with most of her novels, it has a triplex theme, but in no other has the structure been raised so skillfully upon it. No novel shows more clear Jane Austens power to take the moral measurement of the society with which she was concerned through the shake off of her characters.The author must, then, choose whether to purchase mystery at the expense of irony. The reliable narrator and the norms of Emma If mere intellectual clarity about Emma were the goal in this work, we should be forced to say that the manipulation of inner(a) views and the extensive commentary of the reliable Knightley are more than is necessary. But for upper limit intensity of the comedy and romance, even these are not enough. The author herself not necessarily the real Jane Austen but an implied author, represented in this book by a reliable narrator heightens the effects by directing our intellectual, moral, and wound up progress.But her most important role is to reinforce both aspects of the double vision that ope rates throughout the book our inside view of Emmas outlay and our objective view of her great faults. The real evils of Emmas situation were the power of having rather likewise much her own way, and a disposition to think a fiddling too well of herself these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her. Duckworths influential book sets Austen in her historical context.In his chapter Emma and the Dangers of Individualism, he aligns Emma with that other dangerous groundbreaker Frank Churchill. Duckworth employs binary oppositions of define Austens social values mercenary stability (represented by Mr Knightley) is contrasted with radical innovation (represented by Frank Churchill). The impart syntax of manners and morals is set against the concealment and opacity of games (79). With Churchills entrance, Emma is no longer the puppet-mistress of Hi ghbury but instead becomes a marionette in Churchills more subtle show. Churchills game-playing is not to be reject as venial.It is symptomatic of a world in which once given certitudes of conduct is giving way to shifting standards and subjective orderings. Marilyn Butler presents Austen as an anti-Jacobin novelist, a propagandist of conservative ideology. Butlers study showed how the exceedingly politicized decade of the 1790s saw a flood of novels (often by women) that were engaged in the post-revolutionary war of ideas. Butler sets Austens novels firmly in the camp of the anti-feminist, hidebound domestic novels of Mary Brunton and Jane West as opposed to those associated with reformist writers such(prenominal) as Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft.Accordingly to this argument, in Emma Austen shows her tasting for rationality and inherited moral systems over imagination and individual choice. Emma is brought to credit entry of her social duty (74). The darn to which the lan guage harmoniously relates is the categorizeic plot of the conservative novel. Essentially, a young protagonist is poised at the starting of life, with two missions to perform to survey society, distinguishing the legitimate values from the false and, in the light of this new knowledge of reality, to school what is selfish, immature, or watery in her.Where a heroine is concerned rather than a hero, the social range is inevitably narrower, though often the personal moral lessons appear compensatingly more acute. Nevertheless the heroines classic task, of choosing a husband, takes her out of any unduly narrow or solipsistic concern with her own happiness. What she is about includes a criticism of what values her class is to live by, the men as well as the women. The novel with a fallible heroine by its nature places more focus on the action than the novel with an exemplary heroine. But Emma is an exceptionally vigorous novel.The point is established first of all in the character of the heroine Emma is healthy, vigorous, and most aggressive. She is the real ruler of the household at Harfield in her domestic control condition she is unique among Jane Austens heroines. She is also the only one who is the natural maidenlike leader of her whole community. The final irony is that this most verbal of novels at last pronounces words themselves to be suspect. It has been called the first and one of the greatest of psychological novels. If so, it resembles no other, for its attitude to the workings of Emmas consciousness is steadily critical.Although so much of the action takes place in the inner life, the theme of the novel is skepticism about the qualities that make it up intuition, imagination, and original insight. Emma matures by submitting her imaginings to frequent sense, and to the evidence. Her intelligence is certainly not seen as a fault, but her disappointment to question it is Easily the most brilliant novel of the period, and one of the most bril liant of all English novels, it masters the subjective insights which help to make the nineteenth-century novel what it is, and denies them validity.Julia Prewitt Brown presents a compelling view of Highbury far from be static and hierarchical, it more closely resembles a road-map of people, a system of interdependence, a community of people all talking to one another change and changing one another a collection of relationships. Brown takes issue with the bolshy critic Arnold Kettle. For Brown, the novel is seen not from the perspective of frozen class division but from a perspective of living change. Miss Bates is singled out as a crucial member of society in that she links together all the disparate ranks.Social co-operations and community are vital for protecting vulnerable single women. To ensure the harmony of the community of Highbury, the life of the individual must be coordinated internally in advance it can function externally (88). Just as the structure of Emma is not causal, it is also not hierarchical. Were we to draw a picture of the novel, it would not, I believe, summate before the reader the ladder of social and moral being that graham Hough assigns. It would look more like a road map in which the cites and towns, joined together by countless highways and byroads, stood for people.As the image of a road map suggests, Highbury is a system of interdependence, a community of people all talking to one another, affecting, and changing one another a collection of relationships. Emma is seen as daughter, sister, sister-in-law, aunt, companion, intimate friend, new acquaintance, patroness, and bride. And each connection lets us see something new in her. Jane Nardin exmines the plight of the genteel, well-educated and accomplished heroine, whose major problem is that she has too much time on her hands.Emma interferes in the lives of others because she is bored, and has no outlet for her imagination. In contrast to Mr Knightley, who involves himse lf with those around him, Emma leads a life of closing off and even idleness. Marriage is Emmas salvation because as Knightleys wife, she will enter his life of activity and involvement (22). Emma Woodhouse sees herself as the typical eighteenth-century heroine who uses her leisure to become an admirable, accomplished, exemplary woman, and who never suffers a moments tediousness for lack of something to do.She plays, she sings, she draws in a variety of styles, she is vain of her literary attainments and public information, she does not the honours of her fathers house with style, and confers charitable favours on a variety of recipients in her own eyes, in fact, she is a unquestionable Clarissa. But Emmas claims to Clarissahood are hollow. Blessed or cursed with money, status, a foolish father and a pliant, though intelligent, governess, Emma has earned admiration too easily.A harsh view of Austens politics emerges from David Aers, who applies a Marxist analysis to Emma. Aust ens idealization of the agrarian, capitalist Mr Knightley nad her dismissive preaching of the disenfranchised, such as the poor, the gypsies, and even Jane Fairfax, typify her bourgeois ideology. Emmas visit to the poor in particular is viewed as an indication of Austens own capitalist values, though it should be remembered that Emmas views are not necessarily Jane Austens especially as her irony is so often directed against her heroine (36).Yet while Mr Knightley is certainly Jane Austens standard of male excellence (without being infallible), she does present him as an agrarian capitalist, not as some kind of pseudo-feudal magnate. He is prospering well, like his capitalist tenant, Robert Martin, and til now despite his relatively modest lifestyle we are told that he has little spare money.. As a Marxist, James Thompson believes that Ausens novels are time-bound and historical and enact the bourgeois ideology of the period.He analyses the complexities and contradictions between the language of (public) social obligation and the feeling of (private) individual interiority in Emma. The individuals sense of alienation in capitalist society turns indoors for true authenticity. Thompson focuses on Austens treatment of marriage in Emma, as a union promising true intimacy against the threat of bareness and solipsism (159). In contrast to Gilbert and Gubar, Claudia Johnson shows how Austen corroborates her faith in the fitness of Emmas rule.By inviting us to consider the contrast between the rule of Emma and that of Mrs Elton. Austen is able to explore positive versions of female power Considering the contrast between Emma and Mrs Elton can enable us to distinguish the use of social position from the shout of it. The novel concludes not with an endorsement of patriarchy, but with a marriage between equals. Furthermore, this is shown in the extraordinary ending which sees Knightley giving up his own home base to share Emmas and thus giving his blessing to her r ule(43).In stunning contrast with Mansfield Park, where husbands dominate their households with as little judiciousness as decency, in Emma woman does reign alone. Indeed, with the exception of Knightley, all of the people in control are women. In moving to Hartfield, Knightley is sharing her home, and in placing himself within her domain, Knightley gives his blessing to her rule. Jane Austen has been seen as a novelist who avoids the physical. John Wiltshire shows the importance of bodies in her text, and Austens emphasis on health and illness in Emma.Wiltshire draws upon medical and feminist theories of the body (54-56). Through its comfortable concern with its denizens well-being, the novel poses series of important questions, I suggest, about the nature of health, which are put more insistently through its gallery of sufferers from so-called nervous disorders, Not only does Isabella Knightley, as might be expected, complain of those little nervous head-aches and palpitations whi ch I am never entirely free from any where, but even serene Harrier, even Mrs Weston, let alone Jane Fairfax, suffer from, or complain of these symptoms called jumpiness.But the two grand embodiments of the nervous constitution in Emma are Mr Woodhouse and Mrs Churchill and they preside, one way or another, over the novels action.