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Nothing much
happens in Jane Austen’s Emma. This novel contains no seductions
or elopements, no putrid fevers, no diverting journeys to Bath or Portsmouth—not
so much as a sprained ankle or a fall from the Cobb. “Of very important,
very recordable events” this novel, like the ball at the Crown (Emma 326), has few, yet from its first
publication, readers have found it compelling. “It wants incident and
romance, does it not,” worried publisher John Murray when he asked Scott to
review it for the Quarterly Review in
1815 (Smiles 1.8), but Scott, who understood exactly what Austen was doing,
disagreed. Emma, he claimed,
was one of the new style of novels that managed to interest and amuse readers
without resorting to “a wild variety of incident,” although, he conceded, “there
are cross purposes enough (were the novel of a more romantic cast) for cutting
half the men’s throats and breaking all the women’s hearts” (Southam 67).
Contemporary Scottish novelist Susan Ferrier also felt that in the “excellent” Emma “there is no story whatsoever . . . ;
but the characters are all so true to life, and the style so piquant, that it
does not require the adventitious aids of mystery and adventure” (Southam 15).
These readers recognized that Austen was redefining what a fictional “event”
might be, and the first reader to learn that lesson is Emma herself, for Emma
Woodhouse, the heroine malgré elle of
her eponymous novel, cannot read her own story accurately until she learns to
recognize the truly significant events of her life. Emma experiences two kinds of events in Emma: the ordinary, everyday
happenings in Highbury that make up the action of Austen’s novel, and those
more novel-worthy events that exist only in her imagination. On the
whole, Emma is a shrewd observer of Highbury life: she sees, understands,
and appreciates most of what goes on, as her survey of village life from the
doorway of Ford’s reveals: Emma went to the door for amusement . . . ;
and when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman
travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over
a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little
bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and
was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively
and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not
answer. (233) Like
Austen herself, Emma does “not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until
there is some real opportunity for it” (21-23 January 1799); she is “amused
enough” by this humble scene without transforming the butcher, the old woman,
the children, and the dogs into characters in an improbable romance, or
expecting them to “answer” her own fictions. Similarly, as the narrator tells us in a
passage that restores Emma to our affections after she has been particularly
outrageous: Emma was very compassionate; and the
distresses of the poor were as sure of relief from her personal attention and
kindness, her counsel and her patience, as from her purse. She understood
their ways, could allow for their ignorance and their temptations, had no romantic expectations of extraordinary
virtue from those, for whom education had done so little; entered into
their troubles with ready sympathy, and always gave her assistance with as much
intelligence as good-will. (86, my emphasis) Clearly
Emma does not expect the humble people of Highbury to act like characters in a
sentimental novel, nor does she invent stories about them. As Moler
notes, “In the manner of romance, the prosaic and the vulgar elements of
Highbury are carefully excluded from Emma’s history” (176). Sometimes, however, Emma fails to see “events”
that careful readers, or enlightened re-readers, might infer.1
For example, when Miss Bates steps into Ford’s to solicit Emma’s approval of
Jane’s new piano, careful readers may conclude from details embedded in her
lengthy speech that Frank Churchill has stayed behind with Jane and the deaf,
dozing Mrs. Bates not, as he claims, in order to fix the rivet in the old lady’s
spectacles, but in order to speak to Jane in what amounts to privacy (236).
A few minutes later, when Miss Bates ushers Emma into “the little sitting-room,”
the “appearance . . . was tranquillity itself; Mrs. Bates, deprived
of her usual employment, slumbering on one side of the fire, Frank Churchill,
at a table near her, most deedily occupied about her spectacles, and Jane
Fairfax, standing with her back to them, intent on her pianoforté” (240).
While canny readers may imagine that an intensely emotional scene between Frank
and Jane has just ended, Austen neither describes nor dramatizes such a scene.
Emma, who notices that Jane is flustered, attributes her visible emotion to the
new piano, not to Frank’s presence. In fact, Emma sees all the clues but
misreads them because she has already created her fictional paradigm based on a
more conventional idea of novel-worthy events than Austen’s. Since Emma’s idea of what constitutes an “event”
is colored by conventional sentimental fiction, critics have long associated
her with Arabella, the heroine of Lennox’s The
Female Quixote (1752), and Cherry Wilkinson (aka “Cherubina”), the heroine
of Barrett’s The Heroine
(1813). Yet despite superficial similarities—they are all attractive,
intelligent, motherless girls devoted to their retired, elderly fathers, and
courted by sensible gentlemen—Emma differs significantly from these quixotic
heroines who, deluded by their naïve reading, fancy themselves romance
heroines.2 Had
Arabella or Cherry been standing in front of Ford’s, she would have assumed
that the butcher was really a highborn suitor in disguise, or that the old
woman was plotting an abduction. Cherry, moreover, deplores her possession of
the very advantages that feed Emma’s complacency: “I am doomed to endure
the security of a home, and the dullness of an unimpeached reputation.
For me, is no hope whatever of being reduced to despair. I am condemned
to waste my health, bloom, and youth, in a series of uninterrupted prosperity”
(Barrett 1.2). Certainly these quixotic heroines view themselves as . . .
, well, heroines: the central
characters in whatever plot is on the boil. Emma, in contrast, would
rather be an author, or authority,
creating scenes and characters through her talent for invention and mimicry,
than be a mere subject heroine. Arabella “had a most happy Facility in
accommodating every Incident to her Own Wishes and Conception . . .”
(25), interpreting events according to the template of old-fashioned French
romances, casting herself as heroine, and treating those romances as
conduct-books. Emma, in contrast, incorporates everyday events into
sentimental fictions of her own making, turning other characters into heroines.
Based on their appearances and circumstances, she sees more romantic potential
in Harriet Smith or Jane Fairfax than in herself. Even before meeting
Harriet, Emma “had long felt an interest in [her], on account of her beauty”
(22). Once they are introduced, Emma finds Harriet “a very pretty girl,
and her beauty happened to be of a sort which Emma particularly admired.
She was short, plump and fair, with a fine bloom, blue eyes, light hair,
regular features, and a look of great sweetness” (23). Emma concludes, “Encouragement
should be given. . . . She would
notice her; she would improve her . . .” (23). In a
subsequent clause, Austen clarifies what Emma means by “improvement”: “she would form her opinions and her
manners” (23-24, my emphasis). Harriet thus provides a blank canvas for
Emma’s creative imagination. Foremost on Emma’s agenda is to help
Harriet discover her mysterious parentage, the plot engine of many a novel, but
since Harriet knows nothing about her parents, “Emma was obliged to fancy what
she liked” (27). We quickly learn what Emma fancies: “‘There can be
no doubt of your being a gentleman’s daughter,’” she tells Harriet (30).
Emma repeatedly reinforces her faulty inferences with variations on the phrase,
“there can be no doubt,” as, for example, to Mr. Knightley about Harriet’s
status: “‘There can scarcely be a doubt that her father is . . .
a gentleman of fortune’” (62), and to Harriet, “‘There can be no doubt of [Mr.
Elton’s charade] being written for you and to you’” (73). In this respect
she does resemble Arabella in The Female
Quixote, who repeatedly prefaces her fantastic interpretations of people’s
behavior with the words “doubtless” and “questionless,” as in: “Doubtless
. . . he laughed, because his Reason was disturbed at the sudden
Shock he received” (15); or, “They will, questionless, soon force the Doors of
my Apartment” (94). Arabella and Cherry are clearly
delusional. Austen, however, implicates readers in Emma’s more plausible,
if doubtful, propositions: like Arabella’s, they are fictions, but they
could—just possibly—be true. So could the fanciful, sentimental picture
(even less accurate than her portrait of Harriet) that Emma sketches for
Harriet: “‘At this moment, perhaps, Mr. Elton is shewing your picture to
his mother and sisters, telling how much more beautiful is the original, and
after being asked for it five or six times, allowing them to hear your name, your
own dear name’” (56). Similarly, in Jane Fairfax’s qualities
and situation Emma perceives a potential heroine for the romance that she
constructs. Before Jane’s visit, when Miss Bates tells Emma that Jane
will not, after all, accompany the Dixons to Ireland, “an ingenious and
animating suspicion enter[s] Emma’s brain with regard to Jane Fairfax, this
charming Mr. Dixon, and the not going to Ireland” (160). Like Harriet’s
beauty, Jane’s appearance feeds the fancy: “Jane Fairfax was very
elegant, remarkably elegant; and she had herself the highest value for
elegance. . . . It was a style of beauty, of which elegance was the
reigning character, and as such, she must, in honour, by all her principles,
admire it” (167). Jane’s elegance is intensified for Emma by the
poignancy of her dependency, for when she considered what all this
elegance was destined to, what she was going to sink from, how she was going to
live, it seemed impossible to feel any thing but compassion and respect;
especially, if to every well-known particular entitling her to interest, were
added the highly probable circumstance
of an attachment to Mr. Dixon, which [Emma] had so naturally started to herself.
(167-68, my emphasis) The
orphaned Jane, like the nameless Harriet, looks
like a heroine and “interests” Emma by her social vulnerability, thus inspiring
Emma to segue from the probability to the certainty of Jane’s forbidden love
for Mr. Dixon. Emma’s inference is fortified by Jane’s reserve: “Her
caution was thrown away. Emma saw its artifice. . . . Mr. Dixon,
perhaps, had been very near changing one friend for the other, or been fixed
only to Miss Campbell, for the sake of the future twelve thousand pounds”
(169). Characteristically, Emma recognizes Jane’s
“artifice” but misreads the cause. The narrator conveys Emma’s thoughts
through free indirect discourse that burlesques sentimental novel diction: In that case [of Jane’s love for Mr.
Dixon], nothing could be more pitiable or more honourable than the sacrifices
she had resolved on. Emma was very willing now to acquit her of having
seduced Mr. Dixon’s affections from his wife, or of any thing mischievous which
her imagination had suggested at first. If it were love, it might be simple, single, successless love in her
side alone. She might have been unconsciously sucking in the sad
poison, while a sharer of his conversation with her friend; and from the best, the purest of motives,
might now be denying herself this visit to Ireland. . . .
(168, my emphasis) First-time
readers schooled in the diction and conventions of the contemporary novel
might, like Harriet, be seduced here by Emma’s faulty inferences, for, unlike the
narrators of Lennox and Barrett, whose readers are always kept at a critical
distance from their delusional heroines, Austen’s narrative voice invites
unwary readers to share Emma’s thought processes and judgments—in effect, to
read Emma’s novel instead of Austen’s. The narrator’s parodic tone,
however, should alert careful readers to question their assumptions about how
this novel’s plot will unfold. If Harriet—soft, blond, pliant, without
acknowledged family—is a clichéd heroine from an eighteenth-century novel, then
Jane—elegant, ardent, isolated and dependent—prefigures nineteenth-century
heroines. In contrast to these detailed portraits so brightly colored by
Emma’s imagination, readers learn about Emma’s appearance only through one of
Mr. Knightley and Mrs.Weston’s quarrels about Emma. In the novel that
Jane Austen writes, Mrs. Weston describes Emma’s most unheroine-like “‘bloom of
full health’” and “‘firm and upright
figure’” (39, my emphasis). This suggestion of tumescence
notwithstanding, “‘firm and upright’” provides little scope for pliancy or
romantic peril. Three hundred pages later, when Emma sees Mr. Knightley
among the old men at the Crown, “His tall, firm, upright figure . . . was such as Emma felt must
draw every body’s eyes” (326, my emphasis). Clearly these two firm,
upright characters are destined for one another—but not until Emma learns how
to read the novel that Austen wrote. At the beginning of the novel, Emma
Woodhouse, “handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy
disposition” and “very little to distress or vex her” (5), does not see herself
as a heroine at all. Her situation is not “interesting,” for she is
threatened neither by illegitimacy, poverty, nor undeserved disgrace. Her
only problem is complacency, hardly the stuff of novels. Moreover, she
eliminates herself from any possible courtship plot by declaring that she will
not marry, assuring Harriet that her romance-less future will be prosaically
occupied with housekeeping, reading, carpet-work, and visiting nieces and
nephews (84-85). Emma does, however, permit herself an
imaginary courtship by Frank Churchill, since even before they meet, “there was
something in the name, in the idea of Mr. Frank Churchill, which always
interested her. . . . She could not but suppose it to be a match that
every body who knew them must think of” (118-19). Tara Ghoshal Wallace,
responding to Austen’s description of Emma’s “sort of pleasure in the idea of
their being coupled in their friends’ imaginations” (119), points out that Emma
takes performative pleasure “in being
a text” to be read by her neighbors (Wallace 79), but I believe that Emma takes
an even greater pleasure in the opportunity Frank provides for creating texts. Emma invents Frank’s character before she
meets him: “‘My idea of him, is that he can adapt his conversation to the
taste of every body, and has the power as well as the wish of being universally
agreeable’” (150). Even after their apparent courtship, she cannot quite
persuade herself that she is seriously in love: “though thinking of him
so much, and, as she sat drawing or working, forming a thousand amusing schemes
for the progress and close of their attachment, fancying interesting dialogues,
and inventing elegant letters; the conclusion of every imaginary declaration on
his side was that she refused him”
(264). Emma is still waiting for something significant to happen to her:
“She felt as if the spring would not pass without bringing a crisis, an event,
a something to alter her present composed and tranquil state” (315).
Meanwhile, Frank’s visit offers an occasion for “fancying interesting dialogues”
and “inventing elegant letters.” Emma’s novelistic imagination is
stimulated by incidents like Mr. Dixon’s heroic rescue of Jane Fairfax at
Weymouth (160) or Frank’s rescue of Harriet from “gipsies” the day after the
ball at the Crown (333)—incidents that Emma identifies as “events.” This
last event Emma finds “very extraordinary”—the phrase is repeated twice—for it
promises “the most interesting consequences” (335): Such an adventure as this,—a fine young
man and a lovely young woman thrown together in such a way, could hardly fail
of suggesting certain ideas to the coldest heart and the steadiest brain.
So Emma thought, at least. Could a linguist, could a grammarian, could
even a mathematician have seen what she did, have witnessed their appearance
together, and heard their history of it, without feeling that circumstances had
been at work to make them peculiarly interesting to each other?—How much more must
an imaginist, like herself, be on fire with speculation and foresight!—especially
with such a ground-work of anticipation as her mind had already made. (334-35) Unwary
readers (even grammarians or mathematicians of cold heart and steady brain) who
share Emma’s conventional sense of what makes an event “significant” might well
find this “adventure” equally suggestive of romance. Emma is still thinking of this “very
extraordinary” event a few days later when she exclaims to Harriet, “‘The
service he rendered you was enough to warm your heart’” (342). Harriet,
with better taste than her patroness, associates the word “service” with Mr.
Knightley’s asking her to dance after Mr. Elton’s snub at the Crown Inn: “‘Service!
oh! it was such an inexpressible obligation!—The very recollection of it, and
all that I felt at the time—when I saw him coming—his noble look—and my
wretchedness before. Such a change! In one moment such a change!
From perfect misery to perfect happiness’” (342). Now, in the novel that Jane Austen
writes, Mr. Knightley’s chivalrous gesture is an act of knightly heroism, and
clearly Emma feels its worth: Of very important, very recordable
events, [the ball] was not more productive than such meetings usually are.
There was one, however, which Emma
thought something of. . . . Mr. Knightley leading Harriet to
the set!—Never had she been more surprised, seldom more delighted, than at that
instant. She was all pleasure and gratitude, both for Harriet and
herself, and longed to be thanking him . . . . (326, 328,
my emphasis) While
Emma finds this event intensely gratifying, however, it does not go into the
novel that she is imagining. She does not label Mr. Knightley’s generous
action as “very extraordinary,” nor does it suggest to her “certain ideas”
about the man and woman involved, nor cause her to feel “that circumstances had
been at work to make them peculiarly interesting to each other.” Thus it
never occurs to her that Harriet is alluding to Mr. Knightley when they discuss
that “service he rendered you.” As Juliet McMaster points out, this
semantic confusion is typical of how speeches in Emma convey multiple meanings for readers to decode (119). Of
course, even if Emma does not yet know it, she loves Mr. Knightley, which might
account in part for her inability to imagine him as Harriet’s lover, but surely
Emma’s semantic confusion over “service” here is also due to her vulgar notion
of what makes an event novel-worthy. Mr. Knightley’s gesture deeply
gratifies her, but only Frank’s “extraordinary” mock-heroic rescue of Harriet
the next day qualifies as an event in
her imagination. Because she focuses on Mr. Dixon’s
physical rescue of Jane and on Frank’s physical rescue of Harriet, Emma fails
to recognize the truly important events of the novel she is living. When
Mr. John Knightley, during his Christmas visit to Hartfield, comments on Emma’s
increased “‘visiting-engagements’” that have “‘made a great difference’” in
her way of life (311), Emma is astonished: “‘These amazing engagements of
mine—what have they been? Dining once with the Coles—and having a ball
talked of, which never took place’” (312). But of course, her
brother-in-law is correct: much has been going on—enough for Austen to
fill three hundred pages with significant events, most of them concerning Emma’s
feelings, thoughts and words. Those feelings, thoughts and words
provide the major events of Austen’s novel. By the time Mr. Knightley
proposes, Emma says, “Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does”
(431), but this lady has occasionally said things she ought not to say,
prompted by her fictionalizing imagination and her talent for mimicry.3
She catches Mr. Elton’s “‘Exactly so’” (49) and Isabella’s “‘Very true, my love’”
(113) and diverts good Mrs. Weston against her conscience by impersonating Miss
Bates thanking Mr. Knightley “for his great kindness in marrying Jane
. . . ‘So very kind and obliging!—But he always had been such a very
kind neighbour!’ And then fly off, through half a sentence, to her mother’s
old petticoat. ‘Not that it was such a very old petticoat either—for
still it would last a great while—and, indeed, she must thankfully say that
their petticoats were all very strong.’” (225) Like
Austen herself, Emma has a gift for burlesque. Jane Austen began her writing career by burlesquing the silliness of other people’s novels, and her early writing is filled with wildly improbable plot incidents that are not meant to be taken seriously; rather, they amplify the “extraordinary” plot incidents of contemporary novels and romances, as Scott, too, does in his review of Emma when he describes the hectic vicissitudes endured by a typical novel heroine even in the relatively realistic novels that immediately preceded Austen’s “new kind of novel”:
She was regularly exposed to being
forcibly carried off like a Sabine virgin by some frantic admirer. And
even if she escaped the terrors of masked ruffians, an insidious ravisher, a
cloak wrapped forcibly around her head, and a coach with the blinds up driving
she could not conjecture whither, she had still her share of wandering . . . ,
and of imprisonment, and was frequently extended upon a bed of sickness, and
reduced to her last shilling before the author condescended to shield her from
persecution. (Southam 60; see also Scott, Waverley 2) In
her novels, however, Austen inverts this amplifying strategy of the Juvenilia, instead scaling down
conventionally melodramatic incidents into events that are not only possible
but probable. Sexual seductions occur in her novels as they do in life,
but offstage and not to the heroine. Instead of wicked abductors
determined to carry off the heroine, she gives us John Thorpe carrying
Catherine Morland off to Blaise Castle in an open carriage. Instead of
forced seductions, her heroines face false suitors like Wickham and Henry
Crawford who are weak rather than determinedly wicked, and the false suitor
Frank Churchill has no sinister designs upon anyone’s virtue. In Emma, as Cronin and McMillan observe, “the
perilous journey shrinks to the seven miles that must be travelled to Boxhill
[sic], and . . . the chariot adventure too appears in a comically
shrunken form, as the journey of two miles from Randalls to Highbury” (li). The really significant events of Austen’s
novels are always interior. After Box Hill, where “Emma could not resist”
the temptation to be witty at Miss Bates’s expense (370), she learns
that a careless remark, like an offer to dance, can be an event of major
magnitude, and she begins to shift from creating clichéd romances for others to
being the heroine of the novel Jane Austen is writing.4 She
recognizes that those negligible “events” of the winter and spring have indeed
been “very important, very recordable”—although recorded by a much better
author than Emma. Her growth can be charted in her use of the word “ought.” For most of the novel, Emma compares
those around her to an implicit paradigm of her own creation, signaled by the
word “ought.” Thus when Mr. Elton returns Harriet’s portrait to Emma, he “sighed
out his half sentences of admiration just as he ought” (69), and Harriet, under
Emma’s prompting, “saw, felt, anticipated, and remembered just as she ought”
(74). Emma’s “ought” is very different from Fanny’s “ought” in Mansfield Park, which always implies a
correct moral standard by which she judges her own and other people’s behavior,
or Marianne’s at the end of Sense and
Sensibility when she compares her self-indulgent behavior “‘with what it
ought to have been’” (345). Emma does occasionally use “ought” to compare
behavior to a moral absolute; for example, in her conversation with Mrs. Weston
about Frank Churchill’s postponed visit: “‘He ought to come,’ said Emma.
‘If he could stay only a couple of days, he ought to come’” (122), even though
she perversely argues the contrary with Mr. Knightley shortly afterward (145-48).
Following Mr. Knightley’s rebuke on Box Hill, however, Emma consistently uses “ought”
as a good Austen heroine ought to—as a measure of rectitude, not of conformity
to her imagination.5 Significantly, Mr. Knightley’s opinions
define Emma’s new “ought.” Thus, fearing that Mr. Knightley might indeed
marry Harriet, she thinks: “Oh! had she never brought Harriet forward!
Had she left her where she ought, and where [Mr. Knightley] had told her she
ought!” (413). For Emma, Donwell Abbey (and by implication its master) “was
just what it ought to be, and it looked what it was” (358). Unlike Mrs.
Elton, Emma has no desire to cheapen Donwell with fanciful donkeys and
beribboned baskets; she respects its quirky authenticity without needing to
romanticize or augment it. On the
contrary, Emma does not want Mr. Knightley subject to fictionalizing and
matchmaking, and she is horrified when Mrs. Weston suggests that he might marry
Jane Fairfax (224). His firm, upright figure does not belong to a
conventional romance any more than Emma’s does. In his review of Emma, Scott describes the typical novel reader as “familiar with
the land of fiction, and adventures of which he assimilated not with those of
real life, but with each other” (Southam 60). Just as Emma always “assimilates”
Mr. Knightley to reality, so too early sympathetic readers of Austen’s novels
evaluated their plots and characters against the template of ordinary lives.
According to James Edward Austen-Leigh’s 1870 Memoir, “to the multitude her works appeared tame and commonplace,
poor in colouring, and sadly deficient in incident and interest” (135-36), but
discriminating readers appreciated Austen’s realism. Lady Gordon, for
example, whose views Austen recorded in “Opinions of Mansfield Park,” felt that [i]n most novels you are amused for the
time with a set of Ideal People whom you never think of afterwards or whom you
the least expect to meet in common life, whereas in Miss A—s works . . .
you actually live with them, you
fancy yourself one of the family; & the scenes are so exactly descriptive,
so perfectly natural, that there is scarcely an Incident or conversation, or a
person that you are not inclined to imagine you have at one time or other in
your life been a witness to, born a part in, & been acquainted with.
(MW 434-35) Eventually, just as we learn to read this
new kind of novel, so does Emma. Her habitual respect for Mr. Knightley’s
opinion, her untainted offer to him of that “‘true disinterested friendship’”
that she had earlier imagined she would share with Frank Churchill as he
transferred his affections from herself to her “‘beautiful little friend’” (267,
266), and, above all, her new appreciation of the significance of small
gestures—these bring her, firm and upright, into her proper role as Jane Austen’s
heroine, which is emphatically not
“that heroism of sentiment” that would prompt her to reject Mr. Knightley
because Harriet also loves him: of that sort of ridiculous heroism,
Austen assures us, “Emma had it not” (431). Readers who have shared Emma’s
blunders and imperfections will discover Emma to be the true heroine of Emma when she discovers her love for Mr.
Knightley through a series of events so subtle that some readers could say, “Nothing
much happens in Emma.” But they
would be wrong. Notes 1.
Generalizations about “readers” of Emma
are problematic because (1) not all readers read alike, and (2) given readers
may react differently upon successive readings. Since “readers” is an
ambiguous, unstable term—do we mean good readers, bad readers, or rereaders?—I
use the modifier “careful” because I believe Austen constructed her novels to
admit varied readings, only some of which she valorizes. See also
Morefield’s interesting essay on readers’ free will and resistance. 2. Moler explored these similarities at
length in his chapter on Emma (162-79);
Cronin and McMillan (liii) and Waldron (115) also see resemblances. 3. On Box
Hill, “Emma could not resist” (370), but throughout most of the novel Emma does resist the temptation to speak
intemperately. See Bander (54-55). 4. Johnson
finds this transformation disempowering (139) as does Wallace (96), but I vote
with Juliet McMaster (130) for the perfect happiness of the union. 5. See
George Justice for another view of how Emma’s use of “ought” changes as the
novel progresses. Works CiteD Austen, Jane. The Novels of Jane Austen. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed.
Oxford: OUP, 1986. _____. Jane Austen’s Letters. Ed. Deirdre Le Faye. 3rd ed.
Oxford: OUP, 1997. Austen-Leigh, James Edward. Memoir of Jane Austen. 1871.
Ed. R. W. Chapman. Oxford: Clarendon, 1926. Bander, Elaine. “Jane Austen and
the Uses of Silence.” Literature
and Ethics. Ed. Gary Wihl and David Williams. Montreal:
McGill-Queens’s, 1988. 46-61. Barrett, Eaton Stannard. The Heroine; or, Adventures of a Fair
Romance Reader. 3 vols. London, 1813. Cronin, Richard, and Dorothy McMillan.
Introduction. Emma. Ed. Richard Cronin and Dorothy
McMillan. Cambridge: CUP, 2005. xxi-lxv. Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel.
Chicago: UCP, 1988. Justice, George. “Must and Ought:
Moral and Real Conditions in Emma.”
Persuasions 25 (2003): 228-32. Lennox, Charlotte. The Female Quixote. Ed. Margaret
Dalziel. Oxford: OUP, 1970. McMaster, Juliet. “The Secret Languages of Emma.“ Persuasions 13 (1991): 119-31. Moler, Kenneth L. Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion.
Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1968. Morefield, Kenneth R. “‘Emma Could
Not Resist’: Complicity and the Christian Reader.” Persuasions 25 (2003): 197-204. Scott, Walter. Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since. Ed. Claire Lamont.
Oxford: OUP, 1986. Smiles, Samuel. A Publisher and his Friends: Memoir and
Correspondence of the Late John Murray. 2 vols. London, 1891. Southam, B. C., ed. Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage.
London: Routledge, 1968. Waldron, Mary. Jane Austen and the Fiction of her Time. Cambridge: CUP,
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New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. |
