Abstract
Each reading of Emma confirms my belief that it is Austen’s masterpiece. The style and tone display an artist at the height of her powers, and the technical virtuosity of narrative and its advance on Mansfield Park is astonishing. The finesse of free indirect discourse1 and focalization combine perfectly with narrative voice and plot. Austen takes, as she famously writes to Cassandra, “a heroine that no one but myself will much like,” and dares her reader not to like Emma.2 Emma is founded on artistic will to power—Austen makes us like her difficult and spoiled heroine just because she can, and she does so effortlessly—we are drawn in as surely as if we were caught in a tractor beam. Any other writer (say, Charlotte Brontë or Dickens), would elect to make us sympathetic with the poor, orphaned child Jane Fairfax, but Austen chooses to tell her tale from the perspective of Jane’s tormentor, the handsome, clever, and rich Emma.
“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.’” (E, 225)
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Notes
James Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen in Persuasion, ed. D. W. Harding (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 375–6.
Mark Schorer, “The Humiliation of Emma Woodhouse,” in Ian Watt, ed. Jane Austen, A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 98–111
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” in Tendencies (Durham: Duke UP, 1994).
The best discussion that I know of Mr. Perry’s role in Emma is John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), pp. 110–54.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995), 167–74.
Laura Mooneyham White, “Beyond the Romantic Gypsy: Narrative Disruption and Ironies in Austen’s Emma,” PLL 44, no. 3 (2008): 305–27.
Joseph Wiesenfarth, “Emma: Point Counter Point,” in John Halperin, ed., Jane Austen, Bicentenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975), p. 215.
Everything in Emma is paired—I’ve come to see it as Austen’s prefiguration of Bleak House. For doubling in Bleak House, see J. Hillis Miller, Victorian Subjects (Durham: Duke UP, 1991), pp. 179–99.
Georg Simmel, “The Poor,” in Donald Levine, ed., On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 171.
George Simmel, Group Expansion and Development of Individuality,” in Kurt Wolff, ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 263.
“On Sociability,” in Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 12.
For a parallel treatment of freedom and restraint, see R. F. Brissenden, “Mansfield Park: Freedom and the Family,” in John Halperin, ed., Jane Austen, Bicentenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975), pp. 156–71.
David Spring makes a persuasive case for the term “pseudo-gentry,” which includes the professionals such as clergy who were dependent upon but still aspired to or emulated the land-owning gentry. “Interpreters of Jane Austen’s Social World,” in Janet Todd, ed., Jane Austen, New Perspectives (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983) pp. 53–72. J. A. Downie is much more hostile to the concept in “Who Says She’s a Bourgeois Writer? Reconsidering the Social and Political Contexts of Jane Austen’s Novels,” ECS, 40, no. 1 (2006): pp. 69–84.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957), p. 176.
See Howard Babb, Jane Austen’s Novels, The Fabric of Dialogue (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1967), pp. 106–11 for a thorough discussion of the dance conceit.
I borrow the term aristeia from Cedric H. Whitman, Homer & The Heroic Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958).
Marvin Mudrick, Jane Austen, Irony as Defense and Discovery (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1952), p. 196
David Harvey, “From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity,” in Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and Lisa Tickner, eds., Mapping the Futures (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 3–29.
Robert Weinmann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978).
Henry James, The Ambassadors (New York: Norton, 1964), p. 156. Book 6, ch. 2
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© 2015 James Thompson
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Thompson, J. (2015). Emma, Simmel, and Sociability. In: Jane Austen and Modernization. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137491152_3
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