“Emma”

    the bolow iS an article to this file, everything must be from the article and the novel “Emma”, it is a response in the form of a thoughtfully-engaged and fully developed essay(as she says). She also says the purpose is to demonstrate your depth of engagement with the course materials and your ability to critically analyze the relevant tests. Here is the question:

    Kohn(1995)(article attached) studies Emma in relation to the conduct book tradition that instructs women on proper, ladylike behavior. In this vein, it could be said that Emma also presents Austen’s views of the idealized masculine role. Kohn suggests: “[Emma’s and Knightley’s] mutual worship is simply Austen’s depiction of the first flush of romantic love, not a sign that Knightley is infallible.”
    1. What traits does Emma suggest are possessed by the socially ideal gentleman?
    2. How is Austen’s Knightley similar/different to that ideal?
    3. While Austen’s ideal lady differs somewhat from the social convention of the time, does her view of men challenge convention as well?

    Reading; Emma as a lesson on “Ladyhood”: A study in the domestic Bildungsroman
    Kohn, Denise. Essays in Literature. Macomb: Spring 1995. Vol. 22, Iss. 1; pg. 45
    Copyright Western Illinois University, Department of English Spring 1995
    Emma can be a problematic novel for the modern reader–especially for the
    feminist reader. On the one hand, feminist critics have lauded Jane Austen for
    her critique of the marriage market and exposition of the problems of female
    independence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Green,
    Johnson, Kirkham, Poovey). The growing emphasis on creating a canon of women
    writers has led many feminist readers to latch onto Austen with fervor because
    she is a woman writer who has long enjoyed a fine critical reputation despite
    the sentimental and damaging myth of”gentle-Janeism” (Trilling 29). On the
    other hand, feminist readers have also raised disturbing questions about Austen
    (Booth, Company 420). While Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar find that her novels
    are subversive in nature, they also believe that her novels depict “the
    necessity of female submission for female survival” (203).

    Ironically, one way for the modern reader, feminist or not, to deal with the
    problems of reading Emma is to approach the novel as a lesson on manners–more
    specifically–as a lesson on “ladyhood.” Modern readers, of course, are not
    usually interested in instruction on the characteristics of a “lady.” But this
    becomes a problem in reading Austen because she was writing to a population of
    readers in a time and a place for whom the attributes of a lady were important.
    Another problem in reading Emma is that modern readers often eschew didacticism
    in literature; Austen, however, expected that a novel could “pratify the
    cravings of the imagination and provide moral instruction” (Poovey 182). To do
    justice to Austen, modern readers must be willing to meet her at least halfway
    on her own territory. If readers are willing to extend their hands to Austen–
    white gloves are not necessary-and politely pretend interest in the notion of
    “ladyhood,” then they may develop a fuller understanding of Austen as an
    artist. One of Austen’s greatest achievements in Emma is that she writes a
    novel of education–a bildungsroman–that instructs her readers to deconstruct
    the pervasive images of “ladyhood” created by her period’s conduct-book
    writers.(2) Austen resists the view of a “lady” as passive and selfless and
    redefines the highest ideals of “ladyhood” as self-assurance, strength, and
    compassion through the depiction of her heroine, Emma.(3) Such a reading of the
    novel, however, not only shows how Emma redefines female ideals but also how the
    novel redefines the bildungsroman within the context of early nineteenth-
    century domestic values.

    In The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Mary Poovey defines the ideal lady in
    the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a “demure young woman,
    with eyes downcast and lips pressed into a faint and silent smile” (47). Both
    male and female authors of popular conduct books of the period define a lady
    primarily through what she must lack: personal agency, ambition, desire, and
    vanity (Poovey 4-36).(4) Indeed, women’s self-denial and self-sacrifice were
    crucial elements in the emerging ideal of the Victorian house angel. While in
    the early eighteenth century a lady was defined as “a woman of superior
    position in society,” by the nineteenth century the term was used to denote a
    “woman whose manners, habits, and sentiments have the refinement characteristic
    of the higher ranks of society” (qtd. in Sangari, 715). In other words, the
    term “lady” moved from one that deacribed only class to one that described
    behavior. In the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century world of a rising middle
    class and declining upper class, social status and survival often depended not
    only on money but also on manners–those culturally constructed markers that
    define community membership. The problems of shifting social classes exist even
    in Emma’s home of Highbury. The Coles and Mrs. Elton are purchasing prestige
    while Miss Bates, who as daughter of the former rector was a “fringe” member of
    the upper class, is losing prestige to poverty. During a period of what seemed
    like class chaos to many Britons, readers increasingly turned to the rising
    artistic form of the novel to find narrative guidance for their behavior.

    While Emma at the beginning of the novel is a “lady” because her family as
    rural landowners are part of the upper class, it is not until the final part of
    the novel that she learns to balance power and propriety in order to better
    fulfill behavioral ideals of a “lady.”(5) Emma, however, fulfills Austen’s
    artistic and social ideals–not the hegemonic ideals of the conduct-book
    authors. Austen’s novels and letters show her critique of a social system that
    required female subjection;(6) even Wayne Booth believes that Austen “in her
    everyday life” believed that men and women were equal (Company 430). Indeed,
    the well-known portrait of Austen drawn by her sister offers visual evidence
    that Austen and her family did not subscribe to the narrow definitions of a
    “lady” celebrated by their culture: Austen is drawn with her arms folded
    assertively across her chest, looking off to the side with a serious look in
    her eyes and a stern set to her mouth.” And as she herself was not portrayed as
    a “proper lady,” Austen in Emna never portrays her heroine as reflecting the
    image of the “lady” as passive and demure. Margaret Kirkham finds that Austen
    in Emma mirrors the Enlightenment feminist etance of Mary Wollstonecraft on
    male and female equality (46-47, 138). Claudia Johnson believes the character
    of Emma “defies every dictum’ about female deference preached by the conduct
    books (xxiii). Katherine Sobba Green does not specifically discuss Emma but
    argues that Austen overturns the “tropic commodification” that defined women in
    the turn-of-the-century ritual of courtship and marriage (72, 154-59). And
    although Poovey also does not discuss Emma, she believes that Austen’s later
    works emphasize the conflict between individual desire and social institutions.
    Austen, Poovey says, shows the danger of “unchecked individualism” and how the
    individual can both exist within and reform social institutions (208-212). So
    while the character of Emma is a celebration of female individualism and power,
    Austen also shows how Emma abuses her power by crossing the threshold of
    propriety and domesticity in her manipulation of Harriet and insensitivity to
    Miss Bates. By the end of the novel, however, Emma as a character is
    strengthened by her experience, gaining greater social and self-knowledge. As
    Austen’s portrait of an ideal “lady,” she is strong and assertive but is also
    more caring and sensitive to others.

    The comic plot structure of Emma would also encourage readers to interpret the
    novel as a social lesson. Throughout the text, characters are paired and re-
    paired as teachers and students. The story unfolds in the second paragraph of
    the novel as we learn about Emma’s lose of Miss Taylor, an “excellent woman as
    governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection” (1). But by
    the end of the second paragraph, we learn that Miss Taylor had ceased “to hold
    the nominal office of goveness” to Emma long ago, and the two had lived
    together as, “friend and friend” (1). Later in the novel, Knightley suggests
    that Emma, not Miss Taylor, was the real teacher of the two. The theme of
    education–and the decentering of authority–continues. Emma teaches Harriet.
    Harriet repeatedly teaches Emma, who is a slow learner, the dangers of
    teaching. Jane, who must become a governess, teaches Frank compassion. Frank
    asks Emma to choose and “educate” a wife for him. Of course, he does not know
    that Emma has already taken this project upon herself, and she does not know
    that Frank has already chosen his wife. Knightley and Emma both teach each
    other about social respect and kindness. She learns to appreciate Miss Bates
    and Robert Martin; he learns to appreciate Harriet. Mrs. Elton tries to teach
    Emma the role of the fashionable married woman and the importance of travel and
    barouche-landaus. And Mr. Woodhouse tries, vainly, to instruct everyone about
    the goodness of gruel.

    The novel’s theme of education and development is also signified by Emma place
    within the genre of the bildungsroman. In nineteenth-century England, the
    bildungsroman, also called the novel of development or apprenticeship, was
    “frequently the equivalent of the Renaissance conduct book, insofar as one of
    its recurrent themes is the making of a gentleman,” writes Jerome Buckley in
    his influential study The Season of Youth (20). But in the case of Emma, which
    has a female protagonist, it is the making of a “lady” that becomes the
    recurrent theme. And though Buckley has been crucial in the definition of the
    English bildungsroman, ironically, he declares that Emma is not a bildungsroman
    (18). Buckley’s definition of the novel of development has been criticized as
    predominantly based upon male perspectives by feminist critics, who have worked
    to define the tradition of the female bildungsroman. And yet, many of the
    female paradigms for the genre do not precisely fit Emma, either.(8) The main
    problem in recognizing Emma as a bildungsroman is that the genre has alway been
    associated with the theme of the journey or quest. And Emma is the antithesis
    of the novel of quest: it is a domestic novel.

    Emma, then, can be considered a domestic bildungsroman, which in turn, makes it
    another possible paradigm for the female bildungsroman–especially those of the
    eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For most British and American women in
    these periods, especially those in the upper and middle classes, the domestic
    setting was the only one usually open for personal growth and development. The
    popular courtship novels of the period, which were often also domestic in their
    concerns, were part of a “social imperative to legitimize women’s self-
    actualization as affective individuals” (Green 14).(9) The belief that women,
    and thus domestic novels about women, are not associated with development
    because they are framed by domesticity is part of a cultural hegemony that
    views male experience as normal and female experience as abnormal or Other. The
    use of male development as a standard to measure female development culminates
    in the theories of Freud, who defined women by their anatomical differences
    from men. Nancy Chodorow’s belief, however, that females usually develop
    through “relation and connection” to other people while males uaually develop
    through separation has reshaped twentieth-century understanding of female
    development (qtd. in Gilligan, 7).

    The psychological studies of Carol Gilligan, which support Chodorow’s theories
    of male and female development, can help to reshape an understanding of the
    bildungsroman. In A Different Voice, Gilligan explores differences in views of
    morality and the self, and the association of these different views with men
    and women in her studies of psychological development. While other
    psychologists, such as Freud, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, and Lawrence Kohlberg,
    have also found differences in male and female development that are similar to
    Gilligan’s findings, these psychologists have tended to describe male
    psychology as “normal” and female psychology as deviant (Gilligan 7-22). In her
    studies of women, Gilligan reshapes theories of human development by showing
    that women tend to view the world and their relationships as a web of
    interdependence, and men are more likely to view the world and relationships as
    a hierarchy (62). While men tend to define themselves through independence,
    women tend to define themselves through relationships (Gilligan 8). Gilligan’s
    comments about the problems of an androcentric psychology in defining female
    development apply equally to the problems of an androcentric theory of the
    bildungsroman in defining the domestic novel of female development:

    While the truths of psychological theory have blinded psychologists to the
    truth of women’s experience, that experience illuminates a world which
    psychologists have found hard to trace, a territory where violence is rare and
    relationships appear safe. The reason women’s experience has been so difficult
    to decipher or even discern is that a shift in the imagery of relationships
    [from hierarchy to web] gives rise to a problem of interpretation. (62)

    The domestic novel has been hard for many critics to read as a genuine novel of
    development because it often does depict a world where “violence is rare and
    relationships appear safe.” What seems to be the safety of the world of
    domesticity–compared to the world of the quest–caused both male and female
    readers to dismiss the domestic setting. But heroinee such as Emma do have to
    overcome obstacles in order to become adult, and these obstacles are often
    domesticated or different versions of those that heroes face on their quest for
    independence. The domestication of personal obstacles does not, however, make
    these obstacles any less real or less dangerous for the heroine. The text of
    the domestic novel simply places personal obstacles in a different context. It
    is also crucial to realize that the development of the domestic heroine differs
    from the development of the men, because female development is based upon a
    definition of self within a web of personal relationships. Although the
    domestic heroine must achieve intellectual independence and self-understanding
    to become an adult, she does not want to physically and emotionally sever
    herself from family and friends. Gilligan’s comments about the problems of
    female development apply as well to the problems of the domestic heroine, who
    must balance “the wish to be at the center of connection and the consequent
    fear of being too far out on the edge” (62). And, of course, the domestic
    setting itself is a web of personal connections in which relationships and the
    home have great value. As a result, the quest novel and the domestic novel are
    shaped by radically different codes. The hero of the quest wants to leave home
    to discover his true self; the heroine of domesticity does not want to leave
    because she wants to discover her true self within her home.

    Gilligan’s findings that women are more likely than men to view the world as a
    web of interdependence restructure the reader’s understanding of Emma’s devotion
    to her father and her hatred of travel, which is a domesticated version of the
    quest. The trip to Boxhill is, not surprisingly, a failure from the point of
    view of Emma, who as a domestic heroine, has little desire to leave her home or
    the community of Highbury. Emma also looks with derision at Mrs. Elton, who is
    associated with travel throughout the novel. Mrs. Elton instigates the trip to
    Boxhill, defines herself socially by a travelling coach, and suggests that Bath
    is the place to meet marriageable men. Austen herself is reputed to have
    disliked Bath intensely (Poovey 209-210, Kirkham 61-65), which increases the
    significance of her negative portrayal of Mrs. Elton, a Bath bride whose
    marriage is marked by monetary motives. Mrs. Elton, a woman who talks
    incessantly of travel, is used as a foil against the more domestic-centered
    Emma to exemplify silly pride and selfishness. Emma, too, may seem silly and
    selfish in the fist volume of the novel, but Emma’s character gains stature in
    comparison with Mrs. Elton because Emma’s interests and values are firmly
    rooted within her own community.

    The fact that Mrs. Elton lives in an ugly house while Emma lives in an
    attractive one also reflects both women’s relationship to the opposition
    between travel and domesticity in the novel. Mrs. Elton cannot become the
    heroine of Emma because her love of ostentatious travel and her search for a
    husband outside her own community illustrate her lack of support for the
    domestic values which shape the novel. Mrs. Elton, though she is female, is an
    outsider and cannot understand the domestic code of Highbury and Hartfield,
    which values the home as the place of affection and happiness. The example of
    the Eltons is important because it illustrates that Austen does not
    characterize all people as following gender based behavioral models. Within
    Highbury, both Knightley and Mr. Woodhouse share the domestic-based values
    found in Emma, Mrs. Weston, and Miss Bates. The Eltons, however, practice a
    sham domesticity based upon ostentation. They seek to prove their affection for
    one another and their home through unrestrained vanity and selfishness,
    constantly calling attention to themselves and their emotions.(11) Augusta
    Elton can never fulfill Austen’s ideals of a “lady” because she can never
    overcome her own individual selfishness. And while readers frequently see
    Emma’s devotion to her father as an example of society’s restrictions on women
    and imply that Emma’s decision to live at home after her marriage is a sign of
    her lack of growth, such criticism overlooks the importance of interdependence
    inherent in female development and the domestic novel. Such criticism is also
    part of a cultural definition of women that denigrates them because of their
    differences from men.

    Reading Emma as a domestic bildungsroman is no longer difficult once cultural
    definitions of apprenticeship, work, and growth are broadened to include
    typical female experience as well as male experience. So while Buckley claims
    that Emma is not a bildungsroman, the novel actually fulfills most of his major
    criteria. Emma certainly fits Buckley’s first characteristic of a
    bildungsroman: A child of some sensibility is up in the country or in a
    provincial town, where he finds constraints, social and intellectual, placed
    upon a free imagination” (Buckley 17). Emma is bored at the beginning of the
    novel; she is a “clever” young woman (1) who is “in great danger of suffering
    from intellectual solitude” (2). And like many characters in a bildungsroman,
    Emma rebels against authority. In the first chapter, she quietly but openly
    rejects the meek advice of her father and the stronger authority of Knightley,
    who want her not to make any more matches after her successful pairing of Miss
    Taylor and Mr. Weston. Unlike the protagonists of most bildungsromane, however,
    Emma, does not leave home to learn in the city because the home is the setting
    of the domestic novel. But Emma does fit Buckley’s next criterion because she
    experiences two love affairs, “one debasing, one exalting that demand “the hero
    [ine] reappraise his [or her] values,” as shown through her mistaken,
    humiliating love for Frank and her true, satisfying love for Knightley (17).
    The “search for a vocation” is also an important characteristic of the
    bildunsroman (Buckley 18) that is evident in Emma’s development once readers
    expand their view of work from the traditional definition as “paid labor
    outside the home” to “unpaid labor inside the home.” Emma’s duties aa a
    daughter and as the family manager are her work–and it is work that she
    refuses to reject or devalue at the end of the novel. Her marriage and her
    attempts to arrange other marriages are also significant aspects of her work
    within the community because marriage and motherhood were female careers during
    this period. While the modern reader will find Austen depictions of female work
    limiting, one must also remember that she was writing within the tradition of
    domestic realism. To have Emma assume work outside of traditional options for
    upper-class nineteenth-century women would have violated the qualifications of
    the domestic and realistic plot.

    While Emma matches the significant characteristics of Buckley’s definition of a
    bildungsroman, it also matches some crucial aspects of paradigms for the female
    bildungsroman. Annis Pratt notes that in the novel of development the young
    woman’s tie to nature is important in her psychological growth. Throughout the
    novel, events and Emma’s resulting moods are associated with nature. It
    suddenly snows, ruining a dinner party, the night Mr. Elton shocks Emma with
    his money-motivated marriage proposal. On the day Emma learns about Frank and
    Jane’s engagement, the “weather added what it could of gloom” as a “cold stormy
    rain destroys the natural beauty of July (290). The next day, however, “it was
    summer again”; significantly, this is also the day that Knightley proposes to
    Emma in the garden (291). “Never had the exquisite sight, smell, sensation of
    nature, tranquil, warm and brilliant after a storm, been more attractive to
    her,” the narrator says (291). And though nature in Emma may sometimes be
    surprising, it is always the safe, domesticated nature of the English village,
    never the violent, raging nature of the gothic English moors.

    The compound structure of Emma’s last name–“Woodhouse”–and the link between
    “wood” and nature and between “house” and domesticity also mark the novel’s
    link to the tradition of the bildungsroman and the domestic novel. The symbolic
    link between domesticity and nature in her surname is mirrored in the name of
    her home–Hartfield–which carries a double connotation as a natural place for
    deer and as a home of the heart.

    And as nature is domesticated in Emma, so is the archetypal role of the
    greenworld lover, who often plays a prominent role in the novel of female
    development (Pratt 22-29). Knightley, who is associated with farming and
    orchards, plays the role of Emma’s greenworld lover, yet he is a domesticated
    version of the mythological Pan or Eros who usually endangers the female
    heroine (Pratt 22-24). Knightley’s domesticated ties to nature make Emma sexual
    growth safe within the novel. And as typical in many female bildungsroman,
    Emma’s education culminates in a personal epiphany instead of a progressive
    process of formal schooling. After she learns about Frank and Jane’s engagement
    and Harriet’s love for Knightley, Emma realizes that with “unpardonable
    arrogance” she had “proposed to arrange everybody’s destiny” (284). It is at
    this point in the novel that Emma learns one of the most valuable lessons of
    “ladyhood”–respect and care for other individuals.

    In the beginning of the novel, Emma takes pride in the fact that she had helped
    to make a match between Miss Taylor and Mr. Weston. Although Knightley
    discredits her role, Emma explains that she has taken an appropriate middle-
    ground as matchmaker, “something between the do-nothing and the do-all” (7).
    Her explanation of her role seems reasonable: she “promoted Mr. Weston’s
    visits,” gave many “little encouragements,” and “smoothed many little matters”
    (7). Emma’s success as a matchmaker, however, leads her to abuse her power as
    she exchanges her role as social facilitator to become a social manipulator. She
    tries to realign Harriet’s affections and soon believes she can judge
    everyone’s true emotions. When she tries to be the “do-all” and for others to
    follow her own plans, Emma crosses the threshold of Austen’s depiction of the
    ideal “lady.”(13) Her “kind designs” for Harriet lead her to the grossest
    unkindness–the belief that she can re-create Harriet on and off the canvas.
    Emma’s desire for social control also causes her snobbery to the Martins and
    her rudeness to Miss Bates. Her snobbery to the Martins is morally
    reprehensible to the modern reader, but it was also reprehensible to
    nineteenth-century readers. Trilling writes that the yeoman class had always
    held a strong position in English class feeling, and at this time especially,
    only stupid or ignorant people felt privileged to look down upon them” (37).
    (14) And Emma’s treatment of Miss Bates at the picnic is made to seem doubly
    heartless by Miss Bate’s quiet acquiescence.

    And yet, though Emma sometimes acts in an unconscionable manner, the reader is
    well aware that she is not without a conscience. It pricks her throughout. For
    instance, after Harriet meets Robert Martin at Ford’s, Emma realizes that she
    was not thoroughly comfortable” with her own actions. At the end, though, Emma
    has changed enough to think that it “would be a great pleasure to know Robert
    Martin” and happily attends the wedding (328). She apologizes to Miss Bates and
    befriends Jane Fairfax. She learns to treat others with tenderness and to
    respect their personal privacy and autonomy. She learns to reject both the
    roles of a “do-nothing” and a “do-all.” At the end she considers a future match
    between Mrs. Weston’s daughter and one of Isabella’s sons, but her matchmaking
    is no longer dangerous because she now realizes the problems caused by the
    abuse of power. She has learned a lesson: a lady is not a bully. But Emma
    learns an equally important lesson: a lady is not a weakling. Unlike so many
    nineteenth-century heroines, she does not confuse kindness to others with fear
    of others and subjection of self. At the end of the novel, she is still able to
    say to Knightley, “I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up
    with any other” (327).

    Emma’s awareness of her own “unpardonable arrogance” allows readers to continue
    their empathetic construction of her character. Emma has learned to balance
    power and propriety, reflecting Austen’s ideal of a lady as a woman who is
    strong but not manipulative. Knightley’s proposal follows soon after, and at
    this point in the narrative Austen inserts those well-known lines:

    What did she say?–Just what she ought, of course.–A lady always does.–She
    said enough to show there need not be despair–and to invite him to say more
    himself. (297, emphasis added)

    In this passage, the narrator mocks readers’ expectations for a love scene
    (Booth, Company 433-34). Such mockery is possible, though, because at this
    point Austen’s portrait of Emma has educated the reader about the attributes of
    an ideal “lady.” Austen creates what Wolfgang Iser calls “a gap in the text,”
    so the “reader’s imagination is left free to paint in the scene” (38). This
    freedom is a test of the reader’s learning process. From the text’s comparisons
    and contrasts of Emma with Harriet, Jane, Isabella, and Augusta Elton, we are
    to have learned what are the best attributes that make up the most admirable
    type of “lady.”

    After Knightley’s proposal, many modern readers such as Gilbert and Gubar have
    trouble in their construction of Emma’s character. It is as if they continue to
    see Emma solely through her own self-critical thoughts instead of trying to
    construct her through the text as a whole. Booth counteracts this reading by
    stating that readers often “succumb morally to what was simply required
    formally”–a plot that ends in marriage. And Poovey argues that although
    Austen’s novels end in marriage, these marriages show the heroine’s
    “achievement of maturity, not the victory of a man” (46). In Emma, Austen adds
    a simple yet crucial twist to the conventional marriage plot: Knightley
    abdicates his seat in the county, his own place of authority, to live in Emma’s
    home–her own seat of authority. The knight does not carry off the princess.
    The gentleman does not place the lady within the shrine of his own home.

    At this point in the novel, readers should have learned to step back and try to
    construct characters and reality through a multiplicity of perspectives. Just
    because Emma sees Knightley as a superior being while she is in the first flush
    of her self-reproach and awakened desire does not mean that the reader is also
    supposed to see Knightley as a superior being. Such readings overlook the
    important fact that Knightley, like Emma, has publicly embarrassed himself
    through a misreading of the true relationship between Jane and Frank.(15)
    Knightley pays a great deal of attention to Jane and extolls her virtues
    throughout the novel. After Knightley orders his carriage to take Jane to the
    Coles’ dinner party, Knightley’s attention to Jane is put in a new light when
    Mrs. Weston tells Emma she believes Knightley may marry Jane. Later Knightley,
    in an uncharacteristic loud and public voice, inquires “particularly” about Jane
    in a conversation with Miss Bates through a window (165). No wonder Emma begins
    to wonder if Knightley is in love with Jane. Of course, even at this point in
    the novel, the reader is quite aware that Emma is not always a reliable
    interpreter of reality, but this time Emma’s views are corroborated by others
    and evidence in the text. When she warns Knightley that he “may hardly be
    aware…how highly” he values Jane, the forthright Knightley becomes suddenly
    engrossed upon buttoning his gaiters (195) . Emma’s view is also given credence
    when Knightley admits that Mr. Cole suggested that his attention to Jane had
    prompted speculation about the nature of their relationship.

    So while the secret of Jane and Frank’s engagement plays a joke upon Emma, it
    also–for a while–becomes a joke upon Knightley. And in an age when “making
    love” to a woman meant simply calling upon her and praising her publicly, it is
    hardly surprising that Knightley’s attention to Jane has caused rumors. These
    type of rumors, as nineteenth-century readers clearly understood, could be
    especially socially damaging to a single woman like Jane, who is also beautiful
    and impoverished. Knightley clearly understands Jane’s precarious social
    position and even criticize Frank for sending her the piano, yet he does not
    seem aware that his praise of Jane could also cause her social embarrassment.
    And although Knightley denounces matchmaking, he does play matchmaker by trying
    to ascertain whether Harriet is a suitable mate for Robert Martin.

    Knightley’s own matchmaking attempts backfire, much like Emma’s, because his
    personal attentions to Harriet make her believe he loves her. In short,
    Knightley is not, as he has traditionally been portrayed by critics, a paragon
    of personal judgment. He, like Emma, is deceived by the differences between
    his own perceptions and reality. In construing Knightley’s character, critics
    also overlook the fact that he apologizes to Emma for his previous paternal
    role. He tells Emma, “It was very natural for you to say, what right has he to
    lecture me?…I do not believe I did you any good” (318). Their mutual worship
    is simply Austen’s depiction of the first flush of romantic love, not a sign
    that Knightley is infallible.

    Knightley is the only one to criticize Emma (besides Emma herself) in all of
    Highbury because he is the only one who is her intellectual equal. Their
    marriage offers her insurance against the “intellectual solitude” that
    endangers her at the novel’s beginning. But as much as Emma loves Knightley,
    she will not leave her father, a point that Knightley understands and respects.
    After they agree to live together at Hartfield, Emma thinks of Knightley as a
    “companion” and a “partner” (310). This equality is reinforced by Mrs. Weston’s
    reflections, who happily considers the marriage as “all equal” without
    “sacrifice on any side” (323). Emma’s love of her father and her desire to live
    at Hartfield should not be interpreted as an example of female submission to
    patriarchy. Mr. Woodhouse has never had any control over Emma; Hartfield has
    been the site of her independence. The first Mrs. Weston was unhappy because
    she could not at the same time be “the wife of Captain Weston and Miss
    Churchill of Enscombe” (8). Yet Emma solves the dilemma of the loss of female
    identity that was inherent in most nineteenth-century marriages. She will
    continue to be Miss Woodhouse of Hartfield, to be mistress at her own home on
    her own terms, and at the same time she will take on the role of Mrs.
    Knightley.

    In the face of Emma’s faults, some critics have deemed Jane as the “good”
    character in the novel. Booth believes that “Jane is superior to Emma in almost
    every part of the book” (Rhetoric 249). Though the “narrator is non-committal
    toward Jane Fairfax,” Booth writes, “the author can be inferred as approving of
    her almost completely” (“Distance” 182). Harold Bloom, who criticizes Booth for
    giving Jane center stage, still believes that the “splendid Jane Fairfax is
    easier to admire” than Emma (4). Adena Rosmarin echoes these ideas when she
    says that Jane is “too good and too distant to be a good character” (216).
    While Jane is certainly too distant to be a good character, it seems doubtful
    that she is actually “too good.” Her love for Frank, who lacks personal
    strength and continually treats her with foolish inconsideration, calls into
    question her own character. And most notably, she shares the same fault as two
    of the other female characters: passivity. Like Isabella and Harriet, Jane’s
    passivity allows others to control her. She submits to Frank’s thoughtless
    treatment of her until his public flirtations with Emma force her to capitulate
    into the “slave-trade” of the governess market (204). While Jane, like Isabella
    and Harriet, is undeniably a “lady,” she cannot embody Austen’s highest ideals
    of “ladyhood” because she is too passive, too demure, and too much like the
    “proper lady” of the conduct books.

    While reading Emma as a lesson on ladyhood might seem at first a superficial
    approach to the novel, in the end, such a reading increases the complexity of
    the portrait that Austen has painted of Emma. This reading also depicts Emma in
    a more favorable light than many traditional analyses. Through the novel’s
    portrayal of Emma, readers learn what Austen considered to be the ideal
    attributer( of a “lady”–and some of those attributes may surprise modern
    readers. A lady, like Emma, is not “personally vain”(25) and has no “taste for
    finery” (334). She speaks her own mind. She is strong. She is intelligent. She
    is artistic. She learns from her own mistakes. She cares about and for her
    family. She is willing to marry–but marriage must meet her own terms. This is a
    definition of a “lady” that most modern readers–even feminists–could live
    with. This is even a definition that some feminists would see as a definition
    of a feminist.

    Like Austen, who was afraid that Emma was a “heroine whom no one but myself
    will much like” (viii), reading Emma as a lesson in “ladyhood” is a critical
    approach that most modern readers will not like. But such a reading also helps to
    explain the continuing popularity of Austen inside and outside academia. The
    dialectic between female power and female propriety continues to act as a
    divisive force in twentieth-century America just as it was in nineteenth-
    century England. One of the great strengths of Emma, for both nineteenth-and
    twentieth-century readers, is Austen’s portrait of a lady who learns to
    compromise between power and propriety to live within her community without
    compromising herself.

    NOTES

    1 Throughout this paper, I use the term “lady” to denote behavioral
    expectations for women during Austen’s period. not to denote wealth or class
    membership, eept where noted otherwise in the by of the text. Of course, theee
    behavioral expectations are not completely separate from class. but it wae
    possible for a woman without wealth of the lower run of the middle class to
    still be considered a lady because of her behavior even though she could not
    use the title “Lady.” For instance, Emma treats Miss Taylor, her former
    governess, with more respect than she treats Miss Bates, even though there are
    distinctions of class between the two.

    The term “lady” ie understandably offensive to the modern reader because of its
    association with female submission, but subjugation plays no part in Austen’s
    behavioral code for a “lady.” The term “lady” differs from the term “feminine,”
    which denotes a belief in an essential “nature” of females, a belief that
    Austen did not share. “Female” and “male,” on the other hand, refer to
    biological sexual differences.

    2 Other critics al believe that Austen did not reinscribe her culture’s idea of
    the “lady” in her novels. Poovey, Kirkham, and Johnson all look at her
    depiction of female characters and how her creation of strong heroines
    subverted social constructions of “femininity.” None of these authors, however,
    tie her re-education of the reader to a redefinition of the generic concerns of
    the bildungsroman.

    3 Austen’s own awarenees that Emma does not fit standard cultural definitions
    of “ladyhood” can be inferred from her well-known comment that Emma is a
    “heroine whom no one but myself will much like” (viii).

    4 Green notes that in the early eighteenth century, conduct-book writers for
    women were usually male and that the genre did not become a forum for female
    until the end of the century (20). By the time Austen began writing Emma,
    however, several popular conduct books had been written for women by women,
    including Haanah More’s Strictures on Female Edluxrtion. While Green agreee
    with Poovey that the conduet books in general were “bourgeois and patriarchal,”
    he does not argue that “male-authored conduct literature was univerally
    exploitative and repressive nor that there was a coherent and invariable
    patriarchal line” (20).

    5 While the term “lady” is gender-based because it is used to refer to women, I
    do not wish to suggest that Austen supported a social system that dictated
    different ethical and moral codes for men and women. Indeed, Austen’s heroines
    and heroes are usually both sensitive and strong. This paper focuses on a
    “lady” rather than a “gentleman” because the main character of Emma is female
    and the domestic novel ia focused more on women than men.

    6 In her biography of Austen, Jane Aiken Hodge details Austen’s critique of
    women’s status, and so does Kirbham. Hodge also notes that Austen’s family did
    not follow the “rules of elegant society which dictated that a young woman
    could not appear in public until her older sisters were married and she was
    “out” (33). Austen was allowed to attend balls outside these “society”
    strictures, and she often enjoyed them greatly. So for Austen, “ladyhood” does
    not signify slavishness to social rules. And Austen quite clearly did not
    support the conduct-book model of a “lady” in her own life–she rejected
    marriage and chose a career as a professional writer.

    7 A copy of this portrait is on the cover and inset of Kirkham’s Jane Austen:
    Feminism and Fiction. For a discussion of the portrait, see page 59-60 in
    Kirkham.

    8 For a full list of studies on the female bildungsroman (rather than the
    domestic bildingsroman), see Fuderer’s annotated bibliography. The Female
    Bildungsroman in English.

    In one of the most well-known descriptions of the female bildingsroman, Linda
    Wagner offers The Bell Jar as a paradigm, but her analysis does not apply to
    Emma because of the differences in life for twentieth-and nineteenth-century
    women. Annis Pratt also offers an analysis that is helpful but is based
    predominantly on archetypes and mythology. In The Voyage In, Elizabeth Abel,
    Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland offer two basic paradigm of the female
    bildungsroman: the novel of chronological development and the novel of
    awakening after marriage (11-12). Emma’s development is more akin to the
    personal epiphany of the awakening–but her awakening occurs before marriage
    and will not lead her into adultery.

    9 Courtship novels are not always domestic novels, even though courtship is an
    important theme in most domestic novels. A domestic novel, however, focuses
    specifically on home and community, while courtship novels often employ the
    paradigms of the picaresque and/or the gothic. (See endnote below.) Green meaes
    the excellent point that women’s texts of the period often displaced sexuality
    because the female courtship novelists wished to “distinguish their texts from
    contemporary romances” (16). I think her argument applies equally well to
    Austen’s Emma.

    10 Abel, Hirsch, and Langland also look at the work of Chodorow and Gilligan in
    their discussion of the female bildungsroman. My discussion differs because it
    focuses on the link between the novel of development and the domestic novel.
    Their book does include analysis of some novels that are sometimes included
    within the broad category of the domestic and courtship novel: Louirra May
    Alcott’s Work and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Villete. These novels,
    however, are actually hybrids of the domestic novel and other forms. Work
    blends the domestic and picaresque tradition, and both Jane Eyre and Villette
    rely more on the gothic and sensational traditions. Emma, however, is solely a
    domestic novel.

    11 Poouey argues that Austen disliked Bath, partly because it was the site of a
    possible failed romance and because Bath did not offer a “desirable or
    affordable home” after the death of her father (209-10). Kirkham, however,
    argues against this more traditional view, stating that Bath offered Austen
    social and intellectual stimulation (63-65). The well-known story of Austen
    fainting when she was told the tamily was moving to Bath is quite probably a
    myth as Kirkham suggests, but it could also be a myth based upon her strong
    dislike of the resort. In any case, because some of the biographical
    information on Austen sketchy or perhaps unreliable, it is difficult to make
    certain statements about her views on Bath.

    12 Within the novel’s domestic code, it is also significant that Mr. and Mrs.
    Elton, who should have been moral leaders as representatives of the Church, are
    depicted as silly and shallow. In late eighteenth-and ninetnth-century England
    and America, the influence of the church waned as the home gained influence as
    the seat of moral authority.

    13 Although Emma is still a far cry from the snobbery and social manipulations
    of Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice, her social planning harkens back to
    Lady Catherine’s autocratic daclarations that Mr. Collins needs to marry and
    that Darcy cannot marry Elizabeth Bennet.

    14 Trilling made one of the most infamous comments upon Emma, which reflects
    the twentieth century’s narrow definitions of female behavior and fear of
    female power. The “exraordinary thing about Emma,” Trilling states, “is that
    she has a moral life as a man has a moral life” (34). Self-love, he says, has
    alway been a part of the moral life of men and is an essential element of their
    power” (34). Austen, however, never accuses her heroine of gender transgression
    and does not use the plot to “punish” her.

    15 Johnson is one of the few critics who notes that Knightley is not “above
    imaginistic misreadings of his own” (140), although she also suggests that Emma
    does not misread her community.

    16 For a discussion of point of view and the reliable narrator in Emma, see
    Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction and “Distance and Point of View.” For an approach
    that counters some of Booth’s readings, see Johnson’s Jane Austen.

    17 See Kirkham, 125-126. She finds that Emma’s relationship with her father,
    whom she calls an “absurd tyrant,” is detrimental beeause it keeps her from
    creatinp relationships with other women. But I do not see that her devotion to
    her father hinders her relationship with women–though it does hinder the
    possibility that she will ever marry a man. At the end of the novel, Emma has
    developed closer relationships with both men and women because she has stopped
    trying to manipulate others. And she has also agreed to marry a man who is
    willing to live at her home.

     

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