Loving Emma, Despite Her Flaws (and partly because of them)

*Emma* Reading Challenge, week one

Alicia Silverstone and Stacey Dash in Clueless, which Susan Bordo claims is the best adaptation of Emma (and I’m inclined to agree).

The title of

Eleanor Anstruther

’s recent, extraordinary novel, which was serialized here on Substack, is In Judgement of Others.¹ It's a title that places her in the great novelistic tradition of Jane Austen, because it calls to our attention the chasm that stretches between our own consciousness and the actions of other people as we observe them, and this, arguably, is the primary difficulty that Austen's novels explore. Other people are opaque to us, and we spend much of our mental energy trying to judge them—not necessarily morally or ethically, but simply in terms of intention. It is a struggle to make sense of their strangeness, and we fail in our attempts to do so more often than not.

How do we cope with this difficulty? Some do not try: either they assume that are able to judge others by their actions and appearance, or they assume that everyone else must share their sensibilities and perspectives. In both cases, there is a failure of empathy, of understanding. Human beings are the most complex and ambiguous texts, difficult if not impossible to read, and ever-changing. As Foucault claimed, albeit in gendered language, "nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men."²

This is why novels, and specifically Jane Austen's, are not just works of art; they are also thought experiments. Let us take this person (Emma Woodhouse, for example) and imagine her situation. Then let us place other persons around her with their own, hidden motivations and desires. Now, what will she make of their behavior? What assumptions will she make? What will she fail to comprehend? Will she learn from her failures, not just about the other people, but also about herself?

Philistines who think that Austen's novels are trivial because they don't focus on monumental historic events utterly miss the point. Her novels, despite their limited geographical and social scope, are profoundly philosophical and get at the heart at what it means to be a human being.

And Emma is her most geographically limited novel of all: this is a confined, one might say a claustrophobic society: a handful of houses and families in one village. That is all that Austen needs to contemplate the human experience.

For example, the two different forms of empathetic failure described above—the assumption that one can easily understand others and the assumption that everyone shares one's perspective—are both found in the same house in the first chapter of our novel. Our heroine, one the one hand, congratulates herself for her own powers of understanding others—specifically the newly married Mr. and Mrs Weston, a match that she believes that she made—though she is about to embark upon a mortifying series of misreadings that will form most of the book's drama.

Her father, on the other hand, is "never able to suppose that other people could feel differently from himself" (7). This tendency derives, the narrator informs us, "from his habits of gentle selfishness." This gentility, however, has the effect of quiet autocracy. The fact that Miss Taylor has moved out of his house to become Mrs. Weston stimulates him into ceaseless complaint, with the deceptive refrain of "poor Miss Taylor." Of course, his pity is actually for himself rather than for the newly married former governess, as Mr. Knightley forthrightly observes.

Hartfield as it appears in the 2009 BBC adaptation of Emma.

Indeed, Austen shows us within a page of his introduction that Mr. Knightley serves as a corrective to the co-dependent family dynamic of Hartfield, the Woodhouse family home, and she does this with just a few lines of dialogue. Despite Emma's attempt to disarm Mr. Knightley's blunt objectivity by calling it "a joke," each of his honest observations threatens to reveal inconvenient self-knowledge in both the father and the daughter: "Mr. Knightley, in fact, was one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them" (9).

In other words, Mr. Knightley is the only figure who threatens to reveal that the "real evils indeed of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself" (5). Austen's third-person narration in this sentence is flexible enough that it is able to convey Emma’s consciousness, to present her from subject and object positions simultaneously. In other words, while we might see these tendencies described in this passage as personal flaws (so carefully presented with the qualifiers “rather” and “a little”—almost as if the narrator were winking at us), it is quite clear that Emma sees them, to the extent that she does at all, as the advantages of her privileged position rather than “disadvantages which threatened to alloy her many enjoyments.” If you know the novel, then you know that central to its drama is Emma’s developing self-consciousness, her growing into an understanding of herself.³

While this move towards self-understanding is not unique in Austen's novels (one thinks, for example of Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice), the laser focus on the interiority of Emma is singular. This is, after all, the only one of the major novels to take its title from its heroine. This difference in emphasis is clear if we compare the famous first sentence of Pride and Prejudice to that of Emma.

Here is the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, though I expect that many of you know it by heart before I quote it:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

It is, of course, a perfect sentence, and it immediately tells us the nature of the narrative that is to come. Its plot bears a superficial resemblance to that of Emma: in both cases, there is a movement toward marriage (or multiple marriages), and in both cases, there is a problematic male interloper who threatens to disrupt the smooth trajectory toward this conclusion. The opening sentence of the earlier novel, however, tells us that there will be much external, exciting drama in the forthcoming narrative, with social implications that will resonate outwards from the central couple(s) to affect wider change. And we have so many questions which must be answered: who is the young man? who wants to marry him? who are the people who are acknowledging this inevitable truth about him? why do they care? are they after his fortune?

And here is the opening sentence of Emma:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. (5)

There is no real external plot implied here, except perhaps the suggestion that something might come along "to distress or vex her." And this is because the action that really matters in the novel occurs inside Emma's head. Again, this interiority is present to an extent in the earlier novels, but here Austen's singular focus on the internal is radical, unprecedented.

Why, then, you might ask, does Austen choose a third-person narrator if the book is so focused on the workings of Emma's mind? After all, there are were novels from the previous century that featured female heroines addressing the reader in the first person (Defoe's Moll Flanders, for example).

The answer goes back to this flexibility of Austen's third-person style, which makes ample use of free-indirect discourse (the use of the third-person narrative voice to convey a character’s thoughts without direct quotation). We will be looking closely at numerous examples of this flexibility over the next few weeks, but suffice to say that it allows Austen to deploy irony on multiple levels, as the subjective merges with the objective, the internal with the external.

It's worth pausing here to observe that Austen basically invented this mode, and it is one of the most important literary innovations of the last three centuries. You might find the occasional use of free-indirect style in earlier narratives, but Austen perfected it. The mode has become so ubiquitous in the last two-hundred years that it seems almost synonymous with the novel form.

Let's look at one early example of free-indirect style in the novel, and you will get some idea of how powerful a tool it is. In chapter three, Emma has become acquainted with Harriet Smith and decides to take the girl under her wing:

Encouragement should be given. Those soft blue eyes and all those natural graces should not be wasted on the inferior society of Highbury and its connections. The acquaintance she had already formed were unworthy of her. The friends from whom she had just parted, though very good sort of people, must be doing her harm. (18)

The narrator is giving us Emma's sentiments but in the third person, which creates an ironic distance not as readily available in first-person narration. Again, the subjective is expressed along with the objective, as the narrator invites the reader to question assumptions and draw conclusions. After all, if Harriet's friends are "very good," then how could they really be doing her harm?

This mode also allows the reader to trace the arc of Emma's growth through the novel, as eventually the subjective and objective effects merge into a sort of equipoise of self-recognition.

And here I will make a declaration that I could never get away with in a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal, but I feel it to be valid and important nonetheless, and indeed essential to the novel’s power: this mode allows the reader to love Emma despite her flaws. Not all readers do, of course. (My undergraduates tend to be very impatient with her, for example, despite the fact that they often resemble her in ways that they do not recognize.)

But despite the naysayers, the time that we spend inside of Emma's head allows us to learn that, unlike Austen's more stridently satirical characters, she has the capacity for empathy and for self-understanding. She is young and hopelessly inexperienced beyond the tiny world into which she was born, but she clearly has a good heart and the desire to help others, even if most of the time she has no idea how to go about it. This is why we love her—even though she is fictional, a literary construction. Such is the power of Austen’s writerly magic.

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Over the next few weeks, we will spend a great deal of time inside Emma's head, and we will follow her series of failed judgments ("in judgment of others")—of what is best for Harriet, of Mr. Martin, of Mr. Elton, of Jane Fairfax, of Frank Churchill, of herself. And, if you are like me, you will come to love her anyway, if you don't already.

On Friday, the first installment of the chapter-by-chapter analysis for premium subscribers will appear. On Sunday, we will listen to some more Schubert to accompany our reading. And next week, we will continue discussing the first volume, while we learn something of the novel’s context in the body of Austen’s work.

You will find the reading schedule here.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Wilson Hidayat on Unsplash

1. A note to my fellow pedants: if I spell the word judgment differently here and elsewhere (with or without the e), it is because of the difference between conventional English and American spellings. Eleanor is English, hence the e.

2. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Cornell UP, 1977.

3. If this paragraph sounds familiar, it’s because I lifted most of it from a previous post of mine from last year. Yes, I am plagiarizing myself, but it’s my newsletter, so I make the rules.