miercuri, 3 septembrie 2014

Jane Austen - Emma - the book

By the time that Jane Austen completed the novel entitled ‘Emma’ when she was thirty-nine years old. She started to work at the novel in January of 1814 and finished it a year later, in March of 1815. The novel was printed in 2,000 copies at the end of 1815, but not all the copies were sold – 563 copies were not sold even after four years. During her lifetime Jane Austen didn’t earned much from her books but after her death. A year and a half after her novel ‘Emma’ saw the light of printing, Jane Austen died. ‘Emma’ was the fourth published novel and the last that was published before the Jane Austen’s death.[1]
‘Emma’  is a novel of manners of the English provincial society at the end of 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. It is among the most important achievements of English fiction. ‘Emma’ is a novel that is dominated by the personality of its heroine. Jane Austen was considered to have accepted her world as it was and she is considered the painter of a world that is limited as she introduced a young lady who can decide for herself and even to make a selection regarding her partner.[2]

“In other words, Jane Austen had decided to leave behind her the world of Little Red Riding Hood, in which the wolves were represented by Lovelaces and where the victims must always be innocent little girls who had to pay a high price for disobeying their mothers.”[3]

It was written in a period in which Jane Austen was at the height of her popularity and it is said that Austen dedicated this novel to the Prince Regent, George although she wasn’t so excited because of what kind of person he was – dissipated, drunk and superficial. George was a person that adopted the behavior of a gentleman during his lifetime. He considered that men who were fashionable were dandies – that kind of man that gives a particular importance for the way in which he looks, for his physical appearance. Jane Austen, besides marriage, also takes up the question of gentleman’s behavior through the character of Mr. Knightley who is rugged, thoughtful and honest. It seems that Jane Austen ironically called him also George.  Jane Austen, generally, uses in her novels the countryside background of the sentimental stories and “the central character is still a young lady and she continues to face sentimental problems. Anne, Catherine, Elinor…the whole set of them, even Emma, for all her originality, pursue the same quest of love.”[4]
Jane Austen’s novel has been a subject of dispute and she “set out with the playful intention of unsettling her readers, judging by one of her rare surviving authorial comments: I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.”[5] Also, her novel would be ridiculed by some female generations such as Maria Edgeworth who says that “there is no story in it, except that Miss Emma found that the man whom she designed for Harriet’s lover was an admirer of her own…”[6] Sir John Mackintosh, a good friend of Madame de Staël, was the admirer of Austen’s novels and he said that “there was a genius in the sketching out that new kind of novel.”[7] He recommended Austen’s novels to his friend who “expressed her view that Austen’s novels were vulgaire, too close to the English provincial life she detested for its narrowness and dullness, its emphasis on duty and stifling of wit and brilliance…”[8] George Eliot said that Jane Austen’s novels gained a high reputation and there are many controversies that are always felt when the author dares to be natural. He considers that Austen is a true artist that makes accurate portraits of the people and society by describing what she knew and had seen.
It was considered that Austen’s novel had also a didactic purpose; she had to control the behavior of her women characters who appeared to be something else instead of what they should have been. Arnold Kettle gave his opinion regarding the moral didactic purpose:

“the prevailing interest in Emma is not one of mere ‘aesthetic’ delight but a moral interest’, and Austen’s ability to involve us intensely in her scene and people is absolutely inseparable from her concern. The moral is never spread on top; it is bound up always in the quality of feeling evoked…The delight we find in reading Emma has in fact a moral basis.”[9](114,119)

This ‘didactic intention’ it is also applied by Jane Austen to his male characters and even to society. Jane Austen discussed the masculine selfishness in her novel Sense and Sensibility through the two sisters and invites the female readers not to judge the ones who never declared their love because it could be only the heroine’s imagination and mind; “men were also being taken to task: not only the double-dealers like Willoughly in Sense and Sensibility and to a lesser extent Emma’s friend, Frank Churchill”[10], but also those who got married only in order to improve their fortune. The new social life that Jane Austen had adopted became an essential element of the feminine novel and “the importance of balls as far as women were concerned need to be stressed…”[11] Actually, there weren’t only the balls that were encouraged but all kinds of social encounters and, thus, the heroines didn’t need to face with solitude and they could participate at different social gatherings. This thing is important because it change the novelist’s attitude towards her work; if the heroine is separated from the world, from the social life, she ceases to find herself. Thus, she decided that isolation is not a good idea and she considered that her characters had to live like any other human being.
The novel centers around romance and courtship and it also presents the distinctions of classes and the importance of manners that were prevalent in the English society. An example is the importance of balls and social gatherings. Being considered the most influent family in Hartfield, the Woodhouse, often, organize gatherings, especially from Emma’s desire. There is not much action and suspense. Jane Austen presents everything in detail, her characters are presented walking, eating, discussing, doing common things. All these constitute the landscape of the social classes of the Victorian period. Jane Austen is a good expert of that society and she presents different problems of that period as the situation of woman in society, differences between social classes and the arranged marriages. The feminism that Jane Austen presents in her novel is subtle and it can clearly be seen the fact that Austen encourages the idea of getting married from love and not for the social status.

“She illustrates her theory all the more successfully because she breaks the spell of an extravagant plot and recreates a realistic world of flesh and blood characters in which falling in love may take time and must follow the evolution of the heroine’s psychology.”[12] 

Jane Austen shows in ‘Emma’ the importance of class in British society. Even if the characters live in a small town, there is in it a specific social structure. Emma with her father and Mr. Knightley are at the top of the social hierarchy, while Harriet Smith, Miss Bates, Mr. Martin are the lower level of the hierarchy. Austen also encourages respect between social classes and also encourages people to maintain their social status. When Emma insults Miss Bates she breaks the rule of class interaction; she is superior to Miss Bates but it doesn’t mean that she has the right to treat her in that way. Austen also encourages the idea that women can also be independent and take decisions by their own and they can even be superior to men: “… the roles are reversed; as in the novels of the pioneers, the heroine is sometimes felt to be far superior to some of the male characters: Emma, for all her faults, can look down upon Elton…”[13]

The writing style in Emma is subtle and ordinary. It can be easily read, it is logical and follows a structured form. Critics said that Jane Austen used in her writing a mixture between neoclassicism and romanticism and though it seems impossible such thing it is said that combining these two was one of her strong talent. Her novels are representative of the late eighteenth century moral world view. People live in this society in socially, economically, emotionally and ethically harmony. The novel is told in the point of view of an omniscient narrator through which Jane Austen presents her visions upon society of the late eighteenth century and the narrator presents the events and characters through Emma’s eyes and perspective. According to some critics, Jane Austen and the narrator is one and the same person and she constantly shares her point of view.[14]


[2] Jane Austen, Emma, Open Road Media, 2014 (cover)
[3] Philippe Séjourné, The Feminine Tradition in English Fiction, Institutul European Iasi, 1999 (page 43)
[4] Philippe Séjourné, The Feminine Tradition in English Fiction,  Institutul European Iasi, 1999(pages 43-45)
[5] Jane Austen’s Emma: A Casebook, Edited by Fiona Stafford, Oxford University Press, 2007  (page 9)
[6] Without Brilliancy of Any Kind. What Some Women Should Not Have Said About Jane Austen.
A Male Voices Web Page, http://www.theloiterer.org/ashton/women.html, 15.02.2014
[7] Without Brilliancy of Any Kind. What Some Women Should Not Have Said About Jane Austen.
A Male Voices Web Page, http://www.theloiterer.org/ashton/women.html, 15.02.2014
[8] Without Brilliancy of Any Kind. What Some Women Should Not Have Said About Jane Austen.
A Male Voices Web Page, http://www.theloiterer.org/ashton/women.html, 15.02.2014
[9] The Dilemma of Emma: Moral, Ethical, and Spiritual Values, www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol21no2/jackson.html, 15.02.2014
[10] Philippe Séjourné, The Feminine Tradition in English Fiction, Institutul European Iasi, 1999 (page 46)
[11] Philippe Séjourné, The Feminine Tradition in English Fiction, Institutul European Iasi, 1999 (pages 46-47)
[12] Philippe Séjourné, The Feminine Tradition in English Fiction, Institutul European Iasi, 1999  (pages 58-60)
[13] Philippe Séjourné, The Feminine Tradition in English Fiction, Institutul European Iasi, 1999  (page 65)
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