Rating: 4/5 stars
"Emma" is a dramatic romance about a girl named "Jane".
There's
a somewhat traditional romantic story line in Emma, in which two young
people fall in love and become engaged, and yet hide their engagement
out of fear of familial censure due to their different in class status
and wealth. However, the strain of keeping the relationship secret makes
the two lovers miserable. In a dramatic series of events involving a
lost break-up letter, a frantic horse ride across the countryside and a
sudden death of a parent, the two young people re-unite and come forth
about their relationship.
Nearly all of this story line occurs off-screen, however, and involves Jane, not the titular heroine.
I
loved this sort of bait-and-switch. It was effective at demonstrating
how our perceptions of people are influenced by our own personal goals
or struggles or the partial information we receive about the world. Just
as Frank Churchill was quite sure Emma had sussed out his secret
engagement (given his own preoccupation with his forbidden love), the
reader thinks the story will be a romance arch of some sort centered
around Emma and including also Mr Churchill, Mr Knightly and/or Harriet.
Instead, these relationship tensions dissipate easily, with the climax
of the novel really peaking instead at the discovery that Emma, all of
Highbury, and the reader themselves have been much mistaken about two
major characters and the meaning of dozens of social interactions.
Austen
does such a good job at portraying all the little nuances and the
subtext of interpersonal relationships and conversation. Through the
portrayal of a few people planning a party, for example, we get vivid
character portraits and critique of social structure. There are some
reviews of Emma on Goodreads that bemoan how many pages are spent
discuss, for example, how to cook a particular cut of pig. And I want to
moan back at them "but you see it's the way they talk about the
cut of pig, through which we feel Emma's exasperation at suffering the
overly chatty Miss Bates, and see Mr Woodhouse's arms-length paternalism
and hypochondriac anxiety, and we feel the claustrophobic, limited set
of acceptable activities available to Emma as a woman of her station
and...."
One of the things I loved about Persuasion
was Austen's bitingly sarcastic prose. I felt like this sort of
authorial voice was de-emphasized in Emma, in favor of showing Emma's
reactions to events instead. In consequence, dialogue played a much
larger role in demonstrating the various follies of the rich. Perhaps
because of this difference, I felt like the cast of Emma was somewhat
more lovingly portrayed by Austen. Although Mrs Enton was delightfully
insufferable in her condescending sense of superiority!
Another
possible effect of this difference was that Emma is much more a
character study and less a social critique. To some extent, this is in
its favour. Emma is a fantastic portrayal of the difficulties in
navigating social relationships as a young woman, when you feel you know
enough to play as an adult, and yet you still haven't really grasped
viewing things from other people's perspectives, nor have you mastered
reflecting on your own emotions. (I enjoyed Emma reacting to something,
thinking first of how Mr Knightly might react, and then thinking of how
Mr Churchill might react, and then thinking how silly she is thinking
always of Mr Churchill first - how crazy to be in love; during this part
of the book, she of course thinks she is in love with Mr Churchill and
not Mr Knightly).
To some extent, however, this makes Emma a
little more limited. The "moral" of the story is that one shouldn't
dream of marrying too far above one's social station. The book ends with
us, and Emma, learning that Harriet is just a tradesman's bastard, and
there for Emma was very wrong to have impeded her happily marrying a
farmer. This "moral" translates somewhat poorly to today (or, if it
doesn't, it ought to...). Charitably, one could think of Emma's meddling
in Harriet's life (and the mirror, of Mrs Enton meddling in Jane's
affairs) as a lesson in checking your privilege and not enforcing your
standards of what "a good life" should be on people with different ways
of lives. That is a lesson still relevant in 2020. Still, this ending
leaves a bit of a sour taste, and was really my only reason I dropped my
rating from 5 to 4.
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