I've been very remiss in not posting but it's been tremendously busy at work and I've been coming straight home (when I don't have an arts event to attend) and applying myself to reading Emma, which I happily finished a short while ago.
About Emma Austen famously wrote, "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like" and for this reader those couldn't be truer words. However, the book is about a study of a young woman's growth - focused more on the true development of the character than her likeability. Having written at least two characters like this myself, and been told others have trouble liking them, I have to yield that that's fair. I'm just so used to adoring at least one of her main female characters - identifying so strongly with her - that I felt cheated at first. Now I just feel that something wanted was missing, but I can do without it in this case.
The afterword by Graham Hough of Cambridge University speaks of the book as having the 'strong element of the mystery story' (I know - wha-???) and that Emma is amusing. Both of these I completely dismiss - she is arrogant and presumptuous and infuriating. None of these inspire amusement. The novel is called a dramatic comedy and to not like it I must be finding it more dramatic than comedic and seeing how much damage Emma does by being so self-absorbed and meddlesome which, again, is not amusing. If it is supposed to be taken thus, then this is where my uneasiness comes in and decides for me. If Emma were just misleading herself, that would be fine, but she is dangerously misleading others for her own entertainment, to the detriment of Jane Fairfax and Harriet Smith, and that I cannot overlook.
I do, though retract what I said before about Mr. Knightley, for Austen allows him to stop being the embodiment of the voice of morality and become both human and attractively love struck in the last (barely) third of the book. She saves him from being a cold, stiff, old man (again, just barely), at the last minute. This despite his creepy comment about having probably been in love with her since she was 13 (when, by my calculations, he was about 30). Ew.
I will add, that had Austen been part of a Regency period critique group with other writers of the time (who? That's a fun idea to think about), surely several of her peers would have cried 'Enough!' at the unending ramble of Miss Bates and Mrs. Elton to which Austen devotes pages and pages and pages and then still more pages (and Frank Churchill's idiotic flirtations as well), instead of taking back some of that space to further - and better - develop Mr. Knightley, his place at Hartfield, and his singular relationship with Emma so that the ending felt less convenient and more earned. Not to give away the end - I don't mean that he would court her - I just mean that for two-thirds or more of the book he's barely there, except on the fringes, or when he steps forward twice to scold her.
We are spared (or rather Emma is spared) what is really our/her due - the scene where she tells him all that she has said and done, which she resolves to do at the very end - and his reaction then! She gets off so easily, it really isn't fair.
It would also have been a good idea to use time and pages stolen back from Miss Bates and Mrs. Elton to dramatize the announcement of the engagement to Mr. Woodhouse and to Mrs. Weston, who deserve better than one paragraph summaries! But this is Austen's way so I wasn't surprised and it's not that big of a deal.
It pains me to critique dearest Jane, but as a writer as well (definitely not in her league, but still aware of the workings of the craft), and as the blog commands me to examine my reaction to these readings, so I find and stand by my opinion. I will watch the new BBC Emma when it's released, but doubt it will soften my feelings toward the heroine.
I will leave off with Prof. Hough's words at the end of his essay, "What we may properly feel about Jane Austen in this age is that her questions are not ours, her answers not always the ones we would have chosen, but that by examining her own sort of life with patience, fidelity, intelligence, and wit, she has given a unique pleasure, and that the very quality of this pleasure sharpens the will to see into our very different lives with something of her penetration and integrity."
Ah, I love that idea - that Austen is not a moralist (I see her guided by her powers of observation and her station, not as a moralist) trying to teach us a lesson (though a lesson is learned nonetheless), but instead leading by example, through her characters, and so more effectively guiding us in a higher and better direction.
Thanks, Jane!
