Emma's Social Freedom?

In her book, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Marilyn Butler states that, "Jane Austen's purpose in giving [Emma] an exceptionally unfettered social position is rather to leave her free to act out her willful errors, for which she must take entire moral responsibility." What Butler is essentially arguing here is that because Emma is, in many ways, the social and moral center of Highbury, she is able to behave in a way that otherwise would have been considered unfeminine and/or tactless at the time. Many of Austen's other popular heroines are not of the social station that Emma is and do not necessarily have the same freedom, which may be why Austen herself claimed that Emma might be a heroine "no one but myself will much like."

For this week's blog entry, I want you to reflect on the argument Butler poses. Do you buy what she is  selling? Give one or two examples to support your response.

Merit vs. Birth in Jane Austen's Emma

We spent just a short amount of time in class today discussing students' take on their reading of Jane Austen's Emma so far. I mentioned that many consider this to be a novel of manners and that, during Austen's time, a person's behavior, purpose and agency greatly varied depending on their position in society. In what students have read so far, they should already be able to see that Emma herself (as well as some of the other characters in the novel) have very clear ideas of what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior for certain people based on where they fit in terms of title, class and position.

In his introduction to the Norton Critical Edition of Emma, editor George Justice discusses this idea when he writes that, "everyone in the novel, and most people within early nineteenth-century culture, would judge the value of people in relationship to a number of expectations. English literary works from Geoffrey Chaucer's late fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales with its "worthy" Knyght to Henry Fielding's Tome Jones (1749)... tackle the issue of the relationship between birth and merit. Emma inserts itself into the class dynamics of its culture, both overturning and confirming that a person's value should be linked simultaneously to merit and birth" (27).

For this week's blog entry, I want students to pick two characters from the novel, that they have encountered so far (besides Emma), and identify what values they bring to the community of Highbury via their merit versus their birth. Does his/her birth give him/her a certain advantage in the community? What characters might not have the advantage of birth but certainly are valued because of their merit? Why is this so? How are certain characters expected to behave because of the elevated esteem (or lack thereof) of their birth? Finally, can students make some modern day connections to this idea? Do we still have these expectations today?

The Emma Complex(ity)

You've now spent a few days reading Jane Austen's Emma. For some of you, this may be your first foray into the world of Austen. Or maybe we have some Janeites in the class (for those of you not in the know, that is the term for Jane Austen superfans and, yes, they have their own Wikipedia page). Either way, I hope you are at least enjoying the experience so far. You can't really teach a British Literature course without studying at least one Jane Austen text and I chose Emma because I think it is fun, the title character is close to you in age, and there is a subtle complexity to this comedy of manners that I believe will make for some interesting class discussions. (And, to be perfectly transparent, Clueless (which is a modern adaptation of the novel) came out my own senior year of high school , and I was/am obsessed with that movie.)

For this week's blog entry, I want you to reflect on your first impressions of Emma herself. Sometimes the novel is dismissed as lighter fare than other of Austen's more "serious" novels (such as Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility), but I think this is a mistake. The subtle complexities of the novel that I alluded to earlier are present right from the beginning in the somewhat contradictory nature of Emma herself.

In the very opening of the novel, we are told that "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." Which is all fine and good until we learn just a little bit later that her mother died when she was a child and that "the real evils indeed of Emma's situation were the power too having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself..." (Austen 1). How are we to reconcile this first description of Emma with what we later come to learn about her? 

Having read several chapters of the novel, do you see these conflicts in Emma's character? What are your impressions of her so far? Similarly, what do you think of the novel itself? For those of you who have never read Austen, is it what you expected?