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?
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?
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