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Jane Austen’s fifth novel, Emma, was published
in London at the start of 1816, and later that year a French translation was
published in Paris with the intriguing title of La Nouvelle
Emma—The New Emma. The anonymous translator’s title seems to me
to capture the essence of Austen’s novel: Emma changes and becomes a new
person. This is the only one of Austen’s novels to be named after its
heroine, and that fact suggests that the action of the novel takes place within
the heroine herself. Emma is the only Jane Austen novel in which
the heroine does not move at the end with her mate to a new place, since the
primary change, at the end of this novel, is internal. Emma, in fact,
ends the novel exactly where she began, at Hartfield; this lack of physical
change underlines the mental and emotional change that has taken place within
Emma. In this essay, I would like to suggest the nature of Emma’s complex
and yet fairy-tale-like transformation. I can do so
by outlining six key ideas, six perspectives on the unfolding action that
define Emma’s change and help us to understand it. My subtitle might well
be “Six Perspectives in Search of a Character.” The six key ideas are: 1) Emma
Woodhouse is a split character, with two very different sides; 2) Emma
often does not attend to, or become conscious of, thoughts and feelings that
are in her mind; 3) The
change in Emma’s character is gradual and not instantaneous or total; 4) Mrs.
Elton arrives providentially during the second half of the novel, so that she
can embody in external form, and so exorcise, Emma’s own worst qualities; 5) The
changes within Emma during the novel are mirrored by great changes within
Harriet and Mr. Knightley, the two characters Emma is most dependent upon; 6) Frank
Churchill and Jane Fairfax, whose love story is counterpointed with Emma’s own,
triumph by good luck; Frank, however, remains inwardly unchanged, unlike Emma. As for my
first point, Emma’s split self: to speak precisely, the change within
Emma does not create a wholly new person. The new Emma has been present from
the start, but dominated by the arrogant, self-absorbed, self-sufficient side
of herself. The Emma of the novel’s opening sentence—“handsome, clever,
and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition” (5)—seems to be
perfect and so in no need of change. That is, in fact, precisely Emma’s own
view of her situation: she tells Harriet Smith early in the novel that
she will never marry because “‘I cannot really change for the better.’”
As Emma explains to Harriet, she is surrounded by those who love and admire
her, and she has complete control of her own daily life: “‘never, never
could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always
right in any man’s eyes as I am in my father’s’” (84). Note that Emma
here equates being first—as she is, socially—with being right, and being
important with being beloved. There is, however, another, more reasonable
and less complacent Emma present from the outset. In fact, one sign of
this split within Emma is her paradoxical fascination with love and courtship:
though believing she herself has no need of them, Emma nevertheless finds her
greatest satisfaction in trying to arrange, and in speculating about, other
people’s love affairs. It is interesting to note that Emma is remarkably
conceited, stubborn, and obtuse whenever she deals with the subject that
fascinates her, her idée fixe, love, but remarkably sensible and
competent when she confronts other issues, such as, for instance, whether the
snow falling outside will prevent her father from getting home from the
Westons’ Christmas-Eve party. The novel’s
first chapter dramatizes this split within Emma. In the novel’s first
conversation, she attempts to make her egocentric father see the rational
benefits to all, now that her former governess, Miss Taylor, has left their home
and married their neighbor, Mr. Weston. When Mr. Knightley arrives,
however, Emma falls into her father’s “gentle selfishness” (8), and Mr.
Knightley responds to her self-pitying tears by declaring, in an echo of Emma’s
earlier words to her father, “‘Every friend of Miss Taylor must be glad to have
her so happily married’” (11). The first chapter, then, suggests that
Emma is torn between a Woodhouse side and a Knightley side; she takes the
Knightley point of view speaking to her father, and the Woodhouse point of view
speaking to Mr. Knightley. The same split within Emma is evident in her
two disputes with Mrs. Weston and with Mr. Knightley about Frank Churchill’s
delay in visiting his father and new stepmother: in Chapter 14 of Volume
One, Emma takes a stern tone in discussing Frank with Mrs. Weston; but, in
Chapter 18, she finds herself embroiled in a heated debate with Mr. Knightley
“and, to her great amusement, perceived that she was taking the other side of the
question from her real opinion, and making use of Mrs. Weston’s arguments
against herself” (145). At the Crown
Inn ball, Mr. Knightley tells Emma that she has two selves. In a
dumb-show reprise of the action of Volume One, Mr. Elton has openly refused to
dance with Harriet in an attempt to punish both Harriet and Emma for Emma’s
attempt to unite him with Harriet. Mr. Knightley, however, dances with
Harriet and thus saves her and Emma from humiliation by the Eltons. When
Emma confesses to him her scheme to unite Mr. Elton and Harriet, and adds, “‘they
cannot forgive me,’” the conversation continues: “I shall not
scold you. I leave you to your own reflections.” “Can you
trust me with such flatterers?—Does my vain spirit ever tell me I am wrong?” “Not your
vain spirit, but your serious spirit.—If one leads you wrong, I am sure the
other tells you of it.” (330) Both this scene and Mr. Knightley’s
role in the first chapter suggest that Mr. Knightley is the hidden
and “serious” side of Emma, and thus that she has a deep need for his love and
esteem from the start. Emma has two selves, and Mr. Knightley embodies
her “real” self. Emma thus vacillates between two poles in her
personality, just as most of us do, or think we do. She frequently acts
foolishly or unkindly, but she is always to some degree aware that she is
misbehaving, even while she is doing so. Her most cruel action in the
novel is her public insult to Miss Bates at Box Hill, an insult that is all the
more cruel since it is cloaked in civility: “‘Ah! ma’am, but there may be
a difficulty. Pardon me—but you will be limited as to number—only three
at once’” (370). Yet the narrator’s words introducing this remark—“Emma
could not resist”—suggest that Emma realizes even as she is speaking that she
is giving in to an impulse that she should repress. My second
point is that, throughout the novel, Emma has thoughts and feelings in her mind
that she is not conscious of—in fact, that she does not want to be conscious
of. Most important, Emma is, unknown to herself, in love with Mr.
Knightley from long before the novel starts. This is exactly what she
discovers in the novel’s climactic pages. In a rapid series of shocks,
Emma finds that Frank and Jane are engaged, that Harriet does not love Frank but
Mr. Knightley, and that Harriet’s love for Mr. Knightley is a calamity—because
Emma loves Mr. Knightley herself. The language describing Emma’s
discovery of her love suggests a process of approaching, confronting,
absorbing, and finally accepting a pre-existing fact: “A mind like her’s,
once opening to suspicion, made rapid progress. She touched—she
admitted—she acknowledged the whole truth” (408). Emma’s awareness is
new, but her love for him has been in her mind and heart all along, she realizes:
How long had Mr. Knightley been so dear to her, as every feeling declared him now to be? When had his influence, such influence begun?—When had he succeeded to that place in her affection, which Frank Churchill had once, for a short period, occupied?—She looked back; she compared the two—compared them, as they had always stood in her estimation, from the time of the latter’s becoming known to her—and as they must at any time have been compared by her, had it—oh! had it, by any blessed felicity, occurred to her, to institute the comparison.—She saw that there never had been a time when she did not consider Mr. Knightley as infinitely the superior, or when his regard for her had not been infinitely the most dear. She saw, that in persuading herself, in fancying, in acting to the contrary, she had been entirely under a delusion, totally ignorant of her own heart—and, in short, that she had never really cared for Frank Churchill at all! (412) Amusingly, then, Emma’s immunity to
Frank Churchill’s appeal has been the result of her unadmitted love for Mr.
Knightley, and not because, as she tells Harriet in Volume One, “‘I never have
been in love; it is not my way, or my nature’” (84). Why has Emma
been unwilling to admit her love for Mr. Knightley, and instead indulged those
other aspects of her personality that she now finds “disgusting” (412)?
The answer seems to be that she finds love threatens her sovereignty, her
independence, her self-control: she tells Harriet, while explaining to
her that she has no need for love, that her affection for her nephews and
nieces “‘suits my ideas of comfort better than what is warmer and blinder’”
(86). Emma’s complacent self-love is why, in her phrase, it never
occurred to her, by any blessed felicity, to institute the comparison of Frank
Churchill and Mr. Knightley. One thing that makes Emma, the novel,
so true to experience and so enjoyable to read is that we, the readers, can’t
help seeing Emma’s deepest impulses much more clearly than she can herself. One
unmistakable instance is at the Crown Inn ball, when Emma is “more disturbed by
Mr. Knightley’s not dancing, than by any thing else” (325); his “tall, firm,
upright figure” ought not to be among the elderly men, she thinks (326).
There is also her extreme concern at the suggestion of Mr. Knightley marrying
Jane Fairfax and disinheriting little Henry: “‘every feeling revolts,’”
Emma exclaims (225). Another sign of her secret love is her unhappiness
whenever she falls out of favor with Mr. Knightley; she is so unhappy following
his rebuke of her at Box Hill for mistreating Miss Bates that she cries all the
way home (376). Emma’s tears are, she realizes, “extraordinary,” and so
is the suggestion that Emma makes to Mr. Knightley early in the novel, in their
debate about Harriet Smith and Mr. Martin: “‘I know that such a girl as Harriet
is exactly what every man delights in— . . . Were you, yourself, ever
to marry, she is the very woman for you’” (44). Emma’s
unacknowledged love for Mr. Knightley provides the novel with its comic plot,
much as Elizabeth Bennet’s unconscious love for Mr. Darcy does in Pride and
Prejudice and as Captain Wentworth’s unacknowledged love for Anne Elliot
does in Persuasion. One of Austen’s rare literary
allusions underlines this point. Emma, delighted at Mr. Elton’s charade
of a courtship, tells Harriet, “There does
seem to be a something in the air of Hartfield which gives love exactly the
right direction, and sends it into the very channel where it ought to flow. The course
of true love never did run smooth— A Hartfield
edition of Shakespeare would have a long note on that passage.” (75) As Jocelyn Harris has pointed out in
her chapter on Emma in Jane Austen’s Art of Memory, Emma,
sublimely confident that she knows better than Shakespeare, finds herself
unwittingly performing in a Hartfield version of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream: several pairs of lovers mistake and misunderstand each
other, but, in the end, are reunited and married. Emma, then,
has many thoughts in her mind that she cannot or will not attend to, thoughts
that remain unconscious. To give one example, she knows very well, but at
the same time cannot admit to herself, that Harriet Smith is in love with
Robert Martin. She keeps herself from acknowledging this obvious fact by
thinking that Harriet must be kept “safe” from the designs of the Martins, kept
away from the “danger” of contamination—in fact, kept under Emma’s own control.
Emma preoccupies herself with protecting Harriet to avoid raising the question
of what Harriet herself wants. In the same way, Emma insists that Harriet
is her special friend, her chosen companion: “‘my intimate friend’” is
the phrase she uses to Mr. Knightley in their debate over Robert Martin’s
proposal (62). Yet, in fact, Emma finds Harriet tiresome and
feebleminded. Her contempt for Harriet appears again and again in the
novel, but Emma remains unaware of it because she clothes it in admiration for
Harriet’s simplicity and humility. Emma, for instance, tries to convince
herself at the end of Volume One that “Harriet was the superior creature of the
two,” but then thinks, “It was rather too late in the day to set about being
simple-minded and ignorant; but she left [Harriet] with every previous
resolution confirmed of being humble and discreet, and repressing imagination
all the rest of her life” (142). On almost
every page of the novel, we see Emma’s ingenuity at work: she manages to
absorb unpleasant facts without actually admitting their obvious meaning.
For instance, John Knightley, her brother-in-law, warns Emma, in Chapter 13 of
Volume One, that Mr. Elton is wooing her and that she is encouraging him.
In the very next chapter, Mr. Elton’s attentions grow increasingly particular,
and Emma finally has to ask herself, “‘Can it really be as my brother imagined?
can it be possible for this man to be beginning to transfer his affections from
Harriet to me?’” (118). Of course, the two questions are very different;
Emma is, in the precise sense of the phrase, begging the question (in the Oxford
English Dictionary, “beg the question” is defined as “assume truth of thing to be
proved”). Here we
reach my third idea. The change that brings into being a new Emma is not
instantaneous or total. The very words in which Emma first acknowledges
“the whole truth” about her love for Mr. Knightley suggest that the new Emma is
still enmeshed in the old: “It darted through her, with the speed of an
arrow, that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!” (408). Jocelyn
Harris aptly remarks, “That arrow must be the arrow of the blind boy Cupid”(181). We might expect
Emma’s all-important realization to be “It darted through her, with the speed
of an arrow, that she loved Mr. Knightley!”—and, indeed, in all three film
versions of Emma produced in 1995-96 (the Gwyneth Paltrow
Hollywood film, the BBC/A&E film starring Kate Beckinsale, and the Beverly-Hills-High
film adaptation Clueless), the heroine exclaims at this moment, “I
love him!” (in Clueless, the heroine Cher tells herself, “I love Josh”).
Emma’s self-discovery arrives in her consciousness as a decree about Mr.
Knightley’s future—and we may recall that “must” has been a favorite verb of
the God-like Emma, who has been arranging others’ destinies. Harriet “must have
good sense and deserve encouragement,” while the Martins “must be coarse and
unpolished” and “must be doing her harm” (23). Again, “Mr. Knightley must never
marry. Little Henry must remain the heir of Donwell” (228), while Frank
Churchill “must learn to do without her” (266). From the
moment that Emma realizes, in less than straightforward terms, that she loves
Mr. Knightley to the end of the novel occupies almost eighty pages in the R. W.
Chapman edition, about one-sixth of the whole; one reason that the ending does
not come quickly after this realization is that Austen has to trace the changes
within Emma. During the twenty-four hours following her initial
discovery, she makes a whole series of subsequent realizations (about Harriet,
her treatment of Harriet, her feelings for Frank Churchill, her treatment of
Jane Fairfax and her motives in maligning Jane, her deprivation if she is to
lose Mr. Knightley to Harriet, and more): “She was bewildered amidst the
confusion of all that had rushed upon her within the last few hours. Every
moment brought a fresh surprise; and every surprise must be matter of
humiliation to her” (411). Even after the romantic éclaircissement, there are
still changes and adjustments, as the new Emma disentangles herself more and
more completely from the old. Emma accepts Mr. Knightley’s love and
proposal of marriage, but she assumes they must remain engaged as long as her
father lives: “‘any change of condition must be impossible for her’”
(448), a pronouncement that she happily withdraws one page later when Mr.
Knightley convinces her that such a change is very possible. Here we can
move to my fourth idea: the entrance into the novel of a caricature-Emma,
Mrs. Elton. Mrs. Elton arrives in Highbury well past the halfway point of the
novel; in a sense, Emma has summoned Augusta Elton from the depths of Bristol
by sending away Mr. Elton wounded and determined to marry to spite Emma.
Mrs. Elton embodies all of Emma’s worst qualities, Emma’s “vain spirit,” but
with none of the counterbalancing good qualities—including self-doubt—of Emma’s
“serious spirit.” Mrs. Elton, like one side of Emma, is conceited; she
patronizes her social inferiors; she considers every social occasion as an event
held in her honor; she thinks in clichés, unable to realize her own limited
awareness—the resemblances between Emma and the woman who says, “‘I am Lady
Patroness, you know,’” are too striking to be missed (354). However,
Mrs. Elton’s belated appearance in the novel helps to raise Emma in the
reader’s eyes, to make her more worthy of the novel’s happy ending, in three
quite separate ways. One is that Emma detests Mrs. Elton from the time of
their first conversation and is determined to be as unlike her as possible.
Another is simply a matter of contrast: Mrs. Elton is so unmitigatedly
awful, so lacking in self-awareness, humility, and consideration, that she
makes Emma appear sensitive and intelligent. A third, and quite
different, benefit to Emma from Mrs. Elton’s arrival is that Emma’s worst
qualities, undiluted and concentrated, now are embodied in someone external to
her. By repudiating Mrs. Elton and all that she stands for, Emma seems to
cast out, to purge and exorcise, the vain side of her own character.
Emma’s exorcism of the Mrs. Elton side of herself seems to me suggested by the
novel’s final paragraph: The wedding
was very much like other weddings, where the parties have no taste for finery
or parade; and Mrs. Elton, from the particulars detailed by her husband,
thought it all extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own.—“Very little
white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business!—Selina would stare
when she heard of it.”—But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the
hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who
witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the
union. (484) This passage tells us that Emma’s
wedding ceremony is as un-Augustalike as possible: all the things that
make the ceremony perfect, the absence of finery and parade and white satin,
are seen by Mrs. Elton as deficiencies. The passage also tells us, slyly,
in the words “from the particulars detailed by her husband,” that Mrs. Elton
was not at the wedding; she has been excluded; she does not belong in the small
band of true friends who gather to celebrate Emma’s marriage to Mr. Knightley. My fifth
idea is concerned with change among the other characters in the novel.
Obviously, most of the characters in this comic novel do not and can not
change. In fact, Emma and Mr. Knightley reach the altar on the novel’s
final page because Mr. Woodhouse remains un-changed: “In
this state of suspense they were befriended, not by any sudden illumination of
Mr. Woodhouse’s mind, or any wonderful change of his nervous system, but by the
operation of the same system in another way.—Mrs. Weston’s poultry-house was
robbed one night of all her turkies” (483). The two characters that Emma
is most dependent upon, however, Harriet Smith and Mr. Knightley, do change
dramatically in the course of the novel, and these changes on their part
reflect and amplify the change Emma herself is undergoing. Harriet, for
instance, begins the novel as guileless, unassuming, and completely humble.
When Emma tells her that Mr. Elton is clearly in love with her, she responds, “‘Whatever
you say is always right, . . . and therefore I suppose, and believe,
and hope it must be so; but otherwise I could not have imagined it. It is so
much beyond any thing I deserve. Mr. Elton, who might marry any body!’” (74).
But Harriet changes under Emma’s ministrations; we hear quite a different
person halfway through the novel, when Harriet disputes Emma’s praise of Jane
Fairfax’s piano-playing, pointing out, “if she does play so very well, you
know, it is no more than she is obliged to do, because she will have to teach”
(232). Harriet, in other words, is becoming uppity, and this change in
her climaxes when she believes it likely that Mr. Knightley has fallen in love
with her and wishes to marry her: she says to Emma, “‘I seem to feel that
I may deserve him; and that if he does choose me, it will not be any thing so
very wonderful.’” Emma is now confronted by a new Harriet, a monster that
she has created, and she feels sincere and total revulsion: “the moment
[Harriet] was gone, this was the spontaneous burst of Emma’s feelings: ‘Oh God!
that I had never seen her!’” (411). Just as the
change in Harriet’s character underlines the change within Emma herself, so we
can see a change within Mr. Knightley that anticipates the change within Emma
at the novel’s climax. He has clearly been in love with Emma from well
before the novel’s opening: he tells her in the novel’s final pages, “‘I
could not think about you so much without doating on you, faults and all; and
by dint of fancying so many errors, have been in love with you ever since you
were thirteen at least’” (462). But, like Emma, he has remained unaware
of his love: in the novel’s proposal scene, the narrator comments that
“jealousy of Frank Churchill . . . probably enlightened him as to
[his love]” (432). The change in Mr. Knightley’s awareness of his love
for Emma is evident in the contrast between “‘Isabella does not seem more my
sister’” (40), his assertion to Mrs. Weston in the novel’s fifth chapter, and “‘Brother
and sister! no, indeed’” (331), the final words of the chapter devoted to the
Crown Inn ball. Like Emma, but much earlier in the sequence of events,
Mr. Knightley has become aware of his love, and, in a fine symmetry, the cause
of his awareness is Frank Churchill. This brings
me to my sixth idea. Emma’s character change is highlighted by the
absence of any inner change on the part of Frank Churchill. In a
conversation commenting on the novel’s outcome in its second-last chapter, Emma
and Frank agree that they have similar dispositions (in fact, Emma admits that,
in his situation, she would have found amusement in deceiving all in Highbury
as he has done); she adds, “‘there is a likeness in our destiny; the destiny
which bids fair to connect us with two characters so much superior to our own’”
(478). The love plot of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax is thus
presented in counterpoint to the Knightley-Emma plot. Both stories
present a secret love affair, though the secrecy in Jane and Frank’s case is
intentional, while the love that connects Emma and Mr. Knightley is
unconscious. One pair of lovers deceives those around them; the other
pair deceive themselves. Both stories reach a climax in the outing to Box
Hill, where both pairs of lovers quarrel. Jane, in an intense speech of veiled
contempt, breaks off her secret engagement to Frank (373); Emma returns home
from Box Hill believing she has lost forever Mr. Knightley’s good opinion by
her brutality to Miss Bates. One love-plot is resolved by fortunate
circumstances; Mrs. Churchill, who rules Frank Churchill’s life, suddenly and
unexpectedly dies, allowing Jane and Frank to marry. The other two lovers are united by inner change on Emma’s part; in
general terms, she has become aware of her love for Mr. Knightley, and, because
of it, she now repudiates her previous self as “disgusting”; more specifically,
Emma actually invites Mr. Knightley to propose to her. Believing he is about to relate his love for
Harriet, she “could not bear to give him pain. He was wishing to confide
in her—perhaps to consult her;—cost her what it would, she would listen” (429).
Emma now can feel for another, can empathize with another person and be
governed by that empathy, and she is rewarded for it. Frank
Churchill’s letter of explanation, which fills the chapter that follows the
Emma-and-Knightley proposal scene, underlines the contrast between Frank’s
inability to change and the new Emma. The letter explains, diffusely,
that he and Jane have been lucky that Mrs. Churchill died when she did.
He ends with the words, “‘If you think me in a way to be happier than I
deserve, I am quite of your opinion.—Miss W. calls me the child of good
fortune’” (443). Emma has been presented from the novel’s first
sentence as another “child of good fortune”—but the difference between the two
is that circumstances allow Frank to remain a child, while Emma, by inner
exertions, has grown up. These six
perspectives that I have outlined are, of course, interconnected, and together
they suggest the nature of the new Emma who prevails at the novel’s end.
The change within Emma is reflected in Jane Austen’s unobtrusive use of
symbolism from nature. One main vehicle for this symbolism is the natural
sequence of the seasons, the passage from life to death to renewed life.
The novel begins in late September with Emma facing a long winter, the winter
of her discontent, that follows from Miss Taylor’s removal from Hartfield to
become Mrs. Weston: Emma reflects, in the first chapter, “many a long
October and November evening must be struggled through at Hartfield, before
Christmas brought the next visit from Isabella and her husband and their little
children” (7). In midwinter, when the year is at its low point, and Emma
is at her most unreasonable, Mr. Elton, “spruce, black, and smiling” (114),
proposes to Emma in a carriage on a snowy Christmas Eve. However, the
year turns, spring comes, Emma’s life becomes richer, and the climactic outing
to Box Hill occurs on a hot day in late June. Emma’s scenes of
self-discovery occur in July, but in gloomy weather; Emma resolves that,
“however inferior in spirit and gaiety might be the following and every future
winter of her life to the past, it would yet find her more rational, more
acquainted with herself, and leave her less to regret when it were gone” (423).
The rain clears at the start of the next chapter, and Mr. Knightley proposes to
Emma in the garden at Hartfield on a sunny July afternoon, “tranquil, warm, and
brilliant after a storm” (424). The two marry in October, the time of
harvest and natural fulfillment. Jane Austen uses a similar unobtrusive
but powerful symbolism of seasonal change in her other novels, most notably Persuasion and Pride and
Prejudice. The human
equivalent of the seasonal procession to fulfillment is the arrival of little
Anna Weston, the baby produced by Mr. and Mrs. Weston, in the final pages of
the novel. In Volume One, the rift between Emma and Mr. Knightley caused
by their quarrel over Harriet Smith is almost magically healed when they take
turns dandling Isabella’s eight-month-old daughter: “Mr. Knightley . . .
was soon led on . . . to take the child out of her arms with all the
unceremoniousness of perfect amity” (98). This scene of reconciliation is
similar to the moment in Persuasion when Captain Wentworth lifts
troublesome young Walter Musgrove from the back of Anne Elliot (80). Both
scenes come early in the novel, before the hero and heroine are aware of their
feelings for one another; we sense in both scenes that the man and woman are
potential parents and perhaps meant to be parents together. By the
novel’s end, Anna Weston, the natural outcome of the Westons’ marriage one year
earlier, represents the new life that has been the natural outcome of the sequence
of events in Emma’s life that began with Miss Taylor’s transformation into Mrs.
Weston. And if Anna Weston is likely to be spoiled by her indulgent
parents, her story will be in the end a happy one. When Emma asks, “‘Poor
child! . . . at that rate, what will become of her?’” Mr. Knightley
replies, “‘Nothing very bad.—The fate of thousands. She will be
disagreeable in infancy, and correct herself as she grows older’” (461). WORKS CITED
Austen, Jane. Emma. Ed. R. W. Chapman. 3rd ed. London: Oxford UP, 1969.
Clueless. Dir. Amy Heckerling. Perf. Alicia Silverstone, Paul
Rudd. Paramount, 1995. Emma. Dir. Douglas McGrath.
Perf. Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeremy Northam. Miramax, 1996. Emma. Dir. Diarmuid Lawrence.
Perf. Kate Beckinsale, Mark Strong. Meridian-ITV/A&E, 1996. Harris,
Jocelyn. Jane Austen’s Art of Memory. Cambridge:
CUP, 1989. |
