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In December of 1815 a novel of social class, marriage, and love was published under the title Emma. Before setting out to put this story on paper, Jane Austen wrote, “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,” but despite her prediction, audiences through the years have enjoyed Emma’s story whether it has been through the novel itself, movie adaptations like Kate Beckensale’s rendition, or modern interpretations like Clueless.
Austen’s Emma helped to develop the novel through obvious characteristics like character development, clean punctuation, and tight chapters. Furthermore Frances Ferguson claims that the development, exhibited in Emma, of Austen’s “free indirect style marks a crucial moment in the history of novelistic technique in which narrative authority is seemingly elided” (161). Free indirect style is a formalistic term for represented speech and thought (159) and shows the “relationship between the social system and the individual” (161), which would be explored and challenged in future works like Henry James’s The American.
At the time Emma was written, Jane Austen was surrounded by sixteen prominent British writers of the day, all of whom had written more books and received more popularity than Austen herself (Mandal 30). Jane Austen’s books did not sell as well as theirs did; she was rejected often by publishers, and those who did agree to publish her works often sought to change them, adding their own subject matters and philosophies (3). Jane Austen held her ground, however, and she was not swayed by her literary environment (3). Apart from Sir Walter Scott, each of those sixteen novelists, including Sarah Green, John Agg, Emma Parker, and Barbra Hofland, is virtually unknown today (30). Jane Austen bested an entire troupe of contemporary colleagues in her day, and went on to influence novelists in the years to come. Be it Henry James, Virginia Woolf, G.K Chesterton, or Mark Twain, everyone seems to have something to say about their inescapable female predecessor.
But not only did Emma influence the novels written in the years following its publication, it directly influences books written currently. For example, Karin Westman shows how J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is directly influenced by one of Rowling’s favorite books: Emma. Similarities like a third-person narrative form, imitated phrases, and a reader value for “characters who balance generosity of feeling with integrity of self” (144-5). With such a high regard as to call Emma “the most skillfully managed mystery I’ve ever read” (145), it is no wonder that Rowling, and others, continue to draw upon Emma for inspiration.
Part of what makes Austen’s Emma so enduring is all of the themes to be analyzed and debated, like gender. What makes gender such a particularly interesting discussion is the complex manner in which it is handled. Modern day readers readily notice the apparently submissive and heavy emphasis of marriage in the novel; however, critics can also point out that Austen’s society’s ideal of ladyhood is challenged by the “self-assurance, strength, and compassion through the depiction of Austen’s heroine, Emma,” and Margret Kirkham believes that the novel, through Emma, takes a feminist position almost identical to Wollstonecraft’s male and female equality (Kohn).Gender and class together stand as arguably the most discussed theme in regard to Emma, due to the blatancy in which it is addressed by the namesake of the novel and her acquaintances. Just one of the many sub-topics of this umbrella is women and work, especially as it is compared with other Austen novels. As can be seen in Jane Fairfax’s near brush with a working position, unless the female be in the working class, women fear work like the plague (Copeland 116). Jane’s future profession is only spoken of miserably and pitifully by the main characters like Emma and Knightly, and it is considered good fortune indeed when she escapes a life of toil to marry Frank Churchill and solidifies her place in the gentry class. This attitude towards work is contrasted to the Minervan heroines of the time who looked on “it [work] with the fervor of a religious convert” (118), of whom Austen parodies in her “Plan of a Novel” (114).
Even though class is repeatedly discussed in relation to Emma, there has grown some confusion with the ever-increasing distance between Austen’s day and present-day. There is a tendency, in some readers and critics, to blur the class distinctions and even labels of Austen herself and her characters, despite the fact that they are clearly delineated. J.A. Downie is a critic who has recently striven to clarify that neither Austen nor her characters, including those in Emma, are part of the bourgeoisie (73-4). Some readers begin to believe that the characters are bourgeois because they are not all aristocracy and they are not all wealthy, but Kohn points out that readers must remember the gentry class, which was separate from any rising middle class. Certainly Emma has characters like poor Miss Bates, but she is not middle class because she does not have money. Current society, which so often places an emphasis on the middle class experience, creates a distance between Austen’s society and causes for confusion and debate.
When Emma was published, the novel as a literary form had only existed for roughly a hundred years, beginning in Spain with Don Quijote, and moving to England in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, with Robinson Crusoe, Clarissa, and Tom Jones. Ian Watt notes that Richardson, (in Clarissa) and Fielding (in Tom Jones), seemed to have irreconcilable differences of style in the novel, Richardson providing full, deep characterization, and Fielding leaning towards the picaresque (Watt 296). It was Jane Austen who found the middle ground between the two, and her “successful resolution” helped mature the novel as an art form (296).
This “successful resolution” is extremely indicative of the power and range Emma possesses, and reveals much about who Jane Austen is. Amid apparent paradoxes and social conflicts that do not seem to resolve themselves, Austen always steps in as the silent voice of wisdom, and provides examples and characters that help the world to recognize its room for improvement. Emma has resolved many problems before, and will continue to resolve them in the years to come.
