Emma: Jane Austen's Errant Heroine

Jane Austen warned her readers that "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." It is easier to say why the reader may dislike Emma than why her creator likes her. Emma is willful, manipulative, an arranger or rather a misarranger of other people's lives. Much of the time she fails to see things clearly and truly, and her self-knowledge is uncertain. At the end of the novel she acknowledges that she has learned from experience, but not every reader is persuaded.

In the beginning we find admiration for Emma and her situation: "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." There is perhaps a qualification in the word seemed. Three paragraphs down, the qualification is confirmed. "The real evils indeed of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her." An absent mother (who died when she was very young), a valetudinarian father, and an indulgent governess combine to give her rule of the household. What follows are the promised "evils," "disadvantages," and "misfortunes" that create a dissonance between Austen's stated affection for her heroine and the reader's unease with Emma, if not outright dislike of her. Part of the drama for the reader will be discovering the source of Austen's affection, whether or not the reader ultimately shares it.

The case against Emma is clear enough. In trying to arrange a marriage between the vain and pompous Mr. Elton (not her first impression of him) and the young and naïve Harriet Smith, Emma ignores both the temperamental disaffinity and the social distance between them—and more grievously she misunderstands the desires of Mr. Elton. He is a vicar from a good family with social ambitions; Harriet, an illegitimate young girl of seventeen, wholly in thrall to Emma's matchmaking machinations. Emma callously dismisses Robert Martin's affection for Harriet. Martin, a yeoman farmer, is a solid and admirable character ultimately deserving of the title gentleman, but Emma's snobbery prevents her from appreciating his virtues. Her intervention delays what turns out to be the right outcome, a marriage between Robert Martin and Harriet. But she seems to have learned nothing from her failure and proceeds to plot a marriage between Harriet and Frank Churchill that is again based on a total misunderstanding of their respective natures and desires.

Emma takes her cues for her behavior from observing external circumstances that she invariably misinterprets. She reads Elton as interested in Harriet when in fact she herself is the object of his interest. She fantasizes a match between Frank Churchill and Harriet on the basis of an event in which Churchill rescues Harriet from an assault by gypsies. If the capacity for accurate interpretation is a sign of intelligence, Emma seems to fail the intelligence test again and again, despite the "cleverness" that Austen attributes to her. Emma in fact is a perfect illustration of how will or desire or preconception may determine interpretation. And then there is a failure of another kind: inconsideration in her behavior toward the kindly but drearily garrulous Miss Bates at the Box Hill outing. Emma cannot resist agreeing with Miss Bates's admission that in the game about to be played she is "sure to say . . . dull things." Her friend, mentor, and husband-to-be, Knightley, observing the event, later rebukes the "unfeeling[ness]" and "insolence" of her response to Miss Bates. Tact is a mark of social intelligence, and again Emma fails the test.

What then can possibly redeem her as she goes from misunderstanding to misunderstanding, from misbehavior to misbehavior, from fiasco to fiasco? The extenuations of...