"Emma"

Paper Summary:

This paper examines Jane Austen's "Emma", a novel about a young woman's education in the true nature of marriage, which, as she learns, is much more than the shallow, somewhat materialistic, ideas that she holds at first. It discusses how at the novel's beginning Emma Woodhouse is clever but spoiled and rates her own understanding of the world much higher than it deserves. It looks at how her attempts to manipulate others into marriages that she believes are suitable for them are disastrous and how, through her failures and her growing self-knowledge she gradually comes to understand what marriage really means. It shows how only once she has acquired this knowledge, and only when she has it, Emma herself is ready to marry.

From the Paper:

"Elegance, therefore, far from being an antiquated notion, was used to describe a person who truly knew how to behave in society with ease and honesty. Emma Woodhouse, despite her social standing and her basic intelligence, is not such a person when the novel opens. The narrator lets the reader understand this very clearly in the description of Mr. Knightley as "one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them" (Austen 8). This was not, the narrator continues, "particularly agreeable to Emma herself" but she tended to pay attention to Mr. Knightley's chiding only when it suited her (8). Yet it is the influence of Knightley and the lessons he teaches that bring about Emma's education and the pedagogical relationship between them, which turns into, or reveals to them, their love for each other is the central relationship in the novel."

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• Analytical Essay # 36071 : "Emma"
• Analytical Essay # 37169 : "The Character of Emma in "Madame Bovary"

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