High Anxiety: Jane Austen's _Emma_
So, for most of my grown-up life, the only Jane Austen novel I'd ever read was Pride and Prejudice. Last week, though, I got very frustrated with the amount of time I was spending on my phone and decided to start re-training myself to read actual books during my downtime. So I grabbed Emma off a shelf of the bookcase in the kitchen and decided to read it for pleasure.
It's a really different experience. I mean, in terms of the world in which it's set, it looks and acts very much like the worlds of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. But the fact that almost the entire novel is narrated through Emma's perspective really changed, for me, how reading it felt. With Pride and Prejudice, the characters you sympathize most with are the ones that are in some way marginal to the social machine with which the novel is preoccupied. You start P&P with the Bennetts, and especially Lizzie, who already feels like she's sort of lost the game by being born into a family with five daughters and an entailed estate; so even though you can't really fairly call her an outsider, she's at least got enough distance from it to talk about it critically. Emma Woodhouse, on the other hand, is (at least from her perspective) the biggest fish in a pretty small pond. Her family is landed and rich; her only sister has already married into the only family in the vicinity that could claim to outrank her own; and she's young and beautiful and deferred to by most of the women she sees socially. And I know this is ostensibly the point: that Emma's privileges have warped her view of both herself and the world around her, and the novel is all about her discovering how her own egotism has led her astray, and how many things she's been wrong about.
All I can say is that Austen World, as filtered through Emma's consciousness but also as constructed for us by this plot, feels very different from the way it does in Pride and Prejudice. In fact, for me as a reader, Emma's social world just feels straight-up dystopian. Which I recognize may entirely be a desired effect.
Spoilers for Emma (the novel; I haven't seen any adaptations of it) follow.
thanks for this detailed discussion! i have so far only watched the movie (movies? the one i recall is with jonny lee miller as mr knightly, but there may be another, i forget. library dvd), but this motivates me to add it to my librivox to-listen list. i did get so much more out of pride & prejudice, listening to a full cast reading on librivox. even just being aware of where the chapter breaks are adds so much.
i also could not live in a world with such high stakes placed on such subtle social minutiae. jr high and high school was bad enough that way, and thankfully time limited.
