Emma, Simmel, and Sociability

Abstract

Each reading of Emma confirms my belief that it is Austen’s masterpiece. The style and tone display an artist at the height of her powers, and the technical virtuosity of narrative and its advance on Mansfield Park is astonishing. The finesse of free indirect discourse¹ and focalization combine perfectly with narrative voice and plot. Austen takes, as she famously writes to Cassandra, “a heroine that no one but myself will much like,” and dares her reader not to like Emma.² Emma is founded on artistic will to power—Austen makes us like her difficult and spoiled heroine just because she can, and she does so effortlessly—we are drawn in as surely as if we were caught in a tractor beam. Any other writer (say, Charlotte Brontë or Dickens), would elect to make us sympathetic with the poor, orphaned child Jane Fairfax, but Austen chooses to tell her tale from the perspective of Jane’s tormentor, the handsome, clever, and rich Emma.

“So very kind and obliging!—But he always had been such a very kind neighbour!” And then fly off, through half a sentence, to her mother’s old petticoat. “Not that it was such a very old petticoat either—for still it would last a great while— and, indeed, she must thankfully say that their petticoats were all very strong.’” (E, 225)