Patricia Spacks

Her entire relationship with Frank Churchill derives from and

depends on her capacity to perceive herself from the point
of view of admiring spectator. When she and Frank first
dance togtherWhen she and Frank first dance together, she
found herself well-matched in a partner. They were a couple
worth looking at. Dwelling as she does on the idea of being
looked at, she neglects to recognize what she feels,
thinking, rather of what she might, or should, feel.
Janet Todd
Letters, too, need interpretation. They are read and reread, are sometimes
private, sometimes public, but never quite yield all their meaning, even when
declared to the whole village. All of genteel Highbury hears of Jane Fairfax
when she writes to Miss Bates, but no one catches her reason for not
travelling
to Ireland. The letters here become metonyms for their writers. Jane and
Frank exist in them before ever they arrive, and they continue to live under
the watchful, unobservant eyes of the community through their clandestine
correspondence.

CLAUDIA L. JOHNSON

Considering the contrast between Emma and Mrs. Elton

can enable
us to distinguish the use of social position from the abuse
of it, a proper
sense of office from a repulsive officiousness; and in the
process it offers
a glimpse of the conservative model of social control
working well. The
principle of difference between the two women and their
rules is not
finally reducible to class. What makes Mrs. Elton
intolerable is not
that she is new money and Emma is old, and that Mrs.
Elton thus only
pretends to prerogatives of status Emma comes by
honestly. Mrs.
Elton's exertions of leadership set our teeth on edge
because of their
insistent publicity, not because of their intrinsic
fraudulence. Emma
may be convinced that in attending their party she "must

have
delighted the Colesworthy people, who deserved to be
made happy!"
but she keeps the satisfactions of condescension to
herself. But by
tirelessly asserting her centrality in the minds of others,
Mrs. Elton
bullies her auditors into frustrated acquiescence: "Nobody
can think
less of dress in general than I dobut upon such an
occasion as this,
when everybody's eyes are so much upon me, and in
compliment to
the Westonswho I have no doubt are giving this ball
chiefly to do
me honourI would not wish to be inferior to others."
Determined
to advertise her sagacity, Mrs. Elton furthermore has a
vested interest
in airing what places others at a disadvantage, uncannily
seizing on
painful features of others' lives, and forcing them to the
center of
attention: "I perfectly understand your situation, however,
Miss Woodhouse(looking towards Mr. Woodhouse)Your
father's state of
health must be a great drawback." But Emma has ready
stores of
"politeness" which enable her to respect what is delicate
by leaving it
unsaid. She feels gratified when Jane Fairfax divulges the
hardships of
living at home; but she exclaims "Such a home, indeed!
such an aunt!"
only to herself.
More than nicety is at issue here. Just as the impoliteness
Lady
Catherine and Darcy evinced towards others in
persistently apprising
them of their inferiority constituted a socially significant
wrong, a theft
of the self-satisfaction to which all are entitled, so do Mrs.

Elton's
bruited exertions of authority triumph improperly in the
dejection of
othersas when she, intervening as friend as well as
patron, hastens
Jane's assignment as a governess, or just as bad, when
she colludes with
her husband to humiliate Harriet publicly for her upstart
pretensions.

Emma is cured neither of misinterpreting situations nor of

meddling. Finished with Frank in her own fantasies, she
immediately starts planning a match between him and
Harriet. In relieving Harriet's angst about Mr. Elton's
marriage, Emma stumbles upon a significant moment of
self-recognition: she sees the value of something she
lacks. She admires Harriet's 'tenderness of heart', her
'affectionate, open manner'. Jane is given more dialogue
that previously a shift the means that the narrator
becomes more omniscient and temporarily less aligned to
Emma.
Chapter 36: Generated by the presence of one outsider,
Mrs. Elton, and significantly deepened by the imminence
of another, Frank Churchill, it permeates Mr. Weston's
conversation with Mrs. Elton in Chapter 36-- a kind of dual
monologue which is one of the novel's wittiest essays in
parallel self-absorption-- and culminates in mutual
awkwardness for Emma, her father and Mr. Knightley.
The sense of unease in the final chapters of Volume 11
intensifies with Frank Churchill's return. Restlessness is the
keynote of Chapters 37 and 38.
Janet Todd: (towards the end of the 18 c)
Inmuch the same period, the feministMaryWollstonecraft was complaining
about the restricted lives of women. The only real work that society seemed
to
sanction was the gaining of a husband and, when genteel, reasonably
educated

girls remained single, they were regarded as a drain on their families, used
primarily to help nurture and nurse their married relatives.Austen accepted
the
inescapable fact of female dependency on men, and the anger
ofWollstonecraft
is not openly expressed in the novels, except perhaps by the melodramatic
Jane
Fairfax in Emma, who implicitly compares her lot as potential governess to
that of a slave or prostitute, but the predicament haunts all the heroines. At
the same time, the duty of care and social usefulness that devolved on so
many
daughters
From this perspective, Emma, often considered the liveliest of the later novels,
can be seen as more landlocked in conservative nostalgia. The character who is
made to work against this happy conservatism is Jane Fairfax, shadow heroine to
the sunlit Emma. Never in good health, she foreshadows Charlotte Bronts Jane
Eyre in her dislike of dependency, and in suffering from social and sexual
repression. She can be seen as one of the dark unhappy ones with whom
George Eliots Maggie Tulliver sided, in The Mill on the Floss (Eliot 1860/1991:
306). That Jane fell in love with Frank Churchill at the seaside, that Emma
credits her with an Irish love-affair, is on the shadowy romantic margins, not in
the heartland of the text, which is Emmas paternal home Hartfield, near the
village of Highbury, and Mr Knightleys estate, Donwell Abbey. Austen
characteristically contains key episodes and encounters within excursions, and in
Emma these are all inwards: to Box Hill, to Donwell Abbey. Although both these
episodes display Janes discordant feelings (more significant on a second
reading), their most obvious surface is Mr Knightleys ideal of good
management, genially trusting to or aiding those who know their place in the
patriarchal order of the estate, the county, the country. This civic humanism can
be called Tory, or bourgeois liberalism. Emmas final marriage to Mr Knightley
is presented as very much the right thing, and even before she expects to marry
him she contemplates his property, the property of a brother-in-law which her
sisters son might inherit, with honest pride and complacency. Her entranced
observationlandscaped at great length by the narrator, lovable by anyone who
loves rural Englandhymns the well-managed estate, and lineal family purity.
It was just what it ought to be, and it looked what it wasthe residence of
a family of such true gentility, untainted in blood and understanding. I

Christine Roulston:
Part of Emma's dilemma as a female subject is that class
solidarity is far more appealing than gender solidarity as a
way of experiencing social relations [... ]As a female figure
equal to Emma and yet without the latter's social and
economic privileges, Jane Fairfax becomes the only
character to dialogize successfully the relationship
between the public and the private in the novel into the
the domestic realm of the living room. The historical
reality of the slave trade and the exploitation of the

women are brought together as a way of dialogizing the

private by means of the public.