Ferghana state university faculty of foreign languages department of philology and teaching languages

Gendered space

Wiltshire wrote about Austen's use of "gendered space" in Emma, noting the female characters have a disproportionate number of scenes in the drawing rooms of Highbury while the male characters often have scenes outdoors. Wiltshire noted that Jane Fairfax cannot walk to the post office in the rain to pick up the mail without becoming the object of village gossip while Mr. Knightley can ride all the way to London without attracting any gossip. Wiltshire described the world that the women of Highbury live in as a sort of prison, writing that in the novel "...women's imprisonment is associated with deprivation, with energies and powers perverted in their application, and events, balls and outings are linked with the arousal and satisfaction of desire".

Nationhood and the "Irish Question"

The novel is set in England, but there are several references to Ireland, which were related to the ongoing national debate about the "Irish Question".In 1801, the Act of Union had brought Ireland into the United Kingdom, but there was a major debate about what was Ireland's precise status in the United Kingdom; another kingdom, province or a colony? Austen satirizes this debate by having Miss Bates talk about Mrs. Dixon's new house in Ireland, a place that she cannot decide is a kingdom, a country or a province, but is merely very "strange" whatever its status may be . Austen also satirized the vogue for "Irish tales" that become popular after the Act of Union as English writers started to produce picturesque, romantic stories set in Ireland to familiarize the English people with the newest addition to the United Kingdom The travel itinerary that Miss Bates sketches out for the Campbells' visit to Ireland is satire of a typical "Irish tale" novel, which was Austen's way of mocking those who had a superficial appreciation of Irish culture by buying the "Irish tales" books that presented Ireland in a very stereotypical way. Austen further alludes to the Society of United Irishmen uprising in 1798 by having the other characters worry about what might happen to the Dixons when they visit a place in the Irish countryside called "Baly-craig", which appears to be Ballycraig in County Antrim in what is now Northern Ireland, which had been the scene of much bloody fighting between the United Irishmen Society and the Crown in 1798, an enduring testament to Ireland's unsettled status with much of the Irish population not accepting British rule. The American scholar Colleen Taylor wrote about Austen's treatment of the "Irish Question": "That Emma applies a distant and fictionalized Irish space to her very limited and dissimilar English circle, turning a somewhat ordinary English young woman, Jane Fairfax, into an Irish scandal, proves that the object of English humor is—for once—not the stage Irishman but the privileged English woman who presumes to know what he and his culture are really like."