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Mr. Woodhouse adopted a laissez faire parenting style when it came to raising Emma. In fact, most of the time it seems that Emma is parenting her father, taking on the role of both daughter and mother. Emma feels entirely responsible for the wellbeing of her father and therefore feels obliged to stay with him. Her father is a selfish but gentle man and does not approve of matrimony. If Emma were to marry he would lose his primary carer. This is not to say that Emma feels restrained by her father, in fact quite the opposite, Emma has the power over the world she inhabits. The narrator announces at the start of the novel: "The real evils of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much of her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments" (Austen, 1). Although Mr. Woodhouse is lacking as a father figure, Mr. Knightley acts as a surrogate father to Emma. Mr. Knightley is not afraid to correct Emma's behaviour and tell her what she needs to hear. Mr. Knightley reprimands Emma when he learns of her match-making and also later when Emma is extremely rude to Miss Bates. Still, the reader cannot ignore the developmental damage that has been caused by Mr. Woodhouse's indifferent parenting style as Emma struggles to form healthy adult relationships.
Class
Class is an important aspect of the novel. The distinctions between the classes are made explicitly clear to the reader by Emma herself and by Austen's descriptions. The social class structure has the Woodhouses and Mr. Knightley at the top, the Eltons, the Westons, Frank Churchill, and even further down the line Harriet, Robert Martin, and the Bates family including Jane Fairfax. This social class map becomes important when Emma tries to match Mr. Elton and Harriet together. Harriet is not considered a match for Elton due to her lowly class standing, despite what Emma encourages her to believe. Emma's initial disregard for class standing (as regards Harriet at least) is brought to light by Mr. Knightley who tells her to stop encouraging Harriet.
The scholar James Brown argued that the much quoted line where Emma contemplates the Abbey-Mill Farm, which is the embodiment of "English verdure, English culture, English comfort, seen under a sun bright, without being oppressive" is in fact meant to be ironic. Brown wrote that Austen had a strong appreciation of the land as not only a source of aesthetic pleasure, but also a source of money, an aspect of pre-industrial England that many now miss. In this sense, the beauty of the Abbey-Mill Farm is due to the hard work of Mr. Knightley's tenant, the farmer Robert Martin, a man whom Emma dismisses as the sort of person "with whom I feel I can have nothing to do" while Knightley praises him as "open, straight forward, and very well judging”.Brown argued that the disconnect between's Emma's contempt for Mr. Martin as a person and her awe at the beauty that is the result of his hard work was Austen's way of mocking those in the upper classes who failed to appreciate the farmers who worked the land.
Conclusion
Emma foreground the centrality of experience to the main characters cognitive, emotional and behavioral development. It can be read as a clinic narrative of experience a Bildungsroman which displays the significance, or inevitability of personal experiences in one’s growth and development. Emma’s egocentric character at the beginning evolves into a sympathetic one at the end. The narrative uses situations, such as Emma’s attempt to shape Harriet’s destiny, to portray how Emma’s evaluations of the other characters are primarily controlled by her imagination. Orienting all her experiences towards a transformational and confessional moment for both Mr. Knightley and Emma herself, the implied author supports Mr. Knightley’s critical and corrective perspective of Emma’s thoughts and actions. In other words, through her experiences . This quality of narrative has the potential to produce cognitive, emotional and even behavioural responses to
the narrative situations in the reader. When Emma successively makes false inferences about the other characters, as Mr. Knightley and the implied author do, the reader also experiences the same kind of psychological tension. In other words, besides being represented semiotically in the narrative itself, experientiality in characteristics add to the narrativity level of Austen’s novel. They present Emma’s subjective (re)evaluations of the narrative events and situations, and their impact both on the operation of her consciousness and on the experiencing mind of the reader. This extra narrative layer can perhaps account for the universal popularity of Austen’s personal experiences in one’s growth and development. Emma’s egocentric character at the beginning evolves into a sympathetic one at the end. The narrative uses situations, such as Emma’s attempt to shape Harriet’s destiny, to portray how Emma’s evaluations of the other characters are primarily controlled by her imagination. Orienting all her experiences towards a transformational and confessional moment for both Mr. Knightley and Emma herself, the implied author supports Mr. Knightley’s critical and corrective perspective of Emma’s thoughts and actions. In other words, through her experiences on her development is, therefore, undeniable. This quality of narrative has the potential to produce cognitive, emotional and even behavioural responses to the narrative situations in the reader. When Emma successively makes false inferences about the other characters, as Mr. Knightley and the implied author do, the reader also experiences the same kind of psychological tension. They present Emma’s subjective (re)evaluations of the narrative events and situations, and their impact both on the operation of her consciousness and on the experiencing mind of the reader. This extra narrative layer can perhaps account for the universal popularity of Austen’s novel over the years.
Bibliography
Advertisement in The Morning Chronicle 23 December 1815 p. 1.
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