Emma (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

own which goes quite beyond the matter of will Emma marry. Emma is someone with an as yet unspecified future, a fate or destiny, a set of possibilities that might find expression in some alternative structure. It is almost as if she were a narrative or a novel herself—with a probable but uncertain line of development, a Bildung, a contingent resolution. She has, in other words, the capacity for creating an identity for herself; and if her career in life includes marriage (and what follows from it), it will in any event be a strongly individuated choice and arrangement.
    Knightley cannot restrain himself for long. When he learns from Emma that she has persuaded Harriet to turn down a proposal of marriage from Robert Martin—Knightley’s tenant farmer—in the hope (and, to Emma, the certain likelihood) of an offer from Mr. Elton, he explodes in exasperation at Emma’s misguided scheme. The two battle it out, with Emma getting decidedly the worse part. He breaks off the conversation and walks out without ceremony and in a state of high annoyance. Emma is momentarily shaken by their disagreement, but quickly recovers her composure and self-confidence. Knightley, she rather ruefully observes, has “walked off in more complete self-approbation than he left for her.” Moreover, she goes on, Knightley could have observed Elton “neither with the interest nor ... with the skill of such an observer on such a question as herself.” He is resentful, ignorant, and prejudiced. He did not “make due allowance for the influence of a strong passion at war with all interested motives. Mr. Knightley saw no such passion, and of course thought nothing of its effects; but she saw too much of it to feel a doubt of its overcoming any hesitations that a reasonable prudence might originally suggest” (p. 59).
    Emma is, of course, talking through her hat. In her fantasy of a passionate courtship between Elton and Harriet she is unconsciously projecting some of her own unacknowledged wishes and desires onto both members of the pair; and in her repudiation of Knightley’s disapproval she is displacing her own misperceptions and misapprehensions onto his “conventional” moral authority. But what chiefly deflects her vision and confounds her observations here is that she is denying the palpable reality of Elton’s desire for her. Still further, she is denying desire in general and altogether so far as she herself is concerned. This denial runs deep and is one of the principal sources of the cognitive (and comic) distortions that characterize Emma’s schemes and plans for others.
    “Mr. Knightley might quarrel with her, but Emma could not quarrel with herself.... She was sorry, but could not repent” (p. 61). She is in fact high on herself, and although she cannot be angry at herself at this point in the narrative, she will soon to her chagrin learn to be increasingly self-critical. Although Emma has to be educated and “cured” of her infatuation with herself, her self-love and narcissism do not at the same time, however much trouble and grief they precipitate for her and others, seem in the end to be irremediable and pathological. There is also something winning and untutored about her narcissism—it is part of her immaturity, part of the unachieved and uneven development of the emotions that we find her contending with throughout the narrative.
    One of the technical devices that Jane Austen deploys to express and investigate this inner matrix is free indirect discourse, the narrator’s entry into Emma’s consciousness. Situated flexibly somewhere between narration and direct speech and fluidly shifting its properties, vectors, and psychic distances, this style of narrative permits the represented consciousnesses of both Emma and the narrator to permeate one another, sometimes to fuse, sometimes to be held distinct, sometimes to be both a mingling of the two and something else at the same time. It is part of the experience the