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

novel provides us with, of “getting to know” with intimacy and in copious and fulminating detail the imagined inner life of a represented character. To this end, Jane Austen represents Emma as habitually talking to herself. We eavesdrop on Emma’s silent conversations with herself. And one of the things we quickly come to learn is how much Emma enjoys the sound of her own (inner) voice. She is regularly aware of how delightful it is to be Emma. She talks to herself so much because she is such good company. And if this incessant silent chatter is further evidence of her narcissism, we might also recall that Knightley and Mrs. Weston agree that Emma is the very picture of “health,” an ascription that is repeated more than once in the narrative. And even though the health here is primarily physical and refers to Emma’s beauty and bloom, her “firm and upright figure,” her robust comportment and energetic bearing, there is an overflow or carry-over into a more general assessment. Knightley remarks, “ ‘I love to look at her; and I will add this praise, that I do not think her personally vain. Considering how very handsome she is, she appears to be little occupied with it; her vanity lies another way’ ” (p. 34). He means, to be sure, that Emma’s vanity lies in her preposterous overestimation of her powers of insight and judgment, her unshaken faith in her own capacity of “penetration.” This conventionally male metaphorical attribute is referred to ironically throughout the narrative (p. 20, p. 120, p. 299, and throughout). What Knightley leaves unsaid is that despite this silly and troublesome characteristic, he loves to listen to her as well. Even when she is spouting rubbish, Emma’s talk is a genuine pleasure to hear.
    Part of that pleasure is incurred through Emma’s “playfulness.” She relishes the rapid stab of wit and paradoxical opposition; she plays uninterruptedly at “imaginistic” matchmaking. She is exceptionally skillful at games, particularly verbal ones: puzzles, riddles, and ciphers, “enigmas, charades, ... [and] conundrums” (p. 62), Scrabble avant la lettre are all integral to the ways she occupies her considerable spare time, engaged for the most part in self-amusement. She reads codes and encryptions with accomplished ease, even as she cannot recognize or interpret correctly matters that are passing in front of her nose. She thinks of Jane Fairfax’s behavior as “quite a separate puzzle” (p. 256). Frank Churchill is Emma’s superior at playing make-believe; his entire relation to her can be thought of as a kind of game of pretending, an exercise in frivolity, bluffing, and fakery, while his treatment of Jane has a distinct element of teasing, of sadistic playfulness and rule-breaking license to it. Emma also likes to “play” the piano, and she loves to dance—steps and rituals and elaborate patterns all appeal to her sense of “the rigour of the game.” vi
    Emma’s playfulness, however, is carefully “placed” by her in a specific context of requirements: She must be “always first and always right.” And although she qualifies this by saying that the demand applies to her relations to men, it equally includes Mrs. Weston and Harriet as well as most of the lesser female lights of Highbury. When it does not, as it does not with Jane Fairfax and Mrs. Elton, Emma responds with coldness and remoteness. The form that her principal exercise of playfulness takes is that of romantic fantasy, of “match-making,” as she calls it. These fantasies reveal a singular and simple structure. They are almost all of them triangles, with Emma at one of the points performing as the managing director of the other two—and hence as a kind of displaced center. First there is Emma and Mr. and Mrs. Weston, a completed pairing that Emma believes she has brought about. Then there is Emma, Elton, and Harriet, which Emma totally misinterprets, denying Elton’s undisguised designs on