This past spring semester I taught Austen’s
Emma in an upper-level survey course
on Restoration and eighteenth-century literature. I realize I’m pushing the
boundaries of the time period somewhat by teaching Austen’s 1816 novel, which
is currently celebrating its bicentennial. Still, Austen is a transitional
figure, and it felt like a nice juxtaposition against the other works of fiction
that we read, which included Aphra Behn’s The
Fair Jilt and Daniel Defoe’s Roxana.
All three of these works contain heroines which my students had a hard time
liking.
In the case of Behn’s Miranda and Defoe’s
Roxana, it is easy to see how these fictional characters might elicit disgust or dislike from their readers. Miranda is a caricature of feminine evil, falsely accusing
a priest of raping her when he spurns her advances, and then plotting to kill
her sister, seducing first a servant and then her own husband to commit the
murder (first by poison and next by gunfire). Roxana is hardly better:
initially she must give up her virtue to save herself and her children from
starvation, but she admits later in the novel that even when she could finally
retire from being a kept woman, her own vanity and greed compel her to seek
even greater fame and riches. By the end of the novel, when her own daughter finds out
her identity, Roxana not only refuses to acknowledge her, but instead wishes her
dead.
Austen’s Emma, by contrast, seems quite
saintly. She’s “handsome, clever, and rich,” as the famous first line declares,
and her worst quality is “the power of having rather
too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself.”
And yet, my students decidedly did not like her—especially in the first half of
the novel. In writing assignments, some of them denounced Emma as manipulative
and controlling, deeming her interest in Harriet Smith “obsessive.”
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| The frontispiece to Emma. |
When it comes to the most
well-known heroes and heroines of fiction, readers are often split into the “love
them” or “hate them” camps. Ask any avid reader what they think of characters
like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, Jane Austen’s Eliza Bennet, Charlotte Bronte’s
Jane Eyre, or George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, and you are likely to get strongly-worded answer. And of course, this doesn’t just hold to female
character, either. Most readers have similarly strong opinions about
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Dickens’s David Copperfield, or
even JK Rowling’s Harry Potter.
Of course, it’s quite
possible, and rather normal, to dislike a character and still enjoy a novel
about that character. (Though I would argue that it’s difficult to like a novel
in which one dislikes all the characters—but not impossible.)
One’s attitude towards a character and that character’s good or bad qualities
also wanes with time. I chuckled a little when several of my students expressed
their rabid dislike of Emma because I could remember reader Emma in college and
disliking her myself. She was too full of herself, too silly, too meddling, despite having all the advantages a lady of Austen’s time could want.
On rereading Emma, I found I minded Emma’s follies
less. Instead, I was more struck by how little happens in the novel. Much of it
occurs inside character’s heads—it is taken up with feelings, letters,
decisions, and a lot of waiting. What does not fall into the camp of thought
and reflection is taken up with dialogue—often great lengths of it, spoken by
characters with less than stellar qualities, like the ever-babbling Miss Bates,
the rather vulgar Mrs. Elton, and, at times, the ever-lecturing Mr. Knightley.
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| Part of the exhibit "Emma at 200" at Chawton House in England. |
Mr. Knightley is not a bad
character, all-in-all. Reading Emma at
twenty-one, I disliked Mr. Knightley quite a bit. He seemed even more full of
himself than Emma, always lecturing her and telling her she was wrong. It was
insufferable. And then to have Emma
actually marry him at the end of the
novel! It was altogether disagreeable, to put it in Austenian terms. This
situation was probably what irked me the most as a young adult: the novel’s
central assumption is that Emma is a silly girl who knows nothing of how the
world works and must be taught a lesson through not one, not two, but three
major humiliations: being wrong about Mr. Elton; being wrong about Frank
Churchill & Jane Fairfax; and getting reprimanded by Mr. Knightley for her
improper behavior towards Miss Bates.
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| Despite this year being the 200th anniversary, Emma had quite the moment in 1995-6, with Clueless, & 2 other adaptations, one with Gwyneth. Paltrow (above) and one with Kate Beckinsale. |
While other Austenian heroines
must learn to set aside their prejudices (like Eliza Bennet) or their fantasies
(like Marianne Dashwood), neither of them are quite so chastened as Emma
Woodhouse. Reading Emma at the same
age as its heroine, I was annoyed and displeased by the assumption that Emma
was quite so wrong about so many things. Reading the novel again and also
teaching it this year made me reflect instead on the many layers of it, the way
that Austen builds the relationships with the characters and gives us insight
into their thoughts and psyches. Many claim that Samuel Richardson is one of the
earliest English authors to truly bring the human psyche onto the page, but I
feel quite comfortable giving those laurels to Jane Austen. Even a heroine as
seemingly clueless as Emma can be of interest to readers when we are allowed to
sit inside her thoughts for five hundred pages. (Pamela, as I have argued
elsewhere, never seems more than a caricature of female cluelessness.)
And speaking of cluelessness,
of course I had my class watch Clueless
(dir. Amy Heckerling, 1995) as a follow-up to the novel. This was my first time
watching the film directly after reading the book, and I had to admire yet
again the filmmakers for their skill and creativity at adapting Austen’s novel
in such a fun, and yet strangely faithful way. In many ways, Cher Horowitz is
very different, of course, than Emma. She is more fashion-oriented and
interested in “retail therapy,” and her “clueless” disposition as a Beverly
Hills teenager means she is “ditzy” in a way that I wouldn’t necessarily
connect to Austen’s Emma.
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| Cher and her besties, Dionne (left, played by Staci Dash), and Tai (right, played by Brittany Murphy) in the role of Harriet Smith. |
I can see, however, why the
filmmakers developed Cher’s character in this way: Cher’s “ditz with a credit
card” status immediately establishes her as recognizable archetype for viewers
who haven’t read the book. In this way, Heckerling’s film places us, the
viewers, into the role not only of the reader of the novel, who judges the
heroine, but also of the other inhabitants of Highbury, who, knowing little of
Emma/Cher, judge her by her looks, her money, and her status. Cher
is more or less about as likeable as Emma: as film viewers we appreciate her
silliness, but are also privy to her whininess and petulance, as well as to her
generosity and moments of genuine confusion.
How important is it to like
characters in novels? When we teach novels that focus so centrally on
characters and character development, it’s hard to divorce discussion of
literary forms, themes, and plot from book club-type discussions of why or why
not a certain novel or character appeals to us. After all, the point of “The
Rape of the Lock” or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is not whether we like Pope’s Belinda and
the Baron or Eliot’s Prufrock; such a discussion wouldn’t make any sense. Yet,
when we discuss character like Emma, it’s difficult not to discuss whether we like or dislike the character. In the
classroom, my best bet is to then turn the discussion around, and ask my
students why Austen would create a
character who is difficult to like, someone so imperfect, vain, or blinded.
Then, of course, there is the
question of how to teach texts that we, as instructors, don’t much like, but that is a story for another post.
