Clueless Heroines: Jane Austen’s Emma in the Classroom

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.