A Loser like Emma

A month or two ago, I glanced through several of the posts I’ve listed (in the right column of the blog) as favorites. I especially happy with what I wrote in “A Loser like Jane Austen:” Austen writes in a way that ensures her readers will identify with the main characters. The heroine is usually a reader whose virtues are valued by only one person: our hero. The Atlantic has just declared on its cover that “The Age of Reading Is Dead,” and anyone reading these books today is as unusual as the teenage girl who read them at the time of their publication. So in reading we identify with the heroine because she also reads, and we identify with the hero because we, like him, appreciate the reading girl.

Over the last two weeks, I read Emma (for the third time), and I’m wondering now how it fits or modifies my view. Emma is the least virtuous of Austen’s heroines. (If you haven’t read it, don’t worry: she’s not a twenty-first-century flawed heroine with drug and sex addictions. Emma pursues matchmaking too aggressively and on one notable occasion says something quite cruel – although the remark is also Austenesquely witty.) And she’s unlike, say, Elizabeth Bennett and Elinor Dashwood in other ways, too. The narrator calls her clever, but she explicitly is not a true reader: all her plans to read great books result in familiarity with a lot of first chapters. And she has not just one but a steady stream of admirers: women and girls who emulate her or crave her advice, and men who want to marry her. So how are we outsiders, we weirdo dreamy readers, we losers supposed to identify with her?

I think the key to saving my oh-so-insightful scheme lies with Mr Knightley, who admires Emma in spite of her flaws. He is, in fact, the only one who tells her the truth about herself when she’s being reckless or self-indulgent, so he alone actually sees how problematic she is. (With the possible exception of Miss Bates, whose constant self-deprecation makes it hard to know how well she sees the faults in others.) He might even love her because her wrong is sometimes so good-hearted and so close to being right. If matchmaking always brought two people a lifetime of happiness, wouldn’t it be a virtuous calling? In any case, if we are to love the book and its lead character (I certainly do), we have to identify with Mr Knightley in loving Emma despite her shortcomings. So there’s half the formula: we identify with the hero.

But is it really so hard to identify with Emma? We don’t have the expected mutual love of books, but don’t we all share with her the love for plans for books? And of course every last one of us has to identify with her spiritual story. After Emma’s cruel remark on Box Hill (which doesn’t fully bother her until her paraclete Mr Knightley shows his disapproval) she begins to see the error of her ways and calls her mistakes “sins.” Anyone else here ever dabble in sin? Emma knows she has to repent, and she does. And Austen does a marvelous job showing us, near the end of the book, an Emma who still displays all the traits we loved even when they were tainted or misdirected earlier in the story.

Jane Austen was very, very clever.