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the bolow iS an article to this file, everything must be from the article and the novel “Emma”, it is a response in the form of a thoughtfully-engaged and fully developed essay(as she says). She also says the purpose is to demonstrate your depth of engagement with the course materials and your ability to critically analyze the relevant tests. Here is the question:

Kohn(1995)(article attached) studies Emma in relation to the conduct book tradition that instructs women on proper, ladylike behavior. In this vein, it could be said that Emma also presents Austen’s views of the idealized masculine role. Kohn suggests: “[Emma’s and Knightley’s] mutual worship is simply Austen’s depiction of the first flush of romantic love, not a sign that Knightley is infallible.”
1. What traits does Emma suggest are possessed by the socially ideal gentleman?
2. How is Austen’s Knightley similar/different to that ideal?
3. While Austen’s ideal lady differs somewhat from the social convention of the time, does her view of men challenge convention as well?

Reading; Emma as a lesson on “Ladyhood”: A study in the domestic Bildungsroman
Kohn, Denise. Essays in Literature. Macomb: Spring 1995. Vol. 22, Iss. 1; pg. 45
Copyright Western Illinois University, Department of English Spring 1995
Emma can be a problematic novel for the modern reader–especially for the
feminist reader. On the one hand, feminist critics have lauded Jane Austen for
her critique of the marriage market and exposition of the problems of female
independence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Green,
Johnson, Kirkham, Poovey). The growing emphasis on creating a canon of women
writers has led many feminist readers to latch onto Austen with fervor because
she is a woman writer who has long enjoyed a fine critical reputation despite
the sentimental and damaging myth of”gentle-Janeism” (Trilling 29). On the
other hand, feminist readers have also raised disturbing questions about Austen
(Booth, Company 420). While Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar find that her novels
are subversive in nature, they also believe that her novels depict “the
necessity of female submission for female survival” (203).

Ironically, one way for the modern reader, feminist or not, to deal with the
problems of reading Emma is to approach the novel as a lesson on manners–more
specifically–as a lesson on “ladyhood.” Modern readers, of course, are not
usually interested in instruction on the characteristics of a “lady.” But this
becomes a problem in reading Austen because she was writing to a population of
readers in a time and a place for whom the attributes of a lady were important.
Another problem in reading Emma is that modern readers often eschew didacticism
in literature; Austen, however, expected that a novel could “pratify the
cravings of the imagination and provide moral instruction” (Poovey 182). To do
justice to Austen, modern readers must be willing to meet her at least halfway
on her own territory. If readers are willing to extend their hands to Austen–
white gloves are not necessary-and politely pretend interest in the notion of
“ladyhood,” then they may develop a fuller understanding of Austen as an
artist. One of Austen’s greatest achievements in Emma is that she writes a
novel of education–a bildungsroman–that instructs her readers to deconstruct
the pervasive images of “ladyhood” created by her period’s conduct-book
writers.(2) Austen resists the view of a “lady” as passive and selfless and
redefines the highest ideals of “ladyhood” as self-assurance, strength, and
compassion through the depiction of her heroine, Emma.(3) Such a reading of the
novel, however, not only shows how Emma redefines female ideals but also how the
novel redefines the bildungsroman within the context of early nineteenth-
century domestic values.

In The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, Mary Poovey defines the ideal lady in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a “demure young woman,
with eyes downcast and lips pressed into a faint and silent smile” (47). Both
male and female authors of popular conduct books of the period define a lady
primarily through what she must lack: personal agency, ambition, desire, and
vanity (Poovey 4-36).(4) Indeed, women’s self-denial and self-sacrifice were
crucial elements in the emerging ideal of the Victorian house angel. While in
the early eighteenth century a lady was defined as “a woman of superior
position in society,” by the nineteenth century the term was used to denote a
“woman whose manners, habits, and sentiments have the refinement characteristic
of the higher ranks of society” (qtd. in Sangari, 715). In other words, the
term “lady” moved from one that deacribed only class to one that described
behavior. In the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century world of a rising middle
class and declining upper class, social status and survival often depended not
only on money but also on manners–those culturally constructed markers that
define community membership. The problems of shifting social classes exist even
in Emma’s home of Highbury. The Coles and Mrs. Elton are purchasing prestige
while Miss Bates, who as daughter of the former rector was a “fringe” member of
the upper class, is losing prestige to poverty. During a period of what seemed
like class chaos to many Britons, readers increasingly turned to the rising
artistic form of the novel to find narrative guidance for their behavior.

While Emma at the beginning of the novel is a “lady” because her family as
rural landowners are part of the upper class, it is not until the final part of
the novel that she learns to balance power and propriety in order to better
fulfill behavioral ideals of a “lady.”(5) Emma, however, fulfills Austen’s
artistic and social ideals–not the hegemonic ideals of the conduct-book
authors. Austen’s novels and letters show her critique of a social system that
required female subjection;(6) even Wayne Booth believes that Austen “in her
everyday life” believed that men and women were equal (Company 430). Indeed,
the well-known portrait of Austen drawn by her sister offers visual evidence
that Austen and her family did not subscribe to the narrow definitions of a
“lady” celebrated by their culture: Austen is drawn with her arms folded
assertively across her chest, looking off to the side with a serious look in
her eyes and a stern set to her mouth.” And as she herself was not portrayed as
a “proper lady,” Austen in Emna never portrays her heroine as reflecting the
image of the “lady” as passive and demure. Margaret Kirkham finds that Austen
in Emma mirrors the Enlightenment feminist etance of Mary Wollstonecraft on
male and female equality (46-47, 138). Claudia Johnson believes the character
of Emma “defies every dictum’ about female deference preached by the conduct
books (xxiii). Katherine Sobba Green does not specifically discuss Emma but
argues that Austen overturns the “tropic commodification” that defined women in
the turn-of-the-century ritual of courtship and marriage (72, 154-59). And
although Poovey also does not discuss Emma, she believes that Austen’s later
works emphasize the conflict between individual desire and social institutions.
Austen, Poovey says, shows the danger of “unchecked individualism” and how the
individual can both exist within and reform social institutions (208-212). So
while the character of Emma is a celebration of female individualism and power,
Austen also shows how Emma abuses her power by crossing the threshold of
propriety and domesticity in her manipulation of Harriet and insensitivity to
Miss Bates. By the end of the novel, however, Emma as a character is
strengthened by her experience, gaining greater social and self-knowledge. As
Austen’s portrait of an ideal “lady,” she is strong and assertive but is also
more caring and sensitive to others.

The comic plot structure of Emma would also encourage readers to interpret the
novel as a social lesson. Throughout the text, characters are paired and re-
paired as teachers and students. The story unfolds in the second paragraph of
the novel as we learn about Emma’s lose of Miss Taylor, an “excellent woman as
governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection” (1). But by
the end of the second paragraph, we learn that Miss Taylor had ceased “to hold
the nominal office of goveness” to Emma long ago, and the two had lived
together as, “friend and friend” (1). Later in the novel, Knightley suggests
that Emma, not Miss Taylor, was the real teacher of the two. The theme of
education–and the decentering of authority–continues. Emma teaches Harriet.
Harriet repeatedly teaches Emma, who is a slow learner, the dangers of
teaching. Jane, who must become a governess, teaches Frank compassion. Frank
asks Emma to choose and “educate” a wife for him. Of course, he does not know
that Emma has already taken this project upon herself, and she does not know
that Frank has already chosen his wife. Knightley and Emma both teach each
other about social respect and kindness. She learns to appreciate Miss Bates
and Robert Martin; he learns to appreciate Harriet. Mrs. Elton tries to teach
Emma the role of the fashionable married woman and the importance of travel and
barouche-landaus. And Mr. Woodhouse tries, vainly, to instruct everyone about
the goodness of gruel.

The novel’s theme of education and development is also signified by Emma place
within the genre of the bildungsroman. In nineteenth-century England, the
bildungsroman, also called the novel of development or apprenticeship, was
“frequently the equivalent of the Renaissance conduct book, insofar as one of
its recurrent themes is the making of a gentleman,” writes Jerome Buckley in
his influential study The Season of Youth (20). But in the case of Emma, which
has a female protagonist, it is the making of a “lady” that becomes the
recurrent theme. And though Buckley has been crucial in the definition of the
English bildungsroman, ironically, he declares that Emma is not a bildungsroman
(18). Buckley’s definition of the novel of development has been criticized as
predominantly based upon male perspectives by feminist critics, who have worked
to define the tradition of the female bildungsroman. And yet, many of the
female paradigms for the genre do not precisely fit Emma, either.(8) The main
problem in recognizing Emma as a bildungsroman is that the genre has alway been
associated with the theme of the journey or quest. And Emma is the antithesis
of the novel of quest: it is a domestic novel.

Emma, then, can be considered a domestic bildungsroman, which in turn, makes it
another possible paradigm for the female bildungsroman–especially those of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For most British and American women in
these periods, especially those in the upper and middle classes, the domestic
setting was the only one usually open for personal growth and development. The
popular courtship novels of the period, which were often also domestic in their
concerns, were part of a “social imperative to legitimize women’s self-
actualization as affective individuals” (Green 14).(9) The belief that women,
and thus domestic novels about women, are not associated with development
because they are framed by domesticity is part of a cultural hegemony that
views male experience as normal and female experience as abnormal or Other. The
use of male development as a standard to measure female development culminates
in the theories of Freud, who defined women by their anatomical differences
from men. Nancy Chodorow’s belief, however, that females usually develop
through “relation and connection” to other people while males uaually develop
through separation has reshaped twentieth-century understanding of female
development (qtd. in Gilligan, 7).

The psychological studies of Carol Gilligan, which support Chodorow’s theories
of male and female development, can help to reshape an understanding of the
bildungsroman. In A Different Voice, Gilligan explores differences in views of
morality and the self, and the association of these different views with men
and women in her studies of psychological development. While other
psychologists, such as Freud, Jean Piaget, Erik Erikson, and Lawrence Kohlberg,
have also found differences in male and female development that are similar to
Gilligan’s findings, these psychologists have tended to describe male
psychology as “normal” and female psychology as deviant (Gilligan 7-22). In her
studies of women, Gilligan reshapes theories of human development by showing
that women tend to view the world and their relationships as a web of
interdependence, and men are more likely to view the world and relationships as
a hierarchy (62). While men tend to define themselves through independence,
women tend to define themselves through relationships (Gilligan 8). Gilligan’s
comments about the problems of an androcentric psychology in defining female
development apply equally to the problems of an androcentric theory of the
bildungsroman in defining the domestic novel of female development:

While the truths of psychological theory have blinded psychologists to the
truth of women’s experience, that experience illuminates a world which
psychologists have found hard to trace, a territory where violence is rare and
relationships appear safe. The reason women’s experience has been so difficult
to decipher or even discern is that a shift in the imagery of relationships
[from hierarchy to web] gives rise to a problem of interpretation. (62)

The domestic novel has been hard for many critics to read as a genuine novel of
development because it often does depict a world where “violence is rare and
relationships appear safe.” What seems to be the safety of the world of
domesticity–compared to the world of the quest–caused both male and female
readers to dismiss the domestic setting. But heroinee such as Emma do have to
overcome obstacles in order to become adult, and these obstacles are often
domesticated or different versions of those that heroes face on their quest for
independence. The domestication of personal obstacles does not, however, make
these obstacles any less real or less dangerous for the heroine. The text of
the domestic novel simply places personal obstacles in a different context. It
is also crucial to realize that the development of the domestic heroine differs
from the development of the men, because female development is based upon a
definition of self within a web of personal relationships. Although the
domestic heroine must achieve intellectual independence and self-understanding
to become an adult, she does not want to physically and emotionally sever
herself from family and friends. Gilligan’s comments about the problems of
female development apply as well to the problems of the domestic heroine, who
must balance “the wish to be at the center of connection and the consequent
fear of being too far out on the edge” (62). And, of course, the domestic
setting itself is a web of personal connections in which relationships and the
home have great value. As a result, the quest novel and the domestic novel are
shaped by radically different codes. The hero of the quest wants to leave home
to discover his true self; the heroine of domesticity does not want to leave
because she wants to discover her true self within her home.

Gilligan’s findings that women are more likely than men to view the world as a
web of interdependence restructure the reader’s understanding of Emma’s devotion
to her father and her hatred of travel, which is a domesticated version of the
quest. The trip to Boxhill is, not surprisingly, a failure from the point of
view of Emma, who as a domestic heroine, has little desire to leave her home or
the community of Highbury. Emma also looks with derision at Mrs. Elton, who is
associated with travel throughout the novel. Mrs. Elton instigates the trip to
Boxhill, defines herself socially by a travelling coach, and suggests that Bath
is the place to meet marriageable men. Austen herself is reputed to have
disliked Bath intensely (Poovey 209-210, Kirkham 61-65), which increases the
significance of her negative portrayal of Mrs. Elton, a Bath bride whose
marriage is marked by monetary motives. Mrs. Elton, a woman who talks
incessantly of travel, is used as a foil against the more domestic-centered
Emma to exemplify silly pride and selfishness. Emma, too, may seem silly and
selfish in the fist volume of the novel, but Emma’s character gains stature in
comparison with Mrs. Elton because Emma’s interests and values are firmly
rooted within her own community.

The fact that Mrs. Elton lives in an ugly house while Emma lives in an
attractive one also reflects both women’s relationship to the opposition
between travel and domesticity in the novel. Mrs. Elton cannot become the
heroine of Emma because her love of ostentatious travel and her search for a
husband outside her own community illustrate her lack of support for the
domestic values which shape the novel. Mrs. Elton, though she is female, is an
outsider and cannot understand the domestic code of Highbury and Hartfield,
which values the home as the place of affection and happiness. The example of
the Eltons is important because it illustrates that Austen does not
characterize all people as following gender based behavioral models. Within
Highbury, both Knightley and Mr. Woodhouse share the domestic-based values
found in Emma, Mrs. Weston, and Miss Bates. The Eltons, however, practice a
sham domesticity based upon ostentation. They seek to prove their affection for
one another and their home through unrestrained vanity and selfishness,
constantly calling attention to themselves and their emotions.(11) Augusta
Elton can never fulfill Austen’s ideals of a “lady” because she can never
overcome her own individual selfishness. And while readers frequently see
Emma’s devotion to her father as an example of society’s restrictions on women
and imply that Emma’s decision to live at home after her marriage is a sign of
her lack of growth, such criticism overlooks the importance of interdependence
inherent in female development and the domestic novel. Such criticism is also
part of a cultural definition of women that denigrates them because of their
differences from men.

Reading Emma as a domestic bildungsroman is no longer difficult once cultural
definitions of apprenticeship, work, and growth are broadened to include
typical female experience as well as male experience. So while Buckley claims
that Emma is not a bildungsroman, the novel actually fulfills most of his major
criteria. Emma certainly fits Buckley’s first characteristic of a
bildungsroman: A child of some sensibility is up in the country or in a
provincial town, where he finds constraints, social and intellectual, placed
upon a free imagination” (Buckley 17). Emma is bored at the beginning of the
novel; she is a “clever” young woman (1) who is “in great danger of suffering
from intellectual solitude” (2). And like many characters in a bildungsroman,
Emma rebels against authority. In the first chapter, she quietly but openly
rejects the meek advice of her father and the stronger authority of Knightley,
who want her not to make any more matches after her successful pairing of Miss
Taylor and Mr. Weston. Unlike the protagonists of most bildungsromane, however,
Emma, does not leave home to learn in the city because the home is the setting
of the domestic novel. But Emma does fit Buckley’s next criterion because she
experiences two love affairs, “one debasing, one exalting that demand “the hero
[ine] reappraise his [or her] values,” as shown through her mistaken,
humiliating love for Frank and her true, satisfying love for Knightley (17).
The “search for a vocation” is also an important characteristic of the
bildunsroman (Buckley 18) that is evident in Emma’s development once readers
expand their view of work from the traditional definition as “paid labor
outside the home” to “unpaid labor inside the home.” Emma’s duties aa a
daughter and as the family manager are her work–and it is work that she
refuses to reject or devalue at the end of the novel. Her marriage and her
attempts to arrange other marriages are also significant aspects of her work
within the community because marriage and motherhood were female careers during
this period. While the modern reader will find Austen depictions of female work
limiting, one must also remember that she was writing within the tradition of
domestic realism. To have Emma assume work outside of traditional options for
upper-class nineteenth-century women would have violated the qualifications of
the domestic and realistic plot.

While Emma matches the significant characteristics of Buckley’s definition of a
bildungsroman, it also matches some crucial aspects of paradigms for the female
bildungsroman. Annis Pratt notes that in the novel of development the young
woman’s tie to nature is important in her psychological growth. Throughout the
novel, events and Emma’s resulting moods are associated with nature. It
suddenly snows, ruining a dinner party, the night Mr. Elton shocks Emma with
his money-motivated marriage proposal. On the day Emma learns about Frank and
Jane’s engagement, the “weather added what it could of gloom” as a “cold stormy
rain destroys the natural beauty of July (290). The next day, however, “it was
summer again”; significantly, this is also the day that Knightley proposes to
Emma in the garden (291). “Never had the exquisite sight, smell, sensation of
nature, tranquil, warm and brilliant after a storm, been more attractive to
her,” the narrator says (291). And though nature in Emma may sometimes be
surprising, it is always the safe, domesticated nature of the English village,
never the violent, raging nature of the gothic English moors.

The compound structure of Emma’s last name–“Woodhouse”–and the link between
“wood” and nature and between “house” and domesticity also mark the novel’s
link to the tradition of the bildungsroman and the domestic novel. The symbolic
link between domesticity and nature in her surname is mirrored in the name of
her home–Hartfield–which carries a double connotation as a natural place for
deer and as a home of the heart.

And as nature is domesticated in Emma, so is the archetypal role of the
greenworld lover, who often plays a prominent role in the novel of female
development (Pratt 22-29). Knightley, who is associated with farming and
orchards, plays the role of Emma’s greenworld lover, yet he is a domesticated
version of the mythological Pan or Eros who usually endangers the female
heroine (Pratt 22-24). Knightley’s domesticated ties to nature make Emma sexual
growth safe within the novel. And as typical in many female bildungsroman,
Emma’s education culminates in a personal epiphany instead of a progressive
process of formal schooling. After she learns about Frank and Jane’s engagement
and Harriet’s love for Knightley, Emma realizes that with “unpardonable
arrogance” she had “proposed to arrange everybody’s destiny” (284). It is at
this point in the novel that Emma learns one of the most valuable lessons of
“ladyhood”–respect and care for other individuals.

In the beginning of the novel, Emma takes pride in the fact that she had helped
to make a match between Miss Taylor and Mr. Weston. Although Knightley
discredits her role, Emma explains that she has taken an appropriate middle-
ground as matchmaker, “something between the do-nothing and the do-all” (7).
Her explanation of her role seems reasonable: she “promoted Mr. Weston’s
visits,” gave many “little encouragements,” and “smoothed many little matters”
(7). Emma’s success as a matchmaker, however, leads her to abuse her power as
she exchanges her role as social facilitator to become a social manipulator. She
tries to realign Harriet’s affections and soon believes she can judge
everyone’s true emotions. When she tries to be the “do-all” and for others to
follow her own plans, Emma crosses the threshold of Austen’s depiction of the
ideal “lady.”(13) Her “kind designs” for Harriet lead her to the grossest
unkindness–the belief that she can re-create Harriet on and off the canvas.
Emma’s desire for social control also causes her snobbery to the Martins and
her rudeness to Miss Bates. Her snobbery to the Martins is morally
reprehensible to the modern reader, but it was also reprehensible to
nineteenth-century readers. Trilling writes that the yeoman class had always
held a strong position in English class feeling, and at this time especially,
only stupid or ignorant people felt privileged to look down upon them” (37).
(14) And Emma’s treatment of Miss Bates at the picnic is made to seem doubly
heartless by Miss Bate’s quiet acquiescence.

And yet, though Emma sometimes acts in an unconscionable manner, the reader is
well aware that she is not without a conscience. It pricks her throughout. For
instance, after Harriet meets Robert Martin at Ford’s, Emma realizes that she
was not thoroughly comfortable” with her own actions. At the end, though, Emma
has changed enough to think that it “would be a great pleasure to know Robert
Martin” and happily attends the wedding (328). She apologizes to Miss Bates and
befriends Jane Fairfax. She learns to treat others with tenderness and to
respect their personal privacy and autonomy. She learns to reject both the
roles of a “do-nothing” and a “do-all.” At the end she considers a future match
between Mrs. Weston’s daughter and one of Isabella’s sons, but her matchmaking
is no longer dangerous because she now realizes the problems caused by the
abuse of power. She has learned a lesson: a lady is not a bully. But Emma
learns an equally important lesson: a lady is not a weakling. Unlike so many
nineteenth-century heroines, she does not confuse kindness to others with fear
of others and subjection of self. At the end of the novel, she is still able to
say to Knightley, “I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up
with any other” (327).

Emma’s awareness of her own “unpardonable arrogance” allows readers to continue
their empathetic construction of her character. Emma has learned to balance
power and propriety, reflecting Austen’s ideal of a lady as a woman who is
strong but not manipulative. Knightley’s proposal follows soon after, and at
this point in the narrative Austen inserts those well-known lines:

What did she say?–Just what she ought, of course.–A lady always does.–She
said enough to show there need not be despair–and to invite him to say more
himself. (297, emphasis added)

In this passage, the narrator mocks readers’ expectations for a love scene
(Booth, Company 433-34). Such mockery is possible, though, because at this
point Austen’s portrait of Emma has educated the reader about the attributes of
an ideal “lady.” Austen creates what Wolfgang Iser calls “a gap in the text,”
so the “reader’s imagination is left free to paint in the scene” (38). This
freedom is a test of the reader’s learning process. From the text’s comparisons
and contrasts of Emma with Harriet, Jane, Isabella, and Augusta Elton, we are
to have learned what are the best attributes that make up the most admirable
type of “lady.”

After Knightley’s proposal, many modern readers such as Gilbert and Gubar have
trouble in their construction of Emma’s character. It is as if they continue to
see Emma solely through her own self-critical thoughts instead of trying to
construct her through the text as a whole. Booth counteracts this reading by
stating that readers often “succumb morally to what was simply required
formally”–a plot that ends in marriage. And Poovey argues that although
Austen’s novels end in marriage, these marriages show the heroine’s
“achievement of maturity, not the victory of a man” (46). In Emma, Austen adds
a simple yet crucial twist to the conventional marriage plot: Knightley
abdicates his seat in the county, his own place of authority, to live in Emma’s
home–her own seat of authority. The knight does not carry off the princess.
The gentleman does not place the lady within the shrine of his own home.

At this point in the novel, readers should have learned to step back and try to
construct characters and reality through a multiplicity of perspectives. Just
because Emma sees Knightley as a superior being while she is in the first flush
of her self-reproach and awakened desire does not mean that the reader is also
supposed to see Knightley as a superior being. Such readings overlook the
important fact that Knightley, like Emma, has publicly embarrassed himself
through a misreading of the true relationship between Jane and Frank.(15)
Knightley pays a great deal of attention to Jane and extolls her virtues
throughout the novel. After Knightley orders his carriage to take Jane to the
Coles’ dinner party, Knightley’s attention to Jane is put in a new light when
Mrs. Weston tells Emma she believes Knightley may marry Jane. Later Knightley,
in an uncharacteristic loud and public voice, inquires “particularly” about Jane
in a conversation with Miss Bates through a window (165). No wonder Emma begins
to wonder if Knightley is in love with Jane. Of course, even at this point in
the novel, the reader is quite aware that Emma is not always a reliable
interpreter of reality, but this time Emma’s views are corroborated by others
and evidence in the text. When she warns Knightley that he “may hardly be
aware…how highly” he values Jane, the forthright Knightley becomes suddenly
engrossed upon buttoning his gaiters (195) . Emma’s view is also given credence
when Knightley admits that Mr. Cole suggested that his attention to Jane had
prompted speculation about the nature of their relationship.

So while the secret of Jane and Frank’s engagement plays a joke upon Emma, it
also–for a while–becomes a joke upon Knightley. And in an age when “making
love” to a woman meant simply calling upon her and praising her publicly, it is
hardly surprising that Knightley’s attention to Jane has caused rumors. These
type of rumors, as nineteenth-century readers clearly understood, could be
especially socially damaging to a single woman like Jane, who is also beautiful
and impoverished. Knightley clearly understands Jane’s precarious social
position and even criticize Frank for sending her the piano, yet he does not
seem aware that his praise of Jane could also cause her social embarrassment.
And although Knightley denounces matchmaking, he does play matchmaker by trying
to ascertain whether Harriet is a suitable mate for Robert Martin.

Knightley’s own matchmaking attempts backfire, much like Emma’s, because his
personal attentions to Harriet make her believe he loves her. In short,
Knightley is not, as he has traditionally been portrayed by critics, a paragon
of personal judgment. He, like Emma, is deceived by the differences between
his own perceptions and reality. In construing Knightley’s character, critics
also overlook the fact that he apologizes to Emma for his previous paternal
role. He tells Emma, “It was very natural for you to say, what right has he to
lecture me?…I do not believe I did you any good” (318). Their mutual worship
is simply Austen’s depiction of the first flush of romantic love, not a sign
that Knightley is infallible.

Knightley is the only one to criticize Emma (besides Emma herself) in all of
Highbury because he is the only one who is her intellectual equal. Their
marriage offers her insurance against the “intellectual solitude” that
endangers her at the novel’s beginning. But as much as Emma loves Knightley,
she will not leave her father, a point that Knightley understands and respects.
After they agree to live together at Hartfield, Emma thinks of Knightley as a
“companion” and a “partner” (310). This equality is reinforced by Mrs. Weston’s
reflections, who happily considers the marriage as “all equal” without
“sacrifice on any side” (323). Emma’s love of her father and her desire to live
at Hartfield should not be interpreted as an example of female submission to
patriarchy. Mr. Woodhouse has never had any control over Emma; Hartfield has
been the site of her independence. The first Mrs. Weston was unhappy because
she could not at the same time be “the wife of Captain Weston and Miss
Churchill of Enscombe” (8). Yet Emma solves the dilemma of the loss of female
identity that was inherent in most nineteenth-century marriages. She will
continue to be Miss Woodhouse of Hartfield, to be mistress at her own home on
her own terms, and at the same time she will take on the role of Mrs.
Knightley.

In the face of Emma’s faults, some critics have deemed Jane as the “good”
character in the novel. Booth believes that “Jane is superior to Emma in almost
every part of the book” (Rhetoric 249). Though the “narrator is non-committal
toward Jane Fairfax,” Booth writes, “the author can be inferred as approving of
her almost completely” (“Distance” 182). Harold Bloom, who criticizes Booth for
giving Jane center stage, still believes that the “splendid Jane Fairfax is
easier to admire” than Emma (4). Adena Rosmarin echoes these ideas when she
says that Jane is “too good and too distant to be a good character” (216).
While Jane is certainly too distant to be a good character, it seems doubtful
that she is actually “too good.” Her love for Frank, who lacks personal
strength and continually treats her with foolish inconsideration, calls into
question her own character. And most notably, she shares the same fault as two
of the other female characters: passivity. Like Isabella and Harriet, Jane’s
passivity allows others to control her. She submits to Frank’s thoughtless
treatment of her until his public flirtations with Emma force her to capitulate
into the “slave-trade” of the governess market (204). While Jane, like Isabella
and Harriet, is undeniably a “lady,” she cannot embody Austen’s highest ideals
of “ladyhood” because she is too passive, too demure, and too much like the
“proper lady” of the conduct books.

While reading Emma as a lesson on ladyhood might seem at first a superficial
approach to the novel, in the end, such a reading increases the complexity of
the portrait that Austen has painted of Emma. This reading also depicts Emma in
a more favorable light than many traditional analyses. Through the novel’s
portrayal of Emma, readers learn what Austen considered to be the ideal
attributer( of a “lady”–and some of those attributes may surprise modern
readers. A lady, like Emma, is not “personally vain”(25) and has no “taste for
finery” (334). She speaks her own mind. She is strong. She is intelligent. She
is artistic. She learns from her own mistakes. She cares about and for her
family. She is willing to marry–but marriage must meet her own terms. This is a
definition of a “lady” that most modern readers–even feminists–could live
with. This is even a definition that some feminists would see as a definition
of a feminist.

Like Austen, who was afraid that Emma was a “heroine whom no one but myself
will much like” (viii), reading Emma as a lesson in “ladyhood” is a critical
approach that most modern readers will not like. But such a reading also helps to
explain the continuing popularity of Austen inside and outside academia. The
dialectic between female power and female propriety continues to act as a
divisive force in twentieth-century America just as it was in nineteenth-
century England. One of the great strengths of Emma, for both nineteenth-and
twentieth-century readers, is Austen’s portrait of a lady who learns to
compromise between power and propriety to live within her community without
compromising herself.

NOTES

1 Throughout this paper, I use the term “lady” to denote behavioral
expectations for women during Austen’s period. not to denote wealth or class
membership, eept where noted otherwise in the by of the text. Of course, theee
behavioral expectations are not completely separate from class. but it wae
possible for a woman without wealth of the lower run of the middle class to
still be considered a lady because of her behavior even though she could not
use the title “Lady.” For instance, Emma treats Miss Taylor, her former
governess, with more respect than she treats Miss Bates, even though there are
distinctions of class between the two.

The term “lady” ie understandably offensive to the modern reader because of its
association with female submission, but subjugation plays no part in Austen’s
behavioral code for a “lady.” The term “lady” differs from the term “feminine,”
which denotes a belief in an essential “nature” of females, a belief that
Austen did not share. “Female” and “male,” on the other hand, refer to
biological sexual differences.

2 Other critics al believe that Austen did not reinscribe her culture’s idea of
the “lady” in her novels. Poovey, Kirkham, and Johnson all look at her
depiction of female characters and how her creation of strong heroines
subverted social constructions of “femininity.” None of these authors, however,
tie her re-education of the reader to a redefinition of the generic concerns of
the bildungsroman.

3 Austen’s own awarenees that Emma does not fit standard cultural definitions
of “ladyhood” can be inferred from her well-known comment that Emma is a
“heroine whom no one but myself will much like” (viii).

4 Green notes that in the early eighteenth century, conduct-book writers for
women were usually male and that the genre did not become a forum for female
until the end of the century (20). By the time Austen began writing Emma,
however, several popular conduct books had been written for women by women,
including Haanah More’s Strictures on Female Edluxrtion. While Green agreee
with Poovey that the conduet books in general were “bourgeois and patriarchal,”
he does not argue that “male-authored conduct literature was univerally
exploitative and repressive nor that there was a coherent and invariable
patriarchal line” (20).

5 While the term “lady” is gender-based because it is used to refer to women, I
do not wish to suggest that Austen supported a social system that dictated
different ethical and moral codes for men and women. Indeed, Austen’s heroines
and heroes are usually both sensitive and strong. This paper focuses on a
“lady” rather than a “gentleman” because the main character of Emma is female
and the domestic novel ia focused more on women than men.

6 In her biography of Austen, Jane Aiken Hodge details Austen’s critique of
women’s status, and so does Kirbham. Hodge also notes that Austen’s family did
not follow the “rules of elegant society which dictated that a young woman
could not appear in public until her older sisters were married and she was
“out” (33). Austen was allowed to attend balls outside these “society”
strictures, and she often enjoyed them greatly. So for Austen, “ladyhood” does
not signify slavishness to social rules. And Austen quite clearly did not
support the conduct-book model of a “lady” in her own life–she rejected
marriage and chose a career as a professional writer.

7 A copy of this portrait is on the cover and inset of Kirkham’s Jane Austen:
Feminism and Fiction. For a discussion of the portrait, see page 59-60 in
Kirkham.

8 For a full list of studies on the female bildungsroman (rather than the
domestic bildingsroman), see Fuderer’s annotated bibliography. The Female
Bildungsroman in English.

In one of the most well-known descriptions of the female bildingsroman, Linda
Wagner offers The Bell Jar as a paradigm, but her analysis does not apply to
Emma because of the differences in life for twentieth-and nineteenth-century
women. Annis Pratt also offers an analysis that is helpful but is based
predominantly on archetypes and mythology. In The Voyage In, Elizabeth Abel,
Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland offer two basic paradigm of the female
bildungsroman: the novel of chronological development and the novel of
awakening after marriage (11-12). Emma’s development is more akin to the
personal epiphany of the awakening–but her awakening occurs before marriage
and will not lead her into adultery.

9 Courtship novels are not always domestic novels, even though courtship is an
important theme in most domestic novels. A domestic novel, however, focuses
specifically on home and community, while courtship novels often employ the
paradigms of the picaresque and/or the gothic. (See endnote below.) Green meaes
the excellent point that women’s texts of the period often displaced sexuality
because the female courtship novelists wished to “distinguish their texts from
contemporary romances” (16). I think her argument applies equally well to
Austen’s Emma.

10 Abel, Hirsch, and Langland also look at the work of Chodorow and Gilligan in
their discussion of the female bildungsroman. My discussion differs because it
focuses on the link between the novel of development and the domestic novel.
Their book does include analysis of some novels that are sometimes included
within the broad category of the domestic and courtship novel: Louirra May
Alcott’s Work and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Villete. These novels,
however, are actually hybrids of the domestic novel and other forms. Work
blends the domestic and picaresque tradition, and both Jane Eyre and Villette
rely more on the gothic and sensational traditions. Emma, however, is solely a
domestic novel.

11 Poouey argues that Austen disliked Bath, partly because it was the site of a
possible failed romance and because Bath did not offer a “desirable or
affordable home” after the death of her father (209-10). Kirkham, however,
argues against this more traditional view, stating that Bath offered Austen
social and intellectual stimulation (63-65). The well-known story of Austen
fainting when she was told the tamily was moving to Bath is quite probably a
myth as Kirkham suggests, but it could also be a myth based upon her strong
dislike of the resort. In any case, because some of the biographical
information on Austen sketchy or perhaps unreliable, it is difficult to make
certain statements about her views on Bath.

12 Within the novel’s domestic code, it is also significant that Mr. and Mrs.
Elton, who should have been moral leaders as representatives of the Church, are
depicted as silly and shallow. In late eighteenth-and ninetnth-century England
and America, the influence of the church waned as the home gained influence as
the seat of moral authority.

13 Although Emma is still a far cry from the snobbery and social manipulations
of Lady Catherine in Pride and Prejudice, her social planning harkens back to
Lady Catherine’s autocratic daclarations that Mr. Collins needs to marry and
that Darcy cannot marry Elizabeth Bennet.

14 Trilling made one of the most infamous comments upon Emma, which reflects
the twentieth century’s narrow definitions of female behavior and fear of
female power. The “exraordinary thing about Emma,” Trilling states, “is that
she has a moral life as a man has a moral life” (34). Self-love, he says, has
alway been a part of the moral life of men and is an essential element of their
power” (34). Austen, however, never accuses her heroine of gender transgression
and does not use the plot to “punish” her.

15 Johnson is one of the few critics who notes that Knightley is not “above
imaginistic misreadings of his own” (140), although she also suggests that Emma
does not misread her community.

16 For a discussion of point of view and the reliable narrator in Emma, see
Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction and “Distance and Point of View.” For an approach
that counters some of Booth’s readings, see Johnson’s Jane Austen.

17 See Kirkham, 125-126. She finds that Emma’s relationship with her father,
whom she calls an “absurd tyrant,” is detrimental beeause it keeps her from
creatinp relationships with other women. But I do not see that her devotion to
her father hinders her relationship with women–though it does hinder the
possibility that she will ever marry a man. At the end of the novel, Emma has
developed closer relationships with both men and women because she has stopped
trying to manipulate others. And she has also agreed to marry a man who is
willing to live at her home.

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