Jane Austen's Emma and other works

[Red Terror]

Man, I read three Austen novels --- Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice and all I can say is arrrrrgghhhhh!!!! I read them because I wanted to read some books written by women but, my goodness, who can tolerate Emma or any other of her characters????!!! Such snobbish characters who can not break with convention, especially Emma.

[Danik 2016]

:D, "arrrrrgghhhhh!!!!" is the shortest comment on the novels of Jane Austen, I ever saw. I think she chose to show how these conventions worked, specially how they influenced the lives of women of a certain social class,who had to marry well to survive, rather than how they were broken.

[Pompey Bum]

Man, I read three Austen novels --- Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice and all I can say is arrrrrgghhhhh!!!! I read them because I wanted to read some books written by women but, my goodness, who can tolerate Emma or any other of her characters????!!! Such snobbish characters who can not break with convention, especially Emma.

The past is a foreign country, Red Terror, they do things differently there. And that goes doubly for past literature. But since I can see you are suffering, I will tell you the only known antidote to Emma (and Jane Austin in general): The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding. Make sure you don't skip the essays that begin each section (they're the best part). Also give up trying to make the human experience fit the cookie cutter of your or anyone else's politics (it won't), stop trying to tell dead (or non-existent) women what they want, and lose the silly avatar. Che looked too much like Monica Lewinsky to be taken seriously.

Hope you take the advice about Fielding anyway. :)

[Clopin]

Emma's a great book but I agree that the character Emma is an annoying snob.

[Red Terror]

Emma is a snobbish character. At the end of the novel she breaks with Harriet because the latter is going to marry Robert Martin, a farmer. If it was a real women's liberation novel she would have done the Ibsen thing that the leading character in A Doll's House did and break with convention by remaining friends and associating with Harriet and her husband.

By the way that is not my leftist analysis but a paraphrase of Emerson which is as American as apple pie.

Have you seen this?:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/32099/7-people-who-hated-pride-and-prejudice

Also read this:

10 FACTS THAT CHE-HATERS HATE


1. Che was named one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century by Time Magazine, and listed in the section: "Heroes and Icons".

2. Che's famous image entitled: "Guerrillero Heroico" has been declared the most famous and reproduced image in the world.

3. Che's radicalism was spawned from living in Guatemala during the 1954-overthrow of democratically-elected Jacobo Arbenz by the CIA at the behest of the United Fruit Co.

4. Cuba, under Batista, was a Mafia-run casino and hooker-haven for American tourists, where US companies owned
75 % of the arable land. This is the context that Fidel and Che rose to power in.

5. Che oversaw the revolutionary tribunals of convicted War criminals from the U.$.-supported Batista dictatorship. These rapists, torturers, and goons ran Batista's dungeons and killed 20,000 people. Che simply reviewed the appeals of those sentenced to death. A decision supported by 93% of Cubans at the time.

6. In Cuba, Che is on the 3 dollar Peso, and school children begin every morning reciting, "We will be like Che".

7. U.S. Imperialism would continue their practice of supporting evil dictators like Batista by overthrowing democracies (e.g. Mossadeq in Iran, Allende in Chile, etc.) and propping up brutal dictators like the Shah in Iran, Mobutu in Zaire, Suharto in Indonesia, Marcos in the Philippines, Pinochet in Chile, and Saddam Hussein et al. (Just like they did with Batista in Cuba).

8. In September of 2007, Che was voted "Argentina's greatest historical and political figure", and this summer they erected a giant statue of him in Rosario.

9. In Argentina schools are named after Che.

10. Che Guevara is prayed to as "Saint Ernesto" in Bolivia and seen as an equal figure to Christ and the Virgin Mary by rural peasants.

P.S. Those who condemn us for paying homage to Che are the same ones who pay homage to their slave-master presidents who were also ethnic-cleansers and sexist pigs. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wanted to have "sodomites" castrated and lesbians branded.





The past is a foreign country, Red Terror, they do things differently there. And that goes doubly for past literature. But since I can see you are suffering, I will tell you the only known antidote to Emma (and Jane Austin in general): The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding. Make sure you don't skip the essays that begin each section (they're the best part). Also give up trying to make the human experience fit the cookie cutter of your or anyone else's politics (it won't), stop trying to tell dead (or non-existent) women what they want, and lose the silly avatar. Che looked too much like Monica Lewinsky to be taken seriously.

Hope you take the advice about Fielding anyway. :)

[Clopin]

Indeed, Emma is a class enemy.

[Pompey Bum]

Those who condemn us for paying homage to Che are the same ones who pay homage to their slave-master presidents who were also ethnic-cleansers and sexist pigs. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wanted to have "sodomites" castrated and lesbians branded.

Well, thanks for setting me straight on that, Red Terror.

Say, would you look at the time?

[milagros]

Hello:

I'm agreement with you when you say that character of Emma is a snobbish. But I don't consider that Jane Austen had the intention write about women's liberation. The Jane Austen's novels are romantic stories, certainly that's reason that her novels likes to women more than to men. In any case, I think that we'll judge her work by literary standards.

[Ecurb]

Austen's comment about her main character in Emma (from a letter)--"I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like..."

I'm on Austen's side on this one. Emma is a snob. She interferes with the lives of others. But she's also basically kind. She loves her difficult father, and is one of the best daughters in literature. She's smart as a whip (she's also delusional, but think how quickly she solves all those riddles and word puzzles). Young people (I think) tend to dislike her; but once a reader reaches an age when he can look fondly at the foibles of youth, one can gaze fondly at Emma, too.

I think Austen often set herself authorial tasks: in Emma a snobbish heroine nobody but Austen can much like; in Mansfield Park a dull, priggish hero and heroine who are less attractive than the villains; in Persuasion a quiet, aging heroine who has almost given up on life. Out of these seemingly unromantic and unsympathetic plots and situations, she crafted three of the great treasures of English literature.

[Clopin]

haha this is a bit of a tangent but I actually HATE when authors have their characters solve riddles (especially if it's done to show how intelligent the characters are). I refuse to believe any of them could ever be solved by anyone in real life in any timely fashion. It bugged me even as a kid when Bilbo and Gollum were able to solve these totally ridiculous riddles that would be impractically difficult for anyone in real life, let alone with only a few seconds to think for each one.

[Ecurb]

I'm guessing that Jane Austen was great at word games. It's just a guess, though.

[Pompey Bum]

In the sequel to Emma, her snobbishness drives her deeper and deeper into the vaults of a subterranean lake where her form shrivels, her eyes become freakishly large, and she fusses endlessly over her "birthday present." It has a riddle sequence, so Clopin may not care for it, but I recommend it to everyone else. (The movie's supposed to be terrible though)

[Jackson Richardson]

The Jane Austen's novels are romantic stories, certainly that's reason that her novels likes to women more than to men

No, no, no!

Jane Austen is the very opposite of romantic. When I have time I must start a new thread on the subject. Contemporary with Shelley and Byron and Frankenstein, her favourite writers were Crabbe and Dr Johnson and her favourite novel (the unreadable and out of print) Sir Charles Grandison. As I say, the very opposite of romantic. OK, her novels end up with marriage, but she has no time for the ghastly sentimental and extravagant shenanigans which wedding are so often now - read the last paragraph of Emma. And she is merciless in dissecting unhappy marriages - Mr and Mrs Bennet are the prime examples.

I’m a man, albeit a gay one, and I love her.

[Pompey Bum]

JR's correct as usual. In fact, Sense and Sensibility is a polemic against Romanticism.

[Ecurb]

Have you read "Sir Charles Grandison", Jackson? I haven't (thus shirking my duties as a Jane Austen fan).

Captain Benwick, the broken-hearted romantic in Persuasion, is a romantic phony. Here Austen skewers him:


...he repeated with such tremulous feeling the various lines which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness, and looked so entirely as if he meant to be understood, that she (Anne Elliot) ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry, and to say that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.

I love the line, "looked so entirely as if he meant to be understood." But I have a suspicion that Anne's advice to Captain Benwick represents Austen's own attitude toward romanticism. Even priggish Fanny Price comes closest to falling for Henry Crawford when he reads Shakespeare to her. Romanticism is in conflict with some other, more important ethos not because it is weak, but because it is so strong, and because Austen was so susceptible to its charms.

IN the fragment "Sanditon" Charlotte (the seeming heroine) says, "I have read several of Burn s poems with great delight, but I am not poetic enough to separate a man's poetry entirely from his character; and poor Burns known irregularities greatly interrupt my enjoyment of his lines.... I have no faith in the sincerity of the affections of a man of his description." (What had Burns done, I wonder?)

Austen was a parson's daughter, albeit a genius with a sense of humor.

Nonetheless, I would not say Austen is unromantic. Persuasion is a novel about dashed dreams and the romance of wistful memory. The sea (Captain Wentworth's domain) represents a sort of pre-Freudian dreamscape awash with the full, sexual life that Anne rejected. This time, in Austen's last novel, it was not sensibility that led Anne Elliot astray. It was sense. Anne "had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older -- the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning".

Austen tries to revert to form in the book's last paragraph, in which Anne says she was right in allowing herself to be persuaded to give Wentworth up. But after the passion of regret that suffuses the whole story, I remained unconvinced.

Austen was one of the early prophets of realism, which is often (but not always) unromantic.

[Jackson Richardson]

No Ecurb, I haven't read Sir Charles Grandison - although I see it is available in print. I've just read Cowper's The Task, about which I have ambiguous feelings. Will you let me off reading Grandison as a quid pro quo?

What Burns did was to have sex before marriage with a variety of girls, or lassies as the handsome Great Scots Poet himself would have said. It is interesting that Anne criticises Burns for his sexual morality but is completely accepting of his non-standard English.

I've started a thread on Jane Austen and romanticism: http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?85175-A-new-circumstance-in-romance-Is-Jane-Austen-romantic&p=1322022#post1322022

[prendrelemick]

I'm guessing that Jane Austen was great at word games. It's just a guess, though.

I reckon she was the most intellegent person there has ever been in the history of the whole world - but she was a woman so it doesn't count of course.
Seriously though, her intellegence shines through in every passage. She had a narrow sheltered life, but a lively and supple mind. She couldn't know stuff like, say, George Elliot or Simone de Beauvoir could, but what she did with what she had, shows that real intelligence is nothing to do with education or experience.
The relationship between her narrator and protagonist (particularly in Emma)was revolutionary. A hundred or so years later it was recognised and named - free indirect style in which a writer imbues a third-person narration with the habits of thought or expression of a fictional character. It is all about the manipulation of the reader -she tells us how to think, she leads us along by the nose she is in perfect control and shows us her story at its best. It means we can't quite bring ourselves to hate Emma even when she deserves it. This style has become so universal it is hardly noticed now. But she invented it and it was a revolution for the Novel.

[Ecurb]

Good post, prendrelemick. Austen likes toying with her readers, and with her protagonists. Here's a favorite bit from "Emma" (she's thinking about Mrs. Elton):


" 'Insufferable woman!' was her immediate exclamation. 'Worse than I had supposed. Absolutely insufferable! Knightley! - I could not have believed it. Knightley! - never seen him in her life before, and call him Knightley! - and discover that he is a gentleman! A little upstart, vulgar being, with her Mr. E., and her caro sposo, and her resources, and all her airs of pert pretension and underbred finery. Actually to discover that Mr. Knightley is a gentleman! I doubt whether he will return the compliment, and discover her to be a lady. I could not have believed it! And to propose that she and I should unite to form a musical club! One would fancy we were bosom friends! And Mrs. Weston! - Astonished that the person who had brought me up should be a gentlewoman! Worse and worse. I never met with her equal. Much beyond my hopes. Harriet is disgraced by any comparison. Oh! what would Frank Churchill say to her, if he were here? How angry and how diverted he would be! Ah! there I am! - thinking of him directly. Always the first person to be thought of! How I catch myself out! Frank Churchill comes as regularly into my mind!' * "

Frank O’Connor wrote a book called "Mirror in the Roadway" about the development of the novel. Here's his analysis of the above scene: "The effect of this extraordinary technique is to make a passage like this almost identical with similar passages in James Joyce, where the fact that the author is trying to express something that has not yet reached the conscious mind compells him to express it symbolically. The principle passions of Emma’s life are set out as they present themselves to the author’s mind: they are Mr. Knightley, Mrs. Weston, and the fancied attachment to Frank Churchill. The last and least important Emma exaggerates into a principal one. She may imagine that she really catches herself out, but her self-knowledge is of much the same kind as Stendahl’s."

Here's a link to a recent New Yorker article on Samuel Richardson (one of Austen's favorite novelists):

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/samuel-richardson-inventor-of-the-modern-novel

[milagros]

Hello:

I didn't read all Austen's novels; maybe my appreciation can't to be entirely correct, but I consider that she also writes about romance; I'm not saying that I compared her novels with the sugary stories between girls and boy flying over sugary clouds. I mean she uses the issues like the love and marriage for to touch other topics like prejudices, habits and thought her epoca.

At the present, her novels are base of the mayority of romantic novels; but few them are so original. By the way, my intencition it wasn't disparage (nor the literary taste of the people) to the writer, unlike I consider she did a great job criticising the society of her time using the sarcasm.

[Jackson Richardson]

Thanks for the link, Ecurb. I might give Pamela another go.

I've been browzing Horace Walpole's letters in which he commented about "those deplorably tedious lamentations,"Clarissa" and "Sir Charles Grandison", which are pictures of high life as conceived by a bookseller and romances as they would be spiritualised by a Methodist teacher."

[Jackson Richardson]

Thanks for the link, Ecurb. I might give Pamela another go.

I've been browzing Horace Walpole's letters in which he commented about "those deplorably tedious lamentations,"Clarissa" and "Sir Charles Grandison", which are pictures of high life as conceived by a bookseller and romances as they would be spiritualised by a Methodist teacher."

[Pompey Bum]

Thanks for the link, Ecurb. I might give Pamela another go.

I've been browzing Horace Walpole's letters in which he commented about "those deplorably tedious lamentations,"Clarissa" and "Sir Charles Grandison", which are pictures of high life as conceived by a bookseller and romances as they would be spiritualised by a Methodist teacher."

I love Joseph Andrews, which is a satire of Pamela (as is the more direct Shamela). I sometimes think of reading Pamela just to get more of Fielding's jokes, but after all these years I still haven't been able to do that to myself. Read if you must, but when you're ready for detox, remember Fielding. :)

[Jackson Richardson]

i have to say, Pompey, that I read it a few years ago and I found it left a rather nasty taste in the mouth for some reason. The satire was too crude, maybe.

Meantime, I'm enjoying dipping into Horace Walpole, of whom Jane Austen would certainly have disapproved.

[prendrelemick]

[QUOTE=Ecurb;1322046]Good post, prendrelemick. Austen likes toying with her readers, and with her protagonists. Here's a favorite bit from "Emma" (she's thinking about Mrs. Elton):

" 'Insufferable woman!' was her immediate exclamation. 'Worse than I had supposed. Absolutely insufferable! Knightley! - I could not have believed it. Knightley! - never seen him in her life before, and call him Knightley! - and discover that he is a gentleman! A little upstart, vulgar being, with her Mr. E., and her caro sposo, and her resources, and all her airs of pert pretension and underbred finery. Actually to discover that Mr. Knightley is a gentleman! I doubt whether he will return the compliment, and discover her to be a lady. I could not have believed it! And to propose that she and I should unite to form a musical club! One would fancy we were bosom friends! And Mrs. Weston! - Astonished that the person who had brought me up should be a gentlewoman! Worse and worse. I never met with her equal. Much beyond my hopes. Harriet is disgraced by any comparison. Oh! what would Frank Churchill say to her, if he were here? How angry and how diverted he would be! Ah! there I am! - thinking of him directly. Always the first person to be thought of! How I catch myself out! Frank Churchill comes as regularly into my mind!' * "[QUOTE]

Yes James Joyce indeed, and Shakespeare would've been pleased to pen "underbred finery" or "How I catch myself out". Of course there is more going on - she is unwittingly demonstrating how alike she and the snobbish Mrs Elton is. It's all cracking stuff.

[Pompey Bum]

i have to say, Pompey, that I read it a few years ago and I found it left a rather nasty taste in the mouth for some reason. The satire was too crude, maybe.

No, JR, it is because you are a sweet man but I am a sour one. You want to believe in Pamelas and I see a world full of Lady Boobys. But Fielding's voice is sublime however one finds what he would call his fables.

Was it Shamela you read, by the way, or Joseph Andrews? And more importantly, have you read Tom Jones? The satire there is a little less over the top than in Joseph Andrews, and the voice has become--wise? In any case, remember it if you ever overdose on Richardson's pietism.

[Jackson Richardson]

It was indeed Joseph Andrews - I found Parson Adams irritating after a while, far more an impossible ideal of goodness than Clarissa. I'm no great fan of Richardson and have no intention of re-reading Clarissa but Ecurb's link made me think I might be missing something in Pamela.

I do think Lovelace is an utter ****, though and I take it Clarissa has no intention of shacking up with her eventual rapist. Which means I miss the famed ambiguity of that very, very long novel.

I think Horace Walpole's putdown of Richardson rather good.

i read Tom Jones as a bookish teenager who was impressed by the introductions to the "epic" sections but I suspect I'd find them rather tedious now.

[Pompey Bum]

I didn't mind Adams as much as you apparently did. Since you've read Tom Jones, you know that the character gets redone as Partridge (their both essentially send ups of Sancho Panza), and I will admit that the make over is an improvement.


i read Tom Jones as a bookish teenager who was impressed by the introductions to the "epic" sections but I suspect I'd find them rather tedious now.

You might be surprised. I'm a bookish middle-ager and I still consider the essays the best part of the book. Fielding for me is all about voice, so he's helped me both as a reader and a writer. And I admire writers who know the world and still manage to forgive it (even if they laugh at it first).

But it's clear we have different tastes. I respect that.

[kev67]

I have read Emma and Pride and Prejudice. I think I will read Persuasion at some point. Emma was a pretty clever book. It is ostensibly about a young, upper class woman called Emma Woodhouse, but there are at least two other stories going on in the background. What do you think Miss Bates' story would be, or Frank Churchill's or even Mrs Elton's?

[Danik 2016]

I reckon she was the most intellegent person there has ever been in the history of the whole world - but she was a woman so it doesn't count of course.
Seriously though, her intellegence shines through in every passage. She had a narrow sheltered life, but a lively and supple mind. She couldn't know stuff like, say, George Elliot or Simone de Beauvoir could, but what she did with what she had, shows that real intelligence is nothing to do with education or experience.
The relationship between her narrator and protagonist (particularly in Emma)was revolutionary. A hundred or so years later it was recognised and named - free indirect style in which a writer imbues a third-person narration with the habits of thought or expression of a fictional character. It is all about the manipulation of the reader -she tells us how to think, she leads us along by the nose she is in perfect control and shows us her story at its best. It means we can't quite bring ourselves to hate Emma even when she deserves it. This style has become so universal it is hardly noticed now. But she invented it and it was a revolution for the Novel.
I liked this post very much, prendelemic. Usually when men comment on woman writers they aren´t aware that their working and educational conditions where more restricted than those of men, specially in those times when the educated women didn´t have a great variety of external jobs. They had to write about what they knew or eventually imaginad.
Thanks for calling my attention to the fact that it was Jane Austen who invented the free indirect speech. That alone was an achievement indeed!

[Pompey Bum]

I liked this post very much, Ecurb.

Poor Prendrelemick! :)

[prendrelemick]

I'll accept sympathy and praise without discrimination new or second hand.

[Danik 2016]

Sorry, Pren!:bawling:As we say here, I mentioned the right miracle, but changed the name of the Saint!:confused5:
I have corrected the mistake (discrimination doesn´t apply here).

[Red Terror]

My favorite character in Emma is Miss Bates as annoying as she is. LOL!!!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6H_KPo68rY



I have read Emma and Pride and Prejudice. I think I will read Persuasion at some point. Emma was a pretty clever book. It is ostensibly about a young, upper class woman called Emma Woodhouse, but there are at least two other stories going on in the background. What do you think Miss Bates' story would be, or Frank Churchill's or even Mrs Elton's?

[Ecurb]

My favorite character in Emma is Miss Bates as annoying as she is. LOL!!!


The reader is set up to find Miss Bates a bore and a fool, just as Emma does. However, if you actually read Miss Bates' interminable monologues, it turns out that she's generally correct in her opinions, while Emma is generally incorrect and foolish. Miss Bates is one more example of how Austen leads the reader astray, and even, at times, pokes fun at her own readers for being so easily misled.

[Jackson Richardson]

Glad you liked something in the book, red terror. She's my favourite character as well.

Notice that in the last scene when she appears after Jane Fairfax has been released from poverty and she says nothing, unlike every other scene where she appears. I quote from memory but it says something like "Miss Bates looked around her perfectly happy". All her chatter is covering her real fear and distress at her precarious position, a social position that Jane Austen, as the daughter of a clergyman's widow living with her mother, shared. (She did have some brothers who did well for themselves, so she was not liable to poverty in the same way as Miss Bates, although she would have had the same social disadvantages.)

[HalInc]

List my name among the snobs. Austen is on the very, very short list of greatest novelist, without qualifications.

[Red Terror]

I don't like her novels. If everyone, however, lived in such small, charming villages as she does I would find her novels delightful.


List my name among the snobs. Austen is on the very, very short list of greatest novelist, without qualifications.

[Jackson Richardson]

Fair enough, she's not everyone's cup of tea. I do worry a bit that there she is writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution and ignores the working classes. At least she doesn't patronise them by making them comic turns.

She is still one of my very favourites, but people respond to different authors. The penny hasn't dropped with me about Henry James despite strenuous efforts to come to terms with him and generally James lovers are Austen lovers. Now he is far more mandarin than Austen.

[prendrelemick]

I don't like her novels. If everyone, however, lived in such small, charming villages as she does I would find her novels delightful.

I find her novels delightful because I don't live in such a place, am not of that class and never, ever have conversations like hers.

[Red Terror]

I don't think I noticed that connection when I read it. Thanks for the input.


Glad you liked something in the book, red terror. She's my favourite character as well.

Notice that in the last scene when she appears after Jane Fairfax has been released from poverty and she says nothing, unlike every other scene where she appears. I quote from memory but it says something like "Miss Bates looked around her perfectly happy". All her chatter is covering her real fear and distress at her precarious position, a social position that Jane Austen, as the daughter of a clergyman's widow living with her mother, shared. (She did have some brothers who did well for themselves, so she was not liable to poverty in the same way as Miss Bates, although she would have had the same social disadvantages.)

[Red Terror]

Well, I don't like her novels because they have nothing of relevance for my life (and I tried hard to find some) but I acknowledge she is quite a stylist; she writes excellent prose.


I find her novels delightful because I don't live in such a place, am not of that class and never, ever have conversations like hers.

[prendrelemick]

Ok, ok, I've been racking my brain (what's left of it ) to find some obscure relevance that Austen's books have to my life, and frankly they just don't! Although, escapism is a good thing, and Austen draws me in like no other. It's not her stories but her craft that seems to makes each page glow brightly from beneath the actual printed words.

[Jackson Richardson]

However distant the social and historic setting, Jane manages to create utterly believable, individual, amusing and irritating characters again and again. Here’s one from each novel: John Thorpe, Mrs Jennings, Mr Collins, Mrs Norris, Mr Woodhouse and Mary Musgrove. (Note my equal gender balance.)

There’s a whole chapter in Emma in which Mrs Elton and Mr Weston have a conversation in which they both want to talk of their own interests without showing the least interest in each other. Conversations go on all the time in which people fail to listen to each other – here it is spelt out.