Jane Austen's statement, “I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.”, gives us an indication of the importance of Emma for the author. It is a clue that Edmund Wilson explores in the essay A Long Talk About Jane Austen. He lays out an audacious argument about Emma as well as possibly illuminating a character trait of the author herself. It seems timely to review these arguments in view of the currently released film Becoming Jane.
Wilson does not, explicitly warns against, a Freudian analysis. He gathers together family treads and weaves them into a cloth where certain patterns emerge. In this hypothesis Emma “is one of her novels in which the author's own peculiar 'conditioning' is most curiously and clearly seen.”. “Jane Austen spent all her life with persons related to her by blood – her parents, her five brothers, her single unmarried sister – and the experience behind relationships imagined by her in her novels is always an experience of relationship of blood, of which that between sisters is certainly the most deeply felt.”. The examples Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, of Jane and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice and of Anne Elliot and the stand in role of sister and mother, of Lady Russel in Persuasion, are examined to develop the argument that this woman to woman sensibility is fundamental in the novels. There is a peculiar detachment in Austen, a coolness and leisure that allows writing for its own sake, that makes for a great artist. Only in Persuasion does Austen gives us a glimpse of a personal emotion, of a sadness at a woman's self-fulfillment missed.
Emma does not have sister, she substitutes Harriet Smith. “Emma, who was relatively indifferent to men, was inclined to infatuation with women;”. “Emma is not interested in men except in paternal relation.. Her actual father is a silly old woman: in their household it is Emma herself who, motherless as she is, assumes the function of head of the family; it is she who takes the place of the parent and Mr. Woodhouse who becomes a child. It is Knightly who checked and rebuked her, who has presided over her social development, and she accepts him as a substitute father; she finally marries him and brings him into her own household”.
“The comedy of the false sister-relationship of Emma has turned into something almost tragic.” Edmund Wilson echoes the comparison of Austen to Shakespeare in “Emma ... is with Jane Austen what Hamlet is with Shakespeare. It is the book of hers about which her readers are likely to disagree most; they tend either to praise it extravagantly or find it dull, formless, and puzzling. The reason for this is, I believe is that, just as in the case of Hamlet, there is something outside the picture which is never made explicit in the story but which has to be recognized by the reader before it is possible for him to appreciate the book.”. It is this quality of woman to woman sensibility, which is an insight into Jane Austen herself.
