emma commentary

duckworth
"Austen’s narrator sought to win the friend- ship of the reader by ironic characterization
and commentary, then to intrigue the reader by the unfolding narrative, and finally to
gratify the reader with a pleasing and satisfying denouement.”

"In Emma, when the narrator’s irony makes the heroine a source of innocent merriment,
the reader responds with sympathy.”

" James felt that this tactic damaged the illu- sion of reality, most important in his view
in a work of art. He is irritated by the “forthright manner” of Austen’s narrator,”

miller

austen as a kind of god figure

"Hence, the staring paradox ofAusten's narration: it is at once utterly exempt from the
social necessities that govern the narrated world, and intimately acquainted with them
down to their most subtle psychic effects on character. It does not itself experience
what it nonetheless knows with all the authority of experience.” (32)
Austen Style
"Austen Style appears always to be telling us ... about itself, to have made style,
small s, its most extensive and obsessive theme, equal to marriage. A female
character can harclly be introduced without her being instantly placed in an
intricately gradated relation to style or one or more of its stand-ins (elegance, wit,
beauty, fashion).” (41)

the novel and time

"Let me suggest that what in the end overtakes Emma's style, despite all the
godlike or proverbial timelessness to which its utterances lay claim, is nothing
less than a sense of its temporality-a tempo·

rality measured not against the large, event-filled scale of world-historical

time, but in that minor unit of social pressure within which the Novel typically
begins and ends: the time of a generation, from youth to eventual settlement. It
is no acci- dent that Emma discovers the folly o f believing herself "in the secret
ofevery body's feelings" amid a flurry ofjust-announced or anticipated
engagements.” (50)