emma commentary 2

franta

The novel is a repudiation of the idea of social form.

the novel traces social relations as a heterogeneous and inter-modal network of relationships. (following latour)

" Everyday life is Austen’s province, but the aesthetic pleasure afforded by this kind of realistic representation is
shadowed by an anxiety that the experience it takes as its object is generic—that the communities and the culture Austen
represents do not refer to specific places or people but to people and places so broadly drawn as to appeal to any reader,
anywhere.”
Emma does not have an exact referent in the world, though it is informed by particular social relations. It is, or at least
we might fear that it is, a sort of aspirational project of the kind of people that ought to exist given the social
relations of the socio-historical context that Austen describes.

q about what we want out of novels: plot, or representation of “the human” and recognizably
human emotions and responses etc..

i guess life doesn’t “inherently” have plot, her writing style is seen to be “natural”

austen’s power is a function of her “extraterritoriality”

Her power is not merely predicated on the representation of inwardness and the everyday. It is ambition turned inward,
and her authority is the product of a range of conscious exclusions reflected not only in the novels’ limited casts of
characters, cozy country settings, class-bound social worlds, and apparent withdrawal from the larger world but also in
what D.A. Miller has recently called “Austen Style,” “a kind of extraterritoriality” as he describes it, established within
“a marriage culture that is total, excepting no one from its dominion, and needing to be propagated always and
everywhere as the condition of its being produced at all.” (6)

idea about historical contingency: probably good thing to bring up: the socio-historical context is sort
of exactly what enables the kind of neurotic and dense inner worlds that these characters develop. it
makes sense that a rich 20-something in the regency era who knows like 10 other people and has no real
problems spends all her time inventing a whole weird schematic of who should marry who etc. its the
kind of thing a very idle person would do, and so can’t really be considered outside of its socio-
historical or economic context. the act of arranging describe here is about accounting for a kind of
socio-historical context: in what historical moments could characters “realistically” be arranged in this
way?:
" The idea that novelists collect people in order to arrange them—to get them “into … a spot”—articulates a different
sense of novelistic practice, one that approaches characters from the outside rather than in terms of their interiority. ...
This approach to the novel suggests that characters’ actions and interactions—their relationships with one another and
also with the spaces in which they are positioned and through which they move—are as important as their imagined
thoughts and feelings. “

" As much as we appreciate Austen’s command of detail and what Scott calls her “knowledge of the human heart,” she
often treats her characters as though they were game pieces to be moved around on a board or action figures to be
positioned and repositioned in elaborately choreographed scenes. “ (13)

contra convention to view austen’s narrow scope as “a microcosm of society”:

"Conversely, in structural terms, “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village” may well be “the very thing to work on” not
because they stand for society in general but because they offer a cast of characters that is sufficient for purposes of the
novel’s plot. “ (8)

the marriage plot

" For Austen, the marriage plot represents something like a principle of structuration—or perhaps a context in which
structuration is made visible in practice. It frames relationships between individuals in such a way as to make it
impossible (or difficult, or at least misleading or incomplete) to arrive at a satisfactory account by focusing exclusively
on either individual actors or social totalities. “
marriage as an institution occupies this weird point of intersection between interpersonal relationships and social
position. people get married, in austen novels, as the result of a kind of calculus between these two modes of “the
social”
" Instead, its structure is rigorously relational. It describes the interaction of agents and structures, and in so doing it
insists on the relationality of relationships. Perfect freedom or absolute determination are simply impossible; the rules of
the game do not permit them.” (18)

the realist novel is psychological

" In the end, the “single system” that organizes the realistic novel is personality, and the patterns that underwrite meaning
in the novel are ultimately psychological. On this account, the nineteenth-century novel’s goal and endgame is the
representation of desire. “ (24)

the mariage plot versus the real and actual institution and ritual of marriage
" The marriage plot is nothing if not an example of pattern, and the fact that it ends with a ritual that corresponds with
one that takes place in real life should not blind us to its conventionality and generic specificity. Austen’s novels
highlight this distinction in their attention to the tension between everyday life and “the visions of romance”—a
narrative conflict they repeatedly resolve through the development of their heroines... Emma Woodhouse’s
blindness finally yields to George Knightley’s insight; (25)

Marriage for austen is a plot device that allows her to track the development of her protagonist in two distinct (but
obviously interrelated) registers: both as an individual agent and a representative of a certain social position. both of these
things are factors in who she marries (i.e., mr knightly is both a good fit in terms of his social position and his personal
disposition). the generic conventions of the marriage plot provide a kind of minimal framework for the intertwined
psychological and social transformation to unfold

plot v character
" the resolution embodied in the protagonist’s growth is enabled by a plot that abounds with unlikely events,
coincidences, and pure contingencies redeemed by little more than the fact that they take place. In other words, and
perhaps this goes without saying, the realistic development of the novelistic character is always shadowed by the
arbitrariness of the novel’s plot. Or, one might say, character translates contingency into necessity…. This is the novel’s
law of conservation—the narratological equivalent of Bersani’s “single system.” “The rules of composition” suggest that
it is plot rather than character that translates contingency into necessity—and, furthermore, that to imagine that the novel
is governed by character is to misrecognize the workings of plot.”
" Conceiving of characters as parts of a plot or narrative functions rather than identities situates them in the context of the
stories they inhabit rather than the totalizing social system that is taken to be the novel’s ultimate frame of reference.
Foregrounding the ways in which plots assemble and reassemble different characters, settings, and situations and
discovering new applications for old systems affords a view of narrative as a combination of processes of connection and
disconnection. “ (29)

what is the social

" It is difficult to say just what “society” meant for Jane Austen because her novels simultaneously depict small, closed
“societies” and yet come to understand the social as a function of the distance between the novel and social reality. The
social, for Austen as for Latour, is not “a stabilized state of affairs” or “a type of material,” but “a movement during a
process of assembling.” The novel’s capacity to give these movements narrative form at once holds out the promise that
they might be represented in such a way as to embody the individual’s social experience and forecloses that possibility by
inscribing them within a closed system that stands at a remove from a world of connections and disconnections to which
it refers but cannot contain.” (35)

furguson

public opinion, public reason, the voice of the public

The moral is not that public opinion is fickle but that changeability means virtually nothing when one
attempts to describe public psychology, because what public psychology lacks is precisely the
connective tissue that enables individual psychology to count as psychology: the memory and
the anticipation that make it possible for one to tell the difference between one’s own thoughts and
someone else’s and that make one feel bound to one’s own thoughts and feelings as one is not to
other people’s thoughts and feelings.

free indirect discourse as a representation of a “communal contribution” to individual consciousness,

or the extent to which others opinions play into our sense of self
" But if I am arguing that social struc- tures have the appearance of durability and authority only
because the demands on their persistence are so minimal, I do not mean that con- sciousness is
merely an individual project. Nor does Austen. The bril- liance of her deployment of free indirect style
is that it recognizes what we might want to think of as a communal contribution to individuals.”

vs Bildung
" Whereas the bildungsroman, in tradi- tional descriptions, emphasizes education as an individual
matter (in which one is proved right or wrong by the world), Austen uses a com- munity to
foreshadow an individual’s actions—to say of Emma, from the very outset, that she will have come
out right by the end.”

the novel is hard on emma because “of its attachment”

"While they insist that there is a clearly available narrative position from which to judge Emma, I
would argue, by contrast, that the novel is hard on Emma to exactly the same extent that it is
committed to her. Moreover, it is hard on her because of this attachment.” (171)

"rules" of marriage
although the novel identifies its characters according to their social circumstances, it does not make
the socioeconomic data amount to a real sorting device.
the eltons understand these rules
'With the Eltons one can see the emergence of the concept of a social rule. The Eltons’ accurate
sense of their standing in the social hierarchy and of the rules of the social game enables them to
succeed against others’ wishes—without, that is, continually being liked or endorsed by them.” (174)

social communal interest in marriage

" the social world of Emma has so far absorbed its function as a witness that it constantly promotes
marriage. Indeed, the pleasure that the community takes in marriages is so intense that a marriage
can effectively wipe an individual’s slate clean: in Highbury a “young person, who either marries or
dies, is sure of being kindly spo- ken of” (121). Just as Wordsworth essentially says that death
makes all of its subjects look good to the living, so Austen suggests that marriage performs the job
of transformation and transvaluation."