Emma

The Kenyon library sponsored several online book groups in April and May, and I participated in the one discussing Jane Austen’s novel Emma. Ron and I had recently watched the new film version, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, and I was interested in re-reading the novel to see if my thoughts about what the movie changes are accurate.

From readings of Emma earlier in my life, I don’t remember being quite so irritated with Emma’s father as I was this time around, being closer to his age. The book group talked several times about the narrator’s claim that everyone liked Mr. Woodhouse, that he was “universally civil,” while on the other hand he displays “habits of gentle selfishness and of being never able to suppose that other people could feel differently from himself.” A reader might suspect that Emma chafes a bit more than she is aware from what she says to her friend about a possible suitor: “the older a person grows, Harriet, the more important it is that their manners should not be bad—the more glaring and disgusting any loudness or coarseness or awkwardness becomes.” But Emma is unfailingly dutiful and loving to her difficult father, whose money and position make it possible for her run her own household rather than have to become someone’s wife. Even when she considers a suitor, she considers that “in spite of her previous and fixed determination never to quit her father, never to marry, a strong attachment certainly must produce more of a struggle than she could foresee in her own feelings.”

Emma is also unfailingly conscious of class distinctions and her responsibility to provide a good example to those who might blur them, even going so far as to tell Harriet that she could not visit her if she marries a local farmer, to which Harriet replies “no, to be sure you could not; but I never thought of that before.” In the book group meeting we talked about how strange these class distinctions are to a twenty-first century American, but we also came up with a few examples of rules that a previous generation was taught were important and how strange they seem to us now, only sixty or seventy years later (Emma was published in 1815).

Emma habitually analyzes her actions so that when she makes a mistake she will never do it again, showing us how little wiggle room she has between remaining an example of a proper young woman and becoming an warning to others. When she analyzes her attempt at matchmaking for Harriet and Mr. Elton she thinks “it was foolish, it was wrong, to take so active a part in bringing any two people together. It was adventuring too far, assuming too much, making light of what ought to be serious—a trick of what ought to be simple.” It does seem that everything that ought to be simple is quite tricky, for Emma and any other woman of marriageable age trying to make her way in this society.

How tricky it is becomes apparent on the picnic at Box Hill, when Mr. Churchill proposes that Miss Woodhouse “desires to know what you are all thinking of” and Emma, “laughing as carelessly as she could,” declares that would be “the very last thing I would stand the brunt of just now.” In the newest film version, Emma’s insult to Miss Bates is a shocking moment, whereas in some of the previous versions the others in the party, like Miss Bates herself and possibly the reader, “did not immediately catch her meaning.”

The trickiness of Emma’s position is also apparent when she forces herself to listen to Harriet’s hopes for Mr. Knightley’s affections; she finds the “resolution to sit and endure farther with calmness, with even apparent kindness.” Her self-discipline is especially impressive because it immediately follows her sudden realization that “Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!” Even at the moment when Mr. Knightley has finally declared himself to her, Emma must still keep herself under strict control: “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.”

Eventually, the strict rules of her society require that Emma must give up her attachment to Harriet. The narrator explains that “their friendship must change into a calmer sort of goodwill” because it is discovered that she is not secretly the daughter of a nobleman. But the narrator does get in a dig at the strictness of the rules by commenting on the discovery that Harriet is the illegitimate child of a tradesman, saying “such was the blood of gentility which Emma had formerly been so ready to vouch for! It was likely to be as untainted, perhaps, as the blood of many a gentleman.”

These kinds of gentle reproofs are all through the novel, for the early nineteenth-century reader to notice and enjoy. Modern readers and movie-goers will have a hard time not noticing how uncomfortable are the strictures and inconsistencies of Emma’s society, as we watch her struggle to satisfy each requirement.

The main changes in the 2020 film version do correspond with what I remembered of the book. The age gap between Mr. Knightley and Emma, so proper in 1815, is narrowed in de Wilde’s film. Casting Bill Nighy as the father helps to soften anything objectionable in his character into lovable eccentricity. And Anya Taylor-Joy plays Emma as a woman working within a difficult form, like a Hollywood actress who keeps her body smaller than it can be in order to make her career as big as she wants it to be.