Emma’s Anxiety: Keeping Dominant Social Power
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Focusing upon the female characters’ relationships in Jane Austen’s Emma especially centering around Emma Woodhouse, this essays examines the novel as a text showing the female protagonist’s superiority complex to maintain her leadership in the society to which she belongs. This essay shows different kinds of anxieties and tension Emma undergoes and how she responds to each of them. Emma’s self-defensive acts and self-justification are examined by scrutinizing manners among the major female characters. By looking closely into three major conflicts happening in the novel, the ones between Emma and other female characters (Jane Fairfax, Mrs. Elton, and Harriet Smith), this essay argues that, at the end of the novel, Emma does not correct her vanity, self-justification, or self-delusion, but manipulates others and justifies herself for the sake of maintaining her selfish identity. Even though the novel uses a match-making plot as its foreground, what Austen really wants to express through the female protagonist is to show the masculine aspect and anxiety in Emma Woodhouse, which is expressed in her endeavor to keep dominant power/position in her society. Furthermore, through this novel, the author shows multitude of manners involved in power struggles and tension between female characters so as to show how they make use of manners to gain the lead in the society.
Abstract
Focusing upon the female characters’ relationships in Jane Austen’s Emma especially centering around Emma Woodhouse, this essays examines the novel as a text showing the female protagonist’s superiority complex to maintain her leadership in the society to which she belongs. This essay shows different kinds of anxieties and tension Emma undergoes and how she responds to each of them. Emma’s self-defensive acts and self-justification are examined by scrutinizing manners among the major female characters. By looking closely into three major conflicts happening in the novel, the ones between Emma and other female characters (Jane Fairfax, Mrs. Elton, and Harriet Smith), this essay argues that, at the end of the novel, Emma does not correct her vanity, self-justification, or self-delusion, but manipulates others and justifies herself for the sake of maintaining her selfish identity. Even though the novel uses a match-making plot as its foreground, what Austen really wants to express through the female protagonist is to show the masculine aspect and anxiety in Emma Woodhouse, which is expressed in her endeavor to keep dominant power/position in her society. Furthermore, through this novel, the author shows multitude of manners involved in power struggles and tension between female characters so as to show how they make use of manners to gain the lead in the society.
참고문헌 (12)
- Austen, Jane, "Emma" (2003), Oxford UP
- Booth, Wayne, "The Rhetoric of Fiction" (1983), U of Chicago P
- Butler, Marilyn, "Jane Austen and the War of Ideas" (1975), Clarendon P
- Goodheart, Eugene, "Emma: Jane Austen’s Errant Heroine", Sewanee Review, 116(4), pp.589~604 (2008)
- Grossman, Johnthan H., "The Labor of the Leisured in Emma: Class, Manners, and Austen", Nineteenth-Century Literature, 54(2), pp.143~164 (1999)
- Kohn, Denise, "Reading Emma as a Lesson on ‘Ladyhood’: A Study in the Domestic Bildungsroman", Essays in Literature, 22(1), pp.45~58 (1995)
- Libin, Kathryn L. Shanks, "Music, Character, and Social Standing in Jane Austen’s Emma", Persuasions, 22, pp.15~30 (2000)
- Looser, Devoney, "Emma: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical, Historical, and Cultural Context, Critical History, and Essays from Contemporary Critical Perspectives", pp.577~593 (2002), St. Martins
- Minma, Shinobu, "Self-Deception and Superiority Complex: Derangement of Hierarchy in Jane Austen’s Emma", Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 14(1), pp.49~65 (2001)
- Park, Hyungji, "Entirely Without words’ in Emma: The Narrative Conspiracy against Jane Fairfax", British and American Fiction, 8(2), pp.177~200 (2001)
- Ross, Josephine, "Jane Austen’s Guide to Good Manners: Compliments, Charades & Horrible Blunders" (2006), Bloomsbury
- Tobin, Beth Fowkes, "The Moral and Political Economy of Property in Austen’s Emma", Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2(3), pp.229~254 (1990)