Austenathon 2011: Emma (Spoiler Thread)

Here, we can divulge as much about Emma as we want. Enjoy!

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This book struck me as a different approach to character than the earlier three novels. We are presented with Emma Woodhouse as an adolescent who is always right, and we can expect like some of the other bad folk in the novels we have read that she will be stuck there. This heroine actually takes counsel to heart, and in a conscious, serious way that Marianne in Sense and Sensibility doesn't get to.

Robert

#2 You could argue that Lizzie is not dissimilar in that sense (excluding a propensity to matchmake) ;o)

...but it's been a while since I last read Emma, so I shall get cracking before I make any other comments!

There is a definite theme in Austen's novels of the heroines becoming more self-aware and cognizant of their own flaws. How much they change, and whether they do so believably, varies from one novel to the next.

I'm about half done with this one now. I did read the book, many years ago, but my latest exposure to Emma came from the Gwyneth Paltrow movie.

My thoughts so far:

Emma isn't quite as annoying as I'd remembered. Although she is quite the social snob. Her matchmaking attempts aren't good, but she seems to have the right intentions. But it was very wrong of her to treat Robert Martin the way she did.

Mrs. Elton isn't quite as evil as I'd remembered. At least not yet. I can see why Emma dislikes her in the beginning, but she did seem to genuinely want to be friends with Emma.

In the movie, the single Mr. Knightley is named John. In the book, I was surprised to find out John is the married one, and George is the single one. I didn't remember that the movie had changed the names.

Funny; so far I'm having the opposite reaction: at the beginning, at least, Emma seems worse than she did on my first read. Still, it's early days yet...only about a fifth of the way through.

I do like Mr. Knightley, who is so very patient with Mr. Wodehouse.

Yes, my feelings could possibly be affected by the fact that Emma is already feeling remorse for some of her actions. Some, but not all.

Mr. Knightley IS quite a gentleman - you can tell a lot about a man by the way they treat elderly people and the less fortunate. He's a keeper. :)

Okay, I'm finished now and Mrs. Elton DEFINITELY got more annoying as the book progressed. She and her husband turned out to be quite a pair.

I really liked Emma, though. She did some silly/rude things, but she always seemed to learn from her mistakes immediately and try to be a better person. I couldn't hate her for messing up when I could see she was trying to change.

I really wish the "class" issue had been different back then. It would have been quite a statement if Emma and her husband and Harriet and her husband could set the example and be close friends after their marriages, regardless of class. I guess such things just weren't done. But in this day and age I find myself asking "WHY couldn't they be close friends? What difference does it make?"

It was really neat/amazing how the whole town catered to Mr. Woodhouse's feelings. He was such a sweet man at heart, I guess that's why they all tried so hard to please him and pacify him, but it was quite a collective effort!

I'm also completely amazed at Mr. Knightley's feelings. He watched Emma grow up and yet he always seemed to love her in a genuine romantic way, throughout most of the book. I would think it would have been difficult to see her as anything more than a little sister. But the signs were there the whole time. He saw her faults and loved her anyway. At least Austen didn't subject us to a last minute change of heart - two paragraphs describing how he went from brotherly to romantic feelings - like she did in the last book!!

I liked this much more than I did on my first reading many years ago. :)

I am slowly making my way through my re-read. I'm about 1/3 done. It's going slowly due to real life getting in the way, not because I am not enjoying it. Though I did read it several years ago, I am having a hard time deciding if my positive feelings/memories of it had to do with the book itself or my enjoyment of the film with Jeremy Northam...

Oh, Jeremy Northam. :D The film version of Emma was what inspired me to pick up the book, which was my first Austen novel. So I have a lot of love for both, especially because they introduced me to my all-time favourite author.

The only movie version I've seen is the Gwyneth Paltrow one. Is that the Jeremy Northam one, or is he in a different version? Sorry if that's a dumb question, but I don't know much about this book in the movies!

#11 The same movie - Jeremy Northam is Mr. Knightley.

The Kate Beckinsale version is much better, I'll recommend it if you havent' seen it...

Must start reading this weekend...

8: I certainly don't have a lot of friendships across class lines, even today. It's embarrassing to have more and better stuff than the people you're having dinner with or to be talking about vacations you know they could never afford. Or to be talking about politics and realize that, even if we want the same outcome, our stakes and risks are completely different.

I think one of the points of Emma is that to really help people you have to understand where they are in the first place, something Emma is bad at and Knightley is good at. Emma's like that guy in Afghanistan who set up all those schools that no one uses because, for various reasons, they don't fit in the culture, where Knightley would have sat down, listened to the tribal elders, etc. and then tweaked a couple of things to make it seem natural to the villagers that some of their kids, maybe even some of the girls, should go to school.

#14 Exactly! Well said.

Interesting discussion. I guess I've just never really thought much about what class I belong to, or what class my friends are. Like you said, I would think it would be only natural to be drawn to friends who are in similar situations to ourselves - those in the same class. That's similar to how some friendships suffer when one person gets married, or has a baby, and the other one does not.

Now that I really think about it, many of my friends are probably in the same class as my husband and me. But I can think of several who are much wealthier than we are, and a few who are very poor. I even have one adult friend who can't read. But we enjoy each others company, and we make each other laugh.

I guess if you have some strong connection or common ground with the person, and the connection has nothing to do with money or class, it could probably work. Like a "poor" person and a "rich" person could become close friends if they both enjoyed the same books, for example. But if there wasn't a common bond outside of class boundaries, it would be difficult.

Maybe it's idealistic of me, but I think that if two people truly care about each other, they can work with any differences to enjoy a friendship. I guess Emma and Harriet discovered that they didn't have enough in common after all, so that's why their friendship cooled.

I think for the most part, Emma and Harriet's relationship wouldn't really fall in a traditional friendship category. Emma and Harriet, even when they interact daily, are distinctly aware of the class differences between them. Emma views her role as more of a mentor or sponsor for Harriet (very similar to Mrs. Elton's perception of her relationship with Jane Fairfax), while Harriet is simply grateful for any attention that the highly regarded Miss Woodhouse gives her. When you compare their relationship with that of Elizabeth Bennet and Charlotte Lucas (in the first section of Pride and Prejudice anyway), you can see there's a significant difference.

True. I agree, Emma is definitely more of a mentor to Harriet. Definitely different than other relationships Austen has portrayed.

I finished Emma last night, and my review is here. Suffice it to say, I did not enjoy the novel as much as I did the first time around. I found Emma very annoying, and while she often resolved to do better and be a better person, I didn't see much change until the end. I just found her insufferable, though not as much as Mrs. Elton :)

One random thing that struck me was the short mention of slavery and abolition when Mrs. Elton misinterprets a comment by Jane Fairfax and assures her that her brother-in-law is against slavery. It made me think of some of the commentary I read about Mansfield Park where there was a complaint that Austen never mentions that the Bertrams' wealth derives from slavery on their plantations in the Caribbean. In this one small moment in Emma, I got a sense of Austen's opinion of the subject.

I just finished Emma yesterday, and I loved the book. This is my first time to read it. I thought that parts of the book were hilarious. It was interesting to me that Emma seemed immune to the flirting of Churchill (although enjoying his company), although everyone else thought that she wasn't. That was pretty much her only instance of not being blind or clueless.

>17 MickyFine:: Very perceptive, Micky, about the parallels between the Emma/Harriet relationship and the Mrs. Elton/Miss Fairfax relationshiop. Looking at the novel with that parallel in mind, Emma's kindness and good intentions, however muddled, come through. I don't think she wanted to bask in reflected glory, the way Mrs. Elton did, always blowing her own horn quite loudly.

That said, Emma did Harriet some harm, where Mrs. Elton may have annoyed Jane to the nth degree, but did her no harm. That's really interesting, I think.

>21 Matke: Thanks. I do agree with you that Emma does more harm to Harriet than Mrs. Elton does to Jane, but at the same time, Harriet still ends up where she should have been at the beginning of the novel (i.e. with Robert Martin) so the harm is rather superficial, in my opinion. If I had to choose, I think I'd pick Emma over Mrs. Elton as a benefactress any day. :)

Oh my, yes; who could possibly tolerate that woman hammering at one? Erg.

#21 That is because Emma was smarter than Mrs. Elton and Harriet was much much dumber than Jane.

I finished my re-read the other day and I was again struck by the stylistic brilliance that is Miss Bates' speeches. The sheer quantity of topics she can go through, particularly in the two page speech she gives during the ball at the Crown is astounding. That Austen can indicate a high-speed, breathless speech with just some massive run-on sentences and some dashes is just fantastic.

>25 MickyFine:: I loved Miss Bates' speeches too. Austen did such an amazing job of really letting you feel what it would be like to be stuck listening to that incessant, meandering chatter. Just reading it was making me feel claustrophobic and impatient.

I'll second the comment above that Kate Beckinsale's Emma was better than Gwyneth Paltrow's. The Paltrow version had a great cast, but I thought Gwyneth was horrible as Emma, which ruined it for me. There's also a more recent BBC miniseries that I thought was the best of the bunch.

#26 I'd be very interested in tracking down the BBC miniseries. BBC does fabulous stuff with classics.

#26 Hmmm - I don't remember a new BBC miniseries - who was in it?

#25/6 Miss Bates is wonderful, isn't she? I haven't come across her too much in my re-read yet, but she's always one of the best bits of the book. One of the most interesting characters too - you have to bear in mind that her situation is very close to what Jane and Cassandra Austen's could have had in their future if Jane hadn't sold Pride and Prejudice.

I'm very much enjoying my re-read and Emma's leaping back up my Austen hit-list again. I'd forgotten just how completely unobservant Emma is and how completely obsurd Mr Elton, right from the start. I also think that Mr Woodhouse is drawn beautifully - you have to admire how patient Emma is with him - I'm not sure I would be that patient, however much I loved my father!

Frank Churchill has recently arrived, so I'm now eagerly awaiting (and cringing from) the Box Hill party...

#28 It was on BBC earlier this year. Romola Garai played Emma And Jonny Lee Miller played Mr. Knightley.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n8s6x

See above link for more details.

I loved Miss Bates, maddening as she was/is. She's an example, I think, of a perfectly drawn character: I've met several like her in real life.

One thing that struck me the other day is that perhaps Emma's snobbery was used by J.A. to show just how pointless and indeed counter-productive such snobbery was. Not sure that was her point, but it did come through, at least to me. Of the four books we've read so far, I think Emma is my favorite, being a bit more realistic than the charming-yet-fairy-tale-like P.and P. Just my own feelings, here.

#29 Thanks! Rings bells (and has great people), but I have absolutely no memory of watching it (which I'm sure I will have done!) - I'll go in search...

I find it interesting that Emma is the only book (at least that I can recall), where substantive sections are done from the perspective of a male character. The entire chapter in which Mr. Knightley observes Emma, Frank Churchill, and Jane Fairfax is highly unusual for Austen. If anyone can think of comparable sections in any of the other novels, let me know. Maybe I just found Mr. Knightley's more noticeable.

#32 There's quite a lot from Henry Crawford's point of view in Mansfield Park too (this is something I only noticed reading it this time round - previously, I would have agreed with you...)

I knew there had to be other books that had large sections from the male perspective in Austen's bibliography, but couldn't think of any obvious examples. Thanks!

Just finished my reread and didn't enjoy it as much the second time around, I found most of the characters annoying, excluding Mr Knightley of course. Emma's one redeeming quality throughout the book is the care of her father. We are expected to forgive most of her actions since she's always been a bit spoilt and often resolves to do better, but let's face it compared to the Elton's, Emma is an angel.

#29: I can also recommend getting the recent BBC-adaptation with Romola Garai as Emma.

Playing time is almost four hours and there's a lot more focus on the minor characters which are almost totally left out in the other adaptations. Mr. and Mrs. Weston for example.

I actually just watched the miniseries last week and found it quite enjoyable (although I still have tremendous affection for the Gwyneth Paltrow version). It really does include a lot of the plot points although I felt some of the additions that occur early on in the first episode were... nice but unnecessary.

I must say I'm surprised that Emma would voice her suspicions, about Jane Fairfax falling in love with her friend's husband, out loud to Frank Churchill - who is, effectively, a complete stranger.

I think it's her imagination running away with her on two counts. Both her speculation about Jane's love life and her own relationship with Frank Churchill. Mr and Mrs Weston had spoken about Frank so much to her (and she had surmised their hopes and imagined a possible attachment) that she must have felt she knew him more intimately than she did.

It is one of the actions she feels ashamed of later on and, although she was responsible for the initial idea, Frank Churchill certainly egged her on.

That's what I assumed the first time I read it, but this time, I noticed that she feels he might become attached to her, but she doesn't feel 'in any danger' (as Jane Bennet might have said) herself.

The threads for Northanger Abbey are up!

NON-SPOILER

SPOILER

I've always been rather fond of Emma - not fonder than I am of Elizabeth or Ann, of course, but she's always seemed like a good kid to me. Thoughtless, but most of us start out that way.