Emma (Themes)

Themes

Age of Reason or Age of Enlightenment

Jane Austen was well acquainted with eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers such as Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose classical ideals of common sense and moderation were revived during the so-called Age of Reason or Age of Enlightenment. Respect for scientific principles, including human nature, were applied to all aspects of life. While emotion, sentiment, and individual imagination were not absent from Enlightenment thinking, reason and rational thought were highly prized. Characters in Austen's works suffer from her lightly ironic and satirical pen when their wit is unconnected with their powers of reason. (Miss Bates, for example, is kind but "ridiculous"; Mr. Woodhouse is loveable but neurotic about health issues and eating habits; the Eltons' powers of reason are dwarfed by their meanness and pretensions.) But Austen's most heroic characters (Mr. Knightley; the Emma at the end of the novel) have found a balanced way to blend reason and compassion, intellect and virtue.

Manners and Morals

Self-control, decorum, and polite conduct are hallmarks of civilized society, and to be thought well of in society was a mark of good breeding in Jane Austen's privileged world. Although Austen has too keen a sense of humor and too deep a desire for good to triumph to be considered a slave to convention, she imposes limitations on her characters to act with gentility at all occasions. Much can be forgiven in the fictional world of Emma if one's manners are proper and if one acts out of a sense of propriety and decency. Hence Frank Churchill is chastised for having deceived the neighbors but escapes condemnation on account of his good manners, gentility, and well-intentioned heart.

Neoclassicism and Wit

Late eighteenth-century England saw a resurgence of classical forms in art (a period often referred to as Neoclassical) — the comic, the tragic, the epic, and heroic genres in literature reflected the universal truths of human nature. Jane Austen was writing during the Regency period, toward the end of the eighteenth century, when writers of the Romantic Movement were reacting with more lyrical and emotional content to the constraints and limits imposed by neoclassicists. Although Austen was not much influenced by romanticism, her witty dialogue and satire focuses on human foibles within a specific social context that fuels emotion, deep feeling, and sentiment. Austen's wit shows most boldly in her comedy of manners and situations when rules of conduct are broken (Mrs. Elton referring to Mr. Knightley with contemptible familiarity as "Knightley"); when one person's play on words hits on a truth that is unsuspected (Frank Churchill's declaring to Emma that the gift of the pianoforte was certainly "an offer of love"); or when human folly is at fault for uncomfortable social situations ("how peculiarly unlucky poor Mr. Elton was in being in the same room at once with the woman he had just married, the woman he had wanted to marry, and the woman whom he had been expected to marry").

The Novel and Realism

The novel, as a recognized genre, was born in the eighteenth century and in its earliest forms is associated with the writings of Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Daniel Defoe. However, the novel was as much a female creation springing from the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Fanny Burney, Ann Radcliffe, and, of course, Jane Austen. The novel was indeed original in that it took for its subject the experiences of ordinary people (rather than mythological, historical, or legendary figures) and based its story on individual expressions of truth common to current times and culture. Jane Austen took the novel to new heights in dramatizing the domestic concerns of her characters. She encompassed the full spectrum of human behavior through situational detail common to her characters and language particular to each character's psychology. The rise of realism and the novel had much to do with the rise of literacy and the middle class as well as the examination and scrutiny by women of their roles in both public and domestic spheres.