A STUDY OF CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS OF “VICTORIAN SOCIETY” AS REPRESENTED BY CHARACTERS
IN JANE AUSTEN’S EMMA
A Thesis Presented to
the Graduate Program in English Language Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Magister Humaniora (M.Hum.)
in
English Language Studies
By:
Eko Budi Setiawan Student Number: 026332009
STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY
This is to certify that all the ideas, phrases, and sentences, unless otherwise stated, are the ideas, phrases sentences of the thesis writer. The writer understands the full consequences including degree cancellation if he took somebody else’s ideas, phrases, or sentences without proper reference.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE ……….. i
Statement of Thesis Approval ...……… ii
Statement of Thesis Defense Approval ……….iii
Statement of Originality ……… iv
CHAPTER IV: THE ANALYSIS OF CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS OF “VICTORIAN SOCIETY” AS REPRESENTED BY CHARACTERS IN EMMA
A. The Economic Base as the Foundation of Class Formation….…………36
1. The Dominant Class………...…37
a. Emma Woodhouse………...…..…38
b. Mr. George Knightley………..…….…….47
2. Class between the Dominant and Laboring Class ………52
3.Laboring Class……….………...55
a. Miss Bates ………..…………...56
b. Robert Martin………...……..57
B. Ideology as a Means to Maintain Class Status……….……….…60
1. The Dominant Class………...60
C. The Class-Contestation in Emma ……….………72
1. Conflicts between the Dominant and Laboring ………73
a. The Conflicts between Emma Woodhouse and Robert Martin……75
b. The Conflicts Between Emma Woodhouse and Miss. Bates…….... 80
2. Conflicts within the Dominant………...80
Acknowledgements
I thank Jesus Christ for blessing me and guiding me in conducting this research. His love and guidance have helped me and motivated me to accomplish this thesis. I believe in Him because He exists in my life.
Second I would like to appreciate Dr. St. Sunardi, my advisor for patiently giving me help, great and insightful ideas as well as encouragement. Then, I would also like to say much thank to Dra Sri Mulyani, M.A. and Drs. Fx. Siswadi, M.A. who have also given me comments, inputs, references and constructive encouragement in the writing process. Furthermore, I will remember all lecturers’ kindness and love at my class (the students of 2002) in ELS.
I offer special thanks to B.Justisianto, Pr.Lic.Phil., the Rector of the University of Widya Mandala Madiun for pursuing a higher level of education and for your financial assistance (via APTIK) and chance for my better merit. Next, My gratitude goes to Dr. B.B. Dwijatmoko, M.A., the Head of English Language Studies of Sanata Dharma University. Thanks are also due to my classmates in ELS. Their advices, jokes have been appreciated.
ABSTRACT
EKO BUDI SETIAWAN, S.S. (2007). A Study of Class Consciousness of Victorian Society as Represented by Characters in Jane Austen’s Emma. Yogyakarta: The Graduate Program in English Language Studies, Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta.
This study discusses a novel entitled Emma written by Jane Austen. Emma portrayed the lives of different classes in Victorian society through its characters. This classification of people is due to some factors such as economics, ideology, taste, hegemony and language. Each character in Emma is the representation of the classes exists in the novel. Each class member could attend the same balls without being really interfered by their different social classes. In this novel, of which the perfection of balance and style reflects the ultimate searching for elegance, everyone has her or his place, and everybody ultimately stays in it. In order to maintain their class status, each character uses different way. In doing so, there are some conflicts between and within characters. The conflicts, then, create a new atmosphere that forces each character to realize her or his class existence. The explanation above has evoked the writer’s curiosity to find out the class consciousness of Victorian society as represented by the characters in Emma.
Three problems related to the topic of this thesis are: (1) How is the class-distinction of Victorian Society depicted in Emma?, (2) How do the bourgeoisie and proletariat maintain their social status in Victorian Society as represented by characters in Emma?, and (3) How is the contestation of class interest of Victorian Society in Emma?
In order to answer the problems, a Marxist theory by Jameson is employed. In his theory, Jameson argues that the needed utopian ideology must be not only economic but also, indeed supremely, social and cultural. The utopian ideology needs not only plans for the egalitarian reorganization of economic production, such that people’s material needs are met, but also plans for new forms of affective and aesthetic life, such that people's emotional and spiritual needs are met. This theory is applicable in Emma, since the characters are engaged to each other not only based on the economic as a means of production, but also on the ideology, social and cultural aspects.
ABSTRAK
EKO BUDI SETIAWAN, S.S. (2007). A Study of Class Consciousness of Victorian Society as Represented by Characters in Jane Austen’s Emma. Yogyakarta: Program Pasca Sarjana Kajian Bahasa Ingris, Universitas Sanata Dharma , Yogyakarta.
Penelitian ini mengulas sebuah novel berjudul Emma yang ditulis oleh Jane Austen. Emma menggambarkan kehidupan kelas-kelas yang ada pada masyarakat Victorian melalui karakter-karakternya. Pengkotak-kotakan masyarakat ini dikarenakan beberapa faktor seperti ekonomi, ideologi, hegemoni rasa, dan bahasa. Setiap karakter di Emma adalah perwakilan dari masing-masing kelas. Setiap anggota kelas dapat menghadiri sebuah jamuan tanpa benar-benar terganggu oleh perbedaan kelas diantara mereka. Di novel ini, yang mana kesempurnaan bentuk dan gaya merupakan tujuan akhir sebuah kemewahan, setiap orang mempunyai tempatnya masing-masing dan setiap orang tetap pada kelasnya. Untuk memelihara status kelas mereka, setiap karakter melakukan hal yang berbeda-beda. Pada pelaksanaannya, ada beberapa konflik yang muncul antara karakter dan intern karakter. Konflik-konflik itu kemudian menciptakan suasana baru yang memaksa setiap karakter untuk menyadari keberadaan kelasnya masing-masing. Penjelasan diatas menggugah keingintahuan penulis untuk menemukan kesadaran kelas yang ada pada masyarakat Victorian seperti yang ditunjukkan oleh oleh karakter-karakter di Emma.
Ada tiga masalah yang berhubungan dengan dengan topik thesis ini: (1) Bagaimana perbedaan kelas dalam masyarakat Victorian digambarkan dalam Novel Emma?, (2) Bagaimanakah kaum kaya dan kaum miskin memelihara status sosial mereka di masyarakat Victorian seperti yang direpresentasikan oleh karakter-karakter di Novel Emma?,dan (3) Bagaimanakah persaingan kepentingan kelas di masyarakat Victorian dalam Novel Emma?
Untuk menjawab masalah-masalah tersebut, digunakanlah teori Marxist yang ditulis oleh Jameson. Jameson beralasan bahwa kebutuhan ideologi masyarakat utopia bukan hanya dalam hal ekonomi tetapi juga sosial budaya. Ideologi masyarakat utopia membutuhkan bukan hanya rencana untuk persamaan ekonomi, misalnya terpenuhinya kebutuhan ekonomi semua orang, tetapi juga rencana untuk kehidupan estetika yang baru., misalnya kebutuhan emosional dan spiritual masyarakat terpenuhi. Teori ini dapat dipakai untuk menganalisa Emma karena setiap karakter berhubungan satu demngan yang lainnya bukan hanya berdasarkan ekonomi sebagai sarana produksi, tetapi juga berdasarkan pada aspek ideologi, sosial dan budaya.
kelas dominant, sedangkan yang sebaliknya mencerminkan kelas pekerja. Karena dasar ekonomi mereka, Emma Woodhouse dan george Knightley menjalani kehidupan yang nyaman. Oleh karena itu mereka berdua dikategorikan dalam kelas dominant. Sebaliknya, Miss Bates dan Robert Martin menjalani kehidupan yang susah dan mereka cerminan dari kelas pekerja. Setiap anggota kelas berusaha untuk menaikkan status mereka, tak terkecuali Emma Woodhouse dan George Knightley. Mereka bersikap berbeda. Emma Woodhouse dikatakan bersifat manja, sombong, suka mengatur, haus kekuasaan, suka berkhayal, acuh tak acuh terhadap perasaaan orang lain, dan kejam, sedangkan George Knightley dikatakan sebagai pria yang bijaksana. Dalam hubungan antar karakter, muncul beberapa konflik intra dan inter karakter. Konflik intra karakter ditunjukkan oleh hubungan antara Emma Woodhouse, Robert Martin, dan Miss Bates. Konflik dalam kelas ditunjukkan oleh hubungan antara Emma Woodhouse and George Knightley. Konflik-konflik ini pada akhirnya membawa setiap karakter menuju kesadaran kelas.
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background of the Study
In our everyday lives, many of us use the language of class to refer to a social hierarchy and knowing your place within it. Scott (1999: 1) states that class is a matter of breeding and of social background. It is reflected in our attitudes and our lifestyles, our accents, and our ways of dressing. Class distinctions are tied to a world of tradition and subordination that no longer exists and the language of class is incompatible with contemporary attitudes and values.
Throughout history, men and woman have expressed their dissatisfaction with their present condition through written and spoken words. In Britain, as in other countries, writers have often questioned the values held dear by the majority of their country people. Thinkers in a society, writers among them, are the persons most likely to examine prevailing values and to discern flaws in the social structure before these flaws have been recognized by society as a whole.
Jameson (1981) provides a model for literary-historical analysis which emphasizes the function of literary genres in ideology production and which places genres in their contemporary social formations. Jameson asserts an inevitable interrelationship between the aesthetic value and the specific historicity (seen in terms of ideological function) of the literary text. Additionally, Jameson (1981: 79) suggests that from this perspective, ideology is not something which informs or invests symbolic production; rather the aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal solutions to irresolvable social contradictions.
Jameson attempts, in symbolic struggle between textual typifications of the bourgeoisie and the nobility, to ask how the force necessary to bring about a return to the old order can be imagined without severe social disruption ( 1981: 173). Jameson’s notion of ideology thus has a strong narrative component. Textual interpretation is a matter of symbolic acts of a novel or romance, which represent the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction in social relations. Texts become, as it were, optional trial runs on a historical problem, daydreams about the nightmare of history (1981: 174).
organization of the desperate elements of culture; the arrangement takes on meaning and value. Different authors may depict society differently but society plays essentially the same formal role that is antagonist to individual protagonist. Society becomes a context to the characters’ growth and self-realization.
McKernan (1993: 7) says that Jane Austen writes about a world long gone and regretted – a golden age of leisured gentlemen and ladies, comfortable, elegant, redolent of a vanished simplicity and taste. She provides for some an escape from the bleakness of time. Austen writes about a world that is insular, middle-class and deadly. McKernan (1993: 10) also states that class, the great winnower, is the major preoccupation of Emma. In this novel, whose perfection of symmetry and style reflects the ultimate quest for elegance, everyone has their place, and everybody ultimately stays in it.
Emma as one of Jane Austen’s novels dramatizes the tensions between a pre-capitalist, feudal order in which status hierarchies are strictly maintained and a capitalist order in which vertical social mobility is more possible through merit. These tensions are embodied in the figure of Mr. George Knightley. He criticizes Emma’s attempts to raise Harriet Smith out of her station and his estate of Donwell Abbey represents a fixed, stable, stratified and coherent order associated with this vision of society as inherently hierarchical. He fails to see either that this social mobility is the very thing which capitalism makes possible, or that by reinvesting his profits on the land at Donwell Abbey.
profits in the farm. He prefers looking to his accounts than dancing and recognizes in his tenant Robert Martin a man who shares his own values, despite their differences in rank. The character of Mr. George Knightley, then, can symbolically resolve the determinate contradictions, which are registered within the novel. He combines the elegance and refinement of the natural aristocrat with the moral, capitalist virtues of industry and thrift. This symbolic act is possible within Austen’s notorious limit of three or four families in a country village.
Emma portrayed the lives of different classes in Victorian society through its characters. There are upper class, middle class and lower class people who could attend the same balls without being really interfered by their different social classes. However, there is still a feeling of superior towards others as represented by the characters of Emma Woodhouse when she deals with Miss Bates and Robert Martin.
The Victorian Age, which spans from 1837 to 1901, is chronologically divided into three, namely early, middle, and late Victorian Age. Although Emma was written in 1816 (the early of nineteenth century), Jane Austen has successfully foreshadowed the early Victorian Age. The characters and society in Emma depict the early Victorian Age. This can be seen from the balls that the
Based on the above facts, the writer is inspired to conduct a research focusing on class-consciousness of Victorian society in Emma.
B. Problem Limitation
This research focuses on Jane Austen’s Emma. The analysis will be concentrated on the Victorian society’s class-consciousness interpreted by characters. In order to make this writing focus on the main problems, issues of social status in Emma are covered. Secondly, the writer of the thesis also depicts the class-distinction and class interest of Victorian Society as portrayed on the char acters through their dialogues or conversations and all statements stated by the narrators in Emma. Thirdly, the depiction of bourgeoisie and proletariat maintain their social status will be interpreted. Those aspects will be analyzed in this research. The study also tries to describe the cultural background of the novel besides the biographical data of the novelist. Although the dialogues and conversations in the novel indicate colloquialism and their local color, all of these linguistic features will not be analyzed as an independent aspect since they belong to certain class of society, which in this research will be included in the analysis of cultural aspects.
C. Problem Formulation
Victorian Society in Emma. Then, those questions will be answered in the analysis of the thesis. Those questions can be stated as follows:
1. How is the class-distinction of Victorian Society depicted in Emma?
2. How do the bourgeoisie and proletariat maintain their social status in Victorian Society as represented by characters in Emma?
3. How is the contestation of class interest of Victorian Society in Emma?
D.
Research Goals
This thesis tries to explain Emma as an evidence of British culture, especially in Victorian Era of the British history. Those main objectives are formulated in the following statements.
1. To depict the class-distinction of Victorian Society in Emma.
2. To present how bourgeoisie and proletariat maintain their social status in Victorian Society as represented by characters in Emma
CHAPTER II
REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE,
THEORETICAL REVIEW, AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
A. Review of Related Literature
The focus of research and criticism relating to Austen’s works, as one might imagine, has fluctuated somewhat over the years, particularly as it relates to Emma. When Austen wrote Emma, her contemporary critics were trying to
discern its meaning, and scholars today are still laboring over what Austen might have been trying to say. As might be expected, critics of her day and the years immediately following saw this work as belonging in the genre of the romantic novel; possible complex properties or abstract meanings were not analyzed. Many of the recent criticisms, however, have focused on the feminist and ironic qualities of Austen’s work; others deal with the different aspects of Austen’s innovative method of alternating narrative consciousness and voice.
The criticism by Austen’s contemporaries reveals that some features of Emma, as a romantic novel, were valued while others were not. In the Quarterly
Review for 1815, Sir Walter Scott declared that there was really not much substance to Emma. (Scott, 1972: 52)
Scott (1972: 12) abbreviated the list of the cast of characters, and took the story at face value, equating unassuming and unpretentious with inconsequential. Accordingly, he has not attributed any of the features of Austen’s style of writing to the purpose of the novel. Nor does he consider any of the implications of the placement in society of Austen’s characters. It should be pointed out that Scott made a telling shift from plot to character in his review.
When viewed in today’s context, these particular remarks might be termed as damning with faint praise. He delves not into the development of Austen’s characters, but, rather, treats them as static, arbitrary, familiar figures. He has, with a few words, marginalized Austen’s Emma as a shallow, non-taxing fable. His reading of the novel has touched only the surface of her text. (Scott, 1972: 151)
Years after that, Casey Finch and Peter Bowen in their article “The Tittle-Tattle of Highbury: Gossip and the Free Indirect Style in Emma (1990),” quote from a study by V. N. Voloshinov and Mikhail Bakhtin that essentially deconstructs the free indirect style:
while retaining its own referential content and at least the rudiments of its own linguistic integrity. “Paradoxically, the free indirect style enables the representation of a seemingly private, independent subject—able to speak his or her own mind at any time—even as it guarantees public access to any character’s private thoughts. Indeed, the dual nature of each character’s interiority—at once perfectly private and absolutely open to public scrutiny—is ensured by the un-nameable and un-locatable nature of the narrator’s voice. It is by thus keeping secret the source of community concern—for we can never know precisely who speaks in the free indirect style— that the novel makes public the private thoughts of individual characters. (Finch, 1990: 5)
This is a thorough explanation of the complex process the reader faces as he reads Emma—the reader does not always know who is speaking. Finch and Bowen go on to compare Austen’s technique with her eighteenth-century predecessors. They name and expand upon the various forms of narrative those predecessors used, namely, the subjective novel, whose first-person narrator is obviously announced; and the objective novel, with its confessed narrator. Both forms of narrative supply an identifiable source of authority. Emma falls under neither of these categories. Such a specific diviner does not exist in Emma, where the narrative authority of the novel is both nowhere and everywhere.
Finch’s and Bowen’s (1990) noted the theory on the way that Austen uses her narrative style to reflect both individual and collective opinion. They said that Austen disseminates her narrative authority among her characters:
Finally, Johnson credits the Revolution in France with the rise of the novel of crisis in England, in which she indicates the “structures of daily life are called into doubt” (Johnson, 1988: 26). Of Austen’s novels, she says:
The novels of Jane Austen focus on the discourse rather than the representation of politics. Alluding only rarely to actual events outside her famously placid villages, Austen does not, it is true, explicitly invoke the French Revolution [. . .] Austen may slacken the desperate tempos employed by her more strenuously politicized counterparts, but she shares their artistic strategies and their commitment to uncovering the ideological underpinnings of cultural myths. (Johnson, 1988: 27)
This overview of criticism on Austen has revealed the important connections between authorial intent, narrative viewpoint, and feminine vocalization. Not unexpectedly, critics from Austen’s time slotted her novels into the romantic novel genre and viewed her work strictly in that sense; later nineteenth century critics noted humor as an additional dimension to her writing.
individual and collective opinion via the gossip in the novel. A number of scholars study Austen’s use of the sentimental novel to exemplify the public and private concept of class and gender. The multi-faceted criticism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has yielded scholarly articles about Austen’s narrative techniques, her feminist leanings, and her use of irony, and also about the society in the novel itself.
Moreover, Spinker (1987) analyzes the social and economic distinctions appear in Emma. Spinker states that the categorization of people according to social or economic distinctions often plays a pivotal role in Jane Austen’s novels. Although Emma proves no exception to this model, the classification of characters as Aristos may be more relevant than dividing them into social classes. Aristos characters also recognize that they are of the “Many,” but they must constantly strive to be of the “Few” (Fowles, Aristos 212-13). Although this may seem elitist or snobbish, the distinctions between the Few and the Many are not external such as money or position but rather internal such as morality, values, and clear-sightedness.
attacks that challenged the hereditary right of the gentry and aristocracy to the exclusive monopoly of the land.
Finally, though this is not the first study of social condition in Emma, this study tries to reveal the class-consciousness in the Victorian Society related to the values within it by using Jameson’s theory.
B. Theoretical Review 1. Marxism in Literature
Literary works are not mysteriously inspired, or explicable simply in terms of their authors’ psychology. They are forms of perception of seeing the world. Moreover, Marxists believe that economic and social conditions determine religious beliefs, legal systems and cultural frameworks. Art should not only represent such conditions truthfully, but seek to improve them. Marxist aesthetics is not flourishing in today's consumerist society, but continues to ask responsible questions (http://www.textetc.com/theory.html).
Though the founder of Marxism, Karl Marx is better known because of his economical and political rather than literary writings, he frequently refers to literature in his writings. Literature may be part of the superstructure, but it is not merely the passive reflection of the economic base. Engels as quoted by Eagleton in Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976: 9) said that:
meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its consequences, constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc. – forms of law – and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the combatants: political, legal, and philosophical theories, religious ideas and their further development into systems of dogma – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form.
In addition, he states that art is far richer and more opaque than political and economic theory because it is less purely ideological. His remark suggests that art has a more complex relationship to ideology than law and political theory, which rather more transparently embody the interests of a ruling class.
In Lukács’s view (1923 History and Class Consciousness), realism means more than rendering the surface appearance: it means providing a more complete, true, vivid and dynamic view of the world around. Novels are reflections of life, and therefore not real, but they nonetheless involve the mental framing that elude photographic representation. Writers create an image of the richness and complexity of society, and from this emerges a sense of order within the complexity and contradictions of lived experience.
Furthermore, the French Marxist Louis Althusser regards society as de-centered, having no overall structure or governing principle. Levels exist, but in complex relationships of inner conflict and mutual antagonism: a far cry from the economic foundations of simple Marxism. Art is something between science and ideology, the latter being “a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to the real conditions of their existence” (Louis Althusser’s For Marx,
http://www.textetc.com/althusser.html). Art is therefore not entirely a fiction, nor of course the view of its author.
More recently, the English Marxist Terry Eagleton (1976: 1 – 19) states that literary criticism should become a science, but rejects the hope that literature could distance itself from ideology. Literature is simply a reworking of ideology, by which Eagleton means a reworking of all those representations – aesthetic, religious, judicial – which shape an individual's mental picture of lived experience.
Finally, the American Marxist Fredric Jameson (1981) sees ideology as strategies of containment which allow societies to explain themselves by repressing the underlying contradictions of history. Texturally, these containments show themselves as formal patterns. Some are inescapable. Narrative, for example, is how reality presents itself to the human mind, in science as well as art. And reality still exists, exterior to human beings: Jameson does not accept the view that everything is just a text. Indeed, in his reading of Conrad’s Lord Jim, Jameson shows how past interpretations - impressionist, Freudian, Existential, etc. - both express something in the text and describe the demand for capital in the modern state.
2. The Definition of Class
schools and colleges. Then, at the end of the eighteenth century, the modern structure of class, in its social sense, begins to be built up. The new use of class does not indicate the beginning of social divisions in England, but it indicates a change in attitudes towards them. Class is more indefinite word than rank.
Furthermore, the decisive step from taxonomy – classifying things – to theology – a set of religious beliefs – was taken by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose polemical writings divide humankind under capitalism into two classes, wage laborers who produce surplus and capitalists who appropriate it. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat are each with its own consciousness and organization (1961: 20).
Jameson in his book The Political Unconscious differentiates social class into two, namely a dominant and a laboring class (1982: 83-84). Though this term is previously and generally used by other Marxist, Jameson employs this term as he wants to position the class fraction or ec-centric or dependent classes. Jameson emphasizes that the usage of these terms is to “differentiate the Marxian model of classes from the conventional sociological analysis of society into strata, subgroups, professional elites and the like”. He adds that:
3. Fredric Jameson’s Marxism
An American Marxist, Fredric Jamesonis generally considered to be one of the foremost contemporary Marxist literary critics writing in English. He has published a wide range of works analyzing literary and cultural texts and developing his own neo-Marxist theoretical position. In addition, Jameson has produced a large number of texts criticizing opposing theoretical positions. A prolific writer, he has assimilated an astonishing number of theoretical discourses into his project and has intervened in many contemporary debates while analyzing a diversity of cultural texts, ranging from the novel to video, from architecture to postmodernism. Jameson views Marxism more than just a means of production, but it is also about social and culture.
Jameson’s first book, developed from his Ph.D. dissertation, was Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961). In brief, Jameson argues here that Sartre's
disorienting style represents in literary form the alienation of his philosophy and the very failure of art itself to make order in a fragmented world. In working on Sartre, he discovered Marxism – not so much from reading Sartre's overtly Marxist works, but from encountering frequent references in Sartre to Marxist terminology and points of view, which Sartre took for granted that his readers would understand, but that seemed quite exotic to an American reader in the late 1950s.
The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) is
theories, that becomes their intellectual horizon, because it effectively describes all of human life. The notion of all of human life is explored via Lukacs's concept of totality, that is, the sum of all the relations among people, culture, and the material world of a given time and place. Economic activity and cultural activities such as religion and the arts are related within the totality, although not in the mechanistic base-superstructure way found in older Marxist views. The totality must be understood as constantly changing (1981: 50-56).
Jameson proposes in Political Unconscious a two-part system of interpretation. The first part, the study of forms, argues that works of literature (or any other symbolic configuration) grow out of changing social pressures as an attempt to solve the contradictions enacted in social relations. Jameson would say that artists are not always aware of the ways their works attempt to imagine solutions to real social problems. The eruption of these proble ms into the process of creating symbolic constructions would be, for Jameson, a sort of return of a collective repressed – our repressed awareness of the crimes we commit against one another via social injustice – and this is the political unconscious that literature, and all other symbolic forms express.
Principally, he modifies earlier versions of the concept of hegemony. In some Marxist analyses, dominant classes exercise their ideological control so thoroughly that the very people they are oppressing assent to the oppression. The marginalized agree that they deserve to be marginalized and, instead of hating their exploiters, wish only to become like them. Jameson suggests that while this hegemonic process does indeed operate, its control is never effortless or total. Some people always resist it, with varying degrees of success, and the hegemonic situation is never static. The dominant class maintains control only through constant struggle. It is this struggle that keeps the totality in flux, so that, one complex of social relations fades away, along with its hegemonic networks, while another comes into being (1981: 57)
Jameson suggests that we understand this struggle as a struggle over who controls the production of meaning. Meaning is produced through forms, or, as Jameson says, the production of aesthetic narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act (1981: 79). Hence, to study history, or the sequence of modes of production of meaning, is to study changes in the ideology of form.
given cultural object, to project its simultaneously Utopian power as the symbolic affirmation of a specific historical and class form of collective unity. (1981: 291)
Jameson’s call here for a utopian moment in analysis may simply express a desire to make his analysis as comprehensive as possible. As Dominic LaCapra notes, one of Jameson’s dominant critiques against Marxism is that it has been undialectically one-sided in attempting to demystify ideologies without seeing their necessity and their well-nigh gravitational force of attraction (1981: 239). It can be said that Jameson hints here about the Marxist critic being motivated by a commitment to fostering social justice, having dreams as well as nightmares about history.
The commitment to social justice need not derive from transcendent sources; that is, it may be ethical, not moral, and unabashedly ideological (indeed, if everything is ideological, there is no shame in admitting oneself to be in the grip of an ideology that promotes social justice).
Jameson says that the needed utopian ideology must be not only economic but also, indeed supremely, social and cultural (1988: 355). Jameson means here is that the utopian ideology needs not only plans for the egalitarian reorganization of economic production, such that people’s material needs are met, but also plans for new forms of affective and aesthetic life, such that people's emotional and spiritual needs are met. He puts the problem another way when he notes, with one signal exception (capitalism itself, which is organized around an economic mechanism), there has never existed a cohesive form of human society that was not based on some form of transcendence or religion (1988: 355).
Since religious belief or transcendent values are in his view absolutely incompatible with the society he wants to come into existence, the requisite that Marxist utopian ideology must contain social and cultural elements that take their place, that provide the incentive for people to live cooperatively and to renounce the omnivorous desires of the id (1988: 355). In Jameson's view, no existing socialist society has solved this problem, although he raises the possibility that it is being addressed successfully in Cuba and Yugoslavia.
(1988: 354). He wishes to understand current national and international life in terms of the historical development of capitalism.
4. Victorian Era
The Victorian era is generally agreed to stretch through the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). It was a tremendously exciting period when many artistic styles, literary schools, as well as, social, political and religious movements flourished. It was a time of prosperity, broad imperial expansion, and great political reform. It was also a time, which today we associate with prudishness and repression. Without a doubt, it was an extraordinarily complex age that has sometimes been called the Second English Renaissance. It is, however, also the beginning of Modern Times.
The background of Victorian Era is also indicated by the growing material prosperity, and a level of industrial production and foreign trade which set
England far ahead of all other countries (Thomson, 1959: 100).
a. Victorian Era in England
manufacturing, rapid growth of the British economy, and seemingly continual expansion of England's colonized territories resulted in mixed sentiments, with some writers such as Thomas Babbington Macauley applauding change and the superior civilization of England and other writers such as Mathew Arnold and Thomas Carlyle expressing more trepidation and concern about this era of change. In addition to general economic and political change, there were advancements made in the promotion of women’s rights, especially in terms of improving labor conditions and their rights in marriage (Derry, 1963: 51-52).
The people of England had suffered many inconveniences during the Napoleonic wars, from which they expected relief with the coming of peace. Instead of relief, however, there followed a period of economic depression for which there were several causes. For one thing, industry was considerably upset by the sudden change from a war time to a peace time basis (Rickard, 1957: 171). The inability of many returning soldiers to return quickly to work also caused much unemployment.
The Victorian Era was also a time of tremendous scientific progress and ideas. Darwin took his Voyage of the Beagle, and posited the Theory of Evolution. The Great Exhibition of 1851 took place in London, lauding the technical and industrial advances of the age, and strides in medicine and the physical sciences continued throughout the century. The radical thought associated with modern psychiatry began with men like Sigmund Feud toward the end of the era, and radical economic theory, developed by Karl Marx and his associates, began a second age of revolution in mid-century. The ideas of Marxism, socialism, feminism churned and bubbled along with all else that happened.
As stated in the beginning, the Victorian Age was an extremely diverse and complex period. It was, indeed, the precursor of the modern era. If one wishes to understand the world today in terms of society, culture, science, and ideas, it is imperative to study this era.
In relation to the above statements this thesis describes the facts that Victorian era portraits an environment in which a full-scale demolition of traditional values is going on, correctively with the uprooting and dehumanization of women, and children by the millions, a process brought about by industrialization, colonial imperialism and the exploration of the human being as a thing or an engine or a part of an engine capable of being used for profit (Langbaum, 1967: 202). Thus, the English working class, coming to birth through the trauma of the Industrial Revolution, suffered not merely from brutality, hunger and deprivation, but from an oppressive snobbism, at times merely patronizing and at other times proudly violent, on the part of the superior social classes (Langbaum, 1976: 272).
From some points of view, the Victorian age might be regarded as an age of religion, an age in which Evangelicalism, the religion of the middle class, set the tone of manners, dress, and taste which the lower orders adopted in their struggle towards respectability (Ford, 1970: 48).
b. The Values of “Victorian Era” in Emma
clearly from the way people get dressed and celebrate events in their lives. The following is the division of the characters into three classes based on their social lives, jobs, belonging, and wealth, namely the upper class, middle class, and lower class.
Upper class refers to wealthy and powerful people. People who belong to this class do not work; their income comes from inherited land and investments. Most characters in Emma belong to upper class, for examples Emma Woodhouse who inherites £ 30,000, and Mr. George Knightley who owns the Donwell Abbey.
Middle class refers to managers and highly paid professionals. People who belong to this class perform mental or clean work, and they are paid monthly or annually. One character that can be grouped into this class is Miss Taylor, Emma’s governess, who is later in the story, marries Mr. Weston.
Lower class referred to people paid average or low wages. They perform physical labor, are paid daily or weekly wages. Two characters, Miss Bates and Mr. Robert Martin, belong to this class.
5. Hegemony of Victorian Era in Emma
Moreover, the upper class people usually attend school and learn good manners, as represented by Emma Woodhouse. The curriculum was heavily weighted towards t he classics - the languages and literature of Ancient Greece and Rome. A lady’s education was taken, almost entirely, at home. There were boarding schools, but no University, and the studies were very different. She learned French, drawing, dancing, music, and the use of globes. If the school, or the governess, was interested in teaching any practical skills, she learned plain sewing as well as embroidery, and accounts. Meaning to say, that ladies learn how to be a good wife and mother.
6. Contradiction
In Marxist terms a class is a group of people with a specific relationship to the means of production. Marxists explain history in terms of a war of classes between those who control production and those who actually produce the goods or services in society (and also developments in technology and the like). In the Marxist view of capitalism, this is a conflict between capitalists (bourgeoisie) and wage-workers (proletariat). For Marxists, classes are antagonistically opposed to one another. This antagonism is rooted in the situation that control over social production necessarily entails control over the class which produces goods – in capitalism this is the exploitation of workers by the bourgeoisie.
more occupations only provide a living through wages or salaries. Private enterprise or self-employment in a variety of occupations is no longer as viable as it once was, and so many people who once controlled their own labour-time are converted into proletarians. Today groups which in the past subsisted on stipends or private wealth – like doctors, academics or lawyers – are now increasingly working as wage laborers. Marxists call this process “proletarianisation,” and point to it as the major factor in the proletariat being the largest class in current societies in the rich countries of the “first world.”
The increasing dissolution of the peasant-lord relationship, initially in the commercially active and industrialising countries, and then in the unindustrialised countries as well, has virtually eliminated the class of peasants. Poor rural laborers still exist, but their current relationship with production is predominantly as landless wage laborers or rural proletarians. The destruction of the peasantry, and its conversion into a rural proletariat, is largely a result of the general proletarianisation of all work. This process is today largely complete, although it was arguably incomplete in the 1960s and 1970s.
In this example it is the shared structure of wage labor that makes both of these individuals “working class”.
Marxism has a rather heavily defined dialectic between objective factors (i.e., material conditions, the social structure) and subjective factors (i.e. the conscious organization of class members). While most Marxism analyses people class status based on objective factors (class structure), major Marxist trends have made excellent use of subjective factors in understanding the history of the working class. E.P. Thompson’s TheMaking of the English Working Class is a definitive example of this “subjective” Marxist trend. Thompson analyses the English working class as a group of people with shared material conditions coming to a positive self-consciousness of their social position. This feature of social class is commonly termed class-consciousness in Marxism. It is seen as the process of a “class in itself” moving in the direction of a “class for itself,” a collective agent that changes history rather than simply being a victim of the historical process. (Retrieved from www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/ Pages/ Back/Wnext26/Bernie.html)
In contrast to simple income – property hierarchies, and to structural class schemes like Weber's or Marx’s, there are theories of class based on other distinctions, such as culture or educational attainment. At times, social class can be related to elitism, and those in the higher class are usually known as the “social elite”.
habitus, which is in turn defined by different objectively classifiable conditions of existence. In fact, one of the principal distinctions, Bourdieu makes a distinction between bourgeois taste and the working class taste. (Taken from http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Back/Wnext26/Bernie.html)
At various times the division of society into classes and estates has had various levels of support in law. At one extreme we find old Indian castes, which one could neither enter after birth, nor leave (though this applied only in relatively recent history). Feudal Europe had estates clearly separated by law and custom. On the other extreme there exist classes in modern Western societies which appear very fluid and have little support in law.
The extent to whic h classes are important differs also in western societies, though in most society’s class as an objective measure has very strong empirical effects on life chances (e.g. educational achievement, life-time earnings, health outcomes). Only in the strongly social-democratic societies such as Sweden is there much long-term evidence of the weakening of the consequences of social class.
C. Theoretical Framework
Jameson in his book The Political Unconscious remarks that there are two classes in the society, namely a dominant and a laboring class. Classes are not subjects but rather positions within the social totality. This concept of class is used to analyze in what class the characters belong to.
Moreover, Jameson argues for the primacy of Marxism on the grounds that its horizon, history and the socio -economic totality, provide the most comprehensive framework in which gender, race, class, sexuality, myth, symbol, allegory, and other more limited concerns can be explored and interpreted. He also argues that it is capitalism and its processes of co modification and reification which provide the motor and matrix of today's world-system, especially after the collapse of Soviet communism.
In addition, Jameson argues that the economic base has a fundamental relation to the cultural objects of the superstructure, yet the relation between these two is not to be found within the object itself. The economic base does not directly generate effects within the object but affects society in its production and reception of the objects. The economic base is found reflectively within the cultural object as a deliberation within the creator or receiver’s psyche. In other words, every person that works towards the creation of a cultural object, and the audience receiving the cultural object, have what Jameson calls a political unconscious. This political unconscious denotes each persons’ political hopes and
CHAPTER III
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
A. Subject Matter
This research analyzes a novel entitled Emma that is written by Jane Austen. Emma, the fourth of Austen’s six novels, was first published in 1816. However, this research uses the novel that was published by David Campbell Publishers Ltd. in 1991. This novel consists of 495 pages that are divided into 55 chapters. Those 55 chapters are grouped into three volumes. This novel has an introduction by Marilyn Butler.
comes to realize her own faults and desires, and eventually comes to terms with what she has done.
B. Research Procedure
The research has four successive steps. Firstly, the writer read Emma for several times. In the first reading, the writer tried to follow and understand the story, then in the second reading, the writer focused on the social classes of the characters. In the further reading, the writer tried to comprehend the relationships of each character in relation with their social classes. The data obtained was the primary data. In this step, the writer also noted important statements and manners that could give clear direction of answering the problems stated.
Secondly, the writer tried to find secondary data through books, websites, essays, and journals that could support the analysis. The writer browsed some websites to find more information about Emma, its critics, Jameson’s theory, and Victorian Society.
Thirdly, the collected primary data was categorized based on the characters’ interpretation, which are related to the class-consciousness of Victorian society. The available data was scrutinized using the Marxist points of view, especially with the use of Jameson’s theories.
C. Data Analysis
The research tried to answer some questions dealing with the formation of lower class, middle class and high-class society in Victorian societies. Secondly the research also found the suitable answer related to how bourgeoisie and aristocracy maintain their social status in Victorian Society. Next, it explained the contestation of class interest of Victorian Society in Emma. Finally the study attempted to describe the changes of social class status of Victorian society in Emma.
There are two steps to be taken in the research. Those steps are explication and interpretation. In the explication step, primary data are read, collected and related to each other so that the meaning is understood. The meaning is mostly surface meaning because it is derived from what is stated in the novel. Secondly, the step of interpretation is used to dig up the hidden meaning of data. Interpretation is conducted by trying to find out the meaning from what is written, or from things, which are not stated in Emma.
D. Research Sources
The major source of this research was the novel itself. The novel provided primary data as the basis of analysis.
CHAPTER IV
THE ANALYSIS OF CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS OF “VICTORIAN SOCIETY” AS REPRESENTED
BY CHARACTERS IN EMMA
The study scrutinizes the class-consciousness of Victorian society in Emma by using Frederick Jameson’s Marxism. The discussion consists of the
economical base as the foundation of class formation and ideology as a means to maintain class status of the characters, which will lead into class-consciousness in Emma.
A. The Economic Base as the Foundation of Class Formation
Martin D. Lee stated that the categorization of people according to social or economic distinctions often played a pivotal role in Jane Austen’s novels (Fowles, Aristos 212-13). Austen tended to figure a homogenous social community in her novel. In Emma, with a few exceptions, that was Robert Martin and Miss Bates, Austen tended to put all characters into the same social class where they could attend the same parties, sit down to dinner together, and intermarry.
Seen from the economic base, Emma Woodhouse and Mr. George Knightley represented the dominant class; Miss Bates and Mr. Robert Martin represented the laboring class, whereas Miss Taylor represented the class between the dominant and laboring class. Then, through her marriage Mr. Weston, Miss Taylor stepped on to the ladder of dominant class.
1. The Dominant Class
The dominant class in Victorian Era referred to immensely wealthy and powerful people. The popular image of this class was elegant, handsome men and women dressed in big fluffy dresses who went to balls and social events most of the time. Mainly these people inherited their wealth. They had an easy life which allowed them to enjoy their lives without thinking money matters. Their daily lives consisted of having brunch everyday, long chats, playing cricket, and in the evening had social balls. The dominant class women in Victorian Era painted, played piano, had social graces, and most of the time had general knowledge of political events.
and Miss Bates, and the relatio nship between Mr. George Knightley and his tenant, Robert Martin. Although Emma Woodhouse and Mr. George Knightley belonged to dominant class, which meant that they could control the laboring class, they had different attitudes in showing their power. This fact is discussed more detailed in the following subchapters.
a. Emma Woodhouse
Emma Woodhouse, the main character in Emma, was wealthy and well-educated. Her economic base put her into the dominant class, a class that had control over the other class, the laboring. Through the course of the story, Emma’s wealth and comfort had influenced her ways in treating others. She acted and talked as she was a real lady of the dominant class. Her wealth had put her in the top of her self-appraisal. She thought that she had had everything in her life, and nobody else could have more than her, especially those who were not at the same class as her.
Furthermore, Emma was beautiful, wealthy, well-educated young woman who was born and raised in dominant class society. She lived with her father at Hartfield, their dominant class home. Emma had led a rather sheltered life at Hartfield. This could be seen from Austen’s opening sentence that appeared to give quite a clear description of Emma:
Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one-years in the world with very little distress or vex her. She was the younger of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father, and had, in consequence of her sister’s marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early period (p. 1).
Being well-sheltered by her family, Emma had a very comfortable life. She would never feel of danger and hunger for she had everything. She had a very big house for herself, huge amount of money, loves and cares from her governess, a loving father, and lots of nice friends. Nothing she had missing.
However, as its nature, everything Emma got made her a snob. This could be inferred from the following
The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived; that they did not by any means rank as misfortune with her. (p. 1 – 2)
[...] “And you have forgotten one matter of joy to me,” said Emma, “and a very considerable one – that I made the match myself. I made the match, you know, four years ago; and to have it take place, and be proved in the right, when so many people said Mr. Weston would never marry again, may comfort me for any thing.” (p. 8)
Emma’s attitude toward Harriet also showed that she was at higher and better position than Harriet. This happened because Emma had lost her best companion, Miss Taylor, and she attempted to find another useful walking companion. Emma thought that Harriet would be useful for her as she could do many things to make Harriet as her own image.
Harriet Smith’s intimacy at Hartfield was soon a settled thing. Quick and decided in her ways, Emma lost no time in inviting, encouraging, and telling her to come very often; and as their acquaintance increased, so did their satisfaction I each other. As a walking companion, Emma had very early foreseen how useful she might find her. [...] She had ventured once alone to Randalls, but it was not pleasant; and a Harriet Smith, therefore, one whom she could summon at any time to a walk, would be a valuable addition to her privileges. But in every respect as she saw more of her, she approved her, and was confirmed all her kind designs. (p. 23).
In addition, Emma noted that Harriet was the perfect acquaintance for her after Mrs. Weston leaving. Emma realized that she could do nothing to Mrs. Weston, but she could do everything she wanted to Harriet. She was just as a great wax puppet maker when she was about to change Harriet.
she could be useful. For Mrs. Weston there was nothing to be done; for Harriet every thing. (p. 23 – 24)
Emma thought that she could do everything to Harriet. She had considered many attempts to help Harriet, such as her attempts to find Harriet’s parents. Emma thought that she was the one who could educate Harriet to be a dominant class woman. She thought she knew the best for Harriet. She could even think that Mr. Martin was, somehow, not good for Harriet.
For some time she was amused, without thinking beyond the immediate cause; but as she came to understand the family better, other feelings arose. She had taken up a wrong idea, fancying it was a mother and a daughter, a son and son’s wife, who lived together; but when it appeared that the Mr. Martin, who bore a part in the narrative, and was always mentioned with approbation for his great good nature in doing something or other, was a single man; that there was no young Mrs. Martin, no wife in the case; she did suspect little danger to her poor little friend from all this hospitality and kindness - and that if she were not taken care of, she might be required to sink herself forever. (p. 25)
Moreover, for being snobbish, Emma did not want to admit her mistakes although she, herself, knew that she had made mistakes. It was getting worse when other person – the one and only person who could tell that she was wrong was George Knightley – told her that she had made a mistake, she still did not want to admit it. Her superior feeling had led her into a frame that she would never make a mistake, and what she made was just another way of solving problems.
[...]
“You have made her too tall, Emma,” said Mr. Knightley.
Emma knew that she had, but would not own it, and Mr. Elton warmly added. (p. 45)
[...]
Further, Emma also did not want to admit her mistake about Mr. Elton’s feeling toward Harriet though John Knightley had warned her about it. In this case, she was too vain. If she pulled off her ignorance, she would have been able to see the reality in front of her. She would be able to see how Mr. Elton fond of her, not Harriet. Once again, Emma proved that she was too snobbish.
[...]
“Yes,” said Mr. John Knightley presently, with some slyness, “He seems to have a great deal of good-will towards you.”
“Me!” she replied with a smile of astonishment, “Are you imagining me to be Mr. Elton’s object?”
“Such an imagination has crossed me, I own, Emma; and if it never occurred to you before, you may as well take it into consideration now.”
“Mr. Elton in love with me! – What an idea!”
“I do not say it is so; but you will do well to consider whether it is so or not, and to regulate your behavior accordingly. I think your manners to him encouraging. I speak as a friend, Emma. You had better look about you, and ascertain what you do, and what you mean to do.”
“I thank you; but I assure you, you are quite mistaken. Mr. Elton and I are very good friends, and nothing more.” [...] (p. 112)
[...]
She believed he had been drinking too much of Mr. Weston’s good wine, and felt sure that he would want to be talking nonsense. [...]
“Mr. Elton, this is the most extraordinary conduct! And I can account for it only in one way; you are not yourself, or you could not speak either to me, or of Harriet, in such a manner. Command yourself enough to say no more, and I will endeavor to forget it.” (p. 129 – 130)
Emma, who realized her power, had a very bad judgment to people below her class. She considered herself too high so that she used quite rude words to explain Miss Bates’ characters. This could be seen from the way she talked about Miss Bates, an old spinster. She considered Miss Bates the worst poor woman ever.
[...]
“But then, to be an old maid at last, like Miss Bates!”
“That is as formidable an image as you could present, Harriet; and if I thought I should ever be like Miss Bates! So silly – so satisfied – so smiling – so prosing – so undistinguishing and un-fastidious – and so apt to tell every thing relative to every body about me, I would marry to-morrow. But between us, I am convinced there never can be any likeness, except in being unmarried.”
“But still, you will be an old maid! And that’s so dreadful!” (p. 84 – 85)
sorrow, and this would extremely influence the relationships with others. At this point, Emma had put herself as a very fortunate woman.
[...]
“Never mind, Harriet, I shall not be a poor old maid; and it is poverty only which makes celibacy contemptible to a generous public! A single woman, with a very narrow income, must be ridiculous, disagreeable, old maid! The proper sport of boys and girls; but a single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else. And the distinction is not quite so much against the candor and common sense of the world as appears at first; for a very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind, and sour the temper. Those who can barely live, and who live perforce in a very small, and generally very inferior, society, may well be illiberal and cross. (p. 85)
However, being a very fortunate woman did not make her wisely speak about Miss Bates. She tended to be a little bit sarcastic when she dealt with Miss Bates. Emma was not in earnest when she said that poverty did not influence Miss Bates. The fact that Emma wanted to point was that Miss Bates was silly and satisfied with her own life, though she was an old poor single.
[...]
“This does not apply, however, to Miss Bates; she is only too good natured and too silly to suit me; but, in general, she is very much to the taste of everybody, though single and though poor. Poverty certainly has not contracted her mind; I really believe: if she had only a shilling in the world, she would be very likely to give away sixpence of it; and nobody is afraid of her: that is a great charm.” (p. 85)
Miss Bates complimented her many times. In this following, Emma showed her feeling toward Jane Fairfax.
“Do you know Miss Bates’ niece? That is, I know you must have seen her a hundred times – but are you acquainted?”
“Oh! Yes; we are always forced to be acquainted whenever she comes to Highbury. By the bye, that is almost enough to put one out of conceit with a niece. Heaven forbid! At last, that I should ever bore people half so much about all the Knightleys together, as she does about Jane Fairfax. One is sick of the very name of Jane Fairfax. Every letter from her is read forty times over; her compliments to all friends go round and round again; and if she does but send her aunt the pattern of a stomacher, or knit a pair of garters for her grandmother, one hears of nothing else for a month. I wish Jane Fairfax very well; but she tires me to death.” (p. 86)
Moreover, Emma, who had got everything in her life, showed her jealousy toward Jane Fairfax clearly. Emma’s jealousy toward Jane Fairfax was increasing by the time she heard the news that Jane Fairfax was about to come to Highbury. It was difficult for her to be a good acquainted of Jane Fairfax though she herself did not know the reason why she could not like Jane Fairfax.
[...] Certain it was that she was to come; and that Highbury, instead of welcoming that perfect novelty which had been so long promised it – Mr. Frank Churchill – must put up for the present with Jane Fairfax, who could bring only the freshness of a two years absence. Emma was sorry; - to have pay civilities to a person she did not like through three long months! – to be always doing more than she wished, and less than she ought. Why she did not like Jane Fairfax might be a difficult question to answer; [...] (p. 167)
[...] Mr. Knightley had once told her it was because she saw in her the really accomplished young woman, which she wanted to be thought herself; and though that accusation had been eagerly refuted at the time, there were moments of self examination in which her conscience could not quite acquit her. [...] (p. 167)
Then, Emma started thinking how she did not like the behavior of Jane Fairfax’s aunt. Although she did not want to admit it, she realized that Miss Bates’ behavior had influenced her attitude toward Jane Fairfax. Emma, once again, considered poverty as a reason to make an acquaintance.
[...] But she could never get acquainted with her: she did not know how it was, but there was such coldness and reserve – such apparent indifference whether she pleased or not – and then, her aunt was such an eternal talker! – and she was made such a fuss with by every body! – and it had been always imagined that they were to be so intimate – because their ages were the same, every body had supposed they must be so fond of each other. These were her reasons – she had no better. (p. 168)
However, the reasons why Emma could not like Jane Fairfax became much clearer on the day of Jane Fairfax’s arrival. Emma was amazed by Jane Fairfax’s manner and appearance. Emma could not understand why a woman named Jane Fairfax could have that elegant manner and appearance. Emma fully thought that it must be her who possessed the highest elegance.
[...] and now, when the due visit was paid, on her arrival, after a two years’ interval, she was particularly struck with the very appearance and manners, which for those two whole years she had been depreciating. Jane Fairfax was very elegant, remarkably elegant; and she had herself the highest value for elegance. [...] (p. 168)
and doubt. She still did not want to understand that Jane Fairfax could possess elegant manners and appearance as she had. Emma kept in her mind that a maid, who lived in poverty, could never possess elegant manners and appearance. It was her and only privilege as a member of the dominant class, and no one, from the laboring class could possess it. Then, a negative trait appeared in her mind. Emma thought that Jane Fairfax had lived a secret life with Mr. Dixon.
In short, she sat, during the first visit, looking at Jane Fairfax with twofold complacency; the sense of pleasure and the sense of rendering justice, and was determining that she would dislike her no longer. When she took in her history, indeed, her situation, as well as her beauty; [...], it seemed impossible to feel any thing but compassion and respect; especially if to every well-known particular entitling her to interest, were added the highly probable circumstance of an attachment to Mr. Dixon, which she had so naturally started to herself. In that case, nothing could be more pitiable or more honorable than the sacrifices she had resolved on. [...] (p. 168 – 169)
From the facts above, therefore, it was clear that Emma used her wealth to maintain her social relationship. Her relationships were mostly influenced by her economic base. She was fully aware that her belongings – her wealth and comfortable life – made everything different.
b. Mr. George Knightley Mr. George Knightley was another member of the dominant class. Jane
Austen has successfully cast him as an equal partner for Emma, a partner that saw everything from different angles. Because of their wealth, Emma was said to be a little bit snobbish, whereas George Knightley was said to be a sensible man. While Emma was being the woman of highest rank in Highbury, Knightley was being a man of considerable blood and status in the area. People admired his family for his family was regarded very kind to the poor. There was no doubt that the characters in Emma reflected a society struggling with value systems that were slipping away. Mr. George Knightley upholds the aristocratic tradition of British society despite the impact of people in his own class who acted against the welfare of the community.
Mr. George Knightley was not only a friend of the Woodhouse, but he was particularly connected to the family because of his younger brother’s marriage to Emma’s sister, Isabella. Jane Austen has introduced him as another main character that would be so closed to and would influence Emma, since the very beginning of the story.
Mr. Knightley, a sensible man about seven or eight and thirty, was not only a very old and intimate friend of the family, but particularly connected with it as the elder brother of Isabella’s husband. He lived about a mile from Highbury, was a frequent visitor and always welcome, and at this time more welcome than usual, as coming directly from their mutual connections in London. [...] (p. 5)
made him worthy of society in Emma. His status is determined by the fact that his family has been landowners in Highbury since at least 1540. As a magistrate, he was used to see things from many points of views and it made him wise.
[...]
“I do not understand what you mean by ‘success;’” said Mr. Knightley. “Success supposes endeavor. Your time has been properly and delicately spent, if you have been endeavoring for the last for years to bring about this marriage. [...]” (p. 9)
[...] Invite him to dinner, Emma, and help him to the best of the fish and the chicken, but leave him to chuse his own wife. Depend upon it, a man of six or seven-and-twenty can take care of himself.” (p. 10)
He was such an ideal gentleman who had the power to tell the truth to Emma, evident by Knightley’s bold statement “Emma knows I never flatter her” (p.7). He was among few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse and he was the only one who could show Emma her faults.
Emma, I must once more speak to you as I have been used to do: a privilege rather endures than allowed, perhaps, but I must still use it. I cannot see you acting wrong, with out remonstrance. How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her characters, age and situation, I had not thought it possible... And, where she prosperous, I could allow much for the occasional prevalence of the ridiculous over the good. Were she a woman of fortune, I would leave every harmless absurdity to take its chance; I would not quarrel with you for any liberties of manner. Were she your equal in situation – but Emma, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born’ and, if she live to an old age, must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done indeed (p. 383 – 384).
