Abstract
Even after the domestication of Arabella, the figure of the deluded female reader does not disappear from English novels. Rather, the ‘imaginist’1 seems to have become a favourite stock character. Although the reading woman continued to be seen as a threat in the cultural imagination, in Jane Austen’s Emma this character takes on new significance. This is typical of the way Austen engages with the fiction of her predecessors and her contemporaries, often identifying ‘stereotypical characters and events which she considered had no credible existence outside the accepted world of the contemporary novel’.2 Given Austen’s propensity to handle known materials with originality, when she takes up the topic of female quixotism in Emma, we can expect some interesting differences. Emma shares the quixotic reader’s erroneous literary expectations in her notion of Harriet’s high birth, indicating her familiarity with popular Gothic fiction in which such conclusions are common. However, there is a crucial difference due to the paradigmatic shift in the position of the romance after the 1750s. Arguably, where Arabella receives too much instruction in matters of the heart from her French romances, Emma gets too little, due to the radically different treatment of feminine conduct in late eighteenth-century fiction. While respectable novels might offer models of proper feminine conduct during courtship, they seem to neglect the female education of the heart in which Arabella was immersed.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Waldron, Mary. Jane Austen and the Fiction of Her Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 1.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. 1957. London: Pimlico, 2000.
Greenfield, Susan C. Mothering Daughters. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003, pp. 31–2.
Austen, Jane. Emma. 1816. Ed. James Kinsley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Parenthetical references are to this edition.
Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen. Women, Politics and the Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, p. 122.
Dated 7 January 1807. Austen, Jane. Selected Letters. Ed. Vivien Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 79.
Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. ‘Narcissism’. Wright, Elizabeth, ed. Feminism and Psychoanalysis. A Critical Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, p. 273.
Looser, Devoney. ‘“The Duty of Woman by Woman”: Reforming Feminism in Emma,’. Emma. By Jane Austen. Ed. Alistair M. Duckworth. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 577–93, p. 581.
See Staves, Susan. ‘British Seduced Maidens’. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 14 (1980–81): 109–34.
Tobin, Beth Fowkes. ‘The Moral and Political Economy of Property in Austen’s Emma’. Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2 (1990): 229–54, p. 252.
Cronin, Richard and Dorothy McMillan. Introduction. Emma. By Jane Austen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xxi–lxiv, p. lxviii.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Eva König
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
König, E. (2014). Jane Austen’s Emma, the Arch-Imaginist. In: The Orphan in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137382023_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137382023_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47984-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-38202-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)