Jane Austen's Emma: A Bit Too Much Pride, A Whole Lot of Prejudice

I finally have completed Jane Austen’s Emma.  My verdict?  A bit too much pride and a whole lot of prejudice.  Which is to say that Miss Woodhouse’s adventures in matchmaking struck me, on the whole, as being considerably less charming than Elizabeth Bennett’s adventures in husband hunting. 

The essential ingredients were still there:  remarkably rich characters, exquisite language, vivid dialogue that almost reaches the level of a therapy session.  The fundamental difference is plot.  Pride and Prejudice has a gripping one while Emma has none at all. 

At first, it seems that we are going to have a replay of the Miss Bennett/Mr. Darcy when will they finally get together narrative with Emma and the impeccable Mr. Knightly filling the key roles.  But the relationship of the two main characters is submerged for hundreds of pages before finally coming to the forefront. 

Then it appears we will be thrust into the consequences of Emma trying her hands at setting up the humbly-born Harriet Smith with gentlemen from far more distinguished social circles.  Those consequences turn out to be nonexistent.  Finally, it appears there will be a love triangle between the rascalish Frank Churchill, the insipid Jane Fairfax and Emma herself.  But the points of that triangle never do connect.

So what we get instead are approximately two hundred pages of young women shopping at the market, families mingling at balls and outdoor parties, and painfully long monologues from both the self-absorbed minister’s wife and the positively selfless aunt of Jane Fairfax.  Many of these scenes can be individually funny or intriguing in themselves but the cumulative effect is to make the reader feel like he is trapped on a sandbar, waiting for a tide to come and sweep him free. 

This method of breaking the plot open to immerse the reader into the mundane details of daily life is by no means unique in modern novels.  You can find it everywhere from Moby Dick to Ulysses to The Savage Detectives.  But behind those books, you find writers who regarded themselves as literary prophets, authors not content with telling a mere story. 

We don’t usually consider Jane Austen as being part of that lineage.  Would it not be ironic—an irony that Miss Austen would surely have been ambivalent about—if her genteel novel of the Georgian countryside provided the template for future writers to offer a more revolutionary approach to tackling the stuff that Emma’s days are made of?