Emma

I'm teaching a 'Special Author' module this semester on Jane Austen. It's coming to an end now, and yesterday we were looking at Emma. It was an unusually lively seminar, everyone very engaged with the discussion. There was some division of opinion about Emma herself, and several students said they had never really warmed to her. This is not really a surprise -- Austen herself said, when she was starting the book, "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like".  People find her  snobbish, for one thing --  and, by today's standards, perhaps she is.  But the main sources of  disquiet seemed to be the way she manipulates Harriet into refusing Robert Martin's proposal, and above all her rudeness to Miss Bates at the Box Hill picnic. Of course these are here so she can learn from them, and certainly she does appear to do so. But a few students doubted if she would ever really stop being nosy and high-handed, and also wondered if she really was in love with Mr Knightly or just making sure she kept her high status in Highbury. This last bit is actually what some critics have said about the book. Other things they have said include the suggestion that Emma's interest in Harriet Smith has a lesbian element, and that Mr Woodhouse is suffering from syphilis. Yes, these are genuine arguments by respected academic critics. As the module includes an important element of reading recent critical approaches to Austen, we have to give them all due consideration. I have my own views, of course, which in the end are pretty traditional, but I do enjoy the to-ing and fro-ing which they elicit from the students. I don't really mind what kind of outrageous-seeming suggestions anyone -- student or critic -- makes about any novel, poem or play, but I do require them to be able to support their arguments by intelligent close reference to the actual text. In fact the bit about Mr Woodhouse is, for me, the most convincing, believe it or not! It's based partly on his symptoms and partly on the poem he keeps quoting, "Kitty, a Fair but Frozen Maid" which, as someone has pointed out, is actually a rather rude poem about a prostitute, which suggests that Mr W had a rather racy past before he became such a confirmed invalid. Next week we go on to Persuasion, not such a contentious novel, but one that I really love -- possibly, right now, my favourite JA, but that's probably because it's the last one I have (re-) read.