Jane Austen’s Emma, the Arch-Imaginist

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.