Emma paper

Emma paper

Jane Austen’s “Emma”


Jane Austen’s “Emma” was not one of the more easily read books for me, not was it one of my favorites either.   I am generally a pretty open-minded person, and give most books a good chance, but this one was just a little outside my realm of liking or ability to really get in cahoots with mentally.   The additional readings at the end of the book with different critical analyses of “Emma” did at least open my eyes a bit to new, different ways to look at, and even appreciate the book a little more.   Some of these readings were more helpful than others, and some just confused and frustrated me further.   In this paper I will attempt to explain a little further how some of these helped me or did not help me.
I feel that the article on feminist criticism was most valuable to me.   When going over the readings at the end of the book in class, our group felt that “Today we may see Austen’s lessons about women’s duty as too individually focused or too limited in scope to offer a model for feminist practice, but in her own time she implicitly argued for greater fairness among women within the existing social, political, and economic order,” to be the article’s thesis.   The book may not be a shining, bright light of feminism in a modern manner of the term, but Austen did what she could in her own way at the time, and this was a bold, feminist writing for that time according to this reading.  
Looser states that “Emma functions as a critique of what I call female/female paternalism, exposing in the process the exploitable structure of companionate relationships; it reveals the powerful ways women wield influence over fellow females…” (p.581, Looser) and goes on to state “Emma shows possibilities for establishing greater fairness within existing female friendships.” (p.581, Looser)
Emma was written by a female, and seeing it critiqued by a female in a feminist manner was helpful to me.   This helped me to...