Reader Response Approach: Emma Essay (Critical Writing)

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Introduction

The novel Emma vividly portrays the life of women and their values, problems and destinies, happy moments and life grievances. The novel portrays life of society and relations between men and women, their attitude towards marriage and the role of women in society. Emma Woodhouse, the main character of the novel, “handsome, clever, and rich,” dominates her story with an energy and confidence which distinguishes her from the other heroines.

Main text

The main part I like the most is the beginning of the novel when Jane Austin introduces Emma and her surrounding. Emma has those external supports of beauty, money, and a comfortable home to express her sense of superiority. Her sister, Elizabeth, is handsome, and many are richer. Emma, more completely than Elizabeth, seems “to unite some of the best blessings of existence.” Emma’s joy in being “so always first and always right,” as if those two conditions were the same, displays her belief in a direct correspondence between her qualities and her position, her confidence that she merits those blessings of existence.

I appreciate this part the most because Austin depicts a real girl in contrast to other writers of this period who portray poor or unhappy women who suffer all their life because of male oppression and inequalities. As she so memorably informs Mr. Knightley at the end of the story, “I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up with any other.” In the course of the novel, Emma, like Captain Wentworth in Persuasion, will learn to brook being happier than she deserves. But what does this mean? Of what does her education consist? From Emma’s own words, we know that the novel can hardly be read as a lesson in humility. Emma does not learn that she deserves less than the best treatment. Perhaps, she learns that the best treatment is not a matter of deserts, that in her high self-evaluation she had not given value enough to the world outside herself.

Summary

The moral of the story is not that Emma should think less of herself but that she should value the world more. Emma’s joy in being first is part of what makes her such an exhilarating character. What she offers us is the conviction that what she thinks about is interesting and valuable. What she offers is a confidence that borders on sublimity in the powers of her own mind. Emma, then, is an appropriate starting place for examining Austen’s ideas of perception because Emma is Austen’s grandest version of a commitment to personal vision. Moreover, women’s exaltation of her mind’s power makes her the very heroine with which to take up the traditional charge that Austen’s fiction treats those areas of human experience accessible to reason rather than to feeling and imagination. For me, Emma Woodhouse is one of the great characters in the English novel. And that moral life means learning the proper relation of imagination to the truth.

Works Cited

Austin, J. Emma. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2021) 'Reader Response Approach: Emma'. 22 September.

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IvyPanda. 2021. "Reader Response Approach: Emma." September 22, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/reader-response-approach-emma/.

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IvyPanda. "Reader Response Approach: Emma." September 22, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/reader-response-approach-emma/.

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