Stieg Larsson/Jane Austen/Harry Potter mashup

[fire_everything]

I spent the holiday weekend doing basically two things: listening to the new Lady Gaga and rereading Jane Austen’s Emma. The Emma urge had struck me, weirdly, just as I was reaching the gripping climax of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I actually interrupted Larsson briefly to indulge it. I didn’t reread the whole novel straight, nor did I

Comments

[kellychambliss]

Yay! Emma-talk. Yes, indeed, I know my "Emma." Mr. Suckling's seat (both at Maple Grove and in the barouche-landau) is as familiar to me as Hogwarts.

I don't think I agree with Terry Castle that "Emma" is about "joy and well-being," though there are certainly parts that are joyous, and various forms of health are both enjoyed and desired. I might agree that it's about wanting joy and well-being, but we're constantly reminded of what a tiny, eternally-beseiged island those feelings actually inhabit.

I really do think there is a dark underbelly to Austen, which is one of the many, many reasons I reread her obsessively. She can let the dark exist with the joy.

Take Mr Woodhouse, for instance. Yes, on one level he is, as the narrator says, a "polite, kind old man." But in many ways, he's destructive, both of Emma and of the less-wealthy classes. I see his essential starvation of himself and others as metaphorical as well as comically literal. (In fact, I'm fascinated by how this book is informed by images of sickness and illness. Austen is so subtle in her symbols/images that it's easy to miss this dimension; I remember an undergrad prof once asserting that "JA uses no symbols." But I think there is a profound dis-ease underlying the "healthful situation" of Hartfield.)

I love your ideas about the fantasy of it all -- yes, indeed (even more so in Pride and Prejudice, perhaps), but it's through the fantasy that she identifies so many of the important questions about "how to live" and also suggests a few answers that might apply even if you don't find a fantasy romance (or even a realistic one). And yes, yes, YES -- JA is awash with (her own brand of) porn.

Houses:
Slytherin: Elton, Mr Woodhouse, Frank, Jane (though she could be Ravenclaw, too)
Hufflepuff: Harriet, Isabella, Mrs. Weston
Gryffindor: Miss Bates (yes, I really think so! Like Neville), Emma (though I don't mean this in all-positive ways; I have to confess that I like Emma a little less on each rereading)
Ravenclaw: John Knightley (though yes, he is definitely Snapian), Jane (though she could be Slytherin, too), Mr Knightley (though I think you could make a good case for Gryffindor)

[fire_everything]

Oh, you have subverted my reading in SUCH intelligent ways! I see Emma as the one Austen novel that escapes that encroaching darkness and sadness, because it's the only one whose heroine genuinely has the choice not to get married and whose life is not in some way warped by the need to respond to that terrible ultimatum. (It's still warped by being female, probably, but of which of us is that NOT true, even now?) I like that she and Mr. Knightley are both loaded and thus there's no element of rescue in his proposal, although if you want to take a dark-side view of their union, it can be seen as a really terrifying consolidation of socioeconomic power, because Hartfield is practically the only thing in two parishes that Mr. Knightley DOESN'T already own.

Yes, Mr. Woodhouse is awful - to a modern eye he's clearly dysfunctional as a parent. I think most modern readers are confused, too, as to why he is held in such high esteem not only by Highbury at large but by two people with such good bullshit detectors as the Knightley brothers. Austen seems to genuinely feel that Emma's treatment of her father (not just her tolerance in putting up with him, but the fact that she actually loves him) should earn her moral points that offset her sins, even as she gives him savage evaluations like "his talents could not have recommended him at any time" and "he was like a child in his total want of taste for what he saw." Is this a 19th-century construct of family that we just have to suspend a certain amount of disbelief to deal with? In any case, I do appreciate that the Knightley men don't just consider Mr. Woodhouse a chick responsibility and fob him off entirely on Emma. Mr. Knightley knows exactly what he's signing up for in that department when he marries Emma, and moving in with her father is a not-trivial way of putting his money where his mouth is.

OMG - Jane Fairfax a Slytherin!!! A bold statement, my friend. And I LOVE that you tag Miss Bates as a Gryffindor - she IS that brave in her way, and she rarely gets enough credit for it. And Mr. Woodhouse as a Slytherin! I think his maliciousness is more oblivious than willed, so I still vote for Hufflepuff, but this is a fascinating idea. As is a Ravenclaw Mr. Knightley - I see him as too confrontational for any house but Gryffindor, but he does like to think, to the point where he'll interrupt a conversation to do so. Totally with you on the houses for the John Knightleys.

I could talk about this book all day. :D

[kellychambliss]

More thoughts to come, but in the meantime, would you mind if I linked this post to my flist? There are several Jane Austen devotees among the horde.