EMMA: Guest Prof. Joan Ray (Wk. of 1/25-29/10)

[ConnieAnnKirk]

Here's our thread for Prof. Joan Ray's visit to us to talk about EMMA and Jane Austen.  You can begin leaving questions for Prof. Ray any time!  She will be with us from January 25-29, 2010.

[ConnieAnnKirk]

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ConnieK wrote:

Here's our thread for Prof. Joan Ray's visit to us to talk about EMMA and Jane Austen.  You can begin leaving questions for Prof. Ray any time!  She will be with us from January 25-29, 2010.

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I'll start with a question for Prof. Ray.  I asked a question earlier of the group, Joan, about why they might think EMMA seems to be so popular lately.  Have you noticed this, too, or do you have any comment on it? 

[Joan-Ray]

Hello from your first guest, Joan Ray! I am delighted to be returning to this forum. Please feel free to ask or discuss any aspects of EMMA, the novel, past productions, and the upcoming PBS telecast of EMMA, which begins on January 24th. I look forward to hearing from you! Sending good cheer, Joan

[Peppermill]

Welcome, Joan!  Good to have you back.

One of my greatest difficulties in reading Austen is the attitudes of characters like Emma towards people like Mr. Martin.  Given the frequency of those attitudes, it always rather surprises me that Americans, with their high espoused value of equality (regardless of reality), find Austen's novels so charming.

What am I missing?  Can you provide some perspectives that might help?  Certainly I know those attitudes get raked over the coals, but what is it that so attracts?  Is it despite these characteristics?  (The "despite" is usually what keeps me giong.)

Pepper

[basson_mommy12]

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Peppermill wrote:

Welcome, Joan!  Good to have you back.

One of my greatest difficulties in reading Austen is the attitudes of characters like Emma towards people like Mr. Martin.  Given the frequency of those attitudes, it always rather surprises me that Americans, with their high espoused value of equality (regardless of reality), find Austen's novels so charming.

What am I missing?  Can you provide some perspectives that might help?  Certainly I know those attitudes get raked over the coals, but what is it that so attracts?  Is it despite these characteristics?  (The "despite" is usually what keeps me giong.)

Pepper

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Well, I was going to comment, but I'll wait to hear what our expert has to say before I jump all over this. 

[Joan-Ray]

Hi Pepper, Emma's attitude towards Robert Martin and others whom she regards among the "second and third class" of Highbury reminds us that Austen said, according to her nephew's Memoir of JA, that she was creating a character whom no one but herself would much like! Emma is, above all, a book about the heroine's education, both as a woman (she has never experienced mature heterosexual love and even says she has no plans to marry) and as a human being. But Emma doesn't just get "raked over the coals," as you write; she LEARNS from her errors and humiliating experiences. While she first deems Robert "clownish," by 3:19, we read that "as Emma became acquainted with RM, who was now introduced at Hartfield, she fully acknowledged in him all the appearance of sense and worth which could bid fairest for her little friend." Thus, many of us readers follow Emma's story with affection: we are pained and embarrassed by her many errors that truly hurt others, but then we are gratified to see how her many humiliations have helped her to grow. (The film "Clueless" shows this well.) As the first woman of Highbury (which becoming Mrs. George Knightley will underscore!), Emma has to learn a sense of noblesse oblige--similar to Darcy in P&P!--which Mr. Knightley already has. Does this help? Joan 

[Joan-Ray]

Hi Ruth, Now that I have posted my ideas, I'd love to hear yours! Joan

[basson_mommy12]

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Peppermill wrote:

Welcome, Joan!  Good to have you back.

One of my greatest difficulties in reading Austen is the attitudes of characters like Emma towards people like Mr. Martin.  Given the frequency of those attitudes, it always rather surprises me that Americans, with their high espoused value of equality (regardless of reality), find Austen's novels so charming.

What am I missing?  Can you provide some perspectives that might help?  Certainly I know those attitudes get raked over the coals, but what is it that so attracts?  Is it despite these characteristics?  (The "despite" is usually what keeps me giong.)

Pepper

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Okdoky!

I was going to say that J.A. doesn't really ever embrace the lowest of the low - even the Miss Fairfax's of the world are still within the gentlewoman's class, but they are considered low due to their immediate relations and lack of connections.  Unlike, say, Dickens, who shocked the Victorian world with his tales of the most impoverished.  I don't consider this a weakness, however.  I would not feel comfortable writing of this class, either, because it would feel condescending, contrived and ill-informed.

As for Emma's snobbery, it's a type of ignorance that comes of youth and always being preferred and loved by all who know her - she assumes her opinion must be right, by no true fault of her own, but born of ignorance.  This novel could be more accurately titled "The Education of Emma Woodhouse," though the one-name thing certainly works, like Madonna or Cher. 

I think that Emma likes Harriet very much because she's maleable and weak, though pretty and well-mannered.  She senses that Jane Fairfax is NOT (or Mrs. Elton for that matter!), and that is why she has never been able to "get along" with Jane.  Plus, she's got that whole sickly-thing for pity and drawing attention.  Two queens in the same hive?  Up to now, she's been the controlling figure in her life: not even her father has as strong an influence on her.  I feel it's more complicated than straightforward jealousy.  With all that said, I think that's why she loves her Mr. Knightley - he won't put up with her ignorance and pet her ego.

I read Austen for their fairy-tale qualities, but also because unlike a fairy tale, they show us what can happen after the wedding.  Unhappy marriages and sad endings are possible, but the heroines of her stories are flawed creatures that learn and because they do, they are the happier for it.

[Forster]

If Jane were alive today, how do you think she would respond to the vast popularity of her books being made into movies? I believe I read somewhere that she believed her stories should be read both "distinctly and audibly" (almost as if she had a precognition that her words someday would be translated to an audible form.) Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that in her day, people recited books and poetry as forms of entertainment, therefore her writing style reflected this appreciation of the spoken word. And did this make it easier to transfer her books to a movie script?

[Forster]

I just wanted to mention how thrilled I am that tonight begins a new season of Jane Austen's "Masterpiece Classics", today is my birthday and I've been looking forward to this for weeks, it's like a little present!

[ConnieAnnKirk]

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Forster wrote:

I just wanted to mention how thrilled I am that tonight begins a new season of Jane Austen's "Masterpiece Classics", today is my birthday and I've been looking forward to this for weeks, it's like a little present!

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Welcome, and Happy Birthday, Forster!  I'm so glad you're sharing your birthday treat with all of us!  I'm excited for the new film as well--it starts in just 10 minutes.  I'm deciding right now whether to move my laptop and stay online while I watch, but I will probably leave the computer for now and just watch and absorb this new interpretation.  I try to approach each new adaptation with an open mind.  Ha.

EnJOY!

[marina-margari…]

Hello from one of your many guests. Which is your favorite Jane Austen film adaptation and why? Thank you from Marina-Margarita.

[ConnieAnnKirk]

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marina-margarita wrote:

Hello from one of your many guests. Which is your favorite Jane Austen film adaptation and why? Thank you from Marina-Margarita.

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Welcome, Marina!  Great question!  I look forward to hearing Joan's reply.

[Joan-Ray]

Hi Ruth,

Yes, Austen does not deal with the "lowest of the low" as you call them--although Robert Martin is NOT in that class as a yeoman farmer. Her main concern is her own class, the gentry, which is comprised of a wide swath of the landowners, from about 100 acres to 10,000 acres. Your comment that Emma's problems stem from ignorance and youth is very much on target. Although she is nearly 21, she has been so sheltered and in a sense pampered (her father thinks she is perfect; she did not listen to Miss Taylor and preferred her own ideas; and she treats Mr. Knightley, the only one who ever saw faults in her, as if he is joking with her, as we read in  Emma, 1:1), that in many ways she has the mindset of a 16-year-old when it comes to dealing with people. By the way, I think that is a reason that "Clueless" was so perfectly modernized for a high school setting with a teen-age Cher.

Cheers,

Joan

[Joan-Ray]

Hi Connie,

Emma is especially popular today because--as we see in Amy Heckerling's ingenious adaptation, "Clueless," set in the 1990's in a Beverly Hills high school--this is the one Austen novel in which the heroine does not face the plight of all her other heroines: Emma is rich, set to inherit Hartfield from her father, and so she does not have to marry to maintain her gentry status.  Emma  is, as I have  said in a reply to Pepper, a novel of the heroine's education about herself, her role in society, and her sexual maturity. Her problems are easily applicable to a young woman today. This was the source of the problem, I believe,  of translating Pride and Prejudice into  Bridget Jones: the clever Elizabeth Bennet, who today would be at the top of her class in college and then headed to a top  law school to train as a litigator, was turned into a silly, lovesick character. But Emma's problems could easily be given to Cher in "Clueless," and the high school setting, as noted in my reply to Pepper, was perfect as Emma, though having lived "nearly twenty-one years," acts really more like a 16-year-old with newly active hormones exciting her sexual imagination. Does that help?

Cheers, Joan

[Joan-Ray]

Hi Forster,

Austen made that comment about reading aloud in a letter to Cassandra, her sister, dated Feb 4, 1813. It was regarding her mother's reading aloud Pride and Prejudice too rapidly. Austen wrote,  "tho' she [her mother] perfectly understands the Characters herself, she cannot speak as they ought." Reading aloud, especially  in the evening, was a very popular pastime in Austen's day. (Note that in Mansfield Park, after dinner, Fanny reads Shakespeare's Henry VIII aloud to Lady Bertram, and in Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney recalls reading The Mysteries of Udolpho aloud to his sister, Eleanor.) In terms of the history of the novel genre or form, one of JA's major contributions to the still relatively new novel genre was to deliver her plot through characters' dialog, rather than narrating about them. And this is why her novels are so readily adaptable as scripts  for stage and film: she renders her "story" through lots of dialog.  Even in the Bollywood version of P&P, some of the film's best lines came directly from Austen's novel! As Mark Twain once said to someone who asked him for advice on novel-writing, "Don't say 'the old lady screamed'; bring her on stage and let her scream!"

Cheers, Joan

[Joan-Ray]

Hi Marina-Margarita,

People are always surprised to hear me say that my favorite Austen film adaptation is "Clueless" because it shows how well Austen understood people: Cher's problems are Emma's! However,  I am so delighted with the new Masterpiece Classic's EMMA, which really maintains the novel's spirit and has a wonderful actress cast as Emma, that this is currently my favorite period adaptation of Austen. Isn't Romola Garai a perfect Emma? And I am delighted that the screenwriter kept Harriet Smith as Austen wrote her and did not turn her into a clown, as she was in the 1996 EMMA by Doug McGrath.

Cheers,

Joan.

[dulcinea3]

Hi Joan, great to have you back with us!

A while back, on another social site, I made reference to Austen's statement about creating a heroine whom nobody but herself would like, and someone asked me if she ever explained more about why.  I assume that there is nothing in Austen's own words, but what do you think about it?  Why would Austen want to write about a heroine whom she liked, but that she thought her readers would dislike?  Wouldn't that perhaps adversely affect the success of this novel?  What exactly did Austen like about Emma, that she thought that others would not recognize?  Why did she think that others would dislike Emma?

Of course, on that last question, I guess the common opinion would be that people do not like Emma because she is spoiled and meddlesome.  The first time that I read the novel, in freshman English, the professor and I were the only two who liked Emma; the rest of the class did not.

Thanks for sharing your insights with us!

[Joan-Ray]

Hello Dulcinea, aka, Grand Dame, etc, It's lovely to be back here! Now to your question: The source of Austen's comment is her nephew's Memoir of Jane Austen. He does not add any commentary about the remark from his aunt Jane. But Austen clearly wanted to know what readers thought about the book as she kept a list of comments about the novel made by friends and family; you can see this in the R.W.Chapman edition of Austen's collected works in volume 6 called "Minor Works," and I bet it is somewhere on line. Most of the comments deal with characterization.  Given this, all I can do is speculate about why Austen wrote such a heroine. First of all, in the final chapter of her previously published novel, Mansfield Park, Austen as narrator displays so much affection for her heroine, Fanny Price, that she calls her "my Fanny," the most overt narrative comment she ever made in a novel about a character. So perhaps with her next heroine,  Emma, she was playing with her readers by presenting her most flawed heroine and challenging us to deal with this character who makes many mistakes. Furthermore, by creating a character like Emma, who thinks she understands everything, and ends up learning that she understands little, especially about herself, Austen was creating a real challenge to herself, as author: Emma  is the novel that truly established Austen's literary reputation because it is so well crafted. That is, Austen tells the story from Emma's flawed perspective so that the author can then show us Emma's errors and finally her learning experiences. I think most readers eventually feel great affection for Emma and prove Austen wrong! Joan

[SilkWorm]

Joan, it seems like the sets and dialogue in the Austen programs airing on PBS are more realistic than those depicted in theater movie versions. When I first watched them a couple of years ago, I was a bit taken aback by the characters "humanness"--they were not glamourized but fitting. The clothes, the rooms in the houses, the detail of the sets and dialogue in the PBS series seem to offer another facet to the stories.

Are they accurate? Do they reflect a genuine sense of scale and proportion of the time?

Thank you.

--SilkWorm