However much we insist it is not true, our choices, actions, and thoughts are rarely uninfluenced by the conditions we are born into. Our culture and society play a huge role in the person we become, shaping our opinions and worldviews from birth. This truth is illustrated no better than in Jane Austen’s Emma. In Emma, Austen uses narrative style, characterization, and the plot device of word games to illustrate the ever-present power of hierarchical control. Emma's plot seemingly hovers around the superficial theme of strategic matchmaking. But while this is an important aspect of Emma, it serves primarily as a catalyst to illustrate the much bigger idea of societal authority present in the novel.
Word games play a huge role in the plot development of Emma. ". . . Emma is itself a word game, anagrammatic in theme . . . and plot structure" (Grey 181). The word games in Emma involve the matching and rearranging of verbal characters. This mirrors the plot of the book, where characters are matched and rearranged as potential marriage partners. (Grey 181). In the same way that rearranging the alphabet tiles changes their meaning, different pairings in Emma demonstrate different aspects of the individual’s character. The theme of Emma is expressed through the word games by the games’ requirement to adhere to the rules. Emma’s society relies on a strict adherence to the rules dictated by the “middle-class aristocracy” (Grossman 1). Likewise, the word games rely on observation of the rules, and when the rules of the game are broken it usually coincides with breaking of the rules of the social game. Frank and Emma break the social rules when they gossip obviously about Jane Fairfax and mock her attachment to Mr. Dixon by spelling out ...
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...ized Consciousness': Richardson, Austen, And Stylistic Influence." Style Spring 2001: 18+. Gale Student Resources In Context. Web. 21 Mar. 2012.
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“Jane Austen is one of the few novelists in world literature who is regarded as a ‘classic’ and yet is widely read” (Kelly 1). Austen is the only novelist, prior to Charles Dickens, whose novels maintain a significantly popular readership, and generations of students regard her fictional world as literature with a capital ‘L.’ The British author, Jane Austen, gave the novel its distinctly modern character in the 19th century by describing ordinary people in everyday life, portraying strong female protagonists, and depicting the perils of misconstrued romance.
Author Jane Austen had porttryal of arrogance that existed in upper class society. She uses Emma as a representative of the faults and lack of values of her society. Just as Emma contains these many faults, the upper class society as a whole also contains these many faults. Additionally, in Emma, Austen depicts the distorted views of gentility. Austen depicts her own message of true gentility by creating characters of differing class ranks. Bradbury relates that the characters that are socially high seem to be morally inferior and those of lower rank are "elevated" by their actions (Austen 81). Austen's development of characters, especially Emma, is very effective in relaying her message about the snobbery and lack of gentility that existed in upper class society.
...Emma’s voice in order to relate the inside ideology, while simultaneously using a somewhat ironic third-person narrative voice in order to provide critical social commentary on the social attitudes of the Highbury society depicted in Emma. Emma’s voice allows the reader to gain an unadultered insight into the lives of the people of Highbury, providing the narrative with a Austen uses a somewhat similar dichotomous technique in Persuasion, in which she splits the novel into two halves -- one in which advocates for the traditional system of formality, and another that works to eradicate the very same system that she extolled so highly in the first half. Under the deceptive guise of “political inaction,” Austen actually provides commentary on the underlying social and political issues that pervade the novel through the literary technique of heteroglossia (Parker 359).
Heckerling alters Jane Austen’s 17th century novel ‘Emma’ to correspond with present audience by adaptation of characters, literature, language and form which still projects Austen’s satire concept for the necessity of living an conventional life adhering to social mores. Skillfully supporting the essence of Emma through a modernised visual. Each writer shares common themes, with both texts represent parallel social settings tha...
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