Monday, April 30, 2007

Emma and the Monk

My part of the presentation tonight is going to involve genre. Specifically, Emma as a Gothic novel. I know, it's crazy! I'll share some criticisms with you, and let everyone draw their own conclusions.

Emma is a very interesting novel on a lot of different levels, which I'm not really going to get into tonight. (Time constraints! Grr!!) The idea of marriage fascinates me, especially Emma's initial desire to never marry. Is she a hypocrite? This ties in nicely with Pamela, another possible hypocrite. Also, leisure time in the book is a theme I'm interested in. Chekhov's Three Sisters highlights the leisure time of the wealthy, and Emma does the same thing. Granted, Chekhov casts a very negative light on the bourgeoisie, does Austen do the same in her novel? How overt are politics in this novel? I hope we have the chance to discuss all these topics in class!

1 comment:

thowe said...

One of the things we discussed in class last night was Austen's changing reputation; some time ago, and during her lifetime, she was viewed as a very domestic and domesticated female novelist, whose works were the very antithesis of political. Yet today, we can ask whether Austen critiques the bourgeois world she is so invested in--we can look at the unacknowledged and often deliberately disavowed "support system" undergirding her playful treatment of bourgeois economies, like the significance of "illness" and "evil," the repeated and never fully defined language games that render the interpretive base highly unstable, even the subtle references to slavery (and in one case, not so subtle--"the rights of men and women!"). Do you think Austen is a political novelist? Or perhaps this is the wrong question to be asking...?