Jane Austen's Emma Research Paper

Like many societies and cultures around the world, a fantasy is created in which greed and vanity strip away love and admiration from the strong marital grips we are accustomed to. Jane Austen beautifully illustrates a world where this vain fantasy becomes each woman’s reality. Love simply dissolves into oblivion while greed and arrogance fill its empty, forgotten space. This toxic, distorted image of marriage storms through 1800s England corrupting relationships and mocking the foundations of marriage; however, Austen implements an opposing force that has the ability to trounce this destructive change in the once traditional, loving society. That force is the power of true love. She intertwines concepts of sly destruction with literary

In Jane Austen’s Emma, the idea of marriage has been morphed into a toxic representation of money and social rank; however, she shows us that love in its purest form has the ability to overpower all else, through her use of: the social hierarchy, manipulation, her personal life experiences, and her syntax. Throughout the novel, Austen provides a clear root of where many of the marital issues derive from, and that is the social hierarchy. It is the constant ranking of people that takes away their ability to be with one another, regardless of the love and passion they portray. One of the most evident cases of this separation is introduced to us in the early stages of the novel. Characters, Mr. Martin and Harriet Smith, show such passion and devotion towards one another and yearn to be together, but because of Mr. Martin’s shameful farming rank, they are torn away from one another (Austen 38). They are forced apart by another’s interference in their compatibility in class as explained by expert Shinobu when she says, “One’s status in society signifies much in Emma, and of course it is Emma herself who is most particular about that” (Shinobu 52).

Shinobu when she says, “Emma’s assessment of the position of others depends to a great degree on how they satisfy her sense of superiority” (Shinobu 54). Emma’s form of ranking and controlling other’s marital situations is often in regards to her morphed sense of what is and the way she wishes things to be, as shown by the narrator when they say, “…too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her…” (Austen 8). Social hierarchy was a natural part of everyday society; therefore, people were slightly aware of their exact standing in comparison to those around them, but they were unprotected from influence, because their exact position was simply an abstract notion. This unsheltered idea of where they stood, allowed Emma to so dictate who was to be with whom and where they stood in relation to one another’s class (Shinobu 52-54). Despite the division of classes people inevitably found a way to end up with their one, true love; even though, the opposing force of ranking was trying to keep them