Emma

I think the story is pretty funny. I wouldn’t say I necessarily like Emma, because I really don’t, she’s a brat. However, she does make the story a bit more interesting. Nice can, at times, become boring and so Emma’s arrogance at least gives me someone to dislike. What I found most interesting about the novel would have to be the significant parallels between Emma and the movie Clueless. Clueless is a movie that I grew up watching. It was fun to mock the valley girls and just find humor in their everyday lives. In the movie, Cher, who parallels the character of Emma, started off as your typical wealthy, valley girl. She is arrogant, selfish, and completely consumed in money and material things. However, as the movie plays out her obession with changing people to become more like her seems less a desire. She begins to focus on and appreciate the differences in people. As the the movie develops she experiences changes within herself and she matures as a character. The character of Emma experiences the same sort of changes within herself as Cher experiences. For Emma, the plot plays out in a way that helps to correct her vanity and self-delusion. Knightley is the one to help teach her these things and so Knightley takes over the role of Cher’s step-brother in the movie. I think already having seen the movie and knowing that there were several similarities, made the reading of the novel a bit more interesting and an easier read.

Poor Harriet.

Can you imagine being told not once, but twice the man you admire is in love with another woman?  Take it one step further … that woman is your best friend.  Poor Harriet!  Emma encourages Harriet’s feelings for both of these men and later discovers that both Elton and Knightley are in love with not Harriet, but her.  Harriet allows herself to be guided by Emma.  She trusts her judgment, her decisions and allows her to become her dearest friend.  Emma’s behavior after her discovery of each man’s love, is horrifying.  She is afraid to approach this woman who has literally “put all her eggs in one basket” and has trusted Emma’s judgement.  Emma only discovers her love for Mr. Knightley after Harriet has revealed her own desires for Mr. Knightly.  How messed up is that?  When Emma finds that Mr. Knightley’s love is reciprocated, she immediately accepts proposal and is too nervous to tell Harriet (her best friend) of the news.  Emma goes as far as sending Harriet to London to avoid her presence.  When Emma comes to find that Harriet is to be married to Mr. Martin, shes relieved (not happy for her friend) that she has found a partner is marriage.  Emma finally reveals to Mr. Knightley Harriet’s affections for him.  Emma chooses to accept Harriets fiance, Mr. Martin, to Hartfield, although he is socially not “up to Emma’s standards.”  Emma realizes her relationship with Harriet must “change into a calmer sort of good will,” because she has chosen to marry beneath Emma’s social class.  After all Emma has done to mess up Harriet’s life, from telling her to refuse Mr. Martin, to falling in love with Harriet’s ‘infatuation’, she can’t even be friends with her anymore!?  Poor Harriet!  Boo Emma!

Emma’s Web

While reading Emma, I was quite interested in the webs of romance woven around her. Emma is this rich, popular, beautiful girl who usually gets what she wants. She thinks everyone is positively smitten with her, including Frank Churchill.  She is jealous of Jane Fairfax and I believe she is ignoring that Frank likes Jane, or that he could possibly be attracted to her at all.

Mr. Knightly is going to play a key factor in the next volume, as far as the web of love is concerned. I think Mr. Knightly is really taken by Emma, and in the end, I predict that Emma and Mr. Knightly will find love with one another. However, I’m not sure Emma is mature enough to handle it.

Emma is parallel to the main plot of the movie clue. Emma is Cher, the rich popular girl and matchmaker, and Mr. Knightly is Josh, Cher’s step brother from a previous marriage who is kind and friendly, but puts Cher in her place. From this pre-requisite, I think the ending of the movie and the ending of the book will be similar, which I am happy about. I think Mr. Knightly will be perfect for Emma because he is not like the fake Mr. Elton, or the somewhat distant Frank Churchill. It will be interesting to see who will end up with who, and which characters ends get tied up.

Emma: A Space Odyssey?

Letter writing in novels was a sort of trend, likely because it was such a common form of communication then.  There is the “blessing of a female correspondent” (p195), and the format of journaling appears again in works throughout the 19th century like Frankenstein and Dracula.

Just as Emma’s use of nicknames (instead of the more proper Mr./Mrs.) would have been shocking at the time, Jane Austen’s writing was well ahead of her time.  The act of work as a distraction from despair was a common facet of Victorian times; the publication of Emma preceeded the Victorian age by 15 years.  Emma claims to be keeping herself busy and that she “must be in love” (p195).  This aligns with that common Victorian idea, yet also surpasses it.

Comparing one’s self to society was a paramount feature of the Victorian age, but much of other Victorian literature includes relations to this in journals: the Harkers lament their separation from each other in Dracula, Victor notes his personal horrors in his journal in Frankenstein.  Yet Austen does not follow this, at least in this section.  Emma typically voices her feelings aloud, and by her “saying” it instead of writing or merely going through the actions (i.e. working and distracting herself from her own feelings), it suggests that Austen has created a character to surpass the Victorian age, 15 years before it began.  She seems to mock the characteristics that later characterize society.  By this mocking, it’s as if Emma has time travelled past the Victorian age all together, and skipped the victimization of the highly conservative age.

Quirkiness in Emma

I was amused by Emma’s conclusion after Frank Churchill’s departure that she wasn’t in love with him. Yet, she considers the possibility for quite some time. I have a feeling that her match-making skills are, even regarding her own romantic interests (although she seems determined to have none), once again, off.

I am not sure what to make of her criticism of Jane Fairfax for being too reserved, because it seems that she is annoyed by Miss Bates for the exact opposite reason: her long-windedness. I’d be interested to read of a conversation between Miss Bates and Mrs. Elton to see who could speak the most about nothing in particular. I think Emma is merely jealous of Jane for her musical abilities.

In this novel I find that the most trivial points are fussed over. I laughed at the awe given to Mr. Weston for joining company after he’d been working all day.

I am curious to read about the interaction between Frank and his allegedly sick aunt in Volume III.

Emma

This story bothers me a little bit. Mainly because Emma seems like such a spoiled brat and she thinks that she should have everything her way. In order to get everything how she wants it she says that she will change it so that it fits her ways. Also, the way that she plays with peoples lives with her match-making is also disturbing because relationships are serious things and to her the people she is fixing up are like chess pieces. She makes certain moves with them and makes them react to one another. But the interesting thing about her match-making is that she has vowed to never marry so in a way it’s like she is scareed to be with someone herself so she just messes with everyone elses lives in order to please her own sick and twisted fantasy. I think that she needs a man in her life in order to be truely happy and for everyone else to be happy because then she would leave everyone else alone. But if she was to get a life of her own there would not be a story because the main story is Emma messing with everyone elses lives to suit her own happiness.

Lord Byron

From reading this text I think that it is an opinionated and comedic type of story. The way that he ends certain stanzas reveals his thoughts of writer like Wordsworth that he was probably afraid to say to the man himself. However, the way that he pokes fun at these other authors is quite funny. There are not too many other writers that have the courage to write things the same way and display their beliefs as openly as he does. But even though I think it is funny, I also think that it resembles The Prelude in certain ways. He discusses where he has traveled to and what he has done in his life time it shows how highly he thought of himself and how confident (or arragant) he was. It is easy to mistake his confidence for cockiness as well.

Dorothy and the Sublime

Dorothy Wordsworth’s poetry contains sublime moments that I think are much easier to identify and relate to than Williams. In her piece, Irregular Verses she has a subime moment saying, “There with my one dear Friend would dwell, Nor wish for aught beyond the dell. Alas!the cottage fled in air, The stremlet never flowed:-Yet did those visions pass away so gently that they seemed to stay, Though in our riper years we each pursued a different way.” She recalls what she dreamed for as a young girl, and has a sublime moment before the thoughts fade away. She discusses another sublime moment in Thoughts on My Sick-bed stating, “I thought of Nature’s loveliest scenes; And with Memory I was there.” When she is so debilitated and ill she enjoys her life through memories and her sublime moments.

     She makes her works more accessible to the average person by addressing the smallest form of the person- children. She learns to simplify her pieces in a way that I would argue William Wordsworth or Cooleridge might not be able to utilize. She discusses nature in a way that people can relate to in Floating Island. In this piece, she discusses the experience people may have with nature and how it relates to life which is much more easily read by the average person.

     She even writes poetry more accessible to the average person in Address to a Child because as children everyone has at one time or another experienced a fierce thunderstorm. She writes in a language that common people not only children could understand and relate to.

Rime of the Ancient Mariner

A lot of times reading something that is turgid or in a form different than I usually read makes it difficult for me to understand a piece. For instance, a while back I was reading The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock and it wasn’t until I saw a webcomic about the poem that I was really able to see what Eliot was going for. Along the same vein, Rime of the Ancient Mariner can be confusing. Though I wouldn’t consider myself a metalhead by any means, I remembered recently that Iron Maiden had a song of the same title. After looking into the lyrics, I noticed that it wasn’t simply an allusory title, but rather a reworking of the poem. This link takes you to those lyrics. If like me, you have problems envisioning certain works, perhaps looking at it from a different perspective will help you grasp the concepts and meaning as well.

Dorothy Wordsworth

The “insane” sister of William was the underappreciated writer of the family. Most of her life was spent with her brother and his writing counterpart Coleridge. She lived with them in Germany and wrote many great poems that most of the time were over looked because she was a female and because her brother was always in the spotlight as the established writer of the family. Furthermore, there were many historians that believed that the two of them had a slightly unuasual attraction that a brother and sister should not have for eachother. However, the work by both of them do not shine any light on the matter.

Much of her work was based off of her life in her journals that she kept while living with her brother and Coleridge. The Alfoxden Journal of her’s was a published journal of the accounts that took place while in that area. Her work was later given the respect that it deserved in the later half of her life but could be considered to have come a little too late.