I haven't re-read Emma in a long time. Your thoughts on the novel help to motivate. Emma's charm masks for many readers, I think, her profound transformation. This is most pronounced in film and TV productions, where it's easy to overlook moral failure when your captivated by an excellent performance that puts a premium on Emma the charmer. We'd like to see her moral failures (and ours) as foibles. Evelyn Waugh, in Brideshead Revisited , had one of his extreme characters comment that "charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art..." Extreme, but somehow brings Emma to mind. I'm so glad she got over it, lol.
Yes that quotation from Brideshead Revisited is very apt! I am a huge fan of Evelyn Waugh, and plan to make a video comparing Austen and Waugh at some point in the future! I think they're both masters of humour and style and they don't get compared often enough!
@@beatrixscudeler That would make a great monograph: Waugh the artist/moralist/satirist in an age of moral flux; Austen, the artist as moralist in an age of apparent moral consensus, but undergoing profound transition. How would they interact at a weekend country house retreat? Lol....
Emma feels very ADHD/gifted kid to me, so that's part of why I do genuinely like her throughout the book. There's a bit about her having the "misfortune" of understanding things as a kid that her older sister struggled to understand, and Mr. Knightley's reference to her well-chosen lists of improving literature that she never gets around to reading. Her disastrous misinterpretations of other people's behavior feel plausible for someone who understands social cues intellectually, but not necessarily emotionally. The way she tries to talk herself into falling in love with Frank Churchill is very much in that line; she likes him socially, finds the match poetically apt, and thinks she ought to have the experience of being in love at some point. And after she and Harriet make a charity visit together, Emma makes the point that there's no utility to feeling bad for other people, except to the extent that it motivates you to help. If you've already helped, continuing to feel bad does no one any good. I feel like Emma has generally good intentions from day one, but fails to understand the consequences of her actions. She's not intuitively good at understanding other perspectives, and she's very sheltered. Especially important in reference to the Miss Bates quip, she's accustomed to Mr. Knightley using dry humor to call her out for minor personal failings (even in front of her father.) It's stated that she hasn't, up to the beginning of the book, had much social contact with other people. Her circle comprises dad, governess, sister, Knightleys... and everyone else is held at some degree of distance because of class. She's used to playfully sniping back and forth with Mr. Knightley with no consequences.
When I watched Emma 2009 and read the novel I almost cried. Austen gets it. She GETS it. Having undergone a moral transformation in the past four years, I felt a kinship to Emma and to Austen for writing her. Emma is my favorite novel and Emma 2009 is my favorite version (2020 is entertaining, but because it's a feature film - it can't really depict the moral development well). I really am enjoying your channel!
I'm so glad you're enjoying my channel! It's my little passion project... The novel is just a masterpiece. Emma 2009 is great and because it's longer than the 2020 film it has more space for Emma's development and moral transformation, you're right. The 2020 version for me excels in humour and sheer aesthetic pleasure 😍
