If anyone has watched the Alicia Silverstone movie,
“Clueless,” then they’ve seen an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. Emma Woodhouse is a daydreamer who tends to
live in her own little world of illusions.
One of those illusions is that she’s a brilliant match-maker. She lives in Highbury, outside of London,
but most of the novel focuses upon the social structure and interactions of the
novel’s characters. She’s beautiful, conceited
and domineering, but refuses to marry,
instead wanting to care for her father –
who tends to fantasize as much as his daughter, only his revolve around being
sick all the
time when he isn’t. When
she decides that she’s going to get people to
marry one another, she goes into it headlong. She tries to bring Harriet
Smith and Philip Elton, a clergyman, together, but instead he proposes to Emma
– which wasn’t her intention in the least, given she isn’t in
love with him. Extricating herself from that mess and
apparently not learning her lesson, she then believes that Frank Churchill, the
adopted son of the wealthiest family in Highbury, who is deceitful and greedy
and uses Emma’s delusion to keep his
engagement to penniless Jane Fairfax a
secret, is in love with her. She thinks
she’s in love with him for a time, but remains steadfast in her decision not to
marry and to instead see happiness for her associates. She tries to set him up with Harriet Smith as
a result; however, once the truth of Frank’s engagement becomes known, Emma is
stunned to learn that Harriet has wanted George Knightley all along. It’s this confession to Emma that makes Emma
realize she actually loves her long-time friend, the brother of her sister’s
husband, John Knightley. Harriet winds
up married to a man she’d dismissed out of hand by the name of Mr. Martin. George Knightley is the man who gently shows
Emma how selfish and rude she is when he sees her behavior amongst her friends,
who helps her mature as a result of that realization, and who ultimately
marries her out of as much love for her as she has for him.
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