For Monday: Emma, Chapters 24-32 & Paper #3

The 2009 BBC Emma, which is well worth watching; there are four versions currently available, from the 80's, 90's, 00's, and 20's. 

NOTE: The Paper #3 assignment is at the bottom of this post, so if you missed class on Friday, be sure to review it. I'll give you a hard copy on Monday.

Answer two of the following: 

Q1. How does Frank Churchill ingratiate himself with Emma throughout these chapters? Is this meant to be romantic, the way any two characters fall in love in a novel? Or does the narrator gently push against this in some way? Are we meant to believe in him (as Emma does), or suspect him (as Knightley does)? 

Q2. Jane Fairfax is a peripheral character in these chapters, seen only in glimpses; yet Austen is careful to lay great weight on these moments.  What are we made to see in her brief interactions with Frank, Emma, and Miss Bates?  What kind of character is she?  Do we agree with Emma’s comment, “this amiable, upright, perfect Jane Fairfax was apparently cherishing very reprehensible feelings”? 

Q3: Find a passage where the narrator employs "free indirect discourse" (see the paper assignment below that follows for a definition) in the novel. How does she incorporate other voices into her narration, and why do you think she does this? What affect does it have to hear the voices through her voice, rather than through their own?

Q4: Why is Emma's first impressions of Mrs. Elton--like Jane's--so unfavorable? How does she form a judgment of her even before she sees her, and how does the impression worsen once they actually meet? What lies behind her dislike? Is it merely jealousy and competition? Or we are meant to dislike her, too? 

Paper #3: The Author Behind the Curtain

From M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms:

“The grammar of narration is the analysis of special grammatical uses that are characteristic of fictional narratives…that mis, words and phrases such as “now,” “then,” “here,” and “there,” “today,” “last week,” as well as personal pronouns and some tenses of verbs—whose reference depends on the particular speaker and his or her position in space and time. In many narratives, usually in a way not explicitly noted by the reader, the references of such terms constantly shift or merge, as the narration moves from the narrator, by whom the events are told in the past tense to a character in the narration, for whom the action is present.

 Another notable grammatical usage in narration has been called free indirect discourse or “represented speech and thought.” These terms refer to the way, in many narratives, that the reports of what a character says and thinks shifts in pronouns, adverbs, tense, and grammatical mode, as we move—or sometimes hover—between the directed narrated representation of these events as they occur to the character and the indirect representation of such events by the narrator of the story. Thus, a direct representation, “He thought, ‘I will see her home now, and may then stop at my mother’s,’” might shift to “He thought that he would see her home and then maybe stop at his mother’s.”

 PROMPT: For this assignment, I want you to examine a short passage in Emma where the narrator is not just telling us what is happening, but is inserting her own ideas into the narrative and/or appropriating the voices of her characters (often satirically) to make her points. How is she using the tools of her trade, including things like “free indirect discourse” to tell the story behind the story? Since she is writing in the present, and her characters exist in the past, how does this passage play with the space in-between the two?

CLOSE READ this passage (it can be a paragraph or about a page long, but not much longer) to explain how Austen is artfully using narration to say things without seeming to say them, and to challenge how we read or interpret the story without the characters being aware of it. Do you think this is fair? Is it too heavy-handed? Too satirical? Or does it help explain the ‘gray areas’ of the text which the characters often can’t express or are otherwise taboo? Why would the book lose something important without this passage (and others like it), and why do you think authors refrain from this kind of narration today?

NO PAGE LIMIT…BUT YOU MUST CLOSE READ: DON’T JUST SUMMARIZE!

DUE NEXT FRIDAY IN-CLASS!