《爱玛》中的婚姻与爱情

Marriage and Love in Emma

《爱玛》中的婚姻与爱情

(文学院英语系英语专业吴萌)

（学号:1999013201）

内容提要:本文旨在论证简·奥斯汀反映在其杰作《爱玛》中的婚姻与爱情观：美满相称的婚姻建构于成熟爱情，真诚体谅，经济保障和相当的社会地位基础之上。通过对小说中几对不同的爱情婚姻关系的分析，尤其是对主人公爱玛的爱情和婚姻分析，本文探讨了简·奥斯汀时代婚姻的社会，经济和心理基础以及婚姻在社会地位和经济保障方面，对于处于依附地位的女性阶层的重要意义。

关键词:婚姻，爱情，成熟爱情，门当户对，经济保障，社会地位

教师点评:本论文对英国19世纪著名女小说家简·奥斯汀的名著《爱玛》进行了较详细的分析。在熟读原著的基础上，论文作者探讨了《爱玛》中的几对婚姻及其经济、社会和心理基础，着重探讨了主人公爱玛的恋爱与婚姻，指出幸福的婚姻必须建立在成熟爱情、真诚理解、经济安全和社会稳定之基础上。本论文立论有据，论证有力，语言流畅，层次分明，逻辑性强，对于英语本科生来说，达到了较高水平。（点评教师：阮炜职称：教授）

Emma is the climax of Jane Austen’s genius and the only one of her novels that has for its title a person’s name. According to Mr. Lionel Trilling, ‘Of Jane Austen’s six great novels, Emma is surely the one that is most fully representative of its author.’ i Pride and Prejudice is of course more popular, however, Reginald Farrer compares its effect with that of Pride and Prejudice: ‘While twelve readings of Pride and Prejudice give you twelve periods of pleasure repeated, as many readings of Emma give you that pleasure, not repeated only, but squared and squared again with each perusal, till every fresh reading you feel anew that you never understood anything like the widening sum of its delights.’ ii

‘ I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like.’

--Jane Austen iii Emma stands apart from the other novels in at least one respect: whereas the heroines of the other novels are all to some extent disadvantaged in a worldly sense, Emma Woodhouse has every worldly advantage. She is “handsome, clever and rich”, and she has other advantage as well. One of them, since families are usually embarrassments in Jane Austen, but to Emma, it is a quite different case. The death of her mother happened too long ago even to be a sad memory, and her feeble father so dotes on her that he is like a child. Her elder sister, Isabella, is as gentle and pliable as Mr. Woodhouse, and lives far away. So is her former governess, Mrs. Weston, who has been as substitute mother of a kind, but she always indulged Emma rather than guided her. Thus, at the age of nearly twenty-one, Emma rules her household. There is no one in it (except Mr. Knightley) to challenge her strong will and good intelligence, and no one who does not love and admire her.

The Woodhouses are at the top of the social tree in their restricted neighbourhood, Highbury.

Though Emma is the queen of her local society and she has a high opinion of herself, her experience is actually limited. When the story begins, she is feeling particular isolated because her governess has just married a local gentleman, Mr. Weston. To fill her time she takes an interest in Harriet Smith, a young woman from the local boarding school, persuading her to refuse an offer of marriage from a respectable farmer, Robert Martin. Instead, Emma decides to engineer a match between Harriet and the local clergyman, Mr. Elton. Her scheme collapses, and Mr. Elton turns out to be not in love with Harriet but with Emma herself. When Emma refuses his proposal, he goes to Bath, and he returns with a brash, domineering woman as his wife.

Then two new figures arrives in Highbury: Jane Fairfax, the poor niece of Miss Bates, a single, well-intentioned but rather talkative and irritating old woman, and Frank Churchill, the son of Mr. Weston. Emma for a while believes herself to be in love with Frank Churchill, and tells him about her speculation that Jane Fairfax has come to Highbury to escape an emotional commitment to a married man. In various ways, Emma is made aware of her misjudgements: she is rude to Miss Bates and rebuked by Mr. Knightley; Harriet confesses that she is in love with Mr. Knightley, making Emma realize that she loves him herself; and it is revealed that Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax have been secretly engaged for some time. In the end, both Harriet and Emma marry the appropriate man: Robert Martin proposes again to Harriet, Emma and Mr. Knightley acknowledge their love to each other and they look forward to a married life, which is of ‘perfect happiness’.

The setting of Emma, like Jane Austen’s other novels, is restricted, rarely moving outside the confines of a community which is little more than a large village. The number of characters is limited, and the social range also. Exciting incidents are in short supply; among the most dramatic episodes in the book are the scenes where one young lady is frightened by meeting some gypsies, and another young lady is rude to an older woman. The mysteries seem trivial: there’s such questions as ‘Who has sent Jane Fairfax a piano?’ and ‘Why does Jane walk to the post office in the rain?’

However, to assume that these qualities damage the interest and significance of the novel is a fallacy, which confuses smallness with narrowness. Jane Austen’s limitation is self-imposed. To a niece who was trying to write a novel she said in a letter: ‘ You are now collecting your People delightfully, getting them exactly into such a spot as is the delight of my life ; …three or four Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on’, iv and this is close to her own case in Emma. When she was invited to write a novel with clergyman as the hero, she wrote: ‘ I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress’.v Though we could only take it as modest statement ( actually , she was quite widely read ) , it does indicate that she is against attempting anything that she was not confident to manage to her own satisfaction.

Furthermore she compared her work to that of the miniaturist, referring to ‘the little bit ( two inches wide ) of Ivory on which I work so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour’.vi But a good miniature is certainly better than a bad oil painting that covers an entire wall. And in any case, her novels are not only skilful miniatures: it is the nature of the novel that small things can imply great issues, and a novel restricted in scope, may stand as a microcosm, reflecting the universal situation and themes. For instance, when Emma is rude to Miss Bates, the matter is not trivial, and Mr. Knightley, the wisest character in the book, does not treat it as trivial. Important questions of human and social relationships are involved.

There are two themes of Emma, one is growing up, the other is marriage and love. Though