Content area
Full Text
Jane Austen's Emma (1816) identifies its heroine as "handsome, clever, and rich" and as "first in consequence" in her village of Highbury.1 Despite these circumstances, Emma is friendless. She is well liked by all of the novel's characters but intimate with none until the marriage plot intervenes in the final pages to match her with Mr. Knightley. Her marriage is as close as Emma gets to friendship. Emma shows that a woman could better fulfill the goals of friendship as the eighteenth century defined it through companionate marriage than through friendship itself. Emma turns to Mr. Knightley after she has tried and failed to form friendships elsewhere because only marriage can reconcile the contradictions of friendship. It is the only relationship in which the social hierarchy supports the hierarchy inherent in friendship, and it allows both the goals of heteronormativity and the goals of sentimental subjectivity to be served. Yet the novel's reversion to the marriage plot offers little reassurance that marriage is an adequate substitute for friendship. Emma honors ideal friendship only in the breach-never in the observance-and does so most strikingly when marriage moves in to fill that breach. The novel thus forecloses the possibility of friendship and, in doing so, highlights friendship's impossibility.
Although writers such as Samuel Richardson, Hester Chapone, and Sarah Scott spent the eighteenth century redefining marriage by comparing it to friendship, friendship itself lacked a settled definition and value. Thus, Emma's confusion about friendship mirrors the confusion expressed by eighteenth-century theorists and authors. The novel establishes early Emma's need for a friend: an equal in age, intellect, and social standing with whom to share both entertainment and confidences. It also dwells throughout on her ill-suitedness as a friend. Emma's friendlessness is a consequence of her circumstances, but it also exemplifies a persistent cultural uncertainty about friendship in general and women's friendship in particular. And while her situation is examined in the most depth, she is not the only character who remains lonely in Highbury society. The novel presents multiple characters who are separated as much by social position as by differences in personality. Emma thereby suggests that fine social gradations keep prospective friends apart, isolating the most admirable people most problematically.2 Friendship, ideally an egalitarian relationship, cannot thrive...