Derrida, Nationalism, and Jane Austen’s Emma

Abstract

ABSTRACT Jacques Derrida’s discussion of the parergon provides a way of understanding the thematic interests and structural peculiarities of Emma. The most striking of these peculiarities is the novel’s resistance to its protagonist’s pre-eminence: Emma repeatedly retracts and reasserts Emma as heroine, presenting her by turns as a parergon and an ergon. The concept of the parergon gives purchase on how artworks, including novels, attempt to distinguish their insides from their outsides—to distinguish what is necessary or intrinsic to the work from what is dispensable or extrinsic. Nationalist ideology is both a way of managing relations between insides and outsides and a way of dissimulating their mutual contamination. Representing human characters as parerga, Emma ironically demystifies the nationalist ideology that it sometimes evokes. Austen shrewdly exposes the bad faith of the novel’s Francophobic gestures, which usually relate to conflicts between Frank Churchill and George Knightley, but also inform Emma herself. Austen’s demystification of English nationalism becomes most conspicuous in her multilingual wordplay and in her description of the visit to Donwell Abbey.