Doating on Faults in Jane Austen’s Emma

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the novel’s interest in powerless female characters and claims that through women’s lack the public experiences a communal loss. Emma famously attempts to repair the lack of socially dispossessed women. Engaging in a fantasy of making up for lack by marrying her friends off to wealthy men, Emma appears to embrace the reactionary side of fantasy, which attempts to escape the trauma of loss by emphasizing wholeness and full satisfaction. However, as psychoanalytic theory makes clear, fantasy has another function: it inadvertently brings the subject closer to the trauma of loss. While much of the novel’s action is focused on repairing women’s lack particularly by emphasizing the marriage plot, fantasy in the novel also leads to the insistent public encounter with loss, culminating in the Box Hill episode. The novel insists on an enjoyment in lack itself. Furthermore, for most critics, the marriage at the novel’s end between Knightley and Emma seems to function as a reactionary kind of fantasy resolution. This article, however, by focusing on the psychoanalytic concepts of fantasy and drive, emphasizes how the protagonists’ union is motivated by a desire for the experience of loss and the acknowledgment of social authority’s groundlessness.