FROM LANDSCAPES TO MINDSCAPES: ECOCRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE SENSE OF PLACE IN JANE AUSTEN’S EMMA

Abstract

This article aims to analyze Jane Austen’s Emma (1816) with a specialized interest in environmental consciousness and place-based identities, presented in the novel, through a close textual analysis of the relationship between the characters and their environment. Accordingly, it discusses the potential of the sense of place to invoke certain environmental values through which the readers could appreciate the interdependent relationship between human beings and their natural surroundings. To this end, it first discusses how Austen’s “environmental imagination” (to use Lawrence Buell’s term) works through Emma to draw a parallelism between the environment in which she grew up as a child, that is, Steventon, and her fictional environment that she created for this specific novel, Highbury. The reflections of her environmental imagination are particularly worth revisiting in line of the environmental ethics philosopher Jim Cheney’s idea of the parallelism between “landscapes and mindscapes” and Holmes Rolston III’s “storied residences”. These two theorists similarly suggest that landscapes are directly or indirectly reflected through mindscapes, and narrative is the most convenient mode to contextualize this parallelism. Building on these theoretical insights, this article displays how Austen is a keen observer of her natural surroundings but also argues that there is a place-based approach in her characters that potentially offer an environmental consciousness for the reader in Emma, explored within the special light of the ecocritical understanding of place.