Selfies with Emma: Jane Austen’s Social Media

Abstract

This essay identifies a series of shared media—drawings, riddles, alphabets, etc.—in Jane Austen’s Emma that generate social networks by establishing public forums for intersubjectivity. These narrative media allow characters to broadcast their own fantasies about the community while refracting the interiorities of others. Observing this trend, I suggest that narrative media in the novel enable characters to participate in something like free indirect discourse (FID) alongside Austen’s narrator, making authorship an extension of sociability. My claim is that social media in the novel both represent and stage the struggle for voice and narrative power between Emma and the novel’s minor characters. Bringing together narrative theory, network theory, and contemporary writings about social media, I propose that we are now in a better position to sharpen our understanding of FID in Austen’s late fiction because of our literacy in social media technologies and our increasing sensitivity to virtual storytelling.