The woman, the woman, the gypsies, and England: Harriet Smith's national role.(Critical Essay)

Austen's Emma captures a culture in transition; Highbury may be a content society based upon traditional civic power structures, but it is also a community experiencing definite uncertainty as England becomes a modern state. Critics of Emma have traditionally viewed Harriet Smith as a mechanism for the heroine's growth and development, but Austen also presents the anonymous parlor boarder as an integral component of Highbury's growth. The novelist emphasizes the great concern of Knightley and Emma, Highbury's civic leaders, for Harriet; indeed, the narrative traces the efforts of Knightley and Emma to secure Harriet's position in England's shifting society. Austen highlights Harriet's significance to the nation following her encounter with a band of gypsies. This scene allows the novelist to place Harriet, an anonymous fair-skinned, blue-eyed young woman, in direct contact with the gypsies, whom English culture understands as the quintessential dark-skinned outsiders. In the chapters following this event, Emma and Knightley work to re-integrate Harriet into traditional English society; Knightley carefully instructs her in the ancestral agrarian culture of Donwell Abbey, and Emma arranges for Harriet to visit the nation's capital. Harriet eventually accepts a stable position in the England's national community and assumes an important role as the future reproducer of the nation's population.

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"But when Emma presumes to look down on the young farmer, Robert Martin, and undertakes to keep little Harriet Smith from marrying him, she makes a truly serious mistake. It is a mistake of nothing less than national import." (Trilling, "Emma")

"The principle topic in Emma ... is England, England's weaknesses, the dangers inherent in those weaknesses, and the choices that might still be made to secure the nation's future." (Smith, "Politics and Religion in Jane Austen's Emma")

"In post-French revolution Europe, women were incorporated ... into the nation-state not directly as citizens, but only indirectly, through men. ... For women, citizenship in the nation was mediated by the marriage relation within the family." (McClintock, Becoming National: A Reader)

"She would notice her; she would improve her; she would detach her from her bad acquaintance; and introduce her to good society; she would form her opinions and manners." (Austen, Emma)

Critics of Emma (1816), have long treated Harriet Smith as a prominent feature of the heroine s educational development; such traditional readings maintain that Emma must realize the error of her egotistical attempt to improve the young woman in order to understand herself and her world properly. (1) In addition, few have denied Lionel Trilling's claim that Austen's text is a work "touched--lightly but quite certainly--by