Emma Woodhouse and the Gift of Humility

“I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up with any other.” - Emma, Jane Austen

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Emma Woodhouse is Jane Austen’s most realistic heroine. Cosseted, beautiful, and full of misplaced confidence, Emma polarizes readers two hundred years after Austen dubbed her a heroine “whom no one but myself will much like.”¹

Emma does not face the prospect of destitution or miserable spinsterhood like the protagonists in Pride and Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility, Persuasion, and Mansfield Park. Instead of facing societal challenges, Emma must face herself.

When her story begins, Emma Woodhouse is a selfish young woman who has lived twenty-one years with “very little to distress or vex her.”² Emma is isolated - she is home-educated in a small village where her only companions are her father and her governess, as her mother died long ago and her sister is married. Now that her governess is marrying, too, Emma faces a future with little companionship save that of her hypochondriac father and a few neighbors. It’s no wonder, then, that she starts meddling in the lives of others - Emma is bored, lonely, and, despite her protests to the contrary, searching for love.

One of the most compelling features of Emma is how universal its themes are. Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility are difficult to adapt in the modern era without significant changes to the plot. In the Anglophone world, sexual mores and the nature of marriage have changed dramatically in the past two hundred years. The main conflicts in Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility - and even Mansfield Park - are far less compelling in a world where premarital sex is socially accepted and women are able to financially support themselves.

But Emma, as we see in the film Clueless, translates rather easily to modern era. Selfish, silly young women will always exist, and the moral transformation of such young women will always be compelling.

I think Emma resembles Persuasion, which is another story that - while not adapted as often as Emma - seems almost as plausible today as it was two hundred years ago. Also like Persuasion, Emma is mostly a quiet novel, propelled forward less by dramatic events than by an internal transformation.

I have to confess that I love Emma Woodhouse and believe she is in the running with Fanny Price as Jane Austen’s least-understood heroine. Many decry Emma as a malicious “mean girl” without realizing that Emma is an extremely isolated young woman who has never attended school, let alone had a close friend, when her story begins. Many also miss the fact that Emma has cared for her father for years in the absence of her mother and sister. Emma has the advantages of beauty and wealth, but she is immature due to her lack of life experience. Her life has passed with little to trouble or vex her because very little has happened in her life. She has not even traveled far enough from home to see the ocean,³ and for most of Emma she plans to live at home and care for her father for the foreseeable future.

Selfish though she may be, Emma accepts the challenges in her life with very little complaint, and she is intensely loyal to her silly father.

I think some of the widespread disapproval of Emma stems from the realistic nature of her story. Though we are loath to admit it, most of us think too highly of ourselves. Like Emma, most of us are selfish and convinced of our good judgment.

A wise friend of mine who also happened to be a priest once told me, “to have humility, you must be humiliated.”

I did not like this at all. I had experienced unfair treatment and felt righteously angry, and I was telling my friend about it. A supervisor at work had scolded me in front of all my colleagues for something trivial, and I was both angry and embarrassed. Both emotions intensified after I talked with my priest - every human instinct encouraged me to disagree with my friend. I didn’t want to be the one who suffered in front of others. I didn’t want to look weak or stupid. In truth, I still don’t, though I am learning to accept that it is necessary.

Becoming humble is hard - perhaps the hardest journey any human being can undertake. That is part of why Emma continues to be relatable today. All of us lack humility. Emma holds up a mirror to us in a way that we dislike, because her story points us to difficult truths. Emma forces us to face the reality of our own foolishness.

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It’s also worth pointing out that Emma’s personality has many good facets. Emma says at one point, “I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up with any other.”⁴ While some may view this as evidence of Emma’s conceitedness, I think it shows that one can be humble and yet still recognize their inherent dignity.

Emma’s high expectations bode well for her choice of her future husband and demonstrate that her judgment, while not perfect, became far better when tempered by humility. While she at first admires the puckish and insouciant Frank Churchill, she eventually realizes that she is in love with a gentle, wise man who is her perfect match. Emma reflects at the end of the novel, while admiring the noble Mr. Knightley, that she has nothing to wish for except “to grow more worthy of him, whose intentions and judgment had been ever so superior to her own. Nothing, but that the lessons of her past folly might teach her humility and circumspection in future.”⁵

This honesty is part of what makes Emma so compelling - the fact she accepts her humiliation and concedes the superior judgment of another. There is a vulnerability at the heart of this story that is rare in literature. Emma’s transformation does mirror that of Elizabeth Bennet to some extent, as Lizzie experiences a brief infatuation with a caddish man before discovering his true nature, but Lizzie’s humiliation is less public and less total. Lizzie also has the advantage of being right about many of Darcy’s flaws when she first rejects him. Emma is right about very little when her story begins, so she must experience a greater humiliation than Lizzie.

When Mr. Knightley admonishes Emma to the point of tears for her bad behavior at Box Hill, we witness an invitation to humility. Modern culture encourages us to see humiliation as negative, so many view this incident as Emma’s righteous comeuppance instead of a gift. Emma receives an invitation to grow in virtue, and that growth leads to her union with a man who is her equal.

Considering all of this, I will continue to defend Emma Woodhouse even though she can seem difficult to love. Emma is an enchanting story, but it is also a moral lesson - one that is as sage and understated as it is universal.

1. Gillian Dooley, “My Fanny” and “A Heroine Whom No One but Myself Will Much Like”: Jane Austen and Her Heroines in the Chawton Novels,” Jane Austen Society of North America, Volume 38, No. 1 - Winter 2017, https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/vol38no1/dooley/.

2. Jane Austen, Emma, Chapter 1

3. “Come, come,” cried Emma, feeling this to be an unsafe subject, “I must beg you not to talk of the sea. It makes me envious and miserable;—I who have never seen it!” - Id., Chapter 12.

4. Id., Chapter 28.

5. Id.