Emma: Volume 2: Chapter 13 скачать в хорошем качестве

Emma: Volume 2: Chapter 13

In Volume 2, Chapter 13, Austen shows Emma settling into a self-pleasing kind of “love” that is more performance than surrender. Emma insists she is in love with Frank Churchill, but the chapter steadily proves her feelings are measured, controllable, and—most importantly—compatible with her fixed plan never to marry. She enjoys thinking about Frank, enjoys hearing him discussed, and enjoys imagining witty “scenes” of attachment, yet every fantasy ends the same way: she refuses him. That discovery becomes Emma’s private evidence that her love is not deep, because real passion would demand the language of sacrifice, and she cannot honestly supply it. Austen makes this self-diagnosis both comic and revealing: Emma is trying to experience love without risk, intensity, or consequence. Frank’s letter to Mrs. Weston briefly shakes Emma’s confidence in her own indifference. It is long, lively, affectionate, and respectful—written with real warmth for Mrs. Weston—and it contains just enough careful reference to Highbury to suggest how strongly Frank feels the loss of it. Emma is pleased to see her own name appear with flattering ease, and she reads meaning even into a small postscript about Harriet (“Miss Woodhouse’s beautiful little friend”). Yet the lasting result is not a stronger attachment, but a stronger certainty of refusal. The letter stimulates Emma’s vanity more than her heart: she can admire the writer without needing him, and she concludes he must learn to do without her. That conclusion immediately breeds a new “scheme,” and Austen makes the pattern unmistakable: when Emma feels any emotional ambiguity, she converts it into matchmaking. Frank’s mention of Harriet triggers Emma’s idea that Harriet might replace her in his affections. Emma tells herself she must not dwell on it—yet she clearly does, because it offers the perfect solution: Frank’s feelings can be redirected, Harriet can be elevated, and Emma can keep her independence while still “arranging” happiness. It is the same controlling impulse that earlier drove the Elton disaster, just dressed now in the language of “disinterested friendship.” The chapter then swings back to the real emotional problem Emma cannot redesign: Mr. Elton’s return, now with a bride. Frank’s disappearance allows the old wound to reassert itself in Highbury conversation, and Harriet’s fragile composure collapses into agitation and obsession. Emma’s response is revealingly complicated. She feels genuine responsibility—because the Elton delusion was “all my doing”—but she is also weary of comforting Harriet without results. Austen captures the emotional labour of friendship here: Emma soothes, reasons, and redirects, only to watch Harriet return to the same distress within minutes. Emma finally breaks through by shifting from logic to feeling. Instead of arguing propriety, she makes Harriet’s fixation a moral reproach to Emma herself: Harriet’s continued suffering becomes evidence of Emma’s past misguidance. This reframing works because Harriet is governed more by affection than by principle; the fear of seeming ungrateful to Emma jolts her into better self-command. Harriet’s grateful outpouring then produces one of Emma’s most important (and most flawed) reflections in the novel: Emma exalts “tenderness of heart” above “clearness of head.” She praises Harriet’s warmth as socially irresistible and wife-worthy, while dismissing Jane Fairfax’s reserve as coldness. The irony is sharp. Emma is correct that warmth attracts, but she uses this truth to comfort herself, to justify her preferences, and to elevate Harriet largely as an instrument in her own emotional and social designs. By the end, the chapter leaves Emma in a dangerous confidence. She believes she understands love because she can moderate it; she believes she understands character because she prefers warmth; and she believes she has learned from her mistake with Elton—yet her mind is already sliding back into the same habit of arranging other people’s hearts for outcomes that suit her. Austen’s achievement is to make Emma sympathetic in the very moment she remains most self-deceiving.