Misreading Emma
Emma Woodhouse misreads the intentions, and the significance of the actions, of those around her in ways that reflect both her projects and her own acknowledged or unacknowledged desires. Moreover, Emma is innovative in its wide use of “free indirect style”: readers view the fictional events largely through a third-person narrative inflected by Emma’s consciousness of these events. A consequence, for most critics, is that the first-time receiver will have difficulty detecting Emma’s misreadings. Contrary to this view, this chapter argues that, far from deliberately obscuring details of the narrative in this way, Austen’s particular use of the free indirect style allows her to furnish the receiver with the clues necessary to see Emma as the misreader that she is. The first-time receiver is intended to register Emma’s misreadings, and one who fails to do so is themselves misreading Emma. Emma, so understood, bears on debates about the cognitive values of literature.