Social Norms In Jane Austen's Emma

The main character is boy crazy. She fell in love with the idea of a man without really knowing him, she saw his portrait and knew someone that was related to him and she decided that she wanted to be with him. When he finally tells her that he is not able to be with anyone because he will lose his fortune unless he stays unmarried she starts to leave him alone. She does not completely leave him alone until she finds out that he is already married. At this point she decides to be with a man that she does not really care for but that has been fascinated by her over the last little while and is willing to marry her. So Emma does decide to be with this man since it is inappropriate for women of a certain age to not be married, at this point a …show more content…
However according to the social norms of the time only one of these women was able to adjust to the norms that society expected of her. Harriet was able to get the life that she had always wanted. In his work Burke has mentioned that women were meant to conform to the social norms and men were the ones that were meant to go out in the world and deal with everything and women were meant to obey the men in their lives since it was what was best for them. If he were to have read these two books he would have continued to believe in what he did since the only one that conforms to th3e norms that he expected ended up with a good life in the …show more content…
Although she did pursue a man when she was not supposed to she ended up marrying a man that wanted to be with her and she was able to live the life she wanted however it did not turn out exactly as planned. Emma was never able to become a mother with her husband and then when he passed (did he?) she ended up getting custody of a child that was never hers to take care of. She got to live a life that was not completely horrible however it is not the type of life a woman at the time would be proud to have lived since it did not follow the social norms of the