Emma wants to be a good daughter and “she hope[s] she [is] not without a heart” (Austen 1815: 353). She helps people, for instance, she sent Mrs. and Miss Bates “the whole hind-quarter… There will be the leg to be salted... which is so very nice, and the loin to be dressed directly in any manner they like” (Austen 1815: 162). Claudia L. Johnson sees Emma as a one “who considers performance of untold acts of kindness a duty attached to her social position required no announcement or praise” (qtd. in Byrne 2004: 81). Another view on this is presented by Bernard J. Paris; he writes that Emma “is motivated in any of her relationships by her need to maintain the various components of her idealized image. As a result, she is almost always, to some extent, insincere” (1978: 82). In the film viewers can also notice how Emma tries to be good with everybody, she visits Bateses
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Another important moment of Emma’s change is when she realises “how wrong she has been to play with the feelings of others” (Jones 2002: 67). It appears when Harriet tells Emma that she is in love with Mr. Kightley, and not with Frank. This is the moment when Emma understands that she is herself in love with him:
Emma’s eyes were instantly withdrawn; and she sat silently meditating, in a fixed attitude, for a few minutes. A few minutes were sufficient for making her acquainted with her own heart… She saw it all with a clearness which had never blessed her before… How inconsiderate, how indelicate, how irrational, how unfeeling had been her conduct! What blindness, what madness, had led her on!.. Her mind was in all the perturbation that such a development of self, such a burst of threatening evil, such a confusion of sudden and perplexing emotions must create. (Austen 1815:
Another important moment of Emma’s change is when she realises “how wrong she has been to play with the feelings of others” (Jones 2002: 67). It appears when Harriet tells Emma that she is in love with Mr. Kightley, and not with Frank. This is the moment when Emma understands that she is herself in love with him:
Emma’s eyes were instantly withdrawn; and she sat silently meditating, in a fixed attitude, for a few minutes. A few minutes were sufficient for making her acquainted with her own heart… She saw it all with a clearness which had never blessed her before… How inconsiderate, how indelicate, how irrational, how unfeeling had been her conduct! What blindness, what madness, had led her on!.. Her mind was in all the perturbation that such a development of self, such a burst of threatening evil, such a confusion of sudden and perplexing emotions must create. (Austen 1815: