The Portrayal Of Childlike Nature In Jane Austen's 'Emma'

Big girls don’t cry. While growing up one is taught that one grows less emotional with age, less of a “crybaby.” The title character of Jane Austen’s Emma believes that logic as well. Believing that as long as she doesn’t cry she can convince everyone that she is a big girl. However, it takes a lot more than some dry eyes to fool everyone into believing that she is indeed all grown-up. Austen unmasks Emma’s by revealing Emma’s childlike nature buried beneath her mature exterior through Emma’s reaction towards Frank Churchill saving Harriet from a band of gypsies.
Austen first shows Emma’s childlike nature through her romanticizing of the incident between Frank and Harriet. By beginning with Emma describing Harriet’s near mugging as an “adventure.” …show more content…
The exclamatory sentence at the beginning of the paragraph, “It was a very extraordinary thing!”, serves to draw the reader’s attention, particularly to one word: “extraordinary”. Like “adventure”, “extraordinary” carries a connotation of wonder and magic, just like in a fairy tale. The continued whimsical tone emphasizes how strong Emma’s childishness is; no matter how much she tries to hide it, it will always be there. However, unlike in the previous paragraph, Austen portrays Emma differently by having her embrace the crack in her mature façade. By repeating that the incident is something that “had [never] occurred before” over and over, Emma emphasizes that this is so extraordinary, so unusual that it must be spectacular. Further, Austen’s use of parallelism to describe Harriet as a fairy tale heroine being saved by her hero dramatizes the situation and emphasizes each of the words in the sentence. Emphasis on each of the nouns: “her terror, her naivete, her fervor.” heightens the terror-stricken and drawn-out tone of the …show more content…
Austen shows Emma’s return to her mature façade through the switch from active voice to passive voice. Phrases such as, “she had had enough” sound like a “mathematician” rather than “an imaginist”. Passive voice provides a more relaxed, grounded tone as opposed to the livelier tone from the earlier paragraphs. The switch in tone also mirrors the actions being described. As opposed to joyful descriptions that used active voice along with exclamatory sentences, these passive voice, declarative sentences explain carefully thought out choices of action. Along with the tone, sentence length also marks the change from joyful, youthful Emma to reserved, mature Emma. While Emma detailed the events of Harriet’s mugging the sentences were long and winding, almost like she was rambling; some thoughts are merely connected with a hyphen, mirroring the hectic train of thought of a small child. In contrast, Emma’s sentences get much shorter and to the point as she returns to her mature façade. Rather than long ramblings, the sentences are now short instructions with no embellishment. Furthermore, the placement of this winding down of emotions right before the end of the passage shows Emma’s return to hiding behind her mask: her return to