A Character Analysis Of Jane Austen's Emma

Mentors and Pupils: A Character Analysis

To be a mentor is to hold influence over a person’s actions or education. Overall, “Emma” is a novel about the influence that people hold over each other, and how that influence can affect people. Conflict is built by different characters who view themselves as mentors struggling to assert their opinions over others and pupil characters who accept their mentor’s opinions without bothering to form their own.

Emma Woodhouse tries to use her influence to manipulate everyone around to her likings, and she only accepts the advice of mentors who agree with her. Emma knows that she is clever, and, having grown up as the smartest person among in Hartfield, she is continually being praised for her wit. As Mr. Knightley told Mrs. Weston, “Considering how very handsome she is, appears to be little occupied with it; her vanity lies another way” (33). She believes herself to be in the right without considering any other possibilities, or she rationalizes those possibilities away. More often than not, she is wrong.

Emma’s greatest pupil, the

They are ignored by the characters, not by Jane Austen. Harriet actually lives at a school, yet she is depicted as intellectually inferior to nearly every other character. Mr. Knightley says, “But I have done with expecting any course of steady reading from Emma,” yet Emma is depicted as one of the smartest characters in the book. This contrast is, of course, because book-smarts are not the type of intelligence valued in Hartfield. Jane Austen makes a point of how the people of high society prefer wit to education by including an entire chapter on Emma and Harriet’s decision to make a book of charades rather than read books (57-69). Riddles are fun and intellectually challenging, but they have nothing to do with the sort of education that one would get at a