EMMA AND THE DEMOCRACY OF DESIRE
In Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, Ren? Girard shows how continental fiction from Cervantes to Proust repli? cates the tripartite structures of what he calls imitative desire.1 Love, for Girard, is always a triangle; the passion that possesses the great novelistic heroes and heroines?Madame de Cl?ves, Julien Sorel, Emma Bovary?is not the spontaneous impulse of one soul toward its double, but a mediated social response that fixes its object at the dictates of a third. Conspicuously absent from Girard's analysis of love in Western fiction is the English novel. Its great couples are star crossed, Heathcliff and Catherine lovers, whose passion negates society rather than developing within it. Even in the English social novelists?Austen, Eliot, Hardy?true love exists almost by definition in opposition to social convention. Sue and Jude, Ladislaw and Dorothea, Anne Eliot and Frederick Wentworth must win their happiness, if at all, in spite of the social constraints that separate them. Love, in English fiction, is the obverse of social intercourse rather than, as for Girard and the Europeans, its most complex and refined manifestation. But every generalization gener? ates its own contradictions. Jane Austen's last great comedy, Emma, belongs to the class of novels Girard designates as romanesque.2 Its ironic social game, so different from Austen's characteristic romantic comedy, evolves as Austen combines and recombines her characters in increasingly complex pat? terns of imitative desire. Like all Austen novels, Emma is a fable of love and marriage in which it is the business of the female characters to find husbands and the business of their male counterparts to serve as partners for the marriageable females. The works address deeper issues?the nature of the relationship between men and women, the possibility of personal happiness in a world of material values?but at the level of the r?cit, an Austen novel resembles a chess board on which the unattached characters are free to interchange themselves