Jane Austen’s Emma, Adam Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’, market capitalism and free-indirect discourse.

Abstract

Jane Austen’s Emma is famous for being among the earliest and most sophisticated expositions of free-indirect discourse which is used to represent ironically a match-making heroine of 21 years whose judgements are usually faulty. It is also famous as a brilliant courtship romance or love story, much imitated in recent years. Less often noticed is that it is a fiercely satiric comedy about the rise of the middle class and the penetration of genteel English society with the language and values of market capitalism. Drawing inspiration from John Bender’s Imagining the Penitentiary and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation this essay proposes that the author’s use of free-indirect discourse constructs Emma as a subject who does not comprehend her own subjectivity, and whose need to be taught to see herself objectively, thanks to the tutelage of Mr. Knightley, opens a paradox in which the subject and its subjectivity need to comprehend themselves objectively as exchangeable objects within a capitalist market society. This paradox is identified as coming to prominence in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, and, for those who refuse to learn regulation, in the Panopticon penitentiary advocated by Jeremy Bentham.