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Cristine Faiello
Dr. Kathleen Oliver
Jane Austen Literature
April 14, 2016
Teacher and Pupil: Emma and Jane Austen’s Bildungsroman
Bildungsroman, or the novel of education, surfaced in nineteenth-century
England, a time when “the individual [was] no longer conceived of as static, a time when
process and the inner life [became] valued over prescribed social roles” (Baruch 338).
However, preceding this type of novel were educational treatises and conduct books,
especially geared towards women, dominated the literary scene. Rather than focusing on
moral and psychological development, these works focused on outward behavior,
manners, and traditional educational tenets—in essence, these books taught woman how
to secure a husband and raise a family. Hence, it seems unlikely that the masculine
concept of bildung, derived from the German literary tradition of the male hero- quest,
would translate into the English culture through works such as Jane Austen’s Emma.
However, forerunners such as Clara Reeve paved the way for Austen through her writing.
For instance, The Progress of Romance (1785) began to destabilize the stagnant
expectations for women’s literature by beginning to examine the internal alongside the
external while still adhering to the linear, historical model that prevailed at the time.
Austen followed Reeve’s lead and progressed the novel beyond the straight facts of
history into a fine web of fiction that developed the spiritual journey of her heroines and,
in essence, perpetuated the newly emerging female bildungsroman. Emma serves as a
prototype of this new type of literature. Edgar F. Shannon says: “[this] book is Jane

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Austen’s masterpiece because she has accomplished the hazardous feat of portraying and
resolving disharmony deriving entirely from within the heroine herself” (650). In other
words, Austen has deconstructed the proper fiction woman, revealing her improper
conduct, lack of restraint, failed education, and hubris-- a woman whom the conduct
books and the readers of her time would dislike-- in order to illustrate her growth in a
way that would not only entice her readers but instruct them alongside the heroine.
Wendy Moffat in “Identifying with Emma: Some problems for the Feminist Reader”
says: “by placing a protagonist whom readers must resist at the center of a novel of moral
instruction, Austen points up the tension inherent in the relationship between such novels
and their audience” (50). Instruction, education, and growth form the foundation of this
novel but not in a traditional sense. Austen’s blurring of the lines between tutor and pupil
establishes a criticism of the traditional educational system of her day that denied women
the opportunity of learning by experience, a heuristic process that she allows Emma to
undertake and invites the reader to take as well; it is the journey of the female bildung.
Denise Kohn says that one of the “greatest achievements in Emma is that she
writes a novel of education…that instructs her readers to deconstruct the pervasive
images of ‘lady hood’ created by her period’s conduct-book writers” (45). Why Austen
chose to do this holds importance as well as how she accomplished it. Kohn goes on to
say: “Emma redefines female ideas,” (46) and this explains why she remains such a
progressive character. Austen makes no qualms about creating a distinctive new type of
protagonist, one who is spoiled and naïve, as the opening paragraph reveals. Moreover,
Emma proves herself to be above education by making herself an equal of Miss Taylor,
her governess. By relegating her teacher to the position of friend, Emma’s educational

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experience can be surmised as one that lacks much. In fact, Austen says that although
Emma esteems her tutor’s judgment, she is chiefly directed by her own (Austen 5). Her
lack of recognition for the importance of a proper instruction also reveals her immaturity.
Emma has a lot of room for growth but as of yet, life has not demanded it of her. The
irony is that the reader expects a novel of education (judging by the title) but immediately
meets a protagonist who is opposed to it. Austen’s contrary character begins to delineate
between the type of education that Austen wishes to criticize and that which she
condones; she ensures the reader that this will not be a typical bildung journey but a
deeply internal one that embraces moral growth over intellectual progress. Moreover,
“[Austen] criticizes…the intellectual, sententious, vocal, and educative woman who
represents [the] kind of writer which she herself chooses not to become”(Bagchi par. 34).
In order for Austen to reveal to us what this approved education will entail and who
Emma will become, she must first demonstrate her shortcomings and need for growth.
Eugene Goodheart outlines much of Emma’s flawed character in his article
“Emma: Jane Austen’s Errant Heroine.” He says: “Emma is willful, manipulative, an
arranger or rather a misarranger of other people’s lives” (589). There is no difficulty in
surmising Austen did not intend to hide Emma’s flaws. However, her more destructive
faults linger below the text: she’s an imaginist who is disassociated from reality. After all,
she had lived over twenty years within the confines of Highbury, barely exploring the
world around her. This naivety leads to her incapacity for proper judgment and “if the
capacity for accurate interpretation is a sign of intelligence, Emma seems to fail…again
and again” (Goodheart 590). So, if Emma resists instruction and appears unintelligent,
growth seems questionable if not unrealistic from the onset of the novel. Therefore, the

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reader forms an idea of her based on her merits or lack thereof—an impression that
Austen desires to create and notions she hopes her reader will form, thus beginning the
their education as well. Just as Emma fancies certain things about other people, the reader
forms certain ideas about her.
Despite Emma’s drawbacks, she does have a knack for one thing: matchmaking;
although, she has only successfully attempted it one time and it could have been, as Mr.
Knightly considers, mere luck. He says: “why do you talk of success? where is your
merit? —what are you proud of? —you made a lucky guess; and that is all that can be
said” (Austen 11). But he fails to realize that this business has invoked Emma’s sense of
worth and sense of self where every other past-time has failed; it is the beginning of her
quest for understanding and development or “experiments in human relationships which
in their failures lead to discoveries about where the truth and happiness of a genuine
relationship is to be found” (Goodheart 598). Up until this point, Emma has received little
to no guidance in this area, especially because, like many characters in this novel, she
lacks a mother who traditionally provides this instruction to her children. True, she had
Miss Taylor, but Austen makes the point that, regarding certain instruction, mothers are
not easily replaced. Mr. Knightly himself concurs, telling Miss Taylor (now Mrs.
Weston) that she better fits the role of wife than governess, especially to Emma who “in
her mother…lost the only person able to cope with her” (Austen 30). This novel contains
many orphaned and semi-orphaned characters: Harriet, Frank, Jane, and Emma. Not
coincidentally, these are the characters that find themselves most in need of the lessons
that Austen has in store—lessons that traditional education has failed to provide. Harriet
must learn her place in society, Frank must learn to be honest and forthright, Jane must

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learn to assert herself to protect her reputation, and Emma must learn to separate fiction
from reality. Therefore, the “orphans” take it upon themselves to enter into an
“education” with each other, each taking on the role of both instructor and pupil at
various times throughout the novel.
Emma not only takes on the role of teacher by usurping Miss Taylor’s role in the
formation of her own education and but also by taking Harriet under her guidance. The
narrator says: “[Emma] would notice [Harriet]; she would improve her; she would detach
her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into good society; she would form her
opinions and her manners” (Austen 19). Interestingly, the same could be said of Austen’s
intentions toward the reader. If Harriet is Emma’s pupil than, surely, the reader becomes
Austen’s. In a similar fashion, Mrs. Elton decides to take Jane Fairfax under her
instruction. The irony persists here in that although Jane is herself a governess-in-
training, Mrs. Elton believes that she lacks guidance and seeks to fill the gaps that the
educational system has created. Jane, therefore, becomes a type of bildung herself, but
not one quite as compelling as Emma, for she lacks the delicious faults that make
Emma’s growth so enticing. Mr. Knightly affirms this when he says to Emma that her
dislike for Jane “[is] because she [sees] in her the really accomplished young woman,
which she want[s] to be thought herself” (Austen 130). This might also be perceived as
Austen’s explanation for why Emma rather than Jane becomes the heroine of this novel.
Despite their desire to teach, Mrs. Elton (who serves as a foil for Emma) and Emma
actually end up being the students of their own instruction, much to their own
embarrassment; both women are blinded by their own hubris by the actual affairs of their
pupils. However, unlike Emma, Mrs. Elton’s misconceptions do not inspire growth or

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change; she remains as shallow and flat as when she is first introduced. Emma, on the
other hand, undergoes a transformation that now serves to define and differentiate a
female bildungsroman.
Elaine H. Baruch notes that “unlike the male bildungsroman, the feminine
bildung takes place in or on the periphery,” and by periphery she means within the
domestic sphere rather than within the public arena (335). She addresses the assertion
some critics have made that this is not a novel of growth and education but, merely, of
courtship and marriage. In doing so, Baruch first emphasizes the importance of
distinguishing between the female bildungsroman and its male counterpart. She begins by
differentiating between the hero (male bildung) an the heroine (female bildung):
“whereas a traditional sign of manhood lies in the hero’s ability to give up guides, the test
of womanhood has resided in the heroine’s ability to find a mentor” (338). In the case of
nineteenth-century literature this mentor often emerges as the lover or future husband.
However, this is not because authors such as Austen believed that women needed to be
educated by men, but rather that women could continue their education because of
marriage, which remained their most viable means to independence. The nineteenth-
century alternative was to train for a career. But according to Austen’s fiction, this creates
oppression rather than cultivating freedom for growth. Jane Fairfax refers to her
impending career as a governess as penance and mortification (Austen 129).
Furthermore, she says: “there are places in town…offices for the sale—not quite of
human flesh—but of human intellect” (235). In other words, a working- woman is an
enslaved woman. Austen, therefore, does not find patrimonial education any more than
beneficial than traditional education for women; rather, in the spirit of realism, she offers

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her heroines marriage as the “ lesser of evils.” A feminist reading of the novel might find
her endings a disappointment, but Austen’s adherence to realism would have to be
ignored to maintain this offense.
William H. Magee also says that marriage is used as an “instrument of growth in
Austen novels (as is indicated by his title “Instrument of Growth: The Courtship and
Marriage Plot in Jane Austen’s Novels”). He says: “the heroine of [this] plot is in search
of a new life to replace that of a lost childhood home that in Jane Austen’s novels is often
stultifying” (206). And Emma’s life fits this definition. Although she claims to adore
living with her father, she has no life outside of Highbury. In fact, she has not even been
to the beach or even to the nearby Box Hill where the characters venture later in the
novel. She may be happy, but she is certainly confined. Modern psychology would even
identify her as an “enabler” who allows her father to persist in his neurosis and indulge in
his invalid lifestyle. However, as a female bildung, she seeks to find herself within rather
than apart from her current domestic sphere, another criteria that Baruch identifies in her
gender/genre differentiation. Concordantly, Tony Tanner calls Emma “a figure-force of
perpetual restlessness,” and her matchmaking efforts serves as her first step towards
“fill[ing] the gaps in her time” (182). Certainly female readers of Austen’s time could
relate with a “bored Emma.” Maybe Austen herself can attribute her choice of career to
the same restlessness. Kohn makes an important statement when she says that nineteenth-
century readers “increasingly turned to the rising artistic form or the novel to find
narrative guidance for their behavior” (46). The most important word here is guidance.
Women were looking for direction, internal instruction where conduct books and

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historiographies had failed them—just as they had failed Emma. And Emma
demonstrates that women do not have to be stagnant after all.
What then is the education that Emma receives throughout this novel? R.E. Hughs
says that her lesson begins with “the invasion by the outside of the inside” (71). Emma
did not journey out of Highbury, her journey manifest itself within Highbury through
people from the outside: Harriet, Frank, Mrs. Elton, and Jane Fairfax are all outsiders.
The incubated heroine becomes exposed to society for the first time and she is forced to
recognize that the world holds more than what her small society has revealed until now.
Joseph M. Duffy says that the theme of this book “is the passage of its heroine from
innocence to experience—from dreams to consciousness” (40). Unfortunately her
innocence hinders her understanding—the knowledge that neither a governesses nor
books can provide but only experience can teach. Duffy concurs saying that Emma has
failed to understand “the responsibility of experience” (41). And ironically, she only
learns this responsibility through her failed experiments on people, the only form of
experience available.
Ironically, Emma’s failed tutelage of Harriet becomes the very education that she
herself needed. Although she seeks to guide Harriet into proper behavior, she learns,
instead, how to better behave herself. Eve Kornfeld and Susan Jackson say that the
female bildungsroman must “learn how to ‘govern the kingdom’ of the self by learning to
be a good woman” (69), and the disappointment and hurt that Emma creates for Harriet
show Emma, ultimately, how not to act in the future or how to be a better person. She
says: “it was adventuring too far, assuming too much, making light of what ought to be
serious, a trick of what ought to be simple” (Austen 108). In other words, Emma learns

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that there are boundaries- she touches the fire and realizes it’s hot. After the episode at
Box Hill with Miss Bates, the narrator says: “never had [Emma] felt so agitated,
mortified, grieved, at any circumstance in her life. She was most forcibly struck” (Austen
296). Furthermore, by realizing what Harriet is not and cannot be, Emma realizes who
she is and must be-- her role in Highbury. Similarly, the reader has also learned
boundaries by the incorrect assumptions Emma has made. Like her, the presumptive
reader might have thought Frank Churchill in love with Emma or been blinded to the
obvious affection of Mr. Knightly or remained judgmental about the reserved manner of
Jane Fairfax. Maybe the reader even incorrectly assumed that Emma would remain
incapable of change or that she was beyond redemption.
Adena Rosmarin discusses Austen’s instruction of the reader in her article
“’Misreading’ Emma.” She says: “Austen meant the reader to be mystified, to make
many of the same interpretive errors…many of the same misreadings that Emma makes”
(322). Just as Emma reads and misreads people throughout the novel, the reader literally
and figuratively reads and misreads Emma. Austen seeks to show her audience, first
hand, how innocently Emma errs by allowing us, the reader, to unknowingly fail in the
same way. Since the lesson is, ultimately, for the reader, Emma finds herself back in the
role of teacher, alongside Austen. By analyzing Emma’s confessions, the reader
necessarily realizes the admissions they must make as well. After her emotional
remonstrance by Mr. Knightly regarding Box Hill (and the snarky comment that every
indulgent reader enjoyed hearing as much as Emma enjoyed saying it), the narrator says:
“She felt it at her heart. How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to Miss Bates!”
(Austen 296). Austen, through Knightley’s admonishment, corrects both reader and

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heroine alike for this evil. It is no wonder that critical history refers to this as Emma’s
moment of change. However, rather than her moment of change, one could argue that this
moment only brings the realization that there must be a change—she has received the
knowledge of her bad behavior, but she must now consciously act and think better. And
she does. The next day she makes her way over to Miss Bates’s house with a contrite
spirit. Her previous refusals to apologize for her errors (her refusals to “repent” appear
several times throughout the story) have given way to the admittance that she has
behaved terribly: “her own conduct, as well as her own heart, was before her in the same
few minutes. She saw it all with a clearness which had never blessed her before” (Austen
320). This clearness, this blessing, is the education that Emma needed to become a round
character. But realization must go beyond understanding and into the realm of action, and
Emma does just this in her active repentance toward Miss Bates. For the first time in this
novel, Emma actually listens to Miss Bates with an open heart rather than eagerly waiting
for her to finish speaking. But has the reader undergone this same change? Or do we still
find ourselves hoping for Miss Bates to finish her frivolous commentary? Has Emma
superseded the reader in growth at this point?
Emma’s growth thus defines this as a bildungsroman, albeit a feminized one.
However, it does still contain some of the classic elements first developed by Goethe in
association with this genre. Tobias Boes says: “the classical bildungsroman thus ends
with its own negation, a state in which development is arrested and mundane reality
suddenly yields a hidden immanent meaning” (279). Austen’s mundane reality is Emma
and Knightley’s marriage. At the opening of the story, Emma asserts that she will never
marry. Then upon the entrance of Frank Churchill, she considers it; and by the end of the

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story she marries. But rather than disappointment at this seemingly hegemonic literary
contrivance, S.E. Maier reminds the reader that an “author’s concepts of character
formation, class constraint, and gender construction all enter into the tutelage of the
protagonist” (319). Emma doesn’t settle for marriage; instead, she partners with a man
who can help her continue in the lessons she has begun to learn, a mentoring position he
proves to deserve throughout the novel. Maier admits that this fulfillment, that the end of
her journey, is a “radical extension of the traditional bildungsroman”(320); nonetheless it
does not disqualify Emma from the genre. She believes that Emma illustrates how a
woman with little experience and freedom can experience transformational growth and
find real fulfillment within her own domestic sphere and cultural context. The greatest
error, therefore, is to perceive Austen as a romantic rather than a realist. Maier concludes
her argument by quoting Butler who says that the female bildungsroman is an “incessant
project, a daily act of reconstruction and interpretation which both radically extend and
challenge the genre” (Butler qtd. in Maier 333). Emma reconstructs and reinterprets her
perceptions continually throughout this novel and she forces the reader to do the same.
Austen hopes, that just as her heroine awakens to truth and embraces reality that the
reader also will also grow to learn that reading requires all to become students whom the
writer instructs, just like a mother teaches her children those necessary, yet non-
traditional, lessons.
Words: 3343

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Works Cited
Austen, Jane. Emma. New York: Oxford, 2008. Print.
Bagchi, Barnita. “Instruction a Torment? Jane Austen’s Early Writing and Conflicting
Versions of Female Education in Romantic-Era ‘Conservative’ British Women’s
Novels.” Romanticism on the Net, No. 40. Institute of Development Studies
Kolkata, 2005. Web. 12. Apr. 2016.
Baruch, Elaine Hoffman.“The Feminine ‘Bildungsroman’: Education through Marriage.”
The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 22, No. 2. 335-357.The Massachusetts Review,
Inc., 1981. Jstor. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
Boes, Tobias. "Apprenticeship Of The Novel: The Bildungsroman And The Invention Of
History, Ca. 1770-1820." Comparative Literature Studies 45.3 (2008): 269-288.
MLA International Bibliography. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.
Duffy, Jr., Joseph M. “Emma: The Awakening from Innocence” ELH, Vol. 21, No. 1. 39-
53. The Johns Hopkins Press, 1954. Jstor. Web. 10 April 2016.
Goodheart, Eugene. “Emma: Jane Austen's Errant Heroine.” The Sewanee Review, Vol.
116, No. 4. 589-604. Johns Hopkins Press, 2008. Jstor. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.
Hughes, R. E.. “The Education of Emma Woodhouse”. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 16.1
(1961): 69–74. Web. 8 Apr. 2016.
Kohn, Denise. "Reading Emma As A Lesson On 'Ladyhood': A Study In The Domestic
Bildungsroman." Essays In Literature 22.1 (1995): 45-58. MLA International
Bibliography. Web. 8 Apr. 2016.

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Kornfield, Eve, and Susan Jackson. "The Female Bildungsroman In Nineteenth-Century
America: Parameters Of A Vision." Jour. Of Amer. Culture 10.4 (1987): 69-75.
MLA International Bibliography. Web. 11 Apr. 2016.
Magee, William H. “Instrument of Growth: The Courtship and Marriage Plot in Jane
Austen's Novels.” The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 17, No. 2. 198-208.
Journal of Narrative Theory, 1987. Jstor. Web. 10 Apr. 2016.
Maier, S. E. “Portraits of the Girl-Child: Female Bildungsroman in Victorian Fiction.”
Literature Compass, 4: 317–335 (2007). Jstor. Web. 11 Apr. 2016Moffat,
Wendy. “Identifying with Emma: Some Problems for the Feminist Reader.”
College English, Vol. 53, No. 1. 45-58. Nat’l Council of Teachers of English,
1991. Jstor. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
Rosmarin, Adena. “’Misreading’ Emma: The Powers and Perfidies of Interpretive
History.” ELH, Vol. 51, No. 2. 315-324. The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1984. Jstor. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
Shannon Jr., Edgar F. “Emma: Character and Construction.” PMLA, Vol. 71, No. 4. 637-
650. Modern Language Association, 1956. Jstor. Web. 11 Apr. 2016. Tanner,
Tony. Jane Austen. “The Match-Maker: Emma.” Cambridge, 1986. 176-207. Print.

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