Friday, May 08, 2020

Fortune I do not want: Emma and "inducements to marry"

Jane Austen's Emma turns up the rhetoric when she tells Harriet Smith about her attitude toward marriage: "Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want; consequence I do not want [...]." The preposed objects and the epistrophe hammer home Emma's clarification of why she has "none of the usual inducements of women to marry": she's already wealthy; she already has plenty to do; she already has high status. But all this rhetoric is also over-insistence, especially when she later finds a man to marry who offers more of all the "inducements" she says she does not "want". She may not have lacked them, but ultimately, she did want them. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 8 May)

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