Emma’s embarrassment

David Southward suggests in a fascinating study of embarrassment in Austen’s novels, Emma “seems more concerned about ‘being looked at’ than she is about ‘doing wrong.’” When she holds a dinner party for the Eltons, it’s intended to avoid being “exposed to odious suspicions” that she is full of “pitiful resentment” for Elton’s marriage to someone else: “In Emma’s mind, the embarrassment of ‘odious suspicions’ far outweighs the shamefulness of her actual resentment, which is itself only an evil when imagined by others.” When she “judged it proper to appear to censure” Knightley’s suspicions about Frank and Jane, “propriety lies not so much in the censure as in the convincing appearance of it.” Her repentance later on is a shift from “embarrassment” to genuine, abject, penitent “shame.”