Abstract: Emma Woodhouse is the only Austen heroine to be introduced as inhabiting a particular "situation." This essay shows how the dual meanings of this word—as both a social position and a contingent set of circumstances—inform ethical questions about various characters in the novel. The narrator's diagnostic focus on Emma's situation models a salient mode of attention, a function of sympathy as defined by Adam Smith: not the replication of someone else's feelings but the imagination of how one would behave in a similar situation. The essay offers a new way of addressing the longstanding question of Emma's blameworthiness by placing the heroine's errors in the context of other characters' fallible judgment about situations.
Christopher R. Miller (Sun,) studied this question.
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