Day 4: Was blind but now I see

Emma written by Jane Austen
(and you have to see BBC's Emma starring Romola Garai
A&E's production starring Kate Beckinsale is good
Clueless starring Alicia Silverstone is a fun variation
I didn't like the version starring Gwyneth Paltrow now that I've read the book and seen a few other adaptations. The casting, chemistry and screenplay are all weaker.)

Jane Austen's heroine Emma happily sails through her 21st year with confidence that she has a clear eye for a good love match and that the unmatched friends around her will benefit from her assistance. She makes some matches in her head that suit her fancy and then interprets and manipulates and responds to all her friends' actions with a predudice based on the reality that is true only in her head.

She is blind to the perfect match that Harriet Smith could have made on her own if only Emma hadn't interfered. She is blind to the true object of Mr. Elton's flattering courtship. She unwittingly serves as a blind for Mr. Churchhill's game of cover-up. And as she busies herself with matchmaking, Emma is blindest of all to the fact that the empty place in her life created by Miss Taylor's becoming Mrs. Weston has made room for an even more suitable companion to spend her own days with.

And that unnoticed companion, like drummer girl Watts, loves with enough wisdom to wait with forbearance while Emma pursues all her dead-end pursuits. He lets time and events take their course till she gains the maturity and insight she needs to really see him and appreciate him and discover his suitability for her. The book has to wait till page 328 for Emma's eyes to be opened. We readers can be patient, especially when we learn just how many years her lover must have had to restrain himself with the words "wait and see."

So the novel of Emma has 55 chapters, and it is not till chapter 47 that Emma realizes that she is clueless and imperceptive, and may have sabatoged the best love match available to her. Chapter 47 is Emma's apocalypse. We often think of this word as meaning earthquakes and widespread doomsday of disaster and destruction, but an apocalypse is simply a dramatic or sudden revealing of what had been formerly hidden to perception. It may not look much like the movie 2012, but a person experiencing something that calls into question everything they assumed to be true is an equally terrifying and cataclysmic experience. The words and phrases that give this chapter a strong tone of catastrophe are not really hyperbole as the chapter recounts Emma having to let go of her life-long compass of reality:

perplexed
did not know how to understand it
"I begin to doubt my having any such talent."
She could not speak another word. Her voice was lost; and she sat down, waiting in great terror
forced calmness
consternation
. . .she acknowledged the whole truth.
Her own conduct, as well as her own heart was before her in the same few minutes. She saw it all with a clearness that had never blessed her before.
inconsiderate
irrational
unfeeling
blindness
madness
struck her with dreadful force
. . .her mind was in all the perturbation that such a development of self, such a burst of threatening evil, such a confusion of sudden and perplexing emotions, must create.
Every moment had brought a fresh surprise; and every surprise must be matter of humiliation to her. How to understand it all! How to understand the deceptions she had been thus practicing on herself and living under! The blunders, the blindness of her own head and heart! she sat still, she walked about, she tried her own room, she tried the shrubbery--in every place, every posture, she perceived that she had acted most weakly; that she had been imposed on by others in a most mortifying degree; that she had been imposing on herself in a degree yet more mortifying; that she was wretched, and should probably find this day but the beginning of wretchedness.
fancying
under a delusion
totally ignorant of her own heart
With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of everybody's feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed to arrange everybody's destiny. She was proved to have been universally mistaken; and she had not quite done nothing--for she had done mischief.
. . on her must rest all the reproach.
. . .a folly which no tongue could express

This chapter is not the ending, though, only the crisis that comes from a long, long delay of recognition, and there are several more chapters which can take wonderfully take place now that Emma can see things a bit more clearly.
What an excellent story!