Reflections on Emma and Mrs. Dalloway

So here is the last blog post. I am somewhat at a loss for what new to write about on the topic of space, time, and technology, seeing that writing more about those topics in relation to Emma and Mrs. Dalloway would be akin to beating a dead horse (or perhaps a dead iphone, in keeping with the previous theme). Instead I will reflect on where my writing and I have come over the course of this semester, and my relationships with the texts that we have been reading and discussing.

I have to admit, when I first looked at the syllabus, I thought that class discussions would focus on feminist readings of the texts we were looking at. When we did discuss women in the novels, it was in a way that was related to how advancements in technologies changed culture and therefore improved how women were viewed in society. This way of analyzing women in novels was very different from what I expected and what I had experienced before.

My reactions to the books also differed from what I would have expected. I thought that I would like a more straightforward book such as Emma over a more convoluted book like Mrs. Dalloway, but through reading I discovered the opposite. Events in Emma, much like events that took place during the time period it was set in, take much longer to complete than events in Mrs. Dalloway. It may require several pages of explanation for one event in Emma but in Mrs. Dalloway the action seems much faster and livelier, even though this is not actually the case. In fact, there is very little actual action in Mrs. Dalloway, as most of the story is told through flashbacks or in stream of consciousness. This corresponds to modern vs. older notions of how time should be spent. In modern times, we feel like we can accomplish more through the use of technology in less time, but often times much less is actually being done.

As a modern reader, I felt like I could appreciate Mrs. Dalloway more so than Emma. The limitations of understanding from the differences in social structure sometimes impeded profound meaning from Emma. For example, Harriet’s ancestry was, for the 19^th century reader, a subject of great interest and a reason to finish reading the book. For me, Harriet’s ancestry was of little importance because as a modern American, class and birth have very little importance on what I think of a person, so I had trouble connecting to the text as Jane Austen would probably had hoped.