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She always declares she will never marry, which, of course, means just nothing at all. But I have no idea that she has yet ever seen a man she cared for. It would not be a bad thing for her to be very much in love with a proper object.
Intimacy between Miss Fairfax and me is quite out of the question. - Jane Austen Emma
Austen critic LeRoy W. Smith asserts that, "contrary to the traditional view, Austen does not avoid the subject of sex in her fiction," that, in fact, "she is well aware of sexuality's powerful role in human behaviour."' Similarly, in Sex and Sensibility, Jean H. Hagstrum warns readers of Jane Austen against allowing the author's "considerable modesty" to obscure "the real passion that seethes beneath the controlled and witty surfaces" of her novels.2 He points out that "anyone so seemingly cool and rational has of course invited speculation about what is being kept out of sight" (p. 269). The critical debate over Austen's novel Emma may be seen as a case in point. For years, critics of Emma have been circling around the apparently disconcerting issue of the protagonist's sexuality. Claudia Johnson finds that "[d]etermining the common denominator in much Emma criticism requires no particular cleverness. Emma offends the sexual sensibilities of many of her critics. Transparently misogynist, sometimes even homophobic, subtexts often bob to the surface of the criticism about her."3 Johnson cites Edmund Wilson's ominous allusions and Marvin Mudrick' s dark hints (p. 123) about Emma's infatuations with and preference for other women as examples of the unease aroused by this particular Austen heroine. In examining these critical responses, she concludes that much of the discomfort generated by the novel results from the fact that Emma "is not sexually submissive to and contingent upon men" (p. 123), and that she "assumes her own entitlement to independence and power-power not only over her own destiny, but, what is harder to tolerate, power over the destinies of others-and in so doing she poaches on what is felt to be male turf ' (p. 125).
Certainly Emma's adoption of the masculine role and the implications of her usurpation of social power are contentious issues. But it is the doggedly recurrent...