Sexing "Emma": Stable and Unstable Bodies in Jane Austen's Fictional World

In her texts, Austen develops a recurrent scheme whereby the young heroine undergoesa process of education, in which her faults are overtly played out and "corrected" by a man, who later becomes her husband. Austen's "marriage plots" thus enact women's need to achieve domestic and social approval and, on a superficial level, dramatise what Sandra M' Gilbert and Susan Gubar named as "the necessity of female submission for female survival", by stressing how the latter depends on gaining male approval and protection. This article discusses the ways in which Jane Austen revisits the marriage plot in "Emma" through an analysis of the figure of the eponymous protagonist, who embodies a different model of femininity.