|
- Knightley is first and foremost a perfect English gentleman. More polite and civil than Mr Darcy, Knightley is kind to all characters in the novel, and encourages Emma to be the same, reproaching her for her rudeness to Miss Bates, saying that she should "secure your [Emma's] compassion.
- Knightley is always willing to behave in a gentlemanly fashion, such as when he invites Harriet to dance with him to save her embarrassment
- Knightley does not have the same traditional notions on class that Emma does- he defends Robert Martin as "a respectable, intelligent gentleman-farmer" when Emma assumes that all working class people are illiterate and ill mannered. He also defends Miss Bates, claiming that her poverty should illicit sympathy rather than ridicule.
- Despite these notions, Knightley is quite conservative in many ways. He dislikes Frank Churchill's "irresponsible behaviour", and the two have been read as representing the chaos of social and political revolution in France compared with the staid English notion of polite, genteel upper class society.
- Knightley is also self-disciplining, a positive quality in the nineteenth century man. He describes his behaviour to Emma as seeming far worse than it actually is- "I have blamed you and lectured you and you have borne it". In fact, Emma deserved all of Knightley's discipline given her fairly bad behaviour.
|
- Knightley is the moral heart of the novel- on the two most prominent occasions when Emma behaves badly it is Knightley who tells her why she is wrong. In this way he is a foil to Emma, whose moral compass is often questionable. Knightley may speak with the voice of the author to enable Austen to pass judgement on Emma, especially as it is Knightley who is able to make Emma into the heroine of her own story by marrying her, just as Austen is by writing it.
- It is interesting that when Knightley reproaches Emma it is often on matters of her class snobbery. He defends Robert Martin and disciplines Emma for her cruelty to Miss Bates, which could again suggest that he functions as Austen's "voice" in the novel to criticise the behaviour of the upper class society she writes about.
- In a novel where men seem to represent nationhood, Knightley has been described as "the paradigm of St George" (clue in the name)- he is foil to the chaos Frank Churchill brings to Highbury, which would seem to uphold class values, and he implies that Harriet should marry within her class rather than rejecting Martin in hope of making a "better" match.
|
|
- Knightley develops to a certain extent- he criticises his own behaviour in lecturing Emma and, while at the start he seems to see the flaws most of the characters are blind to, by the end of the novel he too is obsessed with her. This doesn't seem necessarily like positive change....
- Austen's message in the depiction of all of her heroes seems to be that gentleman are made, not born. This is obvious in Mr Darcy, the classic Byronic hero, but can also be seen in Knightley, whose modifying of his own behaviour is key in illiciting sympathy and allowing the marriage to happen.
- Although he does undergo change, Knightley's main role seems to be to provide an unwavering moral compass for Emma to guide herself by.
- In the later twentieth century, Austen's gentlemanly heroes came back into fashion in response to the idea of the "new man". However, in the film version of the novel with Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma, his proposal scene is far longer and he seems a much more emotional character- the habits of the 1990s are applied anachronistically to him.
|
|
Comments
No comments have yet been made