Situational Awareness in Emma

Abstract: Emma Woodhouse is the only Austen heroine to be introduced as inhabiting a particular "situation." This essay shows how the dual meanings of this word—as both a social position and a contingent set of circumstances—inform ethical questions about various characters in the novel. The narrator's diagnostic focus on Emma's situation models a salient mode of attention, a function of sympathy as defined by Adam Smith: not the replication of someone else's feelings but the imagination of how one would behave in a similar situation. The essay offers a new way of addressing the longstanding question of Emma's blameworthiness by placing the heroine's errors in the context of other characters' fallible judgment about situations.