I have to confess my heart skipped a beat to think the venerable Cleveland Playhouse was bringing Howard Zinn’s play about the revolutionary anarchist Emma Goldman to the stage. How very - revolutionary - of them!
But no, the Emma coming to Cleveland this month is described in promotions as the ‘beautiful, witty, and much too mischievous Emma Woodhouse, one of Jane Austen’s most unforgettable heroines.’ Reading the script for a study group, initially I found Austen’s Emma a faint pastel compared to the Zinn character’s vibrance. What’s so unforgettable about Emma Woodhouse?
Austen’s Emma plans tea parties, country excursions and formal dances, the better to practice her matchmaking cleverness on young friends and admirers. Zinn’s Emma is a garment worker who spends her cleverness convincing the boss to unlock the eighth story shop doors so the workers won’t perish in a typical factory fire of the late 1900s.
Austen's young women of Britain’s Regency era are fragile creatures, admonished for going to the post office in the rain (‘You sad girl, how could you do such a thing!’) and warned against being ‘extremely imprudent. Emma might catch cold from the draft.’
Meanwhile Zinn’s Emma is handing out leaflets at the crack of dawn with like minded cohorts and facing down club wielding cops at populist rallies.
I might write off Emma Woodhouse of Hartfield if she weren’t so much like me. I’m not into the social flitter flutter, but I’m fond of domesticity, the intimacy of meals and music, the intricacies of the heart. Austen’s Emma renounces marriage at one point, because she craves autonomy.
‘Oh, I will never marry. Few married women are half as much mistress of their husband’s house as I am of Hartfield... I shall have music and sewing and books and nieces and nephews.’When she does decide to marry, she veers around the handsome charmer to choose Knightley, an aptly named challenger to her egocentric lapses. Hearing her condescend to an elderly, less privileged neighbor, Knightley tells her,
‘If her situation was equal to yours, I would leave her silliness to itself and not quarrel with any liberties you might take in mocking it. But she is poor. She has lost most of the comforts she was born with, and if she lives to a very old age she will probably lose more. Her situation should elicit your compassion... Yet now she is laughed at, humiliated... It isn’t pleasant for me to say, Emma, but, as your friend, I have no choice but to speak the truth. It was badly done, Emma. Badly done indeed.’After which Knightley walks away. But Emma stays, thinks it through, and in a keen blast of selfless autonomy, decides he is right.
‘How could I have been so contemptuous? Why have I sacrificed the good opinion of such a great friend?’Her response reveals the steel of a woman who, born into other challenges and partnered with her noble accomplice, might well remind us of Emma Goldman, the heart muscle of downtrodden citizens, beating at the system with her passion for a more perfect union of power and principle.
Picture credits Morning Dress from 'Ackermann's Repository', ca. 1820 and T. Kajiwara, Emma Goldman
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