What I most enjoy about Persuasion
and Emma are the characters. Anne
Elliot is wracked with guilt and regret over her decision years ago to refuse
Captain Wentworth and has resigned herself to being unhappy for the rest of her
life. She could really use some good counselling! And Captain Fredrick
Wentworth is determined that Anne will know that he is completely indifferent
to her and thinks her weak and easily persuaded.
Emma is by far the most unlikeable heroine in all of
Austen’s novels. I’ve read that Austen was quite concerned about how the readers
would take to Emma, worried that she would be very much disliked.
In my opinion Emma, is Austen’s most honest character, her
flaws are real and in view of the reader the whole time. She says things that
make the reader/watcher cringe. She makes mistakes and assumptions, her
behaviour is not always what it should be and her motivations are questionable.
And, she’s the most frightful gossip.
Who doesn’t get filled up with dread when Emma takes her
trip to Box Hill and we know that she’s about to say the most horrific things
to Miss Bates?
“Badly done Emma, badly done indeed,” says Mr. Knightly. And
yet, it is at that moment that he realises he loves her.
And I think it’s that wonderful quality of Emma and Persuasion, where characters have disappointed each other, they
have made mistakes, they are hurt and have shown probably their worst sides,
“Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant,”
writes Captain Wentworth to Anne. And yet… and yet, they are loved.
When writing my own stories I have found it difficult not to
make my characters perfect. It is easy to take out flaws that will make them
unlikeable. To try and weave character traits together which make fictional heroes
and heroines seem too good to be true.
I think is has a lot to do with my own struggle to try and
look perfect to others, try and seem ‘all together’. But this is a great
mistake because it is these very flaws that make characters in books relatable
and real to us. It is these very flaws in myself which, when I am honest about
them, draws out honesty and empathy in others.
A friend sent me this quote,
“The ache is where the stories come from, the art comes
from… the truth comes from. To create, you can’t step around it—you fall into
it.” Jonathan Martin
The ache within ourselves, whatever it is, flaws, you name
it, is what makes writing and the characters we create real, with the ability
to touch other people deeply. To be honest with where we are in life. To ignore
that ache in us, to step around it and to have characters, which do not have an
ache, is to be untrue to life, untrue to ourselves.
And no matter how flawed we are, there is always someone who
loves us.
