Harriet’s “Most Precious Treasures”: Collecting Practices and Reparative Reading in Jane Austen’s Emma

초록

Despite her illegitimate birth, Harriet Smith features prominently in Emma (1816), thus making her an anomaly in Jane Austen’s fiction. Yet she has not received much critical attention, which I suggest can be attributed to the paranoid critical orientation that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick identifies as the dominant mode of literary studies. In order to redress such critical neglect, this article seeks to perform what Sedgwick calls a reparative reading of Harriet by focusing on her collecting practices. Throughout the novel, one can see her engaged in acts of purchasing, consuming, and ultimately assembling material objects as illustrated by the scene in which she presents Emma with her collection of “Most precious treasures.” Rather than reading this collection of discarded objects as symptomatic of Harriet’s misplaced romantic feelings, which Emma has manipulated her naive protégée into cultivating, I argue that her collecting constitutes a significant act of revaluation. Drawing on Susan M. Pearce’s discussion of collecting practices in early modern Europe and Susan Stewart’s theory of the souvenir, I examine how Harriet confers great value upon personal mementos that the traditional system of value would deem of little worth, and how she uses the aforesaid objects to construct a sense of self and an alternative version of the novel’s events, thereby rescuing herself from the anonymity prescribed by her illegitimacy. I assert that Harriet, in so doing, not only challenges the novel’s official historical account that works to relegate her to its margins, but also engages in an act of political resistance against the emerging culture of domesticity that imposed increasing limitations on women’s agency during this period.

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