Abstract
This thesis proposes that Emma exposes Jane Austen's critique of the class hierarchy, female predicaments, and the forbidden quest for individual freedom. In terms of Michel Foucault's power theory, the idea of break, discontinuity and gap is essential to reveal the interplay of the dominant ideology and the suppressed. My study focuses on the strategies of solving conflicts of the main text and the submerged subtexts. To take Jane Austen's anxiety of female authorship into consideration, female authors in the nineteenth century have to narrate their stories in disguise. The submerged subtexts conceal its socially unacceptable implication beneath the surface presentation. However, in the end of Emma, all discords of the subtext are all eliminated to fuse into the main text. Jane Austen employs the art of compromise to resolve all problems, in which those repressed ideologies are not peacefully eliminated but oppressed. For Jane Austen is not a radical novelist or reformer. Emma expresses Jane Austen’s view of her contemporary crises: people have to give up some of individual desires, in order to integrate within the social system. My study analyzes that the art of compromise is Jane Austen's narrative technique to survive peacefully with the dominant ideology in the Victorian Age. Jane Austen's concern lies in how to work within the society rather than change it.