author has in store for Emma an awakening of sorts, sooner or later, and probably of the romantic sort, based on Emma's proud statements of anti-romanticism:
I have none of the usual inducements of women to marry. Were I to fall in love, indeed, it would be a wonderful thing! but I have never been in love; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall. And, without love, I am sure I should be a fool to change such a situation as mine. Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want; consequence I do not want: . . . and never, never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man's eyes as I am in my father's (Austen 55).
A close textual analysis of this passage gives us deep insight into Emma's character, or lack thereof. We would do well to keep in mind the essential factor of self-awareness in examining this passage, and in fact in examining any part or relationship in the book. This particular passage shows the limits of Emma's self-awareness. In one sense, she knows herself, or at least that part of herself which she has experienced. Her mistake is assuming that her "nature" consists only of what she has already experienced. She believes her experience to be vast, and that she knows more than everybody else and is superior to all others in almost every imaginable way. Her fear of her own weaknesses keep her from falling in love, but as we see ultimately with Knightley, she is hardly beyond love. Whether or not the reader can accept as believable her relatively sudden awakening in this regard, the author at least can imagine it. In the passage above, however, Emma reveals herself as a woman posing as a worldly and jaded individual whose own superiority has exempted her from love. She imagines, like the little lonely girl she actually is, that only Daddy can truly love her. At the same time, however, she blatantly exposes the deep flaws in her conception of lo...