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of her marrying is also articulated in her resistance to change. “ ‘I cannot really change for the better. If I were to marry, I must expect to repent it’ ” (p. 76). Like so many of Emma’s categorical certainties, this “must” covers over doubt, anxiety, and uncertainty. It is a characteristic bit of Emma’s bravado, which is, however, and in its turn, connected with both her chutzpah and her courage. But her aversion to change is not restricted to her personal life. It is expressed in a global sense in her snobbery. The Woodhouses, along with the Knightleys, are at the top of the heap in Highbury. Emma, in addition, can add social privilege and superiority of inherited status to her personal claims to ascendancy and power. We have observed this already in her treatment of Harriet and Robert Martin. Harriet, an illegitimate child with no known family, is raised above her “appropriate” plane simply by virtue of her personal connection with Emma; and Martin, a prosperous and upwardly mobile young farmer, is correspondingly demoted by Emma to being “Hodge,” illiterate, unmannerly, and uncouth simply because he is a farmer and labors for his livelihood—and is hence unworthy of any young woman whom Emma has stooped to “notice.”
    The absurd comedy of Emma’s snootiness is admirably dramatized in the dinner party proposed by the Coles. The Coles, relative newcomers to Highbury, and personally “friendly, liberal and unpretending,” are also unfortunately “of low origin, in trade, and only moderately genteel.” The last few years, however, have “brought them a considerable increase of means—the house in town vii had yielded greater profits, and fortune in general had smiled on them”—unlike Highbury itself, which seems to have had both ups and downs. Accordingly they undertake to enlarge their circumstances and improve their amenities. They add to their house, increase their number of servants, purchase a grand piano, and “in fortune and style of living” were by this time “second only to the family at Hartfield.” Donwell Abbey is out of the parish as well as out of range, but they have surpassed in material and consumerist terms the Westons at Randalls. Their sociability plus their new dining room add up to expectations of a dinner party. They have already had some trial runs at parties “chiefly among single men.” Emma from on high pontificates that the Coles would “hardly presume to invite” the “regular and best families”—“neither Donwell, nor Hartfield, nor Randalls. Nothing should tempt her to go, if they did.”
    The Coles were very respectable in their way, but they ought to be taught that it was not for them to arrange the terms on which the superior families would visit them. This lesson, she very much feared, they would receive only from herself; she had little hope of Mr. Knightley, none of Mr. Weston (p.188).
    Only she is capable of reminding them of their proper place and of the propriety of their staying fixed in that station. In the event, however, both Knightley and the Westons (along with almost everyone else Emma is friendly with) are invited and accept, but no invitation arrives for the Woodhouses. Mrs. Weston’s consoling effort to account for the omission—“ ‘I suppose they will not take the liberty with you; they know you do not dine out,’ ”—makes no dent on the disappointed, disgruntled, and offended Emma. “She felt that she should like to have had the power of refusal.” And the presence of all her friends and the possibility of after-dinner dancing leave her paradoxically stranded: “Her being left in solitary grandeur, even supposing the omission to be intended as a compliment, was but poor comfort” (p. 188).
    It turns out that the invitation arrives belatedly. And though Emma at once declares “ ‘of course it must be declined,’ ” she just as quickly asks the Westons “what they advised her to do ... their advice for her