Mr. George Knightley, on the other hand, in his sedate and kindly way accepts the social status quo and governs himself accordingly, even cautioning Emma about what she is doing. On this major thematic point, then, Emma represents imagination and Mr. Knightley stands for realistic reasoning (some would say merely realistic acceptance), two human characteristics that are so often in opposition that a contrasting pairing of them leads to irony. The story, of course, belongs primarily to Emma, for her willfulness most readily lends itself to satire and it is the feminine point of view that Jane Austen knows best. Still, for contrast, Mr. Knightley is often enough on the scene to keep us reminded of the other side of the coin, and Mr. Woodhouse, Emma's father, is constantly before us as an extreme example of one who wants to keep things the way they are. Of the two men, it is Mr. Woodhouse, so fearful of the least change that he bemoans the very thought of marriage and urges reason of health for not leaving his fireside even in good weather, who is the main object of satire on this side of the opposition.
What Miss Austen has done is to take two human traits and put them in different characters in order to make her contrast highly effective. They of course belong to human nature in general and represent those ironical mixed qualities of humanity and human relationships. Throughout the story a reader feels that somehow these extremes ideally should be able to meet on common ground and be resolved into something right. From her realistic point of departure as a storyteller, however, Miss Austen knows that relationships are tangential: hence the irony in the fact that the willfully imaginative Emma is the closest of blood relatives to the sedentary and senilely reasoning Mr. Woodhouse. There is doubtless significance far beyond the surface plotting of a love story in the fact that Miss Austen finally marries Emma and Mr. Knightley — that is, marries imagination and reason. Having realized her self-deception to some degree, Emma, with Mr. Knightley beside her, may now develop a proper balance within herself. Mr. Knightley, with Emma beside him, now seems to stand a good chance of never ending up on that dead-end street of static, senile reasoning at which Mr. Woodhouse has arrived. It is a common-ground marriage of reason and imagination, of head and heart, of common sense and goodness.
