The two preceding chapters have presented and explored an inward change within Emma. The revelations, while leading to the positiveness of self-recognition and self-knowledge, lead also to the negative position involving gloom, despair, estrangement, and isolation. This chapter constitutes an outward change for Emma and thereby effects a reversal of fortune. Starting out with misunderstandings, it concludes with understanding and positive, happy commitment. Containing a highly interesting rearrangement of human relationships, the three chapters together also constitute the major climax of the novel. This rearrangement of relationships is the process of the social order righting itself, but it is also the natural working of equals finding each other. Though some more rearrangement is to come in order to resolve all the forces set in motion in the novel, the ideal correspondence between natural and social order is well on its way to being realized.
