The ending of the story is, then, what we call a happy one. Or is it? In consideration of the bulk of the story about human foibles, Miss Austen gives us reason only for hope. She concludes the book with a final sentence about "the perfect happiness of the union." But this is said with at least a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek. Emma will not marry without her father's consent, and that comes only after the robbery of a nearby turkey house one night convinces Mr. Woodhouse that Mr. Knightley's living with them will be a needed protection. The close juxtaposition of this small causative event and the closing statement of the book connects the ridiculous with the more sublime and should at least make a reader wonder. Based on a moralistic realism as Miss Austen's satiric comedy is, it is not untypical of her in one twinkling to see both a robbed turkey house that will doubtless be replenished and a human household which, while it encloses a "perfect happiness of . . . union," also includes Mr. Woodhouse and the displacement of Mr. Knightley, who will now forego the ease and security of his own finer home, Donwell Abbey, in order to placate Emma and Mr. Woodhouse. Miss Austen's satire ends with an indication of what might be right; but she only points, for her moralistic realism will not let her be certain. She has seen too much of life for that. After all, who can say that Emma will never again try to manage things and people? In spite of robbers (and bridegrooms) this world is still full of turkeys, and Miss Austen knows that.
A brief word remains to be said about the ambiguity of opposites as Miss Austen sees them, and perhaps the best example is Emma's willful imagination, which stands in contrast to the reason of someone like Mr. Knightley. The ambiguity lies in a further contrast which embodies a contradiction. A lively imagination, in its purity, is an admirable and interesting quality. Perhaps willfulness, too, has its good points. But imagination can be too unfounded upon reality, and willfulness is perhaps too often misdirected because of its tendency to become presumptuous if not arrogant. Thus, on any one side of Miss Austen's oppositions there is ambiguity in that that side contains both good and bad inextricably fused. For this reason we can like and even admire Emma for the lively energy of her imagination, for her readiness to make amends, her benevolence, her affirmative sense of direction, while we are also critical of what she is doing.
