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Associationism and the Dialogue in Emma

There is something slightly overheated as well as schoolgirlish about Harriet's response to Elton's banal metaphors, and Austen's original readers would have been as ready as we are to link associative thought with unrestrained sensibility and unruly desire. The dominant psychological model at the time Emma was written (and indeed for a century thereafter) was associationism, which distinguished sharply between "natural" and arbitrary—hence delusory—associations. Harriet's conjectures are notably arbitrary: her mind moves among concrete images, and slides from one to the other in dubiously motivated ways. She would have encoun-