Chattin’ with Chat

in which a life-long lover of books—and especially, sentences—responds to ChatGPT’s answers to his questions about books—and especially, sentences

The prompt:

This is the first sentence of Jane Austen’s celebrated novel, Emma: “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.” In 200 words or fewer, please tell me why this is such a good sentence.

ChatGPT’s response:

Jane Austen’s opening line in Emma is celebrated because it compresses character, theme, and tone into a single, flowing sentence. In just a few phrases—“handsome, clever, and rich”—we learn Emma’s defining traits and her enviable social position. The balanced rhythm of this triad, followed by “a comfortable home and a happy disposition,” creates a sense of harmony that mirrors the ease of Emma’s life. Yet Austen immediately subverts this perfection with irony: Emma has reached twenty-one “with very little to distress or vex her.” This signals both her privilege and her inexperience, foreshadowing that her flaws will come from a lack of challenge or adversity. Stylistically, the sentence exemplifies Austen’s elegant control; the clauses build like a well-tuned melody, offering both admiration and critique. It also establishes the narrator’s confident, slightly satirical voice, inviting the reader into a story that will balance social observation with humor. In fewer than forty words, Austen provides character sketch, social context, and thematic groundwork while setting up the novel’s central conflict. It is economical, witty, and layered—an opening that both charms and warns, embodying Austen’s genius for storytelling.

My response to Chat’s response:

Welp, we’re doomed. Sarah Connor warned us. One day our AI overlords will kindly remind us that the Wi-Fi password is now “BowBeforeMe123.” 

But seriously, ChatGPT produces a smart, comprehensive, and beautifully articulated answer to my question about what makes the first sentence of Emma so remarkable. Let me be clear: very few undergraduate students, even at the best colleges in the country, can write—or think—this well. It’s no wonder they’re using generative AI to do their homework and write their essays. It’s like having that nerd you cheated off of in Spanish class living in your phone.

There is, however, one glaring gap in Chat’s analysis: not one mention of the most breathtaking word in the sentence: seemed. This, to me, is the feature of this sentence that catapults it from being a darn good sentence to being a delicious masterclass in sentence-ness. Because Austen’s omniscient narrator, of course, could simply have stated that Emma united some of the best blessings of existence, but instead, the narrator slyly observes that Emma seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence. This tiny narrative hedge, a trademark of Austen’s style, does the extraordinary work of complicating—indeed, undercutting—everything we’ve just been told about Emma in a single breath. Emma’s enviable coalescence of beauty, brains, wealth, fortunate circumstance, and good nature—all of it is seeming— although in Austen’s world, what seems to be is always as, if not more, important than what is.

So yes, I think Chat does a bang up job of producing an accomplished an answer to my question, but I find the lack of engagement with seemed a strange omission. Not only does this word help us understand who our narrator is (answer: a fundamentally moral, very smart, fiercely judgmental, deeply funny bitch), but it also introduces us to several technologies of the genre—hyper-discrimination; acts of detection, discernment, and reading; precise verbal articulation as a tool for everyday life; the fundamental coded-ness of the social world; systems of vigilance, inclusion, and exclusion; seeming and being; class; taste; rumor and gossip—all in the space of a wink.