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Taking for granted the critical commonplace that Jane Austen's Emma is about marriage, the author attempts to respond to the clues that suggest why Emma avoids marriage throughout most of the novel. Her contention is that the novel is the story of Emma's discovery that she has a heart—a euphemism for sexual needs. She proceeds, with the help of psychoanalytic theory, to examine the way in which Emma's infantile narcissism and her sexual fear are gradually dispelled under the impact of reality, the stimulus of Emma's own honesty and self-awareness, and the abreactive effect of her effort to act out her fantasies. In Emma's case, the fantasy is essentially that she can control the world by planning other people's lives, especially their marriages. The essential movement of the novel, then, is from infantile narcissism and a posture of omnipotence, denial of instinctual needs, and adolescence to an emotional and psychological maturity as Emma discovers and acts on her love for Mr. Knightley—an act in accord with both psychic and external reality. This well-written essay uses psychoanalytic theory judiciously and nonreductively.