Satire much?

Jane Austen has a reputation of using a gentile satire humor. In her novel Emma, she expresses her humor among several characters, especially in the Box Hill scene. I believe that Emma definitely received the greater portion of her humor in this scene. Satire is defined as irony, sarcasm or ridicule, and Emma clearly gets the ridicule side of it. When they’re about to start their game, Miss Bates jokingly says that it wouldn’t be tough for her to mention three bad qualities of hers. Emma takes this quite seriously and doesn’t like the fact that Miss Bates is getting a lot of her attention. She proceeds to tell Miss Bates that three and only three qualities may be mentioned, no more, no less. Of course, she is implying that Miss Bates has many flaws.
The other person that Austen has granted a satire touch to is Miss Bates herself. She, however, has a much more sarcastic humor. She was almost insulting herself when she was joking about being able to mention bad things involving her own personality. The first scene that was shown to the class was in the room with Emma and Miss Bates was dealing out tea and cake. Meanwhile she was explaining stories to Emma and the others. She kept on rambling about her stories and the girls were barely even listening to her. She was so distracted by her own stories and drawing so much attention to herself that she goes back and forth from handing Emma cake, to going back, and eventually giving her cake.