Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Jane Austen’s first novel tells the story of two sisters—Elinor and Marianne Dashwood—who are contrasted by the two concepts in the title. Elinor--aligned with Sense—is characterized by a sensitive intelligence, patience, good manners, and attention to propriety that allows her to negotiate society and the world for her family. She is highly sensitive to the idea that polite, elegant people almost never speak their true thoughts. Marianne, younger by two years, is aligned with Sensibility and does not believe in hiding one’s feelings. She is ruled by strong, passionate emotions that lead her to make sweeping statements about beauty and grandeur, and to be occasionally rude to her friends because of her unwillingness to filter or dilute her thoughts before she speaks them.

At the beginning of the story, Elinor, Marianne and their mother and younger sister are impoverished by their father’s death and the ungenerosity of their stepbrother and his wife, despite a deathbed promise to support the Dashwood women. John Dashwood and his selfish wife start off the cast of ridiculous Austen characters that populate this book. The Dashwood women remove to a distant cottage where they can live within their means and meet a new cast of friends, who are more kind, but equally ridiculous as John and Fanny Dashwood. Unlike Pride and Prejudice, where these ridiculous characters are consciously amusing the intelligent Bennets, in Sense and Sensibility these ridiculous characters are frustrating to Marianne and wearisome for Elinor. But because they are poor, they do not have a choice in who their friends are for the most part.

Early in the novel, Elinor and Marianne are both set up with young men whom they are in love with, but of course are prevented from marrying conveniently. Elinor’s love interest, Edward, is prevented from pursuing her because he is financially dependent on his mother and, as we later learn, has been previously engaged to the wily Lucy Steele. Marianne falls in love with Willoughby early in the novel. The two share the same strong passions and are wildly in love. But Willoughby turns out to be the proverbial libertine, prevented from marrying Marianne by his past indiscretions and his need to marry rich in order to support his greed and extravagance. He breaks her heart, sending the high-strung and tempestuous heroine into a downward spiral and a type of nervous breakdown. Elinor’s disappointment with Edward is experienced privately though perhaps no less wrenchingly.

One interesting section of the introduction that I ran across is this: “Austen suggests that the most dangerous thing for women is to reveal themselves and to assume that they will be understood and valued. All they have of their own is an ability to safeguard a realm of privacy, a place of no access—metaphorically demonstrated by Elinor’s screens. But this lesson, like everything else in Austen’s world, threatens to break down; Elinor can’t keep up her façade of tranquility in parts of the novel, and her constant self-policing leads to resentment, anger, and depression.”

I find it interesting that this concept of a woman’s need to screen herself, to set up a barrier between her true thoughts and the outside world as a sort of protection is so prominent in this, Austen’s first novel. Marianne’s unwillingness to screen eventually almost kills her, where Elinor’s skillful screening keeps her safe, but leads to dissatisfaction, unhappiness and bitterness. In this light, even after they are happily married at the end of her novels, there is no true happiness possible for Austen’s women.

Austen declares in her first published work--subtly and while outwardly saying the opposite--that there is no real winning for women in her world. I’m often confronted with anti-feminist ideas in Austen’s work. After all, the female characters spend most of their time speculating about this man or that and spending all their energy trying to get into marriages in which they will be subordinate to husbands, and likely die in childbirth. (Austen herself, interestingly, never married and turned down at least one proposal.)

What this suggests to me is that Austen's novels are perhaps artfully disguised as cleverly crafted will-they/won't-they plots between aristocrats. You can be entertained with her surface plots and characters. There is enough there to amuse. But for those who would begin to pull back the layers of protection that she builds around herself, her heroines, and the deeper ideas of her novels, they may see something very different. As the introduction concludes: “Austen explores the layers subtly covering…the inarticulate, intangible disquiet that haunts drawing rooms and country houses…Even in its unsatisfying conclusion, Sense and Sensibility leaves one thing intact: The bond between Elinor and Marianne is ultimately more restorative than any romance or happy ending.”

Work Cited:

Engel, Laura. Introduction. Sense and Sensibility. By Jane Austen. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003. Print.