A Sensitive Subject: Sense and Sensibility

Abstract

If Pascal could say ‘we should respect the gentry because...’,1 then ‘Jane Austen’ is widely supposed to have spent her time composing a monster footnote to the idea, authorizing it, as it were. But Sense and Sensibility is a crucial text to consider here. For one thing, it seems, much of the time, to be against rather than for the gentry, in a mode of rampant disrespect which might be felt to bring it closer to Paine than to Burke. Although the closure of the novel seems to compose a flourish for what Burke called ‘the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion’,2 ? as its heroines Elinor and Marianne are married off, respectively to the spirit of religion in the form of Edward Ferrars, and the spirit of a gentleman in the form of Colonel Brandon, this conclusion has often been felt to be somewhat spiritless. And there is something questionable about both of these as wooers, as prospective husbands, and in what they might be said to ‘personate’. However, a charitable view would state that both the Colonel and Edward are fairly decent chaps, forced to skulk against their better natures, and to be rather low-spirited as a result of the selfishness and skulduggery (legalized) which surround them. More to the point, critically speaking, is that this is what surrounds them.KeywordsGood NatureDouble BindSocratic DialogueNatural AffectionAncien RegimeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.