Marianne Dashwood Research Articles

Hand in Hand: The Erotics of Touch in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

ABSTRACT The significance of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood’s bond in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility has been well acknowledged by critics. In the midst of lackluster suitors, malicious relations, and brazen gossips, Elinor and Marianne’s relationship seems the only one that really matters in the end. Yet despite the centrality of Elinor and Marianne’s intimacy, the novel concludes with their respective marriages to Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon. Turning our attention toward the phenomenology of hands and touch in Sense and Sensibility, however, changes the way we approach narrative by undermining the teleology of the marriage plot. In contrast to the hollow acts and mediating objects of affection offered by potential suitors, Willoughby and Edward Ferrars, Elinor and Marianne’s handholding constitutes deeply affective and unmediated moments of physical contact that attest to the primacy of touch underlying the most passionate attachments. In this light, the concluding marriages do not recant the rest of the novel but rather serve a strategic choice motivated by what these marriages make possible. Far from enforcing heterosexual closure, Elinor and Marianne’s marriages fulfill a different agenda: preserving the sisters’ lasting haptic contact with one another.

AN ANALYSIS OF INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR IN JANE AUSTEN’S SENSE AND SENSIBILITY: A SOCIAL PSYCOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Individual behavior is an outcome reaction of a person to a social engagement or how they perceive themselves in a situation. In Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility (1811) Elinor and Marianne Dashwood’s behavior is the polar opposite of each other at a certain situation. This study discusses Elinor and Marianne’s behavior during the social events when they are facing situations that occurs. This study aims to observe the cause for the characters behaviors based on the Attribution theory by Harold Kelley. The method used in this study is descriptive qualitative method. The data sources for this study are primary data and secondary data. The primary data is the novel itself and the secondary data sources are from online journals and websites. The result of this study draws conclusion that the reason for the characters behavior shows that they are attributed to external and internal factors.

‘The Great Mrs Churchill was No More’: Death in Jane Austen’s Novels

Death was a common occurrence in Jane Austen’s life. Her father died in 1805; her friend Mrs Lefroy was killed in an accident in 1804; her sister’s fiancé died in 1797. In the songs she sang and played, death was a recurrent theme, with sentimental and melodramatic lyrics vowing fidelity unto death, or mourning the passing of a lover or a sister. However, death usually keeps to the background of the emotional landscape of her novels. No character we ‘know’ well dies in the course of any of the novels, although some – Marianne Dashwood, Tom Bertram, Louisa Musgrove – may be in mortal danger. Deaths ‘offstage’ can liberate characters, like Eleanor Tilney and Frank Churchill. Other deaths, typically of parents before a novel’s action begins, put the main characters in perilous financial situations, or deprive them of essential moral and emotional support at an early age. The few examples where a child or young person has died – Fanny Price’s sister, Captain Benwick’s fiancée, Dick Musgrove – provide perceptive portrayals of characters grieving in their idiosyncratic ways. In this essay I aim to explore whether particular deaths are ever much more than plot devices in Austen’s novels. To what extent does the form of comedy constrain her from dealing with darker themes? Does her resistance to melodrama and sentimentality mean that she avoids deaths or intimations of mortality in the six completed works, or can grief and the fear of death undercut the gaiety of even the most light-hearted of her novels, and pervade the shadowy depths of the more serious works?

The Fulfillment of Hierarchy of Needs of Elinor in The "Sense And Sensibility" Novel by Jane Austen: A Study of Humanism Psychology of Abraham Maslow

This research was intended to find and describe the fulfillment of hierarchy of needs of Elinor in the “Sense and Sensibility” by Jane Austen which mostly about the story of Dashwood family, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. The story began with their father’s death, Henry Dashwood. He left only a small fortune to Elinor, Marianne, their mother and younger sister, while most of Dashwood's wealth and property were handed over to John, Henry's son from his previous marriage. Elinor's struggles to fulfill her needs began with discomfort that occurred in her family. The method used was a qualitative descriptive, in which the data were in the form of words, sentences, and paragraphs that identified the fulfillment of hierarchy of needs. The data source was the "Sense and Sensibility" novel by Jane Austen and the data collection techniques were reading and note-taking. The data were analyzed by identifying, classifying, describing and drawing conclusions. The results and discussion in this article showed that in fulfilling her physiological, safety, love and belonging, and esteem needs, Elinor faced struggles and twist and turn. Those four needs were found sequentially in the story, but the need for self-actualization had not been reflected in the novel.

WOMEN INDEPENDENCE IN JANE AUSTEN’S SENSE AND SENSIBILITY AS A FEMINISM STUDY

This research paper entitled Women Independence in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility as a Feminism Study. This research paper aimed to show the form of women independence of Elinor Dashwood and Marianne Dashwood as the main characters in Sense and Sensibility novel. This research is using feminist critical approach and applies Simone de Beauvoir’s theory with her book The Second Sex that was published in 1949. This research used qualitative research methods from which the data are taken from books and online sources. Data is classified into main data which is taken from the book itself and supporting data which is taken from online sources that related to this paper. Beside analyzing the forms of women independence, the researcher also analyzed the causes of women independence and the effects of women independence towards the main characters. The novel presents the independence of thought and behavior of women in the 19th century. After all data have been collected and analyzed, it concludes that the causes of the independence of the main characters is their parents, the forms of their independence is Elinor and Marianne Dashwood can prove that they have a good attitude, good knowledge and ability in the world of art although they are just from the middle social class and the effects is they have a positive and negative effect of their independence and get some obstacles of it. However, after overcoming all their conflicts they finally found what they really wants in life and they can live happily.

“Every day was adding to the verdure of the early trees”: Women, Trees, and the Relationship between Self and Other in Jane Austen’s Novels

Jane Austen’s heroines are environmentalists, as evidenced by a pervasive dichotomy in her fictional landscape in which nature-lovers transcend the eco-callous in virtue and likeability. In Pride and Prejudice, the charismatic Elizabeth Bennet belongs to fields and groves and rarely “shut[s herself] into her own room” (PP 186)1 unless confronting a problem, whereas Bingley’s artificial sisters always appear indoors, and Charlotte Lucas sells herself for a home she can enjoy only by giving her moronic husband monopoly of the garden. Elizabeth’s habit of outdoor tramps lends parody to Caroline Bingley’s invitation to “‘take a turn about the room’” (56).2 Similarly, Anne Elliot of Persuasion “glorie[s] in the sea” (P 102) and its rejuvenating influence, while her shallow sister Elizabeth can only move “with exultation from one drawing-room to the other” (138). The green young Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey declares to Henry that “‘[t]he pleasure of walking and breathing fresh air is enough for me, and in fine weather I am out more than half my time.—Mamma says, I am never within’” (NA 174); by contrast, her false friend Isabella Thorpe man-chases her way through ballrooms, city streets, and country drives without heeding her surroundings. More famously, Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne Dashwood expresses a “passion for dead leaves” (SS 88) and bids a bittersweet farewell to the trees of Norland when she and her family are forced to move out, and Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price delivers a “rhapsodizing” ode on the evergreen. Fanny’s foil, narcissist Mary Crawford, responds to this rhapsody by infamously avowing to “‘see[ing] no wonder in this shrubbery equal to seeing myself in it’” (MP 209–10).3

An Analysis of The Main Characters’ Conflicts in Jane Austen Novel Entitled “SENSE AND SENSIBILITY”

Conflict is not always happen between two person or more, but it also can happen with the environment, furthemore with our selves. Because sometime conflict is a problem that can not be seen factually. The existency of the conflict in anovel, it can attract the readers to read the contain of the whole page. Because they raise the curiousity of the readers. So that many the readers interest in reading novel to know the ending of the story. It is also encouraged the researcher do this literary research. The title of this research is An Analysis of The Main Characters’ Conflicts in Jane Austen Novel Entitled “ SENSE AND SENSIBILITY”. There are some conflicts occur in the novel, that is why the researcher want to analyze the conflicts of the main characters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. in order to know the main characters’s problems face in the novel and also the solving problem in the novel. This research only discussed about the main characters’ conflicts on psychological conflicts and social conflicts. Hopefully this study can help the readers in understanding the conflicts that happened in the novel.

Reading Projects

"By reading only six hours a day", says Marianne Dashwood, outlining her plan of future application to her sister Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, "I shall gain in the course of a twelve-month a great deal of instruction which I now feel myself to want." She adds: "Our own library is too well known to me, to be resorted to for any thing beyond mere amusement. But there are many works well worth reading at the Park; and there are others of more modern production which I know I can borrow of Colonel Brandon" (301). We know, to some extent, what was in the Dashwoods' own library – volumes of Cowper, Scott and Thomson are mentioned. But what might Marianne have borrowed at Barton Park and Delaford? Which publications would Colonel Brandon have considered most appropriate for her project of self-improvement? Elinor considers Marianne's plan excessive, but what would have been a more realistic amount of time for her to spend reading each day, and where might she have done it?

Sibling rivalry, separation, and change in Austen's Sense and Sensibility

The paper explores a process of growth represented in the interplay of Jane Austen's characterizations of Marianne and Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, approaching the text through the lens of psychoanalytic theories on oedipal sibling rivalry, separation, and processes of change. A close reading of Sense and Sensibility tracks Marianne Dashwood's repudiation of any ‘second attachment’ as the surface of an unconscious fantasy, denying a rival for the mother's love. A psychoanalytic view contrasts Marianne's lack of separation from her mother, her use of denial and projection, and her near death after losing the man she loves, with her older sister Elinor Dashwood's capacities for depression, reflection, and greater acceptance of loss and separation. The narrative portrays Mrs. Dashwood's identification with and idealization of her daughter Marianne, which contribute to her oedipal sibling ‘victory’. In the language and structure of the novel, the projections, identifications, aggressions, and separations (conscious and unconscious) of the sisters in the vicissitudes of their adolescent loves and rivalries constitute a process of growth. Austen's novel brings to life, with the vividness and coherence of great literature, forces and fantasies in oedipal sibling rivalries, inspiring renewed attention to their subtle presence in the transference and countertransference of the psychoanalytic process.

At Seventeen: Adolescence in Sense and Sensibility

Examining Jane Austen’s seventeen-year-old protagonist Marianne Dashwood as an adolescent provides new insight into how Austen presents, and how readers have responded to, Marianne’s emotions, behaviours, and eventual marriage to Colonel Brandon. I work against the conventional opposition of sense versus sensibility to posit instead a developmental progression from adolescence to adulthood. In this article, I show how Austen uses the imaginative space of the novel to depict adolescence by allowing her protagonist first to explore and then to grow out of the dangers associated with this stage of life. This thoroughgoing re-evaluation of Marianne’s character challenges the prevailing readings of Sense and Sensibility.

Fanny Price: “Is she solemn?—Is she queer?—Is she prudish?”

IN MEMORY OF RALPH W. RADERIn his 1973 landmark essay, Defoe, Richardson, Joyce, and the Concept of Form in the Novel, Ralph W. Rader articulated a concept of the novel form that has resonated with his students and novel critics and theorists since that time. For Rader, novels present themselves to intuition as self-intelligible and self-justifying, that is, as forms the act of understanding could be experienced as its own justification.1 explaining this concept further, Rader describes what he calls the general model, whichspecifies works of fiction designed to develop and maximize concern for a character (or characters) along a line of development in the ground of concern is a dynamically shifting contrast between the reader's sense of the immediate and ultimate fate of the character (or characters) as compared with his (or their) immediate and ultimate desert, and to resolve this concern by a surprising but probable extension of the means used to raise it, so as to give the reader the greatest satisfaction in the ultimate fate of the character (or characters). To put it more simply, the author pits our induced sense of what will happen to a character against our induced sense of what we want to happen to him, our hopes against our fears, in order to give the greatest pleasure appropriate to their resolution.2The describes a work, Rader says further, which the reader at some level of consciousness must know from the outset is being shaped beneath its realistic surface to meet the requirements of desire.3 As articulated, this action model would apply to most novels in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition, and it applies to none more obviously than to the novels of Jane Austen.Austen usually brings novels to tidy, if somewhat frustrating, conclusions. Sense and Sensibility (1811) ends with both sisters marrying, even if no one is fully persuaded that Brandon is right for Marianne; and in the other novels, the closure is clear, even if peremptory. But in Mansfield Park (1814), especially for twenty-first-century readers, is a huge obstacle to narrative closure at the end of the novel. That difficulty involves Fanny Price herself. Fanny Price is of course central to the structure of the novel, just as fate is central to the resolution of the plot. each of novels, Austen molds central characters so carefully that they carry the burden of plot and resolution exactly as she intends: this is true of Catherine Morland, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth and Jane Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot. It must also be true of Fanny Price, even if she challenges our sympathies in various ways. Why is Fanny so timid and self-effacing? Why so relentlessly moral and so unrelievedly judgmental? What is the function of a character who seems at times spineless, even though we know she has a spine that is perhaps too rigid? Joyce Jenkins represents this school of response to Fanny when she says, there are at least three reasons for thinking that Fanny is not to be taken as a moral ideal in spite of purity of principle. First, principles may be good, but sentiments are suspect. Second, she is a of passivity and inaction. Third, she is a rule-governed wet blanket.4 Of course, this is how other characters in the novel think of Fanny too. By seeing mind and understanding emotion, are we not given a different perspective?Critics point to Austen's astonishingly effective handling of the details of plot and rich evocation of character. For Janet Todd, the key to Austen's universal popularity is her ability to create the illusion of psychologically believable and self-reflecting characters.5 Rader argues that Austen's novels are popular also because they adhere to what he calls Johnson's Rule. He finds this rule in Rambler 4 (March 31, 1750), where Samuel Johnson says: In narratives, where historical veracity has no place, I cannot discover why should not be exhibited the most perfect idea of virtue; of virtue not angelical, nor above probability, for what we cannot credit we shall never imitate, but the highest and purest that humanity can reach, which, exercised in such trials as the various revolutions of things shall bring upon it, may, by conquering some calamities, and enduring others, teach us what we may hope, and what we can perform. …

Catherine Madsen Responds

Catherine Madsen Responds Catherine Madsen I am most grateful for these five attentive—and very differently attentive—responses to my essay. Vanessa Ochs’s anthropological approach is appropriately open‐ended and nonjudgmental, and raises entertainingly a number of criteria for evaluating liturgy. Conspicuously absent from these criteria—because they are not the province of anthropology, and because, not being on the seder plate of most contemporary liturgists, they cannot even be studied as other people’s criteria—are aesthetic competence and moral weight. Naturally these are contentious factors, but some combination of them is necessary for a ritual to gain currency and staying power across generations. Possibly the central question of liturgy is “What kind of people are we trying to make?” The anthropologist can just wait and see what happens, but the liturgical innovator must either have some instinct or learn to take some thought for consequences. Steven Kepnes takes a harder theological line than mine; I do not insist that it is God “before whom you stand.” I do insist that liturgy be congruent with our experience of obligation. In the most important moral sense, it may well be mom and pop, grandma and zeidi, one’s friends and the rabbi, among others, before whom we stand—not in their capacity as familiar faces and known quantities, but in their capacity as the stranger, the Other. The vulnerability of the face, as Levinas says, commands us; if we are never sure whether we stand before God, we stand always before the poor and destitute, and before the nakedness and fragility of every face we encounter. A case could be made that the service leader should indeed face and serve the congregation. Yet I agree with Kepnes and Cantor Feffer that in practice this puts a false emphasis on the leader, who cannot genuinely serve every face in the group at once and is therefore put in the position of a performer, a “personality.” To scale back the personality, to return it to the plain offer hineni, “here am I,” it is helpful for the leader to address the face we cannot see. Leah Hochman has been generous with my ingratitude; the intuitions of an insistent layperson must seem to a professor in a rabbinical seminary to originate in left field. I agree with Hochman about the power of a good tune, and as a service leader I seek tunes and pursue them; in fact it was music that brought me over the line of conversion after several years of philosophical ambivalence. Still, a tune can misdirect one’s experience of a prayer. If the best‐known Aleinu tune were based on something more reflective than “Itsy‐Bitsy Spider,” it would convey something more complex than a “reification of Jewish superiority through divine justification.” Is it a convert’s naïveté that reads the Aleinu in a minor key, as a resolute acceptance of a difficult and tragic fate and a difficult God? The Itsy‐Bitsy tune is finally a little endearing for its sheer inadequacy to the occasion, but that does not quite excuse it. The heart‐opening properties of the late Debbie Friedman’s songs are best appreciated by hearts that open easily, while hearts seeking to be broken and contrite will find in her music no hard edges to break on. The interesting juxtaposition of Lech lecha and Lechi lach becomes unfortunately vacuous when set to a tune that recalls the slighter pop efforts of 1958. We await a pop‐inflected liturgical music with the moral urgency—indivisible from the aesthetic urgency of instruments, lyrics and voices—of the Four Tops’“Reach Out, I’ll Be There” (whose meaning, not incidentally, is hineni). Randi Rashkover’s complex and wide‐ranging discussion offers many points of entry. I am agnostic on the relationship of truth and beauty, at least as Mendelssohn presents it: his Euphranor, like Jane Austen’s Marianne Dashwood or Kierkegaard’s aesthete in Either/Or, is an aesthetic consumer, not a producer, and has only the dimmest sense of the role of judgment in artistic creation. What the authors of Ritual and Its Consequences mean by “as if” is not at all this kind...

Adapting Jane Austen: The Surprising Fidelity of "Clueless"

The many liberties taken by the adaptors of Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Persuasion--unquestionably the most serious of the feature-length adaptations of Austen's novels to have appeared recently--cannot be dismissed as indulgences or inaccuracies. Rather they are attempts to rectify problems and to smooth out inconsistencies in the novels by way of saving Austen from her less felicitous or, the adaptors seem to feel, less-than-Austenian tendencies. The treatment of Sense of Sensibility (1995) written by Emma Thompson and directed by Ang Lee does something altogether counterintuitive, or so it seems, in foregoing the most cinematic moment in the entire novel: John Willoughby's tenth-hour visit in the midst of Marianne Dashwood's near-fatal illness. But this move was more likely the result of an either/or proposition posed by the novel's incoherence. After all, not only does Willoughby's visit in which he explains his otherwise bad behavior go a long way in retrieving him from the villainy with which he is otherwise saddled by the plot to which the film in turn is pegged but also his surprise visit, along with expectations it resuscitates, creates additional complications in endorsing sensibility as a mode or affect of resistance to things as they are. While the novel, like the film, is obviously aligned with something opposed to sensibility, specifically the good sense and propriety Marianne's older sister Elinor continually displays in the face of disappointment or adversity, it remains, as the title suggests, just as faithful to the sisters as a unit (as opposed to a binarism) or to a sisterhood writ large, where the desire for something else or better finds a register in Marianne and an enabler in Willoughby. All of this might not matter much if the sisters' condition--specifically the precariousness of their lives in a culture where women typically have no control over wealth or property--were secondary or ancillary to the novel. However with a material sanction literally begins on page one, the resistance of the sisters' situation to the story, where Marianne (to quote Eve Sedgwick) is ultimately taught a lesson (833) never really flags. And so the liberties the film takes with the novel are not liberties. They are efforts to keep faith with the book as a vehicle of instruction and containment other, equally crucial, aspects of Sense and Sensibility forever oppose. In striving for coherence in a text where confusion and discontent are linked, the Lee/Thompson adaptation saves the novel in lieu of the its ability, apparently, to save itself. Driving this (in)fidelity (where what film theorist Jean Mitry terms inspiration (4) is mobilized on Austen's behalf regardless of what her novels actually say), is a myth or conception of Austen as somehow flawless has been a commonplace for over a century and a half. Some of this flawlessness falls under the heading of nostalgia particularly for Victorian readers who were much taken with the lost world of a largely gentrified community Austen brings so vividly to life. But most of it resides in the special place literary history has accorded Austen as the writer who essentially invented or helped to codify the novel as a realistic instrument. As the first writer successfully to negotiate what James Thompson (echoing Ian Watt) has described as that most fundamental contradiction of novelistic discourse ... between subjectivity and objectivity, Austen found the means of displaying the inside and outside of human life, how her characters think and feel, along with how they interact with others. And for this she occupies a crucial spot in the development of the novel; not just showing more of life, but a leap to showing all of life. As F. R. Leavis puts it, Jane Austen makes possible George Eliot: 'Jane Austen, in fact, is the inaugurator of the great tradition of the English novel' (18). Observations along these lines are manifold, including those by Raymond Williams, who also takes particular issue with the totality of Austen's vision: The paradox of Jane Austen is the . …

“Love” and “Connoisseurship” in Jane Austen's SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

In the early chapters of Sense and Sensibility, as we become acquainted with Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, we find frequent references to art. Elinor and Marianne are both creative girls—Elinor dra...

Framing Narratives

Marianne Dashwood was well able to imagine circumstances both favourable and unfavourable to her. But for all her romantic sensibility she was not able to imagine these things from anything other than her own point of view. ‘She expected from other people the same opinions and feelings as her own, and she judged of their motives by the immediate effect of their actions on herself.’ Unlike her sister, she could not see how the ill-crafted attentions of Mrs. Jennings could derive from a good nature. And when Elinor had to explain her troubles with Edward Ferrars, she knew that Marianne would feel it as a reminder of her own relations to Willoughby, judging Edward's behaviour as equivalent to that of Willoughby himself. Without the capacity to shift her point of view, Marianne can get no ironic distance from herself; she cannot see the unrealism of her later determination ‘to live solely for my family’.

Framing Narratives

Marianne Dashwood was well able to imagine circumstances both favourable and unfavourable to her. But for all her romantic sensibility she was not able to imagine these things from anything other than her own point of view.‘She expected from other people the same opinions and feelings as her own, and she judged of their motives by the immediate effect of their actions on herself.’ Unlike her sister, she could not see how the ill-crafted attentions of Mrs.Jennings could derive from a good nature. And when Elinor had to explain her troubles with Edward Ferrars, she knew that Marianne would feel it as a reminder of her own relations to Willoughby, judging Edward's behaviour as equivalent to that of Willoughby himself. Without the capacity to shift her point of view, Marianne can get no ironic distance from herself; she cannot see the unrealism of her later determination ‘to live solely for my family’.

"Describing What Never Happened": Jane Austen and the History of Missed Opportunities

"Describing What Never Happened":Jane Austen and the History of Missed Oportunities William Galperin I. Jane Austen's fictions are seemingly rife with missed opportunities. From her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), to her last completed novel, Persuasion (1817), the missed opportunity casts a shadow over Austen's world that her narratives never quite succeed in either dispelling or, even in Persuasion, fully redressing. Sense and Sensibility is forever haunted by the specter of John Willoughby, whose own reflections at the novel's close—in particular the "pang" he experiences at the thought of Marianne Dashwood's marriage to Colonel Brandon—are less a retributive instrument than a darkling echo of earlier prospects that the novel has concertedly nurtured.1 It is no accident surely that, in a typical gesture of damage control, the recent cinematic adaptation of Sense and Sensibility has no place for the most cinematic moment in the entire book: Willoughby's tenth-hour, and largely self-exculpatory, visit in the midst of Marianne's near-fatal illness. The movie, it is true, ends with a version of Willoughby in pang as he surveys Marianne's and Brandon's domestic tranquility from afar. But this grandiose and contrived image of him contravenes the novel's concluding observations (and directives), which are marked less by melodramatic longing than by a duller ache where the everyday is simply fraught and set against an horizon of plenitude from which life and its pleasures are a falling away: But that he was for ever inconsolable, that he fled from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart, must not be depended on—for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.2 [End Page 355] The countercurrent against which happiness must struggle for Willoughby, and the marital and gender division it projects, hardly requires unpacking. But what is less immediately clear is how the impedance to joy, both here and elsewhere in Austen, is as much a function of things as they are as an index of something missed or bypassed that does not belong entirely to the realm of fantasy. In addition to noting that Marianne remains Willoughby's "secret standard of perfection in woman," and a placeholder for the very plenitude that Willoughby had himself figured (and had figured as recently as his dramatic reentry to the narrative), the narrator projects a different sequence of events from those that have transpired. For "in the voluntary forgiveness" of his benefactor following his marriage to what the novel calls "a woman of character," Willoughby is given "reason for believing that had he behaved with honour towards Marianne, he might at once have been happy and rich." This is not of course how things have worked out, either for Willoughby or for Marianne, who is gloomily described as being "taken from" her family on the occasion of her marriage.3 Still, the force of any lesson derivable from these developments is mitigated not just by the imperatives of comedy, which see to it that Willoughby is left, more or less unpunished, in the company of his animals and diversions, but even more by what in the context of the novel is very nearly a historical imperative. In this respect, loss is not strictly speaking absence but a residue or trace of something sufficiently palpable in its lingering materiality that it literally blots both the comedic close and the sententia attached to it. Persuasion, by contrast, appears pitched in a different direction insofar as the interrupted union of Anne Elliot and Capt. Frederick Wentworth is identified at the novel's outset as the problem or missed opportunity that the narrative must somehow redress. But even as Persuasion is given over in nearly exclusive measure to restoring what was lost in the prehistory of the narrative, when Anne initially rejected Wentworth's proposal of marriage, it is far from clear that what Anne has missed, much less...

Change and Fixity in Sense and Sensibility

In his introduction to Sense and Sensibility, Tony Tanner notes Marianne Dashwood's relish for the language of the early Romantic poets, "a language of solitude rather than society," and remarks that Jane Austen, too, had a special affinity with these writers. 1 In that small detail, perhaps, lies part of the novel's complexity--its mandate of having, if not to kill the thing it loves, then at least to mute it with compromise and social adjustment. A "language of solitude" is de facto a personal discourse to which the reader gains access as a privileged eavesdropper, and style indirect libre, that supposed invention of the nineteenth-century novel, was already implicit in the discursive verse of sensibility, as witness the way, in William Cowper's Retirement, it opens a window on a different consciousness from the speaker's:

Reshaping the Sexes in 'Sense and Sensibility'

Moreland Perkins's Reshaping the Sexes in 'Sense and Sensibility' is an accessible exploration of Jane Austen's revision and reversal of sexual stereotypes. He argues that Austen's first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, embodies her most sustained effort at correcting dominant concepts of gender in her era. Through an analysis of the text, he demonstrates how the novel's protagonists deviate from ruling ideas of their sexes and reveal Austen's own feminist tendencies. By comparing Elinor Dashwood to Austen's other female protagonists, Perkins argues that she alone exemplified a type of heroine unique for her time and still unacknowledged: an intellectual. With her acute sense of honour and her commitment to civic responsibility, Elinor is one of Austen's most complex constructions. Perkins also shows that Elinor's passions are more intense and interesting than many readers have seen. Critics have described Marianne Dashwood's love ethic as emotive and her illness as brought on by Freudian repression, but Perkins finds her sexually unrepressed and rational in her ethic. Edward Ferrar's modesty, shyness as lover, and merely domestic ambitions also challenge gender stereotypes. Yet his wit, moral courage and practicality enrich his portrait in a way that helps us appreciate Elinor's love. Perkins prefers to scrutinize, not theorize. Seeking reconstruction, never deconstruction, he offers readings of puzzling actions, such as Marianne's marrying Colonel Brandon, and Elinor's assisting Brandon to enable Edward to marry her fair rival. Perkins shows that this underestimated novel offers important insights into Austen's notion of what a woman can be and a man should be, and into the deeply social conception of felt emotion that drives and structures her fiction.

"I See Every Thing As You Desire Me to Do": The Scolding and Schooling of Marianne Dashwood

"I See Every Thing As You Desire Me to Do": The Scolding and Schooling of Marianne Dashwood