Sense and Sensibility critic quotes

Sensibility

Sensibility

Janet Todd defines ‘sensibility’ as: “the faculty of feeling, the capacity for extremely refined emotion and a quickness to display compassion for suffering” (1986)

Ballaster: “Women who have been enslaved to sensibility, according to Wollstonecraft, either neglect or indulge their children, whereas women given the opportunity to exercise their capacity for reason would educate them to become full rational citizens themselves. By contrast, Edgeworth’s novel instructs its heroine in the necessity of balancing sensibility and rationalism rather than rejecting the former outright.”

John Mullan: Marianne’s devotion to sensibility is indeed a ‘problematic form of self-hood’, as it leads to her own illness, both performative and genuine. ‘It is as if her willed sensitivity has so weakened her that she is in real danger’

Critic Thomas Keymer argues that: “Marianne’s habit of causing stirs and making scenes, while at one level a mark of culpable self-absorption, also works to disrupt the serenity of social mechanisms that empower rank and wealth at the expense of both sisters” - Keymer in ‘Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility’, Cambridge Companion, 2011.

Critic Keymer stated that: Marianne’s ‘extraordinary fate… to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract, by her conduct, her most favourite maxims’ (p. 352) includes the acceptance of those ‘social mechanisms that empower rank and wealth’

Money

Janet todd stated: “Money is a constant topic of the rich and poor. People ponder how much they owe and are owed, and the book hums with precise sums”

Lucy Worsley stated: “To the Georgians, [financial] information would have immediately indicated a certain standard of living.  [Income is used] as a shorthand for status, and [Austen] expects her readers immediately to know what kind of household she is talking about when she says a family has £500 or £1000 a year.  Five hundred pounds annually was about the lower limit at which a family could aspire to ‘gentility’.  A thousand pounds a year was another significant point because it was the level at which one became able to run carriage” and therefore enjoy some independence of movement. 

“Girls are often cruelly left by their parents without any provision; and, of course, are dependent on, not only the reason, but the bounty of their brothers.  But when the brother marries, his sister is viewed with averted looks as an intruder, an unnecessary burden.  The wife is displeased at seeing the property of her children lavished on an helpless sister” - Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

Critic John Mullan says that money “deforms human relationships” in the novel

Marriage and Courtship

The average man marries a woman who is slightly less intelligent than he is.  That’s why many brilliant women never marry. They do not come in contact with sufficiently brilliant men, or fail to disguise their brilliance in order to win a man of somewhat less intelligence - Dr. Clifford R. Adams, Modern Bride Magazine, 1953.

The Female Instructor, published anonymously c.1811: On love and courtship: “This is an affection of the mind, compounded of desire, esteem and benevolence, which forms the bond of attachment and union between individuals of different sexes; and makes them feel, in the society of each other, a species of happiness which they experience nowhere else”. 

Critic Janet Todd says: “Austen’s books… suggest the emptiness of women’s lives without men; indeed throughout her completed works, women are shown living what Nina Auerbach (1976) calls ‘a purgatorial* life together.”

Purgatory= a place or process of punishment and purification before souls can enter heaven 

“Austen’s novels, while alive to the pressures of family expectations, unreservedly endorse the aim of marrying for love” - John Mullan.

In Mary Wollstonecraft’s pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), she comments how in order to rise in the world, women have to “marry advantageously, and to this object their time is sacrificed, and their persons often legally prostituted”.

Courtship was a semi-public process, acted out according to fixed conventions” - Mullan.

“Marriage is presented as a unifying force in society” - Theobald.

“While the heroines may seem to submit to society’s expectations by marrying, they do not do so passively” - Theobald.

“In Austen’s novels, marriage means a complex arrangement between the marrying couple and society - that is it means not only feelings but property” - Dorothy Van Ghent (1953).

“Jane Austen’s view of marriage is far from sentimental” - Todd

“[We should not] assume that because Austen never married she was indifferent to passion or to the essential humanity of her male creations. One of her gifts as a writer is her ability to suggest what is going on beneath the surface - even if this is filtered obliquely through a series of perceptions and comments from other characters. Just as her rogues are drawn with hints as to their background and motivation, so her heroes are often complex and troubled young men who do not know how to express their feelings openly” - Judy Simons, ‘Beyond Stereotypes - Jane Austen’s Men’,

Conduct in female characters

The ideal Georgian woman: “To be mistress of oneself was paramount - genteel ladies aimed to be self-possessed in social encounters, self-controlled in the face of minor provocations, self-sufficient in the midst of ingratitude, and, above all, brave and enduring in the grip of tragedy and misfortune” - Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter (London & New Haven, 1998).

In the novels of Austen, “becoming a man means proving or testing oneself or earning a vocation, becoming a woman means relinquishing achievement and accommodating oneself to men and the spaces they provide” (Gilbert and Gubar)

Critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that: “Austen always defers to the economic, social, and political power of men as she dramatises how and why female survival depends on gaining male approval and protection. 

Uncertainty and hope

Critic Claudia Johnson says: Austen is concerned with how beliefs are complicated with wishes, hopes or fears.  Her subject matter is particularly well-suited to this set of psychological concerns, for the passivity and circumscription* of women’s lives give rise to intense situations of hope, fear or - later perhaps - regret.  Because they do not have what Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey terms “the advantage of choice”, women can only wait for and conjecture about the possibility of proposals.  They must observe their suitors’ gestures, review their encouraging words, speculate about their intentions, and then wait” - Claudia L. Johnson, ‘The “Twilight of Probability”: Uncertainty and Hope in Sense and Sensibility’

Critic Claudia Johnson argues: “In her principled ardour, Marianne has allowed her hope for Willoughby to exceed a dearly desired wish and to become a radical dependency on something which, after all, might not be.  Austen chastises Marianne’s single-minded ardour not because it fosters unseemly emotionality, but because it is not the appropriate response to a world where “one’s happiness must in some measure be always at the mercy of chance” (p. 233).  It is the disappointment of an entirely plausible but obsessively cherished hope that debilitates and almost destroys Marianne.”

Samuel Johnson identified: “idleness and solitude as two primary threats to the well-being of the understanding because an ‘empty and unoccupied’ mind is more vulnerable to the incursions of ‘any wild wish or vain imagination’.  Furthermore, he argued “that the confined and undiversified quality of women’s lives” made them “more likely to be ‘cankered by the rust of their own thoughts’”

Samuel Johnson warned that fixation on future hopes and the indulgence of sorrow could lead to obsession: “Mournful ideas, first violently impressed and afterwards willingly received, so much engross the attention, as to predominate in every thought, to darken gayety, and perplex ratiocination.  An habitual sadness seizes the soul, and the faculties are chained to a single object, which can never be contemplated but with hopeless uneasiness” 

Claudia Johnson argues Elinor’s effort to be animated but not deluded by hope is genuinely heroic.  Knowing that hopes are only probable, she does not allow them to engross her mind, and instead cultivates a lucid readiness for any eventuality which enables her to go forward. Austen’s aim in S&S has not been so much to expose the folly of intense feeling as to show the danger of hoping too intensely for so much, given a world that cannot be penetrated by our understandings, much less conjured by our wishes.  At the end of the novel, Austen circumscribes* her heroines’ felicity, then, to show that this is the most which may safely be hoped for.”

Male characters

Critic Marvin Mudrick (1952) says: “Elinor often assures her dubious sister that Edward is an intelligent and upright young man, but the author never produces the evidence upon which Elinor’s opinion is purportedly founded.  In the action of the novel, whatever Edward says or does makes him seem very damp company.  Edward Ferrars is dull, awkward, clumsy and characterless.”

Critic Marilyn Butler (1975) says: “Elinor sees beyond the defects of Edward’s manner to the enduring qualities of his mind and spirit, his ‘sense’ and ‘goodness’, and both these words imply that Edward’s virtues are those of a given code of values, namely the Christian.  Edward’s character, Edward’s opinions and Elinor’s methods of assessing him are based on prescribed standards, not on subjective impulse.”

Critic Marvin Mudrick (1952) says: “No hero enters a story more romantically than Willoughby.  To sweep into his arms a lovely girl and carry her to the pretty cottage which is her home: the circumstances alone are enough to predispose us in his favour.  No hero, besides, is given the benefit of a more attractive appearance and manner.”

Critic Alastair Duckworth (1971) says: “Willoughby is, to a large degree, an invention of Marianne’s imaginative mind.  This is not to deny that he is handsome and possessed of ‘ardour’, ‘talents’ and spirit, but from the moment he becomes her cherished ‘preserver’, Willoughby is defined, and is willing to be defined, in terms of ‘the hero of a favourite story’.

Helena Kelly argues: (Regarding Edward and Willoughby) “Both men indulge their own vanity, and their own feelings, without much regard for the women they claim to love”(2016).

In the novels of Austen, “becoming a man means proving or testing oneself or earning a vocation, becoming a woman means relinquishing achievement and accommodating oneself to men and the spaces they provide” (Gilbert and Gubar)

Critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that: “Austen always defers to the economic, social, and political power of men as she dramatises how and why female survival depends on gaining male approval and protection. 

Motherhood

Critic Ros Ballaster on S&S as a matriarchal novel (A05): Sense and Sensibility is “preoccupied with maternal affection and priorities” (p. vii). There is a “significant absence of paternal authority in the families which are its focus. [...] For the Dashwood sisters and the Ferrars brothers, it is a mother who has sole parental authority over them.  And Sense and Sensibility is full of, indeed over-crowded with, mothers”

The home

“The search for a home is an idea that’s central to Austen’s fiction.  The majority of her scenes take place indoors, with people talking, always talking, in a room, which is very often a drawing room.  And yet, when Austen’s characters want to talk about what really matters - their feelings, the truth - they often have to go outdoors.  They escape the jaws of the drawing rooms that confine their lives.  All of Austen’s leading ladies are displaced from either their physical home, or from their family.  Austen shows how hard it is to find a true home, a place of safety in which one can be understood and loved” - Lucy Worsley

“In the opening chapter of Sense and Sensibility, Austen is making explicit a deeply held and deeply inconsistent belief - that women, the very people who are supposed to spend their life at home, in the bosom of their families, don’t really belong there.  Whatever the domestic contribution of the Dashwood women - the ‘solid comfort’ and ‘cheerfulness’ they have provided, the ‘attention’ they have given - it’s worth nothing at all, its value can easily be outweighed, ignored and dismissed” - Helena Kelly.

“Girls are often cruelly left by their parents without any provision; and, of course, are dependent on, not only the reason, but the bounty of their brothers.  But when the brother marries, his sister is viewed with averted looks as an intruder, an unnecessary burden.  The wife is displeased at seeing the property of her children lavished on an helpless sister” - Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

Critic Alison Hennegan says: “The home is a gendered space, associated most in literature and culture with women.  Austen is writing at the beginning of the 19th century, before the cult of the domestic that dominates during the Victorian era.  However, there is evidence that she distinguishes in her novels between ‘Houses’ and ‘Homes’.  ‘Houses’ tend to be large estates with a reputation and lineage (the term ‘house’, Hennegan points out, can refer to a family e.g. the ‘House of Windsor’ for the British Royal Family) and are bound up in primogeniture and entail.  Characters’ movement from House to House contributes to their development.  But ‘homes’ refer to places with greater emotional ties, places that reflect the personality of those of live there”

Hennegan says, “Characters’ movement from House to House contributes to their development”

John Mullan observes: “The bedroom is a sanctum and only special people may enter.  It is in their shared bedroom in Mrs Jennings’ London house that the revealing conversations take place between the sisters and it is hard to imagine these conversations taking place anywhere but a bedroom.”

Emotion and Reason

Janet todd argues: S&S does not present a “crude antithesis of self-control and emotionalism” but rather uses Elinor and Marianne “to investigate how a person can live in the world without giving it too much and without growing alienated by its demands and indifference” 

Wollstonecraft argues that the whole person requires the strengthening of both reason and sensibility, so that sensibility might be “moderated by reason” and reason must be sustained by sensibility; and excess of either relaxes the other powers of the mind

Critic Alastair Duckworth says: “Marianne is one of the most interesting characters in Jane Austen’s fiction.  She anticipates the tragically Quixotic* heroines of the nineteenth century novel, whose visions of existence can find no fulfilment within the limitations of their societies”. 

*extremely idealistic; unrealistic and impractical.

Illness and improvement

‘Marianne's illness, convalescence and recovery can be seen as symbolic of her ridding herself of Willoughby's influence and of the romantic sensibilities that have nearly led to her destruction. When she finally emerges from her fever, it is to acknowledge that she has been mistaken, that she now understands that she must abandon her selfish ways and take her place in society.’ H. Fram 

‘Assertion, imagination, and wit are tempting forms of self-definition which encourage each of the lively heroines to think that she can master or has mastered the world, but this is proven a dangerous illusion for women who must accept the fate of being mastered, and so the heroine learns the benefits of modesty, reticence, and patience.’ Gilbert and Gubar

When Elinor and Marianne have to confront the same painful situation — betrayal by the men they deemed future husbands — Elinor’s stoical self-restraint is the strength born of her good sense while Marianne’s indulgence in sensibility almost causes her own death, the unfettered play of her imagination seeming to result in a terrible fever that represents how imaginative women are infected and sickened by their dreams. Gilbert and Gubar 

“Consumption” of which Eliza perishes, and which Brandon describes as a mercy, is not, in fact, tubercular; Eliza dies of nothing less than venereal disease. “Consumption” is Austen’s euphemism—and not only Austen’s—for syphilis. When Brandon pronounces the nearness of Eliza’s death his “greatest comfort,” he is not implying that he, or society, will be more comfortable once the fallen woman is removed from view; he means that her venereal disease is so advanced that death will be a mercy. Eliza’s downward trajectory, her “life of sin,” has involved dire economic necessity. Three and a half years later, when Brandon finds her, she lies dying of what any eighteenth-century doctor would unhesitatingly have diagnosed as a confirmed pox. “Only to Sink Deeper”: Venereal Disease in Sense and Sensibility, Marie E. McAllister

Marianne’s fever both re-enacts and redirects the elder Eliza’s consumption. Each is harmed by love and her own actions, each sickens, each is watched by loved ones when at death’s door, and so on. Marianne lives: Austen refuses to punish her, or let her punish herself, with the classic death scene meted out to sentimental heroines who have dared to feel passion…That Eliza’s death results from venereal disease sets her even further apart from Marianne. The latter has been too quick to feel and to trust, but she has not committed the sin that contemporary novels punish with death: nowhere in the novel does Austen suggest that Marianne forgets her culture’s beliefs about premarital sex and parentally approved marriage, even if she boldly defies other conventions. “Only to Sink Deeper”: Venereal Disease in Sense and Sensibility, Marie E. McAllister

‘Edward carries the taint of his engagement with him just as Eliza carries the taint of the disease that kills her. Discontented and depressed, he cannot state or act on his love for Elinor, and his unhappiness puzzles her and undercuts her pleasure during the short time together at Barton that Austen gives them’ Marie E. McAllister

‘The reference to venereal disease makes it almost impossible to see his (Brandon’s) marriage to Marianne as either a punishment or a triumph of convention. Brandon’s knowledge of a world tainted by debauchery and venereal disease—and especially his knowledge of their horrible consequences for women—shows that he is no symbol of propriety or restrictive social convention. His narrative affirms his own sensibility by placing him in a sentimental tableau far beyond any imagined or experienced by Marianne: at the bedside of the fallen woman whose disease spares her just long enough for “a better preparation for death” . Likewise, he is no controlling patriarch…He fails the second Eliza precisely by granting her too much freedom for her age and asserts that his own imprudence should be blamed for her seduction in Bath… he admires rather than seeks to suppress the passionate side of Marianne’ Marie E. McAllister

Professions for men in the regency era

Gentleman did not work for a living.  They would live off an independent income, either inherited or an allowance provided by a rich relation e.g. Willoughby and Edward Ferrars: “what we would now condemn as laziness was then a universally accepted part of the leisure-class code.  Young gentlemen with expectations of inherited wealth were not supposed to work so Ferrars’ concern about his vocation deserves much more credit than it would today” - Watt (1961).

Colonel Brandon

“Colonel Brandon is a vacuum. Colonel Brandon represents the antidote to feeling, the proposition that the only cure for a passionate heart is to remove it” - Mudrick (1952).

“There is certainly an unconvincing quality about Brandon” - Watt (1961).

“Brandon’s knowledge of a world tainted by debauchery and venereal disease - and especially his knowledge of their horrible consequences for women - shows that he is no symbol of propriety or restrictive social convention.  Likewise he is no controlling patriarch although he surely wishes to offer himself as protector.  He admires rather than seeks to suppress the passionate side of Marianne and he waits on the sidelines.  He represents the world into which both Elinor and Marianne are still growing - a distressingly real and often painful place despite its rich rewards; a world in which sense and sensibility are always problematic yet both essential” - McAllister (2004).

“The melancholy Colonel Brandon has let his earlier experience take hold of his life and reduce him to despair, then settled depression.  Colonel Brandon projects his desire onto Marianne, makes it reincarnate his lost love - a passionate instance of the novel’s habit of duplication.  Rather chillingly he then routes his new passion through memory. Colonel Brandon believes the first Eliza would have been identical to Marianne had she been guarded ‘by a firmer mind, or an happier marriage’, both of which he offers at the conclusion of the novel.  Only in this way will he compensate for his failure to guard the second Eliza.  Ironically, he is going to rescue the romantic Marianne from her romantic propensities - when it is these, the youthful warmth and sexual candour, which attract him” - Todd (2006).