Sense and Sensibility - Week 1 > Likes and Comments

My apologies for the late post. I was unwell yesterday.

The story starts with the death of Mr. Dashwood (father). The house and fortune are left to his son from a previous marriage, leaving his widow and three daughters with a very small income. John Dashwwod promised his father to provide for them. Fanny, his wife, basically convinces him to help very little.

Elenor (sense) is the pragmatic one. Maryanne (sensibility) the sensitive and dramatic one. She is very much like her mother. Elenor develops a relationship with Fanny’s brother, much to the distress of Fanny and her mother. The Dashwood wonen are neither rich enough nor prominent in society.

The Dashwoods receive an invitation to move to a small cottage. Their new landlord is very kind and supportive. His wife is a bit cold. The Fashwoods accept and move into the cottage which is quite a ways away from home.

1. What does Austen mean by sense and sensibility?

2. What do you think about the characters so far (be specific)?

3. What does Austen capture about society in these pages?

So sorry you’re not feeling well!

Abigail wrote: "So sorry you’re not feeling well!"

Thanks. Today seems to be the first day towards back to normal 😸

The title used to confuse me because in modern English (at least American English, unsure if the same in British English), sensibility means something similar to sense. It wasn't until I read a lot of other classics that I realized sensibility is something like what we'd call sensitivity today.

I seem to have “always” known the meaning of Sensibility here. Before Junior High / Middle School anyway, when some of my classmates were reading it (or trying to).

One possibility is that I ran into a reference to someone’s “delicate sensibilities” and asked what it meant. Or used a good dictionary.

Or it may have been from a discussion of late eighteenth-century manners, when at least the affectation of Sensibility was in vogue.

That would probably be in a book about one of the Founding Fathers: I read stuff above my grade level in elementary school, and I don’t recall a lot of it very specifically. This was sometimes a problem when I couldn’t explain why I thought something was true (or false).

SENSIBILITY
Meyer Spacks has the following to say about sensibility in his annotated edition of the novel:

“Earlier [in the eighteenth century], it had labeled a capacity for emotional responsiveness highly valued in life and literature.” In this original meaning, it was more likely to refer to “responsiveness to the feelings of others” or “emotional expressiveness.” By the time Austen wrote this book, however, it “often referred to a then current version of emotional extravagance: something more like a cult than a quality. . . . Sensibility became often an object of ridicule, largely because it had turned into a form less of feeling than of show.” So sensibility might be an admirable trait in its milder forms, but might become performative.

SENSE
Austen’s use of “sense” is a little harder to get at. Jane Austen often uses the term the way we would use “common sense,” referring to a habit of mind that favors practicality and an understanding of “the world.” It also suggests reasoning, a temperate approach to life, or a combination of intelligence and education applied to social situations. I’ll dig around some more and see if I can come up with something that puts her use of “sense” into historical context.

I would question the idea that Elinor embodies sense and Marianne embodies sensibility. Maybe we might say instead that Elinor practices sense and Marianne enacts sensibility, but both characters have a mixture of both qualities.

There is a whole chapter on the various meanings of sense (etc.) in C.S. Lewis’ “Studies in Words.” I am a little hesitant in suggesting it. The chapter is dense with Latin, to begin with, and Lewis was taken to task for carelessness with etymologies. But he was a pretty good Latinist. And I suspect he was using the Lewis and Short Latin dictionary, which is pretty reliable, although dated.

Sensibility here is more like what we would call sentimentality.

Chapter 2 is a deliciously hateful masterpiece! The way Fanny Dashwood manipulates her husband into selfishness is so clever, and Austen lays it out with very little editorializing.

If sensibility becomes performance when taken too far, what does sense become?

Deborah wrote: "If sensibility becomes performance when taken too far, what does sense become?"

If the context is financial, maybe miserliness? We could see Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood in that light, taking prudence for the benefit of their son to extremes. In other contexts, it could be excess caution, or the paralysis that comes when a person considers too many possibilities and can’t make a choice. It could also be seen as a lack of feeling, valorizing logic over emotional intelligence.

Maybe we can see Jane Austen’s idea of virtue not as a fixed quality but as a constant search for balance amid competing tendencies, rather the way the medicine of the day sought to balance the humors. None of the humors was inherently destructive to health, but in excess or deficit, any of them could cause trouble. Similarly, both honesty and amiability are virtues, but they often come into conflict—as will become more apparent in next week’s chapters.

Abigail wrote: "Chapter 2 is a deliciously hateful masterpiece! The way Fanny Dashwood manipulates her husband into selfishness is so clever, and Austen lays it out with very little editorializing."

This was definitely a fascinating chapter, especially as the manipulation comes so gradually step by step going to more or less nothing and then the justification how they will be so comfortable because they will not have any horses, no carriages, hardly any servants - so no expenses at all so they will not need any money.
Calling it a comfortable living without all the things that Fanny (most probably) could not live without is pure irony.
I thought Mr Dashwood very weak in this chapter considering that Elinor is 19 years old and he must have lived at least some time relatively closely with the family. So he should not be able to completely ignore them as strangers or far relatives.
How he could be so easily dissuaded in helping them as he had promised his father does not speak for his character.

I have read this novel many, many years ago, but have also seen many adaptations several times (especially the one with Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet) - so I have to be careful not to think too far ahead.

Regarding sense and sensibility distributed to the characters, I also think that both have some of both characteristics in them. Elinor has to be the prudent and wise one in the situation as her mother and sister are not, but it does not mean that she is not emotionally overwhelmed. She just tried to "get her act together" and make the best out of the current situation.
We will have to see how this develops, also with regards to her attachment to Edward.

People with money judging how people without should live has never gone away!

So true!

Yes, unfortunately, very true!

I have always wondered about the lives of the Dashwoods before they came to live with the uncle. what happened to their previous home at stanfold (?I forgot the exact name( did they sell it? so where is the money did they rent it out? what did they live on? they are evedently Gentry so where did they come from? and where is their money?

Mrs wrote: "I have always wondered about the lives of the Dashwoods before they came to live with the uncle. what happened to their previous home at stanfold (?I forgot the exact name( did they sell it? so whe..."

Excellent questions! Austen doesn’t seem to have thought about that past at all. My guess is that Mrs. Dashwood’s husband (the one who’s the father of John, Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret) would have sold that estate and invested the proceeds in the 3%s or 5%s, and that would account for the small amount of unencumbered income he was able to will away from John.

Austen is ambiguous about that. Since John and Fanny moved into the house and he was the only son, I got the impression they owned the house. I felt Austen was starting to show what happens to widowed/unmarried women.

John is the owner of Norland Park, yes. I think Mrs. Benyishai was referring to Stanhill, the house Mr. Henry Dashwood and his family lived in before they moved to Norland Park to live with the older Mr. Dashwood.

Austen did a wonderful job in these chapters of defining the various characters. I found it very interesting that Mrs. Dashwood so often turned to Elinor for advice and help in making practical decisions. It's almost as if Mrs. D is the child and Elinor the mother. John and Fanny are another study in contrasts; he wants to do the right thing but seems very unsure and dominated by his wife; she is dominated by no one and knows what should be done, which is whatever benefits Fanny. Sir John, chatty and perhaps over-friendly is in contrast to Lady Midddleton who is reserved to the point of coldness. Overall, I think Austen has set up a set of characters who will have some very interesting conflicts!

I really enjoy Austen's irony. Her remark about half-siblings was funny, at least I think that it was irony when the narrator says that half-siblings are expected to not be fond of each other.

Hedi wrote: "How he could be so easily dissuaded in helping them as he had promised his father does not speak for his character.."

Because she is smart. If she had escalated it quickly he could evade her ambush, so she goes building the trap slowly. This is how in the real world dictatorships are installed. Attacking one right then other, not all of them at once.

That is, unfortunately, true. But you could be smarter, see through this and keep your position or show some backbone and stand up for your family.
Fanny is definitely the one with “the pants” in that relationship. 😉

Well, the novel starts with a romp through the genealogy of the Dashwoods, a romp that is over in a few paragraphs leaving a number of dark corners and obscure connections. Was this deliberate in order to avoid a full blown Trollopian style deviation from the story or was it maybe just to leave a little mystery floating in the ether? Whichever it was it felt like the author wanted to dispense with it as quickly as possible.

With this reread coming so quickly after finishing Pride and Prejudice, I was struck by the characters of the two mothers we have been introduced to in these initial chapters. Does Jane Austen enjoy making her fictional mothers either inept or selfishly domineering? Perhaps I have condemned them (JA’s fictional mothers) too early when so much of the author’s canon is yet to follow. Nevertheless Mrs Dashwood’s incompetence and Fanny’s ’narrow, selfish’ controlling behaviour reminded me at least in some respects of Mrs.Bennet and Lady Catherine.

Regarding ‘Sense’ and ‘Sensibility’ I am happy to go along with Jane Austen’s definitions of the terms, as explained in her descriptions of the two eldest Dashwood girls.

’Elinor, this eldest daughter, whose advice was so effectual, possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother, and enabled her frequently to counteract, to the advantage of them all, that eagerness of mind in Mrs. Dashwood which must generally have led to imprudence. She had an excellent heart;–her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn; and which one of her sisters had resolved never to be taught.’

Marianne’s abilities were, in many respects, quite equal to Elinor’s. She was sensible and clever; but eager in everything: her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting: she was everything but prudent. The resemblance between her and her mother was strikingly great.

Elinor saw, with concern, the excess of her sister’s sensibility; but by Mrs. Dashwood it was valued and cherished.’

My favourite ‘scene’ in this first section was in Chapter 3 - the reaction by Marianne to the poetry reading given by Edward Ferrers.

’He admires as a lover, not as a connoisseur. To satisfy me, those characters must be united. I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter into all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both. Oh! mama, how spiritless, how tame was Edward’s manner in reading to us last night! I felt for my sister most severely. Yet she bore it with so much composure, she seemed scarcely to notice it. I could hardly keep my seat. To hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference!”–
“He would certainly have done more justice to simple and elegant prose. I thought so at the time; but you WOULD give him Cowper.”
“Nay, Mamma, if he is not to be animated by Cowper!– but we must allow for difference of taste. Elinor has not my feelings, and therefore she may overlook it, and be happy with him. But it would have broke MY heart, had I loved him, to hear him read with so little sensibility’

There’s sensibility for you. Marianne driven wild by Cowper.

My choice of the poem(s) that so disappointed Marianne because of Ferrers’ perceived apathetic performance of them would be ……..

‘Hatred And Vengeance, My Eternal Portion’…..

https://keytopoetry.com/william-cowpe...

or maybe ’Love Increased By Suffering’

https://keytopoetry.com/william-cowpe...

Good comment on the mothers. I think it is part of the "absent mother" syndrome that shows up in fairy tales and romances. A strong helpful mother would guide the heroine, thereby eliminating many of the plot twists, misunderstandings, etc.

Good point, Robin! If a heroine being introduced to the world is guided by an attentive mother, how is she going to get into troubles she has to learn to resolve for herself?

In Northanger Abbey, the heroine has a good mother, but she spends most of the book away from home.

In Mansfield Park, Fanny Price has a mother from whom she is separated, and who is unimpressive when we meet her, an aunt who claims to be a foster mother but is too indolent to count for much, and another aunt who functions like a wicked stepmother in a fairy tale. (For those who have not read it, the three women are sisters.)

Of course the father-figure in MP is also absent a good part of time, and his moral sense seems blunt compared to Fanny’s. (Not to mention that he is a slave-owner.) In Emma, the father is a hypochondriacal cipher. And in Persuasion, Anne Elliot’s father is puffed up with pride, and generally foolish.

I wonder whether these are judgments on parents she has witnessed in action, or just convenient plot devices.

Abigail wrote: "Good point, Robin! If a heroine being introduced to the world is guided by an attentive mother, how is she going to get into troubles she has to learn to resolve for herself?

In Northanger Abbey, ..."

When I was in college, we used to read True Confessions magazines in order to make fun of them, because they were so ridiculous. The heroines never had mothers - maybe stepmothers who didn't care about them, often no family at all, so they could get into predicaments.

I suspect Jane Austen was fully aware of the conventional nature of heroines of novels having inadequate or absent parents. One of the jokes in Northanger Abbey is about how Catherine is unpromising heroine material since she had perfectly normal parents. In some of her juvenile stories (thinking about “Love and Freindship,” for instance) she has the protagonists reject their kindly parents in order to go off to fulfill their hero or heroine destinies.

Great point, Abigail, for sure the heroines of gothic novels were on their own in the cruel world.

I liked the way Mrs John Dashwood manipulates her husband by arguing in stages and gradually depleting the sum that John Dashwood proposes to give to the family. In increments starting at £3000, and then ending with nothing; my reading experience was that I was in the room with them when that conversation was taking place. I felt I was watching the devious lady preying on John’s gullibility to achieve her end which was to give them nothing! Jane Austin is superb at writing conversations that takes you into the interlocutor’s mindset.