Sense and Sensibility- Week 6 > Likes and Comments

Once again I’m a bit behind. Feel free to start the discussion. My recap and questions will be posted tomorrow

This section includes a number of vivid scenes—from that horror show of a dinner party at the John Dashwoods’ house to the cringey moment when Edward calls on Elinor only to find Lucy there, and then Marianne comes in to make everything infinitely worse.

For my taste, Jane Austen goes overboard in her portrayals of the urban sophisticates of London; they are more burlesques than real characters. Mrs. Ferrars with her slavish praise of the Honourable Miss Morton; Robert Ferrars’s drawn-out prate about cottages and his selection of a toothpick case; John Dashwood’s poor-mouth talk of all the expenses he has “had” to incur; various characters’ susceptibility to obvious flattery. Austen is acting within a literary tradition of “town versus country” here, where town is the site of falsity and pretension, and country people are “normal”—but I feel she’s succumbing to stereotyping and not living up to her usual standard of subtlety in characterization. As all these types are presented, Elinor and Marianne are reduced to a passive observer role, not active participants in their own stories. It’s funny in spots but also drags. Glad to be moving on to volume 3.

BTW, did everyone notice that there was a duel? 🤺

Willoughby gets married and Marianne is devastated. Edward’s engagement is still ambiguous. Elinor hides her discontent about the Edward’s possible engagement, and her feelings about the Miss Steeles. There is a lot of cattiness in these chapters among the women. We find the buffoon who ordered the card case is Edward’s brother.

1. In today’s vernacular there are HSPs (highly sensitive people). How does Marianne compare?

2. There is quite a bit of talk about money in these chapters. What is Austen saying?

3. What is your opinion of Lucy?

Abigail wrote: "BTW, did everyone notice that there was a duel? 🤺"

It was a very subtle mention and yes there was a duel.

Now that the worst moments of Marianne's broken heart have passed, I found this section to be much more humorous. First there was the incident of the Toothpick Man (as I will always think of Robert Ferrars, then the awkwardness of Lucy Steele and Edward accidentally calling on Elinor at the same time. Yes, there is definitely cattiness, and it's wonderful and funny. I also was both amused and irritated by John Dashwood's usual whining about money to Elinor, as well as by how easily he caved when his wife did not want to invite Elinor and Marianne to stay with them.

#3: Lucy seems to me a rather pathetic figure; I think Jane Austen is torn about whether she's just a self-interested schemer or someone desperately trying to survive against the odds. Austen describes her as pretty and clever but not well educated; the "educated" part refers not just to reading and learning but also to being brought up to have certain moral values and to follow certain rules of conduct.

There's no mention of Lucy and her sister having living parents, and they seem to have no settled home, trailing about from one household to another for long visits. As a result I don't think Austen entirely blames Lucy for the way she is; Austen tends to blame parents for young people being allowed to develop bad character traits.

So without much money and no dowry, Lucy and her sister pretty much had to live by flattering others into taking care of them. Austen mocks them a bit for the blatant way they go about it, but I don't think she treats Lucy as an out-and-out villain.

Does Lucy still care about Edward? Probably not, but she cares very much, and with good reason, about her chance at marriage. So for her, the stakes in meeting and pleasing Edward’s family are very high. She clearly regards Elinor as a serious threat to her chances and keeps trying to maneuver Elinor into saying something that could be used against her later on, if Elinor were to fight her for Edward. Elinor, of course, is too well brought up to do any such thing, and her sense of honor makes her cede Edward to Lucy because of her prior claim.

A quick note about engagements in Austen's era: while it was acceptable, if somewhat scandalous, for a woman to back out of an engagement, it was not possible for a man to do so without losing standing in society and being widely regarded as a cad. So Edward is trapped and Lucy holds the power in this situation. If Edward were to back out of the engagement, under any type of pressure, Elinor would lose all respect for him. The reasons, as the scenario Austen has created here, are economic: in a society where genteel women had few options for gainful employment and did not normally inherit from their parents, if a man dumped a woman, he was doing her material harm and even in some cases threatening her survival.

Great, thought provoking comments, particularly relevant to me as I am reading concurrently Esther Waters by George Moore, set nearly a hundred years later. It is a novel heartrending in its account of the trials and tribulations of poor and almost destitute women whose fates lie almost entirely in the hands of men.

The dinner party scene and the Edwards Ferrers bursting in on Elinor and Lucy scene made me think that I was watching an Oscar Wilde comedy of manners, transported back to Regency times. Oscar would certainly have loved to have ‘toothpick man’ in any of his plays.

However, my main thoughts this week lie with Marianne, now that she knows the worst about Willoughby, and that barely mentioned duel, dismissed in so matter of fact a manner that I wondered if it really was like a bout of all in wrestling….. i.e. all pretence.

Marianne’s confused and self absorbed state seemed to boil down to both loving and hating Willoughby at the same time. Of course she blamed herself and swore that he never asked her to marry him. But knowing that he had used all the same techniques on her that he had used to ruin Brandon’s ward, must have ripped out her heart and soul, as well as her trust in mankind. And was her mother really acting in a wise and selfless manner advising her daughters to stay in London? It seemed to me more like not wanting the hassle of comforting a distraught child. Shame on you Mrs. Dashwood.

Could it be that Marianne was so pleased to see Edward Ferrers again (the man she had dubbed the most boring man on earth) because he was the exact opposite of Willoughby or was it just to please Elinor? Edward as an entity, represented to Marianne the time before Willoughby came into her life, the time of her idyllic, romantic childhood, now shattered into a thousand pieces.

I have read about many duels in various novels mainly written in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, as well as in historical fiction. (My favourite is probably the one in this novel - The Angry Tide) However, Colonel Brandon was so dismissive of his duel with Willoughby that it could have been very easy to overlook and yet its lack of importance in the whole saga does raise a few questions.

’ we met by appointment, he to defend, I to punish his conduct. We returned unwounded, and the meeting, therefore, never got abroad.'

Yes, I do think Colonel Brandon ‘deloped.’ i.e. deliberately missed his target.
After doing so much damage to womankind, not to mention himself personally, why didn’t the Colonel want to do everyone a favour and rid the world of Willoughby once and for all? Being a soldier I would have thought that killing a foe would have come naturally to him, but maybe the colonel considers forgiveness as more important than revenge. However, it could be argued that with his newly obtained wealth and power, there is nothing to stop the married Willoughby from continuing his Byronesque rampage amongst the women who are unlucky enough to catch his eye.

Regarding the duel, I think little was made of it because it was a practice only acknowledged in the male sphere. Even mentioning it to Elinor was unusual. I believe it was the accused who got to choose the weapon, and if I were Willoughby, I would have chosen swords when faced with an older military man. It may have been that Colonel Brandon disarmed him; once he was disarmed, it would have been murder to kill him so Brandon had to declare the duel finished.

Abigail wrote: "Regarding the duel, I think little was made of it because it was a practice only acknowledged in the male sphere. Even mentioning it to Elinor was unusual. ………

It may have been that Colonel Brandon disarmed him; once he was disarmed, it would have been murder to kill him so Brandon had to declare the duel finished."

Yes, you are probably right. I still wonder about how Colonel Brandon controlled his anger. Maybe the cowardly Willoughby dropped his sword on purpose before he could be run through.

How can Colonel Brandon put up with Willoughby swanning around with a wealthy bride having committed such foul acts with those who mean so much to him?

I imagine that they had to go abroad to fight, or at least somewhere remote and in secret, because duelling would have been illegal by that time.