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(My thoughts on rereading S&S for the Austenprose bicentenary challenge turned into this essay-like piece.I am well aware that to transform it into a really credible essay, as I may someday do, would require better bibliography and editing. And, yes, I am Canadian. I must apologize for every post I make on this blog.)











When, in 1811, Jane Austen paid for the publication of her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, she had already written two other novels that would later be published. These were Susan (an early draft of Northanger Abbey) and First Impressions (which would later become, under the title of Pride and Prejudice, her most popular novel, with her most endearing – and indeed her own best loved - heroine). Why then did she choose to publish the manuscript originally known as Elinor and Marianne?



The fact is that I do not know her motives. However, I would like to suggest that S&S, often devalued by critics, provides the foundation for properly understanding Austen's themes in all her successive novels.



Working backwards, from theme to its foundation, I would like us first to hold that Jane Austen's overarching theme in all six novels is about morality. It is not my purpose now to defend this view, which has been ably argued by eminent academics and writers, but I will provide in my notes the names of several works which have helped to confirm me in this early-formed opinion. (1)



In holding this view of Austen as primarily concerned with moral development in the lives of her characters, we must expunge the notion that didacticism is synonymous with cant – a thing Austen deplored and satirized mercilessly. Rather we must acknowledge, with C.S. Lewis (2), that some riveted basis is necessary to the irony that was Austen's coloring lens.



Presupposing Austen to be a didactic novelist, it is wholly appropriate that her first novel should set forth her basis for right living. This, I believe, S&S does. Certainly Jane Austen was not trying to hoist a new basis for morality on the world. The morals in her world were already well established by religion and reason. The religion was that of the Church of England, formal and perhaps impersonal, but still elevating Biblical principles. The Enlightenment had also elevated reason and Austen especially was a daughter of the cool-thinking Samuel Johnson. C. S. Lewis wrote, “The great abstract nouns of the classical English moralists are unblushingly and uncompromisingly used: good sense, courage, contentment, fortitude, 'some duty neglected, some failing indulged,' impropriety, indelicacy, generous candor, blamable distrust, just humiliation, vanity, folly, ignorance, reason. These are the concepts by which Jane Austen grasps the world... All is hard, clear, definable; by some modern standards, even naively so.” (2)



Austen, of course, never ignored the inherent irony of the fact that, while strict codes of conduct were theoretically applicable to all, wealth, position and (male) gender negated them for some. Still, the majority of society had sense, piety or pride enough to see manners as indicative of character and to deplore, for example, the lasciviousness of the Lydias, Wickhams and Willoughbys.



But by the time Austen wrote S&S a new mindset was beginning to influence the conduct of some persons, typified in Marianne Dashwood. This mindset was based on the belief that “man was naturally benevolent; that he had an innate moral sense... and that this faculty spontaneously led the individual to satisfy his impulses of sympathetic goodwill through his personal relationships.” (3)



This philosophy was at first known as sensibility, but soon evolved into the Romantic movement. The Romantic poet John Keats, whose work was first published only six years after S&S, wrote, “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affection and the truth of Imagination.” Readers of S&S can doubtless hear an echo of Marianne Dashwood's sentiments in these words, for it is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen set out to prove the superiority of sense by subjecting sense and sensibility to similar experiences.



Romantic poets, publishing contemporaneously with Jane Austen included Byron and Shelley, whose ideas led them to the abandonment of traditional morality, especially where it guided love and sexuality. Philosophical and mental progression toward sexual license is implicitly shown in the fate of the two Elizas - a fate that could easily have become Marianne's. It is also probable that Austen, so often accused of ignoring the great events of her day, understood that certain Romantic ideas had played a part in the French Revolution and created a miniature, in her portrayal of the two Elizas' seductions and Marianne's break-down, of the degeneration of morality and society that resulted in France.



Of course the Romantic movement claimed a benevolent interest in others, based upon what must naturally be empathetic and noble human feeling. Marianne undoubtedly believed herself to be fostering her better feelings when, after Willoughby's desertion, she wallowed in her lachrymosity. Austen informs us that “Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby. She would have been ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning, had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose than when she lay down in it...” But her “noble” feelings led her to give “pain every moment to her mother and sisters.”



Here Austen refutes Keats' assurance of the holiness of the heart's affections or impulses, and takes her stand with the Biblical pronouncement that the human heart is “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” (Jeremiah 17:9) A consistent theme in Austen's novels is the need for self-knowledge, especially regarding inherent selfishness. Elinor's strongest indictment against Willoughby was that of selfishness, declaring that “his own enjoyment, or his own ease, was, in every particular, his ruling principle.” It would appear that Willoughby followed his own heart, as youth today are often advised to do.



Yes, of course Austen's emphasis on hard rules of duty and honor is incongruous with the emphasis of our own society on individuality, self-expression and following one's heart. We probably sympathize with Marianne in ignoring conventions that seem to us silly, but Austen showed the value of those conventions for protecting, for example, the honor of a young girl. The manners of the day, appearing to us formal and insincere, were a sign of respect and a safeguard against wounding the feelings of others.



While Austen placed decorum on a foundation of unselfish principle, she did not teach that it must entail fawning attendance or even admiring respect. The Miss Steeles are shown to be selfish in going beyond the call of politeness in their behavior to Lady Middleton; they seek what they can gain from her, but Lucy at least is perfectly willing to wound others for her own aggrandizement. Especially to Elinor she professes great sensibility, while her aim is the very “sensible” one of securing a husband and thereby a fortune.



Lucy's story concludes with an ironic statement of her good fortune, reminding us that while Austen may be a moralist, she is also a realist. “The whole of Lucy's behavior in the affair, and the prosperity which crowned it, therefore, may be held forth as a most encouraging instance of what an earnest, an unceasing attention to self-interest, however its progress may be apparently obstructed, will do in securing every advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than that of time and conscience.”



But S&S also reminds us that scrupulous decorum may be united with cold selfishness, as in the case of Lady Middleton, and kindness of heart united with vulgarity, as with Mrs. Jennings.



Indeed, Austen's thesis in S&S is too sophisticated to be confined to two polarized characters, or to credit all goodness to sense, all evil to sensibility. Marianne and Elinor both possess faculties for reason and emotionalism. To show that Elinor, contrary to frequent first impressions, is not a consistent model of sense, we need only instance her unreasoned conviction that the hair in Edward's ring is her own. And Marianne is rather un-romantic in her need for 2000 pounds a year.



But other characters too are presented in light of their relations to sense or sensibility. Ian Watt points out, “The opening scene, with the John Dashwoods' coolly disengaging themselves from their solemn family obligations to support Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters, begins the book, it must be noted with an attack on the abuses, not of sensibility, but of sense, in its prudential economic meaning. John Dashwood is much more a caricature of a narrow view of sense than Marianne is of sensibility; while his wife, as Jane Austen tells us, is a 'strong caricature' of him.”(3) Again, selfishness is the root of human evil and inherent in motives and thinking. Yet we often see John, Fanny and Mrs. Ferrars alleging noble motives for what we, through the narrator, see as very selfish deeds. Austen again agrees with Jeremiah that the human heart is deceitful: “who can know it?”



At least four of Austen's novels reach their zenith in the heroines' realization of their self-deception. But how does this take place when self-deception is so natural? (For Emma, Elizabeth and Catherine it comes through the heroes' instrumentality, awakening them to love, as well as to their own evil hearts.) Marianne must go through a (well-nigh literal) death and resurrection experience (4). The symbolism and rhetoric is intensely Christian, but Austen goes further and has Marianne declare of her realization during her illness: “I saw in my own behavior... nothing but a series of imprudence towards myself, and want of kindness to others... My illness, I well knew, had been entirely brought on by myself, by such negligence of my own health, as I had felt even at the time to be wrong. Had I died, - it would have been self-destruction... I wonder that the very eagerness of my desire to live, to have time for atonement to my God, and to you all, did not kill me at once.”



Marianne had awoken to newness of life, but like every other Austen heroine, her primary question was now to be, “How should I live my life?” (5) Her conclusion is one which we sense Austen approves, while ironically understanding Marianne's impetuous nature and the inevitability of mistakes. Conduct, Marianne concludes, is to be “checked by religion, by reason, by constant employment.” (6) This guide for “right living” was to be built on in Austen's successive brilliant explorations of the morality of day-to-day living.





Notes



All works cited in the following notes explore elements contributing to Austen's didactic themes.

1. See James Collins in “Fanny Was Right: Jane Austen as Moral Guide” or in A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers On Why We Read Jane Austen)

2. See C.S. Lewis in “A Note on Jane Austen”, included in A Truth Universally Acknowledged

3. Quoting Ian Watt in “On Sense and Sensibility” in A Truth Universally Acknowledged

4. See Anne Richards in “The Passion of Marianne Dashwood: Christian Rhetoric in Sense and Sensibility"

5. See Jane Austen's Philosophy of the Virtues by Sarah Emsley

6. I have not explored the dangers of idleness, as presented in S&S, but would recommend this article on the subject.