Sense and Sensibility Acquired & Progress on, Part 1

[bunnyboo]

Sense and Sensibility won the coin flip. It’s been a while since I’ve read Austen, and it’ll be interesting to go through her first published book in comparison to the others I’ve read. Here’s my progress so far.

 

For some reason, Sense has so far been more approachable for me than Emma was. It might’ve been because I’d been burnt out on Austen at the time, but Emma was a challenge for me for the first quarter or so. It might also have something to do with the delicious, delicious drama was there right from the beginning! I love the family politics going on here, and mixed families and inheritance in historical settings have always fascinated me for some reason. I like to think of it as one big game of The Sims or Crusader Kings—where all these familial relationships create a tangled, nasty ball of intrigue and deceit. I’m getting off track here. There’s nothing like that going on but even the faint glimmerings of familial discord surrounding primogeniture got my attention. (Isn’t that sentence a mouthful?)

I like how Mr. Dashwood isn’t motivated to cut his stepmother and half-sisters out of his father’s estate out of cruelty; instead, it’s a lot funnier to have him being continually bargained down to nothing by his unscrupulous wife. It brings to mind a boiling frog. Mrs. John Dashwood is delightfully selfish, a shrew if there ever was one. There is some depth to her character, however, as she does seem to genuinely care for her husband and son (and they for her). She’s very similar to Jane Eyre’s Mrs. Reed in that they both have this kind of twisted maternal instinct that they use to dispossess vulnerable family members. Mrs. John Dashwood stops shy of being abusive—she doesn’t openly do anything to harm the Dashwood women—but she’s hostile in a way that’s pretty unique in what I’ve read of Austen’s work. She confronts Mrs. Dashwood and gets this close to saying that her daughter Elinor isn’t good enough for her brother Mr. Edward Ferrars. That’s huge! For a cultural that values discretion and propriety, it’s almost vulgar that Mrs. John Dashwood said it right to her face. Her dislike of the Dashwood women are just barely disguised by courtesy. There’s a lot more open hostility between all the female characters in Sense, and the conflict so far has all been instigated by women. Consider this in opposition to Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, or Emma where there is at least one antagonistic or at the very least central male character. Here, men are the objects of the Dashwood’s affections but they don’t have a lot going on themselves barring Mr. Willoughby (who’s shaping up to be an asshole like Mr. Wickham). It’s interesting, and I wanted to make a note of it.

I love how much of a drama queen Marianne is, quite similar to Lydia Bennet in that way. Her temperament is meant to be exaggerated for satirical purposes but it’s recognizable to me as both a former teenaged girl and a person who frequently works with teenaged girls. It’s really strange to think of Austen characters as teenagers, though, when they’re discussing poetry and making marriage plans. That’s just a cultural difference, I suppose. Marianne’s moods seem to shift with the wind, and she comes close to impropriety (as I understand it) in a striking similarity to Mrs. John Dashwood. In both cases, Mr. Edward Ferrars’ and Elinor’s relationship—or lack thereof—is the subject but where they differ is the motive. Mrs. John Dashwood, beyond having a personal dislike of her husband’s relatives, is motivated by the financial and political side of the equation; Marianne focuses on Mr. Ferrars’ personal qualities instead, projecting her own desires and sensibilities onto her sister’s suitor. I feel like this is getting dangerously close to this post including the sentence, “As you can see, there is both sense and sensibility in Sense and Sensibility,” shortly followed by a Works Cited page. I should stop while I’m ahead.