“Sense and Sensibility”, which is the first of Jane Austen’s novels, is a fully developed work. It has the brittle and humorous dialogue, the vivid characterizations, the plot twists, and the deep penetration into the social life of the time, that mark all of Austen’s completed novels, even if there are later novels that include even deeper and more complex people than is the case in “Sense and Sensibility”, such as Fanny Price in “Mansfield Park'', or themes very different from supposedly sunny Jane Austen, such as when death and despair provide the tone for “Persuasion”, the last of her novels. In “Sense and Sensibility”, Jane Austen had already established herself as the best author since Shakespeare. Moreover, “Sense and Sensibility” is clearly grounded in and expressed in its moral lesson and so the novel has the weight that other of her novels have about the meaning a reader is to infer and to contemplate, even if this meaning is one that current readers might find uncomfortable or even repugnant.
One reading of the title refers to how the two central figures are so different from one another as to their characters. Elinor Dashwood is reticent and quiet, not allowing others to see the emotions which roil her, especially her feelings for the man she loves, who seems always absent and unwilling to explain himself. Elinor is a model of sense, that term meaning practical as well as restrained, a shorthand for “good sense” or reasonableness, no use hoping or expressing what might or might not unfold for her. Marianne Dashwood, on the other hand, is a model of sensibility, meaning the Romantic tone of her times. She expresses her feelings and dwells on her concerns. She reads Lord Byron. Emotions at the time are shifting not only from one character type to another but a shift from one emotion, one sensibility, as dominant or to be preferred to another: from reason and judiciousness to overwrought feeling. This is a very central divide between the classical or Georgian Age and the Romantic Age.
There is a different and much more definitive difference between the two girls. Elinor is sensible in that she acknowledges the proprieties, that she does not risk her own reputation, the loss of which is a disaster, her never then marriageable. Marianne, on the other hand, mildly violates convention in that she is open about her feelings and so risks having expressed more feelings, those not to be offered before a promise of marriage. Morality depends on there being a balance between feeling and social arrangement. To go ahead on feeling endangers leaving people at loose ends, not rectified for their feelings, hurt more by feeling than they should. Better to remain reticent, to be assured of formal respect rather than to rush forward
The trouble, of course, is that both of the young women are deeply wounded. Marianne is spurned in public by a man who she had become too deeply loved without formal acknowledgement on his part of his intentions while Elinor suffers in private because her beloved has not explained to her why he has not more overtly acknowledged his feelings towards her. Moreover, both of these girls are rescued by contrivances rather than the two of them left to become spinsters. An older man woes Marianne even though she had previously rejected him and she has to settle as best she can, insisting that she had indeed come now to love him, and so it is a happy wedding, a love match, rather than an accommodation for the badly bungled prior courtship, and Elinor is finally married to her heart throb because his affianced had spurned him for no longer having a great deal of money, when, had the author not arranged for it, Elinor’s love interest would have married elsewhere. What is the difference between the two men, one a cad and the other honorable? Each had other love interests to engage them. The difference is, as Elinor says, her lover had never spoken or offered feelings untruly met, while Marianne’s beau had toyed with her feelings and was not manly enough to stick with her when money was not available. But both of these women had been tempted by love and both had expressed some feeling of attachment. Trying love is a very dangerous thing in that men are free to toy with whom they will and only some men will hold up to high moral standards. Women, to the contrary, are more easily caught up in their feelings, and so to be protected by men from their own male impulses.
This is a long way from then to now, women so far having liberated themselves at the present juncture so that women are free to do without chaperons or indulge in impulsive decisions of romantic attachment so long as they care to and have not had to endure unwelcome advances, those sufficient reason to lose congressional seats or a governorship or a person relabeled as notorious rather than a celebrity in sports, music and other areas of entertainment. A double standard in early Nineteenth Century Europe required chastity for women but allowed men to sow their wild oats, was largely abolished for most men and women in our just past two generations. So Austen, who decries the fact that men inherit wealth from their fathers while women are dependant on men, hoping only to find a husband who will take care of them only should the men care to, wound seem to be part of a very different and more antiquated age-- except that such is not the case. There still remains an asymmetry between the emotional and sexual feelings of men and women, as is indicated in the current case by the response of women at inappropriate advances. Women are or claim to be deeply distressed at these, and it is to be assumed that is the case because women have a more delicate, favored and protected set of feelings, given to idealizing men’s advances to them and being more circumspect in referring to them, the emotions of women still limited by a gauze or a filter about the sexual deeds perpetuated on them. It is a dirty business and women are most of them less coarse in facing up to it. That being the case, Elinor and Marianne remain as two types of how to deal with the facts of sexuality, whether to be either open or reserved, and getting pains for doing either one.
A difficulty in dealing with Jane Austen’s sense of sexual morality is, first of all, tha she does not deal with the matter explicitly, something that will not happen before Lawrence and Joyce (or maybe Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure'', where Hardy treats sexuality as the motive for people fixing on one partner than another). It also was because Austen did not talk about things she did not know about and her sexual experience, if at all, was very limited. Austen treated the double standard of sexuality, whereby unmarried women were tainted by sexual experience, while men were not, however much it was also the case that males could be libertines in that they did not honor women or dealt too much with dishonored women, like Pierre Bezukhov in “War and Peace”, This double standard was prevalent or more than that, a very severe taboo, in nineteenth century life, and can say that there were three stages in its evolution. There was the view that a woman despoiled once was despoiled forever, hardened by her experience, less delicate in her finer feelings, a view dispelled by Sir Peter Wimsy, (invented, after all, by a woman, the classicist Dorothy Sayers) who consents to marrying a “fallen woman” because marrying her is no different than marrying a widow, someone who is not despicable and yet has had sexual experience. Then the view changes so that only repeated sexual encounters will lead to a coursening of character, and so people are allowed early flings or trial relationships, as of the sort that happen in Norah Ephron movies, where Meg Ryan is sensible precisely because she has tried out a live in boyfriend, and then there comes what might be thought of as full out liberation, whereby women, as Madonna put it, are “like a virgin, the very first time”, suggesting that people are renewed again to love freshly because of love itself.
The sexual revolution of the past fifty years might have been thought to dramatically change world social structure in that there was such a change in the basic relationship between men and women, with men able to decide whether or not to have children and no longer needing to be supported by a husband as the breadwinner. But that is not at all what happened, only that women remained modest in their fashion, dealing with men as they pleased but only as they chose to, reinventing their own romantic attachments, all the while maintaining a delicacy of feeling Austen would recognize as the universal condition, even if some women were lewd or only so in private. There are also other ways in which social structure has persisted despite the sexual revolution. Women today are like men in that they have double careers: that of the family and that of an occupation, the two possibly in conflict, though everyone recognizing that one can be successful at one or the other or both, both men and women treating courtship and marriage and child rearing as an adventure on its own, everyone heroic in remembering when he or she declared love to one another, who made the plunge to acknowledge private feelings in public, just as when one was heroic when he plunged into a work job as a neophyte and proved himself capable of managing to handle it, or trying out a business, or having earned one’s spurs as a fresh approach to an academic or scientific question. The parallel worlds of work and family go as far back as Abraham trying to manage his wife, his sheep, his clan, and even God Himself. What Jane Austen shows about marriage does not change things except to think that love has something to do with it and so her ideas of romance are quite familiar to our sexually liberated world.
There are a number of themes in “Sense and Sensibility” other than that of sexual propriety. There is the issue of how people can rationalize greed, as happens when the inheritor of the estate decides not to provide for the second wife, Mrs. Dashwood, and her family, while at the same time, there are people who are just decent and generous, part of their nature, as Sir John Middleton, who gave a cottage to the Dashwoods, that a fitting contrast to the inheritor of the Dashwood estate, who dispossessed her. Another contrast between people is offered by the two men interested in the two Dashwood girls. Both had abandoned the women and so why should one favor Elinor’s beau while Marianne’s beau is to be regarded as a cad? It is because Elinor’s boyfriend had been honorable even if not candid, nevertheless leaving her and perhaps to marry someone else, and so he feels deeply for everyone even if he is just lucky to have become rid of the woman she may or may no longer loves and so can return to Elinor, while Mr. Willoughby has flirted a bit too much with Marianne, but was just making an economically fortunate marriage, as was also the original circumstance with Elinor’s Edward Ferrars before he was jilted. Everyone will marry for money unless they are lucky, women waiting around until men ride up to declare themselves, either truthfully or not, the men always at the initiative, at least in Regency England.
But the real and the persistent theme in Austen is love rather than money, and how necessary it is for women to be restrained about their emotional feelings because they can be so emotionally hurt if a budding relationship is thwarted by circumstances. Everyone, whatever people do sexually before marriage, the absense of a double standard notwithstanding, Is therefore at risk, and so courtship constitutes an adventure, a great event, when people recognize that there is a special bond that can develop between a man and a woman which can very quickly become very valuable, and so take care. That is true in rural England two hundred years ago or a man and woman meeting together on a blind date at Katz’s Delicatessen, or even having met on some dating service. People get transformed, a couple recognizing one another in perhaps short order as essential rather than circumstantial to one another, as if they were fated. It is magic.