Sensibilitous
I won’t insult you by suggesting you don’t know Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Everybody should read Austen, and if you’ve read her already, why then you should re-read her. Austen is great. In this one, sensible Elinor, and sensibilitous (that is: emotional, irrational, in hock to her feelings) Marianne are two sisters who are excluded from a comfortable inheritance on their father’s death — their elder half-brother gets it all — and who approach their two love-stories in the ways determined by their natures, rational and gushing respectively.
The novel is, if I’m honest, my least favourite Austen. The story moves along nicely enough, and there are some scenes of marvellous comedy and wit; but the titular dyad is too rigidly elaborated in the two main characters. Critics like to pretend that there’s something more cleverly dialectic going on, as there is (I agree) with the later Pride and Prejudice … to the effect that, yin-yang-like, sentimental Marianne is also, in her way, sensible and sensible Elinor also sentimental. I’m not convinced this is true, I must say.
Hmm: ‘sensibilitous’, back there, surely isn’t a word. Sorry about that.
Anyway: re-reading Sense and Sensibility, as I did last week, made me think that Austen in this, her first completed novel, can’t quite manage her governing principle, can’t stop it becoming pressingly schematic. ‘When a character exemplifies a quality or habit, it must continue to exemplify it, and though the manner and incidence of the consequences may be made interesting their effect is predetermined,’ argues William Lindsay Renwick of this novel. ‘Nor,’ he goes on, ‘is the balance preserved: sensibility meets its ironical fate in middle-aged worthiness; sense merely fades into inevitable respectability.’ His conclusion, and larger judgment on Sense and Sensibility is: ‘personification and symbol are tied but comedy is free.’ There’s something in that I suspect: Marianne and Elinor are recognisably sisters, and read as believable characters, although on my recent re-read I felt more strongly than I had before that they are also too cartoonishly distinguished as flubbely-blubbery FEEling! and sensible-and-grounded respectively.
My reaction may be jejune, in the sense of being unfair to the complexities of the novel. I wonder if I’m missing a level or quality of nuance in the way Austen has written, if not Elinor, then Marianne. So: via an infelicitous (or fortuitous, depending on how you look at it) sprained ankle, Marianne meets the dishy Willoughby and falls plungingly in love him. He’s so handsome and dashing! He shares her passions for poetry and music! He’s so into her! It looks like a runaway love-story, with, surely, a proposal and marriage soon to come. But neither Willoughby nor Marianne are independently wealthy, which constrains their ability simply to choose one another. More, we discover as the novel proceeds, Willoughby isn’t all he seems, is something of a philanderer, can’t be trusted. He later ‘ghosts’ (as I believe today’s youth say) Marianne and gets engaged to the wealthy Sophia Grey. The cad!
After the initial flush of Marianne and Willoughby’s mutual amour, the novel notates the first intimations that things won’t run smoothly. Willoughby declines an invitation to Barton Cottage to see Marianne, instead announcing that he has to go to London on business and will be away indefinitely. Marianne is distraught. This is how chapter 16 opens:
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 the feelings which made such composure a disgrace, left her in no danger of incurring it. She was awake the whole night, and she wept the greatest part of it. She got up with a headache, was unable to talk, and unwilling to take any nourishment; giving pain every moment to her mother and sisters, and forbidding all attempt at consolation from either. Her sensibility was potent enough!
When breakfast was over she walked out by herself, and wandered about the village of Allenham, indulging the recollection of past enjoyment and crying over the present reverse for the chief of the morning.
The evening passed off in the equal indulgence of feeling. She played over every favourite song that she had been used to play to Willoughby, every air in which their voices had been oftenest joined, and sat at the instrument gazing on every line of music that he had written out for her, till her heart was so heavy that no farther sadness could be gained; and this nourishment of grief was every day applied. She spent whole hours at the pianoforte alternately singing and crying; her voice often totally suspended by her tears. In books too, as well as in music, she courted the misery which a contrast between the past and present was certain of giving. She read nothing but what they had been used to read together.
Such violence of affliction indeed could not be supported for ever; it sunk within a few days into a calmer melancholy; but these employments, to which she daily recurred, her solitary walks and silent meditations, still produced occasional effusions of sorrow as lively as ever. [S&S ch 16]
This is a fascinating piece of writing. The heart of the matter is this: does Marianne genuinely — that is, spontaneously, authentically — feel bad that Willoughby has gone? Or is she in some sense performing her grief, performing not just for the benefit of those around her but also for the benefit of herself? The latter option does not necessarily mean her grief, her intense and theatrical affect, is hypocritical, I think. On the contrary, it is saying something quite interesting and, indeed, profound about ‘feeling’ as such. How do we feel stuff? 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 — the elegantly expressed self-consciousness of this implies that she is, on some level, aware that feelings are social as well as individual, that unless people see what you are feeling you aren’t, in a real sense, feeling at all.
We’re only a few years, here, after Wordsworth’s ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ valorised the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ as the wellspring of poetry and the mark of a life lived as best it can be. Austen’s portrait of Marianne not only satirises (too strong a term, I think) that intensely ‘Romantic’ ethos, it critiques it. One of the things Sense and Sensibility is saying is that powerful feelings are not exactly spontaneous and don’t exactly overflow; that we shape and direct them into social performances, partly because it is important to us that others see and register (and react to) our emotional states, but more radically because we ourselves can’t apprehend our emotional states unless we act them out, perform them.
This isn’t, I think, to argue what I have seen some critics argue, that Marianne’s ‘sensibility’ is dialectically engaged by her ‘sense’. It is, rather, to say that Austen’s comprehension of human subjectivity treats it as primarily social. It’s this that separates her vision from that of Wordsworth, wandering lonely as a cloud and communing only with Nature, or Blake retreating from socialised conventional reality into his mad, beautiful private (affective) world. It is the position that all human affect is not only performative, but performative in a way that includes a quantum of self-consciousness: it’s the kid who cries because s/he is upset or has been rebuked, and who slips in a quick side-eye halfway through the weeping to check that her/his crying is having its required effect on the watching parents. Or more precisely it’s Austen saying our emotions, actually, are really just more grown-up, less patent versions of this.
I could add, I’m not sure this is true, although it may be — by ‘true’ I mean, an accurate description of how people actually are, in the world. But maybe it is. It’s certainly possible that my own attitude has been shaped by the beguiling myth created by, precisely, Romanticism, that there is an unaccommodated authenticity of emotional existence, a spiritual and affective directness of being, untangled gtom the web of societal expectations and conventions and politeness and self-repression. Freud is a Romantic in this sense, although it’s a qualified version of the Wordsworthian gush — civilisation, he insists, is impossible without its discontents, the child’s sly eye in the middle of the weeping performance is its anchor in reality, actually. Only gods and monsters live outside the city after all.
At any rate I’d suggest this frames the issue which criticism can neither leave alone nor, it seems, satisfy, as to the political dimension of Austen’s fiction. Terry Eagleton’s not-bad history of the novel, The English Novel: an Introduction (Blackwell 2005) is at its weakest in its Austen chapter. He knows he can’t simply ignore her, but he really doesn’t know what to do with her, critically-speaking, because she doesn’t seem to engage politically in the way he thinks essential to great art. So Eagleton pegs her as a Tory and a ‘classical moralist’ who believes ‘the ethical life is primarily about action, not feelings, intuitions, inner states or intentions’ [106] and makes a few brisk points about her canniness on the topic of material wealth, and her belief in the need to keep this requisite in balance with the moral authority of the upper classes: ‘the business dealings of the gentry were in danger of corrupting their traditional values from within … and this in Austen’s eyes was at risk of insidiously undermining their moral standing.’ I don’t think Eagleton is right about the ‘ethical life is about action’ angle for Austen, as it happens. But my point is that his premise is so rootedly that the socio-political is the real vector of fictional value that he ends up arguing that the very absence of this from Austen’s fiction is, paradoxically, the real socio-political interest of it.
The great realist novel is basically a response to the French Revolution. In its preoccupation with the solidity of the everyday world, its shyness of absolute crises or ruptures, its nervousness of the political, its fascination with the individual, its preference for the normative over the extreme, its concern for settlement and integration — in all these ways, the realist novel can be seen as a cultural solution to a political problem. In its thickness of social texture its portrays a world so substantial — so richly, irresistible there — that the idea it could ever be radically altered becomes almost unthinkable. [Eagleton English Novel, 99]
I’m not sure this is right, though. Or, at least, not right with respect to Austen, whose novels surely give us remarkably little of this degree of materiality of worldbuilding: structure and infrastructure, field and garden and so on. Even clothing and furniture is rarely described and mostly has to be inferred by the reader, or supplied by the set-dresser and costumier of the cinematic adaptation.
We could contrast this with, let’s say, Zola, who gives his reader scads of this kind of thing: great teeter-totter lists and itineraries of every aspect of the physical environment of his novels, every last type of fish for sale in the fish-market, every last roof-tile and window in all the myriad houses of Gray Par-eee. But Zola is also unembarrassed by big wah-wah reversals and ruptures. His whole project, we could argue, is actually revolutionary in purpose — the dull solidity and bourgeois complacency of Napoleon III’s France laid on the novelist’s slab, from the top of the society to the bottom and in all its myriad components, by way of pointing his readership towards something better. 1892’s La Débâcle is literally about revolution, and other societal and personal crises and ruptures.
Zola has his inheritors today, although perhaps less importantly in the writerly schools of Franzen et al, and more in boxset texts like The Wire. Austen has her inheritors too, in many elegantly written novels of domesticity and romance but more penetratingly in the globally and perennially popular RomCom iterations of what she wrote — to say nothing of the many many adaptations of Austen’s actual novels into other media, sequels and fanfictional rewritings and so on.
What does this say? Perhaps that Austen anticipated, and even shaped, the way ‘politics’ has moved from Eagleton’s older-school Marxist apprehension of materiality to a newer ‘the personal is the political’ logic. It’s not that Austen is apolitical; it’s that her politics are (that fraught term) identity politics, which happens to align well with a world today that cares less about the means of production and whom should be seizing them (tractor factories, collective farms etc) and more about the means of emoting and whom is feeling them — about who is suffering in their sensibilities (in the widest sense of that word) and who is standing back, cruelly laughing at those suffering. Who is virtuously punching up and who diabolically punching down. About how we feel, about our bodies, our selves, our love-lives, our workplaces, our TV shows and video games. It’s a caricature, I know, putting it like this. I don’t mean to slide into snark. The thing is: tractor factories and farms and so on still matter, intensely, to our continued existence as a species. But this is no longer the line of our political focus and action. ‘We’ don’t really care who owns the means of production so long as the Deliveroo guy is still able to get our pizza to us by 9pm — or more precisely, we only care about the means of production if they impinge on the affective realm. We care that animals are mistreated in factory farms, because we imagine them feeling bad and that makes us feel bad. I mean, Factories Don’t Care About Your Feelings, as the slogan almost has it, but here we are. The greatest trick the various Keyser Sözes of international Capital pulled was convincing the world they didn’t exist, that our energies should be expended not on who is owning what but who is feeling what. Our sensibilities govern the logic of politics to a senseless degree. Pick your Marianne, I guess.
