Response: Sense & Sensibility (Volume III)

Like many of you, I have found it challenging to make connections between Sense and Sensibility and the eco-critical issues that we have been discussing in this class. Austen’s novel has much to say about civilization (at least the eighteenth-century British variety), but it seems to have very little to say about nature. Most of the narrative takes place in people’s drawing rooms, not in the great outdoors.

As we saw on Thursday during our discussion of the “picturesque,” Marianne is the character who connects Sense and Sensibility to a larger cultural discourse on nature. Over the course of the novel, however Austen continually undermines Marianne’s Romanticism – her passionate nature, idealistic beliefs, and even her aesthetic standards cause her heartache and disappointment. After her near-death experience and her meeting with Willoughby in Volume III, she “converts” to a more pragmatic view of human relationships that mirrors her sister Elinor.

This raises an important question that I think would be very profitable for us to consider: does Sense and Sensibility critique Romanticism (and its view of human/human and human/nature relationships) by valorizing Elinor and undermining Marianne? Or does the novel include Elinor in a larger critique of human relationships?

What I am going to suggest is that Austen’s novel does not create a simple dichotomy between Elinor’s reason and Marianne’s passion, between Elinor’s pragmatism and Marianne’s idealism. Instead, I argue that Sense and Sensibility explores how each character endangers her own happiness by letting her understanding of desire be constrained by a “false consciousness” (to use Marx’s phrase). Marianne risks losing Colonel Brandon because her understanding of love is flawed by Romantic assumptions about compatible tastes and sensibilities. Elinor, however, also risks losing Edward because her own desires are so constrained. She can barely articulate her love for him, and when she does express her feelings she uses a rhetoric of friendship that frustrates Marianne to no end. While Marianne's happiness hinges on a change of perspective, Elinor's happiness ultimately depends on a change in circumstances. 

If Sense and Sensibility explores the problems with both “sense” and “sensibility,” what are the implications for an eco-critical reading of the novel? If Austen does critique the dominant binaries of her time (reason vs. emotion, society vs. the individual, neo-classicalism vs. Romanticism), then it would seem that she is participating in a proto-poststructuralist critique of how our understanding of reality is shaped by the binary oppositions that society establishes. Though this critique may not extend far enough to cover ecology, it links the novel with the poststructuralist criticism we have read so far that posits that eco-criticism is as much about language games as it is about trees and rivers. My own thoughts on this subject are still forming, but I think it would be fascinating for us to discuss the possibility that Austen attempts to step outside the language games of eighteenth-century British society in her critique of human nature and what implications this might have for the study of human/nature relationships.

- Cole