Change and Fixity in Sense and Sensibility

In his introduction to Sense and Sensibility, Tony Tanner notes Marianne Dashwood's relish for the language of the early Romantic poets, "a language of solitude rather than society," and remarks that Jane Austen, too, had a special affinity with these writers. ¹ In that small detail, perhaps, lies part of the novel's complexity--its mandate of having, if not to kill the thing it loves, then at least to mute it with compromise and social adjustment. A "language of solitude" is de facto a personal discourse to which the reader gains access as a privileged eavesdropper, and style indirect libre, that supposed invention of the nineteenth-century novel, was already implicit in the discursive verse of sensibility, as witness the way, in William Cowper's Retirement, it opens a window on a different consciousness from the speaker's:

Ye groves (the statesman at his desk exclaims,
Sick of a thousand disappointed aims,)
Beneath your shades your grey possessor hide,
Receive me languishing for that repose
The servant of the public never knows. ²

Here the servant of the public has his solitude compromised by silent public witness, as we see the dishabille of his inward thoughts and the discrepancy it reveals between the public and private selves.

Just such a window opens in Sense and Sensibility, when, taking her leave of Norland, Marianne recites a chorographic prose poem in honor of the place. Its authorially neutral presentation makes the tone rather difficult to gauge, though Austen has supplied a clue to her position in the sentence that introduces it. Because all three Dashwoods--the mother and both the daughters--experience grief at the severance, she clearly endorses such strong attachments. Elinor, after all, her ideal mediatrix of sense and sensibility ("my Elinor [emphasis mine]" she once called her) weeps a contribution to those "many tears." ³ Even so, the question remains: is Marianne being affectionately mocked or is the prose-ode a relatively straight utterance? The signals would seem to be mixed:

Many were the tears shed by them in their last adieux to a place so much beloved. "Dear, dear Norland!" said Marianne, as she wandered alone before the house, on the last evening of their being there; "when shall I cease to regret you? when learn to feel at home elsewhere? O happy house! Could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more! and you, ye well-known trees! but you will continue the same. No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer! No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade! But who will remain to enjoy you?" ⁴

Let us start with a detail potentially unorthodox and therefore potentially risible: the fact that Marianne is taking a solitary evening walk and that she wanders through the landscape on impulse. On the one hand, Austen admitted to a "preference for Men & Women" that inclined her "to attend more to the company than the sight," and, on the other hand, she took frequent imaginative strolls with Cowper through his Bedfordshire landscapes. ⁵ No wonder, therefore, that the attitude, as so often in Austen, is hard to pin down. Taking Dr. Samuel Johnson and Cowper (as the external correlatives, apparently, of sense and sensibility), Angus Wilson remarks that her reading is "so hedged round by ironies and jests in her references that it is often difficult to know exactly what were the final moral influences upon her even of her 'dear Doctor Johnson' or of Cowper." ⁶ Even so, while the "exact" extent of those influences defies our measurement, there can be no doubting their compound nature, a negotiation of "both/and" rather than...