Sense and Sensibility and Suffering; or, Wittgenstein’s Marianne?

This essay approaches Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility through concerns drawn from ordinary language philosophy, developing the other minds problem against a teaching backdrop in which Elinor and Marianne serve as “pictures” of the title. I chart an alternate, minimal sensibility as the capacity to respond to stimuli at all. In addition to the troubling eclipse of Marianne as an expressive subject upon her marriage, Elinor’s opacity as a knowable character is an obdurate weight inside the book. Teleological readings focusing on Austen’s so-called early free indirect style fail to register the appropriately thin (not “deep”) resiliency of the novel’s dissatisfying conclusion.