"I See Every Thing As You Desire Me to Do": The Scolding and Schooling of Marianne Dashwood

"I See Every Thing As You Desire Me to Do": The Scolding and Schooling of Marianne Dashwood Barbara K. Seeber Such behaviour as this, so exactly the reverse of her own, appeared no more meritorious to Marianne than her own had seemed faulty to [Elinor].1 During the course ofSense andSensibility, Marianne Dashwood's passionate beliefs are corrected; she learns to "compare" her conduct "with what it ought to have been" (p. 345) and to "counteract ... her most favourite maxims" (p. 378). Sense and Sensibility's status as a problem novel is well documented, and Marianne's transformation is considered particularly puzzling. Her marriage to Colonel Brandon, who "sought the constitutional safeguard of a flannel waistcoat" (p. 378), has disappointed many readers. If, however, we cease to read it as a problem novel—riddled with flaws which Austen learned to correct—this early work sets a precedent for dialogism in Austen. Sense and Sensibility illuminates a world of contesting ideas and shows that in this war of ideas, it is the strongest, those who can make others "submit" (p. 379), who survive. Austen's dialogic novel does not side with Elinor, or even Marianne; instead, it explores the struggle to achieve ideological dominance. 1 lane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 104. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 11, Number 2, January 1999 224 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION Mikhail Bakhtin's critique of Dostoevsky scholarship as "too direct an ideological echoing of the voices of his heroes," which neglects the "genuine polyphony offully valid voices," is relevant to Austen studies.2 Readers of Austen often focus on the story of the great heroines—Emma, Elizabeth, Anne, and Fanny. The values the central heroine learns to embrace by the end of the novel are often taken to be those of Jane Austen and the novel itself.3 The "truth" the heroine arrives at is taken to be the novel's "truth" or ideology, and this move obscures the text's dialogism . Bakhtin argues that the representation of the hero's world-view as "someone else's discourse," separate from the author and novel as a whole, allows other characters and their world-views to coexist. Dialogism insists "that all meaning is relative in the sense that it comes about only as a result ofthe relation between two bodies occupyingsimultaneous butdifferent space."4 Although some critics acknowledge the potential of other worldviews represented in other characters, they render them in the light of attitudes the heroine successfully combats to achieve full maturity or happiness ; ultimately, "the culminating marriages in Austen's novels lack the undercurrents of ambivalence."5 Part ofthe critical problem with Sense andSensibility is that it resists this pattern of reading by presenting two heroines, both appealing in their own way, who meet radically different fates: Elinor is rewarded with the object of her affections, while Marianne has to learn to retrain her heart. The "reader must be made to accept the priority of ... [Elinor's] moral vision," Alistair Duckworth insists, but this "task is complicated by the author's refusal in any way to limit the attractive individualism ofthe other sister." In the othernovels, "this problem is successfully avoided": "Whereas in Sense 2 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 8, 6. 3 Alistair Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War ofIdeas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986); Jan Fergus, Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1983); Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (London: Macmillan, 1986); and A. Walton Litz, Jane Austen: A Study ofHer Artistic Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). 4 Bakhtin, p. 65. Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 20. 5 Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 203. Similarly, Nancy Armstrong argues that Austen's "marriages ... make...