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  • The Poetics of Enclosure in Sense and Sensibility
  • Julie Park (bio)

Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) was written and published as the enclosure movement accelerated and reached its peak. In fact, by 1815, almost all farmland in England had been enclosed.1 Although Austen is generally read as writing without regard to the particular political conditions of her age, one can argue the ideology supporting the social-economic patterns of enclosure—its rule of contraction for greater expansion, above all—emerges in Sense and Sensibility as the very basis of its narrative structure and the intertwined economies of domestic and emotional life it engenders. In tune with its surrounding cultural energies, Austen’s novel recreates the emotional and social environments of lives affected by the patrilineal agenda that enclosure movements served.2 In doing so it dramatizes the life of the imagination—realized in the two characters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood—as it faces the constraints of social and economic realities.

Austen carefully represents the material conditions of such constraints, whether in the type of house they are forced to live in—the cramped cottage on a relative’s estate after being evicted from Norland—or the inheritance laws that drive the novel’s very first chapter, and prompts that eviction.

Rather then presenting an overt polemic against its damaging effects on rural life, I suggest, Austen reframes enclosure as an intensely interiorized [End Page 237] mode of being for dispossessed young gentry women—and their male love interests—as they negotiate the complex transactions between social and emotional life that determine their precarious lives.3 Such states of interiorization—keeping one’s thoughts and feelings to oneself to the extent that they constitute a rich world in themselves, apart from others—both necessitate and are made possible by another type of enclosure, the novel, which, by Austen’s time, has become institutionalized as a medium for accessing that equally imagined world of interiority. Within this context, Austen translates enclosure’s dominant maneuver of contraction into an affective and mental condition created by epistemological uncertainty about the status of another’s love, a matter of vital importance for gentry women such as Elinor and Marianne Dashwood with little to no value on the marriage market.4

The second half of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth, roughly 1760 to 1815, was a significant period in the centuries-long English practice of land enclosure. This practice, which entailed converting open fields and commons used for subsistence farms into privately owned profit-centered farms or pleasure gardens, drove tenants and laborers off land their families worked and lived on for generations. In doing so, enclosure not only changed human lives and social structures, but also transformed the physical landscape into a series of “mathematical grids” that divided and subdivided once open fields.5 Enclosure’s divisions and boundaries, as manifested in the fences and hedges built to separate property, made the signs of private possession environmentally legible. Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” (1770) famously described this environmental transformation in social and moral terms: “Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide/And ev’n the bare-worn common is denied” (l. 307–308).6 Similarly observing enclosure’s effects on familiar landscapes, Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) lamented the disappearance of daily scenes in which “the cow that supported the children grazed near the hut, and the cheerful poultry were fed by the chubby babes, who breathed a bracing air, far from the diseases and the vices of cities.” With parliamentary enclosure, “domination blasts all these prospects.”7

Motivating “sons of wealth” to “divide” those “fenceless fields” and “blast” pastoral prospects was not just the desire to create a pleasure garden on one’s estate—as was the case in Goldsmith’s poem—but also, a paradox of proto-capitalist logic: by containing land in smaller portions for agricultural improvement, productivity and thus profits might grow.8 Contraction—effected through creating enclosures and setting boundaries—produced [End Page 238] expansion. And yet as Goldsmith’s epithet—“sons of wealth”—indicated, the conditions for benefiting from enclosure replicated its very structure. Only...

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