The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen's Novels

CHAPTER 2

ASPECTS OF
Northanger Abbey AND Sense and Sensibility

I see clearly that the principal ties which kept the different classes of society in a vital and harmonious dependence upon each other have, within these 30 years, either been greatly impaired or wholly dissolved. Everything has been put up to market and sold for the highest price it would buy.… All … moral cement is dissolved, habits and prejudices are broken and rooted up, nothing being substituted in their place but a quickened self-interest.…

Wordsworth, Letter to Daniel Stuart, 1817

It is surely mistaken to assume that the affirmative elements in her morality and her humor are not as real as the subversive ironies which occasionally accompany them.

Ian Watt, Introduction to Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays

TO TURN from Mansfield Park to a consideration of Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility is to move back in terms of chronology of composition and down in terms of literary quality, but it is not to move into an entirely different world. Though the tones, textures, and literary contexts of these “early” novels are evidently different, they exhibit the same underlying social and ethical assumptions as the mature work.1 True, their ironic content is greater, and they seem to give to the individual a larger freedom to define his own world, but Jane Austen’s irony is not here the aloof and secretly critical irony in face of a vulgar and acquisitive society that it has been considered, nor does she grant to, or even unconsciously desire for, her characters an unlimited power of self-definition. To withdraw from society and place faith in a passionate relationship, as Marianne does with Willoughby, is to take a direction to be censured even as its appeal is admitted. Society remains in these novels the necessary context of individual action.

This is not to say that the “grounds” on which an individual is to act are always to be discovered in the setting of his experience. The Bath society of Catherine Morland’s adventures, the London into which the Dashwood sisters are introduced, are hostile, vulgar, and acquisitive environments, whose selfish and economic principles it would be immoral to accept. Nothing is more noteworthy in these works than the incisive ways in which economic motivations are exposed. Yet there remains behind the perversions of moral conduct everywhere described a steady vision of ideal social modes. Jane Austen is deeply aware of a threatened change from a stable society based on Christian principles to a society in which money, or the appearance of money, is all that counts, but her irony works to locate and reveal those elements in society subversive of traditional norms.

It is important to insist upon the positive nature of her fictional response. As is true of all her major fiction, with the exception of Persuasion, these novels suggest through the controlling presence of an affirmative narrative voice and the developing careers of their heroines, acceptable social alternatives to the largely corrupt worlds described. Both novels fail ultimately to find a convincing artistic shape for the moral and social vision proposed, but the failure is artistic—in Wayne Booth’s terms a failure of aesthetic rhetoric—and not a covert indication of Jane Austen’s unconscious dislike of her world.

To a far greater degree than her mature fiction, these novels find their origin in other novels and fulfill their impulse by correcting, qualifying, or reconstituting the fictional “shapes” of previous works. That they are “parodic” is not, of course, to their discredit. All fiction (and art, too, if we accept E. H. Gombrich’s persuasive argument in Art and Illusion) is parodic in the sense that authors do not present a wholly original picture of life, but create out of an existing fund of characterization and design. Far from diminishing the quality of Jane Austen’s novels, indeed, careful studies of her alterations of motifs in other novels reveal the superiority of her moral and aesthetic achievement to that of the Gothic and sentimental fiction on which she was bred, and we may now see Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility as the products of a continuing effort on her part to capture in fictional form a satisfying personal resolution of real moral questions, already raised but unsatisfactorily answered in the fiction of her experience.2

My purpose in this chapter is not, however, to examine Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility against their fictional predecessors. Rather, I wish to consider certain aspects of these works as they contribute to an understanding of Jane Austen’s social and ethical attitudes, and to suggest briefly the developing manner in which she came through these early efforts to a wholly convincing aesthetic expression, in Pride and Prejudice, of an original and positive view of the individual’s relation to society.

Of first importance to this approach is a recognition of the particular structure of these works. Behind the parodic aspect is the pattern of the heroine’s effective disinheritance, followed by the need to formulate a response to a new, less certain existence, which I have considered to underlie much of Jane Austen’s work. In Northanger Abbey, of course, the insecurity of Catherine is itself a matter of irony. This “mirror-image of the ‘standard’ heroine” is compelled by the premises of models to be satirized to be separated from the serenity of her Fullerton home and to encounter, in a suitably deflationary way, “the violence of such noblemen and baronets as delight in forcing young ladies away to some remote farm-house” (18).3 The stolid Mrs. Allen is a comic version of the villainous chaperon (we compare and contrast, for example, Mrs. Jewkes in Pamela), and when the grotesquely comic anti-villain, John Thorpe, carries her off to Blaize Castle, and when she wishes to stop, “only laughed, smacked his whip, encouraged his horse, made odd noises, and drove on” (87), we see the joke and hardly consider him another Gothic tyrant. But the atmosphere changes in the second volume, where General Tilney’s conduct does indeed approach a Gothic tyranny, and it is not unreasonable to suggest that, as readers, we have been lulled into a false sense of security, only to have our complacency dislodged at the abbey. Certainly one of the effects of the General’s brutal domestic conduct is to lead us to question not only the “placid indifference” (61) of Mrs. Allen but also the “philosophic” composure (234) of the Morland parents and the “common feelings of common life” (19) which were apparently at first set up as normative against the “thousand alarming presentiments of evil” to be expected (18). Jane Austen has her cake and eats it too. The novel subverts the falsities of such works as The Mysteries of Udolpho, but it also retains enough of the extrarational probing of the Gothic novel to put into question any easy acceptance of a rationally grounded existence.4

An even more critical awareness of the possible insufficiency of inherited grounds is present in Sense and Sensibility. Unlike Catherine Morland’s experience, the isolation of the two heroines in Sense and Sensibility is not, even initially, simply a matter of following a fictional formula, and the novel as a whole, though it is obviously a version of the novel of sentiment, contains a surprising amount of direct social observation. The early chapters of this uneven work have a sureness of tone and a precision of statement that qualify them to be ranked with the best chapters Jane Austen ever wrote, and as the Dashwoods are expelled from their seemingly secure and timeless “estate,” the possibilities of social fragmentation, of increasing distances among social groups, and of an economic transvaluation of traditional morality seem to be strongly present in Jane Austen’s mind. A rather close attention to these chapters is warranted, since they reveal concerns never far from her thought throughout her career.

The story opens with an estate changing hands. Held for many generations in the same family, Norland Park has been managed with respect, and its trustees have over the years gained the “general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance” (3). As we encounter it, however, Norland is passing out of the direct line, for the late owner had been a single man. He leaves the estate to his nephew, but attaches strings to the bequest: the estate is entailed on Henry Dashwood’s son and, beyond this, on his grandson. Though such provisions were not unusual in a society anxious to secure the continuity of the land, they present something of a problem, for Henry Dashwood has married twice, and though John Dashwood, the son of his first marriage, is provided for by the inheritance of his mother’s fortune (half of which is his now, the other half to be his when his father dies), the three daughters of his second marriage are less well situated, the present Mrs. Henry Dashwood having no fortune whatsoever. Thus when Henry Dashwood survives his uncle a bare twelve months, and to the £7,000 at his own disposal and the £3,000 that his uncle provided for the girls, can add nothing but a dying request to his son to look after his wife and daughters, the Dashwood sisters find themselves in a somewhat reduced and dependent condition. John Dashwood, meanwhile, inherits the estate (worth £4,000 per annum) and the rest of his mother’s fortune (“which had been large”). Having married a woman with £10,000, he is financially very well situated.

The solidity of financial specification evident in these scenes is found throughout Jane Austen’s work, marking an awareness on her part, which is only now beginning to be recognized, of an economically fluid contemporary society.5 It will be useful briefly to ask what thematic implications her attention to incomes have. How well off, for example, is John Dashwood? Assuming his mother’s fortune to have been as low as £20,000, we can estimate his annual income, conservatively, as between £5,000 and £6,000, compared with a total of £500 for Mrs. Dashwood and her three daughters; but what does this mean in contemporary terms? Glancing at other novels, how rich is Fitzwilliam Darcy with his £10,000 a year, his park ten miles round, and his house in London? What shall we say of Bingley with his inheritance of £100,000, but with no inherited estate? Then, what of Emma Woodhouse with her fortune of £30,000, Mary Crawford with £20,000, her brother with a yearly income of £4,000 and his estate at Everingham? Rushworth has £12,000 a year, making him, as far as we know, the richest of her characters. Sir Thomas Bertram’s income is not specified, but he has a considerable country seat, an overseas estate, and two livings at his disposal. But his Antigua interests are in some trouble and he has an extravagant eldest son, reasons enough, perhaps, for the too quick acceptance he grants to Maria’s union with Rushworth and Sotherton. When we look to the less well situated characters, similar questions arise. How necessitous is Willoughby with his income of £600 a year? Does he really need to marry an heiress with £50,000? How unmarriageable are the five Bennet girls with the share of £5,000 which is all that they can expect? It is clearly ironical that Mrs. Bennet should consider that “if a smart young colonel, with five or six thousand a year, should want one of my girls, I shall not say nay to him” (PP, 29), but why should Jane Austen set her unjustifiable optimism at this figure?

One indication of the contemporary value of these and other carefully described incomes is given in G. E. Mingay’s English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century.6 Mingay proposes three large categories of great landowners, lesser landowners, and freeholders. Great landowners are defined as having a great house, a London residence, at least £5,000 a year, and about 10,000 to 20,000 acres. Only Darcy of the major characters is of this group. Bingley, with his £4,000 to £5,000 a year is rich enough, but his family’s money has been made in trade and he is seeking entry into the land. Most of Jane Austen’s families can be placed in Mingay’s second group, which he subdivides into three categories: wealthy gentry (£3,000 to £5,000 per annum), Squires (£1,000 to £3,000). and Gentlemen (£300 to £1,000). Assuming this to be roughly correct, several of Jane Austen’s incomes become significant. As I have already noted in the introduction, the Bennet family, on the death of Mr. Bennet and with the entailment of their estate on Mr. Collins, face degradation. They are already living to the limit of the Longbourn income (£2,000) and should their father die, their £5,000 will provide a mere £250 a year, a sum scarcely capable of keeping a smaller family in a position of gentility. Returning to Sense and Sensibility, it is equally clear that Mrs. Henry Dashwood and her three daughters, with their £500 a year, are confronted with a critical reduction in expectations.7 There is, therefore, good reason for Henry Dashwood to urge his son to do something more for them. John Dashwood, for his part, finds himself favorably situated for climbing. Solidly placed among the wealthy gentry as he is by virtue of the Norland income, Dashwood’s inheritance from his mother and his prudential marriage to Fanny Ferrars have substantially increased his income and his social horizon.

What conclusions are we to draw from these facts? One persistent line of interpretation would, I think, see in Jane Austen’s concern over income, status, and the rise and fall of families an autobiographical relevance, and it is true that Jane Austen’s existence after her father’s death in 1805, as she moved from Bath to Southampton and finally to Chawton, was a “reduced” one.8 The family income, before Mrs. Austen’s sons came to the rescue, was a mere £210 a year, and even after annuities from Edward (£100) and James, Henry, and Frank (£50 each), this only reached a relatively meager £460 a year, £40 less than the Dashwoods. In her visits to such great houses as Stoneleigh Abbey and Godmersham Park, moreover, Jane Austen would have had ample opportunity to contrast her habitual life with a more luxurious and spacious existence. But while there are intriguing biographical comparisons suggesting a personal predicament behind her interest in an economically fluid world, it would be a mistake to read her life too closely into her fiction. As I have argued in my introduction, Jane Austen ironically exposes mercenary conduct in her novels not in order to come to terms with her own “reduced” position but because she fears that economic considerations will outweigh and overcome moral considerations in human conduct. Throughout her fiction the most amoral characters—Wickham, Mary Crawford, Mr. Elliot—are also the most economically motivated. In Northanger Abbey, of course, Catherine’s attraction for John Thorpe and the General, like her brother’s attraction for Isabella, is purely mercenary. When the General discovers she is not an heiress, his attitude becomes hostile in the extreme. But it is in Sense and Sensibility that the vicious cancer of economically motivated conduct is most searchingly analyzed.

The brilliant second chapter describes the diminution of John Dashwood’s generosity, as, abetted by his wife, he progressively reduces the size of his financial aid. At first he considers giving his sisters £1,000 each, but Mrs. Dashwood points out that this will be the “ruin” of him and his son, and so by degrees this sum is diminished by half and then considered unnecessary in view of the £10,000 that his sisters will share on their mother’s death. An annuity of £100 while the mother lives, John Dashwood thinks, is to be preferred, but his wife has other ideas:

“To be sure,” said she, “it is better than parting with fifteen hundred pounds at once. But then if Mrs. Dashwood should live fifteen years, we shall be completely taken in.”

“Fifteen years! my dear Fanny; her life cannot be worth half that purchase.”

“Certainly not; but if you observe, people always live for ever when there is any annuity to be paid them; and she is very stout and healthy, and hardly forty. An annuity is a very serious business; it comes over and over every year, and there is no getting rid of it. You are not aware of what you are doing. I have known a great deal of the trouble of annuities; for my mother was clogged with the payment of three to old superannuated servants by my father’s will, and it is amazing how disagreeable she found it.…” (10–11)

From an annuity to a “present of fifty pounds now and then,” from this to occasional “presents of fish and game,” these are easy steps, and, with barely a break in the logic, the John Dashwoods move on to a recognition of how “comfortable” their relations will be on five hundred a year. Then, in this economic reductio ad absurdum, they end with a feeling of injury that the Norland china, plate and linen have been left to Mrs. Henry Dashwood and not to themselves.

What had been a center of order and morality has in the change of ownership become the home of the most grasping covetousness. Ties, not only of family affection, but, as Mrs. Dashwood’s remarks about superannuated servants imply, between landlord and tenant, master and servant, are excluded from the reckoning. In such a society, as Wordsworth would soon phrase it, “everything has been put up to market and sold for the highest price it would buy.”9

London especially is permeated by this transvaluation of traditional assumptions. It is a world in which Miss Steele “was never easy till she knew the price of every part of Marianne’s dress” (249), in which value words acquire new and economic meanings. Thus John Dashwood construes Edward’s action to remain true to his engagement to Lucy Steele, rather than accept the heiress his mother has found for him, as a disregard of “duty, affection, every thing” (266), and he finds Mrs. Jennings “a most valuable woman” because “her house, her style of living, all bespeak an exceeding good income” (226). A little later, when he hears of Colonel Brandon’s gift of a living to the now disinherited Edward Ferrars, Dashwood is astonished; since there is not even the excuse of “relationship” or “connection” (294), Brandon has no reason for being “so improvident in a point of such common, such natural, concern” (295). Learning that the living is worth £200 per annum, he immediately calculates its “value” (£1,400) and is then the more astonished at the improvidence of the Colonel’s action. Dashwood’s most vicious expression of a totally economic outlook occurs, however, when he sees how sick Marianne is (she is grief-stricken on account of Willoughby’s infidelity). He can only express his concern to Elinor in terms of the fall in Marianne’s market value: “I question whether Marianne now, will marry a man worth more than five or six hundred a-year, at the utmost” (227).10

The economic cancer has spread from the city (traditionally the home of greed) to the country, and at Norland Park is marked by the enclosure of the Common and by the land purchases that Dashwood has made in the name of “duty”:

“… I have made a little purchase within this half year; East Kingham Farm, you must remember the place, where old Gibson used to live. The land was so very desirable for me in every respect, so immediately adjoining my own property, that I felt it my duty to buy it. I could not have answered it to my conscience to let it fall into any other hands. A man must pay for his convenience; and it has cost me a vast deal of money.” (225)

The kind of “conscience” shown in this action will not keep the Dashwood family in that “general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance” (3) which it had enjoyed for generations. Within the park, Dashwood’s improvements (in anticipation of the theme in Mansfield Park) have already altered the structure of the landscape at the same time as they have ignored the provisions of old Dashwood’s will. A greenhouse is being built for Mrs. John Dashwood upon the knoll behind the house, and the “old walnut trees are all come down to make room for it. It will be a very fine object from many parts of the park…” (226).

More than a decade before Cobbett took his rural rides, Jane Austen seems to have sensed the rise of the economically motivated landed gentry which he (and Wordsworth) disliked so much, and the implicit distinction she makes between a morally based and an economically based country society anticipates Cobbett’s distinction between a “resident native gentry, attached to the soil, known to every farmer” and “a gentry only now-and-then residing at all … looking to the soil only for its rents, viewing it as a mere object of speculation … and relying, for influence, not upon the good will of the vicinage, but upon the dread of their power.”11

Sense and Sensibility may not be a total artistic success, but in its cool exposure of economically motivated behavior it gives powerful expression to Jane Austen’s persistent apprehensions about the possible course of society. In face of these recognitions, two directions seem possible to her: disaffection and withdrawal from a manifestly imperfect world, or commitment to society, properly defined as a morally founded structure. Jane Austen takes the second direction, though the temptation of the first is strong. Before supporting the argument with an analysis of Sense and Sensibility, I shall first examine Jane Austen’s attitude toward society in Northanger Abbey, the least artistically mature of her novels.

Northanger Abbey, while it does not reflect the same persistent awareness of an economically debased society, takes its own close look at the conditions of social existence. As well as being a response to the Gothic novel, it is, to borrow Malcolm Bradbury’s phrase describing E. M. Forster’s fiction, a “sociomoral” novel, and in her description of Catherine, Jane Austen provides an early attempt at defining proper moral behavior in the face of a largely immoral world. In describing Catherine’s journey from Fullerton to Bath, to Northanger, and then back to Fullerton, Jane Austen follows the pattern of the English novel of education in which, from Defoe and Fielding onward, movement through space has accompanied a moral enlightenment on the part of the protagonist. In Catherine’s case, there is little psychological development, and while this is not a sine qua non of the novel of education—Tom Jones undergoes little psychological change—it becomes in Northanger Abbey a matter of dissatisfaction both for the reader and, I think, for the author. As W. A. Craik has said, Catherine seems younger than the reader or the author, and she is too naive “to work out her own disillusionment like Emma.”12 What mental change does occur in the heroine is unsatisfactorily prepared: we are not convinced by her suddenly acquired susceptibility to lurid Gothic imaginings at Northanger, and, as Alan McKillop has argued, there is a break in imaginative continuity between the volumes. Catherine changes from an antiheroic ingenue to an unabashed Gothic heroine without sufficient preparation.13 Neither her reading of Gothic fiction nor Henry’s extemporaneous recipe for horrors on the ride to Northanger can adequately explain the psychological shift, though Henry’s invented story (II, v) does quite skilfully provide the schedule for Catherine’s later “Gothic” adventures.

But if Jane Austen fails structurally and thematically to combine a novel of manners and a literary response to the Gothic novel, we should nevertheless be aware of her positive moral intentions in Northanger Abbey. An examination of the heroine’s experience in Bath with the Thorpes and at Northanger with Henry Tilney reveals Jane Austen’s direction, even if the moral journey is not completed satisfactorily.

In Bath the conduct of the Thorpes is all too plainly outrageous to need much in the way of comment, and in depicting them (especially the boorish brother) Jane Austen may be doing little other than catching “the grotesque shapes toward which the human form and the world are being forced under the weight of stupidity.”14 It would be to break a butterfly upon a wheel, for example, to draw the didactic conclusion that it is immoral to treat one’s mother as Thorpe does on his first meeting with her in Bath: “Ah, mother! how do you do? … where did you get that quiz of a hat, it makes you look like an old witch?” (49); or to condemn his version of “fraternal tenderness” as cruel, in his treatment of his younger sisters: “he asked each of them how they did, and observed that they both looked very ugly” (49). Nevertheless, beyond our amused recognition of the barbaric energy of Thorpe’s portrait, we cannot be unaware of how invariably his actions violate decorum, and how they are, beyond this, occasionally vicious.

If John Thorpe’s behavior exhibits a brazen disregard for decorum, his sister Isabella’s apparent observation of decorous standards is the hypocrite’s recognition that it pays to simulate propriety. Aware that there are public norms of behavior, Isabella seeks to justify her conduct by seeming to observe them. In something of the same manner she appeals to the norms of fiction, pretending to be a heroine of sensibility. But though her sentimental behavior is occasionally coincident with propriety, it is more frequently at variance, and the “easy gaiety,” immediate friendship, and “lengthened shake of hands” (34) on her first meeting with Catherine indicate at one and the same time her conformity to the behavior of romantic novels and her insincerity.15 Isabella’s pose as a heroine of sensibility (evident, for example in her specious remembrance of her first meeting with Catherine’s brother [118]) is no more sincere than her pose of decorous conduct. Her apparent acceptance of the sentimental attitude conceals a hard-hearted realism in money matters as is revealed when, on learning of the modest income of the Morland family, her enthusiasm for her brother’s courtship of Catherine diminishes considerably: “You have both of you something to be sure, but it is not a trifle that will support a family now-a-days; and after all that romancers may say, there is no doing without money” (146).

In the meeting of Catherine and Isabella we have that encounter between innocence and experience, between benevolence and prudence, which the eighteenth century novel took such delight in exploiting. Until Catherine can add a touch of percipience to her “simplicity” she is doomed to be duped and misled. However worthy her ingenuous attitudes are, they militate against her coming to terms with her society. That Jane Austen intended some growth of moral perception in Catherine may be seen through an examination of the three “schemes” in which she is invited to participate while in Bath.

On the first occasion, when John Thorpe arrives at Pulteney Street and rudely bids Catherine accompany him to Claverton Down, her innocence, undirected by her habitually placid chaperon, is imposed upon. She is permitted by Mrs. Allen to perform a dubious moral action by accompanying Thorpe, but at least the trip teaches her to doubt whether he is “altogether completely agreeable” (66). On the second occasion, the invitation to Blaize Castle is of equally short notice, and Catherine’s acceptance is, despite extenuating circumstances, morally reprehensible. Her excuses for going are: (1) Mrs. Allen makes no objection, (2) since it has been raining, the Tilneys will probably not fulfill their engagement anyway, and (3) according to Thorpe, the Tilneys are out driving in a phaeton. In addition to these excuses from outside there are also some internal promptings in favor of the trip, for it is to the romantic Blaize Castle, “the oldest in the kingdom,” with “dozens” of “towers and long galleries” (85). Catherine’s internal conflict between right conduct and self-gratification suggests a certain growth of conscience: “Thorpe talked to his horse, and she meditated, by turns, on broken promises and broken arches, phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys and trap-doors” (87). And she is deservedly punished for her wrong decision by the appearance of the Tilneys walking to meet her soon after the start of the drive, by Thorpe’s refusal to stop the horse, and by Mrs. Allen’s criticism on her return of the “strange, wild scheme” (89). In addition, she has to suffer apparent rejection from Eleanor when she goes to apologize, and coolness from Henry at the theater.

Catherine’s moral progress is most clearly evident when she is invited to take part in the “Clifton scheme” (97). Already engaged for a walk with the Tilneys, she is determined not to break her word again. The pressure that is put on her in this scene anticipates the pressure Fanny Price will resist in her determined refusal to act in the play. As Edmund in Mansfield Park first degrades himself by adding his voice to the chorus of cries that Fanny should act, so in this novel “this was the first time of [Catherine’s] brother’s openly siding against her” (99). The scene reaches an appropriate climax when Thorpe returns after a short absence to announce that he has “been to Miss Tilney, and made [Catherine’s] excuses” (100). When Catherine reacts by saying she “must run after Miss Tilney directly and set her right” (100), the emotional coercion of the Thorpes and her brother becomes physical: “Isabella … caught hold of one hand; Thorpe of the other; and remonstrances poured in from all three” (100). But Catherine’s determination resists even this attack, and she runs off to Milsom-street, secure in the knowledge that “she had attended to what was due to others, and to her own character in their opinion” (101).

By the end of the first volume, then, Catherine has gained enough in the way of moral discrimination to resist immoral pressures and to act on a moral basis. Her education along these lines will culminate in the second volume when she finally comes to see through the “shallow artifice” of Isabella’s letter requesting her intercession with James (218). But in the second volume—and because she is required to be the agent of Jane Austen’s complex response to the Gothic novel—Catherine’s progress as a moral heroine is interrupted, and she is made to become a figure of simplicity again as she figures, first, in the low Gothic parody of the locked cabinet, and then in the more serious misapprehension over the fate of Henry Tilney’s mother. Henry’s famous rebuke on this occasion has become something of a crux in critical discussion, but before considering whether it serves as a legitimate criticism of the undisciplined imagination, or is itself subject to authorial irony, something must be said of Tilney’s role in the novel.

As much the anti-hero initially as Thorpe is anti-villain, Tilney’s function in the first volume is to expose to Catherine various modes of triviality and affectation. His first act is to ridicule the conduct of the Assembly rooms by imitating the “simpering” manners of a Bath beau (26). Later, with a lexicographer’s discrimination, he calls Catherine’s attention to her inaccurate, Thorpe-derived, use of language, particularly to her misuse of “nice” (108). Then, with the confidence of a man who has studied his Gilpin—and his Uvedale Price—he lectures her on the picturesque, to such good effect that “when they gained the top of Beechen Cliff, she voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape” (111).16

Tilney’s love of Gilpin and the picturesque, together with his likeable vitality and ironic power of discrimination, have led many readers to consider him as effectively an authorial surrogate within the novel.17 This is only partly true, for his opinions, as recent critics have recognized, are often undercut, and his vision is far from being coincident with Jane Austen’s. In his taste for the picturesque, for example, Henry (unlike Marianne Dashwood) seems unaware of the artificial nature of this cult, of any distinction between natural and acquired taste. A more serious and certainly “prepared” instance of his vulnerability, however, occurs on the occasion when his sister takes Catherine’s remark that “something very shocking indeed, will soon come out in London” (112) to refer to an impending riot, rather than to the latest Gothic publication Catherine intends. Henry has great delight in exposing both his sister’s over-imaginative response (“My dear Eleanor, the riot is only in your own brain” [113]) and the ill-chosen language of Catherine. Apparently acting as a center of rationality equidistant from points of excessive imagination and linguistic impropriety, his lesson for the day is that it is irrational both to speak and to think hyperbolically. But there is a further irony present. Henry’s lurid description of “a mob of three thousand” (113), which is apparently his ironical reconstruction of Eleanor’s irrational fears, is actually—as the reference to St. George’s Fields confirms—a description of a real event, the Gordon Riots of 1780. The effect of the passage, therefore, is not that it is unreasonable to conceive of “expected horrors in London” (113) in terms of a popular uprising but, on the contrary, that it may be perfectly reasonable so to construe such a phrase.18

Since Henry has himself introduced the detailed description of the Riots (113), the effect is that of dramatic irony in that the necessary information is conveyed from author to reader through the medium of a character’s speech, but without that character’s awareness of the implications of what he says. But it is important to recognize that the deeper irony here does not entirely destroy the character’s irony. Though Henry’s brief for rational attitudes is undercut, all of his ironical censure of Catherine’s linguistic hyperboles, and some of his ironical censure of Eleanor’s imagination, remain. (It would be an alarming world if all hyperbolic expressions were to be taken literally.) Henry’s function as teacher is limited but important in this passage which anticipates in the complexity of its irony the crucial and much misunderstood scene at Northanger, where Henry discovers to his horror that Catherine suspects General Tilney of having murdered his wife. Here is his rebuke:

“Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you—Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?” (197–98)

This is the point at which readers are apt to take different directions. For some, Henry’s remarks are the “thematic climax” of the novel, the proper censure of the undisciplined imagination. For others, the scene reveals the fallibility of the rational outlook, and, taken with the violence of the General’s later conduct, provides sanction for the validity of the “sympathetic imagination.” For D. W. Harding, the clause, “where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies,” is the unconscious revelation of Jane Austen’s dislike of a society on which, nevertheless, she felt compelled to rely.19 As in the case of his “riot” speech, however, Henry’s remarks here are partly fallible and partly correct. There is a double irony present. Catherine’s imaginative fantasy is undercut, but given the nature of her actual experiences with the General, Tilney’s rational rebuke is also insufficient. It is, after all, shortly following the rebuke that Catherine experiences the very real violence of the General, when, having discovered in London that she is not the heiress he thought her, he returns with dramatic suddenness to the Abbey and orders her immediate dismissal on the morrow.

Clearly, in the second volume of Northanger Abbey Jane Austen was trying to translate into characterization and action a complex response to Gothic fiction and the attitudes it embodied. To subvert the false and excessive reactions of a Radcliffe heroine was easy—too easy—as she revealed in the burlesque of Catherine and the mysteriously locked cabinet. But wholly to affirm a life without terrors, wholly to reject the function of the imagination, was not part of her intention. Thus, as she was preparing for the subversion of Catherine’s “dreadful suspicions” concerning the General, she was also, I believe, depositing evidence which would give to Catherine’s “sympathetic imagination” a certain, carefully limited, validity. A brief glance at Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) will help make the point. For Smith, moral judgments involve the individual’s sympathetic participation, not only in the feelings of the person who is affected by a certain act, good or bad, but also (and this is relevant to Northanger Abbey) in the feelings of the executor of the act, and in the motives or promptings which led him to the act. Though the sympathetic faculty is not to be identified with the imagination for Smith, it cannot in fact function without the imagination: “Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did and never can carry us beyond our own persons, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.”20 With Smith’s distinction in mind, Catherine’s “Gothic” misconceptions are to some degree excused. Throughout her relationship with the Tilneys, Catherine has intuited the General’s habitual domestic tyranny. By her sympathetic participation in the feelings of his children (especially Eleanor) she has reached an intuitional knowledge of their unease in their father’s company, and by her imaginative responses to the General’s occasional fits of anger she has come to an undefined recognition of his violence.

The General’s actual domestic tyranny has been revealed in his obsessive attitude toward time. Even as Catherine upbraids herself after Henry’s rebuke, the partial justice of her suspicions asserts itself, without her knowledge, when in spite of her grief she goes down to dinner as “the clock struck five” (199). On her departure from Bath for the Abbey the “clock struck ten while the trunks were carrying down,” for the “General had fixed to be out of Milsom-street by that hour” (155). When they stop at Petty France, “his angry impatience at the waiters, made Catherine grow every moment more in awe of him” (156); when they arrive at the Abbey, Eleanor’s manner suggests that “the strictest punctuality to the family hours would be expected at Northanger” (162), and she later “gently hints her fear of being late,” a fear which is not unfounded, for on the “very instant of their entering” the General pulls the bell “with violence” and orders “Dinner to be on table directly!” Catherine trembles “at the emphasis with which he spoke” (165).

In such instances of his autocratic severity Catherine’s intuitions have a credible basis. Though there are other instances of his selfishness and vanity, his violent egotism is particularly apparent in his psychotic demand that his household, and that of Henry’s at Woodston, be regulated according to his habits. As long as he considers Catherine a financial catch, he feels a “pressing solicitude … of making Miss Morland’s time at Northanger pass pleasantly” (209; my italics), but it is only during his absence in London that Catherine is aware of the “happiness with which their time now passed” (220; my italics). And when the General returns, of course, it is to order her to leave the next morning at seven o’clock, without a servant, “not even the hour … left to [her] choice” (224).

If we now return to Henry’s reprimand, it is with the knowledge that Catherine has a real foundation for her suspicions. She has been imagining from actual behavior and not from Gothically structured fancies. In contrast, Henry’s passivity in face of his father’s selfish and violent habits is hardly commendable.

Jane Austen’s implied brief for the sympathetic imagination should not, however, be exaggerated. As Sense and Sensibility will again stress, Jane Austen requires of any mode of moral vision that it contain a rational awareness. When Henry bids Catherine to consult her “understanding,” her “sense of the probable,” therefore, he is speaking for his author. The General is a domestic tyrant, but he is not a murderer, and the distinction is not a small one. Catherine’s sympathetic imagination is both valuable and dangerous. When it leads her to consider, on seeing the late Mrs. Tilney’s portrait, that the General “must have been dreadfully cruel to her” (181), her opinion does not exceed a “sense of the probable.” But when it leads her to speculate that because a husband does not take his exercise along his late wife’s favorite walk, because the wife’s death occurred after an “illness … sudden and short” (186), and because the husband stays up late at night, therefore he must have murdered her, or have her now imprisoned, it goes beyond the probable, it leaves an “observation of what is passing around” her and enters a fictional realm of unlimited imaginative error.

By some such devious and, ultimately, unsatisfactory way, Jane Austen has brought her heroine, and her hero, to the moral recognitions which are the necessary preliminaries to their union. Catherine has had to learn that moral action is no simple matter, that its grounds have to be discriminated from the grounds of a number of unacceptable responses. Common sense without suspicion—the assumption of her parents at Fullerton that life has no real dangers—has to be rejected, as well as the innocence which is born from it, for however benevolently intentioned the ingenuous self is, it may, without prudence, be led by the Thorpes of this world into immoral actions and situations. On the other hand, it may not be sufficient to stand back, as Tilney does, and rationally disassociate oneself from hypocrisy in a pose of superior awareness of discrepancies. There is a place for the sympathetic imagination in social intercourse: fellow feeling and moral intuition are, indeed, necessary parts of both social and ethical attitudes; but the role of sympathy is to be carefully limited and continually grounded in fact, examined against the laws of probability.

Such a summary describes the framework on which the moral discriminations of Northanger Abbey rest, but it has to be admitted that the ironic mode of the novel, though it is not the subversive weapon it has been considered, is ultimately unsatisfactory, not only for the reader, but also for the author. Jane Austen has progressed by a series of nons. Her ideal society is not Fullerton complacency, not Bath duplicity. Her ideal moral outlook is not Tilney’s rationalism, not Catherine’s benevolent ingenuousness, not her undisciplined imagination. Somewhere between Fullerton and Northanger, and necessarily by way of Bath, an ideal locus is discoverable, in which ingenuousness and acuity, sympathy and logic are reconciled, and from which both complacency and alarmism are banished. But the locus of this ideal—the grounds—is not in the novel.21 It is implied, and affirmatively implied, but it remains outside, or behind, the characterization, as a property of the narrative consciousness. The reader comes to perceive the presence of standards of behavior and a fixed point of moral outlook, but he is apt to feel that his arrival at such a perception has left Catherine far behind. In Emma, to look ahead, though the reader has a constantly greater awareness than Emma of the disparity between her conduct and ideal behavior, Emma herself eventually comes to an equal awareness. At the end her awareness is total, and the norms continually implied in the narrative consciousness (and there discoverable by the reader) are finally accepted and understood by Emma, the central intelligence of the novel. A perfect coincidence of morality and art has been achieved, and this, I take it, is one meaning of F. R. Leavis’s opinion that Jane Austen does not offer us “an ‘aesthetic’ value that is separable from moral significance.”22

In Northanger Abbey, by contrast, Jane Austen fails to dramatize a moral outlook in the novel’s resolution. In recognition of this, I believe, as much as from a desire to reintroduce a parody of the romantic novel, she had her narrator enter the novel in person in the last two chapters to ask, “what probable circumstance could work upon a temper like the General’s?” (250), and then provide the most hackneyed of devices to unravel the plot: a Viscount is introduced, whose fortune and title are sufficient in his marriage to Eleanor to remove the objections to the marriage of Henry and Catherine.

The introduction of the narrator into her work in these last pages may be illuminated from Robert C. Elliott’s work on satire.23 Elliott has shown the dual nature of all satiric works, their social value and their dangerous power. As the genre develops, he argues, the author often detaches himself from his persona, who is allowed to do the dirty work but is then himself satirized by the author. This procedure we have already seen working with Henry Tilney, and something of like nature is also happening at the end of the novel. The self-conscious appearance of the narrator is a recognition that her creation, too, is a work of fiction. The entry is as much a wry self-criticism as a criticism of other fictional works. Like Elliott’s honest satirist, Jane Austen recognizes that she is part of the folly of mankind and that her subjective vision is not necessarily any greater than that of the very authors she has from time to time parodied. But as in Elliott’s view, though the persona is himself undercut, much of what he says remains valid. As with Tilney, so now within the self-admitted fallibility of the narrator, there is a measure of valid outlook, a criticism of aberrant social behavior, and a requirement for objective values. Jane Austen’s later fiction will, however, require a narrative procedure other than a progression by nons, will require that standards be dramatically externalized in characterization, that public norms be discovered in the actions and internal development of her characters, and in the setting of her novels.

Sense and Sensibility takes a step in this direction. Its twin heroines are much deeper characters than Catherine, and in their developing careers and relationships Jane Austen defines more convincingly than in Northanger Abbey her notion of the proper relation between the individual and society. This is not to say that the novel is without flaws. Two mediocre heroes who fail to realize the dramatic investment their author has placed in them; the wretched episode of the miserable Eliza; a failure wholly to overcome what Walton Litz has called the “tyranny of antithesis”—these are among the fairly obvious artistic limitations of the novel. Against such limitations, however, one places an incisive exposure of economic motivation and the fact that the novel is, after all, the finest example of the sub-genre in which it takes its place.

As many scholars have shown, Jane Austen is here working within inherited terms of aesthetic and ethical debate. Mrs. Inchbald’s Art and Nature (1796) and Maria Edgeworth’s Letters of Julia and Caroline (1795) are only two of many novels, in the decade in which Sense and Sensibility had its genesis as Elinor and Marianne, to anticipate Jane Austen’s treatment of familiar dualities of prudence and benevolence, reason and passion, discipline and freedom. While Mrs. Inchbald is Godwinian in her dislike of institutions and Rousseauesque in her affirmation of the natural virtues, Maria Edgeworth is nearer the norm of the genre and Jane Austen’s own position in recognizing the potential excesses of sensibility and the need for the temporizing effect of reason. Another novel, Mme d’Arblay’s Camilla (1796), suggests in its description of the heroine a common view of the “wayward” faculty:

[H]er every propensity was pure, and, when reflection came to her aid, her conduct was as exemplary as her wishes. But the ardour of her imagination, acted upon by every passing idea, shook her Judgment from its yet unsteady seat, and left her at the mercy of wayward Sensibility—that delicate, but irregular power, which now impels to all that is most disinterested for others, now forgets all mankind, to watch the pulsations of its own fancies.24

Jane Austen is listed among the subscribers to the first edition of Camilla, and she would, on the whole, subscribe to these reflections.

Her achievement in Sense and Sensibility is not, however, to be assessed merely in terms of her ability to reveal the dangers of excessive sensibility, or, for that matter to modify a strictly rational outlook. Given her awareness of the widespread corruption of traditional moral assumptions, more than a mere accommodation of her inherited—almost hackneyed—terms was needed. The resolution of the novel was intended, I believe, not merely to discover the private happiness of the central characters, but to reconstitute around these unions the grounds of a moral society. It cannot be said that this intention is convincingly achieved—Marianne’s marriage to the rheumatic Colonel Brandon is a gross over-compensation for her misguided sensibility—but it is wrong to imply, as Marvin Mudrick does, that the novel’s failure reveals bad faith on Jane Austen’s part, that Marianne’s vitality and enthusiasm are betrayed not by Willoughby, but by an author who has here substituted for a personal commitment to feeling a dull conformity to social conventions.25

Marianne is one of the most interesting characters in Jane Austen’s fiction. More than Emma even, she anticipates the tragically Quixotic heroines of the nineteenth century novel, whose visions of existence can find no fulfilment within the limitations of their societies. But while Jane Austen permits Marianne’s quixotism to act as an implicit criticism of what is limited and pedestrian in her society, she also, quite convincingly, reveals the deficiencies of her idealism.

Nothing is clearer initially than that we are to view Marianne with a good deal of sympathy: she has “a life, a spirit, an eagerness which could hardly be seen without delight” (46). At first it seems she is to exhibit “heroic” qualities, conspicuous by their absence in the young Catherine Morland. Like her mother, she “can feel no sentiment of approbation inferior to love” (16); she is passionately fond of music and drawing; she objects to Elinor’s friend, Edward Ferrars, because “he has no real taste” (17); and when they leave Norland, she sheds tears for a “place so much beloved” (27). But although her enthusiasms are occasionally those of the romantic heroines Jane Austen had delighted in burlesquing in her juvenilia, the parodic satire here is not harsh. What vindicates Marianne in the early scenes is the sincerity behind her enthusiasms, the personal quality present even when her sensibility is mediated through her reading. That she is not merely fashionable is shown in her dislike of Gilpinesque “jargon,” indeed of “jargon of every kind” (97). During her conversation with Edward about landscape scenery she observes: “sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning” (97). And when Sir John Middleton suggests that she “will be setting [her] cap” at Willoughby, her caustic reply, though somewhat outspoken from a seventeen-year-old, is no less than his use of cliché deserves (45).

Strongly individualistic, Marianne’s attitudes are often without egoism, and her disregard of “every common-place notion of decorum” (48) is on occasions magnificent. When Mrs. Ferrars, in the drawing room of her home in Harley Street, ignores the painted screens of Elinor to praise the absent art of the absent Miss Morton, Marianne’s reaction is superb:

“This is admiration of a very particular kind!—what is Miss Morton to us?—who knows, or who cares, for her?—it is Elinor of whom we think and speak.”

And so saying, she took the screens out of her sister-in-law’s hands, to admire them herself as they ought to be admired.

Mrs. Ferrars looked exceedingly angry, and drawing herself up more stiffly than ever, pronounced in retort this bitter phillippic; “Miss Morton is Lord Morton’s daughter.” (235–36)

Given the mercenary and mediocre world in which she lives, Marianne’s responses are often admirable, and one can understand why Mudrick sees in her a “passionate, discriminating, instantaneous sympathy for worthy people and beautiful things,” a “basic opposition to lying and the forms of lying.”26 But if one sees Marianne not only as an aspect of her author (which she is, I think) but also as a representative of sensibility, then her outlook is not so unequivocally to be affirmed nor her subsequent chastening wholly deplored. Rather than unconsciously destroying what is authentic in her nature, I would argue that Jane Austen is consciously rejecting a tendency, in herself as in her time, which she sees to be mistaken and, when taken to an extreme, immoral.

Marianne is the legatee of a philosophy of sentiment, which, wherever its roots are exactly to be located, was generally considered to have begun in the Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) of the third Earl of Shaftesbury.27 Happiness for the sentimental philosopher, in opposition to the Calvinist view of man’s innate depravity and necessarily troubled life in this world, is possible for the individual who recognizes the promptings of virtue and exercises his innate benevolence. Morality is discoverable in the “heart” rather than the “head,” in feelings rather than in conformity with received precepts. Shaftesbury’s thought did not deny a rational access to truth, but his emphasis on an innate moral sense tended in later writers to become a full-fledged sentimentalism, and when his views were joined with the sensationalist epistemology of the empiricists, who were reducing the function of the mind to that of passive receptor of external impressions, ethical rationalism was frequently discredited. In Hume’s moral philosophy, for example, morality is “more properly felt than judged of.”28 The tendency toward ethical sentimentalism did not go unchallenged; Bishop Butler, for example, opposed it, arguing that any theory of ethics must include judgment as a primary component;29 but when the rapprochement of Shaftesburian rationalism and Humean empiricism was aided by Adam Smith’s theory of sympathy and Rousseau’s immense influence as a philosopher of “natural” goodness, not only was a rational access to moral truth frequently denied, but the validity of all external structures was called into question.

Jane Austen sets herself against these tendencies in Sense and Sensibility, insisting on the necessary aid of judgment in the process of moral decision, and requiring, as she will elsewhere in her fiction, that the individual respect and support his cultural heritage. The major limitations of Marianne’s sensibility, adequately dramatized as we will see, are that it places excessive faith in the self’s inner ability to reach moral decisions intuitively and rejects entirely the need for living within conventional limits.

The dangerous tendencies of Marianne’s individualism only become apparent in her relationship with Willoughby, who is, like Anna Karenina’s Vronsky, to a large degree an invention of the imaginative mind. This is not to deny that he is handsome and possessed of “ardour,” “talents,” and “spirit,” which put Ferrars and Brandon in the shade, merely to note that from the moment he becomes her “preserver” (46), Willoughby is defined, and is willing to be defined, in terms of “the hero of a favourite story” (43). Hearing of his indefatigable dancing powers, Marianne cries: “That is what I like; that is what a young man ought to be. Whatever be his pursuits, his eagerness in them should know no moderation, and leave him no sense of fatigue” (45)—and his expressed passion for dancing on their first meeting is sufficient to earn him from Marianne “such a look of approbation” (46). Thereafter, the “general conformity of judgment” that is discovered between them is not a little due to her enthusiasm and his compliance. It is she who brings forward and rapturously describes her favorite authors, while Willoughby “acquiesced in all her decisions, caught all her enthusiasm” (47).

In company with Willoughby, Marianne is drawn into increasingly serious acts of impropriety. She accepts from Willoughby the gift of a horse, forgetting that the expense of keeping it will be a burden to the family’s reduced income. Faced with the additional charge that it may be improper to accept a gift of this kind from a man so lately known to her, Marianne answers with spirit that “it is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;—it is disposition alone” (59). Though Marianne is persuaded by Elinor to give up the horse, Willoughby is heard to promise that “when you leave Barton to form your own establishment in a more lasting home, Queen Mab shall receive you” (59), and this hint, together with his use of Marianne’s Christian name, is sufficient to convince Elinor of their being engaged.

Such instances of their disregard of decorum culminate in their unchaperoned visit to Allenham, the home of Mrs. Smith, the elderly relative and benefactress of Willoughby. This trip is not only indecorous, it more seriously shows an entire lack of concern for the feelings of others. From the point of view of the present owner, the unannounced visit of her heir and a young female companion can only indicate barely concealed impatience for her death. In her Shaftesburian defense of her conduct on this occasion the weakness of Marianne’s position is evident: “If there had been any real impropriety in what I did, I should have been sensible of it at the time, for we always know when we are acting wrong, and with such a conviction I could have had no pleasure” (68).

In keeping with the tenets of the tradition she represents, propriety and morality in Marianne’s definition are innate qualities of the self and not conformity to any set of social rules. She has responded to her experience of seemingly universal selfishness by retiring into a subjective world into which she will allow only a few privileged and manifestly worthy people. When Willoughby comes dramatically into view, Marianne looks to him for the limits of her happiness, and, like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, argues that what she and her lover do together has “a consecration of its own.” Like Hawthorne, however, Jane Austen refuses to sanction the spiritual autonomy of a relationship.

In rejecting the forms of this world in her passion for Willoughby, Marianne has substituted emotional laws for social laws: “I felt myself … to be as solemnly engaged to him, as if the strictest legal covenant had bound us to each other” (188). Willoughby, however, is unwilling to obey the unwritten laws of Marianne’s private world, and instead prudently adheres to the propriety of society for his own selfish ends. Thus it is that in the climactic scene of their meeting in London, the sincerity of her sensibility is noticeable in her manner of speech and salutation, while the falsity of his sensibility (and its prudent content) is seen in the reserved manner of his response. Marianne, on sighting him across the room,

started up, and pronouncing his name in a tone of affection, held out her hand to him. He approached, and addressing himself rather to Elinor than Marianne, as if wishing to avoid her eye, and determined not to observe her attitude, inquired in a hurried manner after Mrs. Dashwood, and asked how long they had been in town. Elinor was robbed of all presence of mind by such an address, and was unable to say a word. But the feelings of her sister were instantly expressed. Her face was crimsoned over, and she exclaimed in a voice of the greatest emotion, “Good God! Willoughby, what is the meaning of this? Have you not received my letters? Will you not shake hands with me?” (176)

Whereas at Barton the ancillary features of sensibility—extravagant language, the shaking of hands—had been found in both Willoughby and Marianne, in the London assembly Willoughby is aloof, “her touch seemed painful to him, and he held her hand only for a moment” (177).

Her relationship to Willoughby has been for Marianne the constitution of a society of two, and when this is lost through the defection of one of its members, Marianne has no rule for living, no motive for action, no “ground” on which to stand. Misery like hers, she admits, has no pride, and in keeping with the anti-stoical strain of the sentimental philosophy in which tears are considered the evidence of feeling, Marianne’s subsequent behavior is an active soliciting of grief. Her illness at Cleveland is spiritual, and the death to which it might easily have led would have been suicide. We should not discount the solemnity of Marianne’s retrospections on her recovery. Recognizing that, “Had I died,—it would have been self-destruction” (345), she wonders that she has been allowed to live, “to have time for atonement to my God” (346).

In Marianne’s subjective attitudes Jane Austen has revealed how the self, unaided by the forms of culture and the administration of self-discipline, finds itself alienated from society and friends. By considering her internal inclinations sufficient arbiters of moral action, Marianne has denied external sources of obligation in family, society, and religion. The inevitably negative effects of her extreme, individualistic response are sufficiently clear, but even if they were not so, Elinor’s contrasting behavior in regard to personal grief, no less than in regard to the maintenance of a decorous politeness even in the company of fools, would indicate her author’s requirement for a positive and social response. When Elinor discovers that Edward is engaged to Lucy Steele, “she wept for him, more than for herself” (140), yet when she joins Mrs. Jennings and Marianne at dinner, “no one would have supposed … that Elinor was mourning in secret over obstacles which must divide her for ever from the object of her love” (141).

Elinor’s characterization in Sense and Sensibility is more successful than has generally been recognized in critical discussion. She starts off with the disadvantage of being the single normative representative of “sense” in the novel. Other characters—the John Dashwoods, Lady Middleton, Mrs. Ferrars, Lucy Steele—exhibit “sense,” as well as “prudence” and “reserve,” only in debased and “economic” meanings. Added to this, the two possible male representatives of the term fail entirely to provide an effective counterbalance to the selfishness and expedient behavior everywhere evident. (In later novels, Darcy and Knightley will successfully provide such counterbalance.) Elinor’s task of upholding the true moral conception of the word is, therefore, large—too large for her to achieve unaided. Yet Elinor is not quite the bloodless figure of sense she has been considered. It is clear, for example, that Marianne’s vital and central position in the novel is in part accounted for by the fact that she is the object of Elinor’s observation. If the first volume describes the rise of Marianne’s hopes and their temporary disappointment on Willoughby’s departure from Devonshire, the second volume her renewed hopes in London and their cruel destruction, and the third volume her near fatal illness and gradual recovery, they describe these events often through Elinor’s consciousness. Consequently, while it is Marianne’s acts that are described, they are frequently filtered through Elinor’s subjective experience of them. Edmund Wilson was perhaps the first to understand the importance of this when he commented upon the scene in which Marianne meets Willoughby in London (the scene which for George Moore revealed the “burning human heart in English prose fiction for the first and alas the last time”). “Isn’t it rather,” Wilson asks, “the emotion of Elinor as she witnesses her sister’s disaster than Marianne’s emotion over Willoughby of which the poignancy is communicated to the reader?”30

In this partial internalization of the debate in Elinor’s consciousness—as Marianne’s actions and Elinor’s perception of these actions merge—Jane Austen’s technical advance over Northanger Abbey, and her movement in the direction of Pride and Prejudice, are evident. Elinor may seem to others to be reserved, rational, and cold, but the reader is given access to her continued inner struggle, not only with respect to her own love affair, but vicariously, as she watches Marianne impetuously fall in love, and, her love slighted, no less passionately give way to melancholy. Elinor, much more than Catherine Morland, though less than Emma, has become a center of consciousness. She is the only character (apart from Mrs. Jennings on one occasion [III, iii] which must be judged a technical lapse) whose mind the reader is allowed to enter. Opaque to the other characters, Elinor is transparent to the reader. By allowing us frequent access to Elinor’s observing mind, the narrator reveals that “sense” need not be cold, nor introspection selfish.

Elinor’s sense is neither a Mandevillian self-interest nor an emotionless calculation. In its affirmation of social principles it resembles, rather, the “early received and uniformly continued sense of mankind” (R, 111), which Burke considered had not only built up the “august fabric of states” but had continued to preserve it from ruin. Like her lover Edward, Elinor accepts the validity of social institutions and acts within received principles of ethical and social conduct. Against the private instinct of her sister, as against the selfish motivations of those around her, Elinor opposes a stoical fidelity to traditional and basically Christian values. Her withdrawal into a personal reserve is a committed withdrawal.

The theme of profession, so central to Mansfield Park, and found in all the mature novels, is relevant here. In the moment of social discontinuity, the responsible individual can only look conscientiously to his duty and actively profess his role. Unlike Willoughby, who is “of no profession at all” (61), or Mr. Palmer, who “idled away the mornings at billiards, which ought to have been devoted to business” (305), or John Dashwood, who is always “thinking about writing a letter to his steward in the country” (259), but never does, the responsible characters of the novel, Ferrars and Brandon, are characterized by their commitment to their roles. Edward, indeed, agrees with Mrs. Dashwood when she suggests that he would “be a happier man if [he] had any profession” to engage his time (102). He admits, “It has been, and is, and probably will always be a heavy misfortune to me, that I have no necessary business to engage me, no profession to give me employment” (102). And, later, looking back on the foolish infatuation which caused him to engage himself to Lucy, he recognizes that his error sprang from his ignorance of the world, his “want of employment,” and his lack of an “active profession” (362). Yet, having made the betrothal, Edward has proved himself willing to take responsibility for his actions, as Willoughby for all his superior appearance and talents has not.

The need for “employment,” “duty,” “responsibility,” is sounded again and again in Jane Austen’s novels, as her heroines all learn that the act of living itself is a profession. After Edward has left the Barton cottage, his melancholy over his commitment to Lucy having communicated itself to Elinor, her reaction may be taken as the positive response that is to be affirmed: she “busily employed herself the whole day” and addressed herself to the “business of self-command” (104; my italics). In comparison with this self-discipline, Marianne’s “indulgence of feeling” and “nourishment of grief” (83) are hardly admirable.

Only when Marianne’s recovery is assured by the attentions of Elinor and the much maligned Mrs. Jennings may Elinor’s self-discipline be relaxed. At the end of the novel we are given explicit indications of Elinor’s sensibility. First she feels for Marianne, who, “restored to life, health, friends … was an idea to fill her heart with sensations of exquisite comfort, and expand it in fervent gratitude” (315). Then she responds sympathetically to Willoughby’s tempestuous arrival and self-pitying tale, and for a time, “Willoughby, ‘poor Willoughby,’ as she now allowed herself to call him, was constantly in her thoughts” (334). Finally with Edward’s arrival the question becomes, “How are [Elinor’s] feelings to be described?” (363), and on news of Edward’s freedom from the duty of his engagement to Lucy, we are given the answer:

Elinor could sit it no longer. She almost ran out of the room, and as soon as the door was closed, burst into tears of joy, which at first she thought would never cease. Edward, who had till then looked any where, rather than at her, saw her hurry away, and perhaps saw—or even heard, her emotion.… (360)

Marianne’s danger over, her morality now properly directed, Elinor may release the emotional tension thus far contained, and herself give way to a temporary display of feeling. By choosing sense as her point of view over sensibility, Jane Austen has made a statement about the priority of discipline to freedom, and of social principles to individual propensities; but, that statement made, she has also recognized in Elinor’s emotion the necessary presence of feeling in the ethical constitution of the individual, if rationality is not to become cold and inhuman.

The novel ends with a union of terms similar to that which will be more successfully achieved in Pride and Prejudice. Marianne, like Elizabeth Bennet, comes to the recognition of the need for self-discipline. She promises that “[her] feelings shall be governed and [her] temper improved” (347), and instead of further indulging her grief, she exercises a “reasonable exertion” (342). Coming to a gradual awareness of Willoughby’s false sensibility, his prudent core of self, she compares her conduct to “what it ought to have been” (345). Her language is characterized now by its ethical vocabulary, and while her sister may show that the individual emotion is a component part of the social response, Marianne determines that, though Willoughby can never be forgotten, his remembrance “shall be regulated, it shall be checked by religion, by reason, by constant employment” (347). Although her marriage to Colonel Brandon fails to convince, it at least demonstrates the imprudence of her previous arguments that wealth had nothing to do with happiness, for with Brandon’s £2,000 a year Marianne gains for herself the “competence” which Elinor earlier had laughingly considered her own idea of “wealth” (91).

There is no doubt that the decision to portray two heroines, and the selection of the “sensible” sister as point of view, led Jane Austen into aesthetic difficulties from which she could not entirely escape. Given the vivacity of Marianne, Elinor’s explicitly normative function can only seem didactic on occasions, though this is less often so than is sometimes charged. By looking through the eyes of one of the heroines, Jane Austen has escaped the narrative problem of Northanger Abbey without discovering the solutions of Pride and Prejudice and Emma. She has to some degree dramatized her standards in the psychology of Elinor (as she failed to do in either Henry Tilney or Catherine) and has thus escaped the problems that arise when judgments remain at the level of the presiding and anonymous narrative consciousness, but she has still left herself with a task of persuasion, of making art and morality coincident. The reader must be made to accept the priority of one sister’s moral vision, and the task is complicated by the author’s refusal in any way to limit the attractive individualism of the other sister. In Pride and Prejudice and Emma this problem is successfully avoided by making the individualistic heroines also the central intelligences of their novels, and by allowing these heroines to come to a gradual internal awareness of the insufficiency of their outlooks. Whereas in Sense and Sensibility there is a bifurcation of action and reflection, in the later novels the two modes are one in the actions and retrospective reflections of the heroine. In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne’s moral growth can only be seen externally in her words and actions, frequently as they are observed through Elinor’s consciousness of them. Elinor herself does not so much evince a moral growth as a constant internal moral struggle. In Pride and Prejudice and Emma (though in ways to be distinguished), the movement from an individualistic to a social morality is followed within the psyche of a single heroine.