A Balance of Opposites

A Balance of Opposites - Blog Entry #2

Mary Rose Donahue

Jane Austen’s novel, Sense and Sensibility orients itself on the dichotomous relationships of opposites. Not only is the title an antithesis, so are the sisters Elinor, Marianne, and even the men the sisters fall in love with. With many oppositions at play, the sisters often find themselves being defined by their dichotomy of either sense or sensibility. What is most puzzling in this novel is the conclusion and reversal of the sisters personalities. The sisters, who until the conclusion, had been completely regarded as sense (Elinor) and sensibility (Marianne) experience a reversal where Elinor more greatly resembles sensibility and Marianne sense.

So often guided by emotions and the elusive promise of love, Marianne experienced a substantial change in her personality when she decides to marry Colonel Brandon. After pining so long for Willoughby and mourning the loss of his love extensively, her change in a love interest may reflect her sensibility transitioning to sense. Her first love, Willoughby represents an extension of her own tumultuous emotions. Their relationship was guided by attraction, raw passion, and filled with intense emotion. Both Marianne and Willoughby threw caution to the wind with from the very start of their relationship. Willoughby acted against his sense and his own betrothed when he pursued Marianne, a passionate girl from a family without wealth or much status whatsoever (regarded as an unsuitable match for a man of high society). Marianne also experienced a disregard for traditional courtship, giving Willoughby a lock of her hair, seeing him alone, allowing herself to be called Marianne instead of Miss. Dashwood, and writing letters to one another, all signs of a confirmed relationship. Her eventual marriage to Colonel Brandon was determined on grounds completely opposite from her relationship with Willoughby. Brandon, the clearly more sensible option of a man to marry did not induce the same dizzying attraction that Willoughby made for Marianne, reflecting Marianne’s transition from sensibility to sense.

Elinor, the more sensible of the two sisters experiences her own reversal of emotion nearing the end of the novel. So long considered the more composed of the two sisters, the reader is shocked by her loss of control and explosion of raw emotion when it is revealed her love is not married to another. The omniscient narrator keeps the reader clued in throughout the novel that Marianne tends to bottle in her feelings to a point close to self immolation. Elinor expertly withholds any and all clues of emotion or feeling from her acquaintances and family. For Marianne not to know of her own sister’s heartbreak speaks to her intense selfishness and ego but, more importantly, of Elinor’s ability to hide her suffering from the public image as well as people very close to her. Feeling a need to control both herself and cover for her sister’s rude manner during her own heartbreak, Elinor held every raw emotion inside of herself, refusing to let anything show. The reveal of Robert’s marriage to Lucy rather than Elinor’s beloved Edward causes the loss of her sense, throwing her into the world of sensibility, overcome by emotion. 

Therefore, by the culmination of the novel, each of the sisters sensibility has flipped. Why does Austen choose to do this though? Why reverse their characteristics so late in the novel? I would argue that it an attempt by Austen to neutralize and balance the difference of sense and sensibility. Finding the balance for both Marianne and Elinor allows them to settle their lives and move on from their past heartbreak into domestic bliss (and what could be more Austenian than that?). They each learn that too much sense and too much sensibility leads to a imbalance of emotion that results in unhappiness and it is only a equal blend of the two that makes life suitable to live.

http://barkingdovesbeauty.blogspot.com/2012/02/sense-and-sensibility-makeup.html