Everything happens to me

Back to Sense and Sensibility
There is an interesting encounter early in the book where Marianne finds out that Sir John Middleton knows Willoughby and begins to ask him questions. She is quickly disappointed as he cannot provide the sort of information she seeks. He cannot understand the sort of things she has feelings for. But the reverse is also true. When Sir John talks about hunting, Marianne quickly bores. If it doesn't matter to her then it doesn't matter.

We see the same here with Mrs. Jennings. Granted she is a boor but Marianne is just as bad a judge of Mrs. Jennings' feelings as Mrs. Jennings is of hers. And that works against Marianne more than it works against Mrs. Jennings. Unable to see Mrs. Jennings efforts for what they are, Marianne can't even appreciate them as kindness. She suffers more.

And we cannot doubt the quality of Mrs. Jennings information. She knows all about the woman whom Willoughby is engaged to. She also successfully predicts how the rest of the story of Marianne will play out. She doesn't have finer feelings but she knows how things work.

The love child
The most chilling thing in the book is Colonel Brandon's account of his no-good brother's marriage with the beloved Eliza. And Austen's account is so powerful because of what it doesn't say. She does not, for example, draw our attention to the incredible injustice of a woman being forced into a marriage she does not want and then losing her fortune to her no-good husband when she divorces.

Neither does she stop to connect the dots on how this fortune figures in the Colonel's current circumstances. We may remember that we were told early on that the Colonel's family estate had once been heavily in mortgaged but now isn't. We now realize that it was this poor woman's fortune—and not hard work by the Colonel or anyone else—that cleared the debt.

But when we connect the dots for ourselves, well, I shuddered when it hit me. Austen doesn't run about crusading against moral injustice. She just paints a picture and lets the injustice show itself.

And consider how blunt the sexual issues are here, however delicately raised. The Colonel's brother mistreated the beloved Eliza because "his pleasures were not what they ought to have been." Now, that's a phrase. Was he gay? Perhaps. Whatever the cause, he didn't give her what she needed. Come with me and put our Mrs. Jennings junior detective hats on a read this sentence:

But can we wonder that with such a husband to provoke inconstancy, and without a friend to advise or restrain her,  she should fall?

I've cut a parentheses out of that sentence for clarity. Think about what the Colonel is saying here. Without a husband capable of loving her properly, she went elsewhere for her love. That is what he is saying! And he doesn't mean she went elsewhere for cuddling and kind words. he means she went elsewhere to satisfy her sexual wants.

What is more, he thinks this understandable.

There is no lay-back-and-think-of-England nonsense here. Women in Austen want sex. They want it a whole lot and it is an awareness of this sexual appetite in women and girls that underlies the entire structure of proprieties and manners of that era. And neither is Austen unaware of the vast prostitution industry that exists to take care the wants of men. She—and her era— treated women differently because of one thing only and that was pregnancy. It is even pregnancy that explains the concern with virginity.

Don't believe me? Consider David Hume who lived just a few years before Austen. When it came time to explain why women should be chaste the only justification he can think of is—you'll want to sit swallow any liquids in your mouth before you read this—property rights! Hume thinks it very important that a man know that his heirs really are his heirs.

Everything happens to Marianne
No matter what news she gets, Marianne takes it as a crime against her.  When she learns that Willoughby has been a cad towards others as well, for example, she suffers for the loss of her hopes rather than feel relieved at her narrow escape.

We might have hoped that things would start to get better at this point. She has had her heart broken and now she can get over it. That is what Mrs. Jennings expects. It is what Elinor hopes for. It is neither what Marianne hopes for nor what will happen.

All of which raises what I think is an interesting question. Suppose Willoughby had not been a cad and he and Marianne had been married. Would she have been happy then?

If we understand Austen properly, the answer is no. This is true of all the Austen novels. It isn't the circumstances that guarantee happiness but the moral understanding of the character. Marianne would be miserable if she married Willoughby in her current state. She has to understand her own sins and do something about it.

That's the other thing. Like sex, Jesus may not get a lot of explicit mention in these stories but he is crucial to understanding what is really going on.