Stoicism revisited

Here is an opening sentence to ponder:

However small Elinor's general dependance on Lucy's veracity might be, it was impossible for her on serious reflection to suspect it in the present case, where no temptation could be answerable to the folly of inventing a falsehood of such a description.

And we're off into book two. Try to imagine what it was like for a contemporary reader to read this. Most likely, you would have just returned Volume one to your lending library and paid a fee to pick this one up. It would be a lot like watching a television min-series. You'd break from the action a while and you need to be reintroduced.

It's hard to imagine how anyone could do the job better than Austen does above. We are reminded of the big finish at the end of Book one and put right back into the action. The place we are put back in is right between Elinor Dashwood's ears. Austen is going to spend an entire chapter showing us how Elinor Dashwood's moral reasoning works.
Frederick William Maitland made a very profound point (in his masterpiece The Domesday Book and Beyond) that freedom is a matter of degrees. It's not like being pregnant where you either are or you aren't. A slave is not the same thing as a serf and neither slave nor serf is the same thing as an indentured servant. None of these people are absolutely free but the serf is more free than the slave and the indentured servant is more free than the serf.

Some people would have no tolerance for that notion and stoics would be chief among them. For them, all slavery is equal and the person who cannot control their craving for potato chips is every bit as much a slave as, well, a slave.

Nowadays, we use the word "stoic" to mean someone who endures hardship without letting their pain show. Originally, however, stoicism was a rather extreme approach to freedom. The stoic sought to be so much in mastery of their feelings that no one could take their freedom away. You can enslave me or even kill me but I am free to take whatever attitude I want to that. It's an attractive position if the society around you seems unstable and seems to be free of any enduring values. In such a world you could create your own universe of value in your inner life.

Elinor Dashwood most emphatically is not a stoic.

In this chapter she will determine the exact degree of Edward's guilt. She is, and this might astonish, quite certain he is guilty of something. (And this is why, however wonderful she might be as an actress, Emma Thompson's Elinor is a travesty. She tells Edward he did nothing wrong. Austen's Elinor would never let him off the hook like that.) He allowed himself to fall in love with her and vice versa knowing he was already engaged. Elinor pinpoints the moment he went to far. Then she reassures herself that, although Edward is engaged to Lucy Steele, he cannot be in love with her.

So how will she proceed? As follows:

Supported by the conviction of having done nothing to merit her present unhappiness, and consoled by the belief that Edward had done nothing to forfeit her esteem, she thought she could even now, under the first smart of the heavy blow, command herself enough to guard every suspicion of the truth from her mother and sisters.

No stoic, Elinor is still in the game.  A stoic tries to achieve happiness in one grand move. Elinor is moving towards happiness by degree. Her strategy is to figure out how to comport herself best to suit her hopes that she might still marry Edward. Far from smothering the feelings, she chooses to hide her feelings for strategic reasons; not the least of which is that she doesn't want them to turn their critical guns on Edward.

This is very foreign to us. We tend to believe, or think we believe, that talking about our feelings is a helpful to do. Elinor, on the other hand, thinks she will suffer if people know her feelings. Think of what happened when the prying Lady Jennings first started trying to expose the identity of the man whose name starts with F. Or when Marianne noticed the ring with the lock of hair. In both those cases, Elinor was worse off for having Marianne be solicitous of her

Elinor does not, of course, know that she can manœuver her way into marriage with Edward nor does she nurse any fond illusions on the point but she wants to remain free to proceed. Freedom in this case means not revealing herself.

Again, how foreign to us. I'll come back to this in tomorrow's discussion of conscience.