Talking about the weather

Sense and Sensibility, Book 2, Chaps 5 to 7 (or Chapters 27-29 in crappy editions)

"I can hardly keep my hands warm even in my muff."

Marianne makes this, at the time purely innocent, comment. She is hoping it will get colder so Willoughby will stop shooting on his estate and come to the city.

We see at some length that her unrestrained feelings have made her a bit of a weather-vane. The most trivial things will flip her from hope to despair and back again. She has a propensity to hope though and that may seem like a good thing to us at this point. Hope is a good thing, right? Saint Paul says so after all.

But hope in what? And there lies the big question: are they engaged? We have an interesting pair of mirror images here. Elinor knows that Edward is engaged to someone else but she feels certain he does not love this other person. OTOH, Elinor knows that Willoughby and Marianne are in love but isn't sure they are engaged.

With no hope of marriage at this point, Elinor looks for other things for solace and inspiration. Marianne has invested everything in Willoughby and we have to wonder on what basis she has done this. We, along with Elinor, tell ourselves that he must have said something to lead her to believe they will be married .

Elegance
 Austen has a lovely way of dropping little hints that we should be paying attention to if we want to grasp what is at stake. Sir John arrives and immediately hosts an impromptu dance. Lady Middleton does not approve. This is interesting enough gossip but it is her reason for not approving that should matter to us.

In the country, an unpremeditated dance was very allowable; but in London, where the reputation of elegance was more important and less easily attained, it was risking too much ....

 Different standards apply in London and we should start to worry a little about Marianne about this. Impromptu responses and a disregard for elegance are exactly what we should expect from her.

And she delivers by promptly making a fool of herself at a party which was carefully planned with elegance in mind. The very next day, the novel reaches its climax.

With a  great thud, we learn that Willoughby is engaged to someone else, that there was never even a  declaration of love from him never mind an engagement.

Elinor tries to convince Marianne to make an effort to cheer up with this rather grim thought:

"Exert yourself, dear Marianne," she cried, "if you would not kill yourself and all who love you. Think of your mother; think of her misery while you suffer; for her sake you must exert yourself."

 And Marianne replies in her predictble, self-centred way.

"I cannot, I cannot," cried Marianne; "leave me, leave me, if I distress you; leave me, hate me, forget me; but do not torture me so. Oh! how easy for those who have no sorrow of their own to talk of exertion! 

We know better of course. And Austen is almost ready to credit us with this. I wouldn't deprive anybody of the pleasure of figuring all the angles and curves to the problem out for themselves. All I want to note here is that Sense and Sensibility is unlike later Austen books in that we get the story mostly from Elinor's perspective. That weighs it down as she is too intelligent. It's a little like reading Emma from Mr. Knightley's perspective instead of Emma's.

Elinor, as I have said before, is the greatest of Austen heroines. No one else will ever match her high standards. Fanny Price may be constant but she is not the paragon Elinor is. Mr. Knightley is a paragon (Darcy is not) but we see him through Emma's flawed vision and not through his morally superior persepctive.

Why does Austen do this? Who knows? Perhaps it wasn't until Pride and Prejudice that she figured out that it was more effective to write from the flawed character's perspective. That changes everything because, seen from Elizabeth Bennet's persepctive, Elizabeth Bennet is a more sympathetic character.

I have another theory though. My guess is that there is a more than passing resemblance between Marianne Dashwood and Jane Austen, that the novel we are reading is more than a little autobiographical. More on that as we go along.