Ophelia's illness

Sense and Sensibility Book 3, chapters 6 and 7  (Chapters 42 and 43 in some editions.)
How does Jane Austen understand sickness?

She does not seem to understand it in a scientific way as we have Marianne getting sick as a consequence of sitting around in wet stockings in these chapters.

Then again, how scientific are we in this sense. Most people have learned the germ theory of disease by now but I knew a medical professional once who talked about infections in non-scientific ways such as colds moving from the head to the chest. She knew better and when you challenged her she would shift back to the more accurate language. And yet she was only doing what we all do.

And nowhere is that truer than when it comes to thinking of sickness as a moral consequence. We attribute people getting sick to some sort of moral failure. We want cancer patients to be cheerful and positive because we don't want them to surrender to the disease. We tend to think people with bipolar syndrome should fight depression. We think alcoholics should resist the need to drink. In each and every one of these cases, the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that these beliefs are nonsense. But we cannot let go of them.

And there is another side of Austen that makes light of the very sort of moral admonitions she seems to heap on Marianne here. Catherine Morland and Elizabeth Bennett go running around, staying up late and tramping across wet and muddy meadows and the only consequence is that they sleep better than usual and wake up hungry. At the beginning of this book, Marianne goes out in the rain and sprains her ankle but recovers rapidly.

On the other hand, there is Fanny Price who, much as I love her, seems an awfully feeble little thing. And shouldn't some responsible adult take Frank Churchill aside and say, "You do realize Jane Fairfax is going to die".

I'm not a fan of autobiographical interpretations but I sometimes think that Austen may have been sickly for long periods of her life and that Mansfield Park and Emma are products of sick periods while Pride and Prejudice came from a healthy period.

And Sense and Sensibility? I'd guess it was the product of a transitional period. I wonder if it was written after Austen had recovered from sort of serious illness or depression or combination of the two. That it was written by a woman who knew disease but had some moral distance on it.

Of course, it need not have been her own sickness for this to make sense. Marianne almost dying as she does here is an unusual thing for us but was a regular experience for people like Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson. And yet, like Dickinson, disease feels like it lived a little closer to Austen than it did even to their contemporaries. Death and disease seems to haunt these women.

In any case, what happens to Marianne is very much like Ophelia. Ophelia doesn't jump in the water, but she climbs out on the limb where it becomes ever so much more likely that she will fall. And she climbs out metaphorically long before she does physically. The Romantics thought Ophelia an entirely blameless victim but I don't think Austen would have read her that way and I don't think we should either.

So too with Marianne who has been wallowing Ophelia-like in her misfortune for chapters now. Whether or not Austen literally means that this behaviour caused Marianne's sickness or whether she believed that it somehow lowered her body's defences against disease, Marianne has been weakening herself morally and physically for several chapters now just as Ophelia does in Hamlet.

Marianne does not actually die of course. That does not stop her Hamlet from showing up and trying to desecrate a scared occasion. Next week, Willoughby's apology.