Sensibility (2)

When Dr. Samuel Johnson writes about Hamlet the character who interests him most is Ophelia. This comes as quite a surprise to some people nowadays as we have had it driven into us from an early age that Hamlet is not only the most fascinating character in the play that bears his name, he is the most fascinating character anywhere.

I think Dr. Johnson gets it right. Hamlet may deserve our pity but he does not deserve our admiration. Ophelia, on the other hand, is a character to pity and admire.

Like Johnson, Austen will focus on the Ophelia character in the story and she is Marianne Dashwood. Marianne has sensibility.

Let me take a step back, though and discuss the sisters in the same order Jane Austen does. Here is Elinor with some emphasis added by me:

Elinor, this eldest daughter whose advice was so effectual, possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counselor of her mother, and enabled her frequently to counteract, to the advantage of them all, that eagerness of mind in Mrs. Dashwood which must generally have led to imprudence. She had an excellent heart; her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong: but she knew how to govern them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn, and which one of her sisters had resolved never to be taught.

And here is Marianne:

Marianne's abilities were, in many respects, quite equal to Elinor's. She was sensible and clever; but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting: she was everything but prudent. The resemblance between her and her mother was strikingly great.

Notice that nowhere does Jane Austen say that Elinor is lacking in sensibility nor does she say she has too much sense. This is something we have to get into our heads to read this novel. Do whatever it takes to get this idea out of your brain forever—write 100 times on a blackboard, write it on the palm of your hand, put an elastic band around your wrist and snap it to hurt yourself every time you make the mistake of thinking of it that way.

Elinor is not perfect, as we shall see, but her character is the superior one in the novel and the story we are about to read is all about how Marianne learns from her sister.

What is due to us (4)

But there is more to it than Hamlet's sensibilities of course. His feeling that something is wrong is soon vindicated and amplified by evidence that his father was murdered. Mrs. Dashwood's sense that her daughter in law is more than insensitive is also soon confirmed.

Hamlet is driven by a sense that more is due to his father. Mrs. Dashwood is driven by a sense that more is due to her daughters.

What is due to us (3)

Efforts are made to persuade Hamlet and Mrs. Dashwood to put aside their sensibilites in the name of sense. Claudius give Hamlet what is, in fact, very good advice about excessive mourning below. Remember that Hamlet does not yet suspect his father is murdered. The only thing that bothers him is that life is moving on and his father is being left behind and that offends his sensibilities.

And if that were all there were to it, then every word of Claudius's here is would be right:

But to persever 295
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness. 'Tis unmanly grief;
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschool'd; 300
For what we know must be, and is as common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie! 'tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, 305
To reason most absurd, whose common theme
Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,
From the first corse till he that died to-day,
'This must be so.' (Act 1, Scene 2)

What is due to us (2)

Another parallel between the back story of Hamlet and the back story of Sense and Sensibility set out in the first five chapters is that both feature a breach of decorum towards the recently deceased.

In Hamlet the breach is the over-hasty marriage of Claudius and Gertrude:

Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature 205
That we with wisest sorrow think on him
Together with remembrance of ourselves.
Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th' imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we, as 'twere with a defeated joy, 210
With an auspicious, and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole,
Taken to wife;

Our sometime sister in Sense and Sensibility is Mrs. John Dashwood:

No sooner was his father's funeral over, than Mrs. John Dashwood, without sending any notice of her intention to her mother-in-law, arrived with her child and their attendants. No one could dispute her right to come; the house was her husband's from the moment of his father's decease; but the indelicacy of her conduct was so much the greater, and to a woman in Mrs. Dashwood's situation, with only common feelings, must have been highly unpleasing; but in her mind there was a sense of honour so keen, a generosity so romantic, that any offence of the kind, by whomsoever given or received, was to her a source of immoveable disgust. Mrs. John Dashwood had never been a favourite with any of her husband's family: but she had had no opportunity, till the present, of shewing them with how little attention to the comfort of other people she could act when occasion required it.

Jane Austen Tuesday: what is due to us

Hamlet is full of characters who are hemmed in by the strictly legal requirements of last wills.

Hamlet himself, is stuck because his father died without meeting the legal (and legalistic) requirement of making final absolution. One way of thinking about this is that Hamlet's sense of what is due to his father as man has been denied by a strictly legal requirement.

And there are legal requirements all over Hamlet. Consider the duel between old Fortinbras and old Hamlet. We might think, typical heroic stuff here. Two guys stake everything on a fight just like two young men racing for pink slips. Only, when Horatio tells us about the famous duel, he immediately starts talking legal talk about legal requirements:

[Old Hamlet] Did slay this Fortinbras; who, by a seal'd compact,
Well ratified by law and heraldry,
Did forfeit, with his life, all those his lands 105
Which he stood seiz'd of, to the conqueror;
Against the which a moiety competent
Was gaged by our king; which had return'd
To the inheritance of Fortinbras,
Had he been vanquisher, as, by the same cov'nant 110
And carriage of the article design'd,
His fell to Hamlet. (Act One, Scene one)

Young Fortinbras does not feel constrained by these legal restraints because he feels that more is due to him as a man. One of the least-noticed aspects of the play is that young Fortinbras (whose name literally means "strong armed") will get his way. We all focus on Hamlet so intently, we miss what the magician Shakespeare is doing with his other hand. Hamlet never has any sense of what is due to him as a man. His sole passion is a sense of what was due to his father.

And that has to make us think somewhat of Mrs. Dashwood.

Recurrences

A fascinating thing about Hamlet is the way things keep happening over over again. So much so that they pile up in overlapping layers like the harmony of Renaissance polyphony. Consider the following:

• Hamlet's father is killed and he gets involved in intrigue and plotting to try to avenge this death.
• Laerte's's father is killed and he gets involved in intrigue and plotting to try to avenge this death.
• Fortinbras's father is killed and he gets involved in intrigue and plotting to try to avenge this death.

One of the interesting changes that Shakespeare makes to his source material in Hamlet is to change Hamlet's fathers name such that he and his son have the same name thereby underlining the recurrence. Fortinbras (the dark horse in Hamlet) also has the same name as his father.

And then consider that old Hamlet killed the father of Fortinbras and young Hamlet kills the father of Laertes.

One thing that distinguished Hamlet from the two competing harmonic characters is that he has a mother and neither of them seem to have living mothers. Another thing that distinguishes him is that he has Ophelia, if he wants her that is. There will be much to say about Ophelia.

Long rotten?

One hint that the rot in the extended Dashwood family is not a one-time thing is the elder Mr. Dashwood's decision to tie up his estate for the benefit of a four-year old. Austen tells us how this boy, the grandson of the nephew who has taken care of him in his declining years, comes to be the prime beneficiary of the will:

The whole was tied up for the benefit of this child, who, in occasional visits with his father and mother at Norland, had so far gained on the affections of his uncle, by such attractions as are by no means unusual in children of two or three years old: an imperfect articulation, an earnest desire of having his own way, many cunning tricks, and a great deal of noise, as to outweigh all the value of all the attention which, for years, he had received from his niece and her daughters. He meant not to be unkind however, and, as a mark of his affection for the three girls, he left them a thousand pounds a-piece.

One of the really amazing things about Austen is how commonplace her irony can seem untiul we unpack it. For the, rather harsh, irony here is that it is not the child who seduced his great uncle but the great uncle who is stupid old fool with no sense of responsibility or gratitude. Austen slips that in like switchblade so sharp that we don't even feel it go in. And we soon find out that Mr. John Dashwood, father of this not-so-precocious child, is just as bad.

What exactly is wrong with Mr. John Dashwood I'll leave until next Tuesday, in order to focus on what I will rather pretentiously call "the problem of recurrence" in my next post, and second last for today.

The first sentence

The family of Dashwood had been long settled in Sussex.

This is the shortest opening sentence of the six Austen novels. Although it is a little shorter than the opening sentence of Northanger Abbey, an intriguing thing is that Jane Austen's sentences get longer with each novel. By the time she hits Persuasion, Austen writes an opening sentence that is long enough and convoluted enough to be the work of Henry James. (That's not a good thing.)

But I have other fish to fry here. There is an "historical" irony in the sentence. For the very first thing that will happen is that a subsection of the Dashwood family will get unsettled.

The estate in Sussex, a southern county, is ironically called "Norland". And, picking up my Hamlet theme, there is something rotten in this Northern Land. And the question I think we need to ask ourselves is whether this rotten thing is a recent occurence or whether there has long been something wrong with the Dashwood family settled in Norland.

On the surface, the something rotten (not unlike Hamlet) is manifested in the request of a dead father to his son who is lately returned to the estate. Unlike Shakespeare, there can be no ghosts in Austen so the request is made on the deathbed. Like Shakespeare it sets up a clear moral duty and the son, Mr. John Dashwood, means to do something about it.

There, the similarity with Hamlet would seem to stop but there is more and more and more.