Jane Austen 's Sense And Sensibility

In today 's society, marriage is a significant bond that must be on the basis of love and understanding. Marriage is a relationship described as more for love and emotion rather than convenience or money. Through the experience of Lydia and Wickham, Charlotte and Collins, and Elizabeth and Darcy, Austen criticizes marriages based on infatuation, convenience and money, and emphasizes that marriage can only be successful if they are founded on mutual love.

Jane Austen's groundbreaking novel Sense and Sensibility is a relationship-driven account of female protagonists. Sense and Sensibility shares much in common with other novels by and about women. Themes like autonomy versus independence and the role of women in a patriarchal society are explored in Sense and Sensibility. Using two sisters to symbolize the different directions the female spirit can be pulled, Austen shows the variable ways women respond to political, social, and economic oppression. The women of Sense and Sensibility are both trapped by, and breaking free from, the conventions of marriage and motherhood. Marriage and motherhood are portrayed ironically as the natural course of women's lives, but also as the chain that prevents their self-fulfillment. The social norm of patrilineal inheritance leaves Elinore and Marianne Dashwood, and their mother, penniless and dependent on distant male family members. Marriage and motherhood are restrictive roles for women, and yet Austen never provides a satisfactory alternative for Marianne. Marianne seems willing to break free from patriarchal social norms, but she ends up being a slave to heterosexual romance. The message in Sense and Sensibility ends up being rather bleak: women remain socially, economically, and politically oppressed because they cannot envision or enact suitable independent alternatives.

Willoughby and Marianne sparks an interesting relationship. Marianne is enthralled with the charming, handsome, and intelligent man who carried her down the hill in the rain. “His manly beauty and more than common gracefulness were instantly the theme of general of admiration.” (Ch. 9 pg. 40) Marianne already the constant romantic, finds him to be everything she could hope for. “His person and air were equal to what her fancy had ever drawn for the hero of her favorite story.” (Ch. 9 pg. 41) It is at this point in the novel when the reader begins to realize the meaning behind the title Sense and Sensibility. The two protagonists, Elinor and Marianne, represent sense and sensibility. Elinor’s personality and relationship with Edward is certainly sensible, while Marianne is more emotional and passionate, as reflected by her budding relationship with Mr. Willoughby. Every once and a while there is a clash between “sense and sensibility” through the two sisters. As the novel progresses perhaps Austen will reveal whether reason can influence emotion, vice versa, or if they both influence each other throughout the sister’s

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, she has specific criteria that her characters follow when choosing their mates. In today’s society, most couples still follow these criteria and more when choosing their ideal mate. What are these important criteria that Austen’s characters consider when choosing a mate? For Austen, the important criteria that she has for choosing a mate are that couples are personally compatible, they are in love with each other, and they must have a good moral character.

Sense and Sensibility was first published in 1811, by Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility represents the neoclassical, dualistic moral world where values and exclusion values will ultimately be successful in a painful, romantic feeling. Not only that, he was making serious cynicisms of society's eighteenth centuries in which the aristocrats were praised and indirectly influencing young people's minds, not the love of love but to betray it just for Wealth. In the novel, Lucy and Willoughby symbolize this kind of people of society

Passage One, portrays the relationship between Marianne and Willoughby. Marianne was blinded by her love, ‘He was exactly formed to engage Marianne’s heart.’ Marianne is someone who can show no concern for wealth if she believes she has found true love. Willoughby was estimated to be ‘Faultless as in Marianne’ Willoughby was all that Marianne fancied, her affection for him was beyond

Sense and Sensibility written by Jane Austen is a novel that does not only deal with two sister’s love matters, but how two dissimilar personalities respond to society and love. The theme of “society vs. sense” is existed throughout the novel because it is concerned with the ruling of one’s feelings, or the incapability to do so. Declaring love for someone, nurturing one’s self and not caring what people think is important in expressing this kind of “social duty.”(Pam Morris, 43) This kind of theme is always present, with some dramatization, within Emma Thompson’s 1995 film adaption. Literary critic Deborah Kaplan argues that Thompson’s film adaption demonstrates “harlequinization”, where the narrative structure of the “mass-market structure”, where a lot of people really like them, it focuses on a hero and a heroin’s courtship at the expense of the other characters and experiences. Kaplan is stating that the film is negative because some characters are underrepresented. She’s right, but at the same time it is to be expected because it is a film adaption. I argue that Kaplan is right, the film adaption does demonstrate this “harlequinization” to the point where it ignores all the important scenes within the novel such as how the Dashwood sisters are represented, Marianne’s rescuers Willoughby and Colonel Brandon in contrast to the novel.

Ruth ApRoberts argues in her essay “Sense and Sensibility, or Growing Up Dichotomous” that “Marianne’s sensibility emerges as an unwillingness to sense the feelings of others and hence a reversal into lack of sensibility. Her feelings... have taken on something histrionic which is inauthentic and which closes to her that empathy we owe to the people we encounter” (360) and that this prevents the reader from connecting with Marianne on the same empathetic level on which they can connect with Elinor. However, the near-fatal result Marianne’s expression of her dramatic sensibility after her heartbreak over Mr. John Willoughby shifts the reader’s perspective of her. Placing the previously strong-willed Marianne into such a somber position establishes an empathetic connection to her, which was previously absent, or at least difficult to maintain. In addition, Marianne's illness gives her a vehicle through which she can evolve as a character.

Throughout sense and sensibility, Elinor is shown to be fair and just in her personal judgements. Elinor is also distinguished for her ability to self govern her feelings. The neo classics disprove of one indulging in feelings and believe one should instead conceal them, suffering silently. An example of this can be seen when Edward breaks Elinor's heart, thus Austin places Elinor and Marianne in parallel situations. Marianne, the romantic, focuses solely on her own feelings and disregards the feelings of others. However, Elinor follows Neo Classic ethics by remaining a pillar of support for those who depend on her. She does not withdraw away and contemplate her life but instead carries on with the duties she undertook since the beginning of the novel. She continually self sacrifices her desire to the needs and benefit of those around her, showing a magnanimous concern to others while silencing her own feelings; dealing with issues with an unbiased outlook:

One person that seems to contribute greatly to the way love is perceived in this book is Marianne, as she experiences heartbreak but also great joy in finding the person to make her happy for the rest of her life. As she progresses through her life in the novel, she slowly reveals what love truly is through real-life situations that are similar to reality, without being sugarcoated or changed to please the reader’s mind. Jane Austen uses Marianne to show her own view of what she thinks that love can be like, and how it is not always what you might think.

When Marianne arrives in London her anticipation in seeing Willoughby again is great. She almost immediately sends a note to Willoughby. ;Her spirits still continued very high, but there was a flutter in them which prevented their giving much pleasure to her sister'; (Austen, p74). Marianne was behaving like a self centered, selfish teenager. Instead of being a gracious guest in Mrs. Jennings home, she was ;anxiously listening to the sound of every carriage (Austen, p74) and not giving any attention to the socially acceptable behavior that was expected of her. Colonel Brandon is a character that stands on the peripheral of the story while Willoughby breaks the heart of his ward and Marianne. Colonel Brandon had a very high regard for Marianne, but Marianne had no interest in an old man.

The failings of not marrying for love are again made apparent by Austen through the account of Lydia and Wickham and their shortfalls. Lydia and Wickham’s relationship was built on a mixture of youthful attraction and naivety. In the letter she sends to Harriet,

She was in love in a matter of minutes, “Everything he said was clever.” (Austen 46). this shows how quickly she opened her heart into loving a man, putting feelings before logic. “Marianne is so drowned by her passions that she does not even stop to think that Willoughby and her may not and will not be engaged” (Manukyan). The sisters develop heartbreaks by their two love interests and it sheds light on how their emotions change the plot of the story.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen is a satirical clash of the two cultural movements:  Romanticism, a movement focused on how imagination and emotion are more important than reason and formal rules, and Classicism, a movement centered on the qualities of formal etiquette, logic, and rationality. Austen focuses on the moral and social attributes of each, mainly their concepts on love.  She portrays these traits in all the characters in the book, mainly the two oldest Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, who indirectly embody the title of the novel. They are inverted to each other where one represents Classicism and the other Romanticism. This is important because it provides the necessary dichotomy to create an understanding of the negatives of both movements. If Austen focused purely on one, than she makes the other seem better, which wouldn't be a proper satire on both movements. So by giving the two main characters traits from each and causing them both to have the same negative results, she makes a stronger contrast on both movements. One of the sisters, Elinor is the sense of the title and the typical 18th century neo-classical woman with many of the traits from that period, such as insight, perspective, judgment, and most importantly logical loving. However this sense causes her to dictate herself to the social conventions of Classicism like not expressing her true feelings and always looking to please others, especially the men in society. Meanwhile, Marianne,

Decisions are made on a daily basis, these decisions that we make create different personalities. The decisions that make up our personalities define our caricature. Normally emotion and brain logic are the two most common personality reactions. Through the process of analyzation the type of character a person is can be found. In the novel Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen there are a number of different characters represented within the story. These characters are a front to the meaning of a much larger scale. Their personalities are defined by the greek medicinal characteristics such as Blood, Phlegm, Black Bile, and Yellow Bile through the process