Sense and Sensibility: Neo-classicism vs Romanticism

on behalf of him. In the end she completely understands the crime her husband has committed. Thomas Hardy states,

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.

Elinor’s curse is first shown to expose this idea of isolation equating to non-humanity when she and Merida are hunting for their first meal away from the castle. Shown to be unsuccessful in finding her own food as she tries to eat poisonous berries, Elinor is characterized as someone who relies on

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.

Austen also wrote novels that showed that women can and should use their minds particularly Elizabeth Bennet. Sense and Sensibility also is a romantic novel that keeps to the same theme of women using their minds. It is about three sisters and their mother. The main two characters however are Marianne and Elinor Dashwood. Like Austen, they struggled with money and were forced to move after their father’s untimely death. After they move they both meet men that they think they love and both get hurt because of this love. Also like Austen, Marianne meets a man named Willoughy. They fall in love and he ends up leaving her because of her financial situation. Elinor has almost the same situation although it is very different in the end. After the Dashwood sisters meet the Steele sisters, Elinor decides that they do not use their minds like they could. Elinor’s different situation is with a man named Ferrar. He almost has to marry Lucy Steele over Elinor because of her financial situation but she ends up being able to marry for love and Lucy married Ferrar’s brother. Marianne ends up also getting married but not to Willoughby and not completely for love. This book was a great example of how Austen showed how uses day to day activities to show the woman’s

Elinor is able to be mature for her age and able to be consoling to other characters in the book. A major event takes place where another character named Lucy is affiliated with Elinor’s

The narrator also, explains that for the time she was able to gain composure. These descriptions of Elinor sense are not praised, the words “for a time” leads the reader to insinuate that Elinor is not truly fine and is temporally hiding her feeling and soon they will overtake her therefore, Elinor’s stoic exterior and

The woman’s generous, strong smile and comfort was beauty and hope, that Cerny had failed, he did not prevail their suffering, though, she admitted, fearing he would come again and finish his retaliation on her body, for he meant to have dented and pinned her soul to his bitterly oozing heart.

Taking place in Somersetshire, Lyme Regis, and Bath England from 1816, Austen’s “Persuasion” a common theme of persuasion (the action or fact of persuading someone or of being persuaded to do or believe something, not the title of Austen’s book) does not only apply to Anne Elliot, but as well as many individuals around the world. In one way or another, whether coerced or not, everyone has been persuaded into doing something that was not ideal. For instance, in “Persuasion”, at the age of nineteen, Anne and Lady Russell, the female figure in her life, did not agree on the engagement of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, a man who, “...had no fortune. He had been lucky in his profession, but spending freely, what had come freely, had realized nothing. But, he was confident that he should soon be rich;—full of life and ardour, he knew that he should soon have a ship, and soon be on a station that would lead to every thing he wanted. He had always been lucky; he knew he should be so still.—Such confidence, powerful in its own warmth, and bewitching in the wit which often expressed it, must have been enough for Anne; but Lady Russell saw it very differently.—His sanguine temper and fearlessness of mind, operated very differently on her. She saw in it but an aggravation of the evil. It only added a dangerous character to himself.” (Austen) And with that, Anne couldn’t have possibly disobeyed such an important female paragon in her life regardless if she loved Captain

Elinor realizes that her marriage to Edward would not be expected because his the snobbery of his family

The truth of his representation there was no denying. She felt it at his heart. How could she have been so brutal, so cruel to Miss Bates (chapter 43)!” Finally, for one of the first times, Emma saw the error in her own ways and showed true remorse, a major turning point for Emma. In the previous times Mr. Knightley had provided correction to Emma, she had brushed past it quickly never giving it much thought.

Elinor would not contend, and only replied, "Whoever may have been so detestably your enemy, let them be cheated of their malignant triumph, my dear sister, by seeing how nobly the consciousness of your own innocence and good intentions supports your spirits. It is a reasonable and laudable pride which resists such malevolence."’ (Austen 140)

Neoclassical and Romantic movements cover the period of 1750 to 1850. Neoclassicism showed life to be more rational than it really was. The Romantics favoured an interest in nature, picturesque, violent, sublime. Unlike Neo_classicism, which stood for the order, reason, tradition, society, intellect and formal diction, Romanticism allowed people to get away from the constrained rational views of life and concentrate on an emotional and sentimental side of humanity. In this movement the emphasis was on emotion, passion, imagination, individual and natural diction. Resulting in part from the liberation and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, the romantic movement had in common only a revolt against the rules of classicism. There are

On December 16, 1775, Jane Austen was born in Steventon, Hampshire, England. She was born into a middle-class family. Her father was Reverend George Austen, a member of the clergy, and her mother was Cassandra Leigh who came from a higher social rank. Jane was the second daughter of a family of eight, and she was closest to the eldest sister Cassandra. From this information alone, there is a pattern present in Jane’s work. She tends to write romance fiction novels about middle-class England. Her characters in Sense and Sensibility are generally from the middle class, and the main characters are females and siblings. Likewise, the eldest sister has amiable traits, and the younger sibling admires her as Jane views her eldest sister in real

Julian North, noting that critics have often read Elinor’s triumphant sense as validating an anti-individualist reactionary viewpoint in which “the self must submit to the moral and religious order of society,” offers a contrasting opinion (39). Other critics “read adherence to conservative ideology as a ‘cover story’…for the ‘implicitly rebellious vision’…of a writer acutely conscious of the confinements of patriarchy” (North 39). This feminist reading of _Sense_ is most cogent when the reader is privileged to Elinor’s own thoughts. Elinor’s sense, manifested in her stoic silence and inner thoughts, contrasts with Marianne’s sensibility, notably with her emotive soliloquies and dialogues, to offer a verbal resistance to their mutual misfortune. The discourse between sense and sensibility in the book offers a means to combat the misfortune the women in the novel suffer, and each temperament leads its possessor to ultimate happiness, even if sense is clearly favored.