Sense and Sensibility: on choosing men

historically a life or death matter!!

Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet in Ang Lee’s 1995 Sense and Sensibility

I read Sense and Sensibility for the first time recently, inspired by B.D. McClay’s essay on Northanger Abbey, and realized that my lifelong suspicion of men with taste comes straight from literature. The book centers around the two Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne. Marianne’s love interest Willoughby seems at first like the solution to all of her problems. Handsome, rich, and refined, he is exciting in a way that Elinor’s suitor, Edward, isn’t. Unfortunately he turns out to be a cad, and she later discovers (spoiler!) that he is engaged to another (wealthy) woman, despite leading her to believe he loves her. We eventually come to understand that he does love Marianne, but he’s also a coward who folded under the first threat of losing his material wealth. Sense and Sensibility is ultimately a morality tale: Edward, who Marianne finds boring and staid, proves to be a stand up guy. Willoughby, who is clever and thrilling, is deeply unreliable.

Being able to judge character is a matter of life or death for women in 19th and 20th century literature. Take Emma Bovary, who falls in love with Leon and Rodolphe because she is bored to death of her husband, or Anna Karenina, who succumbs to the charms of Count Vronsky, a fundamentally spineless man. Or Isabel Archer, who chooses the penniless, sophisticated Gilbert Osmond, precisely because he is the unexpected choice, and is punished for her naivety.

But we love our heroines precisely for their naivety and arrogance. Emma, “clever, handsome, and rich,” decides she knows better than everyone else and takes up matchmaking (a woman after my own heart, and of course Jane Austen’s, who set out to write a “heroine whom no one but [herself] will much like”), only to be greatly humbled by her own meddling and end up with Mr. Knightley. Lily Bart, a beautiful socialite with no money, clings to high society but ultimately through a series of poor decisions and ill-advised suitors ends up (you guessed it) in debt and suicidal. In a world where money, protection, and social standing are everything, women who overlook the trustworthy man for the flashy one end up dead.

As previously mentioned, it’s astonishing how much of my own sensibility growing up was informed by these novels. I came of age not only convinced that poise and discernment were the most valuable qualities for a woman to develop, but equipped with a bizarre suspicion of sexual passion and men who were too readily agreeable. As far as I was concerned, developing a crush on a too-attractive man was the equivalent of taking three steps up the stepladder towards suicide (yes, Flaubert really did a number on me!). In other words, I was looking for my own Edward: a man who could bore me into a long life.

Is this a good strategy? If I’d attempted a closer reading, I’d perhaps have realized that the idea no one escapes eros unscathed could be interpreted in more ways than one. In fact, you could simplify it to: nobody escapes eros. That is to say, there is no easy way out. Sympathetic Opposition posits that Isabel Archer chooses Gilbert Osmond primarily in an attempt to avert eros: she likes him, in fact, because there is nothing to him. (Harold Bloom in The Daemon Knows: “Anthony Mazzella deftly observes that Isabel learns again from Goodwood’s desperate kiss that her self-reliance depends upon what Sigmund Freud was to term the freeing of thought from its sexual past.”) How Sympathetic Opposition puts it:

But I do think she was trying to do something that just couldn’t possibly work. If you’re afraid of linking yourself to someone strong because you’re afraid of their power over you, you can’t save yourself from that by trying to link yourself from someone weak.

This is a lesson that Isabel learns the bitter way. Of the two Dashwood sisters, Elinor is the more discerning: the sense, not the sensibility. She has coolness and poise, and more importantly the ability to wait it out. Less striking than Marianne, she is in many ways more sensitive. She is the more sympathetic by far of the two. And yet: sensibility is what moves us. In thinking about Marianne, I am reminded of James Wood writing that Tolstoy originally planned a novel that would condemn an adulteress, and instead “as Richard Pevear has written … ‘he gradually enlarged the figure of Anna morally and diminished the figure of the husband; the sinner grew in beauty and spontaneity, while the saint turned more and more hypothetical’.” Anna is wildly charming, deeply alive, irrepressible. Alas: sensibility without sense. Earlier in the essay, Wood notes that there are “familiar similarities in the novels about fallen women that were written in the second half of the nineteenth century. Anna, like Emma Bovary, reads novels. Hardy’s Tess, like Anna, is full-bosomed. Indeed, all three women are sensuous to the point of irresponsibility. Men cannot help being seduced by them, which of course is not thought to be the fault of men; Levin, after meeting Anna late in the novel, accuses himself of having yielded to her ‘cunning influence’. Yet Tess, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, while carrying the germs of male blame, produce their own antibodies, as it were, so that their doomed heroines are finally sympathised with rather than judged, written into rather than written off.”

So: sensuality without outlet leads to ruin. Of course, Isabel’s relationship with Gilbert echos Dorothea’s with Casaubon (the original thinkboi!) in Middlemarch, and boils down to: beware, he can lecture you, but can he fuck you? We are moved by our passionate, headstrong, sentimental, novel-reading female narrators, who do not deserve what befalls them. We also shake our heads at them: why do they choose either men who bore them, or men who are charismatic but ultimately fallow? It certainly seems that women today still struggle to find a man who can do both.

So, female heroines who have sense: Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe, Elinor Dashwood. Female heroines who have sensibility: Anna Karenina, Isabel Archer, Lily Bart, Marianne Dashwood. The anti-heroine I love most of all is Undine Spragg, a woman who could have only been written by a woman,because no male author could resist the urge to punish her. Conniving, rabidly ambitious and unconcerned with taste, she is unmoved by the appetites of the body, totally uninterested in motherhood, and possesses a savant-like understanding of status and how to acquire it. She does not need to be morally superior because she is fundamentally uninterested in morality. Her desperation, rather than being a cause of despair, is fuel. Over the course of the novel, she moves from her first husband, a man with a good heart, to her second husband, a man of good taste, to her third husband, a true man of capitalism. To Undine, “success [is] beauty and romance.” What she’s seeking no one can give her, but she makes a phenomenal attempt at securing it for herself.

Of course, neither of the Dashwood sisters possess Undine’s violent desires. Their ambitions extend mainly to loving each other, and loving and being loved by upstanding men. Elinor ends up with Edward, and Marianne with Colonel Brandon. Sensibility is chastised by sense. All is as it should be, as Austen is concerned. The reader is left to imagine where our passionate heroine relegates her sensuality.