In Search of Sense and Sensibility

Exploring Jane Austen’s challenging first-published novel.

Posted: 1 March 2008 (printer-friendly permalink)

Preface

The Enduring Interest of Sense and Sensibility

Trapped in the Cabinet of Horrors

Butler on Austen and Hume

The Structure of this Book

A Note to the Reader

Acknowledgments

Discussion:  (huh?)

Preface

This is the first draft of In Search Sense and Sensibility, a book exploring the philosophy of Jane Austen through her first-published novel.  Please beware, this first draft is the first time that the book has been reviewed by anyone and this on-line format is experimental.  To get the best out of it you may like to make the kind of allowances you would make for an author friend of yours who passes you an unreviewed manuscript.  Through the feedback I get from you I will shape it for the next round of readers.  Having said this I have gone to some lengths to make the book accessible for the on-line reader (see A Note to the Reader, below).

The Enduring Interest of Sense and Sensibility

The publication of Sense and Sensibility in 1811 saw the birth of the modern English novel.  In Sense and Sensibility we can see Defoe’s interest in the economic basis of society, the mischievous satire of Swift,[1] the psychological realism of Richardson, the comic irony of Fielding, the sentimental manipulations of Sterne and the social satire and observation of Burney.  The first part of this book (Introduction) explores the technical problems that were solved in synthesising these great 18^th century novelists.

To say that Austen pulled this off is common enough,[2] but it is rare to credit Sense and Sensibility with this achievement, most critics concluding at some stage that it is essentially flawed; Edward Copeland’s introduction to the new Cambridge edition of Sense and Sensibility does this throughout, leaving the reader with the unmistakable suggestion that the work belongs as much with Austen’s juvenilia and minor work as with her major work.[3]

Why is there such a long tradition of deprecating Sense and Sensibility?  It is the contention of this book that, though the novel isn’t faultless, the critical reaction springs from its unsettling and subversive challenge to our modern philosophical assumptions, this being manifest in the arguments advanced by its critics.  Reginald Farrer’s 1917 review provides an excellent example when he says ‘Never again does the writer introduce a character so entirely irrelevant as Margaret Dashwood or marry a heroine to a man so remote in the story as Colonel Brandon.’[4]  Farrer’s point about Margaret is an excellent one, as we can see from the absence of Margaret in a telling speech from Marianne: “This woman of whom he writes—whoever she be—or any one, in short, but your own dear self, mama, and Edward, may have been so barbarous to bely me.” (29.56)  However Margaret’s role seems to be largely symbolic of the wider issues at stake, that Margaret’s weaker character (and society in general) will be vulnerable to the kind of reckless  and poorly thought through philosophy being advocated by the romantics, if it isn’t checked (1.14).

Although Margaret’s inclusion can’t be justified in classic novelistic terms the kink does point out the novel’s philosophical design.  Farrer’s point about Marianne is a blunder that is almost but not quite universal in the critical literature on Sense and Sensibility; Marianne is not only not a heroine of Sense and Sensibility  (any more than Jane Bennet is a heroine of Pride and Prejudice) but Austen went to great lengths to tempt the reader into forgetting that Marianne was not the heroine of the novel for reasons that will become clear as this critique is developed (in Sense and Sensibility).  The novel worked in its original market of trash sentimental novels[5], yet it retains sufficient depth and interest to set critical challenges and reach out to modern readers (in a way that the minor works and juvenilia do not).

Trapped in the Cabinet of Horrors

In the Conclusion I note the marked similarities and divergence between Sense and Sensibility and Richard Sennett’s 1974 study, The Fall of Public Man: “because every self is, in some measure, a cabinet of horrors, civilised relations between selves can only proceed to the extent that nasty little secrets of desire, greed or envy are kept locked up”.  Madeleine Bunting’s recent Guardian article, From buses to blogs, a pathological individualism is poisoning public life, laments the modern failure of civility, citing this book’ highlighting of  (adapting Madeleine Bunting’s words):

• the turning of the self-absorption and narcissism of “knowing oneself” into an end rather than a means by which to know the world, and
• the vain search for authenticity and honesty intoxicated by absurd interpretations of freedom of speech and individual entitlement.

It is not difficult to see similarities between this and Austen’s critique of Marianne’s romantic philosophy but contrast the singularly post-Freudian idea that we are naturally a cabinet of horrors with the poetic vision of Cowper, Marianne’s (and Austen’s) favourite poet:

He that attends to his interior self,
That has a heart and keeps it; has a mind
That hungers and supplies it; and who seeks
A social, not a dissipated life,
Has business; feels himself engaged to achieve
No unimportant, though a silent task.
A life all turbulence and noise may seem,
To him that leads it, wise and to be praised;
But wisdom is a pearl with most success
Sought in still water, and beneath clear skies.
He that is ever occupied in storms,
Or dives not for it or brings up instead,
Vainly industrious, a disgraceful prize.

William Cowper, The Task

To be sure, a doctrine of authenticity that calls for the projecting of whatever arises in our minds into the social sphere is bound to degrade general civility, but the old-fashioned idea of knowing oneself, not repressing these tendencies (which would be a kind of self-directed violence), but taking an interest in them and learning what they have to teach us may allow us to cut off the problem at the source.  In short, meaningful and sustainable civility will be authentic.  I return to this in the Conclusion.

Butler on Austen and Hume

Marylyn Butler’s enormously influential Jane Austen and the War of Ideas still provides some of the most accurate criticism on Austen, based as it was in Whately’s observation that Austen was ‘evidently a Christian writer’.[6]  Butler assumes that Austen was therefore writing in a reactionary conservative tradition but this fails to take into account some key evidence like Sense and Sensibility’s satirising not only the radical sentimental novels, but equally the conservative ‘jacobin’ novels that rewarded the ‘virtuous’, ‘rational’ heroine with the kind of prestige and wealth that come the way of Austen most popular heroine, but in Sense and Sensibility these fall to the scheming anti-heroine, Lucy Steele.[7]

For Butler Austen was clinging onto pre-Enlightenment ideology.

Her bystanders are very unlike those of the age of Mackenzie.  She is not committed in the same way to the inner life.  She is not an observer in the same way of the whole consciousness.  Except partially in Persuasion, she filters out most of the irrational elements typical of the subjective, associationist, anarchic inward experience perceived by the age of Hume.

Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, pp. 292

Hume comes up again and again in The War of Ideas,[8] Butler rightly pointing out that Austen’s philosophy is quite antithetical to Hume’s, as encapsulated in his famous dictum:

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. 

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, §2.3.3

Hume is trapped in a false dichotomy of whether the head or heart should rule, and the answer is of course that neither should, exclusively.  The head/heart division was not nearly so marked in earlier Christian thought nor in, for example, classical Buddhist and Greek thinking (the Sanskrit word citta and Greek word ψυχή typically get translated as mind-heart and some combination of mind/self/soul, respectively).  In the classical view sense and sensibility must work together.  To understand Sense and Sensibility is to understand the total absurdity of the sentimental ethical project at the heart of Hume’s treatise and the other 18^th century moral sense theorists.  Indeed it is doubtful if any Enlightenment system of ethics escapes its critique.

This is because the Enlightenment philosophers were trying to extend the method of natural philosophy to cover ethics,[9] as they either worked for or anticipated the destruction of the religious authority underpining pre-Enlightenment ethics.  However, while  natural philosophy aims to master physical causation, ethics inescapably involves the mind (as Joseph Butler understood[10]).  For this reason, motives must be constantly scrutinised by sceptical, rational faculties—an old-fashioned idea found in all religions but essentially rejected by Enlightenment philosophy and its romantic derivatives that both fear and revere the psyche and the self, and will do anything to avoid challenging it.  (It is equally true, and equally emphasized in Sense and Sensibility, that the rational faculties must be connected to a good heart.)

To see what should be a powerful example of our reluctance to face our not-so-enlightened selves consider our collective conviction that we are more clever, knowledgeable and civilised than the barbaric, ignorant and stupid humanity that we almost invariably (believe we) encounter either as we go back in time or move outside the first world today; and then consider how this conviction stacks up against the objective evidence.

[The P[er] C[apita] W[eighting] column in the defence spending section gives the amount that each citizen of a given country spends on defending themselves relative to the world average.]

Although it looks like a political point,[11] that isn’t the point.  It is relevant to almost everyone living in the first world and benefiting from the arrangements that sees the bulk of the world’s natural resources being deployed to support the lifestyles that the energy-hungry first world has become accustomed to, and to which the rest of the world aspires to (and, in the pursuit of trade, is encouraged to aspire to).  It certainly concerns the ‘progressive’ types that are likely to be out in force on a peace or environment-related protest.  The top graph reminds us that the biosphere of future generations is being degraded, this now being visible in the manoeuvring among some powers to claim the arctic regions because the previously regarded unexploitable oil is no longer seen as such with the now rapidly thawing polar regions,[12] sea levels rising at twenty times the average rate of the last 3000 years,[13] usage of the Thames Barrier increasing from once every two years in the 1980s to an average six times a year over the past 5 years.[14]  Anthropogenic climate change is a manifest reality and it is caused by our hydrocarbon-fuelled activity.

The table of data gives the energy usage for the year 2003 and the expenditures on defence for the years 2004/5 for a selection of countries.  From this table we can get a sense of just how much the first world is consuming in relation to everyone else, this being significant for a number of reasons.

• Economic activity is entirely driven by energy and can be almost perfectly predicted from energy inputs, and any economic growth that isn’t fuelled by  energy efficiency gains or increased use of non-fossil fuels will require higher inputs of fossil fuels.[15]  Unless something unusual is going on economic growth will be driven by the increased use of fossil fuels.
• Consumption of energy is an excellent measure of wealth as well as our contribution to the destruction of the environment.  Needless to say all the countries that are industrialising and therefore increasing their consumption of fossil fuels took their lead from the industrial nations—us.
• Of course the fuel so essential to our way of life doesn’t all lie in the industrial world—far from it.  This means that the industrial world needs to trade something in exchange for the oil, and that is usually arms, and that the industrialised north ensures that the non-industrial countries living on top of the oil don’t hold the industrial world to ransom.  The cost of the ‘defence’ of the industrial world and the running of the wars in these oil-blighted regions is enormous, not least to the people living in these regions.[16]

All of this is well known.  The question is this—just on what basis do we maintain our ‘civilised’ self-image, being manifestly the most greedy and aggressive (and confused) people that have ever lived, and we know that we are destroying the environment for future generations through our unchecked greed.  This is not about a small group of war mongers in our midst; it can’t be; it is too systemic a phenomenon; those of us who complain about others while excluding ourselves are (for the most part) the real hypocrites.  Yet almost nobody will face up to the consequences of this because it is deeply embedded in our philosophy that our critical faculties must never be used to challenge the self but ceaselessly project problems out into the environment where we can bring to bear our formidable skills at manipulating the environment.  The ego must be protected at all costs.

One of our best philosopher and sharpest critic of our ‘Enlightenment’ philosophies is John Gray,[17] yet in a recent article Gray seemed to place the entire emphasis on rescuing the situation to technology, ‘there [being] no technical fix for the human condition’.[18]  Technology can’t by itself fix this problem; the human condition must be addressed in the solution.  To illustrate this, consider that we have doubled our energy efficiency since 1970, but at the same time also doubled our energy consumption.  Indeed gains in energy efficiency tend to drive economic growth as the energy becomes cheaper, thereby leading to an acceleration in energy consumption, just as wider roads tend to draw more traffic so leading to more congested roads (Jevon’s paradox).  The only way to reduce our energy consumption is to decide to reduce our energy consumption—it is as simple as that and it requires a transformation in attitude—i.e., becoming less greedy—i.e., addressing ‘the human condition’.  The logic is inescapable.[19] 

If the adjustment is done in an orderly manner (including the development and deployment of the right technology) then the stress and/or distress of the needed adjustment can be reduced immensely.  Indeed we may even find ourselves much happier for it.  A philosophical revolution is needed, one that sees the futility and sterility of pursuing  ever-increasing consumption and instead seeks fulfilment through self-development (and caring for the environment).  Pre-Enlightenment norms—religious norms—have consistently taught that happiness through materialistic means is a powerful delusion that must be systematically resisted and with the rise of happiness metrics, science is now agreeing; thanks to the work of those like Kasser (2002) and Malka & Chatman (2003), we know that people who try to achieve happiness by pursuing materialistic goals tend to be more distressed than those that don’t (Oliver James summarizes the case in Chapter 2 of The Selfish Capitalist and associated articles). Note that there is no evidence at all to suggest that those compelled through poverty to be materialistic suffer from their materialism; the most acute dangers lies with those with a surplus of wealth who nevertheless continue to be driven by materialistic motives.  The former (absolute materialism) is healthy as the materialism is addressing true needs; the latter (relative materialism) tries to achieve fulfilment through acquiring ever more wealth, fame and reputation, a debilitating, stressful and unfulfilling treadmill (much as those in the first world tend to suffer poor physical health through eating too much rich food). But it is those in the First World, making themselves sick and miserable through over-consumption, that are leading the destruction of the biosphere.

The pre-Enlightenment systems remain (to authentic practitioners) highly effective in turning their adherents away from pursuing fulfilment through material means, but they are also remarkably tenacious.

Less than a fifth of the world’s population is secular/nonreligious/agnostic/atheist despite hundreds of years of being dismissed by great philosophers (as well as the not so great).  People that continue to attack and undermine these pre-scientific wisdom traditions are hideously deluded, the naked objective evidence—the data—the figures—showing plainly that it is an entirely doomed enterprise.  It can’t possibly be a solution to the modern malaise, there being far too much cultural inertia for religion to be expelled from our global village in any reasonable time frame (even assuming it was at all desirable).  The solution must lie in making modern religion rational, and that means understanding it, and that can never be done from the contemptuous, dismissive vantage point typified by so many contemporary enlightened individuals making up the intellectual establishment of the first world.  Unfortunately the people most exercised by the damage being done by (bad) religion show an appalling inability to grasp even the basic rudiments of religious thought—indeed they manifest some of the worst tendencies of dogmatic religion in the unshakable conviction their rightness and righteousness.

This is why Jane Austen’s writings are so important and why they have such potential.  Any perusal of a good bookshop (both the general and specialist sections) or any good video shop, will confirm that her novels have a powerful attraction for our modern culture that seems to grow with the modern malaise.  As Richard Whately said, not only was she a ‘evidently a Christian writer’, but, for aesthetic and practical reasons, it was ‘not at all obtrusive’.  It is this secular presentation of the wisdom at the centre of our Christian tradition that makes Jane Austen’s writing so important to us today.  She had a deep understanding of the old world while shaping the new, and that channel, so urgently needed, remains wide open. [20]

The Structure of this Book

The Introduction explores some of the most important critical studies of both the modern novel and Austen’s writing and is divided into three chapters.  The chapter on Sentimental Novels looks at the philosophical battleground that surrounded the development of the 18^th century novel, especially as they related to some of the sharp ethical problems exercising novelists and critics alike, problems that interested Austen and are of interest to us.  The Austen Criticism (I) and Austen Criticism (II) chapters look at the philosophical debates that run through all Austen criticism and argues that the novels must not be critiqued in isolation: any conclusion about the author’s intent that is not supported by all the novels should be treated with much suspicion, especially if it is contradicted by any of one of the novels, and it is possible to find a clear and coherent philosophy that covers all of the novels, but precious little existing criticism succeeds or really tries to do this.[21]

The chapters in Sense and Sensibility form the heart of the book and they critique the novel.  Although the chapters are arranged thematically, they form a single narrative thread that aims to unravel mystery at the centre of this extraordinary book.  The great critic, Lionel Trilling famously said of Austen ‘It is possible to say of Jane Austen, as perhaps we can say of no other writer, that the opinions which are held of her work are almost as interesting, and almost as important to think about, as the work itself’,[22] and this book certainly takes that advice to heart.  It is actually critical to its method, in aiming to not only understand Austen’s philosophy but, by tracking the critical reaction, how our own philosophy has evolved and why have been resisting Austen’s philosophical line of thought.  Indeed by better understanding either Sense and Sensibility or its criticism we get a deeper insight into the other, for they are exist dependently, Austen critiquing some modern philosophical developments that we have by no means discarded.

For this critique Persuasion & Emma have a particularly close relationship with Sense and Sensibility.  There is some evidence to suggest that Persuasion may have been written in part to clarify some misunderstandings that had arisen over Sense and Sensibility, and this is explained in the short Persuasion chapter.  Emma has also provided the critics with some challenges[23] but in the 1984 article, Misreading Emma: The Power and Perfidies of Narrative History, Adena Rosmarin provides a convincing explanation of why there is so much perplexity surrounding Emma and goes a long way to dispersing it; in the chapter on Emma I show that the techniques that Rosmarin describes were being used in Sense and Sensibility.

The Hearts and Minds section has two chapters that look at the strands of Sentimentalism and Romanticism running through Austen commentary, indicating a massive failure at the centre of our modern philosophy.

The book is brought to a close in the Conclusion.

A Note to the Reader

You may choose not to read the book linearly.  If so then they should be aware that while it may be possible to read later material without having read some of the earlier chapters, the material in earlier chapters will have to be understood to get the full argument.  Having said that, I will try and provide a number of entry points into the book, starting points in the middle of the book from which the reader can work backwards and forward.  For example, the reader may like to try some sections of the sections have been given over to discussion the later novels that Austen published: Candour (Pride and Prejudice), The Critical Spirit of the Moralist (Mansfield Park) and Emma.  The section Austen’s Cycle of Comedies explains how they fit together and might make an interesting entry point.  The blogs (see About Making Sense) will provide other entry points.

Acknowledgments

Firstly I would like to acknowledge all of the critics I have used in this book, for plainly this book would have been entirely impossible without them, not least that without their insight I would be, perhaps to an even greater extent than I continue to do, skating around on the surface of Austen’s novels wondering how on earth she does it.  My debt of gratitude to these is formidable and I beg the reader to separate in honour of Elinor’s doctrine my criticism of their theses from my loving appreciation of their awesome achievements.

On a more personal note I would like to thank Simon for providing the software used to write and publish this book, Annette, Richard, Kate, Lester, Helen, Joyce, Jiva, Robin, Marc, Nadia, Emma, Mum, Trevor, and Dad for all your encouragement, support and great conversation.

Copyright © 2007 Chris Dornan
Background by www.digitalblasphemy.com

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