Making Sense of Sensibility

A FIRST-TIME READER of Sense and Sensibility unconcerned with historical context and prompted by cover graphics depicting the head and the heart might assume the title reflects an easy dichotomy. In many ways, the novel supports such a dichotomy; however, the actual meaning of both the words themselves and their function in Austen's work is a little more complex. In fact, both qualities generate the same adjective: sensible. You can be "sensible" as in having sense, or "sensible" as in responding emotionally to something: therefore a "sensible reaction" could either exhibit common sense or deeply felt emotion. (1) If we look carefully at Austen's initial descriptions of Elinor and Marianne, the characters also begin to look less dichotomous. Each of the sisters has a mix of excellent reason and warm, feeling heart. Of Elinor we hear that she has "an excellent heart;--her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong." Of Marianne, that her "abilities were, in many respects, quite equal to Elinor's. She was sensible and clever" (6). So why is the dichotomous understanding of this novel so common? I'm going to argue that if we see the sisters as dichotomous, we fall into a trap Austen builds to ensnare us and, ultimately, to teach us about sensibility. In other words, Austen plays with the cultural assumptions and intellectual fashions of the time for didactic as well as comedic purposes. And some of her jokes are not readily accessible without the historical context. (2) The culture of sensibility was a pan-European intellectual fashion that demoted the importance of "disengaged reason" in moral life and championed sensibility and natural goodness in its stead. This movement both flourished and decayed during Austen's years as a young reader and author at Steventon parsonage in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. I would argue that the culture of sensibility shaped her thought and many choices in all of her mature novels, even if it is most apparent in her juvenilia and early works. In her work, Austen describes the dangerous pleasures associated with sensibility in order to both critique and affirm it. Austen ultimately uses her own narrative techniques to rehabilitate sensibility to its original philanthropic purposes and to teach her readers lessons about sympathy. SELFISHNESS AND SYMPATHY The cultural history of sensibility, which flourished in the second half of the eighteenth century, is even richer (and perhaps more comprehensible) than the concept's etymology. Sensibility, as a human faculty, becomes the name for a deep and untaught capacity to feel emotion, to perceive beauty, and especially to sympathize with others' sufferings. It associates virtue with the nervous system: the individuals most easily stirred are the most capable of sympathy and love. Sensibility as a concept grew to help resolve deeply troubling observations about humanity. It expresses a hope for goodness and virtue despite (ample) evidence of worldly corruption. In the background of this optimism hovers the specter of Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century philosopher whom so many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors loved to refute. In his Leviathan (1651), Hobbes offers a chilling description of our natural state when we are left to face one another without a common authority to hold us "in awe." Without a common authority to enforce contracts, we must reconcile ourselves to "continuall feare and danger of violent death" (Hobbes 88, 89). Without such a supreme power to hold us accountable, we cannot escape perpetual mistrust, competing desires, fear, isolation, and civil war. In contrast to Hobbes's recommendations, the political, moral, and aesthetic goals of the culture of sensibility coalesce in the desire for weaker central government, liberation from social conventions, and release from ineffective education and ethical norms. Writers and other artists in the culture of sensibility affirmed spontaneity over planning, song over reasoned argument, English gardens over French, and wildflowers over cultivated plants, etc. …