Epilogue: Silence as a Weapon of Self-Defence in Sense and Sensibility

Nora Bartlett

… concealment, if concealment be possible, concealment is all that remains.

Elinor took immediate possession of the post of civility.1 ∵

A side of Bill Miller’s interests that may not be widely known is his endless, absorbed, meticulous reading and rereading of the novels of Jane Austen. This has led to many exchanges, in person and by mail, between us over the years, in- cluding noisy disputes on street corners in St Andrews. In particular these have been about Sense and Sensibility, probably for both of us the favourite novel, and even more particularly about its heroine, Elinor, if not the favourite, the most significant character. In this brief discussion of Sense and Sensibility I’ll be asking you to listen both to words and silence, wounding words that pass between sisters, and silences between them; and words that sharpen, and si- lences that sustain, the conflict between rivals. For those who have not recently read the novel, it tells the story of two nice- ly brought-up sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, who have been made relatively poor by the death of their father, and are forced soon after the open- ing of the novel to move from their home in Sussex to a cottage in Devonshire, where they find themselves among a new, lively set of people who include the Middletons (stupid, kindly Sir John, his insipid wife, her well-meaning, vulgar mother Mrs Jennings, and a family friend, the melancholy Colonel Brandon) and John Willoughby, a devilishly attractive young man of the world. Marianne falls in love with Willoughby; Elinor has already fallen in love, back in Sussex, with Edward Ferrars, whose rich and grand family do not want him to marry ‘a portionless young woman’ like herself. I want to look at two moments in the novel, one in Sussex, between Elinor and Marianne, and one in Devonshire

1 Sense and Sensibility 160, 173 (italics added). Page references are to the R. W. Chapman edi- tion, 3rd ed. (Oxford: 1933; repr. 1978) and hereafter will be placed in the text.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004366374_019 Epilogue: Silence as a Weapon of Self-Defence 345 between Elinor and Lucy Steele, a cunning little vixen who is her rival for the affections of Edward. The Dashwood home at the novel’s opening is Norland, a substantial coun- try house—but a house of mourning, for the Dashwoods’ beloved father dies in Chapter One, and his death has followed that of the uncle from whom he inherited the house. Something not always remembered about the two hero- ines is that they and their mother must have been in mourning for a good long time when the novel opens. Mourning is what I want to start by looking at, but in Jane Austen, for whom the Chapter One death scene of Mr Dashwood is the only death scene in all of her major novels, it looks on the surface as if grief is sidelined by disappointment. As well as learning, in Chapter One, about a pile-up of Dashwood family deaths, we also learn that Norland is ‘entailed’: bequeathed only for life to Mr Dashwood, to be passed on at his death to his son John, Elinor and Marianne’s brother. Mrs Dashwood and her daughters will have only a small income, and no home. This is crucial to the plot, but let us ignore wills, money, and property for the moment and look at death, and grief, and the women who are living through it:

Elinor … possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judg- ment … at nineteen … [she was] the counsellor of her mother…. She had an excellent heart;—her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn … Marianne … was sensible and clever…. She was generous, amiable, in- teresting: she was everything but prudent. The resemblance between her and her mother was strikingly great (6).

This ‘strikingly great’ resemblance is shown most of all in their style of mourning:

They encouraged each other now in the violence of their affliction. The agony of grief which overpowered them at first, was voluntarily renewed, was sought for, was created again and again. They gave themselves up wholly to their sorrow…. Elinor, too, was deeply afflicted; but still she could struggle (7; italics added).

I want us to keep in mind the language of ‘giving up’ to emotion versus the language of ‘struggle’, such a strong, evident contrast, but also to look at the language of creativity about emotion which characterizes Marianne and her mother: ‘grief … was voluntarily renewed … created again and again’.