Deviant Sensibility and Normality in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice

This study compares and contrasts Jane Austen’s novels of sensibility with those of Rousseau and Goethe. In Julie, or The New Heloise and The Sorrows of Young Werther, the passionate but doomed love of the heroine and her lover is juxtaposed with her passionless marriage to the virtuous husband. In Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, Austen revises Rousseau and Goethe’s novels of sensibility to accommodate them to the puritanical English literary conventions. She parodies the basic plot of Ménage à trois found in their novels of sensibility and transforms her novels into British Bildungsroman, focusing on the heroines’ maturation. In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne stands up against the mercenary and snobbish high society. However, Austen represses Marianne’s sensibility since the indulgence in sensibility can bring about sexual fall, as is evidenced by the cases of the two Elizas. Marianne’s dangerous fever following Willoughby’s betrayal emphasizes that female sexual desire should be punished for her continued existence in the high society. The taming of her sensibility and body through the fever is posited as a prerequisite for the happy marriage. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth favors the deprived Wickham over the wealthy Darcy. As Wickham turns out to be a debauched lover, Darcy snatches sexual charms from him and is transfigured into one of the most virtuous and attractive husbands in Ménage à trois of the novels of sensibility. Acknowledging sexuality as a vital element of a courtship, Austen embeds sexual desire in dances and glances. However, Elizabeth has to repress sensibility and desire and the complete gratification of desire is continuously deferred to some indefinite period in the future. Marriage is a synecdoche for the union of the bourgeois and the aristocracy in Austen’s Bildungsroman and Marianne and Elizabeth are bestowed with happy marriage in return for repressing their sensibility and desire. Since their ‘normality’ and ‘maturation’ have been achieved at the expense of subversive sexual power of deviant sensibility, they look too impotent to gratify their desire when they finally secure comfortable but mediocre upper class life.