Abstract
In the traditional view Sense and Sensibility juxtaposes ethical or moral opposites and satirises the novel of sensibility by showing that feeling is a dangerous guide to conduct.1 As a chapter in Jane Austen’s treatment of the ‘drama of woman’, the novel concentrates on the sexual and emotional vulnerability of women in a patriarchal society.
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Notes and References
See, for example, L. Brown, ‘Marrying and Mothering’, pp. 33–6; Bush, Jane Austen p. 83; Duckworth, ‘ “Spillikins, paper, ships, riddles, conundrums, and cards”: games in Jane Austen’s life and fiction’, in Halperin, Jane Austen.: Bicentenary Essays p. 285; L. P. Hartley, ‘Jane Austen and the Abyss’, Essays by Divers Hands 35 (1969) 97–100; Lerner, Truthtellers pp. 160–6
S. Morgan, In the Meantime: Character and Perception in Jane Austen’s Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 1980) pp. 111–12; Nardin, Decorums p. 24; and Rees, Jane Austen, Woman and Writer p. 131.
Henriettta Ten Harmsel, Jane Austen: A Study in Fictional Conventions (The Hague: Mouton, 1964) p. 47; see Hartley, op. cit., p. 97; Nardin, Decorums pp. 30–5; and Rees, op. cit., p. 131.
Chrisopher Gillie, ‘Sense and Sensibility: an Assessment’, Essays in Criticism 9 (1959) 5.
A. McKillop, ‘The Context of Sense and Sensibility’, Rice Institute Pamphlets, 44 (1957) 77.
H. Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (New York: International Universities Press, 1958) p. 87. Auerbach, in ‘Jane Austen and Romantic Imprisonment’, in Monaghan, Jane Austen in a Social Context pp. 20, 24, describes the ‘sense’ that Elinor endorses as ‘less general wisdom than . [an] acute perception of “the fangs of the tyger” ’, a ‘seismographic awareness of … the reality of others’ power’.
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© 1983 LeRoy W. Smith
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Smith, L.W. (1983). Sense and Sensibility: The Risk of Being Female. In: Jane Austen and the Drama of Woman. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17184-2_4
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