Vulnerability as socio economic check, ethical move and aesthetic proposal in Sense and Sensibility

Nathalie Jaëck (1)

1 CLIMAS - Cultures et Littératures des Mondes Anglophones

That in all her six novels, Jane Austen poses the fact and satirizes the ways in which late 18 th century England politically organized the conditions for the vulnerability of women is a well-known fact. Vulnerability is forcefully presented not as a natural attribute of women, but as a " product of injustice " (Gilson 2), as a " politically induced condition " (Frames 26): indeed, the legal system assimilated them to minors; primogeniture could lawfully deprive them of any inheritance; lack of access to education, as it was most compellingly lamented by Mary Wollstonecraft, maintained them in a state of inferiority and dependence. In Jane Austen's fiction then, country gentry women are definitely liable to harm, and the plots revolve around whether and how social endangerment will be avoided–marriage usually securing for women a position of lesser vulnerability. In Sense and Sensibility, though, Jane Austen stages female vulnerability in a more violent way, but also in a more dialectical way than in any of her other novels. While in Pride and Prejudice for example, vulnerability remains a theoretical liability, an imminent susceptibility to harm–the absence of an heir in the Bennet family makes it urgent that the girls, five sisters in all, should find a way out of danger by securing husbands–Sense and Sensibility opens on the instant and violent activation of vulnerability. As early as chapter one, Mrs Dashwood and her three daughters, Marianne, Elinor and little Margaret, are brutally ousted from their own house by their elder half-brother, as the legal system of male entail allows him to: they are deprived from the outset, left utterly dependent on others, not vulnerable but actually wounded. But what I would like to prove in this paper is that the novel stages an unexpected shift: as it confronts the readers with the blunt violence of social vulnerability, it also proposes a revaluation of the concept. Instead of being seen as " exclusively negative, equated with weakness, dependency, powerlessness, deficiency and passivity " (Gilson 4), vulnerability by the end of the novel becomes a positive ethical alternative, and even an ethical disposition. Jane Austen disengages vulnerability from the usual determinant binaries of rank and gender and untypically distributes it among all the major characters. Though they should be shielded by their status as rich heirs, the principal male characters who will eventually marry the heroines in Sense and Sensibility are no invulnerable heroes, clearly no almighty Darcys.

Domaines: Littératures

Nathalie Jaëck. Vulnerability as socio economic check, ethical move and aesthetic proposal in Sense and Sensibility. Leaves, 2017. ⟨hal-01599770⟩