Content area
Full Text
DESPITE ADMIRING ELINOR Dashwood's strength of character and sympathizing with the pain she endures, the narrative of Sense and Sensibility pokes intermittent fun at the heroine as if to remind us that she is no picture of perfection. In contrast to her criticism of Willoughby and skepticism about his intentions, for example, Elinor reads Edward Ferrars's mysterious behavior as a story she has encountered many times before: 'The old, well established grievance of duty against will, parent against child, was the cause of all. She would have been glad to know when these difficulties were to cease, this opposition was to yield, - when Mrs. Ferrars would be reformed, and her son be at liberty to be happy" (118). At the beginning of the same paragraph the narrator remarks sardonically on Elinor's interpretation: "[[IJt was happy for her that he had a mother whose character was so imperfectly known to her, as to be the general excuse for every thing strange on the part of her son" (117). Elinor - like Austen's characters and like her readers - has literary experience to guide her, but that guidance helps her understand Edward little more than Marianne's reading helps her understand or predict Willoughby's behavior.
In the same chapter that highlights Elinor's habits of interpretation, her mother also resorts to her reading to explain Edward's character. As Edward's visit to Barton Cottage draws to its ambiguous conclusion, Mrs. Dashwood gently rallies him on his low spirits and his lack of purpose and then remarks that his '"sons will be brought up to as many pursuits, employments, professions, and trades as Columella's'" (119). This allusion to Richard Graves's Columella; or, TL· Distressed Anchoret: A Colloquial Tale (1779), calls up another novel in which sense and sensibility, picturesque and practical approaches to landscape, and varied narratives of courtship, seduction, and marriage all play a role. This reference, ignored by the disconsolate Edward, links him to the misanthropic hero/victim of sensibility. The allusion to Columella connects Mrs. Dashwood's reading and her insight into character but reveals her willing suspension ofthat knowledge; it also suggests that in Elinor's comfortable reliance on literary models for identifying the trajectory of her own romantic plot she, no less than Marianne, is her mother's daughter.