Themes of "Sense and Sensibility"
Name :- Gohil Devangiba A.
Email id :- devangibagohil786@gmail.com
Roll No. :- 14, Sem.-2
Paper No. : - 5 (The Romantic Literature )
Topic :- Themes
of "Sense and Sensibility"
Submitted to Department of English
Introduction
about Writer
Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775. She grew up
environment that stressed learning and creative thinking. Jane Austen was a
romantic fiction writer. She became one of the most widely read writers in English
literature.
She
started writing in the 1790s. Alongside writing, she enjoyed the playing piano,
attending church, and socializing with neighbours. Austen died on July 18,
1817. Some believe that her death was from Addison's disease. However, the true
cause of death is unknown.
Jane was
an unmarried woman herself which explains how she knows so much about the
pressures society puts on a young woman. Although time and technology has
changed, the human nature is the same. This is what drives people to continue
to read her works and relate to her themes in current times.
" Sense
and Sensibility " was her first
published novel, and she wrote 6 novels that were published. She has a total of
13 novel but due to her illness and than her death she could not finish them.
Themes of Sense and Sensibility
The first theme of Sense and
Sensibility is "Love and Marriage".
Love and Marriage :-
The
plot of Sense and Sensibility revolves around marriage. The
novel begins with Elinor and Marianne as unmarried
but eligible young women and only concludes when both of them settle into
marriages. Engagements, possible matches, and marriages are the main concern of
most the novel’s characters and the subject of much of their conversation.
Thus, love is a central theme of the novel as Marianne and Elinor fall in love
and seek to marry the men they love. In
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen shows
us dramatically different facets of this little thing we call love.
However,
marriage isn’t all about love in the world of Sense and Sensibility.
In fact, it’s often more about wealth, uniting families, and gaining social
standing. Moreover, it’s often families and parents who attempt to decide
engagements as much as any individual husband or wife. Mrs. Ferrars,
for example, cares only about her sons marrying wealthy, upper-class women. She
does not care whether Edward loves Lucy and cuts
all ties with him when she learns of their engagement. For her, the decision of
whom her sons will marry is as much hers as theirs, because their marriages are
more about their whole family than about their own individual desires. For Marianne and
Elinor, marriage is not a choice, but a necessity; and their need to marry
expediently and well is a pressing concern in the novel, as they look for
suitors. Young men may choose more freely when and whom they marry,
and Colonel Brandon is even 35 and still unmarried; but even for
women who have money, marriage is necessary to secure their social positions
and ensure financial stability for the future.
Marriage
is an important part of the functioning of the high society in which Austen’s
characters live. It determines who will inherit family fortunes and properties,
and is of particular importance to women, whose futures depend almost entirely
on the prospects of the men they marry. Nonetheless, while people in the novel
often marry for reasons other than love (Willoughby, for example,
marries Miss Grey just for money), Elinor and Marianne ultimately
do marry for love. For Marianne, though, this means redefining her notion of
love and allowing herself to develop affections for Colonel Brandon,
even though she did not love him at first sight. The novel also shows the
importance of love through a consideration of family. The bonds between Elinor,
Marianne, Margaret, and their mother stand strong through all the
difficulties they endure and at the end of the novel they maintain a happily
close relationship. Thus, while marriage may often be more a matter of
economics than of love, the examples of Marianne and Elinor show that it
doesn’t necessarily have to be this way. And, insofar as marriage brings
families together and creates new family units, it can create strong and
lasting bonds of familial
love.
Society and Class :-
In this novel we can see the class conflict
between the upper class and lower class and also the marriage are depending on
sake of money. We can see the class difference through the marriage of Edward
and lucy, Willoughby and Elinor, and Edward and Elinor. This all marriages are
depending only on money. Through these marriages we can understands the mind
set of seventeenth century's people. These characters are money minded we can
see through their marriages and society is also But despite these examples,
women of the novel are often at the mercy of the male-dominated society in
which they live. Eliza and her daughter (also named Eliza),
who is abandoned by Willoughby, exemplify this. Without husbands, they
are left in desperate situations. Elinor and Marianne are
constantly confronting the threat of this kind of fate, should they be unable
to find a husband. As Elinor tells Marianne, she should be thankful that her
time with Willoughby did not leave her like Eliza. Only by marrying eligible
men can both sisters get a guarantee of a stable, comfortable life. Austen’s
novel thus presents the dangers and limited possibilities for women in a
rigidly patriarchal society, while also showing how some women in such a
society can still find ways of exercising certain forms of power and influence.
In
this novel we can see the many others difference themes likes classicism and
romanticisms, money and inheritance, expectation and reality, family and
motherhood.
Austen
has represented the society in which she lived. In these novel women characters
are so powerful Austen gives the more importance in comparing to male
characters to female characters. Women characters are not hopeless and helpless
comparing with others novels. "The consummation of a woman's life in
marriage to a commanding man." Jane Austen does not creates a women's
world but she represented the real world.
Austen
is mirroring the basic tension of her times in this work. Reason, the
eighteenth-century symbol of all that is good, and the accompanying moral order
of the times, which is exemplified in the standards of the community at large,
are being challenged by the nineteenth-century romantic strain, where morality
is interpreted by the individual. What was to result is literary history.
At the end of the novel, when Elinor ends up with Edward, the man she
loves, their story is not completely concluded until they secure financial
security through Mrs. Ferrars’ forgiveness of Edward. Even for this couple,
money seems to be in some respects their ultimate, final concern. Perhaps the
only character who really steps outside of the novel’s society of greed
is Colonel Brandon. In the novel’s biggest gesture of generosity,
he gives Edward the property of Delaford to live at. However, even this grand
gesture is an act of generosity directed simply to an already privileged,
wealthy individual. While Austen negatively depicts the extremes of greed that
can be found in upper-class society, her characters never really get outside of
their own limited social class and she does not go so far as to critique the
wealthy society as a whole that almost exclusively populates her novel.
By
the conclusion of the novel everything is solved: Marianne marries Brandon and
with some fancy footwork it seems Ms. Lucy Steele ran off with the other
brother and left Edward to marry Elinor.
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