Sense and Sensibility (Broadview Literary Texts)

When Sense and Sensibility first appeared, the words of its title had enormous cultural weight: Austen was addressing–and also satirizing–notions of sensibility, the meaning of which, while akin to the current use of "sensitivity," was already a subject of debate. Sensibility had been considered the incorporation of reason and feeling, a virtue–according to many–that would lead people into correct and benevolent behavior and that marked them as intellectually and morally superior. However, by Austen’s day, there was already a concern about excessive sensibility, and most especially the effects of such excess on women. Sensibility had come to imply a susceptibility to illness, and untamed female sexuality (an association in part derived from The Memoirs of Emma Courtney in which Mary Hays’s heroine cultivates her feminine sensibility and offers herself sexually to the object of her affections). Indeed in Austen’s novels, characters of sensibility do not distinguish between bodily and mental sensation, leading Marianne to the questionable conclusion that she would be physically "sensible" of any improper action. More recently, critics have found the "sense" in Sense and Sensibility the more problematic term with the debate centering on whether Austen’s characterization of the self-controlled Elinor may have a satirical edge as well. James-Cavan addresses these questions and in the appendices, she includes materials from conduct books prescribing women’s behaviour.