Sense and Sensibility

Abstract

Is Marianne Dashwood pregnant? Is the ‘putrid fever’ (SS, 330) which threatens her life and robs her of her looks in Volume 3 of Sense and Sensibility, and which is itself a consequence of her disastrous romantic encounter with the rakish Willoughby, a decorous euphemism? At the heart of the novel there lies not, as Tony Tanner once suggested, ‘a muffled scream from Marianne’, but a hidden narrative, barely touched upon but of enormous resonance (Marianne Dashwood’s scream, ‘muffled’ by biting her handkerchief, is, it is true, a part of this resonating effect, but it is a symptom, not the thing itself).¹ This is the story of Eliza Williams, Colonel Brandon’s niece, and her mother Eliza Brandon, his sister-in-law. Brandon’s tale is, in Barbara K. Seeber’s words, one of Austen’s ‘narrative cameos’, which

all speak of sexual and financial exploitation that the main narrative tries to elide. Yet this subversive content cannot be contained. The stories spill over into the main narrative, disturbing the peace of the narrative that has been privileged by traditional criticism. They talk back to the central plot and reveal its inability to accommodate their stories; in this way, Austen reveals ideology as a constructed ‘truth’…. The narrative cameos challenge some common assumptions about Austen. The novels are narrow in their social milieu; yet the cameos deal with illegitimate children, fallen women, and abject poverty. Austen is conservative, for she reconciles the desire of the individual with the structure of society; the cameos show just the opposite: individuals for whom the social order has failed. The cameos provide a countercurrent to the main narrative.²