The Failure of Resolution in Sense and Sensibility

Abstract

Sense and Sensibility begins as a balanced ledger sheet. Norland, the home of the Dashwoods, a large, prosperous and respectable estate, represents economic stability. Here, for Austen’s fiction, is the equivalent of primal security, an Edenic paradise of the landed gentry. The novel begins in a numbing muddle of financial detail, describing flatly the economic situations of Norland’s owner, Mr. Dashwood, and those of his heirs: his nephew and nephew’s wife, his grand nephew and nieces, and his great-grand nephew. These monetary details constitute both the status quo and a paradisial stability, for at the old man’s death in the third paragraph, narrative wit and economic instability enter the novel hand-in-hand: ‘The old Gentleman died; his will was read, and like almost every other will gave as much disappointment as pleasure’ (p. 4). The one grand nephew and his son are favoured over the three grand nieces. This initial imbalance of the ledger causes all the subsequent action of the novel, because the fates of the Dashwood sisters devolve almost entirely from their disinheritance. The entrance of irony at this crucial moment is metaphorically right, because only when innocence and security are lost is the double nature of language apparent. There is no need for irony in an Unfallen paradise; irony is a postlapsarian aspect of langugage.