It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of even a few female relations, who marries into a family in which females preponderate, will be exposed to screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels until his conscience compels him to read the source material.
I just read
Sense and Sensibility – the working title of which was
Elinor and Marianne – and am within a hundred pages of finishing
Pride and Prejudice. This is a good time to reflect again on Austen.
(See
this earlier review of
Pride and Prejudice.)
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The movie
Sense and Sensibility (1995) clocks in at a mere two hours and sixteen minutes. Necessarily, the story it tells is an abridgment.
Mrs. Dashwood (Gemma Jones) is widowed. Her daughters, Elinor (Emma Thompson) and Marianne (Kate Winslet), are left virtually penniless while their older half-brother, John (James Fleet), inherits everything. (A third and much younger sister, Margaret, is an amusing background presence but adds little to the story.) Mercifully, Sir John Middleton, a distant relation, invites the Dashwood women to live in the spare cottage on his Devon estate. To Devon they decamp, but not before Elinor has grown attached to the brother-in-law of her half-brother: Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant). Edward is much kinder than his dreadful sister – John Dashwood’s wife – but, due to cinematic embellishment, he is painfully awkward: when he makes social calls, he blushes and stammers, and he struggles to cross the room and to put his bottom into his chair.
The Dashwoods are welcomed to Devon by their boisterous relation, Sir John (Robert Hardy); and by Sir John’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Jennings (played with gusto by Elizabeth Spriggs), who relishes matchmaking. Marianne soon acquires two suitors: middle-aged Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman), as well as dashing young Willoughby (Greg Wise) with whom she falls in love. But, to the Dashwoods’ confoundment, Marianne is
“ghosted” by Willoughby and Elinor by Edward. Marianne breaks down and almost dies; Elinor bears her grief stoically but is tormented by the devious Miss Lucy Steele (Imogen Stubbs), Edward’s old flame. The main theme of the story is the contrast between Marianne’s self-destructive passion and Elinor’s dutiful restraint. Because there is little doubt as to which husbands Marianne and Elinor ultimately will be paired with, the story’s interest lies in the moral scrutiny to which each party is subjected.
I say this is the
story’s interest; the
movie’s lies in what each actor does with this old material. Rickman, especially, delivers his lines with hammy verve. Winslet, whose Marianne strives to maintain high-flown ideals, paradoxically gives the least affected performance: her cry of relief when she sees Willoughby across a London dancefloor is endearing
and pitiful. Thompson projects exquisite, quiet suffering: it’s lovely when, at the movie’s conclusion, Elinor’s reserve is shattered.
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One episode in the book that the movie surprisingly omits is a duel between Willoughby and Colonel Brandon. (“He [dueled] to defend: I to punish,”
the Colonel explains.) Neither man is wounded, and the book dispenses with the matter in a few lines. It spends more time on caddish Willoughby’s (not entirely uncreditable) self-justification. Bizarrely, the movie’s nearest thing to a defense of Willoughby is spoken by Colonel Brandon, whose magnanimity is thereby underscored. (An unprejudiced viewer might suspect that Willoughby isn’t getting a fair shake.)
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Some minor characters are excised from the screen: Sir John Middleton’s wife, who, in the novel, combines flawless manners with an utter lack of interest in humans other than her children; and Miss Anne Steele, Miss Lucy Steele’s elder sister, a gossiping nitwit.
Thus, the movie leaves us thinking of old Mrs. Jennings as little more than a gossiping busybody. Her kindness and good sense aren’t hidden, but they’re less conspicuous due to the absence of the book’s more injurious gossip, Miss Anne Steele. And it’s harder, once we’re deprived of the sedate, self-absorbed Mrs. Middleton, to notice that Sir John’s helpfulness springs from a keen curiosity about his fellow creatures. Take away just a few minor characters, and the others are impoverished.
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Why look to Austen for moral insight today, now that – in theory, at least – we no longer venerate the aristocracy? Do we care so much about her implicit criticisms of that bygone society? No; what affect us are her descriptions of timeless differences between individuals.
For Austen, each person may fit into a slightly different place in the social hierarchy, but the crucial moral ingredient is character. (And if character isn’t determined by position, neither is it a matter of choice; if we’re to believe Mr. Darcy’s old housekeeper in
Pride and Prejudice, it’s detectable in infants.) Character’s worth is intrinsic, but it’s to be
judged comparatively, each person against other members of the same family or class. Elinor (for instance) may initially be considered on her own; but, for Austen, what finally tells is how she compares against Marianne. Similarly, we know that Edward is almost saintly, not because he always does what’s right but because his mother and siblings are
so deficient in habitual basic decency. Even the conniving Miss Lucy Steele is shown to be worthy when measured against her sister. (Analogous things could be said about many of the figures in
Pride and Prejudice; I haven’t read the other novels.)
Austen’s reformist point, then, is that a person is
not to be judged by whether he or she comes from a distinguished family or class; social background doesn’t
constitute virtue but merely supplies a context for
discerning it. The book begins:
The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintances.
It’s this “general good opinion” attaching to certain families, so coveted in her day, that Austen seeks not to falsify so much as to banish as irrelevant. Why praise the Dashwood
family when John Dashwood is far less good than Marianne, and Marianne far less wise than Elinor?
