“Sense will always have its attractions for me”

feminine good sense in Sense and sensibility

Abstract

This article investigates the construction of the notion of feminine good sense in the novel Sense and sensibility, by Jane Austen, from the conscious conduct of Elinor Dashwood, in comparison with her sister Marianne’s conduct. I stress, in Jane Austen’s novel, the points of ideological divergence between the British Enlightenment and the French Lumières, and the ways in which the British good sense articulates the concepts of reason and sympathy. The study begins with the construction of a modern understanding of future based on the idea of “progress”, aligned to the 18th century notion of a cyclical “feminine time”, to understand Austen’s anti-Jacobin and anti-romantic critique both of the cult of reason and of the cult of sensibility. I defend that Austen portrays the virtue of prudence, or good sense, as a self-protective system for women, inspiring the preservation of traditions, in a conservative tone, not as legitimation of absolute truths, but as a strategy of moral survival in the face of an imprisonment within the feminine role of reproduction both of life and of the historical time of men.