Indifference in
Sense and Sensibility
319
even encourages her readers to refrain from sympathizing with
Marianne. Few readers can retain their gentle feeling for
Marianne when he realizes that she can be strong but chooses
not to: “She was without any power, because she was without
any desire of command over herself.” The superior importance
of emotional detachment in this passage can be explored on
the sentence level. We are told that Marianne’s behavior
“giv[es] pain every moment to her mother and sisters.” Do her
mother and sisters experience pain because they are admitted
to the recess of Marianne’s heart and are able to understand it
or because they are not? The syntax, framing this phrase
within Marianne’s defiant self-absorption (“unable to talk”;
“forbidding all attempt”), supports the latter interpretation. If
readers of
Sense and Sensibility
are encouraged to distance
themselves from Marianne’s sorrow and to dismiss it as
self-inflicted trouble, Marianne’s family, whose affectionate
gestures either meet rejection or serve to exacerbate her grief,
are forced to assume the role of an indifferent bystander.
The problem of unconcern dominates the representation
of Marianne after she learns a lesson from her unsuccessful
romance. Significantly, this lesson involves not so much the
danger of her “unguarded affection” as the moral inadequacy
of her indifference (Austen, 2006: 390). In the presence of
Elinor, Marianne does not even wish to discuss her old
affection: “I do not mean to talk to you of what my feelings
have been for him” (390). But her comments on her disregard
for other people’s feelings span two pages of the novel: “the
unceasing kindness of Mrs. Jennings, I had repaid with
ungrateful contempt. To the Middletons, the Palmers, the
Steeles, . . . I have been insolent and unjust, with an heart
hardened against their merits . . . Your [i.e. Elinor’s] example
was before me; but to what avail?
—
Was I more considerate of
you and your comfort?” (392). This textual imbalance is
suggestive, because it implies that the novel in fact dwells much
