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abilities in every respect improve as much upon acquaintance
as his manners and person” (Austen, 2006: 23). Even the
morally corrupt Willoughby is saved from utter condemnation
by his confession. After listening to his story, Elinor “forgave,
pitied and wished him well” (376). Such is the narrative’s
endorsement of sympathetic understanding that, when Austen
fails to sympathize with Marianne’s youthful infatuation with
Willoughby and decides to marry her off to Colonel Brandon,
her readers feel dissatisfied. To the eyes of Marvin Mudrick,
Marianne’s strong emotions have long been “the life and
center of the novel” (1968: 93). He famously argues that
Marianne’s final withdrawal into domestic peace and calm
reveals her author’s moving away from and eventual burial of
“the heart of passion” (91). This plot arrangement induces
Mudrick to suggest that, despite her creation of a sentimental
heroine, Austen after all is a cold lady fundamentally “against
feeling” (91). Mudrick’s complaint indicates a disjunction
between the unfeeling conclusion and the bulk of the novel
celebrating “the heart of passion.”
This textual discontinuity
annoys him and gestures toward another reason why
indifference largely eludes critical accounts of this novel.
Critics tend to assume that indifference and feeling are
opposites. In a novel supposedly dominated by strong feeling,
indifference is at best a tangential issue.
Enit Karafli Steiner’s recent discussion of
Sense and
Sensibility
demonstrates how persistent the opposition
between feeling and indifference can be in Austen scholarship.
Steiner argues that the ability to “enter into another’s feelings”
plays a central role in the development of Elinor and Marianne
(2012: 86). This novel, therefore, bears witness to “the
transformative power of what Adam Smith called ‘sympathy,’”
a power that seems antithetical to either unconcern or reserve
(87). Understandably, in her attempt to scrutinize the
circulation of feeling in Austen’s novel, Steiner bypasses the
