1067ELH 80 (2013) 1067–1091 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

SEnSE and SEnSibiLity and SUffering; or, WiTTgenSTein’S Marianne?

by eric lindSTroM

The picture of the mind revives again[.]

—William Wordsworth, “Tintern abbey”1

How do words refer to sensations? —There doesn’t seem to be any problem here; don’t we talk about sensations every day, and give them names? but how is the connexion between the name and the thing named set up? This question is the same as: how does a human being learn the meaning of the names of sensations?—of the word “pain” for example. Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, the natural, expressions of the sensation and used in their place. a child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behavior.

“So you are saying that the word ‘pain’ really means crying?” —on the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it.

—ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations § 2442

a major tenet of so-called ordinary language philosophy, which Stanley cavell reinforces throughout his groundbreaking work the Claim of Reason (1979), is that human beings learn far more than they are systematically taught and ever could teach another person.3 What we learn and the way we learn, for cavell at his most Wittgensteinian angle of approach, involves reaching fluency in the gestures by which language is conducted according to communal criteria. but at its further reaches, learning can also take on the burden for cavell of a disappoint-ment with criteria as Wittgenstein seems to deploy them.4 as a prompt for reexamining the interconnections of philosophy and literature, this experiential conviction recommends itself immediately to a reading alongside the all-in romantic educational moment of Jean-Jacques

1068 Sense and Sensibility and Suffering

rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft; or, equally, in terms of the fused educational and aesthetic projects of William Wordsworth’s Lyrical ballads and William blake’s Songs of innocence and Experience, poetic experiments that show rather than merely tell in their genealogies of valuation. Here, however, the point of contact is to be (for the most part) a single novel of Jane austen. although this will not be an essay about teaching after the first paragraphs, it begins from a position in which i have found myself when grading papers on austen’s Sense and Sensibility and standing before the classroom during those weeks on the syllabus. i am happy to acknowledge any inroads pioneered by students—reaching for their own interpretive strategies in frustration and insight—rather than stemming from my own intuitive sense of where best to push on austen’s text for breakthroughs.5 My ground-work question will be: How can we learn more actively to take interest in the novel’s seductively binary pairing? How might we learn better ourselves in order to teach students—that is, to the extent that these two sides of an education can form a congruent experience—so that the inevitable character-based readings of the title’s overlapping terms are at once appropriately subtle and still stick?

To start, one can mark the change from the draft title of austen’s long-held manuscript of the 1790s, “elinor and Marianne,” to the publication of Sense and Sensibility in 1811 as a kind of historically belated novel of ideas; the novel makes its appearance with this abstract, ever-so-slightly Jacobin choice of title (to go along with the french revolutionary resonance of Marianne), but only well after the historical moment in which such a choice would be politically laden. but this matter of titling and chronology only begins to flesh out the exploratory if equivocal relation of modern philosophical controversy to “polite” austenian literature. Whereas austen’s own apparent source text for the novel’s title evinced the need to disambiguate the semantic and cultural realms of sense and sensibility as an effect of “mistaken synonymy” (as a writer from the Lady’s Monthly Museum of 1798–99 fears is the case) in my experience the default position in the classroom couldn’t be further from that kind of rich, antireductionist interpretive anxiety.6 Predisposed to a certain logic of the “and,” which conveniently stacks up according to the same geometry ruling the relationship of an older to a younger sister (like the novel’s narrator, more or less, we forget the third sister, Margaret), students can’t help entering the novel with too much certainty.7 That position upon opening the book, further, is surprisingly hard to dislodge even by the time we reach the novel’s end, where a good but not the best common response is to

1069Eric Lindstrom

decide that Marianne (“the patroness of a village” who is married to an older man in flannel waistcoats and deprived of the expression of her subjectivity) and elinor (an emotional marathon runner who has just burst nearly screaming out of the room with uncontrolled tears of joy and surprise) have had their ruling passions switched.8 Sense and Sensibility ends on this reading as a sibling Freaky Friday prolonged through the mature conjugal state—though not, of course, prolonged in austen’s field of narrative representation, which forgoes all view of the married protagonists as a couple in point of law.

critical materials only partly succeed at reimagining possible alter-nate shapes for this powerful interpretive impulse to craft a kind of rebus in which to contain elinor and Marianne as the living pictures of Sense and Sensibility. but they help with rather more clarity to disclose the method of reading i want to pursue further in this essay. along with sharing period sources for the vogue of aesthetic and moral “sensi-bility” waxing in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, i have recently made sure always to discuss raymond Williams’s entry in Keywords. Perhaps the most resonant part of that entry, with an eye trained on the Marianne of the first two volumes, recounts an historical affect rooted in “a conscious openness to feelings, and also a conscious consumption of feelings.”9 Williams’s point of emphasis on a scholarly concern that has really only come into its own since his time—the romanticism and rise of modern consumption—unlocks a whole range of further access to Marianne’s most scripted, conventional, and yet surprising behav-iors in the book: her visit to allenham to make plans for the sitting room furniture for when Willoughby’s benefactress, Mrs. Smith, is dead; her allied notion of what exact number will suffice as economic “competence” (£2000 per annum, an amount twice that in elinor’s richest fantasy); her hoarding of sentimental pleasures but stoking up on an even greater measure of cherished pain (S, 105–6). Marianne’s powerful role as the expressive subject of the novel, it seems, is based on little but this avidly transparent species of declaration. by means of her nearly constant string of avowals and disavowals in the first part of the book, she claims a role in the game of achieving bourdieuian distinction over against the dull and duplicitous, the Middletons, Jennings, and Steeles of the world, all of whom she lumps together. yet against such a sociological method of plotting her character on a map of the prescribed choices that only appear to the individual as passionate, subjectively original taste, as readers we tend to smile at her instances of predictable judgment (her views on landscape, poetry, and so forth), yet nevertheless broadly experience the central assertion

1070 Sense and Sensibility and Suffering

of identity as Marianne does. even if the specific positions to which she adheres are easy to condescend to (not because they are “wrong” or immature, but because Marianne does not appear to know they exist as already plotted coordinates in the game of taking positions), the novel seems constructed so that most readers grant the bigger driving truth of her character, as a locus of subjective agency willed by and for herself and not to be violated as such. The experience of subjective freedom is so strong in Marianne that its sudden eclipse at the end of the novel creates an impasse i will need to return to at the close of my essay.

Working against this framework, however, both sense and sensi-bility retain operational meanings that are profoundly materialist and passive. The funny thing about the typical classroom result of this sharp, layered historical definition from Williams is that, in responding to it, even some of the strongest students in a given class will reject its very bounty as too informative to help. from there, many recur to an older—in some contexts medical, or preprofessionally philo-sophical—construction of what sensibility could mean at its minimal point: the ability to receive stimuli, to be affected by changes in the environment.10 from the perspective of the organism susceptible to it, then, since all change rehearses a logic of trauma writ either large or small, sensibility boils down essentially to the sensation of pain, to suffering and susceptibility.11 a novel titled Sense and Sensibility must in great measure be about the linguistic communicability of the pain sensation in narrative and other cultural forms. it’s worth keeping in mind that, from the point of view of a Wollstonecraft on education, all novels go in too heavily for a physical sensation understood in this way.

Translation in particular of the sense in austen’s title pairing into other languages can also be instructive: Spanish offers the flexibility of sentido, but in french one must choose between the widely divergent raison and sens. comparably useful in that it denatures the word to modern ears, which expect subjectivity where he gives only qualia, david Hume’s understanding of sentiment compares to my displace-ment of sensibility in this essay. “all sentiment is right,” according to Hume—but it is not subject to truth claims, not a matter of cogni-tive investigation—in the same sense as “to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or the real bitter.”12 in a recent essay published as part of the 2008 “new lyric Studies” roundtable in PMLa, oren izenberg shows an impressively tactful concern for part of the subject i mean to address, perhaps from only slightly less subjective a vantage, by means of austen’s novel. reading an emily dickinson lyric, he is led to reflect:

1071Eric Lindstrom

“These coordinates, the intrinsic, the private, the ineffable, are also applied (though not without controversy) to what in the philosophy of mind go by the name qualia. Qualia are (most ordinary, most difficult) the subjective or phenomenal aspects of conscious experience—what it is like to see a color or to hear a sound.”13 Too primary to call an accomplishment or any kind of character trait at all, what can an aware-ness of this level of response lead to as an interpretive framework for austen? over against the sophisticated cultural code of her romantic “sensibility,” Marianne’s binary state of being either insensible or rational, once she takes ill at cleveland, suggests a bedrock level at which to find austen’s relation to the older definitions of sense. Mr. bennet relishes inflicting the brunt of this joke on the sensibility of his hysterical wife’s nerves at the end of volume 1 of Pride and Prejudice, which can be related almost after the manner of vaudevillian comedy:

[SHe] “i cannot bear to think that they should have all this estate. if it was not for the entail i should not mind it.” [He] “What should you not mind?” [SHe] “i should not mind anything at all.” [He] “let us be thankful that you are preserved from a state of such insensibility.”14

The brutal fun, from Mr. bennet’s point of view, is that even now his living wife is not all that distinguishably preserved from such a condition of forensically braindead “insensibility.” Without having the word exactly appear, one also finds this kindred, curiously philosophical description of elinor after the london ball in volume 2—another instance of austen winking at the valences of sensibility that pertain to mere sensory information and awareness: “again they were both silent. elinor was employed in walking thoughtfully from the fire to the window, from the window to the fire, without knowing that she received warmth from one, or discerning objects through the other” (S, 216). like an absorbed reader’s, perhaps, or an engaged writer’s—and at the opposite end of the spectrum from a certain preconception of Mrs. bennet (who is quite mindful of some things: the intransigent and menacing facts looming over her own and her daughters’ lives)—elinor’s is an insensibility brought on by focus.

My first point of emphasis has been to show that there are shapes of narrative and exemplary human problems that again become appre-ciable or at least apparent, given this historically and perhaps aestheti-cally flattened point of view in which to be “insensible” means to be altogether senseless, unresponsive physiologically to light and heat, a vegetable, or when playing at being dead or plain dead.15 a second

1072 Sense and Sensibility and Suffering

perspective for which i hope to provide an adequate frame of discus-sion relates to where it is in the relationship between a philosophical approach and a literary text that the critical act might be thought to intervene. in his essay “Perfectly Helpless,” andrew H. Miller cues in on a similar aspect to one i have been introducing in austen’s fiction, by positioning the reader in a helpless (if not altogether insensible) relation to austen’s fictional characters:

When the characters themselves are helpless, we discover (with something like relief, whatever our frustration) their company in our own condition, as if they have come to join us in that state in which we have languished since we first lifted the cover of the book.16

Miller persuasively attends to a level of analogy that holds between the novel as a whole and the reader, arguing that austen’s readers, like her characters, are peculiarly—or, in the stylistic terms he borrows from d. a. Miller, “perfectly”—helpless before the novel’s events, which are recounted in a grammatical mode specific to this genre: the past tense. My tactic here, however, will be to try to splice together a new configuration of interest between two characters within a novel at a slightly more specific (and therefore idiosyncratic) level of detail than Miller’s splendid essay provides. as i discuss below, this choice of location for the analysis forces me to deal with two major issues simultaneously: the prerogative of the artist to allow or bar access to the inner thoughts of created fictional characters most generally, whether considered to lie in the domain of the author or narrator per se; as well as the quandary presented by the opacity of other minds in the linguistic terrain of nonfictional real life. conceding—certainly of novels and poems, if not of experience altogether—that expres-sions are functions of their mediation to the point that it is no longer really correct or meaningful to speak in terms of the inner access they provide as the corresponding outer sign, Wordsworth’s “picture of the mind” must be clarified and understood first as a picture of language. and in the context of austen, of course, this means tackling at least some aspects of the philosophical register of her famous free indirect discourse.17 if, that is, one obvious challenge which poses itself in the attempt to read fiction in terms of the philosophical problem of other minds results from the bracingly different starting coordinates of omniscient transparency and epistemological opacity (which i take to be a fair shorthand for the reductive standing of fiction against real life), it will require formulating an idea about how the density,

1073Eric Lindstrom

or finitude, of the human other features in the narrative art that a book like Sense and Sensibility is still on the way to developing in the austen oeuvre. in what ways is the free indirect style of austen’s later, so-called mature phase a fuller representation of the embedded phenomenological contours of subjective and social experience?18 and to what extent might that accomplishment as a method actually serve to please by evading and offering a wish fulfillment about fundamental problems of extra-fictional reality, such as the opacity and unavailability of other minds, which actually might be better kept visible to readers by working within conventionally flat representational limits?

The rest of this essay examines a key passage from Sense and Sensibility about the linguistic conditions under which the protagonists share the experiences of their suffering. My account of the novel takes for its enabling premise such a deliberately blunt shift in the idea of sensibility, in order to let our reading be stimulated by (if not overtly to depend on) conditions like color-blindness, or extreme sensitivity to tooth pain, or the literal understanding of the narrator’s assertion in a different austen novel, northanger abbey, that a young woman’s parents never suspected she had a heart. if the “verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it,” as i relay from Wittgenstein in this essay’s second opening epigraph, the language of suffering conveys a very important matter indeed: such a role for language appears at once learned, primitive, and already almost a repressive technology against what one is tempted to call the simple fact of pain. as economically as i can, i will set Marianne’s delayed recognition (usually felt to be a severe failure of her sympathetic moral imagination) and elinor’s impeded disclosure of her true interior state (often judged necessary and worthy of sympathy), alongside the twentieth-century philosophical concern about access to other minds.19 as a whole, this effort forms part of a larger scholarly project to which i am committed, whose goal is to explore austen’s philosophical reso-nance beyond the eighteenth-century skeptical and empirical traditions.

by the time of austen—as Jacques derrida, among other thinkers (and in a quite different context, needless to say) recounts—the ques-tion of whether human and other animals could think, which was particularly marked as an intellectual and ethical inheritance of réné descartes, had shifted by way of Jeremy bentham and burgeoning liberal discourse of political economy, to the no less philosophically intractable classification of beings based on whether and how they suffer.20 in her introduction to the oxford paperback edition of Sense and Sensibility, Margaret anne doody remarks that “[a]ll of Jane

1074 Sense and Sensibility and Suffering

austen’s novels express a profound epistemological interest, and their plots are sustained adventures in modes of knowing.” yet as doody continues she alludes suggestively to an even more particular branch of philosophy than epistemology as a whole:

Sense and Sensibility together promise perceptive activity, apprehensions, synthesis, recombinations—i.e. mind, thought, consciousness. a modern philosopher, J. l. austin, paid tribute to austen’s philosophical title and concerns when he named his own book Sense and Sensibilia. The adventures in a world presumed to be knowable are, however, fraught with tormenting problems in austen’s second novel.21

in Sense and Sensibility, the “tormenting problems” of knowledge to which doody alludes are redoubled by the fact that the concrete subject of these matters is quite often the characters’ experience of suffering. The novel’s method and content, combined, occasion the “adventures” which trouble philosophical assumptions. Twentieth-century ordinary language philosophy has recurrently taken up the quandary of a private experience—can it exist as such without public language; if so, is there cognitive access to it?—as the problem of other minds. in a companion essay, i have introduced the argument that austen’s novels respond in advance to the philosophical energies of austin’s speech act theory; i build there from the suggestion that austen—as Stanley cavell remarks—is more than just the “namesake” of austin, but is kindred to him as much in terms of their shared formalist approach as in a continually devious way of presenting normative social content.22 Here, though, my aim is to stress instead a broadly Wittgensteinian dimen-sion shared by an austen novel and the approach offered by so-called ordinary language philosophers, by focusing on the narrative status of other minds (a picture of experience that lays stress to issues involving communication, pain, and suffering) as privileged dimension common to Sense and Sensibility and in some of the passages highlighted most often in Philosophical investigations.23

austen’s own writings at the juncture of nineteenth-century realism and an earlier mode of representation far less concerned to provide consistency and depth would lead us to ask—are her literary characters always structured to think and suffer as people, or even like humans?24 does our solidarity with these figures occur after a human pattern or on some other order? one of the subtexts of my philosophical interest in Sense and Sensibility is that its early, even immature qualities allow readers to discern and address such questions with greater energy than

1075Eric Lindstrom

would be possible for encounters within the more cohesive regime of representation at which austen succeeds in the later novels such as Emma, where the leading characters do in fact play at eliciting the contents of other people’s minds and seeing into their hearts, even where emma ironically has least gotten clear about her own.25

* * * * * *

for how can i go so far as to try to use language to get between pain and its expression?

—Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations § 245

“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?” “i never know what you are thinking. Think.”

—T. S. eliot, “a game of chess”26

beyond its important role in describing the method of ordinary language philosophy, another reason i evoke the pedagogical context above is because it takes something like that dogged, step by step regression to the force and conveyance of mere “stimuli,” moving back from the advanced cultural front lines of Williams’s remarks on “c18” and “c19” sensibility (as Keywords’s indexical manner puts it), to appreciate what is conceptually adventurous in some of the most morally obvious scenes to read in the novel. i mean the passages where Marianne finally awakens from her dream of Willoughby to see that she’s not the only one in pain; or more strangely than that, to realize she’s not the only person susceptible of having the kind of experi-ence—with the depth, which also always must be witnessed through vents in a surface—that one validates as a pain sensation.

The drawing rooms of austenworld provide a finely calibrated environment for testing the verbal objective correlatives of sensation that must mediate, if anything can, between feeling and expression, and then from experience to art. yet austen’s social and verbal range is of course less manically pleading than the Waste Land’s “a game of chess”; the binding force of her style in prose—which serves at the same time as a cutting edge between bradleyan monads of subjec-tivity—by comparison to eliot’s is at once more communal and more avowedly prescriptive.27 “no, no, no, it cannot be . . . she cannot feel,”

1076 Sense and Sensibility and Suffering

Marianne proclaims at one point of her kind but comfort-oriented host in london, Mrs. Jennings (S, 228). and her pattern of response toward other characters of more established insight and subtlety—in judging edward ferrars, for instance, who doesn’t read the poet William cowper aloud or show a taste for drawing with sufficient ardor right at the start of the book, but of course most of all toward her sister elinor once edward has flown—is hardly more generous in its fundamentals. from her earlier circular theory of “the business of self-command”—that “with strong affections it was impossible, with calm ones it could have no merit” (S, 121)—Marianne draws conclu-sions about the character of elinor’s feelings in the following conversa-tion (though the entire long passage deserves quoting, it covers three pages, so i make excerpts below):

“four months!”—cried Marianne again. —So calm! so cheerful!—how have you been supported?” “by feeling that i was doing my duty. —My promise to lucy, obliged me to be secret. i owed it to her, therefore, to avoid giving any hint of the truth, and i owed it to my family and friends not to create in them a solicitude about me, which it could not be in my power to satisfy.” Marianne seemed much struck. ……………………………………… “if such is your way of thinking,” said Marianne, “if the loss of what is most valued is so easily to be made up by something else, your resolution, your self-command, are, perhaps, a little less to be wondered at. —They are brought more within my comprehension.” “i understand you. —you do not suppose that i have ever felt much. ……………………………………… if you can think me capable of ever feeling—surely you may suppose that i have suffered now.” (S, 297–99)

Though allowed to have her own thoughts in this climactic scene of dialogue, and not simply condemned for her indulgence by austen’s censorious narrator, Marianne nonetheless comes off badly in this interchange. from the point of view of crediting others’ sensations of suffering as well as the reality of their complex emotions, her perfor-mance, however predictable, is strange.

rather than just saying Marianne judges elinor by her own standards of unwittingly conventional behavior (which is true), i am inclined to argue there is a philosophical weight behind Marianne’s speech because of her use of a word like “comprehension.” it loosely evokes

1077Eric Lindstrom

the framework of rational understanding that is marshaled under descartes’s search for clear and distinct ideas, as well as lightly trig-gering a very different scheme from immanuel Kant’s philosophy: the Kantian mathematical sublime (say in taking in a view of the egyptian pyramids at one glance) confounds the usual joint working of operations he calls apprehension and comprehension. Here, Marianne suggests she has gotten a better hold on elinor’s “way of thinking” in order to bring her true feelings “more within my comprehension.” However, of course by just adopting a slightly different angle on the word, we see right away that Marianne fails to “comprehen[d]”—in the sense of include—elinor. as hypersensitive as she is toward her own plight regarding Willoughby, right at this moment Marianne’s apprehension of reality (one might call it her touch on reality) is distressingly thick. as readers trying not to pass over the scene having only noticed its most brutal ironies and obvious pieties of judgment against Marianne’s narcissism, we need to interpret nimbly after the sharp turn taken by her pattern of seeking knowledge, her pointed and false conclusion regarding elinor that she doesn’t really feel, or couldn’t—based on her sister’s way of talking.

in this light, it is the narrative tension and overall tone of the passage, instead of a lone philosophical word choice, that must convince us most fully of a dense philosophical braid of interest and complica-tion. Marianne’s attitude combines the tone of judging standards quite ordinary and habitual to her, with a taste of her permanently alien sort of moral imagination. Marianne can only credit her sister elinor’s inner feelings if she emits signs of her suffering by them. but getting to that situation would already involve, for elinor and perhaps also from the narrator’s point of view, her having not tried enough or having failed in all necessary exertion against their expression. The kind of allegedly communicative intimacy that Marianne does seem to put a great deal of store by, found for example in the meeting of minds that is the Willoughby romance in volume 1, moves in its own kind of circle. This pattern gathers in a faintly mordant illustration, which goes to show that if anything, conformation of exterior signs hints nothing may stand good for them independently on the inside of his character: “but Marianne abhorred all concealment where no real disgrace could attend unreserve; and to aim at the restraint of sentiments which were not in themselves illaudable, appeared to her not merely an unnecessary effort, but a disgraceful subjection of reason to common-place and mistaken notions. Willoughby thought the same” (S, 63–64).

1078 Sense and Sensibility and Suffering

against the generous, broadly Wollstonecraftian candor in this proclamation of Marianne’s “unreserve,” free indirect style and the imbalance of the sentences take their effect. There is not much to Willoughby in the apodosis; we cannot even be sure whether he speaks up for himself in that little echo tabbed onto her sentiments. Marianne, that is—and in a barely less explicit way that is just as voracious as any thinker’s since descartes, who stared out his window at human beings he managed to doubt could be automata in hats—is located for most of the novel inside what ordinary language philosophers have called the problem of other minds. yet austen’s novelistic voice and form necessarily come from a different perspective on this problem. especially because of her pioneering development of free indirect style as a means of characterization—a technique that blends third-person narration with the verbal signs and energy of a character or characters (such as local rumor, what “everybody” in one of austen’s country villages supposes and therefore cannot be determinately traced) —the narrative vantage of an austen novel on other minds begins from a mirror-opposite position from that found in the extra-fictional, real world.28 Where the obstruction and unavailability of another person’s inner life often structures the problem for reality beyond novels, within austen’s narrative art there is a premise of availability, at least where the reader needs to have it toward certain key characters. narrative theorist dorrit cohn has termed this novelistic construction of inner access the principle of “transparent minds.”29

The important detail to note for my purposes is that the plot of Sense and Sensibility depends on putting great emphasis into not simply one way, but on two modes, of construing the kind of impasse that other minds philosophy poses. at the beginning of volume 2, austen makes the reader an intense spectator of elinor’s constrained interiority, so that we are sure to judge Marianne’s failure to acknowledge her sister’s emotional burden as both just as real yet handled otherwise—that is, handled differently than her own.30 yet of the twin protagonists it is rather surprisingly Marianne—as now we are in a place to observe—who is first positioned in the questioning subject’s vantage on other minds in Sense and Sensibility: she assumes, or rather presumes, the kind of evaluative role that is always filled by a communal “we” in the language-based philosophy of Wittgenstein; she grapples (or fails to wrestle enough) with elinor as an object of doubt and learning; and this is a twist on our expectations insofar as the reader thinks about the novel’s staging of the problem at all, since elinor’s perspective by contrast weaves the “subjective” nesting, and filters the tone, of almost

1079Eric Lindstrom

the entire book. later, at the start of volume 3, the axis of the novel that turns around the availability and knowledge of inward experi-ence is made to shift forcefully, and (in my experience of reading and teaching the book at least) almost into black comedy, as Marianne is shut off from all internal narrative representation, becoming herself an impassive object. austen as the master builder of Sense and Sensibility renders her an incapacitated body in pain. Within the contour of my reading, this drastic measure in the plot does not simply have to occur in order to stage Willoughby’s confession as a peculiar mission to elinor, and subdue Marianne to make her later courtship by brandon a bit more plausible; it also has a less forced effect that lets us see the unavailability of pain for both dashwood sisters, but in different keys.

integral to austen’s muscling through of the plot, and providing an essential—though again, almost raucously imbalanced—thematic parallel, Marianne’s illness and insensible state at cleveland should be layered into an account that goes back to elinor’s silent and inward suffering from the preceding volume. it is this realization that the novel anticipates an “other minds” philosophy both in a richly interior and in a radically, indeed stupefyingly, exterior mode, which models the distinctive manner of proceeding one finds unmistakably in Wittgenstein.31 “an inner process stands in need of outward criteria,” maintains Wittgenstein in Philosophical investigations (§ 580; quoted in cavell, C, 6). Here i will quote from just two more entries from the Philosophical investigations. The first establishes Wittgenstein’s dialogic approach to the “public” rather than “private,” linguistic criterion of pain.32 He writes:

“When i say ‘i am in pain’ i am at any rate justified before myself.”—What does that mean? does it mean: “if someone else could know what i am calling ‘pain’, he would admit that i was using the word correctly”? (§ 289)

The second entry has more to do with testing the adequacy of our thought “pictures”:

of course, if water boils in a pot, steam comes out of the pot and also pictured steam comes out of the pictured pot. but what if one insisted on saying that there must also be something boiling in the picture of the pot? (§ 297)

responding to this passage in the Claim of Reason, cavell writes: “The philosophical task posed by Wittgenstein’s parable (not, again,

1080 Sense and Sensibility and Suffering

notably unlike a literary task) is to describe what is wrong with the assertion that ‘something is in the pictured pot’—that is, to describe the emptiness of the assertion, the momentary madness in the asser-tion, that is, its failure to amount to an assertion within an insistent sense that it is one—without at the same time seeming to deny that something is in the pictured pot” (C, 338).

any direct application of this kind of “emptiness” and “momentary madness” to the world of austen’s novels must, i will concede, neces-sarily remain just an impression.33 i wouldn’t know how to supply verifiable evidence of any link, which did not itself depend on historical and medium-specific stylistic translations attempting to move between these two ways of proceeding with language. only the performance of a communicable likeness would go to prove its existence. yet this is the inherently open verification procedure, as such, of all language. That austen was capable herself of having, and interested in sharing, such an impression in the philosophical register of her art is evident from the presence of a rather ostentatious joke about an invalid’s sensibility and representation, through the fears of Mr. Woodhouse in Emma. When his judgment is elicited upon emma’s finally completing one of the many fragments of her own artistic work—the full-length portrait of Harriet Smith in volume 1, chapter 6—Harriet and Mr. elton both make it clear that their great approval of the painting ultimately shoots over the art object to their interested claims on the person of the artist. but Mr. Woodhouse by contrast is disapproving and utterly object oriented. except he is not able to properly play the game “respond aesthetically to a picture”; he is worried that the pictured version of Harriet is underdressed for the season and—since the portrait seats her outside—that she might catch a cold.34

* * * * * *

in what sense are my sensations private? —Well, only i can know whether i am really in pain; another person can only surmise it. —in one way this is wrong, and in another nonsense. if we are using the word “to know” as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very often know when i am in pain. —yes, but all the same not with the certainty with which i know it myself! —it can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that i know i am in pain. What is it supposed to mean—except perhaps that i am in pain? other people cannot be said to learn of my sensations only from my behavior, —for i cannot be said to learn of them. i have them.

—Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations § 24635

1081Eric Lindstrom

in her essay, “The imagination goes Visiting,” Hina nazar presents a conceptual account on behalf of an emotive, not arid, rationality in Sense and Sensibility, through elinor dashwood’s intersubjective and social habits of judgment.36 as opposed to Marianne’s narrow and mostly self-confirming culture of enthusiasms, elinor finds quite enough time to reflect on and “know” her own mind in the everyday sense of that phrasing, even in the busy company of a sitting room: an argument that nazar turns (using the writings of Hannah arendt as a comparison) toward the idea that austen’s female-gendered domestic spaces can function as their own kind of generative public sphere. yet it is telling that even a perspective on the novel so flexible and acute as this, for lack of all evidence on the other side, must focus entirely on what we might call elinor’s intake and processing of her environment. i use the wording of information culture reductively, for the sake of effect; and yet it should remind us how elinor does not let herself be found similarly accessible as a source of information to maintain the social fabric, or reinforce the intersubjective basis, of language. The taut admission of the narrator in free indirect speech—“she was stronger alone”—has little to do with elinor’s discipline in keeping the promise extorted from her by the reverse emotional blackmail of lucy Steele (S, 162). later on in the plot, her effective conveyance of the offer of the delaford living from colonel brandon to edward depends, precisely, on a sequestration between her practical mission and her emotions.

That warped version of the novel’s major theme of the “promise” bond does, however, provide an aspect of narrative cover for why elinor’s soul is a lockbox for much of the book. relative to her constraint, elinor’s strength as measured against others’ indulgence, and against other possible forms of configuring their whole family’s strength, derives at least as much from acts of her self-withholding. The key to our more than satisfactory knowledge of elinor’s mind as readers comes from the premise of a “transparent mind” placed before us in narrative discourse, which simply does not exist at the level where Marianne, or anyone else in the book, lives: theirs is a level at least analogous to the one obstructing knowledge in the concrete world of the philosophical problem of other minds.37 in Wittgenstein’s terms, elinor’s and Marianne’s inner feelings support a pair of analogies to judging the steam off a pot and what’s “beneath” or “inside” of it, if not boiling water (“something boiling in the picture”). Marianne’s example presents the computational adjustment of realizing she boils at low temperatures, up there in sensibility’s high altitude. rather

1082 Sense and Sensibility and Suffering

than constrain herself as elinor does, she manifests her sensibility so earnestly that the inner disposition and the outer behavior are just one and the same; so in place of the novel’s disclosure of what the reader might wish to infer mistakenly is “beneath” it all, we receive instead the extended scenes of the radical insensibility of her physical body: Marianne is taken down by a cold showing “a putrid tendency” (S, 347), knocked out by a fever and by austen so as to enable all of the plot development to be channeled through her older sister in the climactic beginning of volume 3.38 (“Marianne was of course kept in ignorance” [S, 349].) Whereas elinor’s case is even more of a puzzle—as if we had to infer the existence of water from a pictured pot that emits no steam, apart from the kind of disclosures in free indirect style that don’t reach the characters but do create intimacy in a closed circuit than runs between elinor, the narrator, and the reader. “‘i cannot know what is going on in him’ is above all a picture,” writes Wittgenstein in Philosophical investigations: a “picture” of what we never quite adequately, and with no standard of certainty, try to clarify through language regarding our human responsiveness to others’ experiences, like pain. a picture that “is the convincing expression of a conviction,” but “does not give the reasons for the conviction. they are not readily accessible” (§326).39 What kind of a “picture,” then, does austen’s novel have in mind for us to meditate, if its representational strategies both preserve this brand of inscrutability and cancel it (almost from the beginning) in the intimate knowledge only a reader and character might share? is this the novel’s way of taking problems of social and philosophical information gathering seriously, yet not passing them on to the reader? elinor’s true intensity of feeling is at once totally opaque to every figure in her world including those we have assumed are closest to her, and the lens we see through into that world.

While she remains conscious, Marianne’s challenge opens to one paradigm of canonical romanticism, in the inability to see another and creditably acknowledge other people’s meaningful existence.40 elinor’s problem however puts us in direct touch with the type of question that cavell draws from his engagement with austin and Wittgenstein—not to mention King Lear: What could it mean to be knowable? What does it take to make oneself passively available to be known and acknowl-edged and loved by others?41 impossible as it too finally may be, the prospect of ultimate knowing and failing of that knowledge is not the most isolated of all imaginable human positions. even the skeptical tradition’s doubts about knowledge miss the mark as a philosophical paradigm for austen, by presupposing a sovereign individual who does

1083Eric Lindstrom

or does not arrive at secure epistemological closure. any encourage-ment austen might give to the reader to fault Marianne decisively for her belated acknowledgment of elinor’s suffering, on this view, only volunteers either skepticism on the one hand, or romanticism on the other, as the novel’s false versions of its worst and most interesting problem stationed in the limbo in between. it might best be taken as the narrative’s way of defensively getting a jump on, and redirecting the reader away from, these hints at a denser way of being stymied and unavailable to a prospect of sharing in common life. almost as if she wanted her narrative logic to cover the tracks of this necessarily unresolved philosophical impasse at the heart of elinor’s complex and likeable character, austen has Marianne lodge her weakest insights against her sister later in the book, and her sharpest ones earlier: “[y]ou have made me hate myself for ever. —how barbarous have i been to you!” (S, 299); “oh! how easy for those who have no sorrow to talk of exertion! Happy, happy elinor, you cannot have an idea of what i suffer” (S, 211); “you—you who have confidence in no one!” (S, 193).

in the essay i have already referenced, andrew Miller builds his account of the impermeability of one austen character’s thoughts to another out of a larger thematization of the place of her reader. The narrative phenomenology of all fiction makes the “helpless” reader a structural feature of the consumption of novels in this sense; but Miller persuasively argues the universal truth of that observation to be most true, as it were, in austen. Miller goes on to invoke and grapple with cavell in order to provide not only an aesthetic but an ethical understanding of this predicament in early nineteenth-century and Victorian novels—a mode of ethical spectatorship before an experience of narrative moral theater:

The more a narrative holds and guides my helpless attention, leading and directing my will, the more it flatters me into the dubious belief that, in putting the book down, i become again unsubjected, free, unwritten. in producing in her readers a subjectivity that is helpless, austen creates an idealized subjectivity that likes to think that it can help, and will.42

Here, though, i want to preserve the costs of an asymmetry between austen’s different and perhaps dialectically interrelated characters (playing off each other somewhat in the manner of Wittgenstein’s different voices), rather than attempt the successful provision of any universal account of fiction and ethics that would collapse the differ-ences in characterological space. Though in a sense elinor’s lack of

1084 Sense and Sensibility and Suffering

confidence is a burden gradually relieved from her by stages of the novel’s denouement—through her consultations with brandon over the delaford living, her open confiding in Marianne at some point (with a few unhealthy details kept back about Willoughby’s speech) once lucy’s extracted promise dissolves its bonds, and ultimately with her joyous reparation of the very pattern of all broken confidence in edward’s proposal—there also remains something true to the end in the idea that elinor’s fate is the more private of the two in this pairing of sisters.

The novel’s protagonist in terms of affective investment, elinor is not our heroine structurally. Marianne is. Her criteria of satisfaction and intelligibility, like those of Wittgenstein, have had throughout an exposed and violable, learned, confronted—public—stake. and, similarly to the intellectual drama cavell rehearses as the stakes of misreading the later Wittgenstein in Must We Mean What We Say?, Marianne’s unmet challenge at the end of the novel lies in realizing the excessive rigidity in the moral that she just ought to conform to the rules, while absorbing a new, lived knowledge about what kind of social behavior “conforming to the rules” is. What does it mean for Marianne to assume a part seriously in that game? To learn it would offer at once a more critical and more capacious, ordinary, form of knowledge than any hard claim to knowledge or humbling into total submission.43 Hers is the future role as “patroness of a village,” for some reason that austen uses the final chapter to give largely unexam-ined stress; and edward and elinor, both of them oldest children of a family, will contentedly live under her. However, at the same time as Marianne emerges the ultimate figure of account, she no longer makes satisfying sense to the modern reader as an individual. Her tastes and desires as we have come to know them are suppressed. To retrieve the language from Philosophical investigations that provides the epigraph for this final section, Marianne no longer is a possessive individual who knows or has her own character, but at the end of the novel merely is that character in austen’s hand. austen provides no way for the reader to get between the reported experience of Marianne’s character and any separate truth about her interiority. even the report of Marianne’s inwardness—much less its direct representation—becomes too risky for austen to handle. every film adaptation dresses her experience of love in customary signs of a turn toward autonomously realized feeling and will, and repackages her second attachment to colonel brandon at least as symbolically coherent. in the recent bbc adaptation by famed austen screen writer andrew davies, through some semi-ludicrous wild horse references and falconry scenes brandon tames

1085Eric Lindstrom

Marianne by giving her room, by facilitating her reading and practice time at the piano.44

but these things are actually far more empowering if left visibly coerced, rather than plausibly finessed, in the text of Sense and Sensibility. a final acknowledgment of the other minds paradigm as a sustaining and vexed measure throughout this book can be taken from the very dissolution of her “i” into a startlingly different logic constitu-tive instead of the reformed group: it is as if Marianne were a Moses figure who, having wandered out in exile from norland, upon arriving safely at delaford with her (now extended) group must relinquish subjectivity but not life itself to its Pisgah view. by analogy to my basic argument here that the most resonant, if anachronistic, philosophical contexts in which to read austen’s novels are not eighteenth-century empiricist contexts, on the last page of Sense and Sensibility Marianne perhaps as much as Wittgenstein is not a mouthpiece for asserting bourgeois individualist culture—even though i think it’s fair to say we know she represents such a figure nevertheless.45 To fruitful effects toward which i hope this essay’s culminating section has gestured, we can go on productively reading Marianne’s radically shifted char-acter in terms of its aesthetic, narrative, and social landscapes of implication, but we can appeal no further to her. Here too, though not at all in the same way as elinor may prove unavailable to others’ knowledge in the book, Marianne’s situation is ordinary enough for our common experience as readers and still it is not to be pictured. The dull, weighty domesticity of the image makes it appropriate that representation of Marianne comes to a halt with just the gnomic pot alone, with all its manifestations of inner motion and expressive escape left to be conjured.

To speak strictly if idiosyncratically, as cavell does of Wittgenstein in the Claim of Reason, what makes the other’s experience unreach-able is not the immediacy of the sensing of their sensations, but the constructed fiction that at once redoubles and hollows this immediacy out. introducing a hole in that pure immanence—and productive of endless layers into which to fold desire—is the inevitable projection we tend to make of people and characters alike, of their having their own life of sensations, as distinct from being them. “if this makes sense at all, it says rather more or rather less than i wished to say,” maintains cavell in a voice it might prove apt to hear as coming from beyond the last page of the book from Marianne: “for i wanted to express my uniqueness, and this way of expressing it makes it seem so trivial”: just a grammatical distinction between possessive attributes and the

1086 Sense and Sensibility and Suffering

unclaimed immanence of predication (C, 356). i have held fast to cavell as a philosophical guide to Sense and Sensibility throughout this essay, due to the way, analogous to the novel’s (as i have been arguing), in which he is able to present his writing as an opportunity for working out the dissatisfaction that is internal even to successfully negoti-ated criteria. the Claim of Reason presents language’s grammatical limits in relation to human experience even where there is nothing else to take over from linguistic practices, or get us inside them. a late-Wittgensteinian, antirepresentational “picture” of the mind may serve as our best critical guide on how to value the seemingly trivial and frustrating as a positive achievement of reading. it has not only helped me to construct a more rigorous narrative mapping of Sense and Sensibility, which does something useful with the inherited cliché harnessing up the title to the main characters, but to develop what is at stake in a timely relinquishment of Marianne within the strange form of life she occupies as a fictional human character. Just where we are apt to judge austen’s reliance on the thinness of conventions to be a sign of her early novelistic art losing its touch, i have argued that Sense and Sensibility shows philosophical resiliency.

University of Vermont

noTeS1 William Wordsworth, “lines Written a few Miles above Tintern abbey,” line 62.2 ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations, trans. g. e. M. anscombe

(Malden: blackwell, 2001), § 244. Hereafter cited parenthetically by section number in the same translation.

3 Stanley cavell, the Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and tragedy (new york: oxford Univ. Press, 1979). Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number and abbreviated C.

4 for a further discussion of cavell’s relation to Wittgenstein and criteria, see charles altieri, “cavell and Wittgenstein on Morality: The limits of acknowledgment,” in Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism, ed. richard eldridge and bernard rhie (new york: continuum, 2011), 62–77. altieri elaborates a sense of dissatisfaction with cavell’s expressive romanticism and prefers “Wittgenstein’s wari-ness” (71) to this (risk of a gesture at) “imperious authority” (76).

5 among my undergraduate students, i’d like to mention corrie Wilcox in particular for exploring with aplomb the scientific approach i mention below, and to thank her for sharing further time in discussing that interpretive strategy.

6 Quoted in deirdre lefaye, Jane austen: a Family Record, 2nd ed. (cambridge: cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), 112.

7 a background sense of this logic—of presuming to muss up a prim or conceptu-ally tidy austen title through superadding a second “and” that busts the system—certainly features in the recent popular adaptations Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Philadelphia: Quirk books, 2009) and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (Philadelphia: Quirk books, 2009).

1087Eric Lindstrom

8 Jane austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. edward copeland (cambridge: cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 430. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number and abbreviated S. While citations from this novel incorporate the new standard cambridge edition of austen, when i cite from austen’s other novels i will be using paperback oxford World’s classics for convenience of reference.

9 raymond Williams, Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (new york: oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 281.

10 This contemporary medical description of what is called “somatosensory” sensi-bility, or “somatoesthetic” sensibility, connects to one OEd definition that goes back to around 1400 (“readiness of an organ or tissue to respond to sensory stimuli” [s.v., “sensibility,” 2a]). a google search for “somatosensory sensibility,” yields a fascinating result among top hits online: “Warning! The following article is from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). it might be outdated or ideologically biased,” http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/somatesthetic+sensibility

11 Thus Susan Manning adduces lear’s speech, in which he holds his dead daughter in his arms, as part of her extended genealogy; see “Sensibility,” in the Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740–1830, ed. Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee (cambridge: cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), 80–99, esp. 80.

12 david Hume, “of the Standard of Taste,” in Selected Essays, ed. Stephen copley and andrew edgar (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 136–37. from the vantage of a powerfully different philosophical tradition that runs parallel if on widely distant tracks from austen, Jean-luc nancy writes of Hegelian “sense” [Sinn] in the aesthetics that, “Sense is a ‘wondrous’ word that designates ‘the organs of immediate apprehension’ as well as ‘the sense, the thought, the universal underlying the thing.’ The two senses of the word must then have, in their distinction and in the opposition that this distinc-tion presents, the same sense. The sense of the word sense is thus the passage of each one of the two significations into the other” (Hegel: the Restlessness of the negative, trans. Jason Smith and Steven Miller [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2002], 46). “Sensibility,” then, “is becoming” in nancy’s succinct presentation of the Hegelian term: a “passage from a simple determinateness to a property” that involves what “is mine” and “proper to one who senses” (47). Here one does sense the appropriateness to Marianne, as not just a neutral processor, but as a possessive claimant of “her” views even when they are immediately legible as commonplace. for two suggestive if glib pages that play out austen’s plots from Pride and Prejudice to Emma in fast forward alongside a trinity of major texts by g. W. f. Hegel, see Slavoj Žižek, the Sublime Object of ideology (london: Verso, 1989), 62–64.

13 oren izenberg, “Poems out of our Heads,” PMLa 123.1 (2008): 219.14 austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. James Kinsley (oxford: oxford World’s classics,

2004), 100.15 a wonderfully wrought scene in elizabeth inchbald’s a Simple Story, ed. J.

M. S. Tompkins (1791; repr. oxford: oxford World’s classics, 1998), appears as a forerunner of austen as read in my discussion below. in chapter 3 of volume 2, the lively protagonist Miss Milner fetches a bottle of her own “specific for the head-ache” after a falsely pious character who systematically hates her, Mr. Sandford, mentions having a headache as an excuse to insultingly take his leave (106). However Sandford’s ploy backfires on him when the main male character to whom he acts as an advisor, dorriforth, reads Miss Milner’s act as attentive fellow feeling, thus earning his paternal affection. in conversation, dorriforth goes on to notice her blushes (Miss Milner has already made clear her designs to everyone else that she loves him) but he misreads their source even as he “reverence[s]” what he imagines to be her “internal sensations”

1088 Sense and Sensibility and Suffering

(110). dorriforth, that is, doesn’t yet know his own heart or Miss Milner’s, for whom he is to forswear both religious orders and another fiancée in order to marry by the end of this second volume. Throughout this part of the novel, and at a rate exceeding even that found in austen’s Sense and Sensibility, sense, sensibility, insensibility, pain, and the play of access to “internal sensations” are given full play across the text. When Sandford returns to the room, “his lips were closed” by Miss Milner’s civil maneuvering to triumph over him (114).

16 andrew H. Miller, “Perfectly Helpless,” Modern Language Quarterly 63.1 (2002): 70. i should add that Miller’s splendid essay also writes in advance of my own interpre-tive strategy by charting a parallel encounter with the work of cavell.

17 for my sense, not just of the fiction of the novel, but of fictionality as such as a development visible in its historical horizon, i am indebted to catherine gallagher, “The rise of fictionality,” in the novel, Volume 1: History, Geography and Culture, ed. franco Moretti (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006), 336–63; and Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy (chicago: Univ. of chicago Press, 2008). The approach i am taking here tends to oppose the most common valence or summary of free indirect discourse as a “stylistic device that vividly suggests the fallibility of the central perspective” (Thomas Pavel, “The novel in Search of itself,” in the novel, Volume 2: Forms and themes, ed. Moretti [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007], 24). While the gloss on a “fallible” or “unreliable” narrator is routine across treatments of free indirect speech in austen and elsewhere, it also strikes me as retaining a strong, implicit theology of narration in which novels are being asked to play god (if usually only a god manqué) to their own plots and characters. This essay’s concern to read free indirect style at times alongside the ordinary language approach to other minds, then, asks to be taken to gesture in a cavellian manner toward the terrain of life after religion if still before philosophy.

18 See frances ferguson, “Jane austen, Emma, and the impact of form,” Modern Language Quarterly 61.1 (2000): 157–80.

19 Manning comments that “elinor dashwood is a better Smithian than many profes-sional philosophers or economists,” because she “understands that truly moral sentiments involve strenuous stoicism as much as a spontaneous expression of feelings” (85). at a crucial moment in his earliest major essay, “other Minds” (1946), J. l. austin writes:

it is fundamental to talking (as in other matters) that we are entitled to trust others, except in so far as there is some concrete reason to distrust them. believing persons, accepting testimony, is the, or one main, point of talking. We don’t play (competitive) games except in the faith that our opponent is trying to win: if he isn’t, it isn’t a game, but something differ-ent. So we don’t talk with people (descriptively) except in the faith that they are trying to convey information.

austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. J. o. Urmson and g. J. Warnock, 3rd ed. (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 1979), 82–83.

20 See Jacques derrida, the animal that therefore i am, ed. Marie-louise Mallet, trans. david Wills (new york: fordham Univ. Press, 2008), 27–28, and vol. 2 of the beast and the Sovereign, ed. Michel lisse and others, trans. geoffrey bennington (chicago: Univ. of chicago Press, 2011), 244. Wittgenstein writes:

“but doesn’t what you say come to this: that there is no pain, for example, without pain-behavior?” —it comes to this: only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious. (§ 281)

1089Eric Lindstrom

21 Margaret anne doody, introduction to Sense and Sensibility, ed. James Kinsley (oxford: oxford World’s classics, 2004), xxix.

22 cavell, Philosophy the day after tomorrow (cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2005), 124. See also eric lindstrom, “austen and austin,” European Romantic Review 22 (august 2011): 501–20.

23 in Speech acts in Literature (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), J. Hillis Miller instructively points out that for little apparent reason austin chooses anger as his privileged example of the problem of other minds, whereas Wittgenstein’s famous embodiment of the problem is pain; see 160–76. french theory reaching its most complex expression in derrida, however, addresses many of the same fixations on the (im)possibility of secret experience through the performative declarations of love. Surely that derridean site of language provides a necessary supplement to the ordinary language approach to suffering, given not only the marriage plot of Sense and Sensibility but Willoughby’s repeatedly betrayed loves.

24 in the Economy of Character: novels, Market Culture, and the business of inner Meaning (chicago: Univ. of chicago Press, 1998), deidre Shauna lynch not only explores the shared cultural space of literary and printed “characters” in eighteenth-century novelistic discourse, but the way in which the relationship between elinor and Marianne preserves yet complicates the pro forma code to the title through the narrative dynamics of Sense and Sensibility. according to lynch,

Sense and Sensibility is in the final analysis very precise about how the two sisters are divided—which is in another manner than Marianne thinks. in conformity with the codes of inner meaning, it is through not displaying that she is a heroine that elinor qualifies as one. Through free indirect discourse elinor’s life is delivered into the safekeeping of an impersonal narrator, who takes up the burden of that language of sentiment and self-expression which, with near-fatal results, Marianne has clamorously made her own. (214)

for an important development of the multiple, shifting concept of the person in fictional and social space, with occasional reference to austen, see amélie oksenberg rorty, “characters, Persons, Selves, individuals,” in theory of the novel: a Historical approach, ed. Michael McKeon (baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000), 537–53. on the question of how to preserve and engage the “early” status of Sense and Sensibility outside a teleology of narrative modes, see William H. galperin’s nuanced account of the shift from epistolarity to free indirect discourse in the Historical austen (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 109–37.

25 i am thinking of William deresiewicz’s tempered distinction between an “early” and a “major” phase of austen’s career—drawn basically along a line that separates the novels that did and those that did not experience a lag time before ultimate publication; see Jane austen and the Romantic Poets (new york: columbia Univ. Press, 2004), 18–55. However, i depart from the implications of deresiewicz’s book in seeming to rank these two period’s relative merits based on an isolable criterion of artistic achievement. i not only find an “early” novel provocative in this essay, but want to credit Sense and Sensibility’s exact way of structuring its intensity and lack of finish for the effects i pursue.

26 T. S. eliot, “a game of chess,” in the Waste Land, from the Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (new york: Harcourt brace & company, 1952), lines 113–14.

27 With conviction but somewhat loosely, i try out an analogy here: T. S. eliot’s idea of the individual consciousness as “cell” or monad, which he adapts from f. H.

1090 Sense and Sensibility and Suffering

bradley’s thought (the subject of his undefended doctoral dissertation of 1916) stands in a kind of mirror reverse relation to Jane austen’s kinship with Wittgenstein’s “public” language rules.

28 See galperin, 110–25; see also ferguson.29 See dorrit cohn, transparent Minds: narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness

in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984).30 My writing on elinor as a character of “constrained interiority”—as the unknowable

rather than unknowing subject, or elsewhere, as lockbox—undoubtedly plays off the main psychological and sexual keynotes of eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s famous account of the novel. in Sedgwick’s account, elinor’s subjectivity is “hollow[ed]” out as an unhappy countenance to Marianne’s policed impulses (“Jane austen and the Masturbating girl,” in tendencies [durham: duke Univ. Press, 1993], 122).

31 This is meant to chime with some of the first readers’ comments on Sense and Sensibility—such as the one made by the smart, fashionable, and well-connected lady bessborough—that the novel ends “stupidly” because of the precipitate and narrator-controlled shift in Marianne’s character (quoted in claire Tomalin, Jane austen: a Life [new york: Vintage, 1999], 220–21).

32 Typically this emphasis is read to counteract a generically “romantic” position of isolation. for an articulate handling of the view that Wittgenstein’s argument against private language puts yet greater stress for that on the stakes of intelligibility, and not merely by way of a contrastive antagonism between Wittgenstein’s life and thought, see rei Terada, “Philosophical Self-denial: Wittgenstein and the fear of Public language,” Common Knowledge 8 (2002): 464–81. “[H]ard-core belief in the public nature of language and a terror of isolation may well go together,” Terada writes. “The more public language is, the more awful failures of communication must be. When one can no longer imagine that an utterance retains a meaning independent of its reception, an ineffective utterance matters more” (464).

33 a comparion between the novelist’s art and puppetry comes to mind; Kenneth gross remarks that gepetto—as the fathering artist of Pinocchio—“has no food in his house, only a picture of a boiling kettle stuck upon his wall” (Puppet: an Essay on Uncanny Life [chicago: chicago Univ. Press, 2011], 102).

34 austen apparently liked the joke about representation. She repeats it in Persuasion with the much more sympathetic figure of admiral croft. Where the admiral’s consternation at the boat in the bath print shop window stems precisely from his worldly expertise, however, Mr. Woodhouse’s incomprehension is a riff on his fearful hobbyhorses and childlike cultural illiteracy. See austen, Persuasion, ed. Kinsley and lynch (oxford: oxford World’s classics, 2004), 137.

35 for discussion of the Wittgenstein passage in another context, see adela Pinch, thinking about Other People in nineteenth-Century british Writing (cambridge: cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), 130.

36 See Hina nazar, “The imagination goes Visiting: Jane austen, Judgment, and the Social,” nineteenth-Century Literature 59 (September 2004): 145–78.

37 in a splendid essay on (among other things) emma’s reverse sensibility to the merits of Jane fairfax, Mary ann o’farrell opens a line of commentary with inter-esting connections to whatever might prove thicker than blood between the dashwood sisters: “if openness is enjoined to like reserve, it is imagined to want it, and the apparent complementarity of the friendship one can see in advance of its existence (‘those two should be friends’) is revealed to be a one-sided supplementarity: the friend urged upon one is perceived as able to complete, to answer, to compensate. if this

1091Eric Lindstrom

logic works in reverse—if reserve lacks openness—openness cannot know this, and its seems impossible to see the corrective friend’s lack as anything but the recessive form taken by what is in fact an excess and a compensation for what one has oneself” (“Jane austen’s friendship,” in Janeites: austen’s disciples and devotees, ed. lynch [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000], 49).

38 i almost suggest a godlike, artless, botcher. a comment more attuned with austen’s moral instincts and art might expand the idea of Marianne the solipsist’s illness as a natural recognition that her radical divide between self and other bears a structural relationship to infection. The experience of illness/infection/invasion brings home just how concretely the other is internal, especially when one takes into account how austen describes Marianne’s falling ill in the most picturesque nooks of cleveland.

39 My prose in bridging the quotations of preceding sentences tries to replicate richard eldridge’s sense that the conventionalist, naturalist, communitarian, neopragmatist, and neo-aristotelian views of Wittgenstein’s thought are all dogmatic reductions of his “writerliness”; see Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, intentionality, and Romanticism (chicago: Univ. of chicago Press, 1997), 86–120, esp. 107.

40 Here claims about the “romantic” and the “ordinary language” response to others’ pain do not say they are incompatible. rupert read holds that Philosophical investigations “contains a powerful philosophy concerning the pain of others, an ethic of acknowledgment that can found a strong anti-racist stance, a determination to truly see the other” (“Wittgenstein’s Philosophical investigations as a War book,” new Literary History 41 [2010]: 594).

41 beyond cavell’s terms of acknowledgment and availability, another philosophical approach to this problem can be found in Martin Seel, “letting oneself be determined: a revised concept of Self-determination,” in Philosophical Romanticism, ed. nikolas Kompridis (abingdon: routledge, 2006), 81–96.

42 a. Miller, 73.43 See cavell, “The availability of Wittgenstein’s later Philosophy,” in Must We Mean

What We Say? (cambridge: cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), 44–72.44 Sense and Sensibility, directed by John alexander (bbc, 2008).45 a wider framework for this claim might be developed by situating my account of

Marianne in reference to the historically over-arching discussion in nancy armstrong’s “The fiction of bourgeois Morality and the Paradox of individualism,” in particular her claim that “[t]he novel takes it upon itself to solve this contradiction by creating fantastic situations in which one can become a good member of society precisely by risking exclusion from it” (the novel, Volume 2, 350).