Sense & Sensibility Chapter 8

Colonel Brandon loves Marianne but does Edward love Elinor?

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Transcript

Frances:  Kia ora, welcome to the amateur austinite. i'm frances duncan, author austinite life coach. my cohost is rachel Pilois book buyer austinite, an all around nerd. hi. our canine cohost is daisy.

Rachel:  sniffs from daisy.

Frances:  today, we're discussing chapter eight of sense and sensibility. we get to learn a little bit more about missus jennings, and she announces that colonel brandon is in love with Marianne anne, the Dashwood's would discuss the differing opinions of it. and when eleanor leaves the room, mary anne is all like, what about Edward? he must be deathly ill. it's been two whole weeks, and he hasn't come for Elinor love the dramatics.

Rachel:  Mrs jennings is an astute woman. she clearly sees things before other people do.

Frances:  she's kind of a delightful character too. yeah. she's described as old in the previous chapter, though. she can't be that old because her eldest daughter is 27, so she's probably maybe in her fifties.

Rachel:  yeah. i'd say so. she's older than missus dashwood.

Frances:  definitely. yeah. and if she is in her fifties by at least ten years. she's a contrast different kind of widow than missus dashwood because she's got it's referred to as an ample jointure, which in my head always makes it sound like she's got an ample butt or a big joint of meat. neither of which is correct. it means she has her dead husband's money till she dies, then the principal reverts back to his estate, all the children, etcetera.

Rachel:  she has all the money until she dies, and then it goes to her kids.

Frances:  but she got money. Mrs dashwood don't have money. yeah. different kind of widow.

Rachel:  sadly, mister dashwood didn't have a joint chair.

Frances:  she likes marrying people off. she's married off her daughters. what else she gonna do?

Rachel:  this is emma when she's older.

Frances:  is it not emma now?

Rachel:  this is emma when she can't be bothered trying to be subtle anymore.

Frances:  oh, yeah.

Rachel:  where it's like, sadly, Mr knightley passed away, and she's ridiculously wealthy. she's always thought herself a good matchmaker, now she's old, she's just like, i'm just gonna say it like i think.

Frances:  one of the major things in missus bennett's life is trying to get her daughters married. do you think that after they're married, she'll start looking at other people and trying to pair them off?

Rachel:  yes. emma would have been like, i'm in wedded bliss. other people need to be too. and maybe that's what missus jennings is doing. i had a good marriage. my husband left me wealthy. let's get all the other youngsters married.

Frances:  that does sound nice. and she does care about making sure that one of them's pretty and one of them's got money. i can't picture missus bennett trying to marry off other people's kids because she don't really care. yeah. that's true. that's true.

Rachel:  she can see that colonel brandon is in love with Marianne for him, it's almost like a love at first sight. and mary anne, doesn't even realize that he is in the room or anywhere in the world. she's met him and she's like, oh, that's a guy.

Frances:  missus jennings does make her assumption based on a very brief the first time that he met her, he listened to her singing. and the second time that he met her, he listened to her singing again. that is what she's basing it off. she is not wrong. yeah. but also, does that mean that colonel brandon did not listen to previous people? i don't think so because he's polite, and he would have listened to anybody that was playing.

Rachel:  yeah. he would. he is a good man. he would've shown all the politeness but maybe it was just how attentively he listened to marianne. maybe he couldn't look away.

Frances:  i like that in some adaptations, you can kinda tell what's going on internally with colonel brandon because we later discover that mary anne reminds him of his lost love. and in some adaptations, you kind of get that impression that he walks in and it's like he's gone somewhere else or he's seeing a ghost. mhmm.

Rachel:  yeah. like, he is seeing his first love again. maybe they look pretty similar as well as behaving similarly.

Frances:  i think sometimes when people have similar personalities that you then think they look similar even though they don't.

Rachel:  i can understand that.

Frances:  mary anne considers him an old bachelor because he's 35. he is five years younger than her mother. so decrepit. it's so much funnier because we know she's gonna end up marrying this guy. she's like, god, he's old. he's old enough to be my father, true, which is a bit ick. and he's talking about rheumatism. but, potentially, the rheumatism, there is some evidence that some rheumatism, quite broad term, by the way. could be caused by injury. this could be a hangover from his days in the military. this could be an old war wound that acts up when it's cold she's missing things that would make him a perfect hero for her. he's an ex military man. he's injured and he's heartbroken. he's had this grand love. he's a real hero.

Rachel:  mhmm. it's true. colonel brandon is probably one of the, better leading men, as well. i love him. i would oh, wait. how old is mary anne?

Frances:  17.

Rachel:  it is quite an age gap, because that's a seventeen year age gap. yeah. that's more than Emma and  knightley.

Frances:  eleanor says that 35 and 17 had better not have anything to do with matrimony together. yeah.

Rachel:  it's definitely on the the higher end, but they could both do worse.

Frances:  mary anne has a wonderful discourse on women of the age of 27. since rachel is at the time of recording 28, i'm gonna make her read it.

Rachel:  a woman of seven and 20, said marianne after pausing a moment, can never hope to feel or inspire affection again. and if her home be uncomfortable or her fortune small, i can suppose that she might bring herself to submit to the offices of a nurse for the sake of the provision and security of a wife. in his marrying such a woman, therefore, there would be nothing unsuitable. it would be a compact of convenience and the world would be satisfied. in my eyes, it would be no marriage at all, but that would be nothing. to me, it would seem only a commercial exchange in which each wished to be benefited at the expense of the other. rough. so rude. i still deserve love. okay? yeah. i got time. my clock hasn't run out yet. and, actually, even if it did,

Frances:  eleanor even says it's impossible to convince you that a woman of 27 could possibly feel anything for a man of 35. i know you're never gonna get that. you gotta remember at this point, when this is published, jane austen is older than 27. she later writes anne elliot, a woman who is single at seven and 20, as eleanor says, and she still gets to marry for love. yeah. admittedly, there is charlotte lucas, but she makes the prudent choice for herself. she goes, i need to marry

Rachel:  to be able to survive. here's a guy who'll marry me. i'm gonna do it. charlotte's really practical about it. but she's not a romantic person. so even when she would have been younger and of a more marriageable age she probably would have made a similar choice, i think, if mister collins had arrived, like, a few years earlier. i still think that she would have gone with mister collins if he'd proposed because we don't get any information about this. but the fact that charlotte is not already married means most likely she hadn't had any offers made to her.

Frances:  yes.

Rachel:  because she is, again, a practical person. she says she's not a romantic. so if she was a romantic, she would have been more like lizzie. she would have waited it now until she found someone. but if she had no other options or, like, no other offers, even if she'd been, you know, 22, 23, she would have been like, yeah. you have a comfortable home. you can give me what i need. you have great connections.

Frances:  it must be remembered that i'm 27 whole line was created for the 2005 movie. but even then, she is roughly that age in the book, so it's like oh, no. she is. do you think that perhaps she's signposting the creation of charlotte lucas and mary anne's speech here? a woman who chooses to marry someone for the provision and security of a wife.

Rachel:  yeah. i think that's possible. maybe charlotte lucas is kinda like what jane well, actually, no. i was gonna say maybe it's what jane would have done in that situation, but actually we

Frances:  know she knows.

Rachel:  we know she doesn't. yeah. so maybe charlotte lucas is what jane thinks society should have thought of jane. that if she had been offered, she should have said yes. and that's what charlotte does. but that's the complete opposite of marianne, it is a lot of work to entice her to forget romantic notions.

Frances:  if mary anne herself did not marry and then some guy came along at 27, do you think she'd still follow her own advice and marry the guy because she didn't have other options? do you think she'd still be holding out for her romance?

Rachel:  i think she'd hold out.

Frances:  yeah.

Rachel:  maybe once she got to 30, then she might do it. but especially because marion is is beautiful, she probably could still get a lot of, men's attention. she's got pretty privilege.

Frances:  yeah. like lizzie, she can choose. she can pick and choose because guys are gonna like her because she's pretty. charlotte's always been plain

Rachel:  charlotte compared to mary anne, charlotte did come from a good family. her father was a sir.

Frances:  well, i mean, he was knighted. he used to run a shop, but we know that she doesn't really have any dowry.

Rachel:  but the family is respectable.

Frances:  yes. definitely.

Rachel:  technically, mary anne comes from a respectable family, but they're not in respectable circumstances.

Frances:  yeah.

Rachel:  and by the end, marianne is a bit more she goes through enough things in this book that it kind of changes her. but i think if those things hadn't happened, and at this point in the story, she would still hold out.

Frances:  i have a theory that potentially austen uses illness as a mode of character development. mhmm.

Rachel:  the potential of dying or of losing someone.

Frances:  yeah. helps them because mary anne does grow, and part of that is because she gets sick. but she actually does a lot of the romantic tropes that she's really into. in this passage, eleanor's making fun of her and being like, if he was sick, wouldn't you think he he was great? like, don't you have romantic ideas about flushed cheeks and hollow eyes, etcetera etcetera? again, falling into the the tropes of the books of the time because mary anne very romantic, or is this whole chapter about mary anne's future? she's talking about this guy is too old for me to ever consider marrying. i would never marry somebody that i didn't love. and then Elinor was talking about people being sick. a lot of this ends up being mary anne's fate. she marries this older guy. she does not love him at the time, but she grows too. and then she's the one that ends up really sick and doing all the dramatics.

Rachel:  i think that this chapter is just jane austen doing excellent foreshadowing. mean, i don't know her writing process. maybe she wrote this chapter and then later on was like, what am i gonna do with these characters? and then was like, she said she wasn't gonna do all this shit. let's just get her to do it all.

Frances:  chapter eight, and jane austen is potentially already setting us up for the end of the novel.

Rachel:  yeah. skills. in austen, i feel like there's a lot of marriages of convenience.

Frances:  because the concept of marrying for love was still relatively new, and people would say and do the correct things, but it didn't necessarily mean that they were in love. they barely knew each other.

Rachel:  austen obviously shows, derision for marriages of convenience.

Frances:  if it's purely for convenience, if you're using somebody, that's different. if we go back to the collinses in pride and prejudice, obviously, lizzie is judging charlotte. i'm not sure that jane austen is because the narrator says perhaps lizzie is more clear sighted when it comes to wickham marrying someone for money, but not okay with charlotte marrying someone for money. but you do get to see that charlotte and mister collins are both happy and both having their needs met just because it's not something that lizzie would choose for herself, and it's not that either of them are using the other.

Rachel:  mhmm. yeah. that's true.

Frances:  but agreed. austin does think there should be affection in relationships, but practicality is still gonna weigh out. you should not marry someone that you're not able to have a life together.

Rachel:  yeah. i guess in many ways, she is practical about it, all of the main love stories yes, there is romance, but they are majority practical as well in the end.

Frances:  because it needs to be more than just romantic. lady susan says a funny thing about i'm romantic that i need more than just money.

Rachel:  mhmm.

Frances:  they're joking about if colonel brandon had been ill. mary anne would have been into it because it's romantic. as soon as Elinor leaves the room, mary anne dramatizes. i'm sure edward ferrars is not well. we have now been here almost a fortnight, and yet he does not come. they live ages away to start with. mhmm. it will take time and money to get to them. also, they've literally just moved there. edward would not be so rude to turn up within a fortnight. he would wanna make sure that they were safely settled.

Rachel:  and did they extend an invitation that he could show up whenever?

Frances:  missus dashwood did when they were leaving, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to wait till after they're settled for the invitation to be extended for then be able to accept it.

Rachel:  yeah. i would agree with that.

Frances:  before, you were like, why the hell is he hanging out with his sister? because he doesn't have anywhere that he can be safely at the moment. potentially, he would want to come and visit the dashboards. eventually, he does. but he knows that that's dangerous for him to do.

Rachel:  yeah. also, what are the rules about him visiting a house with four women, two of which are marriage able age

Frances:  one of them is a widow. he's safe. he's safe. they've got proper chaperonage.

Rachel:  just checking.

Frances:  we discover that mary anne was trying to push eleanor and edward together on the final day, that they were at Norland she would walk out of the room to give them privacy, and he just followed her out. yeah. like, oh, you're going? okay. i'll go too. i'll go too. let's go. which is supposed to be funny, and it is funny. he probably didn't trust himself to be alone with eleanor. i'm not sure if it's appropriate or not because reading regency romances now, you can never be alone in a room with a man, especially with the door closed. but people do it all the time in Austen

Rachel:  yeah. it happens a lot. darcy and lizzie have a lot of times. emma and knightley have so many times where it's just the two of them.

Frances:  yeah. so i don't think it's inappropriate.

Rachel:  i wonder how that kinda started. is that a trope that came about, later on, where that was how we perceived that kind of time period?

Frances:  it might be one of the things that georgette heyer did in some of her novels. i'll have to read some again because a lot of people jumped on stuff that she did, and that was just the continuing understanding deciding what that period was like, even though it wasn't necessarily. still great novels, by the way. very funny. i think it was appropriate for them to be alone together in the room, but maybe he just felt uncomfortable. he knew that he couldn't speak openly with her, but also mary anne was probably super obvious. yeah. she is not subtle.

Rachel:  subtle is the opposite of mary anne's character.

Frances:  here's more foreshadowing to mary anne's fate in the novel. talking about eleanor and edward, and eleanor's reactions to edward not being there, mary anne says, when is or melancholy? when does she try to avoid society or appear restless and dissatisfied in it? blueprint for mary anne's reactions when she's separated from willoughby.

Rachel:  yeah. this is exactly how marianne responds to willoughby, but maybe that's how she thinks she needs to respond, how she's supposed to respond, because that's how she thinks eleanor is supposed to respond.

Frances:  yeah. it says at the time something, like, she would have been embarrassed to get up and have rested well. she needs to have been in distress, and people need to know that she's doing the appropriate things, that she's spending a sleepless night.

Rachel:  and that people should feel bad for her for it. feel sorry for me. pick me. pick me. marianne is a pick me girl.

Frances:  and that's our discussion of chapter eight of sense and sensibility. i've been frances duncan. this has been rachel Pilois bye. and daisy. thank you for listening, and we wish you happy reading.

Rachel:  and this is what daisy has to say on the topic.