Sense & Sensibility Chapter 17

How much money is enough? What does the future hold?

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Transcript

Frances:  welcome to the amateur austinite. i'm frances duncan, author, austinite, life coach. my co host today is emma dunning.

Emma:  i'm gonna go for, real estate obsessed.

Frances:  and today we are discussing chapter 17 of sense and sensibility. edward's visiting at barton cottage. things are a little little bit weird to start off, and then there's this whole discussion about wealth and what constitutes wealth,

Emma:  it's a chapter of conversation. everyone is sitting presumably in the parlour. missus dashwood, eleanor, mary anne, edward, and even margaret, and they are talking about the nature of life, what makes a happy life and the nature of people about character, about their own characters and about character in general. it's a really interesting chapter almost entirely made up of dialogue, but it's sort of basic underlying philosophies that reveal the characters.

Frances:  edward says that he wishes to be happy just like everybody else, but just like everybody else, he's gotta do it in his own way. basically, the point you just made.

Emma:  can money buy happiness? that's an eternal question.

Frances:  mary anne says, what have wealth or grandeur to do with happiness? oh, mary anne, anne, you are so

Emma:  naive. but then she's busted by eleanor who, you know, who makes the the comment that, mary anne's idea of the basic competence is actually quite a lot of money. it's 1,800 to £2,000, which is a lot. it's wealth. it is not competence.

Frances:  mary anne has it feels like it's almost a disdain for wealth as we're talking about this.

Emma:  what does it have to do with happiness?

Frances:  for shame, money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it. studies have shown that after a certain amount of money, yeah, it doesn't necessarily make you more happy, but having a certain level of it reduces a whole lot of stress. if you're not worried about keeping a roof over your head and food

Emma:  in your stomach, you're gonna be happier. absolutely. so money does buy happiness is the bottom line. it buys you financial security. you need to have a place to live that is secure and you need to know where your food is coming from and you need to know that your family is safe and that's what money buys you. so that's i guess what they're talking about how much money do they individually feel you need to have to have those things? and mary anne's idea of the basic requirements, for life is much higher than eleanor's, which is at about a thousand pounds per year we're talking. so they're all living on £500 a year at the moment. the ladies, four

Frances:  of them, are living on £500. what's interesting about this discussion is they end up with the amount of money you're talking about. eleanor's yearly income ends up about £1,000. mary anne's yearly income ends up

Emma:  to be about £2,000. i did not realize that, frances. what an interesting little seed

Frances:  that's put in there. marianne doesn't think that she's being extravagant when she's talking about having a proper establishment of servants. potentially two carriages and hunters, those things are excessive. absolutely. hunters, man, they just sit in your stables eating their heads off most of the year, and they only come out in

Emma:  the hunting season. i don't know if that's a couple of months in the winter when the ground is hard enough.

Frances:  and edward makes a good point that not everybody hunts. i bet he doesn't because it's flashy.

Emma:  most people do, as mary anne, by which she means willoughby does.

Frances:  but edward's not the sort because he doesn't wanna hang out with the boys and kill things.

Emma:  he's quieter, chill. and margaret does the classic thing. i do this all the time. what if i won the lottery? what if i had a million dollars? you spend all this time speculating on what you would do with this money that you don't have. i don't buy lottery tickets, but i still speculate on, well, what if i got that power ball of $4,000,000 now what would i do with it and how much would i give to this person and they have this beautiful conversation which reveals a lot about their characters teasing each other about, edward in particular, is teasing mary anne that she would spend it all on books about how to admire twisted trees and, her favourite poets and that eleanor would order the art prints. it's a really kind of intimate conversation. actually, right at the beginning there's a bit, from mrs. dashwood shows how really intimate edward is with the family. like, missus dashwood is teasing him about his character. she's saying to him, he's got no inclination for expense, no affection for strangers, no profession, and no assurance. like, that's pretty incisive stuff, and you have to know someone quite well to say those things to them, about them, without being offensive. and he takes it in good part, so clearly she knows that that's not gonna offend him. so that did get really close. they were living together for six months. yeah.

Frances:  and they didn't really leave the house much. everything was on the estate. in the first paragraph of this chapter, he arrives and is still a little bit awkward, but missus dashwood warms him up, and the line that austen says is, a man could not very well be in love with either of her daughters without extending the passion to

Emma:  her. she is so charming.

Frances:  i was going with that as creepy and hilarious, but yes, that too. but edward needs time to warm up. he's not good with people, and that's what she's teasing him about. you're just not good with people and that's okay

Emma:  we love you anyway. it's just a it's a really beautiful family scene this chapter.

Frances:  and they accept him? this is the difference between his family and the dashwoods because mrs. ferris, his mother, has views. she wants him to be something grand.

Emma:  eleanor teases missus jack dashwood about her, renovations, about her idea of how much renovations will cost as well, which,

Frances:  coming back to that joke when she was like, no, you're not gonna have the money. come

Emma:  off it. missus dashwood said she doesn't know what she would do with £2,000, and, eleanor says start your renovations, and you'll find you'll have no problem.

Frances:  amongst all this familiarity, dashwood. he calls missus dashwood missus dashwood appropriately, but mary anne and margaret get their first names. they don't have the miss in front of it, but eleanor is still miss dashwood. he's trying to keep a little bit of distance, i think. keep himself safe. and this is the thing that's going on in the background that nobody knows, because we are gonna have spoilers. i know you always tell me off. part of the reason that he's a bit uncomfortable and doesn't really know how to behave with the dash words is because he's just come from seeing lucy, and so he's gotta keep in the forefront of his mind, that's the woman i'm gonna marry. i can't let them think i'm gonna marry eleanor. i may be in love with her, but i can't do anything about that. promise to somebody else. and he brings up mary anne's love of the maxim that no one can ever be in love more than once. and you gotta wonder if he's thinking about himself when he brings that up. i thought i loved lucy. he's actually asking whether your opinions on that have changed, and mary ann hilariously, at my time of life, opinions are tolerably fixed

Emma:  meaning that i'm so mature. i know my own mind. but of course, she's 17, and 17 year olds are known indeed for having tolerably fixed opinions and that 17 year olds are quite black and white thinkers and they are very certain and they are about to be proved wrong. life always proves 17 year olds wrong, and marianne doesn't know that yet.

Frances:  well, she's barely ever left home. thinks she knows everything, and she does know the things within her

Emma:  small purview of the world,

Frances:  but there's a whole bigger world out there that she hasn't experienced. it seems like she's never been to london before. it's unlikely that they would have been. it would have been mentioned if they had. didn't seem like the dashwoods had a yearly trip to london for the season. and that's the biggest part of the world at this point in time if you're in the uk. but yeah, edward notices that she's changed. he refers to her as a little more grave. and then there's a whole, oh, no. she's never exactly been happy. she's just eager. the nuance of the language, and i think some of it's lost because they're also words that we use differently now.

Emma:  yeah, she's never been gay. or merry but lively. interesting. they do discuss how you can tell what people are really like, whether you go by what other people say about them or what people say about themselves. and there's a a big conversation between mary anne and eleanor about how much you should rely on other people's opinions. so this is where the reputation thing comes in because reputation is so important. but how much you should judge for yourself and how how much time you should observe someone before you decide what kind of person they are. and marianne's got the impression that your judgement were given to us merely to be subservient to those of our neighbours, this has always been your doctrine i'm sure and eleanor says no that's not what i meant, i've meant that i want you to treat people well but that your own judgement, is more important than what everyone else says you should do.

Frances:  and i'm not trying to change your opinions of people, you can still have your own thoughts, etcetera. i just wanna influence your behavior. so externally, you're doing the right thing. that's the important thing.

Emma:  you don't have to think well of everybody. you just have to behave well to everybody. yes. and then edward makes a comment about his own shyness, that his shyness makes him seem negligent in his management he treats other people, that he seems negligent when it's only that he's being held back by his natural awkwardness. and i think that's so true. shy people often do seem standoffish, and other people misinterpret their shyness as being rude when it's actually that they are just very awkward. yep. i very related to that sentence. i never wish to offend, but i am so foolishly shy that i often seem negligent when i'm only kept back by my natural awkwardness. i've many times been called awkward. thank you. but sometimes it will be that person's a snob or they are not interested or they're standoffish rather than identifying that it's actual shyness.

Frances:  yeah.

Emma:  he gives a definition of what the basis of shyness is too. it's about, a sense of inferiority, says edward. if he could persuade himself that his manners were perfectly easy and graceful, then he should not be shy. so that if you know your own worth, then you are not shy. if you believe that you are good in social situations then you become good in social situations. but then if it goes too far that way it becomes cockiness. and we know who's cocky. but then mary anne says he's reserved and edward starts. he turns red. he goes back into his shell because reserved means you're holding something back.

Frances:  because he is. he's keeping so much inside just like eleanor, which is why they're great partners for each other. they know how to keep things internal and not spew them out for the whole world to see and know. he has more secrets than other people because he's got the secret engagement, and he's secretly in love with eleanor. but, yeah, that's why he is the way he is.

Emma:  so he has a guilty secret, and when he thinks that somebody might perhaps have detected or sort of stepping into that a secret exists, he's back to being silent and dull again.

Frances:  at the start of the chapter he was that way, then he got comfortable, and he was enjoying himself being part of the family, and then he remembered i can never be a part of this family, and it sort of threw him back out again. poor Edward

Emma:  we have sad looks on our faces. poor edward. i always thought that edward was really drippy. i'm feeling more sympathetic towards edward.

Frances:  when you think about what's actually going on for him, and what a good person he is to maintain an engagement to somebody that, even before he met eleanor, he was tired of the engagement, and now he's in love with somebody else. but he knows that it is the appropriate thing to maintain the engagement, and as far as he's aware, lucy is in love with him. she is playing her part very well, and he does not want to hurt her, let alone let her down.

Emma:  and also he has to make this visit to barton cottage because he said he would, and he knows that it's gonna be painful for him, but he's doing it because he said he would, and he's keeping his word.

Frances:  he is a good man. yeah. and that is our discussion of chapter 17 of sense and sensibility by jane austen. i've been frances duncan. this has been emma dunning. thank you for listening. we wish you happy reading.