Hand in Hand: The Erotics of Touch in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

ABSTRACT

The significance of Elinor and Marianne Dashwood’s bond in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility has been well acknowledged by critics. In the midst of lackluster suitors, malicious relations, and brazen gossips, Elinor and Marianne’s relationship seems the only one that really matters in the end. Yet despite the centrality of Elinor and Marianne’s intimacy, the novel concludes with their respective marriages to Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon. Turning our attention toward the phenomenology of hands and touch in Sense and Sensibility, however, changes the way we approach narrative by undermining the teleology of the marriage plot. In contrast to the hollow acts and mediating objects of affection offered by potential suitors, Willoughby and Edward Ferrars, Elinor and Marianne’s handholding constitutes deeply affective and unmediated moments of physical contact that attest to the primacy of touch underlying the most passionate attachments. In this light, the concluding marriages do not recant the rest of the novel but rather serve a strategic choice motivated by what these marriages make possible. Far from enforcing heterosexual closure, Elinor and Marianne’s marriages fulfill a different agenda: preserving the sisters’ lasting haptic contact with one another.

KEYWORDS:

• Jane Austen
• narrative theory
• marriage plot
• queer theory
• hands
• phenomenology

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Ros Ballaster (London: Penguin, 2014), p. 20, cited henceforth parenthetically in text as SS.

2 See Joe Bray, The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 114–6, Peter Sabor, “Good, Bad, and Ugly Letters in Sense and Sensibility,” Persuasions On-line, 32.1 (2011). There has been some debate about whether Austen’s original draft of Sense and Sensibility was epistolary or not.

3 See Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 113 and Joe Bray, The Epistolary Novel, chapter 5, for more on Austen’s transition from first-person epistolary to third-person free indirect discourse.

4 For more on Austen’s use of free indirect discourse, see Susan Sniader Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), chapter 4 and D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

5 Susan Sniader Lanser, “Sapphic Dialogics: Historical Narratology and the Sexuality of Form,” Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses, eds. Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik, (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010), p. 193.

6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed. Claude Lefort, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 142.

7 Judith Butler, Senses of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), p. 51.

8 Early examples of this tendency include Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), chapter 8 and Tony Tanner, Jane Austen, (Mass: Harvard University Press, 1986), chapter 3. See also Tom Keymer, Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), chapter 3. Keymer has suggested that “a properly flexible account of Sense and Sensibility would see it as a novel in which simple binaries break down” (65).

9 See Margaret Anne Doody, Introduction to Sense and Sensibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. vii–xlvi, especially xii-xiv. Doody has shown that “sense” and “sensibility” were more intimately connected in the eighteenth century.

10 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Critical Inquiry, 17.4 (1991): 818–37, especially 831–2. John Wiltshire also suggests Elinor and Marianne occupy these opposite poles of embodiment. See John Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body: ‘The Picture of Health’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chapter 1.

11 Susan Sniader Lanser, “Of Closed Doors and Open Hatches: Heteronormative Plots in Eighteenth-Century (Women’s) Studies”, The Eighteenth Century, 53.3 (2012): 285.

12 On rethinking the teleology of the eighteenth-century marriage plot, see Stephanie Insley Hershinow “The Incest Plot: Marriage, Closure, and the Novel’s Endogamy”, The Eighteenth Century, 61.2 (2020): 149–64. Hershinow argues that (socially, if not biologically) incestuous marriages trouble the linearity of the marriage plot convention by turning the plot in on itself.

13 Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientation, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 74. In Touch, Sexuality, and Hands in British Literature, 1740–1901 (New York: Routledge, 2022), Chapter 5, Kimberly Cox likewise argues for the erotic potential of touch to cut across heteronormative binaries using Ahmed’s phenomenology.

14 Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 58.

15 Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 43.

16 Heydt-Stevenson, Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions, p. 43.

17 Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body, p. 33.

18 In Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, Johnson has also noted, “Edward never hints at any consciousness that he may carelessly have created an attachment in Elinor that he had no intention of reciprocating” (58).

19 Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body, p. 41.

20 Terry Castle, “Sister-Sister,” London Review of Books, 53.3 (August 3, 1995): n.p. In “The Divine Miss Jane: Jane Austen, Janeites, and the Discipline of Novel Studies,” Boundary 2, 23.3 (1996): 147, Claudia L. Johnson discusses the astounding backlash both Castle and Sedgwick received in the 1990s for their work on Austen, noting “the wonder is rather that Austen’s normality itself now appears beyond question to so many.” Queer readings of Austen have since abounded in twenty-first-century scholarship. Notable examples include Clara Tuite, Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, Or the Secret of Style (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003); George Haggerty, “Fanny Price: ‘Is she solemn?—Is she queer?—Is she prudish?’” The Eighteenth Century 53.2 (2012): 175–88. Margaret A. Miller, “Making Room: Queer Domesticity in Jane Austen’s Emma and the Anne Lister Diaries,” At Home in the Eighteenth Century: Interrogating Domestic Space, ed. Stephen G. Hague and Karen Lipsedge (Routledge, 2021), pp. 225–44; Susan Celia Greenfield, “‘Queer Austen’ and Northanger Abbey,” The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen, eds. Cheryl A. Wilson and Maria H Frawley (New York: Routledge, 2022): 342–57; Leigh-Michil George and Lillian Lu “‘A Hundred Different Ways of Being in Love’: Emma, Queer Austen, and Asexuality Studies,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 36.1 (2024): 149–58. See also Vincent Quinn, “Jane Austen, Queer Theory and the Return of the Author,” Women: A Cultural Review, 18.1 (2007): 57–83 and Olivia Murphy, “Queering Jane Austen in the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of Popular Culture, 53.4 (2020): 790–810.

21 George E. Haggerty, Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later Eighteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 75, 87.

22 Cox, Touch, Sexuality, and Hands, p. 147.

23 Christien Garcia, “Taking Hands: The Fisting Phantasmic in Sense and Sensibility,” Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance: Engaging with Desire in the Novels and Beyond (Rochester: University of Rochester, 2022), p. 47.

24 Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 49.

25 Salamon, Assuming a Body, p. 51.

26 As Tanner has noted, this bedroom scene takes place “at the centre of the book in the centre of London” (87–8). That this moment occupies such a central position should encourage us consider the significance of this scene as a turning point both in the novel and in the sisters’ relationship to one another.

27 Merleau-Ponty, Visibilities and Invisibilities, p. 142.

28 Butler, Senses of the Subject, p. 51.

29 Merleau-Ponty, Visibilities and Invisibilities, p. 142.

30 Salamon, Assuming a Body, p. 53.

31 Salamon, p. 54.

32 Salamon, p. 54.

33 Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body, p. 34, 61.

34 Wiltshire, p. 61.

35 See Tanner, Jane Austen, pp. 87–8 for a Freudian reading of the bedroom scene; he argues that Marianne’s “muffled scream” exemplifies the crisis of the novel’s paradox between secrecy and expressive sociability.

36 Although it may seem contradictory to refer to a moment of suffering as an erotic release, the narrator’s account of the “precious, invaluable misery” which makes Marianne “rejoic[e] in tears of agony” suggests there is pleasure and catharsis in the experience of deep suffering throughout the novel (SS 283–4).

37 See also Haggerty, Unnatural Affections, p. 83. Haggerty reads this as a moment when Marianne, after pulling away from Elinor for much of the novel, returns to her without resistance. As I suggest however, this scene must be understood as a renewal and continuation of their previous moment of handholding.

38 Butler, Senses of the Subject, p. 56.

39 See Claudia Johnson, “The Divine Miss Jane,” pp. 158–9. Johnson suggests that the orienting role of the marriage plot since the 1960s has obfuscated earlier critical work that was interested in diverging from a heteronormative agenda.

40 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, p. 15.

41 For more on the relationship between queer theory and narrative theory, see Robyn Warhol and Susan Lanser, eds. Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015) and Tyler Bradway “Queer Narrative Theory and the Relationality of Form,” PMLA, 136.5 (2021): 711–27.

42 The status of these marriages has been a continual source of debate. See, for example, Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 208–40 and Julie Shaffer, “The Ideological Intervention of Ambiguities in the Marriage Plot: Who Fails Marianne in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility?” A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin, eds. Karen Ann Hohne and Helen Wussow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 128–51. Poovey argues that the marriage undermines the feminist agenda of critiquing patriarchal institutions because the marriage plot “cannot provide women with more than the kind of temporary and imaginative consolation that serves to defuse criticism of the very institutions that make such consolation necessary” (237). Shaffer, by contrast, insists this stance “is overly dismissive of the critiques of patriarchal ideology that are provided within the marriage plot form” (Shaffer 130). Like Shaffer, I argue that the marriage plot does not in itself undermine Sense and Sensibility’s critique of patriarchal structures, but I am more concerned with how marriage might serve ulterior motives.

43 Haggerty, Unnatural Affections, p. 87.

44 Lanser, “Of Closed Doors,” p. 277.

45 Susan Sniader Lanser, “Toward (a Queerer and) More (Feminist) Narratology,” Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions, eds. Robyn Warhol and Susan S. Lanser (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press), p. 37.

46 In The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), Susan Lanser argues that Romantic literature presents the sapphic as an elegy marked by transience and persisting only as memory.

47 Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 181. See Livia Arndal Woods, “Generations in, Generations of: Pregnancy in Jane Austen”, Women’s Writing, 26.2 (2019): 132–48 for more about the role of pregnancy in Austen.

48 In Sibling Love and Incest in Jane Austen’s Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), chapter 3, Glenda A. Hudson argues Austen’s marriages often resemble sibling relations rather than attachments based on sexual attraction. The lack of sexual energy in Marianne and Elinor’s respective marriages, I suggest, contrasts the actual sibling relationship imbued with erotic potential.

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Notes on contributors

Jennifer Comerford

Jennifer Comerford is a PhD Candidate in English at Northwestern University. Her current research focuses on how hands and touch structure female experience and knowledge-making practices in long eighteenth-century British literature.