Favorite Characters: Elinor Dashwood (Sense and Sensibility)

I love every Austen heroine – some more than others, true, but each one in her own way – and for my money, you can’t go wrong with Elinor Dashwood.  What a champ, a young woman who has way more than her fair share in the “stuff to deal with” department and powers through it all (Elinor-related spoilers.)

Like its sister “aptly named after two strong, alliterative personality traits” book, Sense and Sensibility puts the contrast between its lead characters right out in the open.  But this time, rather than being our unlikely potential lovers, they’re the two sisters who form the basis the story.  Marianne is all about her romantic sensibilities and fly-away passions, and really, Mrs. Dashwood’s temperament suggests that Marianne comes by it honestly, and Margaret isn’t far behind.  With the rest of the family stacked so thoroughly on one side of the scales, it’s up to Elinor to provide the sense.

Which she does, in spades, despite a wall of protests.  When her father dies with no choice but to settle his whole estate on her stepbrother, Elinor goes about finding accommodations modest enough to serve her mother, her sisters, and herself in their new reduced circumstances.  When Marianne throws herself wholeheartedly (and I mean wholeheartedly, with the whole of her heart) into love, Elinor is the one who urges decorum and at least tries to advise that Marianne might not want to rush into things so blatantly.

Because her mother and sisters enjoy stuff like eyeing houses they can’t afford and shouting their love from the rooftops, this paints Elinor as the total killjoy, the one who rains on everyone’s parades with her wearisome practicality.  Also, because Marianne is so unrestrained in her feelings, she looks at the more reserved Elinor and sees someone without any feelings at all.  Marianne can’t imagine not putting her every emotion on full and immediate display, and so she wheedles Elinor for being cold (in what is probably the only comparison to be made between Jane Austen and Arrested Development, it’s a little like the other Bluths calling Michael a robot.)

When, in actual fact, Elinor is anything but emotionless.  She feels deeply, and even though you wouldn’t know it to look at her, I dare say Elinor’s feelings oppress her more than Marianne’s, because she pushes them down instead of releasing them.  When she learns about Edward and Lucy’s secret engagement, killing whatever reticent hopes she’d been nursing toward him, it absolutely kills her, and she can’t tell anyone.  Throughout the majority of the book, she’s the textbook image of a stiff upper lip, quietly keeping on as her heart breaks inside her.  And all the while, she has to listen as Lucy not-so-subtly marks her territory with feigned sweetness, and she takes Marianne’s petulant digs about how Elinor just doesn’t understand her and Willoughby because Elinor has no idea what it’s like to feel so much for someone.  When the news of the engagement is finally known to all, it’s such an enormous weight to lift off.  Because, at last, as Marianne presses Elinor and needles her about why she didn’t say anything, Elinor reaches her breaking point and finally lets loose in a glorious, page-long tumble of pent-up emotion that is just stunningly cathartic to read.  That’s my girl.