Sense and Sensibility Analysis

Jane Austen was a skilled and well accomplished writer when she lived. Having written many books, Sense and Sensibility is one of her more well-known novels. Through Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen displayed the consistent factors of society that continue to relate to society today. These factors being, emotional attachments, family, social norms, and social beliefs. Emotional attachments are some of the biggest parts of our culture. We have thousands of attachments and each are developed in a unique way. Sense and Sensibility talked about how we do have these different ways of attaching to people.

Elinor and Marianne both developed relationships in such different and unique ways. Today we each do the same thing we have our own ways of developing relationships and depending on how we do it we will have different depths and values to each attachment.

These emotional attachments have some deep roots, family contains some of the deepest emotional attachments that we can develop. The role of families has been the fundamental building block of culture as we know it.

Culture is based off of these relationships. Jane Austen’s use of family throughout Sense and Sensibility shows how important family has been throughout time. She displayed the fact that family should be used to confide and find support in as with the Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters. But also, the frailty of family as those from the outside may have a bad influence on your family such as Fanny destroying the relationship between John and the rest of his family.

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Emotional attachments and family play important roles in our social norms.

The social norms we have surely changed in comparison to when Jane Austen lived but the basic principles behind all the responsibilities are the same. The principles that Jane Austen implies is the duty that people have to express their feelings for others. Whether it be with control and discipline like Jane or with vigor and spontaneity. The other norms are that of responsibility to family. Whilst the brother of Elinor and Marianne disregarded that Elinor kept to that entirely she put her family before her own self. Whilst we don’t expect people these days to behave as Elinor did, we do expect a respect to parents from children and a care of children by the parents. Social beliefs were interesting in Jane Austen’s period of time. Marianne being young and very naïve expected things to go almost perfectly with Willoughby after he left for London without explanation. Interestingly we see similar beliefs throughout culture during this era as well. The abandonment belief is what I will call it.

This belief that we see in not only literature and films for interesting plot twists but in people’s lives is more present than we may realize. This belief has destroyed and lead astray many people. As Americans one could say that certain parts of our society have been abandoned by our government and they expect things to be the same while in harsh reality they have only changed for the worse. Thus, giving us reason to search for the fault in abandonment and abandoning this belief to better our culture and society. The societal factors of emotional attachments, family, social norms, and social beliefs, displayed by Jane Austen through her novel, Sense and Sensibility, have been found consistent and similar to the factors we have in society today. Emotional attachments shaping how we create and grow relationships. Family being the basic unit of society and the need for it to help our culture grow through internal family support. Social norms setting a common standard as to how we should approach our feelings. With Social beliefs being destructive if we do not search for their faults.