Jane Austen didn’t need Hollywood to make her male characters “feminists.”
That’s the insulting premise of a recent Atlantic essay by Devoney Looser, who writes that the Emma Thompson-Hugh Grant-helmed 1995 movie adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, “deliberately imbued Austen’s first published heroes with qualities they either didn’t have in the novel or didn’t have to the same degree: egalitarian attitudes toward women, an affection for children, and emotional sensitivity.”
Did Looser and I read the same novel?
In the novel, there’s never a sense that either of the two main male characters – Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon—don’t view their loves, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, as equals. Both men talk respectfully and thoughtfully to the women—a fact that becomes striking in comparison to a secondary marriage in the novel, which features an intelligent man who foolishly married a pretty (but not clever) woman, and very clearly does not talk to her as an equal.
As far as emotional sensitivity goes, both men display it. Edward Ferrars regularly demonstrates awareness of uncomfortable situations (such as when his fiancée and the woman whom he really loves are in the same room together), while Colonel Brandon’s back story—including his tragic love of a woman who was forced to marry another, only to die young in desperate circumstances—and his feeling in sharing it with Elinor hardly show him to be a stoic.
I’ll grant Looser one item: I’m not sure either Brandon or Ferrars cared for children. However it’s not clear that Austen—as much as she was the narrative voice of Sense and Sensibility—did either; she peppers her novel with deadly dull conversations about people’s children, and notes how ill-behaved one family’s offspring are. (Also, it’s rather amusing—considering some feminists’ tortured relationship with motherhood—that liking children is viewed as definitively a feminist trait.)
But why did Hollywood need to change what Austen wrote?
After all, while I have no idea if a 2016 Austen would self-identify as feminist or not, Sense and Sensibility has always made a memorable case for women’s independence. The book begins with the Dashwood sisters’ half-brother and his greedy wife conspiring about how to avoid giving additional financial assistance to the Dashwoods, whose financial status was greatly affected by the loss of their husband and father. It is abundantly clear that the Dashwood sisters must marry well if they wish to do better financially: no other paths are open to them. And Austen’s sharp depiction of their half-brother—“He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted and rather selfish is to be ill-disposed”—indicates a willingness to tear down the idea that men had some inherent virtue that made them better trustees of money than women.
Austen, too, depicts how differently women and men were affected by pre-martial sex. Willoughby, the one-time love of Marianne Dashwood, seduces and impregnates a young woman, Eliza Williams, who is also the ward of Colonel Brandon. But his ending is hardly tragic: “He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.” By contrast, Brandon finds Eliza pregnant “in a situation of the utmost distress, with no creditable home, no help, no friends” and her ending is not a wealthy or society-approved marriage, but being settled in the country with her child. Austen’s narrative illuminates the double standard in effect in society then.
In other words, had Hollywood wanted to make a feminist-focused Sense and Sensibility there was ample material in the original novel to highlight in a film. Instead, according to Looser, the film Sense and Sensibility made its male heroes “irresistible nurturers,” which is evidently a victory for contemporary feminism. (Pause for a moment and reflect on Looser’s argument that the way for Hollywood to make a screenplay more feminist is to . . . focus more on the male characters?). Perhaps it’s not surprising that in 2016 (as in 1995 when the film adaptation was released) feminists would find something they claimed needed improvement from Austen’s original work. But they are wrong. When encountering a writer as insightful as Jane Austen, it’s best to suppress the urge to turn her witty dialogue into politicized fan fiction. Let the Dashwood sisters speak for themselves.
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