DHARABA GOHIL

Roll no: 8

Semester : 2

Enrollment no.: 2609108420170011

Batch : 2016- 18

Paper no. 5 The Romantic Literature

Smt. S. B. Gardi. Dept. of English

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, at Stevenson Rectory in Hampshire, England.

Austen’s novels mostly focus on themes of courtship and marriage. However, her work stands out because of her sharp, satirical depiction of late 18th century English society.

She is still one of the most studied and influential novelists of her time, largely because she was creating strong, unusual female characters during this period and also for her mastery of form, satire, and irony.

His famous works are Emma, Mansfield park, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, sense and sensibility.

Women and Femininity Society and Class Love The Home Language and Communication Family Marriage Wealth Dreams, Hopes, Plans Competition

Rumor has it that girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice, but we think that Jane Austen might disagree.

Her very real, at times rather harsh depiction of the women of Sense and Sensibility exposes the undeniable fact that there's more to her proper young ladies than meets the eye – underneath their dainty exteriors, we see dangerous passion, frustration, and even a bit of malice in one case in particular.

Austen's portrayal of women is challenging and incredibly real, and she sums up both the delights and difficulties of femininity through the array of characters revealed in this text.

The world of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility is a complicated one, in which everyone fits neatly into minute little pigeonholes in the incredibly stratified, hierarchical class system.

Imagine this system as an enormous card catalog, in which every single person we encounter fits somewhere – and moving them to another place is quite a big undertaking, that involves shuffling everyone else around slightly and getting them all used to it.

Her characters are all painfully, obsessively aware of their individual positions in society, and all of their relationships are marked distinctly by their varying amounts of power within the social system.

In Sense and Sensibility, she shows us dramatically different facets of this crazy little thing we call love, from the euphoric to the life-threatening.

While love is certainly the driving force of the various plots we see in this novel, it's not always a good thing – in fact, more often than not, there's an edge of danger or tragic potential in it.

The loss of a cherished home is one of the first major thematic elements of Sense and Sensibility, and that sense of transition and movement persists throughout the novel.

Home is identified as any number of things – a beloved place, a specific set of well-known, well-loved landmarks, a treasure trove of memories – but most of all, it's where the heart is, as they say. And that mostly means that it's where the family is; the sense of connection between the Dashwood sisters (our protagonists) is what keeps them grounded throughout this novel, even when everything seems like it's about to fly apart.

In Sense and Sensibility basically everything in this book – plot, the characters, their various motivations – all boil down to marriage. As the most important social contract of the world that Austen depicts, marriage is an all-important concern.

Wealth

Money is nice, and we all want to have it. We know it now, and Austen knew it back in the nineteenth century. For this simple reason, money is a motivating factor in a lot of the decisions that we see unfold in Sense and Sensibility. Wealth and inheritance create systems of control and power here, that profoundly influence the personal choices and options of our characters; most of the young people Austen introduces to us are financially dependent upon parents or other relations, and therefore obliged to submit to them, according to the rules of the day.

Most of the dreams, hopes, and plans that we see unfold in Sense and Sensibility have to do with love, romance, and marriage.

Basically, these are the only possible futures that are available to our two heroines, and they both have their own visions of how these futures should play out.

The novel deals with the gaping chasm between idealistic hopes and pragmatic plans – and what happens when these two concepts clash.

The results are by turns comic and tragic; through the struggles of our characters, we see what happens in the difficult process of making dreams into real plans – and then into real life.

http://www.shmoop.com/sense-and-sensibility/society-class-theme.htm

https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/status-rank-and-class-in-jane-austens-novels