The Setting Always casts a different Shade on It: Allusion and Interpretation in Sense and Sensibility
Mark Blackwell, University of Hartford
Volume 17, no. 1, October 2004
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ABSTRACT
Claudia Johnson has remarked that “Mansfield Park is noticeably more allusive than Austen’s other novels,” and the work’s explicit references to Cowper, Inchbald, and Shakespeare would seem to corroborate her hunch. Yet Mansfield Park’s allusions may be distinguished less by how frequently they appear than by how insistently they call attention to themselves, how “noticeable” they are. My subject in this article is the slippery, hard-to-see allusiveness of Sense and Sensibility — in particular, a heretofore unremarked allusion to John Dryden’s “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham” in volume 1, chapter 12. If, as Irvin Ehrenpreis asserts, “Austen deserves minute attention because … few authors conceal their opinions on subjects of controversy so well,” then careful scrutiny of this subtle allusion may provide an interesting interpretive context for the novel, one that promises to shed light on the critical controversy concerning how thoroughly Austen differentiates the two Dashwood sisters, whether she defines alternative spheres of value through them, and where her sympathies lie. On the other hand, the allusion’s unobtrusiveness, its proximity to Austen’s better-known — if no less subtle — invocation of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, and its location at exactly the point where the novel begins to explore problems of evidence, detection, and interpretation suggest that the invocation of Dryden may function less as a key to the resolution of interpretive quandaries than as an interpretive trap, a reminder that one’s perspective determines the meaning of the evidence and not the reverse.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Austen” include:
Why the Show Must Not Go On: ‘Real Character’ and the Absence of Theatrical Performances in Mansfield Park
by KATHLEEN E. URDA (ECF 26.2, Winter 2013-14)
Jane Austen’s “Excellent Walker”: Pride, Prejudice, and Pedestrianism
by OLIVIA MURPHY (ECF 26.1, Fall 2013)
Adolescence in Sense and Sensibility
by SHAWN LISA MAURER (ECF 25.4, Summer 2013)
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