Vulnerability as socio economic check, ethical move and aesthetic proposal in Sense and Sensibility

Abstract

In this paper, I will prove that Sense and Sensibility is a little different from other Jane Austen novels as far as vulnerability is concerned. In the novel, Jane Austen stages female vulnerability in a more violent way, but also in a more dialectical way than in any of her other novels. Indeed, the heroines are brutally ousted from their own house as early as chapter one, and so vulnerability is presented as liminal inescapable data. But the novel stages an unexpected shift: as it confronts the readers with the blunt violence of socially-organized vulnerability, it also proposes a revaluation of the concept, both from an ethical, and from a narrative point of view. Vulnerability is redistributed, reassessed, and eventually embraced as an ethical and narrative alternative.