Sense & Sensibility, chapter 20: Meet The Palmers

Marriage sucks, so you better hurry up and get married, girls.

This is the best way I can articulate the essence of the satirical aspect of Jane Austen novels. I mean, here we’ve got two young women pining for their men, hoping to get married—and the married couples surrounding them are so mismatched as to be strictly comic. Ellen Moody claims as much when she classified the Palmers as “Unsuited but Too Strongly a Caricature to Pronounce Anything but as a Satiric Portrait” (she’s got a way with words). 

But actually, I’d push back on that just a little. True, they are unsuited in terms of personality and humor, but in terms of bad manners and improper behavior, they’re pretty even. Mr. Palmer* is the most obvious example, firing off, “I did not know I contradicted anybody in calling your mother ill-bred” when his wife teases him about his rudeness.** Elinor concedes that “[h]is temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding, like many others of his sex, that … he was the husband of a very silly woman,” though she observes that his rudeness stems from “the desire of appearing superior to other people.” Which means he’s in a hell of his own choosing: his wife is occasionally bright enough to call him out, but he’s never challenged to change his behavior. And I don’t know about you, but I’m hard-pressed to think that Mr. Palmer would change even if his wife behaved better.

I saw a Facebook post a week or so back that pulled a quote from this chapter: “It was quite a sudden thing our coming at all, and I knew nothing of it till the carriage was coming to the door, and then Mr. Palmer asked me if I would go with him to Barton. He is so droll! He never tells me anything!” The poster thought it showed a sweet side to Mr. Palmer and some measure of love between the couple. While that’s a lovely thought—and we do see his softer side much later on—I don’t think that’s what we’re meant to take away here. I think Mrs. Palmer is not just ditzy, but woefully immature and overly reliant on those around her. 

Examples? Sure:

She can’t calculate the difference between 10 miles and thirty miles. She claims that Col. Brandon would have proposed to her had Mrs. Jennings not intervened (Shapard calls out the absurdity of this claim; the colonel is a catch and Mrs. Jennings knows it). She talks a mile a minute without saying anything of substance. And most damning of all, she makes the cardinal sin for any female character in a Jane Austen novel: she immediately pushes her friendship onto Elinor and Marianne. She invites them to stay with her at London, rudely teases Marianne about Willoughby, and erroneously claims that Col. Brandon told her about Marianne’s impending marriage. And she refuses to stop talking about the engagement when Elinor asks her to. Guys, Mrs. Palmer is unfurling red flags left and right.

What kind of makes this worse is that not even Elinor sees them all. She asks Mrs. Palmer how well she knows Willoughby. “Oh! dear, yes; I know him extremely well,[...] [n]ot that I ever spoke to him,” she replies. “I do not believe many people are acquainted with him, because Combe Magna is so far off; but they all think him extremely agreeable.” Somehow, Elinor is “pleased” with this “testimony in [Willoughby’s] favor.” 

I missed the “testimony” part. Probably because it’s not actually there, Elinor.

Interestingly, at one point when Mrs. Palmer is talking about Col. Brandon’s unrequited love for Marianne, Elinor changes to topic to Willoughby. Then a few lines after that, while Mrs. Palmer is on the Willoughby train, Elinor asks her more about Col. Brandon. Mrs. Palmer is so bad at making conversation that she somehow makes Elinor bad at it, too. Proof that once again our common sense gal can make mistakes.

Now, step back to see the bigger picture. What are the comical Palmers doing in a story about the love trials of two sensitive sisters? Austen didn’t write them in just to give me heartburn. Much like Mr. Collins, they serve the dual purpose of providing humor and illustrating a larger concern for the Dashwood sisters. Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, like many other married couples, just don’t work together. On the surface, they can live with each other. But man, they really bring out the worst in each other, don’t they?

Next time, we introduce the worst people you will ever meet.

*Shapard provides some interesting background on Mr. Palmer’s foray into politics—he “is almost certainly campaigning for a borough seat” and is very likely a Tory. Why Austen chose to make a minor character have a political career is a bit of a mystery, as it doesn’t add much to the theme or to the tension of the narrative. Maybe others can shed some light on that point?

**Mrs. Jennings gets in a zinger of her own—“[Y]ou have taken Charlotte off my hands, and cannot give her back again,” showing us another glimpse of her Nanny Oggness.