Sense & Sensibility, chapter 31: Seduction Junction

There’s no ideal way to handle Marianne while she’s mourning the loss of her relationship with Willoughby. She vacillates between believing Willoughby to be innocent and recognizing the “impossibility of acquitting him.” So she clings to her long-held beliefs that Mrs. Jennings is using her for gossip fodder and that Col. Brandon is an old busybody nobody (read: MA) wants to talk to. Mrs. J blunders into this while delivering MA a letter, naively raising the latter’s hope that it’s from Willoughby—when in fact it’s from Mama Dashwood, still uninformed of recent developments. MA has a similarly bratty reaction when Col Brandon drops by. “A man who has nothing to do with his own time has no conscience in his intrusion on that of others,” she exclaims moments before fleeing the room.

But by the end of this chapter, we’ve realized that we have been visited by Jane Austen’s irony fairy. Because Col. Brandon’s tale of woe he hopes will provide “a means of giving [...] not present comfort—but [...] lasting conviction to” MA. And in the process, proving that he is the one who can understand MA’s sensitivity, and at least partially understand the position she’s in.

In the interest of saving time, I’ll give the bullet points version of Col. Brandon’s story:* when he was younger, he fell hard for his cousin Eliza; after their unsuccessful attempt to elope, she was married off to his older brother and he entered into military service. A few years later, he comes back to England to discover Eliza divorced (she cheated on Mr. Brandon, who wasn’t a prize himself) and *cough cough* dying. She charged him to look after her kid, Eliza the Younger (born out of wedlock). This Eliza was allowed to go to Bath with a friend and then disappeared about a year ago. Eliza the Younger eventually reached out to Brandon in October, when he found out that she was pregnant …

… with Willoughby’s baby. A duel ensues between the two gentlemen—kind of incredible that Willoughby would even show up. Given what we hear from him later on, it’s difficult for me to imagine that he meets with Brandon out of a sense of guilt. He certainly doesn’t respect Brandon, either (as Brandon is well aware). Like Elinor, I’m not really sure what purpose it serves—except to show Brandon’s willingness to stand up for the honor of Eliza the Younger.

This significant plot twist does a lot of work for the narrative. Not only do we get a clearer idea of why Willoughby left Marianne so abruptly, but it also provides Col. Brandon’s character an element of tragedy and Romance (note the capital “R”). Brandon claims that Eliza the Elder and MA share similar personality traits—“the same warmth of heart, the same eagerness of fancy and spirits”—but his backstory also links him closer to MA. We also have a better context in which to place his melancholic behavior. If he acts older than five-and-thirty, it’s probably because the guy’s gone through more than enough trouble for one lifetime.

Consider, also, what else we learn about Brandon:

• He made a mistake as a teen. When he and Eliza the Elder attempt to elope, he’s eighteen years old—one year older than MA is now. And his relationship fell flat on its face, as well: “I had depended on her fortitude too far,” he says of Eliza’s capitulation to his father’s wishes.
• He’s incredibly loyal. On realizing that Eliza the Elder was in her final days, he “saw her placed in comfortable lodgings [...], visited her every day during the rest of her short life; [and] was with her in her last moments.” Now that is dedication.
• He needs to work on his judgment skills. He admits that he was wrong to trust Eliza the Younger to the guardianship of her friend’s father. Possibly an example in Austen’s list of struggling/inadequate fathers and father figures.
• He had faith in MA’S “influence” over Willoughby. Even a week earlier, when Brandon had the opportunity of sharing what he knew about Willoughby, he thought it best to keep it to himself. “I had no hope of interfering with success; and sometimes I thought your sister’s influence might yet reclaim him,” he says. It seems like he didn’t want to impede Willoughby from doing the right thing for MA. With the guy having seduced Eliza the Younger without a whisper of an engagement, I find this to be pretty generous on Brandon’s part.

Col. Brandon hopes, by sharing all this with Elinor, to give MA peace of mind: her “sufferings,” he asserts, “proceed from no misconduct, and can bring no disgrace.” In other words, she has escaped Eliza the Younger’s fate—a fate that neither girl deserves, obviously, though I’m not sure if this is the intended subtext. Col. Brandon’s admittance that Eliza still harbors “an affection for him as strong, still as strong as [Marianne’s] own” miiiiight not be what MA should hear right now. Brandon, perhaps sensing this, asks Elinor to censor the details of his story as necessary when she relays it to MA. Elinor promises, not knowing what the rest of her journey has in store for both sisters.

Next week, the Dashwood girls’ world shrinks with a marriage and a group of new arrivals to London.

*There are a handful of criticisms I’ve heard in regards to Col. Brandon’s tale. Helena Kelly thinks his math doesn’t add up and uses this to construct an alternate character interpretation that, in my view, isn’t borne out by the rest of the novel. David M. Shapard notes that Austen’s description of Eliza the Elder in a “spunging-house” is unrealistic, perhaps due to her limited experience with the “seamy side of life,” and that at one point it’s unclear how Brandon has money to support Eliza the Younger before he inherits his brother’s fortune.