The Sentimental Heroine and Hysteria in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

This chapter explores the relationship between sensibility and hysteria in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. In the sensibility-hysteria plot of pathology prevalent at the time, hysteria was viewed as sensibility’s dangerous doppelganger. Women were expected to govern their sensibility to avoid falling into illness. Austen’s Marianne Dashwood embodies this plot, having succumbed to hysteria due to a supposed lapse in self-governance. The cure prescribed by the medicine of the day involved enforcing self-exertion to restore Marianne’s self-governance and wellness. But Austen uses the sentimental heroine ironically in the context of the sensibility-hysteria narrative. She treats the insistence on Marianne’s “exertion” to regain health ironically and in doing so teases out the idealist assumptions of certain models of sensibility. She revises the stages of the plot of pathology to present a more psycho-physiological theory of mind-body relationality as the cornerstone of health. Austen challenges the cultural climate that idealized the mind’s control over the body and the gender implications of this idealization. While Austen still champions the self-governed subject, she bases stability on mind-body relationality, undercutting the absolute idealization of the mind. Austen’s model offers a new perspective on the mind-body relationship and its role in achieving wellness.