“Marianne the Masturbator:” Alternate Understandings of Love in Sense and Sensibility
By Madison McCoy
For many, the word “masturbator” has no place in public discourse. Having been raised Christian myself—although I no longer believe—I can empathize with this sentiment. However, I cannot abide the tendency to discard the "impure" simply because it's uncomfortable. Author Eve Sedgwick, too, seems to appreciate the potential of taboo for radically queer interpretations of literature. In her essay on Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl, this appreciation for the darker side of eroticism is clear to see. Through analyzing the relationship between Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne and Elinor Dashwood, Sedgwick integrates multiple seemingly disparate types of love into a single, undefinable whole. As the strict lines between the erotic, romantic, and platonic begin to blur, this merging of love types mirrors Austen’s integration of sense with sensibility, and ultimately provides Sedgwick’s primary justification for centering a sisterly relationship as the core love story of Austen’s novel.
On the surface, Sedgwick’s argument is already provocative: in Sense and Sensibility, Marianne is a masturbatory character, and Elinor (her sister) is her voyeur. Their relationship is one of mutual and reciprocal addiction between Marianne’s “sensibility” (onanistic, masturbatory tendencies) and Elinor’s “sense” (voyeuristic, Marianne-oriented austerity). Although centering an erotic relationship between sisters within a romance novel might seem like an odd choice (to say the very least), Sedgwick argues vigorously that “…the passion and perturbation of [Marianne and Elinor’s] love for each other is the backbone of Sense and Sensibility” (Sedgwick 114). In fact, she argues that this passion far exceeds any experienced by the novel’s other heterosexual, obviously “romantic” pairings (i.e. Edward Ferrars, John Willoughby, and Colonel Brandon).
This interpretation stems from Sedgwick’s subversive understanding of Marianne as a “masturbating girl,” an erotic identity that was in its heyday during Austen’s time but has since died out as a sexual identifier in the modern era (Sedgwick 118). In its historical context, “masturbation itself” (or “onanism”) was treated as a type of disorder or “repetition compulsion,” where so-called “masturbators,” were pathologized and treated as “self-[defilers]” for whom “discipline, … surveillance,” and even “[physical mutilation]” were justified in preventing their deviant behaviors (Sedgwick 111-112, 116-117). As a “masturbating girl,” Marianne is doubly-problematic—being a woman, her body necessitates increased control, yet her autoeroticism threatens every “[order] of propriety” required by Regency Era (early 1800s) England (Sedgwick 111). Thus, to be a “masturbating girl” is to inherently transgress societal boundaries of acceptability, queerness, and personal autonomy that most would prefer to leave uncrossed.
In arguing for Marianne’s status as a “masturbating girl,” Sedgwick focuses on two key aspects of her character: Marianne’s remarkably autonomous (or autoerotic) existence, and her emotionally onanistic tendencies. Concerning her autonomy, Sedgwick describes Marianne as “radiantly attractive to almost everyone” due to her “autoerotic closure [and] absentation” (Sedgwick 120). This “autoerotic inaccessibility” is the driving force for Marianne’s “excess of sexuality” in line with descriptions of “onanistic” practices as “[excesses] dangerous to others but chiefly to [oneself]” (Sedgwick 120). Furthermore, regarding her emotionally masturbatory tendencies, Sedgwick describes Marianne as sensation-seeking to the extreme. Her every choice is guided by a need for stimulation in the form of emotional (or physical) perturbation, regardless of whether that stimulation is harmful or helpful in nature. Before she leaves Norland for her family’s new residence at Barton Cottage, for example, Marianne willingly foments herself in grief to a nearly absurd degree, giving a paragraph-long monologue describing her pain to the reader in excruciating detail:
"’Dear, dear Norland!’” said Marianne, as she wandered alone before the house, on the last evening of their being there; ‘when shall I cease to regret you?—when learn to feel a home elsewhere?—Oh happy house! could you know what I suffer in now viewing you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view you no more!—And you, ye well-known trees!—but you will continue the same.—No leaf will decay because we are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we can observe you no longer!—No; you will continue the same; unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion, and insensible of any change in those who walk under your shade!—But who will remain to enjoy you?’” (Austen 21).
To an intensely grieving Marianne, even the trees are provocations of negative sentiment. Her intentional “[wandering] alone before the house” does nothing but increase her sadness, yet Marianne chases this ever-increasing state of sensation like an addict missing her last dose.
Overall, Sedgwick uses this designation of Marianne as a “masturbating girl” to define the sister’s relationship as primarily rooted in Marianne’s blackhole-like, emotionally overindulgent presence, and Elinor’s subsequent focus on Marianne as the center of her own universe. In response, Marianne continually orbits Elinor. No matter how strongly she is tugged in any given direction as she desperately seeks sensation, Elinor remains her single tether to reality. Although Marianne might initially appear more distant and autoerotically independent than Elinor (as the “masturbating girl” stereotype might suggest), in reality, Marianne would be unmoored without Elinor. Her flights of fancy and hyperindependence all too often carry her away from reality, and it’s only due to her sister’s influence that Marianne is able to occasionally keep her head out of the clouds. Ultimately, to Sedgwick, Marianne and Elinor’s relationship is a symbiotic one, based in a fundamental organization of Elinor’s attention around Marianne’s “absent presence,” (Sedgwick 121). Given that Elinor’s attention directs the point of view through which the novel is read, no other relationship could possibly outshine theirs as Sense and Sensibility’s core love story.
Sedgwick’s mutually addictive, passionate, codependent vision of Elinor and Marianne’s relationship is a metaphorical depiction of the consummate integration of emotion (Marianne) and logic (Elinor), and ultimately of sense and sensibility. In this sense, Marianne and Elinor’s relationship acts as a physical manifestation of the novel’s central theme. While this integration justification for centering Sedgwick’s understanding of Marianne and Elinor’s relationship might not initially seem clear, this argument becomes easier to grasp when Marianne and Elinor’s relationship is considered outside the boundaries of traditional love. Because conservative values have predisposed many of us to interpret love as only heterosexual and romantic, alternate versions of love may seem strange, and thus difficult to understand. Still, reading Elinor and Marianne as Sedgwick does makes their relationship fall clearly in line with Austen's overarching theme in Sense and Sensibility. Once we recognize this, the mere discomfort of the reading as evidence against it seems much weaker than the evidence for it.
For example, Sedgwick never explains exactly what type of love Marianne and Elinor’s relationship embodies. She provides adjectives for it in passing, yes, but never defines it as such. Instead, Sedgwick provides multiple examples of instances where the sisters’ relationship seems to embody many different—often incompatible—types of love. In her first bedroom scene, for instance, Sedgwick notes the “unmistakably sexual” undertone to Marianne and Elinor’s interactions, but never explicitly argues for their relationship as sexual, or as anything with a definite description (Sedgwick 114). To Sedgwick, and to me, their relationship is nebulous, multifaceted, and utterly defiant of strict categorization.
Indeed, it’s precisely because of the uncategorizable nature of their relationship that I argue so strongly for Sedgwick’s interpretation of their love story as central to Sense and Sensibility. Just as Austen seems to argue for a fusion of sense with sensibility via Marianne’s adoption of sense and Elinor’s adoption of increased sensibility, Sedgwick’s understanding of Marianne and Elinor’s relationship is one that metaphorically integrates various “types” of love into a single larger, ultimately undefinable, whole.
To see this integration of “love types” at play, we can consider Marianne and Elinor’s interactions from a few different relational perspectives. Like Sedgwick, we can begin with the potentially erotic dimensions of their relationship: is their relationship erotic? Is it sexual? After Willoughby’s initial departure from Barton Cottage, for instance, Marianne’s “sensibility was potent!” (Austen 61). The “violence of [her] affliction” was such that Marianne’s constant “indulgence of feeling” in order to stoke the flames of her grief was, as Sedgwick argues, onanistic and blatantly masturbatory in its desire for self stimulation (Austen 62). Additionally, as the narrator of this whole ordeal, Elinor acts in regard to her sister as a pseudo-erotic voyeur, where her constant need to direct her attention towards her sister—“her beloved”—is arguably somewhat sexual in connotation (Sedgwick 121). In this sense, Marianne and Elinor’s relationship could be understood as vaguely (and uncomfortably) erotic.
Still, that’s not all that it is, and I would argue that eroticism is very much not the core of their relationship. So, if their ‘type’ of love isn’t erotic, might it be romantic? Platonic? In service of the ‘platonic’ definition, one could interpret Marianne’s conversation with Elinor upon her recovery from death’s doorstep as evidence in favor of their relationship as nothing more than deep, sisterly friendship: “Had I died,” says Marianne, “in what peculiar misery should I have left you, my nurse, my friend, my sister!” (Austen 254). In this scene, while Elinor and Marianne seem to be sisters, friends, or nurse and patient, they are never construed as romantically (or sexually) entwined.
But does this mean that their relationship is completely without either of these elements? Is Marianne and Elinor’s relationship purely platonic, or sisterly, or erotic, romantic, or any other “type” of modern descriptor? No, indeed it is not. I argue that it’s this evasion of perfect definition that is the true genius of centering Marianne and Elinor’s relationship within Sense and Sensibility. In this way, Marianne and Elinor’s boundary-breaking love mimics their novel’s core thematic focus, and thus cements their status as Sense and Sensibility’s central relationship.
While I believe that Sedgwick’s interpretive framework for Sense and Sensibility is, ironically, an extremely sensible one, one might argue that it is overly radical, particularly because it uses varying types of erotic and romantic overtones to color a relationship between sisters. Put very bluntly, Sedgwick’s interpretation seems to center incest as the core of a classic novel. For many conservative readers, this is an unaccountable violation of decency. Still, the conservative veneration of classic novels as paragons of morality is a bit strange to begin with—the practice stinks of nationalist, historically-revisionist tendencies, and even of fascistic dog whistles. While this review isn’t long enough to confront literary conservatism head-on, I do think many so-called ‘classic’ novels would be well-served by removing them from the grubby-little conservative hands that have clung to them as bastions of “virtue” for so many years.
Overall, Eve Sedgwick has done something extremely important by putting forth a radical understanding of love into the zeitgeist of academic discourse. The interpretive framework that she presents for Marianne and Elinor’s relationship within Sense and Sensibility is an exceedingly illuminating one, particularly within the realm of classical literature, a genre that has historically drowned beneath a sea of overly-conservative interpretations. Ultimately, Sedgwick provides an understanding of love and eroticism that’s neither wholly sexual, nor wholly innocent. She gives depth to the traditionally stifling definition of ‘romance,’ and for that accomplishment, I applaud her wholeheartedly.