Sense and Sensibility

Characters

Elinor Dashwood - a nineteen year old woman of sense

Marianne Dashwood - her seventeen year old sister with sensibility

John Dashwood - her greedy brother, heir to the Norland estate

Fanny Dashwood - John's selfish and manipulative wife

Edward Ferrars - Fanny's sensible older brother

Sir John Middleton - a jovial but vulgar Dashwood relation

Colonel Brandon - Sir John's honorable friend

John Willoughby - deceives Marianne who loves him

Lucy Steele - in love with Edward

Robert Ferrars - conceited younger brother of Edward and Fanny

Themes

Money/Inheritance

Role of Women

Expectations vs. Reality

Marriage and Courtship

Sense or Sensibility

Passion and Romanticism

Social Classes and Hierarchies

The main theme in this novel is the danger of excessive sensibility. Austen is
concerned with the prevalence of the "sensitive" attitude in the romantic novel which,
after the 1760s, turned to emphasizing the emotional and sentimental nature of
people rather than, as before, their rational endowments. The influences which
worked this change were many. The philosophy of Lord Shaftesbury was popular at
the time, stressing man's natural beneficence. Rousseau wrote about the "noble
savage," and Samuel Richardson's intense portrayals of the emotional life of women
were also popular. The gothic revival was developing at the time, with its stress on
the exotic and its accompanying disgust with the trivialities of everyday life. And
there was a prevalence of female novelists, writing for a large female audience. The
book that brought this genre into the fore was a work by Henry MacKenzie called The
Man of Feeling. Tears and sighs were streaming from every chapter. To be able to
show one's emotions was thus desirable, and restraint, in fact everything relating to
rational control, was deemed artificial. Austen tries to discredit this trend towards
sentimentality by pointing out its dangers in the example of Marianne and showing
the superiority of sense, in the example of Elinor.

There is a dual plot and dual heroines. Elinor and Marianne each pursues her
romance according to her temperament and beliefs. Each has an unhappy love affair
at the start. The parallel plots, illustrating the dual theme, are one of the weaknesses
of the novel, for they occur too "conveniently" and are therefore not convincing.

The theme of sensibility is illustrated in the love affair between Marianne and
Willoughby. The theme of sense begins with the relationship of Elinor and Edward.
The two plots are carefully interwoven. Marianne's romance is ideal until Willoughby
deserts her. Elinor's is threatened from the start. Marianne's reactions are always
impassioned and uncontrolled; Elinor is always sensible and restrained.

Sense is finally justified and sensibility shown to be a weakness. Ironically,

Marianne marries a prosaic older man, and for both it is a second love, something
Marianne vowed she could never tolerate. Elinor's fate is more romantic; she marries
her first and only love and is quite happy to settle down as the wife of a country
parson.

Austen, in expostulating this theme, is setting up in the process what she believes
to be a fitting standard of behavior. But the issues are not so clear cut. The
proponents of sensibility actually emerge as much more favorable characters than do
those that stress the tenets of sense. The moral qualities of goodness and loyalty to
one's family are an integral part of what Austen means by good sense. In fact, they
are the most important parts of it. Thus Marianne and her mother, while immature
and overly romantic, are, on the whole, good people. Sir John is much more pleasing
than his wife, and Mrs. Palmer is preferable to Mr. Palmer for just those qualities of
feeling that he abhors. Willoughby, John and Fanny Dashwood, and Mrs. Ferrars, the
villains of this novel, all lack the necessary human sentiments. Only Elinor and
Colonel Brandon remain unscathed, and both have ample portions of both sense and
sensibility.

Austen is mirroring the basic tension of her times in this work. Reason, the
eighteenth-century symbol of all that is good, and the accompanying moral order of
the times, which is exemplified in the standards of the community at large, are being
challenged by the nineteenth-century romantic strain, where morality is interpreted
by the individual. What was to result is literary history.

Setting

England
 early 1800's
the "country" -Devonshire
London
 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep begins in the bleak landscape of San Francisco
in 2021 (earlier editions list the year as 1992). The world has been completely altered by
World War Terminus and the nuclear destruction that caused a radioactive dust to
descend over the entire world. Most of earth's residents had relocated to a new colony on
Mars and the government actively encouraged more people to do so. The radioactive
dust had killed many forms of life and in the society that remained, life had become
extremely important and valuable. All humans are expected to own and keep animals
and many of the animals had become quite expensive.

Rick Deckard wakes with his wife Iran in their apartment. Rick is a bounty hunter
working with the San Francisco police department. His job is to "retire" androids who
have escaped to earth from Mars. Rick is quite self-centered and dreams of one day
owning a very expensive animal like his neighbor's horse. Iran is more in touch with the
decay of the world around her and willfully sinks into depressions and sadness even
though they own a Penfield mood organ that could dial up new emotions for her. Iran is a
devout follower of Mercerism, a kind of religion in which individuals fuse with a man
named Mercer who is slowly climbing a hill towards his death. The point of Mercerism is
to bring all humanity together in a show of empathy towards this man being persecuted.
Rick owns a sheep, but it is an electric sheep, a secret he keeps to himself. He longs
to own a real animal but in order to afford one he knows he must retire a great many
androids in order to collect the $1000 bounty. Rick reflects that by owning an animal,
human beings are able to show the one true emotion that belongs to them alone:
empathy. Upon arriving at work one day, Rick finds that his fellow bounty hunter, Dave
Holden, had been seriously injured in an encounter with a new kind of android, the
Nexus-6. Rick then becomes the department's chief bounty hunter and becomes
responsible for finding and retiring the remaining Nexus-6's.
To learn about the Nexus-6, Rick travels to Seattle to visit the Rosen Association, the
company that makes the Nexus-6. While there, Rick meets Rachael Rosen and her uncle
Eldon. He begins to administer a test called the Voigt-Kampff test which tests for true
empathy by asking a series of questions that are supposed to illicit empathetic
responses. If someone passes the test, they are human. If they do not, they are androids.
Rachael does not pass the test, but Eldon tells Rick that it had been a trick and that she
was really human. The Rosen Association was concerned, chiefly, with their ability to
continue to manufacture androids. Rick tries once again, and discovers that they had
again been trying to trick him and that Rachael was in fact an android. After trying to
bribe him with expensive animals, Rick leaves the Rosen Association to continue his
mission of finding and killing the Nexus-6 androids, satisfied that they would not be able
to pass the test and that he would not accidentally kill a human.
John Isidore is a parallel story that interweaves itself with Rick Deckard's story.
John is a "chickenhead," a person that has become mentally impaired because of the
radioactive dust. This means that he cannot be considered a full and active member of
society or that he could emmigrate to Mars. He is forced into menial labor with an electric
animal repair shop. One day John meets a young woman that has moved into his empty
apartment building, Pris Stratton. Stratton's apartment is filled with "kipple," a word that
means the accumulation of junk, and John offers to help her clean it and to cook her
dinner. Pris is reluctant to let anyone near her but John leaves feeling happy that he has
made meaningful contact with another human being.
John has an encounter at work in which he mistakenly picks up a sick cat for repair. The
cat dies on the way to the shop and John finds out that the cat was actually real. This
horrifies John and he is forced to call the cat's owner and explain its death. The owner is
also horrified but agrees to have a mechanical cat built so that her husband, who loves
the cat, will not know the difference. John returns from work to cook dinner for Pris
Stratton but something is not quite right with her. She is both grateful for John's interest
in her, yet is often mean and cruel to him because of his disability.

Rick Deckard, meanwhile, begins the task of retiring the Nexus-6 androids. He
fortuitously finds the first android, Polokov, when it attempts to imitate a fellow police
officer in order to get close to Rick and kill him before he can be killed. Rick realizes the
android's plot and kills him quickly. He then turns his attention towards Luba Luft, an
android impersonating an opera singer. Rick finds Luft at the Opera House and corners
her in her dressing room. He administers the Voigt-Kampff but finds Luft to be adept at
avoiding an accurate reading. Luft accuses him of assault and calls the police, an action
Rick thinks will spell doom for her.
Instead, Rick finds that the officer that arrests him works for a completely different police
force than Rick's, one that he does not even know exists. No one at the force knows him
and they begin to accuse him of being an android. Rick is taken to the office of an
Inspector Garland where he meets a fellow bounty hunter, Phil Resch. Garland shows
Rick that one of the androids he is supposed to retire is, in fact, himself and this confuses
and disorients Deckard. When Resch leaves to get his test equipment, Rick realizes that
Garland is in fact an android and that this is a shadow android police department, built to
watch and keep track of human activity. When Resch returns, he sees the showdown
between the two and kills Garland. As they leave the police station together to find Luba
Luft, Rick tells Resch that he might be an android who does not remember his previous
life on Mars. Resch gets Rick to promise that he will administer a test on him after they
retire Luft.
They find Luft at an art museum admiring a painting by Edvard Munch. As they take Luft
to their hovercraft, Resch becomes angry and kills Luft in cold blood. Noting Resch's lack
of empathy, Rick administers a test on him, but finds that he is in fact human. Finding a
human devoid of empathy who enjoys killing just for the sake of killing shakes Rick's faith
in his own ability to have empathy towards androids. He decides to retire from bounty
hunting.

While John Isidore cooks dinner for Pris Stratton, she makes comments that lead
the reader to believe that she is, in fact, an android. She tells John of her previous life on
Mars and why she tried to escape. Roy and Irmgaard Baty, her only friends on earth, join
them. Roy had been a pharmacist who had attempted to find a way, through drugs, for
androids to have the emotional and spiritual experience of Mercerism. Roy and Irmgaard
are skeptical of John at first, but then reveal that they are androids and that they are
being hunted by bounty hunters. They decide that Pris might be safer if she lives with
John and John is thrilled at the chance to care for a life, even if it is an android life.

Using his $3000 of bounty money, Rick goes and purchases a very expensive
goat. He takes it home and shows it to Iran who is thrilled with the purchase. Rick then
tells her that because he feels empathy towards androids he can no longer hunt them.
But, when Rick fuses with Mercer, Mercer tells him that even though it is wrong to hunt
androids, he must do it anyway. He then receives a call from his boss, Inspector Bryant,
telling him that the last three androids have been found and that he is expected to retire
them that evening.

Rick call on Rachael Rosen to come help him. Rachael had offered her help
because other androids might be more amenable to talking with another android,
allowing Rick to get closer to them and to kill them. Rachael and Rick meet in a hotel and
Rick has sex with her. She then tells him that there is an android that looks exactly like
her and that the entire experience had been arranged by the Rosen Association in order
to make him feel more empathy towards androids so that he would not be able to retire
them. Rick finds that he cannot retire Rachael Rosen, but that he can still go on and
attempt to retire the other three Nexus-6's, though he has a feeling that his empathetic
response will not allow him to finish the work, thereby ensuring his own death.

John Isidore has the feeling that he is being used by the androids, but he doesn't
care. While hauling Rachael's stuff up to his own apartment, he finds a spider, an insect
though to be extinct. When he shows it to the androids, they begin to torture the
creature, pulling off its legs, until John finally drowns the thing in order to put it out of its
misery. At the same time, Buster Friendly, a television personality who is constantly being
broadcast, reveals that he has discovered Mercerism to be a complete fake, a religion
that was engineered by a group of Hollywood filmmakers. Both the spider incident and
the news of Mercer sends John into a void. He attempts to fuse with Mercer and finds that
Mercer admits to him that he is a fake, but that this does not mean there is no value in
the religion. He hands John a spider and John leaves the apartment as the other androids
discover that a bounty hunter has entered their building.
Rick meets John Isidore on the roof of his building where he is releasing the spider into a
patch of weeds. Rick then goes into the building to retire the androids. As he goes
through the building he has an encounter with Mercer, who tells him that what he has to
do must be done. At that time a girl that looks just like Rachael Rosen runs towards him
and Rick realizes that, because she looks just like Rachael, she is there to illicit an
empathetic response in him, giving the other androids time to kill him. He fires his laser
and kills Pris Stratton.

He then enters John Isidore's apartment where he proceeds to shoot and kill both
of the remaining androids. As Rick leaves the scene and returns to his apartment
building, Iran meets him with the bad news that their goat is dead. A young woman had
come to their apartment and thrown the goat off the side of the building. Rick realizes
that it was Rachael Rosen and, upset, he leaves the apartment.

He flies to northern California where he gets out of his hover car and steps into a
cold desolate landscape. He begins to climb a hill and realizes that he is soon taking on
the form of Mercer. He feels a complete fusion with Mercer that he had never felt before
and realizes what it means to have true empathy. He himself has been defeated,
banishing all notion of selfishness. As he returns to his car he is delighted to find a toad,
an animal thought once to be extinct. He once again has visions of all the money and
fame he will receive from finding the animal.

When he returns to his apartment, Iran discovers that the animal is actually
mechanical. Instead of another disappointment, however, Rick discovers that with his
true sense of empathy that he could maybe love the toad just as if it were real. The novel
ends with Rick falling asleep and Iran ordering supplies in order to care for the toad as if
it were real.