There are three daughters in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and on the surface that is one too many. If you have only watched the movie (and it is worth watching), you may not realize the work done by the film to create a character out of Margaret, the book’s forgotten child.
For pages of the book, a reader can forget her and wonder if she has disappeared like Chuck on the television show Happy Days.
Every college student thinks Marianne Dashwood is sensibility (think passion) and Elinor Dashwood is sense. Maybe. The problem with this clever take on the text is that Margaret Dashwood exists. Who is she? One bright student wondered if the younger Jane Austen had not just introduced a character that she later forgot, but Pride and Prejudice suggests this is not so. In that book, too, Austen gives us more sisters than we need to advance the main plots.
There is, I think, a simple solution to this “problem.”
Most of us are not needed to advance the main plot and Jane Austen is masterfully creating a real world.
I have four delightful children and any one them would make an excellent character study, but if you were to write one, then one or two of the adult siblings might get short shrift. The youngest, after all, would not even be born until the oldest was already six! You could tell the story of his preschool years (title? Goodnight, New York Moon) without mentioning his dear sister at all.
If you told the story of his first few years of school, then baby sister might appear as a bundle of cuteness doing little “plot work” at all other than being adorable. This would not be a weakness in writing, but an accurate description of the truth. Life is like a Jane Austen novel and not like a television show or video game.
In a video game, if you see an object, you should pick it up. Why? Trust me. Pick it up. You will need it later. Note that in real life if you pick up all the objects you can pick up, you will end up in prison if you have not died of a broken back beforehand. You cannot live your life like a video game. In the same way, you can guess many details of a show like The Mentalist simply by noting seemingly random people on whom the camera lingers. There are no wasted shots on a good television one hour drama so if you get a long look . . . you matter.
That’s not true in life.
Today I chatted with a college student on her way to class, but if the story of her day was told by a novelist, I would either be cut, or in the hands of a skilled novelist, appear to produce depth. I am an incidental character in her story.
We are all Margaret, the daughter that does not matter for this particular tale, in some story.
This is important to remember lest we demand to be the corpse at every funeral or the bride at every wedding . . . as Teddy Roosevelt was accused of wishing to be. Sometimes we are just there because we are the background for a wedding, a funeral, or a celebration. This is a jolly role, lacking pressure and easy for even the most graceless amongst us to pull off. I may lack the passion of Marianne or the character of Elinor, but I can be there being Margaret.
We are there to give life and having done so can be happy. We are Margaret.
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I am thankful for my class at The Saint Constantine School who stimulated this idea.
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