AS - Poetic Justice, Endings and Epilogues in Sense and Sensibility

• Main Author: Armelle Parey
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès 2016-11-01
• Series: Miranda: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone
• Subjects: Sense and Sensibility; Jane Austen; Ang Lee; film endings; novel endings; epilogues
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/9384

Jane Austen rewards her heroines with a marriage at the end of her novels but the question arises as to whether these marriages are a sign of poetic justice whose existence is not a given in Sense and Sensibility. Contrasting views point to an ambiguity inherent in the 1811 text, an ambiguity which will be explored in the course of this paper. The novel was adapted to the screen by Ang Lee in 1995 in a big-budget Columbia pictures film and we shall also examine what happens to this ambiguity regarding poetic justice in the film considering adaptations often lose in subtlety and prefer to promote a marked happy ending. This paper thus proposes to re-examine the presence or absence of poetic justice in the endings to the novel and to its film adaptation as an indication of the critical commentary each work offers on the society it depicts.