Feminism and the Film Adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility is Ang Lee’s first Hollywood film, which is adapted from Jane Austen’s 1811 novel of the same name. Produced in 1995, it cinematically visualizes an early, inchoate stage of feminist consciousness that is crafted in the binary opposites of Austen’s main fictional characters. This article engages with the feminist theme of the film version of Sense and Sensibility directed by Lee. Through an elaborate analysis of the two female protagonists’ sense and sensibility by reading some relevant scenes, it will explore the representation of British women’s life experiences and argue that the rendering of feminism extends a transcendental sympathy for women’s sufferings, or rather, their emotional distress in the synchronic patriarchal society in Sense and Sensibility. What underlies the discourse of sense and sensibility is the two heroines’ nonautonomous life predetermined by the male-dominated social system in the late eighteenth-century England. The purpose of this essay is to examine the feminist messages of Ang Lee’s film in his portrayal of the Dashwood women’s predicament, with reference to the original fiction that is contextualized in particular social and cultural context.