Student Question
What character traits explain John Willoughby's and Colonel Brandon's different treatment of women in Sense and Sensibility?
Quick answer:
In Sense and Sensibility, Willoughby has a charming but morally shallow character. He is able to treat women as he does because he puts his own pleasures and ambitions ahead of their best interest. Colonel Brandon lacks personal charisma but is a man of rock-hard integrity, reliability, and honesty. He would never lead a woman on for his own pleasure or profit, as Willoughby does.
Willoughby owns a small estate that doesn't bring him much income while Colonel Brandon's estate makes him a wealthy man. However, it is character issues more than wealth that divide these two men.
Willoughby is a charming and charismatic character who knows how to make himself agreeable to people. He has an outwardly warm and sociable personality. In a word, he is likable. This allows him to attract a woman like Mariannne Dashwood, who is picky about who she loves. However, Willoughby is also self-centered, loves his pleasures, and has the kind of shallow character that is fixated on money. In the end, he is going to look out for himself. It is this character weakness that allow him to lead Marianne on to think he wants to marry her while he has every intention of making a wealthy match. His charm is deceiving, disguising a heart that is more...
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calculating than his personality might indicate.
Colonel Brandon's character is the polar opposite of Willoughby's. He is not at all charismatic or particularly likable. He is the kind of character who can get lost in a crowd. However, beneath his less-than-magnetic exterior, he is a person of integrity, steadiness, resolve, and moral strength. He would never lead a young woman on and then unceremoniously dump her for someone more wealthy. Marianne has to suffer and mature to learn to see beneath the surface and find the worth in a man like Brandon.
Compare John Willoughby and Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility.
John Willoughby and Colonel Brandon are the two gentlemen whose love interests are bestowed upon Marianne in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The reason why Marianne demonstrates an obvious partiality toward Willoughby, and it takes her forever to demonstrate any affection for Brandon, is precisely because the two men are polar opposites. In the end, however, it is obvious that looks are, indeed deceiving.
John Willoughby is a young man of a good family but with not a lot of money. He is entitled to an inheritance of property, but he demonstrates a careless attitude that, at first, fools the reader into thinking that he is just a "free-spirit". He lives with a relative at the time of his acquaintance with Marianne, whom he meets after picking her up from a fall. His debonair is that of a dandy, and his love for literature is what makes Marianne fall deeply for him. Not known to Marianne, however, Willoughby is actually not a free spirit, but a libertine. He had gotten at least one girl in trouble, one of them being related to Colonel Brandon. Always hungry for money, he makes a match with a Miss Gray, who is worth "50,000 pounds a year".
Willoughby is a shady character. He is never clear about his intentions, which leads people to pre-suppose them. This is how Marianne ends up believing that she had been in some form of engagement to Willoughby before finding out through his total disregard for her in London that she had been assuming things all along.
In comes Colonel Brandon. To the modern reader, Colonel Brandon may come across as a bit of a "perv" due to the huge age difference between himself and Marianne. In fact, he is in this 30's while Marianne is barely ending her teens when he falls for her!
Due to his many life experiences, and disappointments, he has learned to be less brash and temperamental than the libertine and immature Willoughby. While Willoughby sees Brandon as "dull" and "old", the reality is that Brandon is a measured and conventional. It is clear that Brandon has amassed quite a good fortune, and that the love that he bares for Marianne can surpass the humiliation and the rejection that she puts him through earlier during the courtship.
When Marianne becomes close to Brandon it is after she experiences deep depression and illness, and after she realizes that, throughout it all, it is Brandon who seems to always be there when she needs him the most. In the end, it is obvious that there is more than a mere infatuation; Brandon is actually a better match for Marianne because he does display the gentlemanly and mature behaviors that would complement her the most.