Modesty declined

MODESTY

A gentleman carrying a gun, with two pointers playing round him, was passing up the hill and within a few yards of Marianne, when her accident happened. He put down his gun and ran to her assistance. She had raised herself from the ground, but her foot had been twisted in the fall, and she was scarcely able to stand. The gentleman offered his services, and perceiving that her modesty declined what her situation rendered necessary, took her up in his arms without farther delay, and carried her down the hill. The Narrator on Marianne Dashwood, Sense & Sensibility, Chapter 9

Injured in a fall, Marianne Dashwood is swept up in the arms of a young gentleman and carried back to her family residence at Barton cottage. What a romantic notion envisioned by Jane Austen to bring two young people together under such dramatic circumstance. How could we not be moved by the proverbial “swept off your feet” gesture by a handsome gentleman?

On re-reading this passage recently, I was struck by Marianne’s modest decline of assistance. Since they had not yet been formally introduced, Regency propriety would not allow for a gentleman to lift and carry a young lady, even injured. Modesty seems to be a forgotten decorum in 21st-century culture and there are few secrets between the sexes. Today, very few ladies would hesitate for a moment to let a gentleman carry them when injured or not! Where did modesty go?

A thought provoking book that has been on the block for a while but still deserves mention on the topic of modern female deportment or lack of it, is author Wendy Shalit’s A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue. She presents a timely observation on modern morals and how they affect culture today. It makes you optomistic of a compromise between the rigid 19th-century expectations of prim female modesty and the 21st-century girls gone wild!

*Illustration by C.E. Brock, “carried her down the hill”, Sense & Sensibility, Chapter 9, published by J.M. Dent & Co., London, (1898)