You might want to insert yawn here.

I'm not writing exactly what I'd originally planned. My advisor really only wants something like a "chapter two" to my first paper, though I believe this one will become chapter one. There will probably be lots of snips of work here and there - ignore if you find it boring :) it's really good for me to see it all typed out somewhere.

As seen in two of the era's most predominant novels, Sense & Sensibility and Jane Eyre, male characters were most often depicted through the eyes of a female. In particular Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte were careful to keep the conscience of their 'sensation' novels confined to the voice of a main female character. Bronte, for example, used an older, wiser Jane to tell her story in a style much like one would expect from a personal journal entry. And while she never clearly identifies Elinor as the narrator, Austen allows the eldest Dashwood sister to offer the reader a clear view of their life, as well as the harsh realities of its lessons.

Austen uses Elinor to show the reader (the reader of her time, naturally, being under-educated young women on the brink of making a marital decision) that a woman can be completely socially acceptable and still be intelligent and free-thinking. She spends a great deal of time showing us that if you openly follow the rules of a society in which you are trapped, you will find success in your private life. As the old saying goes - the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I think there's a Japanese version of that saying that is something like 'the crooked nail gets the hammer'. Yeah, that's what Victorian England was like - no one wanted to stand out because you could really suffer for it.
Elinor spends a GREAT deal of time silently judging the people in her world. Because we're allowed into her head, we see that she really doesn't understand people who seem to live lives based on passion. She sees only the negatives of reacting without forethought. In fact, the amount of forethought that Elinor allows to herself leads us to believe Austen found women like Elinor to be very smart, and very worthy of a happy ending with a wealthy, adoring man. However, I'm now wondering about the value of judgment. One critic I recently read compared judgement to imagination and creation. She stated that the subjectivity of judgment is similar to that of creating an idea in your head.
So I wonder, if any of you are up to answering it, do you think judging someone (accepting the filters of what you believe are fact and your bias) is on the same level as a day-dream world you invent in your imagination? Do the conclusions contain the same value?