ABSTRACT
Austen’s debut novel Sense and Sensibility is a literary manifesto for the future of the courtship romance genre. She rejects the masculine stereotypes that dominated mass fictional genres of the eighteenth century and Romantic era, beloved by her sentimental heroine Marianne Dashwood, and their inscription of performative masculinities. John Willoughby is an ingenious literary creation Austen uses to raise and reject three generic masculine modes — the dashing hero, the rake, and the villain. Marrying Marianne and Elinor Dashwood to Colonel Brandon and Edward Ferrars, Austen demands that her readers overthrow assumptions about desirable literary heroism and forces them to imagine very different men as romantic heroes. Discarding stylised approaches to writing men was necessary because, although they complemented externalised definitions of masculinity, they did not possess the scope for interiority and psychological depth Austen needed to rewrite masculinity as an individual, internal, and authentic identity.
