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This paper offers an analysis of Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility (1811) as shaped by a reading of Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold (1988), which extols baroque architecture, music, and mathematics. With reference to Deleuze, we seek to show how Austen’s discourses of interior design become folded into the characters’ personalities and, from there, into the plot of the novel. This baroque process of overflowing and folding composes an interesting exchange between Austen and Deleuze, one that generates a surprising commonality between their understandings of space, events, subjectivity, and narrative. Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811) opens with a detailed discussion of the Dashwood residence at Norland Park, using the family’s tenuous relationship to this estate to introduce the characters through systems of kinship and inheritance. As the Dashwoods are forced to move away from their family home, Sense and Sensibility sustains its interest in architecture and interior design to a surprising extent. Interior design, we argue, quietly shapes point of view in a novel famous for its experiments with narration. Beyond simply indicating levels of prestige within a world of landed gentry, the novel begins to theorize subjectivity through interior design. In this paper, we seek to show how Austen’s discourses of interior design become folded into the characters’ personalities and, from there, into the plot. As these elements of the novel become co-implicated, Austen rethinks the basic elements of interpretation: it becomes difficult to make distinctions between the novel’s settings and its characters, then point of view and its narration, then narration and the narrative, and then the actual storyworld and other incompossible storyworlds, as each structure successively collapses in a distinctly baroque manner. This, we suggest, brings Austen into surprising alliance with the twentieth-century philosopher Gilles Deleuze and particularly his work in The Fold (1988), which engages with Leibniz, early eighteenth-century calculus, and the baroque to present subjectivity as a shifting set of points of view, created in and by their relation to infinity. The plot of the novel, with its inescapable conjugality derived from the women’s tendency to confuse the Ferrars brothers, finds its resolution only as the novel learns to fold interior space, and thereby the structure of human subjectivity, and thereby the meaning of “events,” and thereby narrative. The delicate interfolding of character, narrative, and setting proves unifying, even if these elements remain separately identifiable. Indeed, the strangely coherent accordance between seemingly dissonant elements within the novel invites a baroque reading, where foldings between divided structures generate unpredicted connections for a creative future. This unifying (if discordant) effect, we suggest, reveals not only a baroque Austen, but also a Deleuzian impulse for complicating structures of relations while composing infinite multiplicities. Sense and Sensibility is concerned with the efficient and even over-efficient use of indoor space, to the point where its spaces achieve the impossible. Even Norland Park, the novel’s nostalgic symbol for the fading dignity of the landed gentry, is found to be “beyond calculation.” It is a novel in which Elinor Dashwood discovers, somewhat defensively, that in Robert Ferrars’s hands even the closed quarters of a cottage can be, somehow, expansive —well beyond the constraints of common sense. If Elinor’s accommodations at Dawlish are small, Robert explains, she has only herself to blame: Some people imagine that there can be no accommodations, no space in a cottage; but this is all a mistake. I was last month at my friend Elliott’s, near Dartford. Lady Elliott wished to give a dance. ‘But how can it be done?’ said she; ‘my dear Ferrars, do tell me how it is to be managed. There is not a room in this cottage that will hold ten couple, and where can the supper be?’ I immediately saw that there could be no difficulty in it, so I said, ‘My dear Lady Elliott, do not be uneasy. The dining parlour will admit eighteen couples with ease; card-tables may be placed in the drawing-room; the library may be open for tea and other refreshments; and let the supper be set out in the saloon.’ . . . We measured the dining-room, and found it would hold exactly eighteen couple, and the affair was arranged precisely after my plan. So that, in fact, you see, if people do but know how to set about it, every comfort may be as well enjoyed in a cottage as in the most spacious dwelling. (189) This is a very strange passage. Robert posits that the interior of a cottage can be vastly expanded without altering the structure—and so to think of a small cottage as small is “a mistake.” This undoes the ideological work from the opening of the novel, according to which landed estates confer social prestige and cottages, humiliation. To the contrary, cottages may contain infinities. Because Robert mansplains about cottages at such length, the novel presents the above passage as a ridiculous statement, evidence of his cluelessness and arrogance. But we still confront two parallax structures here, one embedded inside the other. In the outer section, we have Elinor begrudgingly listening to Robert’s commentary, which in her point of view becomes a sign of his dullness but in his, it’s a sign of hers. Yet his perspective contains a report of another parallax gap, such that in one perspective (Lady Elliott’s) the interior space is very small and couldn’t accommodate twenty people; in the other (Robert’s), thirty-six people can be accommodated “with ease”—indeed, “there could be no difficulty in it,” and they might even be able to dance. This is a significant difference in scale, occurring twice over, and is indicative of more than their relative degrees of comfort in densely populated rooms. As we can see, the question of point of view is already caught up, in multiple and enfolded ways, in the question of interior space. The narrator asks us to take Elinor’s side in the matter as a means, it seems, of traversing these gaps; yet Robert’s perspective, itself constituted by the gap between two incommensurate perspectives, remains irreducible here and quite astonishing in its claims. Put in Deleuzian terms, for Robert, a small cottage can be “a unity that envelops a multiplicity,” which, in its “power of envelopment and development,” delivers the inhabitants into “a universal Unity that ‘complicates’ them all, and that complicates all the Ones.” Such a cottage can function as “a large zone of [1]

Sense and Incompossibility: Deleuze’s The Fold and the Baroque Jane Austen