6 Degrees of Jane Austen, Episode 5
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We’re here for a good time, not a long time. The topics our audience chose:
The Office
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
Waffles
Time Travel
Renaissance faires
Mardi Gras
This episode marks the end of “Phase 1” of Reclaiming Jane! We’re taking a few months off to doctorize a host and will return in summer 2024 with new readings, discussions, and shenanigans.
Transcript
6 Degrees of Jane Austen R6
Emily: [00:00:00] This is Reclaiming Jane, an Austen podcast for fans on the margins.
Lauren: I'm Lauren Wethers.
Emily: And I'm Emily Davis-Hale.
Lauren: And today, we're connecting your outlandish topics to Jane Austen in our Six Degrees of Jane Austen segment.
Well, we have come to the end. Ish.
Emily: Ish. The end of this phase. We can, we can pull out the, the Marvel thing. This is phase one of Reclaiming Jane.
Lauren: I love that. Yes. The end of phase one of Reclaiming Jane, and as we should, we are ending it with just a little bit of silliness, of being ridiculous because that's what we do here.
Emily: It is what we do here.
So if you are not familiar with Six Degrees of Jane Austen. At the end of each season, we ask our beloved listeners to send in the most outlandish topics they can think of, that we then have to connect in some way or other to Jane Austen. Some of these connections are very tenuous.
Lauren: But we will stand by them. And we have a good time regardless, as you know, if you've listened to us before, if you've not listened to us before, and you're just finding our six degrees segment for the very first time, we don't do a traditional six degrees type game where we go from Jane Austen to something directly connected to her, on and on and so forth until we get to the topic. We decided that we make the rules and so we don't want to do that. And we've just created our own connections to Jane Austen. So if you're wondering why we haven't gone through the traditional six degrees, it's [00:02:00] because we know that that's the game and we don't want to do it.
Emily: Also shout out to our lovely patrons who voted on our final six topics. We each will have three that we have to connect. so in the future, if you want to be involved in that kind of direct influence on our lives, join the Patreon.
Lauren: You will have all of the power of being able to force us to discuss very, very, very out there things, at least as far as it relates to Jane Austen.
Emily, would you like to share what our outlandish topics are for today?
Emily: I would love to, I'm going to have to look up yours. Give me a sec. All right. Our outlandish topics today for connecting to Jane Austen are Mardi Gras, Ren Faires, the TV show The Office, Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Time Travel, and Waffles.
Lauren: This is going to be a good episode. I can feel it.
Emily: It's, this is always a wild episode.
Lauren: Okay, which one of us is going first? Would you like to go?
Emily: Sure. I can go. Now, traditionally, we do also pick the order that we each have to address these topics in. So Lauren, if I'm going first, what do you want to hear about?
Lauren: I want to save what I feel like will be the best for last. And so I'm going to say, I want you to start off with The Office.
Emily: Okay, good, because The Office is what I have the least for.
Lauren: Fantastic.
Emily: This was, this was really hard, not least because I'm very tired. but I would like to position The Office and Jane Austen, as related to one another, in that they are both making some kind of commentary on a very particular middle class existence that relies heavily on dealing with the idiosyncrasies of the people surrounding the protagonist.
Lauren: That is the most Emily answer I've ever heard in my life. [00:04:00] How did you make this an academic hypothesis?
Emily: I've been writing a dissertation all day. That's what it is.
Lauren: Do you have any examples that you would like to bring to mind?
Emily: Well, one thing that we very commonly see Austen heroines dealing with, is the absurdity of their families or other people they're associated with.
Take Lizzie Bennet trying to deal with her mother and the constant matchmaking. and then look at, you know, the, the protagonists of The Office who are positioned as being the reasonable people, like Pam and Jim trying to deal with Michael's antics or Dwight's absurdity. There's just something universal about having to deal with somebody who's just completely over the top.
Lauren: That was an excellent example for doing that off the cuff, so thank you.
Emily: Thanks.
Lauren: Okay, I think that means it's my turn. So, Emily. Which one would you like to hear first? Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, Time Travel, or Mardi Gras?
Emily: Let's start off with Rudolph.
Lauren: I was hoping you would say that.
Emily: Oh good. Fantastic.
Lauren: So I think in general, it would be pretty difficult to figure out how to connect Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer to Jane Austen because what on earth are you going to do to connect this like, Christmastime fable to Jane Austen? However, I am thrilled to inform you that there is somebody on blogspot.com. Their name is JJ Howard and their blog is jjhowardbooks.blogspot.com. And they have written Jane Austen's Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, which I would love to read.
Emily: Please. I love when other people do our [00:06:00] work for us.
Lauren: I was so thrilled to find this because it just, it cracked me up. Okay. I don't know if I can do a dramatic reading without absolutely losing it.
So I will try to read this. Okay. Just generally I will, I'll do my best. Okay.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a most unusual reindeer may in fact come in useful from time to time. And so it came to pass a long time ago on a quiet Yuletide Eve in the County of Northlandia, a fledgling reindeer had the great misfortune to be born with a highly unusual nose.
This nose to the great shock of his mother and the even greater shock of his father, who was often said to be proud nearly to the point of arrogance, was quite, quite red. In addition, the aforementioned facial feature actually glowed. Indeed, no one in the neighborhood could account for such a deformity.
And young Rudolph, as he was named, felt himself from the first in great danger of losing the comfort and consequence, which would otherwise have been due to him as a sole heir to Mr. Dasher, who had himself from many years enjoyed a high position in the favor of Mr. Santa Claus. An unfortunate and Ill-advised, attempt to hide the glowing proboscis only served.
To highlight how unsuitable poor Rudolph seemed to be to inherit his father's position, the young deer suffered a not inconsiderable amount of teasing, and was sometimes rudely and with impolitic cruelty excluded from various reindeer games, a loss which Rudolph felt quite keenly, for he was an animal of fine feelings.
It was not until some years had passed that another yuletide evening dawned. Not clear and bright like the night of young Rudolph's birth, but dark and tempest tossed. Santa Claus found the prospect of proceeding into the darkness unaided by any light source to be a daunting one. But one felicitous glance at Rudolph convinced him that the instrument of his salvation was very close at hand.
Young Rudolph would guide his sleigh that night, and guide he did, his gleaming red olfactory organ yielding sufficient illumination to carry the day. Then how the other [00:08:00] reindeers loved and praised him, they even shouted out with jubilation and glee. And so Rudolph, once a dispirited wretch, found a new purpose in life.
Let other pens dwell on misery. Rudolph, with so much true merit and true love, and no want of fortune and friends, and possessed of a skill no other reindeer could boast, passed many a happy year with his furry friends." The end.
Emily: Thank you so much, J. J. Howard. Also sorry for laughing. I was very much trying to hide behind my pop filter.
It didn't work.
Lauren: It's very okay because I also would have been laughing. It was just making me laugh.
Emily: It was when you hit proboscis. I was holding it together until then.
Lauren: Oh my God. It's just so perfect. And I, I don't know, because there is no preamble on this blog post.
Emily: Oh, it just exists.
Lauren: Somebody-- it just exists.
There's nothing that's like, 'Oh, my friend said that I should do this.' Or, 'I got a writing prompt to connect Rudolph to Jane Austen. And so I wrote this.' There's no, there's no context at all. It just is merely a blog post published in 2015 that is simply entitled "Jane Austen's Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" with no context.
Emily: Wow. That's just been sitting there waiting for eight or nine years for us to come along and find it.
Lauren: Pretty much. So thank you J. J. Howard, middle grade and YA writer and teacher for creating that piece of art. I very much appreciate it.
Emily: So, so appreciated.
Lauren: Okay, let's see. So that means that you have Ren Faire and waffles.
Emily: That's correct.
Lauren: I'm gonna go with waffles.
Emily: All right. So waffles was also a little thin, but I have, I have a couple of points to potentially connect. So first is what is an early possible origin for what eventually became the waffle, was the ancient Greek [00:10:00] Obelios, which was like pressed wafer. And then the Georgian period is also very well known for its revival of classical, including Greek Hellenistic aesthetics.
So that was kind of something.
Lauren: The Hellenistic aesthetic of the waffle.
Emily: The Hellenistic aesthetic of the waffle, yes. But then also part of, what led to the waffle's popularization in Europe, was declining sugar prices due to the Caribbean trade, which also very directly, as we know, led to some of the topics that Austen wrote about, like in Mansfield Park.
Lauren: Fantastic, thank you.
Emily: Also, a little fun fact to tack on is that the first English use of the word waffle, was only 50 years before Jane Austen was born in 1725.
Lauren: I would not have guessed that. That feels surprisingly recent.
Emily: Yeah, that's what I thought too. All right. So, Lauren, you are down to, what was it?
Lauren: Mardi Gras and time travel.
Emily: Ooh, which one of those do I want to hear first? Let's do time travel and we can save Mardi Gras as the nice conclusion because that is the season that we are in here in New Orleans.
Lauren: Fantastic. Because I've actually written the most for Mardi Gras. So thank you for reading my mind.
Emily: Wonderful. All right. What do you have on time travel and Jane Austen?
Lauren: So when you put time travel and Jane Austen into the same sentence, I feel like I would be remiss if I did not mention Lost in Austen.
Have you ever watched that TV series?
Emily: I never did.
Lauren: For those of you who have not seen it or don't know what it is, that is a miniseries that aired in 2008 on ITV where the premise is that a modern woman whose name is Amanda Price accidentally swaps places with Elizabeth Bennet after she enters a portal in her bathroom, which... we're going to roll with it.
That's that's it. That's the premise. Also of interest to nerds, [00:12:00] Alex Kingston, who played River Song in Doctor Who plays Mrs. Bennet in this adaptation. So just so you know, that's, that is there for your, for your perusal and your enjoyment. However. So that could, that could just be my time travel connection because we already have a whole TV series that's Lost in Austen, where she's like thrown back into Regency England, and she has to not mess up the events of the book, but.
Once again, I'm thrilled to inform you that somebody has done my work for me. There is a book that was released in 2022 that is literally Jane Austen: Time Traveler.
Emily: Amazing.
Lauren: And this is the, the summary is written by the publisher. So "Jane Austen comes alive in a witty time bending romance. Bridgerton meets beach read when Jane Austen leaps into the future, meets her handsome 21st century super fan and joins a time traveling team. Jane Austen, a writer of romance novels," -- I take umbrage with that description, but okay-- "faces a terrible publishing rejection. At the same time, she gets an alarming proposal of marriage. How can she escape her fate? Who can save the despairing Jane? Through his golden net of time, time traveler, George St. James sees his favorite author in distress. He travels to 1802 to persuade Jane that she has a glorious future. Claiming to be an interested publisher, he offers to take her to his office to sign a publishing contract. That office turns out to be in 2024. And it's not an office, but a bookstore in Pasadena, California, where Jane Austen fans gather.
Jane greets her club only to find that superfans can be super picky. While she aspires to publication, secretly, Jane hopes even more for romance, perhaps with a tall, blue eyed superfan named Will. Her publisher had hoped to inspire Jane's writing by showing her that success awaits her, but it's Jane who rewrites her own future.
History may have to save itself."
Emily: Wow. I, yeah, there's, there's a couple of concepts that I kind of take issue [00:14:00] with there, but sure.
Lauren: You know what? We'll, we'll roll with it.
Emily: We'll roll with it. For the purposes of this bit, we'll roll with it.
Lauren: Exactly. I have to admit, I am very interested to see how they write Jane Austen basically arriving in a room full of people like us.
Emily: Yeah.
Lauren: I don't know the vibes of the superfans because I have not actually read Jane Austen, Time Traveler. So I have, I have no idea like what types of superfans are in this bookstore in Pasadena, California, but that would be a very funny premise to explore.
Emily: Definitely.
Lauren: That is what I have for time travel, a little giggle and a little laugh and both the TV series and a book.
Emily: Absolutely love it.
Lauren: Which means that we get to hear you connect the Ren Faire to Jane Austen.
Emily: Yes. All right. So for those of you who don't know, I, I am. Kind of a Ren faire person. I volunteer in the nerdiest role I think you can have at a Ren faire. I'm an educational demonstrator. So I like go out and teach people about how like spinning and weaving work.
yeah, so I was very excited to be able to talk about Ren faires. and here I want to draw kind of like a conceptual parallel, between how the Renaissance period and the Georgian period are treated today, it's relevant to a lot of different periods in history, but I think, like, right now, we're seeing a lot of this between the Renaissance and the Georgian period.
There is a lot of romanticization of, the events and the aesthetics. There's also a lot of like, flattening, of what actual world events were, as is very common just in history in general. Conflating times and places too. So like medieval often gets kind of subsumed under the renaissance umbrella or vice versa.
And then [00:16:00] people tend to conflate sometimes like Regency and Victorian, which are not the same thing. And then also in even just the last few years, we've seen a very fantasy kind of phenomenon being applied to both things, for the renaissance, with the Ren faires, specifically, and then the explosion of popularity of things like Bridgerton and these kind of accompanying themed events.
So I saw a lot of parallels there between how we treat Austen's time and how we treat, the Renaissance broadly construed.
Lauren: I think that is perfect. And I was so glad when I saw that Ren Faire was a topic and that was an immediate. I'm not even going to say, 'Oh, wait, maybe I could do Ren Faire.' It's like, no, no, no, no.
Emily: I need to hear it.
Lauren: Exactly. I need to hear how Emily is going to connect Ren Faire to Jane Austen. And I really like that comparison a lot. So I think there is like a flattening and a conflation, like you said, of both of those time periods, whether people are aware that they're doing it or not. So it's interesting to see how those can be compared.
Emily: Yeah. It doesn't necessarily get quite the same, like, 'oh, it was a better time thing' that like the mid 20th century does, but, but it gets kind of that vibe.
Lauren: I think so. I mean, we do have a tendency to romanticize times that we never actually experienced because the grass is always greener. And if we can never actually experience it, we don't have to confront all the ways in which the grass was very much brown, not greener at all.
Emily: Definitely. But that was a lot of fun to do. All right. Which brings us to our final topic, Lauren, tell us about Mardi Gras and Jane Austen.
Lauren: Oh, goody. I'm very excited. Okay. So For the uninitiated, Mardi Gras is just a time where you flash your boobs on Bourbon Street and you get cheap plastic beads. Please don't try that at actual parades.
You will anger the Karens and there are children around. It's actually a family event, not what people [00:18:00] think of it as, but that's, that's truly what Mardi Gras is if you're in New Orleans. But for those of you who are in the know, there's an incredible amount of mystique and pomp and circumstance that surrounds Carnival or Mardi Gras.
So for those people who are looking for a place to cosplay as a Regency era debutante taking her place in society, look no further than a traditional Mardi Gras ball, and the Mardi Gras ball in New Orleans is the Rex Ball, which in its own words, "brings Mardi Gras to a glittering conclusion, combining music, traditional pageantry, processions, marches, and dancing."
So here's what I want you to picture as far as Rex Ball goes. Picture ladies in ball gowns with long white gloves, curtsying to a middle aged man cosplaying as the King of Rex with a 20 year old college student as the queen, because that makes sense. Picture men in ridiculous costumes that kind of look like if the KKK decided the new theme was Mardi Gras colors.
And then also picture a room without a black person in sight, unless they're in the Marine Band or serving someone. And you have Rex. That is, that is the, that is the, the Mardi Gras ball. You got it. That's your mental picture. But where you really will not see a Black person is at the Comus Ball. And that traditionally takes place right across the street from Rex.
So Rex is also a parading krewe. So they parade every Mardi Gras day at like eight o'clock in the morning. And they are allowed to parade in New Orleans because it integrated back when New Orleans passed an ordinance that said that krewes had to integrate. And Emily, I would love for you to guess what year that was.
Emily: Oh, way too recent. I would say, like, at the earliest, the 80s.
Lauren: Oh, push it back.
Emily: Was it 90s or 2000s?
Lauren: It was 90s.
Emily: Oh, man.
Lauren: 1992 is when there was actually something passed. The year of our Lord, 1992, is when [00:20:00] there was actually an ordinance that said, you can't actually keep black people out anymore. And so Rex listened to this, Comus did not.
And so they no longer parade, but they can still have their exclusive all white society ball, because I guess that's fine. So obviously the vast majority of New Orleanians are not at either of these celebrations. We are at home watching it on YouTube or television or ignoring it completely. And this is where I see a connection to Jane Austen, because I think aside from like the, I guess like, yearning for times gone by in all like the pageantry and pomp and circumstance of Rex, I think that Austen would have absolutely skewered events like these with like that trademark, like, wit and humor and sarcasm that we see her use in all of her books. And in that same spirit, New Orleanians watch the live broadcast of the Rex/Comus Ball and we make a drinking game out of it and we play bingo.
On Twitter with all the other jaded people. Drink if someone has four or more names drink if a debutante actually goes to school above the Mason Dixon line, drink if a page-- who is like the, you know, the poor little eight year old kid who has been conscripted into this by one of his parents-- does not attend Country Day, you get the picture.
so I see like Jane Austen in the obvious connection as, you know, this is, a society event, the general look of the event is, I think, something that people usually tend to associate with something Austen-esque, people dress up in all of their finery. There's a live band, some sort of playing music to which you do the waltz or whatever.
I think that's usually like, the kind of imagery that people associate with something like Jane Austen and you can make that connection. But I think the stronger one and the funnier one is the ways in which people just absolutely roast this ball every single year, because I'd like to think that Austen would have joined us with a few well timed roasts of [00:22:00] her own on Twitter.
Emily: I love that so much. I had no idea how you were going to manage to connect Austen and Mardi Gras, but like, that was so perfect.
Lauren: I was very proud of that. Thank you. Those are our six. Those are the topics we had for today.
Emily: Those were delightful. Now, normally we would try to call out the people who submitted them, but we had to do, we did so much like pulling from previous suggestions this time.
Some of these may have been submitted two years ago. so unfortunately there wasn't a way to track down our submitters this time.
Lauren: But if you heard a topic that you submitted, thank you. And this was a really fun episode to record. Yes.
Emily: We love any chance to get our listeners involved, get our patrons involved, and let you guys, choose what we talk about.
It's always a lot of fun.
Lauren: And this, I know we've been alluding to it throughout the entirety of the Northanger Abbey season, but this is our last episode for a little bit. Not last episode, period, but I do want to acknowledge that we will be back. We're just going to be taking a short break and this is the episode that marks the end of phase one, as Emily put it earlier, and the beginning of our, of our brief hiatus.
Emily: Yeah. So we'll be taking a few months off. I have to finish a PhD. And I'm a little bit stressed about that. So we're going to let me get through like my defense and graduation. and we should be back, summer 2024. We're not going to commit yet to a date, but keep an eye out on our social media as soon as we have a solid plan. We will let you guys know when you can expect us back.
Lauren: And during the hiatus, we'll be also recording and uploading some one off content for patrons as well. So if you really miss us and you want to continue engaging with us in some way and getting new content from us, we will still be on Patreon and still uploading new content there.
And we will also be planning what the return of Jane will look like, or the return of Reclaiming Jane in this case, [00:24:00] because this was phase one. So phase two will look a little bit different and you'll be able to learn more about that when we come back.
Emily: Also speaking of Patreon, as usual, we will have an exclusive season sticker for Northanger Abbey at this time.
If you want to get your hands on that, you have until February 14th to sign up at the five or 10 tiers, and you'll get a one time sticker designed by yours truly, for some of you to join a whole collection, which is always delightful to see pictures of.
Lauren: Please send those because I really want to see, especially if you've gotten all six, I want to see the people who have been with us from day one and have all six of the Patreon stickers, because I think that would be really cool.
Emily: The real MVPs.
Lauren: The OGs!
Emily: So that concludes six degrees of Jane Austen, at least in phase one, that concludes our housekeeping too. So we'll see you guys in a few months, hopefully with Dr. Emily Davis Hale as co host.
Lauren: Not hopefully, we will see you in a few months with Dr. Emily Davis Hale as a co host because they are going to rock the dissertation and we are going to give them some space to focus on that so they can re emerge as a newly minted PhD.
Emily: I'm entering my dissertation cocoon and I'm going to break out as a doctoral butterfly.
Lauren: Yeah, exactly.
Emily: But I think that's how it works. Yes, I will have to be rendered down into sludge. you know, it's part of the process.
Lauren: Yep.
Emily: Inevitable.[00:26:00]
Lauren: Thank you for joining us in this episode of Reclaiming Jane. We'll be returning to your headphones in summer of 2024.
Emily: To read our show notes and a transcript of this episode, check out our website, reclaimingjanepod.com, where you can also find the full back catalog and links to our social media.
Lauren: If you'd like to support us and get access to exclusive content, you can join our Patreon at reclaimingjanepod.
Emily: Reclaiming Jane is produced and co hosted by Lauren Wethers and Emily Davis Hale. Our music is by Latasha Bundy and our show art is by Emily Davis Hale.
Lauren: We'll see you next time, nerds.
It is Mardi Gras season in New Orleans. So I hope that you, you too watch the Rex Comus ball on YouTube and make a drinking game out of it. Join in on the fun.
Emily: Enjoy New Orleans culture.
Lauren: And it can be water. It does not need to be alcohol.
Emily: Yeah. Yeah. By Tuesday morning, hopefully most people have gotten back to water.
Lauren: I, yeah, by the time it, yeah, it's evening when that airs and I think most people are at least attempting to dry out at that point.
Emily: Yeah. Attempting.
Lauren: Yeah.