6 Degrees of Jane Austen, Episode 4
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Your regularly scheduled guaranteed chaos episode is here, The contenders this time around are:
Dungeons and Dragons
Food Network
Charles Darwin
Lesbians
Magical Realism
Barbie
And you didn’t think we’d leave you without those sweet, sweet links, did you?
A Court of Fey and Flowers Trailer
A rather scathing Guardian article: “Jane Austen’s lesbianism is as fictional as Pride and Prejudice”
Transcript
Emily Davis-Hale 0:05
This is Reclaiming Jane, an Austen podcast for fans on the margins.
Lauren Wethers 0:09
I'm Lauren Wethers.
Emily Davis-Hale 0:10
And I'm Emily Davis-Hale.
Lauren Wethers 0:11
And today we're connecting your suggested topics to Jane Austen in our six degrees of Austen segment.
Emily Davis-Hale 0:43
I am always so delighted to come back around to this. Like, we have a lot of fun with this podcast. But six degrees is where the absurdity really shines through.
Lauren Wethers 0:54
And who doesn't love a little controlled chaos?
Emily Davis-Hale 0:57
I was sitting down to figure out my connections earlier and texted Lauren that every single time I start doing this, and I'm thinking to myself, I don't know like that's really a reach to make that connection. And then I have to tell myself every time that's literally the point.
Lauren Wethers 1:13
It is, it is and it's going to be a delight. I think I'm also going to end up ad-libbing some of my parts today. So we're going to add some chaos to it where I have a general idea of where I want the connection to go. But I don't have a fully fleshed out thought. Both of us are also sipping on some red wine. So honestly, you know let chaos reign.
Emily Davis-Hale 1:32
Let chaos reign.
Lauren Wethers 1:34
We will see where this adventure takes us.
Emily Davis-Hale 1:37
So our topics for today, as suggested by people on social media and ultimately chosen by our delightful patrons, are the Barbie movie, Food Network. Magical Realism, Charles Darwin, lesbianism and Dungeons and Dragons.
Lauren Wethers 1:55
I can't wait. I'm so excited.
Emily Davis-Hale 1:57
I love the things that people come up with, to inflict us with. I will say at least this time, we have, at least on my end, only fun topics. Because after Mansfield Park, we had to talk about the Supreme Court. And that was just not fun.
Lauren Wethers 2:14
I would just like it to be known that I was joking when I said oh, don't send us the Supreme Court because I did not know what the Supreme Court was going to be up to at the time of recording. And it just ended up being a little bit too on the nose. So I was serious when I said I didn't want to talk about it again, I did not know that it was going to be that bad. It's like the meme. There's a child in the foreground of this photo holding like a dodgeball, and the text overlay is like, 'Apollo and the gift of prophecy.' And then in the background, there are two kids who are cringing away and the text overlay's 'internet users just trying to be comedic.' I was just trying to be funny. I didn't know it's gonna be that bad.
Emily Davis-Hale 2:52
We keep doing that though. We keep making offhand comments or choosing a topic in our regular episodes that then like the day before the episode releases, some news item will come out. This has happened like three or four times now. Absurd.
Lauren Wethers 3:07
I'm so sorry. I honestly I need to stop making jokes about things I don't want to happen because I think the universe hears me and they're like, Oh, were you manifesting? Would you like that to actually happen? I wasn't. But thank you so much.
Emily Davis-Hale 3:19
Yeah, we are not trying to predict the news cycle today. We are just trying to have fun. Podcast hosts just want to have fun.
Lauren Wethers 3:26
Oh my gosh. Okay, so speaking of fun, where should we start? Which one of us is going to go first? Would you like to do the honors?
Emily Davis-Hale 3:32
Sure. I guess you get to choose which of my topics I'm going to cover first. I will say one of them is significantly less involved and therefore less fun than the others but from Dungeons and Dragons, magical realism and Charles Darwin, what do you want me to do first?
Lauren Wethers 3:50
I sincerely hope that Dungeons and Dragons is not the more involved one because I am dying to hear the Dungeons and Dragons connection.
Emily Davis-Hale 3:58
No spoilers, but yes, of course, that was a little more involved.
Lauren Wethers 4:01
Okay, do it anyway, do it anyway.
Emily Davis-Hale 4:03
All right. So for the uninitiated, because I know we have some purely Jane Austen fans in our audience and not just people who are also terminally online, Dungeons and Dragons is a tabletop role-playing game. It's one of the most popular in the world. Tabletop role-playing games being distinct from other kinds of RPGs like live action, which is LARP, or online or video role-playing games. This, you sit around a table and you often roll dice and you play your characters and you make up a story altogether. It's collaborative storytelling. I'm a huge fan of d&d. Classically, it's very high fantasy and it takes a lot of inspiration from mythology and history, and more contemporary fantasy like Tolkien. But d&d ended up being a shockingly easy connection to Austen to make because other people have already made this connection.
Lauren Wethers 4:59
Oh?
Emily Davis-Hale 5:00
You can immerse yourself through role-playing in Jane Austen's world or in an Austen-esque setting. So there are two games that I would like to highlight as being delightful connections. One is an adventure designed to work on traditional d&d mechanics. Fifth Edition specifically, it's called an unexpected wedding invitation. So it's just a sort of little preset adventure. But the one I'm really enthusiastic about, the game itself is called A Good Society. And I became familiar with it, because it was featured on the RPG show Dimension 20 in the season, called A Court of Fey and Flowers, Dungeon Mastered by Queen Aabria Iyengar, with whom I am obsessed, she's incredible, which is a more fantastical take on Regency society because it takes place in the Fae realm and is populated by like, magical creatures. That's absolutely delightful. It's so full of that Austen yearning, and all of the social dynamics. So if anyone has interest in the crossover between Jane Austen and RPGs, and you want to witness it happening, highly recommend, go watch A Court of Fey and Flowers.
Lauren Wethers 6:20
Incredible. I'm definitely looking this up after this episode is done recording.
Emily Davis-Hale 6:24
Please do. It's only like 10 episodes long. So yeah.
Lauren Wethers 6:29
Okay, but how long are the episodes though?
Emily Davis-Hale 6:32
I think they're all less than two hours.
Lauren Wethers 6:33
Okay. All right. That's the other thing for the uninitiated, is that an episode of a d&d session is hours. Yes, multiple with an S.
Emily Davis-Hale 6:44
See, the difference is that this particular show is not actual play. So they don't show you every single second, they actually edit around. Which makes it I think, a little easier for the beginner to watching D&D shows. But yes, yes. Dungeons and Dragons and Jane Austen, not a new connection that I am making.
Lauren Wethers 7:06
Excellent. I love it. I mean, nerds are everywhere. And we have multiple interests. So I'm not shocked that somebody's made that connection already.
Emily Davis-Hale 7:13
Nerds contain multitudes.
Lauren Wethers 7:15
We contain multitudes.
Emily Davis-Hale 7:17
All right, that means it's your turn now.
Lauren Wethers 7:21
Okay, between Barbie, lesbianism and the Food Network, which would you like?
Emily Davis-Hale 7:26
you were so excited about Barbie that I have to save that for last.
Lauren Wethers 7:30
No! okay, no, that's fair.
Emily Davis-Hale 7:34
I'm a big believer in saving the best for last.
Lauren Wethers 7:37
This is true. Yeah, I think you have the right call there.
Emily Davis-Hale 7:40
So let's hear about the Food Network first.
Lauren Wethers 7:43
Ooh, okay. So I grew up watching the Food Network with my parents. They are big Food Network stans. Anything from Chopped to Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, we have seen God knows how many Food Network shows. And usually when we go to new places, what my dad will do is look up places that had been on the Food Network. And those are how we like choose what restaurants to go to. And so I was really interested to see like what kind of connection I can make to like Jane Austen and the Food Network.
Lauren Wethers 8:13
But then I realized that there is an actual Jane Austen Food Network focused on people who want to connect like food-based research from the Romantic era and various food recipes used in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and other works. So then I took a left turn because I was like, this is way cooler than trying to create a six-degree connection between like the Food Network, and just Jane Austen or I could talk about the Jane Austen Food Network, which deserves airtime on this podcast because it's super cool. So this is just a normal WordPress site. It's a product of the summer 2016 English class that focused on remediation and the Romantic era of English literature.
Lauren Wethers 8:57
So apart from research and discussion, there's also a food blog section on the website. So they attempted to recreate dishes from Austen's era with modern technology and ingredients. And then they also have an academic focus where they focus on the implications and symbolic role that food plays in class representation and gender. And then they expand on those topics to include background information on how ingredients were acquired during the time and how food was categorized and organized to reflect larger social issues, which is so cool.
Emily Davis-Hale 9:30
That is incredible.
Lauren Wethers 9:32
Isn't that awesome? Their about slash mission statement about the the JAPP. AKA Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice Food Network is, "we all see, share, and consume food in our lives. But there was once a time where food was a class symbol. This website is home for our research, discussion and models that explore the world of food and class and Jane Austen's book Pride and Prejudice. You'll find discussions around the influence of gender, hunting, land, recipes, and ingredients on the early 19th-century English class system and we hope you enjoy our work." So if you're interested, it is JAPPfoodnetwork.wordpress.com, I would highly recommend doing some exploring and digging around if you want to find more about the relationships between food and the work of Jane Austen.
Emily Davis-Hale 10:16
We will also definitely include that site in our show notes because I want to check it out too.
Lauren Wethers 10:22
It is super cool. I was really excited to find it.
Emily Davis-Hale 10:26
Thank you so much. That was delightful.
Lauren Wethers 10:29
You are so welcome. And thank you English class 327 for creating this WordPress site.
Emily Davis-Hale 10:34
Shout out to English class 327. All right, Darwin or magical realism.?
Lauren Wethers 10:42
I want to end on magical realism. So I'm gonna say Darwin,
Emily Davis-Hale 10:44
Perfect. Darwin is the least involved.
Lauren Wethers 10:47
Okay.
Emily Davis-Hale 10:48
Because Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, as we know it was also prior to becoming well known for his evolutionary research, Oh, he was a popular author. He was born in 1809. So did not really overlap with Jane Austen much, at least in lifetime. But he gained popularity as an author well before publishing On the Origin of Species because he published his travel journals from the voyages on the HMS Beagle.
Lauren Wethers 11:22
Was that like a scientific paper that he was publishing or when he was publishing from HMS Beagle, what was what was the publication like?
Emily Davis-Hale 11:30
So that fell pretty firmly into the very popular genre at the time of travel writing. So people would go on trips, and then just keep a diary or later write up the things that they had done. And it was wildly popular.
Lauren Wethers 11:48
He was a travel blogger for, for the 19th century.
Emily Davis-Hale 11:52
Exactly. He was just a Victorian travel blogger.
Lauren Wethers 11:55
I love that.
Emily Davis-Hale 11:55
and then also revolutionized evolution. You know, just as like a casual other hobby. Yeah. I also learned for the first time that he had 10 children, which just seems excessive, but you know, maybe he was trying to do his own little evolutionary experiments.
Lauren Wethers 12:10
You got to keep that family tree robust.
Emily Davis-Hale 12:12
You know, he could have gotten the Mendel route and stuck to peas, but nope. Humans.
Lauren Wethers 12:18
My grandpa was one of 10 siblings. So that's why my family on my mom's side is so big. We have so many cousins.
Emily Davis-Hale 12:24
Wow. But yeah, that's my, my dinky little Darwin Austen connection is that they were both very popular writers.
Lauren Wethers 12:33
There we go. I wonder if Jane Austen would have read Darwin? Had they been contemporaries? You know what I mean?
Emily Davis-Hale 12:40
Oh, that would have been interesting. Yeah, cause travel writing, as far as I'm aware, kind of hit its peak in like the early mid 19th century. But yeah, I wonder I wonder how Jane Austen, Jane, how Jane Austen would have felt about reading that kind of thing and whether she would have had any kind of interest in that massively popular scientific revelation.
Lauren Wethers 13:10
Since this is an episode where we are chaotic. And we go off topic, a book recommendation for those who may be listening and are interested in ladies of the Regency era who may have been interested in scientific pursuits. I just finished reading The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics. So if you're looking for a queer Regency romance, 10 out of 10 would recommend.
Lauren Wethers 13:32
One of the protagonists is a lady astronomer. And then the other protagonist, slash love interest is the widow of this, you know, like, great scientist, but she went with him on all of his travels. And her interest is botany. So she was doing her own, like, research or explorations or what have you, independently of her husband as they go on these trips. So I won't say too too much about it, because it's one of the plot points, but I just finished reading that book. It was delightful. The characters in that novel absolutely would have been reading Charles Darwin. Had they been, you know, later in the 19th century, rather than Regency era, but it was so good. So if you want something queer and Regency era and just like a light fun read, The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics is a great recommendation.
Emily Davis-Hale 14:22
I haven't read it yet, but I've heard very good things about it. So clearly what I'm done with my current sci fi kick, I should go dive into that.
Lauren Wethers 14:32
Rent on Libby. I just finished it over the weekend.
Emily Davis-Hale 14:34
Also all hail Libby.
Lauren Wethers 14:36
All hail Libby.
Emily Davis-Hale 14:39
All right. I guess that wraps up Darwin for us. So what you've got Barbie and lesbianism? Oh, well, I already said I'm leaving Barbie to last. So tell us about lesbians Lauren.
Lauren Wethers 14:49
I mean, honestly, this is a perfect segue for me talking about queer regency era into lesbians, which is also a good segue into me talking about how people think that Jane Austen was a lesbian. Not everyone, but some people and it is a source of great debate. So if you are interested in like, if one were to ever Google, you know, Jane Austen lesbianism, for example, not that anyone on this podcast may have done that today, while thinking of what to talk about with regards to Jane Austen and lesbianism?
Emily Davis-Hale 15:16
Surely not.
Lauren Wethers 15:18
Surely not.
Emily Davis-Hale 15:18
couldn't be us.
Lauren Wethers 15:20
Surely not. You will find a debate from 2017 that was going back and forth between historians and people who want to see Jane Austen a specific way. Anyway, so there was biographer Lucy Worsley, who wrote a book about Jane Austen in 2017. It's called Jane Austen At Home, A Biography. And in her book, you know, she says that people often longed to know if the eternal spinster Jane Austen ever had sex with a man. And the answer, she concludes, is almost certainly not.
Lauren Wethers 15:52
She goes on to explain, you know, she occupied a tricky position in society, for a female member of the gentry or pseudo-gentry, a pregnancy outside of marriage would have been world shattering. And so she says, you know, of course, Austen did not have sex with a man. And when it comes to lesbian sex, the stakes would have been much lower. So yes, it was frowned on by society. But this was an age where women very often shared beds, and Jane herself frequently recorded sleeping with a female friend. And she adds that "people were much less worried about lesbian sex in general, because it wasn't pursued in the law courts or policed against by the matrons of polite society. This was not least because many of them didn't quite believe that it was even possible. So that door of possibility may remain ajar."
Lauren Wethers 16:33
So she is not saying yes, Jane Austen was a lesbian, she 100% had lesbian sex, what she is saying is the stakes would have been lower for her. And it's far more likely just based off of like risk analysis, that had she chosen to dabble in some kind of sexual exploration that she would have done so on the queer side of things rather than straight side of things, so that she did not risk her position in society. And so because she had written that in the biography, then people like sites like The Pink News or other sites, picked that up and ran with it and said, like, Oh, my God, Jane Austen always slept with the female friend and she might have had lesbian sex, to which then --
Emily Davis-Hale 17:11
No, stop it.
Lauren Wethers 17:12
Yep. And then people took wind of that. But rather than just saying, yes, it was a possibility, but no one knows for sure. Because it's not as though Jane Austen was keeping sex logs in her diaries. Like we don't we're not entitled to that area of her personal life.
Emily Davis-Hale 17:25
She's not Anne Lister.
Lauren Wethers 17:27
She did not have a little black book. Is -- that was not -- that was not it. But then people got up in arms about that. And there was a Guardian headline that was, 'Jane Austen's lesbianism is as fictional as Pride and Prejudice.' like, okay, all right, we can calm down. Like, yes, it was not a 100% Jane Austen was a lesbian, but also, it is not impossible. It's simply not. And I would like people to stop pretending as though it is.
Emily Davis-Hale 17:53
These historical debates about queerness and whether or not people were just get so blown out of proportion, people get so invested in their interpretation. And the answer is usually, well, we just don't know, because 99.9% of people didn't sit down and write out every single thing they have done at every minute of every day. So we just, we just can't know for a lot of people, we can make educated guesses and we can talk about the way the surrounding society viewed certain activities at certain points of time. But for most people we just cannot ever say with certainty, and it just becomes a modern ideological debate.
Lauren Wethers 18:40
That's really all it is. And so it makes sense that people are going to fall on either sides of the debate. I do find it funny, though, when people treat the debate as though their own aunt has been like personally wronged or mislabeled as queer when she wasn't. Just for context, the first line of the Guardian rebuttal of this interpretation was, "it is a truth universally acknowledged that a hack in search of a headline cannot resist conjoining Jane Austen's name with the word lesbian."
Emily Davis-Hale 19:12
Wow.
Lauren Wethers 19:14
It's not that deep.
Emily Davis-Hale 19:15
It's not. also were they calling Lucy Worsley a hack? Because like--
Lauren Wethers 19:20
no, no, no, they weren't calling Lucy Worsley a hack. There were calling the other people who reported on her biography saying that Jane Austen is a lesbian, a hack, no no.
Emily Davis-Hale 19:28
Still, overly dramatic.
Lauren Wethers 19:29
Yeah, no, Lucy Worsley's name was not being dragged through the mud. nor should it be.
Emily Davis-Hale 19:34
I Love Lucy Worsley, she's second only to Ruth Goodman in my eyes.
Lauren Wethers 19:37
Love. So yeah, the, the Guardian was saying, you know, this passage is being misquoted. Worsley does go on to say that the door was only opened by the very tiniest crack and only in the absence of evidence either way. Yeah, it's like just let people have fun with things and enjoy things. saying that Jane Austen could have been a lesbian is not going to rewrite history if in fact she was not. she could have been straight as a ruler. It really doesn't matter. That is my connection of lesbianism and Jane Austen is that six years ago, there was a massive online debate over whether or not she was a lesbian. And people got very upset about it.
Emily Davis-Hale 20:16
Well, I had no idea I completely missed that because it was before my Austen era.
Lauren Wethers 20:22
You were in your Pride and Prejudice era, but not your Austen era.
Emily Davis-Hale 20:25
Yeah, exactly.
Lauren Wethers 20:28
No. Oh, my gosh, wait. One last thing is that there was another claim about Austen's sexuality back in like 95. From professor of English at Stanford, Terry Castle, who published an essay called "Was Jane Austen Gay?" in the London Review of Books, who argued that not only was Jane Austen a lesbian, but that so was her sister, Cassandra.
Emily Davis-Hale 20:51
Wow, that's bold.
Lauren Wethers 20:53
It was very bold. I don't really know where she got the evidence for that one. But she posted it.
Emily Davis-Hale 21:01
It sure does exist in the world.
Lauren Wethers 21:02
It sure is out there.
Emily Davis-Hale 21:04
Sometimes that's all you can say about any kind of piece of writing.
Lauren Wethers 21:09
But that's that's all I got. All right. I think that brings us to magical realism for you.
Emily Davis-Hale 21:15
Yeah, yep, our final around. So magical realism unexpectedly is the one that I kind of had the most fun with. As much as I loved, you know, having the excuse to think about my favorite D&D campaign ever. Magical Realism gave me more to work with than expected. So magical realism is a style of literary fiction and art that blurs the line between reality and fantasy. Often, it's based on a very realistic view of the world that also adds magical elements. European magical realism is credited to romantic writers like E.T.A. Hoffmann, who wrote the original Nutcracker, which I have a personal fondness for. And he was also a contemporary of Jane Austen. But there are certain key characteristics of magical realism that really resonate to me with Austen's style and her tendencies in her writing.
Emily Davis-Hale 22:13
I'm not calling Austen a magical realist. That's not what this is. She does not have magical elements in her writing. But there are very distinct elements of magical realism that I think Austen also employs. So some of these are first off, the real world setting. That one's pretty self-explanatory. Authorial reticence where certain information is deliberately obscured and fantastical events are treated as commonplace. In Austen, the events aren't necessarily magically fantastical, but they may still be outliers within their worlds. There's also, this one's a little bit more of a stretch. But hybridity where plots in magical realism will occur across multiple planes of reality, which, for me, brought to mind Fanny's different settings in Mansfield Park, between --
Lauren Wethers 23:09
Okay.
Emily Davis-Hale 23:10
--class rather than between real planes.
Lauren Wethers 23:14
I like that.
Emily Davis-Hale 23:16
right? I- Yeah, that was kind of what really drew me in on that idea. metafiction, which emphasizes the reader’s role in mediating between fiction and reality. And then related to that political critique is also a very common tool or not tool. But magical realism can also be used very often as a tool for political critique, which Austen doesn't necessarily engage in politics, but her social commentary is one of the most iconic parts of her writing, which I think also has some inherent element of critiquing the status quo. So she's not a magical realist. I'm not trying to say that, but she shares a lot of commonalities with that style. And also, I think, to me kind of explains like, why I enjoy both of these things so much, because I'm a huge fan of magical realism. And obviously, I'm also a big fan of Austen.
Lauren Wethers 24:19
I love that. That's a great connection.
Emily Davis-Hale 24:22
Thank you. gave me so much more to work with than I expected.
Lauren Wethers 24:26
I'm glad that you made the distinction that you weren't calling Austen a Magical Realism writer, not that I think that we would have anybody who listens to this podcast at any regularity who would send you hate mail about that, but I can only imagine the comments if this left our circle of podcasters of, 'what do you mean, Jane Austen is a magical realis-realism writer?!'
Emily Davis-Hale 24:46
Don't let the Guardian write a headline about me.
Lauren Wethers 24:49
Oh, can you imagine? Like you have to be the worst Jane Austen podcast I've ever heard of. But you have heard of me.
Emily Davis-Hale 24:59
Oh, Oh yeah, those are all three of my topics. That's magical realism and Jane Austen for ya.
Lauren Wethers 25:05
that was delightful. Thank you.
Emily Davis-Hale 25:07
You're so welcome now, the piece de resistance. Lauren, connect the Barbie movie to Jane Austen for us, won't you?
Lauren Wethers 25:15
Come on Barbie! Let's go party! Let's go. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Okay, so I'm very excited about the Barbie movie that is upcoming directed by Greta Gerwig. I have had my excitement tempered a little bit by the realization that it's Mattel trying to create like their own like Toy multiverse with films; they want to create movies out of multiple other toys. That does give me the ick a little bit. But I am choosing to only support this Barbie movie because I don't really give a crap about whatever Mattel decides to come out with. But I will be seated for Barbie, I do already have my tickets. I also have an outfit picked out. I'm really excited. I'm going with a whole group of people who are going to brunch and then having a very pink photoshoot and then go into the Barbie movie. It's like a whole event. So I was very excited that this was one of the suggested topics for this episode.
Lauren Wethers 26:14
And what I want to talk about is that in one of the like press tour junkets for the Barbie movie, Margot Robbie is speaking to an interviewer named Kevin McCarthy, who is also fantastic. I feel like if you are somebody who gets frustrated by interviewers asking actors or directors the same rote, tired questions every single time, he would be an account or an interviewer to follow or to watch because he always has really thoughtful questions that he asks of the subjects. And in this particular interview with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, he plays Ken, he is, you know, in a pink suit he has on some Barbie swag sunglasses. And so you know, they're kind of poking fun at him saying like, Oh, it's really funny that you're asking us these serious questions, while your appearance is so silly, which he's, you know, taking in stride, because, of course, he's done this on purpose to be in the spirit of the Barbie movie.
Lauren Wethers 27:12
And then Margot Robbie says, you know, it's actually, that is our movie and the moment, it's totally silly on the outside, but comes from a very pure and profound place. And that is the Barbie movie. That's what the movie is summed up. And I think about that, with regards to Jane Austen, and how it's perceived, or even like any like, quote, unquote, chick lit, or women's fiction, whatever you want to call it, and how it's perceived by people who don't engage in that kind of literature, or just what the stereotypes about it are, are that it's romance and so it's silly. or it's for women and so it's silly, and there's not much substance to it. But when you actually take a moment to sit down and read a Jane Austen novel, or read a romance novel, or read women's fiction, you see that it really is coming from a pure and profound place. Whether or not it's meant to be a serious novel, like the emotions at the core of it are really pure and profound. And that's why people keep coming back to them to revisit or to read, or to experience because it's that pure and profound, emotional core.
Lauren Wethers 28:18
And so I just thought that quote from Margot Robbie about the Barbie movie about like, it's silly on the outside, but pure and profound on the inside. It's just this perfect encapsulation of what it is to like, be interested in things that are particularly or traditionally marketed towards women and seen as like silly or frivolous, and how it is really pure and profound if you give it a moment and give it a chance. So that is how I have felt about Jane Austen for quite some time. And I just felt that that was a perfect connection. And I hope that when I actually go see the Barbie movie, it lives up to that quote. Margot Robbie, my hopes are high, I will be seated in pink. I hope that your movie is pure and profound.
Emily Davis-Hale 28:57
I love that so much. And that's such a good thematic connection between the two because Jane Austen does so often get dismissed as being Oh, you know, that's just a lady writer writing about women getting married.
Lauren Wethers 29:15
lady things!
Emily Davis-Hale 29:16
Yeah. But there's such a, there's such an earnest heart to it.
Lauren Wethers 29:23
Yeah. And I think that's what people don't see because they don't try to. And I think there's been enough marketing around the Barbie movie that I haven't quite seen... I've only seen, and granted the algorithm's working in my favor, I follow people who have the same interests as me, et cetera, et cetera, qualifier qualifier, but I haven't seen as much derision for a Barbie movie as I thought I would. I've seen a lot of excitement and people really ready to engage with it and I'm very happy about that.
Emily Davis-Hale 29:55
I can't wait to see it. Yeah, Barbie!
Lauren Wethers 30:00
There is also a Jane Austen Barbie. That's the last thing I'll say.
Emily Davis-Hale 30:03
I had no idea. Oh my god.
Lauren Wethers 30:05
I think I mean like, Barbie as in like-- it's a doll that looks like a Barbie. I don't know that Mattel actually made it. That would have been even cooler.
Emily Davis-Hale 30:12
That would be cool. Yeah, yeah.
Lauren Wethers 30:15
Well, the end.
Emily Davis-Hale 30:16
I think that concludes our random topic connections. It always goes too fast.
Lauren Wethers 30:25
I know. It's so much fun. Time flies when you're having so much fun.
Emily Davis-Hale 30:30
It really does. Well, that's, that's Six Degrees of Austen.
Lauren Wethers 30:38
We are coming up on the beginning of a new season, Northanger Abbey. So season six of Reclaiming Jane, which is absolutely wild to say or think out loud, will start on August 16. And so as usual, if you would like our sticker for Persuasion from this season, you must sign up to be a patron on Patreon before August 16 To be eligible for our persuasion sticker and existing patrons who also get to vote on the topics for this episode, of course will already get the sticker as long as you're pledged at a certain level.
Emily Davis-Hale 31:09
We can't wait to bring our usual little bits of inter-season content we will absolutely be watching some Persuasion adaptations.
Lauren Wethers 31:20
Netflix Persuasion. Yes, yes to see the drama!
Emily Davis-Hale 31:24
Keep an eye out for information on live tweets versus patron-only content because we do sometimes do that where there's stuff that only patrons get to see in between the seasons.
Lauren Wethers 31:36
If you really want to see all of our thoughts about the Persuasion adaptations, you know where to find it.
Emily Davis-Hale 31:42
But for now, we'll be taking just a little bit, a tiny little hiatus until as Lauren said August 16, when we will return with Northanger Abbey.
Lauren Wethers 32:35
Thank you for joining us in this episode of Reclaiming Jane we'll be returning on August 16 with the first section of Northanger Abbey.
Emily Davis-Hale 32:42
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 Wethers 32:49
If you'd like to support us and gain access to exclusive content, you can join our Patreon @ReclaimingJanePod.
Emily Davis-Hale 32:55
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 Wethers 33:02
We'll see you next season, nerds.
Emily Davis-Hale 33:11
I don't have my tickets yet. But I am planning an outfit around the one piece of pink clothing I own so you know try to be as prepared as possible.
Lauren Wethers 33:21
I have an outfit planned out only because the person who organized this outing, the group outing, also texted us a full lookbook of what she wants us to wear-- or or not what she wants us to wear, but outfit inspiration rather, and said that we could wear whatever we wanted but here was some ideas. and then later revoked that about a week later and said if you show up in neutral colors or black, you will not be allowed.
Emily Davis-Hale 33:51
Wow. Committing to the bit. Admirable!
Lauren Wethers 33:56
Committed fully to the bit. Yes. So I have bright Barbie pink that I will be putting on, there's another outfit that I've been eyeing. That's like a two-piece that I might impulse buy. Is it an impulse if I've been sitting on it for two weeks? Probably not. If I decide that I still want it, which I probably do because it's still in the back of my head. I might show up in in all pink we'll see.
Emily Davis-Hale 34:17
Absolutely amazing.