Emma 31-35: “Assert Yourself”
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New challenger approaching... The Eltons are shaking things up in Hartfield! Will Emma stand her ground and assert her place in the hierarchy?
Join us for mail talk and a healthy dose of intersectional feminism.
Transcript
Reclaiming Jane Season 4 Episode 7
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 reading chapters 31 through 35 of Emma through the theme of assertion.
Emily: As much trouble as I had with finding the theme of beginnings last time, it was not an issue here.
Lauren: At all.
Emily: Every single line was assertion in some form or other. It was incredible.
Lauren: It was on every page.
Emily: Every single page, multiple times, on every page.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: This is just a fun section in general.
Lauren: Lots of characters bouncing off of one another, lots of assertions being made both to people thinking to themselves and to other people, both directly and indirectly. Yeah, lots, lots to talk about here. Lots to dig into.
Emily: Shall we go ahead and recap so that we can get started?
Lauren: I believe it's my turn to go first, so I will reluctantly say yes.
Emily: Well, let's see how you do. Are you ready?
Lauren: Okay, I'm ready.
Emily: Okay. 3, 2, 1, go.
Lauren: Okay. The Eltons have arrived. Mr. Elton's bride is finally in Highbury and Lord, if she doesn't have a lot to say about everything and everyone. She is grating on Emma's nerves. She decides to make Jane Fairfax her best friend, which Emma also really does not appreciate. There's lots of back and forth between Emma and with the new Mrs. Elton. She decides to have them up to Hartfield for a dinner party so that she doesn't look like she's a total wipe.
That dinner party also is just drama. Frank Churchill might be coming back and Jane Fairfax actually asserts herself and has mysterious letters. [00:02:00]
Emily: Very nicely done.
Lauren: Thank you.
Emily: I think you got more in that off the top of your head than I have in my cheater notes.
Lauren: It helps that I read the section today, so there's that.
Emily: That does help.
Lauren: Okay. 30 seconds on the clock.
Emily: Okay.
Lauren: Three, two, one. Go.
Emily: Emma decides that she must not really be in love with Frank Churchill because she's just not sad enough about her imagined refusal of him, but he's definitely in love with her. Mr. Elton has gotten married. He is bringing his wife back to Highbury. Everyone thinks that Mrs. Elton is charming and lovely, but all Emma will say is that she's pleasing and she's well dressed. The Eltons visit at Hartfield and they are unnecessarily rude to Harriet, but Mrs. Elton has made Jane Fairfax her own pet project. The Woodhouses host a dinner party for the Eltons, and Emma is very particular about who she invites--
Lauren: The end.
Emily: And I missed my last point, but, Oh well. That's okay. It wasn't important.
Lauren: You got the bulk of it.
Emily: We got the bulk of it.
Lauren: You got to the last chapter.
Emily: Good enough.
Lauren: Good enough. We'll take it. Oh my goodness. But yeah, there was, there is a lot to cover in these five chapters. There's a lot that is happening.
Emily: Emma herself is such a uniquely assertive heroine.
Lauren: Mm.
Emily: that she just gives us so much to work with, and then we have all these other characters to play off of as well, and it's just delightful. I texted Lauren while I was reading that Mrs. Elton was making my eye twitch, and I love it. It's so much fun.
Lauren: I think one of the first notes that I wrote down is that Emma constantly asserts her opinion, as does Mrs. Elton, and all of their interactions are just them trying to impose their own opinions and views on each other while being as polite as possible.
Emily: Yeah. One of the notes that I made was that Mrs. Elton is just the same as Emma, but without quite the sheen of charm.
Lauren: Mm-hmm. Yeah. She lacks tact. She thinks that she has it in spades, but she does not. She's not very artful in her language. And Emma, for all of her faults, is usually a little bit better [00:04:00] about concealing what her true intentions are and is much better about like, masking her distaste under charm. Mrs. Elton does not have that command of her behavior or her language, and so everything just comes off as very pointed.
To Emma, at least. Other people don't seem to be picking up on this as much, but they also aren't necessarily in the same social circle as Emma and aren't listening for the same barbs that Emma is picking up on.
Emily: Yeah. Mrs. Elton is also, I guess we're kind of jumping a little into the section here, but yeah. Mrs. Elton is just such a topic. She also is trying really, really hard to position herself on the same rung of the social ladder as Emma--
Lauren: mm-hmm.
Emily: --and Mrs. Weston, she is always emphasizing 'we should do this, and if you and I started this club, or if we patronized this person, then everyone else would follow along.' and Emma is really feeling this as a barb. She does not want to be made a peer.
Lauren: Mm-hmm. '
Emily: of this lowly preacher's wife, no matter how much money her brother-in-law has.
Lauren: And she starts off by negging both Mrs. Weston and Mr. Knightley as well. So it's hilarious that she then wants to put herself on the same social rung as them.
Because in one of her first meetings with Emma, she talks about how surprised she was at how lady like Mrs. Weston was, because wasn't she her governess? And Emma has to stop herself from like-- do you know the Demi Lovato clip from their documentary? They're discussing an incident that happened when they were on tour as a teenager that made headlines back in like 2008, 2009, because they beat up their dancer.
And Demi Lovato is talking about this in retrospect in this documentary and the clip that went viral on Twitter is them saying, "and all I can remember thinking is, I'm about to beat this bitch up." And that is exactly what's going through Emma's head as Mrs. Elton is talking about Mrs. Weston and Knightley is just like, 'Hold me [00:06:00] back, hold me back!'
Emily: I don't know why, but the first thing that came into my head was a Regency themed pro wrestling match. I think that would be simply incredible.
Lauren: I'm just hearing the ring of the bell now. Like da-ding, fight!
Emily: I, I would pay money to see that, actually.
Lauren: I--
Emily: Emma versus Mrs. Elton!
Lauren: Say it in the voice of the guy from Epic Rap Battles of History. "Who will win? Who's next? You decide!"
Emily: We have fun here.
Lauren: Yeah. A, a fight between Emma and Mrs. Elton I would pay to see.
Emily: Right, now that we've had that little tangent, what were we doing? Where were we?
Lauren: We were discussing Mrs. Elton and how she asserts herself. In theory. I think we kind of skipped over the, the Frank Churchill musings.
Emily: Oh, right. Well, it's just sort of a continuation of the end of the last section.
Lauren: Yeah. The only, the only new thing that we need to talk about regarding Frank Churchill is that Emma has the passing thought about maybe she can pass him off to Harriet, because of one line where he says that he wasn't able to pay his respects to her beautiful little friend, and then an idea starts percolating in her brain like, huh, maybe this could be a thing and then she says, 'No, I shouldn't. I shouldn't be entertaining these things.' No, because it's ridiculous.
Emily: I am begging, begging this woman not to make the same mistake twice. He doesn't like Harriet. He's trying to pay you a compliment. I also don't think that he's actually in love with Emma, but still, no one actually has any regard for Harriet because she is not in their social circle.
Lauren: No. Emma, even like, she almost gets it at first. So it says, "I had not a spare moment on Tuesday, as you know, for Mrs.-- for Miss Woodhouse's, beautiful little friend," blah, blah, blah. And Emma says "this, Emma could not doubt, was all for herself. Harriet was [00:08:00] remembered only from being her friend." Correct. Okay. At first you get it. And then she goes on to continue in the, that "it suggested to her the idea of Harriet succeeding her in his affections. Was it impossible? No. Harriet undoubtedly was greatly his inferior in understanding." Correct.
Emily: No shit.
Lauren: "But he had been very much struck with the loveliness of her face and the warm simplicity of her manner, and all the probabilities and circumstance and connection were in her favor." no, they are not. You were right the first time. He only mentioned her because she's friends with you. He does not care. He didn't even mention her by name.
Emily: He's being polite. And that is it.
Lauren: That's it. Don't do this. Don't do this again.
Emily: On the other hand, who did he go out of his way to say goodbye to before he left?
Lauren: Hmm. Interesting.
Emily: Very interesting.
Lauren: Interesting.
Emily: Mm-hmm. Connecting the dots!
Lauren: We're just as bad as Emma except for we are correct.
Emily: We are correct. I mean, we do also have some foreknowledge of what happens, but.
Lauren: We're still correct.
Emily: We're still correct. Emma also in relation to Harriet, gets a little manipulative in this section.
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Emily: because Harriet is still sort of going on about her loss of Mr. Elton, which Emma had encouraged. Lest we forget. And Emma is just so sick of it now that she pulls this whole, 'I know I should feel bad about encouraging you. You don't have to make me feel more guilty.' Devious!
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Emily: like that's a little concerning. That's a red flag right there, Miss Woodhouse.
Lauren: And then Harriet falls all over herself to say,' Oh my, no. I'm so lucky to have you. I couldn't have a better friend. Why would you ever, I don't want you to feel guilty at all.'
Emily: Gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss.
Lauren: And we said that from the beginning.
Emily: That was a little more than I expected from Emma to twist Harriet's dependence on her in precisely that way. But, wow.
Lauren: Gaslight, gatekeep, Girl Boss is really the only thing I have to say about that.
Emily: Yeah, [00:10:00] basically.
Lauren: That's what she excels at.
Emily: Yeah, it was, it was very, you know, kind of textbook manipulative friend or partner saying, Oh, I feel so bad about this.
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Emily: so that you follow over yourself to make them feel better about something that they did wrong objectively.
Lauren: Oh, I'm such a terrible boyfriend. How could you ever forgive me? And you're like, No, you're not terrible. You're awesome. I don't care that you didn't go to my doctor's appointment with me or whatever. I don't know. Like.
Emily: Yeah, that's a red flag. If someone's doing that to you, that's not good.
Lauren: No. Speaking of slightly more benign red flags, all of the bragging that Mrs. Elton does in her first conversation with Emma. The barouche that her family keeps and the fact that they have, you know, multiple of these lovely carriages they can take out on any occasion. And oh, Emma, if you ever go to Bath, I can introduce you to some lovely people. Meanwhile, Emma is seething, like you introduce me?
I don't want to be introduced to anyone in your society. I can introduce you to other people, but how dare you condescend to think that you can introduce me. She's just heated the entire time, like mask of civility. And inwardly, she's screaming the entire time.
Emily: By the standards of the time, Emma is the social superior of Mrs. Elton. The only thing she doesn't have going for her between the two of them is that Mrs. Elton is married.
Lauren: Mm-hmm. That's it.
Emily: Yeah. But Mrs. Elton's family has made their money through trade. Her only aspiration to better social standing is through her sister's marriage.
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Emily: which only confers her a certain amount of dignity. Emma is actually a landed gentleman's daughter.
Lauren: There's really not a competition by the standards of the time.
Emily: There really is not, which also gives some explanation to why Mrs. Elton is reaching so hard to place herself [00:12:00] upon the same pedestal that Emma sits.
Lauren: Because she knows. She might not act like it. She may be acting as though those distinctions don't exist, but she does. And that's exactly why she's trying so hard to make sure that they vanish.
Emily: She's trying to ingratiate herself with Emma and with Mrs. Weston.
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Emily: and take on her own little charity case in Jane Fairfax, who is such a lovely girl, but certainly is not at the same level as them. Everyone here is insufferable.
Lauren: You know what cracks me up is that we had kind of hinted earlier at the fact that Mrs. Elton and Emma are not too, too different from one another. Mrs. Elton is like the Wario to Emma's Mario.
Emily: Not what I expected, but I'll, I'll take it.
Lauren: That wasn't what I was think-- I, I first was thinking about how when two people are too alike, they clash and it's because they're too similar.
Emily: That's definitely the case here.
Lauren: And that's definitely the case. Like there are some big differences between the two and their refinement and their upbringing. But in how they approach things, they're really not that too far apart.
Emily: Yeah, personality wise, Emma just has enough tact to keep certain conversations among certain people.
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Emily: So she'll say things to Mrs. Weston or to Mr. Knightley that she wouldn't in general company.
Lauren: Right.
Emily: But Mrs. Elton will say all of these things to everyone, even people that she's only known for a couple of weeks.
Lauren: Mm-hmm. And she's so anxious to have a certain image of herself in everybody's mind.
Emily: She definitely seems to want to be the first lady of Highbury society.
Lauren: Oh, 100%. That was one of the things related to assertion that I had written down. I don't know that we wanna jump ahead into theme or if we wanna integrate theme with discussion of the chapters, but--
Emily: Let's integrate it because it's all over this.
Lauren: It's all over it.
Emily: I don't think we can separate them.
Lauren: I-- Okay, great. Cuz I was going to struggle with not mentioning it as we go through the chapters.
Emily: Go for it, babe.
Lauren: That was one of the things that I noted was that she's really making an effort to assert herself in society, [00:14:00] not just in her conversations with Emma, but immediately becoming part of like the Highbury social fabric and placing herself at the top of the heap.
Emily: And adding to this social fabric as well. Like when she's encouraging Emma that the two of them should start a musical club.
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Emily: because she's so fond of music and they need more of that in their society.
Lauren: Yeah. And Emma is trying to do the polite thing and compliment her, and she goes, Oh no, my taste is been complimented before, but I play poorly. You on the other hand, I hear you play amazingly. Whereas what we've heard before is that Emma's kind of just average, cuz she doesn't practice.
Emily: That little classic attempt at self-deprecation.
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Emily: in the service of appearing charming and humble. It's not working.
Lauren: It's not. Emma can see right through it. One of the few things that she's accurately assessing.
Emily: Yes, her judgment may be clouded in many other ways, but she has Mrs. Elton's number.
Lauren: When it comes to analyzing other women, she's right more often. She's not always correct. But she tends to get it right more often than when she's analyzing men. .
Emily: I need her to stop trying to analyze men. She's really bad at it. She can read her father, but that's about it. And even her father, they have a little moment of miscommunication, disagreement where she's accusing him of encouraging people to get married, and he's like, No, no, no. That's not what this is about.
Lauren: Like she's been brought up by him and she has to be in tune with his every whim and desire just to keep a happy home. If she couldn't read him, that'd be more concerning, but anybody else? No.
And then the second interaction that Emma and Mrs. Elton have, we also discussed some of the, the lingering mystery surrounding Jane Fairfax and what's going on with her and why she's still in Highbury, because she was only supposed to be there for three months, and yet her visit has just extended, despite the fact that the Campbells invited her to come out with them.
And said that, you know, we'll arrange the whole [00:16:00] thing. We'll send a carriage. We'll like, make sure that friends help you. And she refuses, but no one really knows why.
Emily: Something is up.
Lauren: Something's up. Something suspicious.
Emily: Emma is still leaning into her fantasy that Jane has something going on with Mr. Dixon, who is the husband of-- the now husband of the woman that she was essentially raised with.
Lauren: Right.
Emily: So functionally, her brother-in-law, it seems like Emma's decided that they're in love because Emma decides things, as we have seen.
Lauren: She asserts her opinion.
Emily: She asserts her opinion, and it becomes reality. Amazing how that happens. But yeah, some things are not lining up there.
Lauren: No, not at all.
Emily: Jane has also been going daily to the post office to retrieve the mail, which is kind of her considering her aunt's anxiety and her grandmother's frail health.
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Emily: but I wonder if there's another motive there.
Lauren: Well, it's good for her health. Remember? She needs to get out.
Emily: This is very true. She gets the fresh morning air before breakfast.
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Emily: which, whew, couldn't be me.
Lauren: She needs it for her constitution.
Emily: Mm-hmm.
Lauren: even in the rain.
Emily: Even in the rain.
Lauren: It's very important that she get that walk to the post office.
Emily: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Lauren: and no one else can get the mail.
Emily: She staunchly refuses when Mrs. Elton kind of pompously offers that their servant would of course fetch the mail from the post office for Jane and the Bates and Jane is like, No, no, no, it's fine. I'll get it. Don't worry.
Lauren: She actually asserts herself quite a bit. This is when they're at the dinner party at Hartfield.
And first in a conversation with Mr. John Knightley with Mr. Knightley's brother. And then in her conversation with Mrs. Elton, she stands up for herself a lot more than we've seen her do in earlier chapters, and I think I like, would've picked up on it regardless, but because assertion was our theme for this chapter, I was like, oh, interesting that this is a section where we get to see Jane actually assert herself rather than just [00:18:00] nodding and acquiescing to whatever people say around her.
Emily: We have seen her sort of quietly try to assert truth in previous sections, but this is definitely more noticeable, and enough that I think Emma picks up on it a little bit too.
Lauren: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And has her own interpretation of why that is.
Emily: Obviously.
Lauren: But at least realizes like, Oh, this is, this is a change. This is interesting. And she's invited Jane because she's trying to be, in theory, better and being nicer to Jane. It's definitely not just because Mrs. Elton has been inviting her to things all the time.
Emily: That has nothing to do with it. What are you talking about?
Lauren: Nothing at all. And it's not because Mr. Knightley called her out on the fact that Mrs. Elton has the time to ask Jane to do things because there's no one else who's asking her to do things, who's in her social circle and of her age, like, ahem, Emma. But she also is sneaky, again, with how she is able to invite Jane because she asks Harriet first, depending on the fact that she'll say no, because Mr. Elton will also be there, and then she invites Jane.
Emily: Pullin' the puppet strings.
Lauren: And it actually works out the way that she wanted it to because had Harriet accepted her invitation, she would've been SOL. But she didn't, as she knew she would not, and she gets to invite Jane and make it look as though that was her plan all along while also not offending Harriet.
I mean, honestly, it's a stroke of evil genius.
Emily: It really is. If, if Emma were to become a villain, I wouldn't be entirely surprised. She has that kind of cunning mind.
Lauren: It suits.
Emily: Yeah.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: Although, to be a villain, an effective one, I think you have to be a little better at reading people.
Lauren: One would think. She could be like a children's cartoon villain. They're set up to fail every episode. Oh, sorry. Jumping backwards again. In the conversation where Mr. Knightley is calling Emma out over not inviting Jane Fairfax to things, we also [00:20:00] get a moment of Mr. Knightley asserting both his lack of feelings and then also like, quietly hinting at other things that might be brewing. Because Emma makes kind of like a side comment like, 'Oh, well, you and Jane Fairfax, you know what's happening with that?'
And he goes, 'Oh, you've gotten there, have you? You're bit late. Mr. Cole already asked me about that. That's not happening. I have no intention of that happening.' And Emma's like, 'Oh, well that's interesting. And why is that?' Meanwhile, Mrs. Weston is like pressing on her foot. Like I told you, I told you there was something going on!
And they're, they're saying to him, 'You know, you might still be surprised by your feelings. You never know.' And he says, "Well, I don't think I'll ever be by surprised by my feelings for her."
Emily: What's the implication there, sir?
Lauren: I don't know.
Emily: Would you like to elaborate on that?
Lauren: No. He's gonna polish his glasses and blush.
Emily: That was also the scene where we came across a couple of lines that made me just. Face palm. Because Emma. Where Knightley says, "Cole does not want to be wiser or wittier than his neighbors," referring to the fact that when he told Mr. Cole he was mistaken about his regard for Jane, he kind of let the subject drop, and Emma responds, "in that respect, how unlike dear Mrs. Elton, who wants to be wiser and wittier than all the world." Look in a mirror. I am begging you.
Lauren: And she's still not wrong. It's just because they're too alike. Pot meet kettle.
Emily: Seriously. Absurd, all of them. I love this book. I hate everybody involved. I-- okay. I don't hate them. Some of them have done nothing to warrant that.
Lauren: What did Mrs. Weston do?
Emily: I was gonna say Mrs. Weston is perfect except for her encouragement of Emma, but I can't really blame her for that.
Lauren: She has no other entertainment in her life, where else is she supposed to get her soap operas?
Emily: That's fair. I mean, what would I do if I were in her position?
Lauren: If I had as entertaining a person as Emma in front of me all the time, I too would just poke her with a stick just to see what she would do. [00:22:00] I would have no other better way to spend my time.
Oh, okay. One other thing.
Emily: Yes.
Lauren: That I found interesting that relates both to our conversations about Mrs. Elton and Jane Fairfax. The fact that Mrs. Elton's family comes from trade. So there's a moment, it's towards the end of the dinner party. The ladies have removed to the drawing room after dinner, and Mrs. Elton and Jane Fairfax are having a conversation, and Jane makes a comment saying, 'Oh, you know, there may be offices for the sale. Not quite of human flesh, but of human intellect.'
And Mrs. Elton kind of immediately, her hackles raise a little bit and she says, "Oh my dear, human flesh, you quite shock me. If you mean a fling at the slave trade, I assure you, Mr. Suckling was always rather friend to the abolition." And Jane's like no, "I was not thinking of the slave trade, the governess trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view. Widely different, certainly, as to the guilt of those who carry it on, but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies."
And I wrote, "I DO."
Emily: Yeah, that one seems pretty obvious.
Lauren: But the thing that relates to Mrs. Elton's family history of trade that you touched on earlier was also really interesting. In the footnote of this edition of my book where it says, "Mrs. Elton's anxiety is revealing here. Her hometown of Bristol was one of the three principal British port cities," which I think we mentioned before, "along with Liverpool and London, that engaged in slave trading with the Americas throughout the 18th and into the 19th century, and that continued to engage illegally for some time after the abolition of the slave trade in 1808.
Although we never learn how either Mr. Suckling or Mrs. Elton's father earned his fortune, the suspicion, which she is perhaps anxious to erase here, that her wealth is somehow connected with slavery, is supported by the suggestiveness of her maiden name. The originators of the surname Hawkins were an established and well-to-do family living in the West County at the time of the Tudors. Probably the most famous was Sir John Hawkins, who in [00:24:00] 1562 became the first successful British slave trader. His account of one of his voyages to Guinea, originally published in 1592, was reprinted in Collections of Voyages, published in London in 1809."
Emily: Hot damn.
Lauren: Yep.
Emily: Wow. And we thought Mansfield Park was the only one with slavery.
Lauren: Little did we know.
Emily: Little did we know. Wow.
Lauren: Yeah. So that was such like, an illuminating footnote and insight into why that's where her brain immediately goes. Like, Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, I'm not connected with that at all. Don't, don't put me down for cardio. We were not involved in the slave trade. This is just not, No. But I wouldn't have realized why she was so anxious about it without the help of that extra research that this book did. So that was really interesting.
Emily: Wow.
Lauren: Yeah, I thought that was fascinating, but also, I'll talk more about Jane's comment in my pop culture connection, but I know that it is the 19th century. I literally, I don't expect anything different. It's just still frustrating seeing it written on paper, like I don't know. Who's more miserable? A governess or a literal slave? Like, ma'am.
Emily: I'll give you one guess.
Lauren: we have discussed on this podcast about how being a governess was like not the best lot in life for you to have.
Emily: But you're not literally enslaved.
Lauren: You were infinitely better off than the people who were being bought and sold at auction and not seen as full humans. Like I don't really think it's much of a comparison.
Emily: It's really not.
Lauren: But yeah, that, that was my one little point about Mrs. Elton and Jane Fairfax having a very interesting side conversation over there, at the end of this dinner party.
Emily: Outta nowhere.
Lauren: Outta yeah, outta nowhere, unprovoked just discussing slavery and abolition.
Emily: I mean, these are the kind of things that we talk about at dinner parties, but.
Lauren: And it was even more topical then, so, hey.
Lots of asserting one's self in this [00:26:00] section. Asserting one's opinions in the company of other people.
Emily: Asserting one's place in the world.
Lauren: Mm-hmm. Yep. Or even trying to prove something to yourself.
Emily: Definitely. Lots of that.
Lauren: Lots of that. In Emma's case, in Mrs. Elton's case, although we don't get as much of her interior thought, we can tell.
Emily: Even in Knightley's case.
Lauren: Even in Knightley's case, because he seems to be trying to prove something to himself. If he keeps saying it enough, maybe it'll be true.
Is that all? All the dissecting we have to do from this section?
Emily: I believe so.
Lauren: What was your historical context for this episode?
Emily: It doesn't necessarily have much to do with assertion, but given the rather extensive discussion of the post office, I wanted to know what was actually happening with mail service.
Lauren: Oh, good, okay.
Emily: It was also partly motivated by jokes on a D and D stream that I watched about like does the Fae Wild have mail? But--
Lauren: Nerd!
Emily: What? Me? Co-hosting a Jade Austen podcast? Perish the thought.
Lauren: Continue with your nerdery.
Emily: Thank you. But yeah, postal service was a very different beast at this time, which I mentioned a little bit in the last episode, actually, by pure coincidence about traveling via mail coach. But what does the actual postal service look like?
So, public mail service began under Charles the First in 1635 when he sort of opened up the Royal Mail for use of, you know, certain members of the public. And then Oliver Cromwell established the general post office in 1657. Most of the history of mail delivery was by post boys, so just individual rider on horseback. It was slow, it was unreliable. Your horses had to be changed frequently. Single riders alone on a road at any [00:28:00] hour were really popular targets for robbery, especially because they could be carrying valuables. Roads were really bad and post boys often lost items, or sometimes they were in collusion with those robbers and just corrupt.
But mail coaches were introduced in 1784 and kind of changed the landscape of postal service in England. Delivery time was just a fraction of the post boys because you could use a team of horses. They also set up regular post stops to change those horses. Much more mail could be carried at once than by a single person when you have an entire coach to load it on.
Multiple people attending and defending that coach also made it a much harder target for potential robbers. And postal employees were also tracking their timetables to keep deliveries on schedule. So, they were, they were delivering mail, previously, it could take a post boy three days to get from Bristol to London. It would take like 14 hours for a mail coach.
Lauren: Oh wow.
Emily: Yeah. They were booking, which is part of why traveling via post was not the most comfortable way to go if you had another option.
Lauren: But you get there quickly!
Emily: But you get there fast. The mail service was actually a really significant factor in increasing both the quality and the number of roads across Britain because people wanted their mail more efficiently. And it also is expensive to keep up both coaches and horses when you're going down really bad roads. the rates for sending mail were calculated by distance and number of sheets, so it would be a certain cost per sheet to go a certain number of miles, which is why people would do things like writing cross, [00:30:00] the way Jane Fairfax is described as doing to save paper.
So you get twice ish the amount of words on a single sheet if you're literally just writing over your other words, I'll have to include some photos of writing cross because it would just give me a headache.
Lauren: How does anyone decipher that?
Emily: Very carefully? I don't know. but a lot of mail actually went undelivered for nonpayment because the recipients, not the senders paid for postage.
Lauren: Ohhh.
Emily: Yeah. There were some cases where the sender could prepay for that, but generally you had to pay to receive your mail. Revenues all went to the government. Presumably some of them were put back into maintaining those roads. But postage stamps and the necessity of an envelope, were not invented until 1837.
Lauren: So much. Well, not much after, but later than the period that we're in right now.
Emily: Yeah. I mean, a good 20, 25 years after this. Yeah, so you would just write on often a single sheet of paper on one side, and then you would fold it up and write the recipient on one side, seal it with wax, and then, just, off it goes. There were some cities, the bigger ones like London and Dublin and Edinburgh, they would have a local penny post that would deliver for essentially a flat rate within a certain radius as long as it was under a certain weight.
And most towns actually did have a post office, but in smaller villages, you would have a designated receiving house, which was usually an inn or just some other local business that would accept the mail for the surrounding area. And then if you had an express delivery, that would usually just go by private [00:32:00] messenger rather than through the regular post.
Lauren: That does make sense.
Emily: Mm-hmm. So yeah, that's more than I ever anticipated knowing about the state of the mail service in Regency England. But there we go.
Lauren: I mean, Jane Fairfax was also waxing poetic about the postal service in this section, so it makes total sense.
Emily: Yeah, I'm, I'm a little skeptical of her claim about how little mail goes un-misplaced.
Lauren: I don't imagine that she would've done the same amount of research as you just did to make that claim. So she's probably wrong.
Emily: If all of her letters get delivered. That's what matters.
Lauren: Yeah. Yeah. It means that everyone's mail is always delivered to them on time.
Emily: But it also makes me wonder about who she's receiving mail from, and is she paying to receive their letters or are they prepaying?
Lauren: Ooh, I don't know. That's a good question.
Emily: Because a courteous interlocutor who's sending enough mail that she's checking every day the post office, every day, she doesn't have any money. Hopefully they're paying in advance.
Lauren: Anyone with a bit of empathy and foresight should be doing that. Whoever this person is remains to be seen, I don't know that we ever actually get an answer.
Emily: I hope we do. I wanna know. I mean, it also kind of puts into perspective just like what, what social status all of our primary families have been throughout Austen, because they're constantly writing letters to one another.
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Emily: And they're always having to pay to receive these letters. So they've got enough expendable income to be in regular correspondence with a surprising number of people.
Lauren: And it's never mentioned as a hardship,
Emily: never mentioned as a hardship. The one context I could think of was Fanny writing to William when she first arrives at Mansfield Park.
Lauren: Yep.
Emily: But that's part of the gregariousness of the Bertrams is that they actually pay for it. [00:34:00]
Lauren: Yeah, that's a good point. That's really the only time where we hear it spoken of as any kind of, imposition.
Emily: So yeah, that was our slightly tangential history topic, but I thought it was interesting.
Lauren: It is interesting. Thank you.
Emily: I'm glad you think so too. What is our pop culture topic for today?
Lauren: So throughout this section I was already thinking about assertion and what that looks like, and then we got to this little exchange between Jane Fairfax and Mrs. Elton, and it solidified what I was thinking of, and I'm talking today about white feminism and who gets to be seen as assertive and who gets to be seen as aggressive.
Emily: This is always a salient topic, I think.
Lauren: Yeah. So in the first four chapters, I was just thinking of things like reality TV and how people are portrayed.
So when you have people on shows like. I mean, any kind of reality competition show, whether that's America's Next Top Model or The Bachelorette, or things that are specifically meant to encourage bad behavior like Bad Girls Club or like Charm School or something like that. Any early two thousands reality television show, pretty much most of the time at some point there will be like the angry black woman stereotype.
I say character because even though they're real people, reality TV is still gonna create characters for us to follow. So they're not playing like a scripted character, but they are being presented as a character on screen, despite the fact that it's like, hashtag reality.
Emily: There's a lot of work that goes into editing those.
Lauren: There's, yeah, there's a lot of work that production does behind the scenes to make us see the narrative that they want, and not necessarily what was actually happening. But those are usually the people who are edited to seem the most aggressive or to be seen as confrontational or loud or any of those other similar descriptors.
And then if there are white women who are behaving similarly, then they either get to be assertive, or they're confident, or they're just [00:36:00] like a take no shit kind of girl. And sometimes, you know, production clearly just does not like them. And they also get the villain edit. Most of the time, there can be similar behavior coming from just two people with totally different skin tones, and one is the villain and the other is somebody who we're supposed to be rooting for as the audience.
And if it's in a situation like Bad Girls' Club or something like that where the whole point is for everybody to just be on their worst behavior because that's what the point of the TV show is. Oftentimes you'll see like the 'wild,' quote unquote white women using markers of black culture, so like really heavily indulging in AAVE and saying that's just the way they talk when it clearly is not, using other markers of black culture to make themselves seem more aggressive.
Emily: I personally have seen that a lot in real life. Mm-hmm. , like going to a, like marginally rural suburban school in the south. A lot of the white girls who were trying to position themselves as being really aggressive would lean super heavily into African American English, and it was always a little bit weird.
Lauren: Uhhuh. And it's happening too on TikTok where there's two separate conversations that can be had about this kind of phenomenon in TikTok. One is the people who are trying to create a name and an image of themselves, and they're bitting off black culture to do that, and then discarding it as soon as it no longer serves them.
I mean, that's been happening since the dawn of fricking time in the US, but it continues digitally, online. And then the other thing is Gen Z appropriating AAVE and then saying it's just Gen Z slang or internet slang, and either misusing it and or completely disregarding where it comes from and then getting mad at black millennials when we use the same language.
Like, Well, you're just using, you're trying to be like Gen Z. Like, no, we're not .
Emily: Y'all innovated that.
Lauren: Like, we came up with this. Who are you, Karen, from Omaha. Like, what? ? You can't, That's not how this works. What the hell? [00:38:00] Anyway. That's what I was, what I was thinking of is the difference between what being assertive looks like, depending on how much melanin you happen to have.
Being assertive as a white woman is being a girl boss. It's being confident. It's being somebody who's strong and really pushing back in the sense that women, read white women, are like delicate little flowers need to be protected. Being assertive as a black woman is aggressive and a liability. And it's never read the same way.
And then it was just that connection was emphasized when we got to the conversation between Jane and Mrs. Elton where Jane is comparing like, Oh, being a governess is just like being a slave. And as egregious as that is, and even, you know, 21st century listeners or readers would say like, 'Oh no, like we can't make that comparison.'
And yet we still get people who try and say like, Oh, well the struggles of white women are exactly the same as the struggles of black women, can't we all just get along? Why does it have to be called black feminism? because my feminism is different. And it is not the same . And that's my black feminist pop culture connection for today!
Emily: I love it. That's really, that's so good. And I'm always --okay. It feels weird to say like, Oh, I love when we get to have these discussions on the podcast, but I really do because those are the kind of topics that tend not to come up in, especially Austen spaces.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: Because it's so heavily dominated by white people.
Lauren: I'm grateful to be able to bring it into conversation. I'm lucky in that like I work in an explicitly feminist workplace, and so these are conversations that I have all the time, and then I forget that they're not necessarily ideas that people get to just turn over on a daily basis. Glad I get to chat about it for a little bit and be on my soapbox.
Emily: It's a good soapbox.
Lauren: Thank you.
Emily: Thank you so much for bringing that in. That was awesome.
Lauren: All right. I suppose it is that time then for final takeaways.
Emily: It is indeed.
Lauren: You're up first.
Emily: This feels [00:40:00] like just taking your topic wholesale, but it was also something I was thinking about before with Emma and Mrs. Elton and these same behaviors being read differently. That interpretation is really, really context based. Interpretation of behaviors, and of personalities, it can change on a dime.
Lauren: Yep. 100%.
Emily: Yeah. Not to, Not to just completely steal everything that you just said.
Lauren: It was different enough.
Emily: Okay, good. Lauren, what is your takeaway?
Lauren: I think my final takeaway is to be secure enough in yourself that you can assert yourself to other people and not just to yourself. And that doesn't always go well in this section, which is why I was hesitant to make that my final takeaway. But I think that even if you are asserting yourself and it goes poorly, everyone should still have the sense of self and the confidence to be able to do so.
So it doesn't mean it's gonna work, but I, I'm a believer in having the sense of self and the fortitude to be able to assert yourself to other people, even if you don't think it's going to end up in your favor.
Emily: I like that.
Lauren: I'm glad because I don't know where it was going. We discovered it together.
Emily: We do that so much on this show.
Lauren: All right. Ooh, tarot card time.
Emily: Tarot card time.
Lauren: Yay.
Emily: Ooh. Our card is the two of Spades.
The hanged man.
Lauren: Ooh. Okay. Our theme is Waiting. One can gain knowledge in a period of waiting and reflection. Catherine Moreland of Northanger Abby loves to pass the time by reading.
Emily: The illustration is of a young woman sitting on a bench reading with two little kitties around her, and they're so cute. Yes, that is the thing that I [00:42:00] notice.
Lauren: Waiting. Okay. I feel like that might be very topical.
Emily: I can't wait to find out.
Lauren: Thank you for joining us in this episode of Reclaiming Jane. Next time we'll be reading chapters 36 through 40 of Emma with a focus on waiting.
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 gain access to exclusive content, you can join our Patreon @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.
Emily: I just, I really want to write an am I the asshole post from, someone's perspective here. I think it would be really entertaining from literally any character involved in any of these scenarios.
Lauren: It would be.
Emily: And the answer for almost any of them would be, Everyone sucks here.
Lauren: Yeah. Maybe not Harriet. Harriet might get away. She hasn't done any asshole things yet.
Emily: That's true.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: Yet?!
Lauren: I don't know.
Emily: when will, when will--
Lauren: Sweet baby angel Harriet? No, she won't.
Emily: When will Harriet enter her villain era. [00:44:00]
Lauren: I think that's another AO3 request.
Emily: Who's writing these down? Come on.
Lauren: Someone has to be keeping track. We should just make a tag on our website, "episodes where we request fan fiction."
Emily: It would be most of them.
Lauren: It would be.
Emily: If we were a big enough podcast, we would have someone tracking that for us.