Jack & Alice: “Heartbreak is One Thing…”

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Our next entry into Austen’s Juvenilia takes us a few years down the road into her teenagehood with “Jack and Alice,” a wild tale of neighborly debauchery, light stalking, and eventual murder (many such cases). We’ll also be talking colonialism and drag, because we have a brand and we intend to stick to it.

Transcript

Emily: 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 "Jack and Alice."

[intro music]

Emily: Oh, we're back with our second excerpt from the Juvenilia!

Lauren: And this one is debaucherous.

Emily: It is. There's some, some scandal, some, some seedy things going on.

Lauren: I was shocked, honestly, I was like, Oh, okay, this is really just diving into the drama. I shouldn't have been surprised given how the last story that we read ended, but I think I still was just surprised and amused by the different twists and turns that we took in "Jack and Alice."

Emily: Definitely. To go ahead and get us started, Lauren, it's your turn to recap our story.

Lauren: Yay.

Emily: Are you ready?

Lauren: No.

Emily: Too bad!

Lauren: I read this four days ago and I had to go back.

Emily: That's too dang bad.

Lauren: Okay, Holes. I, I was, I was reading ahead and now I had to go back and like refresh my memory today because I knew I was recapping and I, I don't know if it's refreshed enough, but we're going to see.

Emily: We will find out. All right, Lauren, you've got 30 seconds on the clock to recap Jack and Alice. Are you ready?

Lauren: Oh, god. Yeah, I think so.

Emily: All right. Three, two, one. One. Go.

Lauren: Okay. So it all starts with this masquerade party that they have, and everyone is entranced with this man, Charles, except for there was one woman in particular who seems to be super, super into him, but he's not into anybody because he's holding out for like the one perfect woman.

Um, the - Lucy who is super, super into him or not Lucy, Alice, um, goes off for a walk and runs into this woman named Lucy who used to be in love with Charles and has come to find him. Um, Alice is also always drunk. This is a really terrible recap. Um, Charles marries Lady Williams, and you don't know who that is.

Emily: [laughs] I'm not gonna lie, that was a little rough.

Lauren: [laughs] I'm really out of practice. I was trying to think about like, what details were important to include in the recap, and I got so stuck in - I don't know how so many things happen. It's like 10 pages, but like, I don't, that was terrible. I'm so sorry. We're going to go through this in more detail.

You can just laugh at my pain. It's okay.

Emily: We're here to laugh at each other's pain. That's what friendship is.

Lauren: Oh my goodness. Okay. Emily, would you like to kick us off in explaining a little bit more of the detail that I was completely incapable of cramming into 30 seconds?

Emily: I would love to start trying.

Lauren: Thank god.

Emily: So yes, we open upon Mr. Johnson, who "was once upon a time about 53. In a twelvemonth afterwards, he was 54, which so much delighted him that he was determined to celebrate his next birthday by giving a masquerade to his children and friends."

Lauren: Who doesn't love a costume party, honestly?

Emily: This has to be, honestly, this is one of my favorite openings to a story. It's just, they're so, it's so funny to me and I don't know why.

Lauren: I don't know, but I think, I just like the innocence of, he's so delighted by the fact that he's made it another year, like, ah! look at that, another 12 months have gone by and I am another year older. We must celebrate.

Emily: I think there's something to the absurdity of, he's 54 and he's just so delighted by that.

Lauren: I love it. I hope that I'm also that delighted and innocent when I'm 54.

Emily: Absolutely. But yes, indeed, his 55th year rolls around and he invites the entire neighborhood, which consists of like a dozen people.

Lauren: And so there are a few different people who are of note who attend this party, um, Charles Adams, who is the cause of much drama and consternation over the course of this story, who is "an amiable, accomplished, and bewitching young man of so dazzling a beauty that none but eagles could look him in the face."

So we have Charles, the amiable one. Miss Simpson, "pleasing in her person, in her manners, and in her disposition, an unbounded ambition was her only fault." Ambition in a woman, you know, so crass.

Emily: How dare.

Lauren: And her second sister, Sukey, was "envious, spiteful, and malicious." And Cecilia, who is the youngest, was "perfectly handsome, but too affected to be pleasing."

It's almost like the Goldilocks of siblings, where it's like, well, this one is really pretty, but she's too ambitious. Uh, this one just sucks in everything. And this one is really pretty, but like, you know, she's just a little off.

Emily: But "in Lady Williams, every virtue met. She was a widow with a handsome jointure and the remains of a very handsome face."

God, I love, I love the subversion of juxtaposition here, with, "Though benevolent and candid, she was generous and sincere. Though pious and good, she was religious and amiable. And though elegant and agreeable, she was polished and entertaining." Those are all synonyms!

Lauren: Yep!

Emily: Someone found a thesaurus.

Lauren: Jane Austen was having a great time sitting in her house, writing this little story.

Emily: Definitely.

Lauren: And the Johnsons themselves "were a family of love, and though a little addicted to the bottle and the dice had many good qualities." The bottle's going to come up multiple times over the course of this story.

Emily: It's a featured player.

Lauren: It is a featured player. Everybody is drunk, especially Alice.

Emily: Oh my goodness, yes. But yes, this masquerade goes off wonderfully, despite, uh, at the beginning, there's one gentleman who is so admired in his mask as the sun - so we think - that no one can enter within a certain radius of him.

Lauren: It's a wonderful metaphor.

Emily: Yes.

Lauren: And there's also somebody who dresses as a Sultana, which will be important later on once we get to the end of the story. The gentleman in question, of course, is discovered to be Charles Adams in his plain green coat without any mask at all. So we think he's been dressed up as the sun and just no one can come within his orbit, but really, it's just how beautiful and amazing and grand in stature is Charles Adams.

Emily: So hyped up. I don't know if I believe the hype.

Lauren: I feel like you can't live up to that kind of expectation. There's no way that if you were described as being so brilliant that you were dressed up as the sun and then people come closer and realize, oh no, that's just your face. I don't think there's a face that could live up to that. I don't care if you're sculpted by the gods. It can't be that good.

Emily: But we'll, we'll see a little of Charles Adams's deficiencies as the story goes on.

Lauren: And no one also can imagine who was the Sultana. But of course, we do figure it out eventually.

Emily: Of course, because the lady dressed as the Sultana says to another, "Oh, Cecilia," the name of one of the Misses Simpson, "I wish I really was what I pretend to be." And so the never failing genius of Charles Adams discovers by this admission that it's the ambitious Caroline Simpson who is dressed as the Sultana.

Lauren: You really had to be a genius to figure that one out.

Emily: Yes, we're definitely vaunting Charles Adams's intellectual capabilities as well.

Lauren: Mm hmm. And Charles Adams, of course, by the end of the party is as bright as ever, because he soon discovered the party at play to be the three Johnsons, Envy to be Sukey Simpson, and Virtue to be Lady Williams, as he's looking at who's sitting at this gaming table. And truly, he must be a genius, because number one, there's only so many people in this neighborhood, as we've already established, and number two, there's only so many people at this party, and it's really not that hard to figure out who is who, but, you know, he's got something going on up here, he can really figure out who is dressed as these different characters.

Emily: Ultimately, though, everybody at the party gets dead drunk, including the lovely Virtue, Lady Williams.

Lauren: And the whole party, not excepting even Virtue, were carried home because they were so drunk.

Emily: Literally, the last, the last line is, dead drunk.

Lauren: And then the whole neighborhood talks about this party for months. Probably because there's honestly nothing else to do or to talk about, but we can just imagine that it was that good of a party.

Emily: And everyone is completely obsessed with Charles Adams.

Lauren: I also just need y'all to know that the name of this town is called Pammydiddle. And I feel like it's a crime that we haven't mentioned this until now, but these are the residents of Pammydiddle.

Emily: Which, according to the notes, is supposed to invoke a Welsh feeling to this village.

Lauren: Sure. I'll go with that.

Emily: I'll trust the scholars. Yeah.

Lauren: Everybody is obsessed with Charles Adams, but the Miss Simpsons, those three sisters we mentioned earlier, "were defended from his power by ambition, envy, and self admiration." So they're either too ambitious, too envious of other people, or just too wrapped up in themselves to really pay that much attention to Charles. But there's one person who is not so lucky as to escape his charm.

Emily: Poor Alice Johnson is utterly enraptured with Charles Adams.

Lauren: Head over heels.

Emily: However, "In spite of every endeavor on the part of Miss Johnson to discover any attachment to her in him, the cold and indifferent heart of Charles Adams still, to all appearance, preserved its native freedom. Polite to all, but partial to none, he still remained the lovely, the lively, but insensible Charles Adams."

Lauren: Insensible in both senses of the word.

Emily: Yes.

Lauren: No emotion, not a thought behind those beautiful eyes, just nothing going on.

Emily: No thoughts, head empty.

Lauren: Head empty. Alice probably also hopes that she could empty her head because she's quite, um, in her bottle when she goes to talk to Lady Williams about this, because she's having a bad time. She doesn't know why this guy won't return her affection.

Emily: Mm hmm. So, she goes to Lady Williams, who says, "I perceive but too plainly, my dear Miss Johnson, that your heart has not been able to withstand the fascinating charms of this young man, and I pity you sincerely. Is it a first love?" Upon which revelation she goes on to bemoan that first loves, we can't be having with them. She's concerned for Alice's safety and the well being of her heart, if this is a first love. If it were a second love, that'd be fine. Who cares?

Lauren: Yeah, you have to save yourself from a first love and then you don't have to be afraid of a second love. How that is supposed to work, it's never really made clear, but just like avoid a first love and then all will be well.

Emily: Yeah.

Lauren: That's how that works.

Emily: Smooth sailing.

Lauren: Perfect. And Lady Williams decides she's going to take it upon herself to explain to Alice how she knows so much and is going to regale her with a great tale.

Emily: So Lady Williams begins telling Alice her own story of falling for this terrible, terrible first love. But she gets no further than saying that her beloved governess had eloped with the butler, and so Lady Williams went to spend the winter in town with a relation than Miss Johnson is completely derailed by the fact that Lady Williams describes her relation as having too much color in her face. Alice can't get past this.

Lauren: She, she's really struggling with it and is becoming progressively redder in the face as she argues because Lady Williams has hit a nerve because Alice, who's almost always drunk, tends to have a little bit of color in her face, and so she cannot move on from the fact that Lady Williams has said that she had too much color. She insists on Lady Williams explaining, how can that be? Do you think that anyone can have too much color? And Lady Williams cannot move on. With the story, because Alice just keeps interrupting her to ask why she thinks this.

Emily: We literally never find out. Why Lady Williams so cautions against a first love. We don't know her story at all.

Lauren: Nothing, nothing at all. And they eventually argue so much that "the dispute at length grew so hot on the part of Alice that from words, she almost came to blows." So I'm now just picturing like a drunken Jersey Shore-esque fight of like, "you can't say that to me! Why would you say that?" Just drawn out, drunk girl fighting.

Emily: Absolutely wild.

Lauren: And before Alice can really throw hands with Lady Williams, Mr. Johnson luckily enters and, with some difficulty, "forced her away from Lady Williams, Mrs. Watkins, and her red cheeks."

Emily: Thank goodness! They were about to fight!

Lauren: Alice said, you can catch these hands. Say you can have too much color one more time.

Emily: [laughing] Yes.

But they do make up. The families are simply too close. And so, Lady Williams called on Miss Johnson to propose a walk, which led from her ladyship's pigsty to Charles Adams's horse pond. You know, the pinnacles of romance.

Lauren: Such a scenic walk. Love it. We love to see it. That's really the landmarks that I want to pass by on my walk.

Emily: Mm hmm. Pigsty and horse pond? Count me in.

Lauren: Imagine the smells.

Emily: No, I would rather not.

Lauren: And Alice knows that, you know, Lady Williams is being very kind in proposing such a wonderful scented walk, and is thrilled to continue and accompany her on this walk. And they start to try and tell the story again, and Alice is still stuck on having too much color. No, that's not really right. Lady Williams tries to apologize for vexing Alice before. And even in the apology, Alice finds something to be offended by.

Emily: Of course, but this argument is saved from devolving once again when they stumble upon "a lovely young woman lying apparently in great pain beneath a citron tree, who was too interesting an object not to attract their notice."

Lauren: I mean, I would hope so.

Emily: Yeah, seriously, there's some strange girl in agony along your walking route. Like, I'm, I would think that would be a distraction.

Lauren: Mm hmm. And so of course they forget their own dispute and they go and ask her, you know, "you seem, fair nymph, to be laboring under some misfortune, which we will be happy to relieve if you will inform us what it is. Will you favor us with your life and adventures?"

I don't know that you need to be asking about life and adventures. Do you want to ask, like, where you're hurt? What's going on?

Emily: Which we have to listen to this young woman's entire story before we find out what happens to her. Should I spoil it or should we save it?

Lauren: I think you spoil it.

Emily: Spoil it? Yeah, she's caught in like a bear trap.

Lauren: And her leg is broken!

Emily: Her leg is broken, but she's just, she's sitting here and happily invites them to join her, and she tells them her story, and then we find out her leg's been broken in a bear trap.

Lauren: I feel like it's important to set the scene. So she responds to this with, "Willingly, ladies, if you will be so kind as to be seated," and then tells this whole tale while her leg is in a bear trap and broken. So just imagine, like, to set the scene, these three elegant ladies, out in nature, and one of them is just calmly telling her life story with her leg just caught in a bear trap and like twisted at a weird angle, just hanging out, regaling them with some tales.

Emily: She talks for two pages before we get to "one of my legs was entirely broken." Girl.

Lauren: But you know, how is she supposed to be worried about her leg being broken when her story is all about Charles Adams?

Emily: This young lady is apparently the daughter of a tailor in a small village in North Wales, which according to the notes is, or at least was at that time, rather renowned for being very rural and remote, and definitely not the kind of place where you would have a lot of excellent tailors. But no matter.

Lauren: Not important.

Emily: She was raised by her aunt who owned an ale house nearby. And she became a very accomplished tailor's daughter. She learned dancing, music, drawing, and various languages. Somehow.

Lauren: You know, we just, we're not going to question it.

Emily: Yeah.

Lauren: And, and also the very Welsh sounding Charles Adams owned the principal estate in her North Welsh neighborhood.

Emily: I mean, you know, the English.

Lauren: Well, yeah, fair enough. But of course she is, to her sorrow, acquainted with Charles Adams and she cannot, she need not describe how charming he is and she could not resist his attractions because evidently who can? There is no woman who can resist the attractions of Charles Adams.

Emily: Apparently so. But her aunt is apparently on excellent terms with Charles Adams's cook. And so, this young lady finds out through that grapevine that the cook, Mrs. Susan, does not think the Charles Adams will ever marry. "He has often and often declared to me that his wife, whoever she might be, must possess youth, beauty, birth, wit, merit, and money." Which is just too much to ask in a future wife!

Lauren: It reminds me of, um, Darcy giving all of his qualifications for what an accomplished woman must be. And so of course, when she's heard all of this, um, the young woman is in distress because she was afraid that although she had youth, beauty, wit, and merit, and could probably count on becoming the heir of her aunt's house and business, he would think that she was still lowly to be considered and unworthy of his hand. And if that's the case, then what on earth is she supposed to do?

Emily: But she decides to make a bold push and writes a letter directly to him, this man she has never met, and proposes marriage.

Lauren: Because that's exactly what's proper.

Emily: Every part of this is unheard of.

Lauren: Just wrong. All of it's wrong.

Emily: "To this I received an angry and peremptory refusal, but thinking it might be rather the effect of his modesty than anything else, I pressed him again on the subject. But he never answered any more of my letters, and very soon afterwards left the country." Yeah, you're stalking him!

Lauren: It's also just so funny to see the reversal of like, Oh, this man must be too modest. Because you see that so often with the stereotype of, um, young, well-bred women being too modest to accept a first proposal. You see it with Mr. Collins when he incorrectly assumes that Lizzy's only refusing him out of like a sense of modesty. And here we are in this story where she believes, oh, Charles Adams is so modest that he had to refuse my proposal the first time. Baby, no, he doesn't know who you are and you're a woman writing to him to propose marriage out of nowhere. That's not gonna work.

Emily: He thinks you're weird!

Lauren: Very! And unsettling!

Emily: And she's not beating the weird allegations because she follows him back to his home in Pammydiddle.

Lauren: "Choosing to take silence for consent" is how she puts it. And I was like, Oh no, no, no, no...

Emily: That's not how that works!

Lauren: That's not how that works at all. She leaves unknown to her aunt and then arrived in this wood after a tedious journey this morning - very speedy, she is. And upon inquiring for his house, she's directed through this wood and she's so excited. She's thrilled. She's not paying attention to where she's going because she's so looking forward to, like, seeing this man who she loves again, when she found herself "suddenly seized by the leg, and on examining the cause of it, found that I was caught in one of the steel traps so common in gentleman's grounds." And there's when we find out that she's trapped in a bear trap.

Emily: Although, the initial response to this is, "ah," cried Lady Williams, "how fortunate we are to meet with you, since we might otherwise perhaps have shared the like misfortune." She's like, oh, thank god you set it off first!

Lauren: Could have been us. Could have been my leg trapped.

Emily: So, we don't know Lady Williams's story, but we know this girl's story. Her name is apparently Lucy.

Lauren: Yeah, and Lucy is, um, also happy that she was able to come across the trap before them. And she did say that she screamed until, you know, it bounced off all the trees and a servant came to release her from her prison, but not before one of her legs was entirely broken. There has been no offer of help yet until she says like, Oh yeah, my leg has been entirely broken. And Alice still says, "Oh, cruel Charles, to wound the hearts and legs of all the fair!" What?

Emily: [laughing] The hearts AND legs.

Lauren: Oh my goodness.

Emily: But fortunately, Lady Williams rolls a natural 20 on her medicine check and miraculously heals Lucy's leg.

Lauren: [laughing] A nat 20 is really the only way to describe that because what do you mean you're just able to like, set this leg? Even the narration even makes sure to say, "She performed the operation with great skill, which was some more wonderful on account of her having never performed such a one before."

Emily: This woman doesn't know medicine. And yet.

Lauren: She's not a surgeon. And, and Lady Williams does such a good job that not only has she been able to set Lucy's leg, Lucy can get up and walk to Lady Williams's house with no problems.

Emily: Wild. Where do I gain this kind of skill?

Lauren: I would love to know.

Emily: But Lucy is just so lovely, so elegant, that Alice and Lady Williams are entirely taken with her. And Alice, even, when they part, assures Lucy that "except her father, brother, uncles, aunts, cousins, and other relations, Lady Williams, Charles Adams, and a few dozen more of particular friends, she loved her better than almost any other person in the world." High esteem.

Lauren: Oh, the highest esteem. She really, really, really thinks she's one of the most important people in her life. And Lucy, to her credit, can see straight through this because she says, "such a flattering assurance of her regard would justly have given much pleasure to the object of it, had she not plainly perceived that the amiable Alice had partaken too freely of Lady William's claret."

Emily: Really the drunk girl in the bathroom telling every stranger she meets how much she loves them.

Lauren: [drunk girl in bathroom voice] You're so beautiful. He doesn't, do you have a boyfriend? He doesn't deserve you. Look at you. Look at your hair.

Emily: Oh my god, truly, that's what it is.

Lauren: No one hypes you up better than the drunk girl in the bathroom.

Emily: And once Alice is gone, Lady Williams has a word with Lucy about how often Alice is inebriated. "She has many rare and charming qualities, but sobriety is not one of them."

Lauren: And then she goes on to say the whole family are a drunken set. Not just Alice. Everybody's drunk.

Emily: And then in a lovely counterpoint to the earlier description of Lady Williams where every adjective is even more flattering than the last, she goes on to say, "I'm sorry to say too that I never knew three such thorough gamesters as they are, more particularly Alice. But she is a charming girl. I fancy not one of the sweetest tempers in the world. To be sure, I have seen her in such passions! However, she is a sweet young woman. I am sure you'll like her. I scarcely know anyone so amiable. Oh, that you could have but seen her the other evening. How she raved, and on such a trifle, too. She is indeed a most pleasing girl. I shall always love her." What's the truth?

Lauren: The truth is that she's crazy, and Lady Williams finds her entertaining. It's like, I feel like it's that type of friend where - maybe not even a friend, an acquaintance, where you know you want to take them out because you're going to have a good time because they're going to do something completely just off the wall. And you don't really, like, want to hang out with them all the time, but you know whenever you do hang out with them, you're going to be entertained and you're going to have fun. And you're always just a little, you're slightly concerned. Every time. There's like, there's a little bit of worry in the back of your mind every time you hang out with them because you're not 100 percent sure if they're okay, but then they do something even funnier and you forget about it because you're just laughing at them for the next 30 minutes. And all is well again, but that is what Alice reminds me of.

Emily: Absolutely. But the next morning after all of these events, the three Miss Simpsons come to visit Lady Williams, and they too are utterly charmed by Lucy, immediately invite her to come to bBath with them.

Lauren: Because, sure. And Lady Williams insists on her going, declares that she would never forgive her if she does not, and that she should never survive if she did, and is so persuasive with all these contradictory statements that, of course, it is decided that Lucy should go.

Emily: Only after she refuses, though.

Lauren: Only after she refuses. She has to at least pretend like she doesn't want to.

Emily: Mm hmm. But she does go and arrives safely, which is where we finally come to Jack. The eponymous Jack of "Jack and Alice." Do you mind if I read this?

Lauren: Please.

Emily: I'm going to read the entirety of Jack's appearance in this story.

"It may now be proper to return to the hero of this novel, the brother of Alice, of whom I believe I have scarcely ever had occasion to speak, which may perhaps be partly owing to his unfortunate propensity to liquor, which so completely deprived him of the use of those faculties nature had endowed him with that he never did anything worth mentioning. His death happened a short time after Lucy's departure, and was the natural consequence of this pernicious practice. By his decease, his sister became the sole inheritress of a very large fortune, which, as it gave her fresh hopes of rendering herself acceptable as a wife to Charles Adams, could not fail of being most pleasing to her, and as the effect was joyful, the cause could scarcely be lamented."

That's it, Jack's gone.

Lauren: And his only purpose is dying and leaving Alice enough money to finally say, I am rich enough for Charles Adams to marry me. Does not care about her brother. RIP to that man. But now I'm rich. So like, thank you so much.

Emily: But Jane Austen, queen of comedy, naming the story "Jack and Alice" and then saying now we come to the hero and then in a blink. Nope.

Lauren: He's gone. Goodbye.

Emily: Masterful. I love it. Because he, he comes in, too, at such a point where Lucy has been really hyped up, she's sort of woefully, uh, been detached from Charles Adams. And I was like, oh, is Jack gonna come in and swoop up Lucy? No, he's gonna die of alcoholism.

Lauren: Yep. That's where we're going with that.

Emily: Yep.

Lauren: And Alice wastes no time. And because she, you know, she's falling in love with Charles more and more every day. And so she lets her father know and asks him to propose marriage between her and Charles. And her father says, sure, why not? And he sets off to, you know, propose this to Charles and say, I'd like to unite you and my daughter in marriage, and, um, doesn't really get the response that he was hoping for.

Emily: Charles quickly disabuses him of the notion that Alice might in any way be an appropriate match, and winds up with, "I expect nothing more in my wife than my wife will find in me. Perfection."

Lauren: Are you, though? Are you?

Emily: Is he?

Lauren: And he gives him like this whole soliloquy of like, why he is so amazing. And, you know, he says - I almost wonder if we get the beginnings of "not handsome enough to tempt me" in this little soliloquy here, because he says, "Your daughter, sir, is neither sufficiently beautiful, sufficiently amiable, sufficiently witty, nor sufficiently rich enough for me."

Emily: What a loser.

Lauren: Just rude.

Emily: The crowning glory, though. "One friend I have, and glory in having but one. She is at present preparing my dinner. But if you choose to see her, she shall come and she will inform you that these have ever been my sentiments." His cook is the only person he considers a friend!

Lauren: Just wild.

Emily: Mm hmm.

Lauren: While this is happening... Um, well, before, before we transition to Bath, we also have to note that Alice is devastated when her father comes back and relates this to her, but she flies to her bottle and so it's soon forgotten about. All is well. I don't know which bottle she chose this time, but she had a little tipple and now she's okay.

Emily: My goodness.

Lauren: Lucy, meanwhile, is just securing every single heart in Bath. She is the new bombshell that's entered the Bath villa and everyone wants to be her friend.

Emily: She has been such a success that she's been offered marriage by a duke - "An elderly man of noble fortune whose ill health was the chief inducement of his journey to Bath."

Lauren: Secure the bag, girl. Marry him and let him croak.

Emily: Seriously. But Lady Williams, of course, can't countenance this. She could never let her beautiful young friend go be married, essentially.

Lauren: And once again, we have her... a series of contradictions. She asks, why does she hesitate even a moment, but then says, "I've inquired into his character and find him to be an unprincipled and illiterate man. Never shall my Lucy be united to such a one. He has a princely fortune, which is every day increasing. How nobly will you spend it? What credit will you give him in the eyes of all? How much will he be respected on his wife's account? But why, my dearest Lucy, why will you not at once decide this affair by returning to me and never leaving me again?" And this goes on for like another half of a paragraph. But we never know what advice Lucy would have taken because the letter that was sent to her arrives in Bath after she's died.

Emily: Sukey, the second Simpson sister, kills her. She poisons her.

Lauren: They said at the beginning of the story that the major flaw of Sukey is that she's envious, and Sukey, seeing that Lucy was the belle of the ball and was getting all this attention, simply could not bear it and poisoned her instead, and so Lucy dies at 17.

Emily: Uh, quickly followed by Sukey, who is hanged for murder.

Lauren: Yep. Yep. Yeah, they figured it out real quickly.

Emily: But the other sisters Simpson, are, um, not too terribly affected by this outcome. Because Caroline, the ambitious one, very quickly snaps up that duke. And then Cecilia, the youngest, realizes that, well, she's never going to get somebody good enough for her in England. And so, "She left and I have since heard is at present the favorite Sultana of the Great Mogul." So she just fucks off to India.

Lauren: Pretty much. And her older sister Caroline was dressed as a Sultana in that masquerade party at the very beginning, and so now Cecilia has become an actual Sultana in real life because she's just decided she's going to go secure her man outside of the country.

Emily: How the turn tables.

Lauren: How the turn tables.

Emily: But in the meantime, "the inhabitants of Pammydiddle were in a state of the greatest astonishment and wonder of report being circulated of the intended marriage of Charles Adams. The lady's name was still a secret. Mr. and Mrs. Jones imagined it to be Miss Johnson, but she knew better. All her fears were centered in his cook, when to the astonishment of everyone, he was publicly united to Lady Williams." The end!

Lauren: Whoa, what a ride.

Emily: Such a ride.

Lauren: I also love that, although Charles Adams has said that he wants birth, he wants rank, he wants money, he wants whatever, the one woman who people can conceive of him actually marrying is his cook.

Emily: She's his only friend!

Lauren: Who's by his own admission, his only friend. So.

Emily: Wow, what a man.

Lauren: What a man. What a man. But it's not that surprising in the end that he ends up with Lady Williams, given that we were told of all of her virtues at the very beginning. She is the one woman in whom everything lovely unites. So.

Emily: It was, it was pretty well signaled that of our known cast of characters, she could be the only option.

Lauren: Who else was he going to marry? Somebody who was beneath him? Heaven forbid.

Emily: Ugh!

Lauren: Ugh. The horror.

Emily: What a thought.

Lauren: Never.

Emily: So those are the events of Jack and Alice, such as they are.

Lauren: Do you see now why I was having trouble summarizing this in 30 seconds? Because y'all, that was wild.

Emily: Yeah, we thought a lot happened in "Frederic and Elfrida," but this just jumps from place to place.

Lauren: Like lightning. Okay, Emily, what was your overall impression of this, of this story?

Emily: I, so, just to note, "Jack and Alice" was written about three years after "Frederic and Elfrida" in 1790, so Jane Austen would have been about 14 years old. And I think we are seeing on the page her maturation as an author. Um, she's delving more into the interiority of characters, and the sequence of events isn't just melodramatic episode after melodramatic episode. There's still a lot of melodrama, absolutely, but there is a sort of throughline to what's happening here.

Lauren: Yeah, I agree with that. And I think as well, I feel like all of the debaucherousness is her kind of pantomiming what she thinks it means to be an adult, like, I feel like you have a certain view of what adulthood means, especially when you're a teenager. So you have one view of it when you're a child and adults are like this world that you can never quite touch or understand or be a part of.

And then as you get older and you start to get a sense of what it means to be a young woman or an adult or what have you, and you start to peek behind the curtain a little bit, you still don't quite have the context or the understanding to fully grasp what it means to be an adult, but you think that you do. And so when you write about people who are older than you or people who are adults, you write about people who are just like always drunk or do all these outlandish things because you're like, yeah, that. That makes sense. That's surely what adults have been doing this entire time, right? That's what it means. That's what I'll be able to do once I'm older.

Emily: Yeah, and we're seeing this recognition of people being, you know, inherently flawed and not just undertaking evil actions. Although, you know, Sukey still gets a little bit of that. But yeah, we see the drunkenness. We see the vanity. It's interesting to watch Jane Austen's understanding of humanity expand through her youth and adolescence.

Lauren: Yes, and wee who she decides to ridicule with her humor and sarcasm, which we already noted in "Frederic and Elfrida," which has been present from day one. But what changes is who she decides to kind of turn her sights on, for lack of a better word, like, who is she going to skewer with her sarcasm today? Because I feel like that also tells you something about how she views the world and who she thinks is deserving of ridicule.

Emiily: Mhm. And I think it does still, uh, square pretty neatly with her definitely, you know, Christian Anglican worldview. It's people who have fallen to these vices of envy and of greed and licentiousness, people who overindulge in drink, who are the ones suffering for various actions.

Lauren: Yeah, agreed. I found this to be hilarious.

Emily: Definitely. But I think we do also, you mentioned it at some point, I think we are starting to see the development of some of the archetypes that she fleshes out a little more in the novels. I have like three or four places where I would highlight something and like write in a character's name from one of the novels and be like, is that you?

Because you can see shades of like, Sir Walter Elliot in Charles Adams. You can see shades of Mr. Collins in Lucy. You see shades of Emma as well in Lady Williams, I think, wanting to take this lovely young project girl and just keep her all to herself.

Lauren: Oh, you're right. I hadn't made the connection to Emma.

Emily: So yeah, I think she's starting to take some of these ideas and down the road develops them into fuller characters who have more of a background and more of a life surrounding these characteristics, but they're definitely there. The seeds have been planted.

Lauren: Agreed. This was, yeah, just a fun read again. And I wonder if there are other... if I go back and read this again, if there are going to be other character archetypes that I could pull out, because I noticed Mr. Collins as well, but I didn't think about the Lady Williams to Emma connection. So it's interesting to see like where the other beginnings either of character archetypes or plot lines or things like that, where you can see the beginnings of it in her Juvenilia and then wonder if she picked up that thread when she was older and said, Oh, I know how I can refine this or make it better or incorporate this into a different idea that I have.

Emily: It's so fun to go through these juvenile writings.

Lauren: Yes. Oh my gosh, it's a joy.

Emily: Yeah, we're getting all the mechanics behind what led into this ream of classic novels.

Lauren: Mm hmm. And speaking of things that lead into novels or world building, what is your historical connection that you have for us today?

Emily: That was such a nice segue.

Lauren: Thanks.

Emily: So I want to touch on something that you called out a couple of times during our discussion. Um, this idea of a sultana. What's the context of that? What's going on here? It's an idea that we've talked about a little bit earlier. I discussed the idea of Orientalism during "Northanger Abbey," I think.

But this definitely drew me to the idea of, like, what's the situation with Britain in India while Jane Austen is writing? Because clearly there's enough public consciousness of that part of the world to have the idea of something like a sultana being a thing that you would dress up as for a masquerade or something that a young girl would run off and become in this wild melodramatic fantasy.

So Britain has definitely been in India for a while at this point. It's been almost two centuries since they began trading with India and since the infamous East India Company was established and, you know, given essentially a monopoly on British trade in India. By the mid 18th century, so a few decades before this was written, the East India Company was actively intervening in Indian politics. They were first focused in southern and eastern India, but they were spreading very rapidly across the subcontinent.

So what Jane Austen refers to as the "Mogul," is presumably the nominal ruler of the Mughal Empire, or what remained of it at this point. By the late 18th century, it had been sort of broken into regional states after a long period of conflict with other regional rulers. And so the Mogul that she names would have been functionally a puppet of other powers. Possibly including the East India Company as well.

But yeah, during Austen's early life, there were multiple ongoing wars to control various territories, and the East India Company was actively annexing Indian states to bolster their power. They're in the process of creating what would, in the Victorian era, in the mid-19th century, become fully this Empire of India that Queen Victoria ends up being, you know, the Empress of India, and this is what's, what's happening during Austen's early life is the consolidation of the power that would have to be dismantled in the mid-20th century.

So clearly there's enough information in various configurations, I'm sure, coming back from that kind of front, and from that trade empire, as it were, that it's clearly in the public consciousness, someone like Jane Austen is aware of this and knows of concepts like sultanas and moguls and things like that, without it necessarily being accurate information. I think definitely, you know, this Orientalist fantasy of what happens in the Indian subcontinent.

Lauren: I'm curious about what images they would have even seen to be able to build the costume for the masquerade. Like who is filtering that image, who's drawing it, like, how would they bring in their own perception and their own kind of like orientalist or racist views into their depictions of what it's like in India or in any other, like, nonwhite country that the British decided to stake their claim on? But yeah, I don't know. I would be interested in learning more about that to see, like, what were the images that you were seeing to even build your perception of this?

Emily: Yeah, because there would presumably have been some kind of images, but there's also trade goods coming back to England, so they could potentially have gotten their hands on actual goods from India. But, you know, the styling of that I'm sure is very influenced by whatever middle to upper class, uh, English people thought was happening. So all very, very fantastical and, um, I'm sure not recognizing, you know, the humanity and personhood of these people being subjugated by the British colonial project.

Lauren: I doubt it.

Emily: Mm hmm. So, once again, a delightful history topic.

Lauren: A bit more uplifting than last time, I'll give you that, but -

Emily: A little bit.

Lauren: It was, it was necessary, though. I really liked that. Thank you.

Emily: What do you have for pop culture for us today?

Lauren: I was thinking also about masquerade for my pop culture connection, but just in a different sense, um, and thinking about why is it that people like dressing up so much? Like, even to this day, we enjoy things like costume parties or masquerade balls, or the thing that I was thinking about is like, drag as masquerade and how you can use clothing or makeup or your hairstyle to either like become someone else or to like, express yourself in a way that feels either genuine or larger than life or what have you.

And so when I was thinking about it, I was thinking about how there's a kind of power in embodying a character that's either different to you or in like finding a way to express yourself. And if there weren't power in that, then people wouldn't be continuously trying to ban it.

And so there was an article in Pink News that was really excellent that was talking about drag bans throughout the years, because as we've seen, unfortunately, in recent years, drag bans have been kind of picking up across the United States, mostly more conservative controlled states. And they're nothing new. There were actually states that were outlawing cross dressing like in the 19th century, specifically because of the fear of people not conforming to their assigned gender in whatever way that society thought that they should at the time.

One of the oldest of these laws, this is - I swear I'm going to bring it back to pop culture and it's not like historical connection, but -

Emily: No, I believe you! I love it!

Lauren: Thank you. One of the oldest goes back to 1845 when New York declared it a crime to appear in public with a painted face or when wearing a disguise designed to prevent identification. There was another one in 1848 in Columbus that forbade a person from appearing in public in dress not belonging to his or her sex. And then Chicago passed another one that was three years later. And then it kind of became this ripple effect where cities across the country adopted laws to enforce gender conformity in dress and in presentation.

And so I was just thinking about why. Like, again, if there's, if there weren't power in self expression, people wouldn't be trying so hard to ban it either in the 19th century or the 21st century when people are just trying to live their lives and, you know, find some kind of joy in self expression and in living authentically, even when authenticity sometimes creates like this level of, or involves this level of artifice or something to that effect.

And the characters here are just having fun. Like they're not trying to necessarily find a different way to express themselves, or at least it's not written in the text in any way. And they likely only talk about it for the following three months because there's literally nothing else to do in the town, but you can also read it as the characters latching on to masquerade because wearing a mask is the only time or way that they can actually be free to express themselves in some way or to become more of who they are.

And so I'm thinking about how that's still so important, whether that's in drag performances or in dressing the way that feels aligned with you and your gender and your gender self expression. Like what does masquerade look like in the 21st century? And then what kind of power does masquerade have? Whether that's in a short period of time, like at a drag performance, whether it's an entire drag persona that you create for yourself, or if it's in just the way that you decide to present to the world, because sometimes choosing how we go out into the world is a form of masquerade and people like to interpret it that way.

Like sometimes it's, uh, this is just me presenting myself and who I am. And other times, like, this is the armor that I'm going to use to go out into the world today. And so masquerade is how I'm going to be able to engage in a world in a way that feels right and good for me. Um, so yeah, I was just thinking about masquerade and all the different forms that it takes today and how the fear of masquerade and of self expression shows how much power there is in doing so.

Emily: I like that. That's really good.

Lauren: Thanks.

Emily: Yeah, I love thinking about that kind of choice of self expression and the extent to which intentionally heightening things beyond what could conceivably be natural, um, becomes perceived as a threat... Yeah, it's so, so interesting. Drag as a phenomenon, just, like, I don't know a lot about it, you know, from a scholarly perspective, but I hang around with the kind of people who talk about that a lot, so.

Lauren: Same. And I actually was thinking, like, as I was doing this pop culture connection, there's a scene in a, um, Pedro Almodovár film where there's a trans woman character, who's talking about what it means to be authentic. And she's saying, you know, these boobs are fake. These lips are fake. This hair is a wig. But this is the most authentic I've ever been. And I, I think that that ties into this really well too, but yeah. Like, what does it mean to be authentic? What does it mean to, like you said, heighten things and have that be a way of expressing yourself.

Emily: Very fun. I love it.

Lauren: Yeah.

Emily: Is this the first time - this cannot be the first time we've talked about drag on the podcast. I feel like it has to have come up at some point.

Lauren: Maybe it has, but I'm similarly, like, I feel like I spend a lot of time in circles that discuss drag, but I also am not, like, well versed in, like you said, drag in a scholarly context. And so I feel like I can't talk about it, because someone is going to call me out for not knowing the entire history of drag. And I don't, I'm sorry, I would like to learn more. But I am not a drag scholar. I am a drag enthusiast. So maybe it is. I don't know.

Emily: Well, does that wrap up our discussion of "Jack and Alice?"

Lauren: I think it does.

Emily: That brings us to final takeaways.

Lauren: And I had a really, a trainwreck of a recap, which means that you get to do your takeaway first.

Emily: Can I do a trainwreck of a takeaway?

Lauren: You are more than welcome to. Please make me look a little bit better.

Emily: [laughs] Hmm, what is my takeaway for "Jack and Alice"? I think it's actually going to be the inverse of the effect that Austen played with here. And my takeaway is that we don't actually have to be defined entirely by our flaws.

Lauren: I like it. We don't have to be merely envy?

Emily: Yes, exactly. I mean, we're, you know, human beings are entire constellations of our virtues and our flaws and, um, perfections and imperfections. And I definitely, I very firmly believe that, you know, actions speak louder. And the things that you choose to do don't have to be aligned with whatever your internal flaws may be. You can think a thought and keep it to yourself and do the exact opposite of that. And the action is what's going to impact the world, not the thought.

Lauren: I don't think there's a person alive who hasn't had an extremely unkind thought and kept it to themselves and did not voice it. It's like, you may have thought the really terrible thing, but you said something charitable and the action is what counts.

Emily: There is no thought police.

Lauren: Thank god for that.

Emily: Mm hmm. What is your takeaway, Lauren?

Lauren: I don't know. I honestly, I feel like my takeaway was Don't drink as much as the Johnson family. [laughs]

Emily: Also decent advice.

Lauren: It doesn't end well for any of them. So I think maybe just enjoy your wine in moderation is my takeaway from this.

Emily: Good enough.

Lauren: I don't know that I have anything that's really intellectual for a takeaway other than I enjoy seeing Jane Austen's sarcasm continue to develop.

Emily: Me too. Well, I do believe that brings us to the end of "Jack and Alice." Thank you so much for joining us in this absurd little romp. It was so much fun.

Lauren: It was a journey. That's, I'll tell you that.

Emily: Truly it was.

[outro music]

Lauren: Thank you for joining us in this episode of Reclaiming Jane. Next time we'll be reading the story "Henry and Eliza."

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 at Reclaiming Jane Pod.

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: See you next time, nerds.

[music ends]

Emily: It did make me think of literally last weekend hiking, uh, making the constant joke that we were making one person go in front so that they could catch all the spider webs first.

[both laugh]

Lauren: That's, that's true friendship.

Emily: It is.