Mansfield Park 1-5: “I’m Not Mad, Just…”
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Welcome to Mansfield Park! In this first episode of Season 3, Emily and Lauren are joined by Diane and Zan of The Thing About Austen to talk about disappointment. Also included: courtships, class divides, and Pirates of the Caribbean.
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
The (Almost) Slaveless Caribbean
Find The Thing About Austen at their website, Twitter, and Instagram.
Show Notes
Welcome to season 3! After a much-needed break, we are so excited to be back tackling another Austen book. We are once again in territory that Emily is unfamiliar with, so please try not to spoil them in social media comments. :)
The start of a new season is a capital-M Moment all on its own, but this one was made even more special by Diane and Zan joining us. They have such a wealth of knowledge to share and are so insightful and fun to talk to. We weren’t kidding when we said on Twitter that Emily had to edit the conversation down from around 2 hours — we just kept thinking of new things to say and share. It’s always lovely to find people with whom you can have such an easy rapport. If you’re not already listening to The Thing About Austen, open your podcast app right this moment and follow them!
Transcript
Reclaiming Jane Season 3, Episode 1 | Mansfield Park 1-5: “I’m Not Mad, Just…”
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 talking about chapters one through five of Mansfield Park through the lens of disappointment.
Emily: Welcome to our special guests, Diane and Zan, from The Thing About Austen. We're so thrilled to have you here!
Zan: Thank you for having us.
Diane: Thank you for having us. So, as Emily introduced us, we are Diane and Zan from The Thing About Austen, and it is a podcast about Jane Austen's world. So, we focus strongly on the material culture in the novels, the historical context, and basically every episode we take one thing from the books, like literally a sentence or a line, and then we do a deep dive into that. So it is very nerdy. It’s just, peak nerdy.
Emily: We're very into nerdy.
Zan: It's been really fun to kind of find that there's a big niche for this deep dive nerd, right? I mean, that's–we found our fellow Janeites and it's so fun to get to have those conversations with people who, who want to nerd with us.
Emily: Well, we're very glad to have you here to nerd with us today about Mansfield Park. So this is the novel that we are focusing on for our season three. We've done Sense and Sensibility, we've done Pride and Prejudice, and we're now back in territory that I'm completely unfamiliar with.
Lauren: Also, this is so perfect that you guys are here because I was relistening to your intro episode, and both of you–Mansfield Park was an early Austen or a favorite Austen, right?
Diane: It was the second Austen I read. Yeah, my first was Emma. And then my second was Mansfield Park, which is not the typical trajectory, I think.
Zan: Mansfield Park was probably my third or fourth, but it was one where it was like, that was the real test of like, “Do I really like Austen?” ‘Cause I mean, I mean the first two that I read were Sense and Sensibility and then, I think Pride and Prejudice, which are two of the fairly easy-to-access novels. And [00:02:00] so then Mansfield Park came up and I was like, “Okay, what do I do with this different…” ‘cause it's a totally different kind of voice, and setting, and feel. So Mansfield Park became one that, for me, was the most challenging, but at the same time it had some of the biggest payoffs.
Lauren: This will be like rediscovering the book for me as well. And I did notice when I went to read these five chapters, how different the writing style is, I was like, “Oh, I'm doing a lot more work,” making sure that I actually understand everything that's read on the page. So if other people who are listening, and perhaps reading along for the first time, feel the same way–don't be discouraged, because it is different. It is a little bit more demanding, I think, a plot?
Diane: It's more dense, I think.
Lauren: Yeah.
Zan: Yeah, I think it has a slightly denser social conscience to it. Not that Austen is ever light on social commentary, but I think this one is making you work for it, but I think also trying to, especially with these first five chapters, add a whole lot of nuance that's going to inform all the things that come after this. And so the setup is pretty intensive, yeah, in these first five chapters.
Lauren: That's one of the reasons why I'm super excited to get into this, which Emily doesn't know yet, but there's so many good social issues that we get to talk about in this book. I can't wait.
Emily: I love social issues, but actually, it's–I feel like that's a perfect segue there talking about the setup of the first five chapters. So, before we start really getting into the discussion, how about we go ahead and do our thirty-second recaps. Lauren, are you ready?
Lauren: No, but I'm going to do it anyway.
Emily: Yes, you are. We go in three, two, one, now.
Lauren: Okay, so there are three sisters. One marries really well. One marries okay. One decides to go run off and marry somebody completely unsuitable. She eventually has a ton of kids that she can't feed and is kind of unhappy with her life. She's kind of like grown-up Lydia Bennett and one of the–one of the other–the middle sister decides that she's going to send for, like, the nice daughter from the youngest sister's family. This is all confusing; I promise it makes sense. So now this, Fanny Dashwood, is now a ward at the bigger sister’s house. They are all really rich and they [00:04:00] want to make sure she knows her place, and she’s there and it's fine.
Emily: I just want to point out you called her Fanny Dashwood.
Lauren: No!
Emily: I’m sorry.
Lauren: Ugh.
Diane: Is that, like, a automatic disqualification, or–how does this work?
Emily: I don't know. We've never had a grievous mistake like that, Lauren. No, that's–that's false. We've definitely called people by the wrong names before.
Lauren: It's because I have Fanny Dashwood Hate Club so ingrained in my mind–
Emily: I know.
Lauren: –it’s Fanny Price.
Emily: It's hard to escape.
Diane: She's just–she’s the worst.
Lauren: She’s the worst!
Diane: Well, you know, there's a contender in this novel as well, so–
Emily: Alright, Lauren, set my timer. Let's see how I do.
Lauren: Are you ready to please do better than me in recapping these very tense five chapters of Mansfield Park?
Emily: I'm so ready.
Lauren: Okay. Three, two, one, go.
Emily: Alright, we start with three sisters, one of whom marries really terribly and has a whole bunch of children. So, one of her sisters ends up taking in, fostering, adopting, her eldest daughter, Fanny. Fanny lives with them for years, she becomes best friends with one of her cousins. Time passes. Her foster father/uncle goes off to see to his plantation in the West Indies. And then a bunch of other young people of that age come in and the marriage market is in full swing.
Lauren: Alright. I think there was a clear winner, but I will still ask for your judgment call. Judge us, please.
Diane: I dunno. I think you guys, I think you both nailed it, so…
Zan: Right? Yeah, there's, there's so much going on there, but I do think that Emily's gets a little bit further into kind of the, the, the action start points.
Emily: Well, I lost last season on our initial recap, so I feel like it's my time to redeem myself.
Zan: Vindication right now, yeah.
Lauren: Okay. Shall we start with these three sisters? Because I feel like we get a very different look at three sisters in a family than we have gotten in those first two Austen novels that we've read. And I feel like there's so much to dig into there.
Emily: Yeah, this really [00:06:00] hits hard the differences between the three of them, or at least the differences in the way they marry, right off the bat. Whereas, with Sense and Sensibility, we have three sisters who are still in the process of growing up together, which is also the case pretty largely in Pride and Prejudice. But here it's like, nope, they're completely different. It's the three bears, but sisters.
Zan: Yeah, both of your summaries did have that, like, “Once upon a time there was three sisters…” like, has those vibes. I mean, Austen's definitely doing that. And I think she's pairing this idea of their personalities, as well as, like where they fit in the social structure, right. So we get the lady who becomes Lady Bertram, right. She can not be bothered about everything. Everything's good, everything's fine. And so she marries really, really well. The commentary there being like, “Be laid back, be complacent, and you can get–you can land–you know, the big fish,” and then Mrs. Norris, who is obviously…not complacent. I don't, I don't know. I'm trying to be very nice about what we describe about Norris–
Emily: We don't have to be diplomatic here.
Zan: Right? I mean like, we all know that this is, you know, this is not going to go well. She is, she's the most cantankerous, she's the one who is like, driven, but she can only land–it's like, “Oh, it's his vigor–we can, we can land him.” And then, and then to “marry to disoblige” is Fanny's mom, is she “marries to disoblige” and I love the way that Austen uses that phrasing.
Emily: I loved the, just the sentence–the two sentences–that she uses to describe that. She says “Miss Frances married, in the common phrase, to disoblige her family, and by fixing on a lieutenant of marines, without education, fortune, or connections, did it very thoroughly. She could hardly have made a more untoward choice.” Like that's damning with faint praise right there.
Diane: It’s very typical of Austen, right? Where, it’s–you don't want to just marry for money because then you're grasping. But, if you just married for love, then you're being foolish as well. The other thing that I love that she's doing with the setup with the three sisters is also really, subtly–not so subtly–she's really pointing out, “Oh, and by the way, Lady Bertram. She was really hot,” you know, like that is, she's really hammering home [00:08:00] that you don't have to have much else going for you, but if you're really beautiful, you might be able to snag a baronet. And I just love that line in there that even her uncle was kind of like, “Ooh, I mean, I would've thought you would have needed a dowry at least three thousand pounds bigger to snag that guy. So, good for you,” you know.
Emily: Jane Austen just loves a beautiful eldest sister.
Diane: So she's definitely set up this dynamic where we have this guy, this very rich guy who's married–sort of very typically of the time, right–a beautiful ornament. And so far, it seems to be working out pretty well for her, you know, so, and he seems okay with it, you know, they don't seem to quite have like a Mr. Bennett/Mrs. Bennett…situation.
Emily: Yeah, it's not antagonism. It's just kind of, they, they both seem to realize like the, the realism of their situation, like they didn't marry for love, but eh, they make it work.
Zan: It's very benign, that kind of really sets up the way that things work in the rest of the novel in a lot of ways.
Lauren: I get the sense that Lady Bertram specifically is so laid back that even if things weren't benign, I don't think that she would muster up the energy to care. You know, she's got her station in life secured. She got the rich husbands, the social circle, the giant manor. She's not really concerned about anything else.
Emily: She's got the heir and the spare, so–
Zan: Right?
Lauren: Yeah, she has a heir and the spare.
Diane: She did her duty.
Lauren: Exactly. She's really not even that concerned about her nieces and nephews. It's her middle sister, who kinda tries to like, have something to do and then passes it off on Lady Perch, and which is the whole reason that Fanny ends up in their house in the first place.
Diane: Well, that's the interesting dynamic there that in many ways, Mrs. Norris is actually playing Lady of the Manor. You know, she's the one who writes the letters. She's the one who's always trying to dictate what is happening in the household and sort of be the one to have those conversations with Sir Thomas, like she wants to be in that position. The interesting thing about Lady Bertram–I never thought I would use the phrase, “the interesting thing about Lady Bertram,”–but, the interesting thing about her is that, you know, she got the status, but it's [00:10:00] almost like she doesn’t really care about the status. She cares insofar as that, by being wealthy, it means that she doesn't have anything to worry about and that she can just sort of sit on the couch, but she doesn't like going to London. She doesn't like escorting her daughters to parties or anything like that. So she, she actually isn't interested in sort of the, the trappings of, of the time, of what a woman–
Zan: –just the comfort.
Diane: Yeah, she just wants the comfort. She really could care less about, you know, see and be seen. She's just, she’s kind of living her best, like, rich lady life, honestly.
Lauren: She's not a Caroline Bingley, who's overly concerned with all the rest of society. She's just there. She's just hanging out.
Diane: Yup.
Emily: Yeah, the Bertrams give me more of a Middletons vibe than any of the other married couples we've seen, I think. They're just kind of…there.
Zan: Doing their own thing.
Diane: Yeah.
Zan: Totally. But I think it's also interesting too, with Mrs. Norris being like, “I'm going to run things.” The fact that she's the one who was like, “Yeah, let's, let's bring Fanny to Mansfield,” but she's also the one who, in the chapters that we read, that she's like, you know, “If anything happens to Sir Thomas, I need to be the one that's going to be notified, you know, so that I can spread the drama the way I want to,” the fact that she's micromanaging everything, and–she is so good at controlling what's going on, but now where we kind of land with the end of the five chapters, these children are no longer children, and let's, let's see what kind of control she can exert over this new situation and, you know, the Crawfords are coming, you know, like, “Let's see what you can do with that, Aunt Norris.”
Diane: I mean, she’s basically living vicariously through Maria's engagement to Rushworth. She's like, “This is my engagement. I made this happen.” It's like, “Okay, calm down, lady…”
Lauren: I honestly–I made a note when I was reading that–one, how much of a cunning mastermind you have to be to basically volun-tell your sister that she'll be raising a whole child, and get her–
Emily: That’s–it’s so much.
Lauren: Yeah. And like, clearly it was not Lady Bertram's idea, and yet she still goes along with it and she manages to–Mrs. Norris, rather–manages to carve out this path in which she does something [00:12:00] self-gratifying without doing any actual work or putting any effort into it, of her own.
Emily: She just gives herself the credit for it.
Lauren: She gives herself the credit for it.
Zan: Hardcore virtue signaling–
Lauren: Yes.
Zan: –that’s what Aunt Norris is doing.
Emily: Yeah, she is–perhaps more than anyone else we see in these first five chapters, at least–extremely aware of the class distinctions and so ready to uphold them.
Diane: “We must maintain the social order.” Okay…
Zan: Yeah. I dunno, I think it's, I think it's so interesting the way that they calculate Fanny is going to fit into this particular…like it sounds like they're trying to do a math equation and like, if we do this, then this won't happen–this result won't happen. And Aunt Norris is doing everything she can to make Fanny feel like an inferior in this house. And it's interesting, even with Edmund's interactions with Fanny in this–in these first sections–he's obviously the most kind, he's, he's the one who's most attuned to what's going on with her, but there are times where he's also one who isn't quite listening to her either.
Diane: He shows that even though he's kind, he's completely lacking in discernment of what is actually happening, because when Fanny finds out, “Oh, we're going to send you to live with Aunt Norris,” and she’s clearly having a panic attack about this terrible thing that's about to happen to her, he's like, “Oh, it'll be so–you guys will be so good for each other. It's going to be great. I really think you'll be a comfort to one another. Maybe it would have been a problem when you were younger and would have been in her way,”–you know, he's, I guess at least smart enough to realize that–“but now that you're older, I'm sure you guys will get along great.” It’s like, what?
Emily: Has he met his aunt?
Zan: He's so out of touch in that moment.
Emily: Yeah, he definitely can't grasp the gravity of–especially that situation–I mean, she's a young girl, and then a young woman, she has been removed from the family that she knew for the first ten years of her life, she has been treated as an inferior within another house, and even Edmund–as you said, the kindest person to her–still sort of treats her as like, the poor cousin, never quite reaching the level of like, sibling affection, that I feel like they could [00:14:00] have. Although it's also not shown that he's that close to either of his sisters anyway. So maybe it's just a, you know–young man, several years older than any of the other girls in his households, and doesn't really want to make the effort to get to know them.
Zan: That's definitely how Tom is portrayed, right? He's just like, “I don't care what you girls are doing.”
Lauren: Does Tom care about anything? Other than getting drunk and gambling away all of his father's money.
Diane: That's pretty much it, yeah. Yeah.
Zan: Horse racing.
Diane: Horses, yeah. He cares about horses.
Lauren: He does care about the horses. He cares about how much money he can win.
Zan: Or lose, as the case may be.
Lauren: Or lose, which is probably more likely.
Zan: It’s interesting, when he does lose so much, and his father is like “Do you realize that you just cost your brother a living?” and Tom's like, “Hmm, I do feel a little bad about that. Oh well.”
Emily: Not bad enough to stop!
Lauren: The whole situation with that–for people who either are saying, “I'm not going to read the book, I'm going to listen to the podcast,” or read it and weren't one hundred percent sure–is that Edmund, he's the second son, so he can't actually inherit Mansfield Park. He was going to become a clergyman–the same living that Mrs Norris's husband has. And so Mrs. Norris’ husband passes away. That was meant to go to Edmund, but because Tom has been spending so much money and has so many debts to pay off, his father's forced to sell the living to someone else, who comes in and takes it instead of Edmund. So Edmund is deprived of like, literal years of income, and his father is trying to impress that fact upon Tom, like “what the–literally like a lifetime’s worth of income you've just taken from your brother because I was forced to sell this off.” And Tom was like, “I mean, but the guy who's going to take it like, eats so much anyway, he's probably going to die soon, and then Edmund can have it. So like, honestly, it's fine.” And goes about his life.
Zan: Yeah.
Diane: He's really not overly concerned with consequences.
Lauren: No. Clearly he's never had to face any, so–
Diane: Can we also just say that I love what Austen does here, where Mr. Norris dies at the beginning of chapter three. He's just mentioned as a line and that's it, that's all we–he never is in the novel, we never see him speak, he has no dialogue, he's never even present in the room.
Emily: The [00:16:00] only thing he does is die.
Diane: And, I just feel like that tracks for his relationship with Mrs. Norris, you know?
Emily: Right. So, actually, bringing up the next, I don’t know, generation–the next influx of characters who come in–
Diane: Things are about to get sexy.
Emily: Evidently. Yeah, ‘cause we sort of time-skip five years. So now Fanny is fifteen. Her female cousins, Maria and Julia, are sixteen and seventeen. The male cousins, Tom and Edmund are now in their early mid-twenties. And yeah, some, some new young people arrive in the neighborhood and Maria, like within weeks, basically, is engaged to this Mr. Rushworth.
Lauren: Like mother, like daughter.
Emily: Evidently.
Zan: With the help of an Aunt Norris–
Emily: Oh, of course.
Zan: –I mean, Mrs. Norris takes full credit for that relationship. She’s like “Yeah, I did that.”
Diane: I mean, socially speaking, Maria has landed herself a whale, you know. He's got twelve thousand a year, so, he is the richest character in all the books. He has more money than Darcy. He is loaded. Unfortunately, unlike Darcy, he's apparently not really hot and, you know–
Zan: –or smart, particularly.
Diane: Yeah exactly.
Emily: But all that can be overlooked in favor of twelve thousand a year.
Diane: Yeah that extra two thousand, that gap between ten and twelve, that can compensate for quite a bit.
Emily: That makes a difference.
Lauren: Think of the carriages you could purchase.
Diane: Well, there's even that line in there that Maria's main consideration is that she will have a house in town, you know, to have the London townhouse–it's just such a mark of prestige. And, unlike her mother who doesn't seem interested at all in the trappings of London or the parties, Maria's like, “This is why I will be getting married. That's my focus.” And you can't really blame her for that too much, you know, she's basically just been stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with only her Aunt Norris as her companion in that way, you know, because as a mother figure–can you imagine a worse mother figure than Aunt Norris? Like, “No, thank you.”
Emily: Poor thing.
Lauren: I [00:18:00] feel like that's the kind of teenage resentment that would resound throughout the centuries, like everyone can get “when you're stuck in suburbia and you're begging your mom so that you go to the cool city and mama's over it because she's already been there, done that, and she's like, ‘No, stay here in Smallville. There's nothing for you in the city,’ and you think that this is the worst place you've ever lived and you were so ready to get out.” Maria–
Zan: You'll do anything to get out.
Lauren: You’ll do anything.
Emily: But–as you said, much like her mother, actually–Maria landing a whale like this is assumed to forecast good things for her sisters as well. So, the hope is that Julia will also be able to–by moving in those circles that her sister is now a part of–be able to land herself a whale as well, and might not have to settle for a clergyman.
Diane: I love that as soon as Henry arrives, it's like, “Well, Maria's already got her guy, so this guy–he's going to be the property of Julia.” Just, we’ll just kinda make that happen.
Zan: They just immediately hand him over, right. It's just like, that's just how that’s going to happen.
Lauren: It’s like “Who else would you be going for? This one's fine.”
Diane: Yeah. And he only has four thousand a year, but, you know, he's doing okay for himself.
Lauren: It’s respectable enough.
Emily: Yeah, she'll probably have a decent dowry, you know.
Zan: Well, and he's apparently very charming. They describe him as not being particularly stunning, right, but that he immediately charms both the Bertram sisters. It's like almost instantaneous that they both are like, “Wow, paying attention to this guy.” At the same time, you know, putting that all in context again–they've never been anywhere, they've never met people, so all it takes is someone, you know, with decent looks, some charm, some money–that's all it's going to take for, for either of these Bertram sisters to be like, “Ooh, ticket out, thank you!”
Lauren: Yeah they don't really need to fall madly in love, they just need to be able to secure this person who can get them out.
Zan: Yeah.
Lauren: It's a pragmatic marriage match once again, which I love that we have so much exploration of that in these five chapters, first with the three eldest sisters whose families we then follow, and then looking at the way [00:20:00] that matches are beginning to be made for Maria and for Julia and what that process looks like, because we see the need for like a pragmatic match in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, but I think the overarching theme is “Finding a way to marry for someone who will like, mutually respect you, and with whom you can have a happy and fulfilling life,” and here we see the more common, “Okay that's gravy, but we don't really–we didn't really care about that. What is going to be a match that's good for you socially that will either help you move up or maintain your position, and then if you get anything else on top of that, fantastic, but it's not really our main concern.”
Zan: I think it's interesting, again, in these first five chapters to see also that we are seeing those, those two different generations, but also we're able to see how a lot of the dysfunctions in the first generation, and how they raised the second generation, are informing the second generation's decisions. You know, if they've been told throughout their lives, “Mrs. Price married to disoblige,”–that's an awful, awful option, nobody's going to take that, you know, and they've only ever seen a purely disinterested match with Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram. And then, you know, I don't, I don't even want to know what the relationship was with Aunt Norris and her husband, you know, he, he obviously doesn't matter, you know, what kind of relationships have they even seen demonstrated? And so when I think the, the Grants come to the parsonage, right, this is, this is the Crawfords’ sister and her husband, and even their marriage is one that's, you know, he's, he's several years older, she's a young woman. They don't have children. You can kind of get this idea that again, they live separate lives. And then when the Crawfords arrive and we get the backstory a little bit, you know, what they're coming from–they've left behind toxic situations, right? Their caretaker is living with his mistress and it's just really, really toxic, and so when, when they come here–and I think Mary Crawford and her brother have that conversation and they're like, “We've been in a bad school for marriage.” And I think that applies to all of this generation.
Diane: And Mary even says, “Everybody should marry as soon as they can, but they need to do it to advantage,” you know, it was essentially [00:22:00] what she says. So she's also coming at it very much from this, “You know, you need to marry rich.”
Emily: Sort of the Charlotte Lucas school of pragmatism, I feel like.
Diane: Exactly. Like I don't, I don't blame her for that. You know, Mary’s whole take on things. You gotta, “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
Emily: If you're going to be miserable in your match, then you might as well have the money to make up for it.
Diane: I mean, Charlotte Lucas is a hero, so–
Zan: She is.
Emily: Charlotte did nothing wrong.
Lauren: Charlotte is always right. Everyone should listen to Charlotte.
Zan: Agreed.
Lauren: But on the topic of money though, I feel like one of the other interesting things is looking at how one can be rich, but not necessarily stay that way. I mean, we see that with Tom spending all the family's money, but also with the fact that Lord Bertram has to leave to go to his West Indies plantation because–surprise!–slavery is not kosher anymore, and now he's losing money.
Zan: Right.
Lauren: And I think that is a thread that I'm really excited to be able to follow throughout this whole book because that's one of the things that we like to talk about and bring into the conversation, like “What was colonialism doing in the background?” like, “What was happening to make these things possible?” but it is more in the foreground in this book, and I think that'll be a super exciting thing to be able to dissect and talk about more.
Emily: It was almost my choice of topic to research for this, but I decided to go in another direction, but I'm, I'm very–I don't want to say I'm excited to do the research about this throughout the rest of the book, but I think it's going to be really fascinating, and I know that I'm going to learn a lot, and I hope that I'm going to bring a lot of new things to our listeners as well.
Diane: It's very, very present in the first five chapters, meaning–we get the first mention of the West Indies in the first chapter, and then it's in the background, it's setting up all the things that are going to happen, you know, Sir Thomas having to leave for two years–two plus years–Tom going with him, then Tom getting sent back, and the way that that is sort of informing things like Edmund’s living having to be sold, and the way that Aunt Norris is kind of like, “Well, you know, Sir Thomas has some [00:24:00] financial considerations,” and Lady Bertram is kind of like, “Oh, it'll be fine.” You know, just this thing that for them is so distant even though it is literally paying for their way of life. They just really have no concept. You know, I'm sure if you were to ask Lady Bertram, “What is going on in Antigua?” she'd be like, “What? Some–huh?” You know, she wouldn't even have a response to articulate.
Lauren: It’s not relevant to her life, why would she care?
Diane: Yeah. She's just–she's getting the money, she's getting the sugar, you know, she's getting all of those things. She's not at all concerned with how it's being made to happen.
Lauren: So I have the Broadview edition of Mansfield Park, and this has an excerpt from Frank Austen's notebook back in 1808, so Jane Austen's older brother, when he was serving in the Royal Navy and was writing about some of the things that he saw, and it said “The inhabitants are chiefly English or of English descent, although there is a considerable number of negroes on the island, which with very few exceptions are the property of individuals or of the company–slavery being tolerated here.” This was on the island of Saint Helena. “It does not however appear that the slaves are or can be treated with that harshness and despotism which has been so justly attributed to the conduct of the landholders or their managers in the West India islands–the laws of the colony not giving any other power to the master than a right to inflict chastisement at his own discretion. This is a wholesome regulation as far as it goes, but slavery, however it may be modified, is still slavery, and it is much to be regretted that any trace of it should be found to exist in countries dependent on England or colonized by her subjects.”
Emily: Alright, Frank!
Lauren: Right?
Diane: Yeah, so Austen was well aware, obviously the way she’s setting this up–that Lady Bertram doesn't know, Aunt Norris might know, but she wouldn't care because that's the type of person she is–but Austen, as the writer of this, she's very well aware of what's going on.
Zan: I think Edmund is, is kind of being set up as someone who–because his, his livelihood has literally been impacted by what's happening with the family, family finances–I wouldn't say that he's the conscience of the family, but he's at least the one that is going to like maybe take a moment to think about what is the [00:26:00] social contexts of this. As the novel goes on, I think we see that Fanny is also going to at least interrogate this a little bit.
Emily: Yeah. I would think–again, not having read Mansfield Park–that of all the characters in like the Bertram households or their sphere, she would be the most likely to interrogate that, because even though she's benefited from it, she is not ingrained in quite the same way, because they have been so particular about making sure she knows that she is not part of the family in the way that, obviously, like Edmund and Tom are–she's not one of the siblings, she's not one of their children, she's just a ward. She's receiving their charity.
Zan: She’s also the person who's lived in Portsmouth, which as a port town has a history of being engaged in the slave trade. While the actual trade is, is abolished in England, it doesn't mean that her hometown isn't deeply entrenched in that history and that it isn't still part of the way that she grew up. I think, again, that there's a certain tangibility to that in the fact that she literally comes from, from Portsmouth.
Lauren: I think too, that there are similarities in the way that she's part of the family, but not, and also made to remember that her station in life is different, that can be drawn between, like her and then Dido Belle–who was particularly important, or at least relevant, because she was living with the first Earl of Mansfield, so a not-accidental connection. And while Fanny obviously is not Black and doesn't have that same kind of physical marker of her different station–because at least she's white–there I think are still similarities that can be drawn between how the two families treat these wards that are with them. “You can be one of us, but not really.” You can sit at the table or be in the room, but at a different table. You're there, but not quite.
Zan: Yeah. That out, not out question.
Emily: Right, exactly. Fanny doesn't, doesn't dine [00:28:00] with ever–other families. There's this whole debate over whether or not she's out in society, which would make her eligible for marriage, and in the end be precisely–because she just sort of stays at home, she doesn't go out with her cousins–Mary Crawford determines based on that, that, no, she's not out. She's not eligible.
I feel like we've come to sort of a natural transition point. Actually, we sort of started in on my historical topic already–
Diane: Ooh!
Lauren: Ooh, let’s go.
Emily: –because like I said, I considered doing the whole West Indies, Caribbean colonialism, and all of that, but I decided instead–because of how deeply we get into it towards the end of the section–to focus on marriage and what the expectations are in this class and how they can be so variably disappointed. We really dive right in from the very beginning on that very first page of how, especially external expectations of a marriage, can be disappointed because the elder Frances, marries just so terribly, so an inappropriate match, I feel like is one of the most visible ways to disappoint the expectations of others when making a, a marriage decision in this era. Of course, that's not always so dire as marrying someone who like, doesn't have money and isn't of the right social class. You could also get the bad end of like this primogenitor deal because for landed gentry, the eldest son inherits pretty much everything. So marrying a younger son, you really don't have as much to count on.
Diane: You see that here in Mansfield Park, because Mary Crawford is kind of like, “Well, Tom is the eldest, so that's the one I'm going for.” She's decided very early on, you know, her sister has said, “Well, I have, I have somebody in mind for you.” And it wouldn't even occur to her sister to try and pair her off with the younger brother when the older [00:30:00] brother is still available, you know, like–
Emily: –like, “What's the point?”
Diane: Yeah, exactly. One is as good as the other. It doesn't really matter. So you're going to go with the one who looks better on paper, apparently.
Zan: Which is, which is so funny, especially when you see like the awkward Mary-Tom flirting thing, right, that happens here where she's trying to flirt, and he's like, “I just wanted to do my race horses.” Like, it's very awkward.
Emily: I think that takes us into the internal disappointments, and the internal version is what Mary really goes hard in on–towards the end of the section– talking about being “taken in”–you go into a relationship thinking that they have all these particular attributes, and then it turns out that like, you've just been lied to. Of course, Mrs. Grant tries to assuage that with saying that, “Well, when you're disappointed in one area, you try to find some comfort elsewhere.” I guess if he’s not that good looking, and not that funny, then at least he has money?
Diane: Yeah.
Emily: Seems to be what she's going for there. But for women, especially, there can be so much more that really goes wrong in that kind of relationship because, upon marriage, women lost any right to their own autonomy–whether that's financial, or legal, or even bodily autonomy–because that's part of the rights of a husband, is that they can take what they want from their wives. All of their wife’s financial resources become their property. It was really rough. There's basically nothing that they could do about it. And I have a quote actually from an 1809 text by a man named Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England. And he says “by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law. That is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.” So, she functionally becomes just another emblem of his property.
Diane: Yeah, it's like two halves become one–but the one is the husband.
Zan: Yeah, and the fact that–like you said–there's no legal recompense that a [00:32:00] woman can go for, and I think perhaps one of the most terrifying things is that yeah, he, he has legal right to your body. That's a terrifying concept, that you as a woman own nothing. And so these engagements that we, that we see starting to form in Mansfield Park are obviously great plot points and we love a good romance story, but like they are truly the only time that a woman has choice. I mean, there's a reason that courtship novels become such a hot genre in Austen's time, but also, you know, that we continue to think about them in historical fiction–it's because this moment of time, this window, that women get to choose–you only get the choice of refusal. That’s the only choice you get. And that's a terrifying thing.
Emily: Yeah, it really is. Yeah. And some imprudent marriages were attempted to be prevented by a legal act that I've talked about a couple of episodes back, I think in Episode 10 of Pride and Prejudice, when I was talking about Lydia and Wickham. This is Hardwicke's Marriage Act of 1753, which introduced a number of restrictions to keep people from marrying very hastily–and especially to keep young people from marrying hastily and imprudently, without their families’ consent or knowledge–but that really only goes so far. So it really does come down to, the woman has the right of refusal to that proposal, and that's it. She's not going to be part of the negotiations about the future provisions for her financial security, or what happens to her children. If her husband assaults her in the future, she has no legal recourse whatsoever at this point in time. So, it's a very precarious line to walk–and very easy, I would imagine, to be disappointed with the choice that you've made, even if you have made it on the best information that you had at the time, because a courtship can take place over the course of a couple of balls.
Diane: Perfect example, I think of this sort of [00:34:00] marital disappointment is–in the very first paragraph–is Fanny's mother, right. You know, she's, she's pretty disappointed in how her life has turned out.
Emily: Yeah. It's not just her family, the people around her, being disappointed in her choice that she’s married below her station, but she ends up quite unhappy with the situation as well.
Diane: Well it’s not like she married below her station to some, you know, charming sheep farmer and they're living out in their bucolic cottage in the countryside–
Emily: Right.
Diane: –you know, like it's–it's not like a cottagecore fantasy of, of not being super rich of this time. She's really living in the realities of, of poverty with so many children and more of them arriving all the time, ‘cause there's no birth control.
Zan: And again–her body isn't her own choice, so if her husband wants to have sex, she doesn't have a choice. Sorry, that was a huge downer.
Emily: No–I mean, we end up with a lot of downers.
Lauren: I was going to say it was better than my downer, which was that, you know, as we're talking about disappointments and things that women do and don't have–all the people who we're talking about are all white women who still had way more rights and choice than any of the people who were working to provide all of the wealth for these white women.
Diane: Yup.
Emily: That is an excellent point.
Lauren: So your downer’s really not that bad because my downer was, like, “Black women had none of it! We got nothing!”
Zan: Right.
Emily: Yeah, you didn't even have to be married to a man for him to own you.
Lauren: Nope. There was no marriage choice for you to make. I mean, you could make a choice for who your commitment was going to be to, but there, there was no legal marriage, and even if there was, who was going to recognize it? Because you could just as easily be separated and shipped to a completely different island, a different country, with no regard.
Emily: Yeah. There's no protection for your choice there.
Lauren: No.
Emily: –in cases where you even can make a choice.
Lauren: Exactly. Yeah. I think that is always, like, the dark side of conversations, at least from my perspective–when I am trying really hard to empathize with how difficult it was for women, without minimizing that–where their choices weren't fantastic, and they were trapped and they [00:36:00] weren't exactly living like these idyllic lives that I think we'd like to picture with, like historical romances and wasn't everything lovely and they just like got to wear pretty dresses. And it was not that idyllic, but I'm also always in the back of my head, like, “Well, if you pick me up and put me back in that time, I would have even less than that. So I don't really feel that bad for you.”
Zan: Right.
Emily: Yeah, there's only so much empathy you can extend when you know that there were people who had it so much worse to prop up the lives of these people that we’re already trying to have empathy for.
Lauren: Exactly.
Diane: And Mrs. Norris is absolutely the type who would think that this is all okay. You know what I mean? Like she, she loses zero sleep over any of this at night. So–
Emily: She probably has arguments in favor of slavery lined up in the back of her head because she just seems like that kind of person.
Diane: Yeah, for sure.
Zan: And she's in the novel explicitly enabling Sir Thomas's travels. She's like, “I'll make sure everything's okay, you know, so that you can go and do what you need to do.” So she's actively supporting the system in that kind of regard.
Lauren: The actively complicit sister and the sister who is still just as complicit by not doing anything about it.
Diane: This is, I guess, maybe slightly off topic, but I feel like it's kind of important to note that in this time period, even if you were somebody who was like an abolitionist and really pushing hard for change and doing those things, no matter what you were still participating in the system, like you could not get away from it. It was just in what you were eating, and what you were purchasing, and what you were wearing and putting on your body–no matter what, you were still part of it.
Emily: Yeah.
Diane: Full stop. There's no way around it.
Emily: There are some things that we just can't escape because all of our systems of economy are built on the backs of people who have been enslaved. There's no way to escape that if you're going to continue participating in the world at large.
Diane: Yep. And even for some of the people at this time, who maybe were pushing for things like a sugar boycott or–or whatever it might be–because of the way that trade worked, the way that money flowed into these port cities, I mean, this is what is [00:38:00] funding roads. Just–you're a person, you're alive, you're moving throughout the world–you were touching this. Like you cannot get away from it, which is why I think it's so important, too.
Emily: Yeah, but people see the romance and the romanticism of Jane Austen, and they just want to float on that perfect little bubble and pretend that none of that has ever touched her works. Which–she was perfectly aware that she was within the system as well. I mean, yeah, everything, everything was built on all of this. And even like you said, going down to–this money built the roads, people paying taxes on money that they have made off of plantations, it's going back into the infrastructure of the empire.
Diane: Yup.
Emily: Yeah, there’s no escaping that.
Diane: I get so annoyed when people are like, “It wasn’t a thing.”
Lauren: Oh my gosh, right? Like why, why are you sticking your head in the sand? It doesn't make any sense–so irritating.
Diane: I think there's also this kind of desire–because we have some evidence based off of some of the things that we know that Austen read, and that she was supportive of–to view her in more of this kind of abolitionist light, and I sometimes struggle with that because I feel like then there can be a tendency to want to give her a little too much credit for a woman of her time. You can’t absolve somebody of this time, no matter how much you love them or think they were a genius or whatever, like–
Emily: Yeah, that's–that’s something that tends to bother me in a lot of, not necessarily like period adaptations, but just like period pieces in general–where they want to show that a character is progressive–
Diane: Yes.
Emily: –and so they give them modern progressive values. I just, I need people to figure out how to calibrate progressivism for the period that they're trying to talk about, because someone can be progressive for their time, but they're still very, inherently, deeply embedded in the processes of their time. People will look back at us in two hundred years and say, “Okay, well, they were talking about this, but what about this other thing?”
Diane: I mean, with somebody like Austen, right? So we have some evidence that she was anti-slavery. We don't necessarily have any evidence that she was anti-racist, you know, [00:40:00] or that she would have welcomed a person of color into her household or treated them as an equal, you know, so–you can certainly try to find evidence for that, and you know, I'm sure scholars will be doing that for-literally-ever. But I do sometimes think that–versus just acknowledging again, like–this is what was happening in this time, this is what people were benefiting from and you can't, you can't ignore it. Like this is, this is a reality, as hard as it might be to–or uncomfortable as it might make some people–to which I would say like, yeah, you should feel uncomfortable because it's an uncomfortable topic.
Lauren: And to your point, Diane, I think that sometimes people take that Austen was obviously anti-slavery as like, “Oh yeah, well, I'm sure we could find evidence for the fact that she would have like, welcomed a black person into her home and broken bread with them,” and being cognizant of the fact that that's not true doesn't mean that we're canceling Jane Austen, it just means that we're being realistic about who she was as a person. We're not trying to cancel somebody from the early 19th century, like–
Emily: –for not saying, “I wish I had a black friend,” like–
Lauren: You know, we're being realistic.
Emily: That actually–that ties in perfectly to what I was going to say, is that we have such different, like psychological categories of things now. I see a lot of people complaining about historians, like not calling somebody “queer” when they lived in like the 1750s, like that wasn't a social category that we had in the same way then. People did not think about these kinds of things in the same way. We can't project our beliefs back onto them. Jane Austen would not have thought about race in the same way that we do today, and so we can't either lionize or demonize her for just not having the same social context and psychological setup that we do.
Zan: You know, it’s definition work too– the fact that you're talking about the categories, but also the language that we use today to create those categories, to make those definitions, you know, Diane said anti-racism and it's like, okay, that's become a very culturally-normed word within the past two years. So of course that's not something that [00:42:00] has a real impact on the way that Austen's world worked, because it's, it's a modern definition of a concept. Like it's just–apples and oranges. And, and I think that, that–it doesn't mean that we don't look at this culture through those lenses, but it's to say, let's also not erase what's happened back here by putting that, that modern lens on it.
Emily: I think we're sort of coming up against the wall that a lot of public history hits, because unless you have done this kind of research or been immersed in any of this kind of historical, or anthropological, or sociological evidence texts–this kind of framing work–unless you've explicitly done this kind of work, it's hard to grasp what people mean when we say, “Well, we can't say that Jane Austen was anti-racist.” Because it's–it's hard to conceptualize that that would not have meant anything to her.
Diane: Yeah. I just always want to be cautious about, again, putting some of these people up on a pedestal.
Emily: Yeah. We have to recognize the context that people were in, without trying to put them on a pedestal, or cancel them.
Diane: Again, which is why so much of this is nuanced. Right.
Emily: But I'm so glad that's there–there are people in this community who are willing and eager to have these kinds of conversations.
Lauren: Emily, did you have more that you wanted to add to your historical context?
Emily: No. Between this and the conversation that we had earlier, that was pretty much–we pretty much covered everything that I wanted to. So now, now that we've kind of gotten into like the language of modern social movements, do we want to transition over to pop culture, Lauren?
Lauren: Yeah. Okay, but I feel like this pop culture connection is going to be one that's really easy to latch onto for most people who like Jane Austen, because when I think of Britain and the West Indies, because I am a queer person who was alive in 2003, I think of Pirates of the Caribbean, a.k.a. the bisexual [00:44:00] awakening of like, everyone.
Emily: Yesssss!
Lauren: That is immediately where my mind goes, because that is how I was first introduced to like, that concept of British colonialism–through swashbuckling pirates in a movie based off of the Disney ride.
Emily: If you have to learn about social issues, you might as well have pretty people to look at, right?
Lauren: Why not! And I was thinking about how, as a kid, I did not question that setting at all. It was just one of those things where, oh–this is the movie and this is the setting that's being presented to me, and because I was a kid, without that kind of social critique that you were going to have as an adult, I was just like, “Oh, okay, there's British people on an island, and there's some Black people in the background, and I'm used to being in the background anyway, because it's 2003, and like–if it's not a specifically Black movie, we're usually not there,” but it didn't really process in my mind of like, what was happening because I thought of slavery as like a specifically American thing because that's what I've been taught so far. Like even in the specific Black history that my family would try to give me and my brother to supplement what we weren't getting in school–because we were so young, we weren't really like getting the broad, “Here was the triangular trade and all the different things,” it was mostly just like, “Okay, here's context for like, who you are, and what the society is that you have to live in.” So I didn't really think anything of the context when I first watched it as a kid, because I was a kid–you know, who really does? But then, as an adult and rewatching, you question like, “Hmm, why is Governor Swan in this random Indies island? You clearly don't belong. Why are you getting your fashions back from home? What has brought you to this island?” You know, what's going on with the few Black people that we see, like on the colony–so there's like the one little Black boy who's with the guy at the docks, holding his book, and just kind of follows him around, “What role do you have to play?” and being able to think about that more critically, even though it's not meant to be a kind of social [00:46:00] critique. I think there was a bit of critique that was cut from the script, where it's actually made explicit that one of the reasons that Jack Sparrow's like, on the run, is because he was freeing slaves. And there's a scene where, I think he's speaking to James Norrington–and I don't remember if this line made it into the movie or not–but Jack basically says something like “people aren't cargo, mate,” and that's part of his origin story into stealing the Black Pearl, and the hundred souls that he freed were the hundred souls that he was supposed to be repaying back to Davy Jones, because he stopped them from dying a watery death on this ship. And those are the hundred souls, by the time he gets to the second movie, where Davy Jones is like, “You owe me these people. That was why I gave you back the Pearl.” It's because he had been freeing slaves, but they cut that! And I'm very mad about it, ‘cause that would have been made explicit, but instead we just get the implicit thing of–because of the setting–you have to have some Black people in the background because otherwise, what are these white people from Britain doing here? And thinking about disappointment, I was thinking about–one, how real life can disappoint as compared to fiction. So like in this fictional world, because nothing was ever actually made explicit in the text of Pirates of the Caribbean because it’s just supposed to be fun, you can see it as something that's fun because as far as the text is concerned, there's nothing that is going on that would require deeper thought or concern or consternation. It's just, you know, some good, happy, fun, and escapism–which it still is for me, it's still one of my favorite movies–and how fiction allows us to escape, but also that it can help us to have these conversations about really important social issues. So what would it have looked like if you had that scene from Jack where it's made explicit what he's doing, how does it change the way that we look at the setting in this movie as a movie-going audience would–do we see Elizabeth's role as different? Do we see her father's role on the island as different? [00:48:00] Because we don't really question what this military is doing, like we've talked about that before with Jane Austen, where it was just like, “Hmm, why is this militia roaming around the countryside?” But same thing with Pirates of the Caribbean, “What are these militia doing on this island? Because they're not fighting an active war, so why are you here?” you know, and the main thing that I want to think about is being able to think critically about those unspoken events and the subtext, whether it's in Pirates of the Caribbean, where it's just like lighthearted and fun or in Mansfield Park where it's not quite so lighthearted, but having, I suppose, the motivation to perhaps look past what your disappointment is going to be, to think critically about it, and that's what I was thinking of.
Zan: I didn't know any of that back history, obviously. That's something that probably very few people know about, about Jack Sparrow's–
Diane: –the origin story–
Zan: –the origin story, exactly.
Diane: Yeah. It's one of the things I noticed, especially if I'm reading a historical romance novel, like an older one, and oftentimes it's–again, it's not interrogated–it's just, whoever was writing this book threw in a line there about “somebody just got back from the West Indies,” or, “they're heading to the West Indies,” or, “his fortune was made in trade,” and you're kind of like, “Uhh,” and that's, that's as far as it goes, but–
Emily: It’s just flavor.
Diane: Yup.
Lauren: And I think that the flavor was what it was in Pirates of the Caribbean, but I think there's so much there, if you care to look.
Diane: A missed opportunity.
Lauren: Yeah! Not that I need every movie to be like, serious and depressing, but even if they just kept in that throwaway line–
Diane: Yeah.
Lauren: –you keep the whole tone of the movie, nothing else changes–just that acknowledgement.
Diane: I mean, you're putting it in that setting, like yeah–how can you not address it?
Emily: Also, it would have added so much depth to that character, too. Like he's not just a scoundrel, like–this is a person who was very clearly on the right side of history.
Lauren: His moral code just doesn't match the law. He just kind of does what he thinks is right.
Emily: Yeah. I love that connection. That's really [00:50:00] great.
Lauren: I'm honestly shocked that we haven't talked more about, we've talked about it–
Emily: Right.
Lauren: –on the podcast, because how could we not–but we haven't quite gotten into that deep of a conversation about it yet, and I'm shocked that we haven't.
Emily: I think it's supposed to be set in like the 1740s. So that's like sixty to seventy years before Mansfield Park would have happened. So the very particular historical context of the Indies would have changed a little bit in that time. Partly because England would have very recently abolished their slave trade–ish, kind of.
Lauren: Kind of.
Emily: Yeah, kinda sorta. They abolish like, transport, but they are certainly still profiting off of it.
Lauren: I actually didn't know that Pirates of the Caribbean was meant to be set in the 1740s, but I'm glad that you do.
Emily: I'm not sure where I saw that, but someone said it and I was like, “Yes, sure.”
Lauren: I was going to give you credit for looking at the fashion and judging the costume designers based off of that.
Emily: I mean, that's probably the only reason I know the context of the years is someone commenting on the fashion.
Lauren: Yeah, that tracks.
Emily: I'm a person of many interests.
Lauren: I feel like we've come to a natural stopping point, but Diane and Zan, do you want to join us in our final takeaways?
Diane: Ooh, you guys go first.
Emily: Okay. I think my final takeaway for these chapters is that there are many ways that you can try and combat future disappointment, but there are also many ways that it can sort of catch up to you that may not be expected or foreseen.
Lauren: And you stayed on theme, too. Now you gave me something that I actually have to follow up.
Emily: Haha.
Lauren: I think that what is like, percolating in my brain is the easiest way to describe it? Money doesn't buy you class.
Diane: Nice.
Lauren: Yeah. That wasn't completely where I was going, but that–that's where [00:52:00] I'm going to stay.
Emily: That's fantastic. I love it.
Lauren: Amen.
Diane: I can go. I think, just for these first five chapters, the thing that's really sticking with me is–even when you think that you know somebody, or even when you think that you know what's going on, you don't know anything. You can already see just in these first five chapters, these people who all live together–in close quarters–and they don't really understand each other at all.
Zan: I think for me, rereading these first five chapters, one of the things that I was kind of keyed into was that we all have dysfunctional families–and that's not to say that they can't be healthy, that's not to say that we all have trauma, but that this particular family has issues that start with those first three sisters, but it's just being compounded in the second generation, and all of the events that are being set into motion in Mansfield Park are coming from these kind of family issues that aren't being resolved. There's no communication happening that–there's, there's these kind of built-in dysfunctions that are going to spin out and make the rest of the novel possible.
Lauren: This has been so lovely. I'm so happy you guys could join.
Emily: Yeah, thank you guys so much for making the time, in your very busy and stressful lives, to come and talk about Jane Austen and history with us.
Diane: We’re always delighted to talk about Jane Austen.
Zan: Exactly, that is–that is what we are here for. So thank you for inviting us.
Emily: Well, everyone listening, please make sure, if you have not yet, go check out Zan and Diane's podcast, The Thing About Austen–they talk about material culture and how it relates to Jane Austen's novels and her world. And it's absolutely fascinating. It's this historical deep dive, every episode, that we often have to cut ourselves off of. So it's really fun to listen to.
Diane: Thank you for having us.
Emily: So one last thing–we have decided to change up how we're choosing our topics. Before, we were just kind of going down a list, but Lauren received [00:54:00] a beautiful gift this past Christmas of Jane Austen-themed tarot cards. So, Lauren, would you like to introduce how we're doing this?
Lauren: What we're going to do is we're going to pull a card at the end of each episode. And then we'll let you know a little bit about what that card is, what the specific Jane Austen connection is that this author, or illustrator, of the tarot deck has made and what it means for our next theme. I should also say, if you're familiar with tarot, this is not a traditional tarot deck, there are only 53 cards, so it's a simplified deck, but I still think that we'll be able to get a lot of enjoyment out of truly randomizing our themes this way. So our next theme and our first tarot card is the three of diamonds. The illustration on that card is just some Regency furniture, and the three of diamonds is “collaboration.” So the artist’s reason for drawing the furniture is that ladies in the Regency era knew how to decorate with styles of furniture that interacted with each other to make a comfortable home. But the key word here that we want to remember is “collaboration.”
Emily: Alright, so that sounds like our topic for the next episode.
Lauren: This should be a good one.
Lauren: Thank you for joining us in this episode of Reclaiming Jane. Next time we'll be reading chapters six through ten of Mansfield Park through the lens of collaboration.
Emily: To read a full transcript of this episode, check out our website, reclaimingjanepod.com, where you can also find show notes, the full back catalog, and links to our social media.
Lauren: If you'd like to support us and gain access to exclusive content, including special patron-only events, 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: See you next time, nerds.
Diane: Can I just say, that [00:56:00] was delightful because I do listen to the podcast, so I get to hear the recaps, but being able to actually see it happen live was just–that's my new favorite thing.
Zan: And the countdown with the fingers that you don't get, you know, like, the pressure’s real–
Diane: And just like, the kind of low-grade panic in both of your eyes when you were trying to get through it.
Zan: Laser focus.