Mansfield Park 21-25: “Challenge Accepted”
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There's nothing like a good challenge, right? This week, Lauren and Emily talk about the challenges that our characters face and the ones they've made for themselves. Also included: textile history, trope talks, and inferiority complexes.
(We swear this was recorded before season 2 of Bridgerton came out.)
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
Transcript
Reclaiming Jane Season 3 Episode 5 | Mansfield Park 21-25: “Challenge Accepted”
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.
And today
Lauren: we're talking about chapters 21 through 25 of Mansfield Park through the lens of challenge.
Emily: Boy, is there so much challenge in these chapters! I was delighted reading through it because we're going to have so much to talk about.
Lauren: For once, this was the section where the theme really matched the events that happened in these five chapters. I feel like for the last couple, we've been struggling a little to connect the theme to the plot. It was a challenge if you will, but this time it was easy to figure out how we could connect our theme to all the things that happen in these five chapters, because everybody is being challenged.
And this was on our Twitter, but we were also challenged to like the characters... at all.
Emily: We struggle with this every single time, but at least it's nice to have a section where our theme is so beautifully laid out and we don't have to work for it.
Lauren: Thank God.
Emily: We just, we did. We deserve a break sometimes. You know?
Lauren: We really did, especially for this section, I feel like. Speaking of, should we get into the recaps? We can talk about all the different ways people are being challenged.
Emily: Let's do it. You're up first.
Lauren: All right.
Emily: On your mark. Get set. Go.
Lauren: Okay. Fanny and Edmund have a conversation, Fanny learns that apparently she's beautiful, which she of course did not know because she's hashtag special.
And that makes her very uncomfortable. Henry Crawford comes back and also sees that Fanny is hashtag beautiful and decides that he wants to make her fall in love with him because he's bored and he just wants to toy with Fanny's feelings because she's difficult and she's a challenge. He starts flirting with her, she's of course still in love with Edmund.
She hangs out with Mary Crawford more. She's actually invited to dinner. She has social engagements and Henry's actually intrigued because why doesn't Fanny like him?
Emily: Very nice.
Lauren: I felt like that was all over the place. So [00:02:00] I'm glad you think it was good.
Emily: I mean, it was a little bit, but the section was kind of-- it's ,it's weird because it was, it felt like a very quiet section, but then there was also a lot of. Interpersonal stuff going on. So before I start talking about it, I should do my recap too.
Lauren: Yeah. As literally, as soon as I stopped talking, I was like, oh, and I forgot this. Oh. And I forgot that, which you will probably pick up on in your own recap.
Emily: We'll see.
Lauren: Are you ready?
Emily: Yes.
Lauren: Okay. Three, two, one, go.
Emily: Okay. So Sir Thomas decides that he doesn't actually like Mr. Rushworth that much. And so he tries to give him Maria a chance to like, get off the hook, but she says no, and marries him. They go off to Brighton with Julia, which is just always an excellent life choice. Mary and Fanny start hanging out more. Now the Bertram sisters are gone. Fanny gets invited out to dine for the very first time ever.
Henry Crawford comes back, decides that he wants to make Fanny fall in love with him. Edmund and Mary are still flirting. But he's about to be ordained. And the whole family gets together.
Lauren: Beautiful.
Emily: So much goes on!
Lauren: It was a lot. That was so good.
Emily: Thank you. I've I've started taking notes to prepare for my recap because the last two seasons I have just been such pure chaos and I was getting a little embarrassed at my lack of preparation.
So I have a memory aid now.
Lauren: I love that, but also no one, who doesn't love chaos vibes?
Emily: That's true. We, we do thrive on the chaos.
Lauren: You brought the carefully planned, measured response this time. And I brought the I, all these things happen. And I tried to remember it all at once because I did not prepare.
Emily: One of us has to be one of those people at all times.
And we've just been passing the baton back and forth for a decade.
Lauren: You know, sharing the same five brain cells.
Emily: We really do. We really do.
Lauren: I feel like we should start with Maria accepting Mr. Rushworth pretty much out of spite.
Emily: I know. Oh my goodness. And even says in the narration, like, because she can't let Henry Crawford win, basically, like he left, he didn't say a word [00:04:00] after that and she's not going to let him see that she's ruined her life over him.
Lauren: This is the modern-day equivalent of like revenge posting on Instagram. I'm not going to let my ex or this person that I dated see, or think that I'm miserable. And instead you just post like 10 different selfies of you looking hot as hell. It's the Lady Diana revenge dress.
Emily: It is. If only it were less legally binding because I still feel like Maria is going to have a bad time with this.
Lauren: Yeah. Even her dad is a little bit unconvinced of her marital bliss. Cause that's the whole reason that Sir Thomas takes her aside in the first place to say, you know, I don't think that you really esteem this man. I think he's kind of stupid. This has been a very public engagement, but if you really want to get out of it, like, I'll support you and I'll help you.
Because he can tell that they're not exactly a well-matched couple, but also he doesn't actually want to deal with the embarrassment and the trouble of breaking the engagement. So when she says, no, it's fine. I'll marry him. He's secretly relieved like, okay, well that saves me some work, but he can tell that it's not going to be marital bliss in their household.
Emily: This felt like such a plot twist to me when it's going through Sir Thomas, like caring enough about his daughter to recognize that she's unhappy. And giving her a way out. And then she was able to give her answer "immediately, decidedly and with no apparent agitation, she thanked him for his great attention, his paternal kindness, but he was quite mistaken in supposing she had the smallest desire of breaking through her engagement or was sensible of any change of opinion or inclination since her forming it. She had the highest esteem for Mr. Rushworth's character and disposition, and could not have a doubt of her happiness with him." Lying through her teeth!
Lauren: And it does say too, that if he had asked her that in the first few days after Henry had left, her answer would have been different, but she's realized, it's been some time. He clearly has no intentions of coming back. He doesn't seem like he is in any way inclined to come back and ask [00:06:00] for her hand. And so she has a decision to make and a challenge of her own like, do I marry and get the status and know that I'm going to be miserable, but at least I'll be rich and I'll have these houses and lands and I'll be settled in a good household?
Or do I turn him down? Because I know that I won't ever be like, emotionally happy with this dumbass. And she chooses option one because as you do in Regency England, you choose the option that's going to make you happy and comfortable and-- or not happy, but well settled, I suppose.
Emily: Yeah. She's made the practical choice and I can't blame her for that at all.
Especially because from the way things were going between her and Henry, if she had broken off the engagement, it would have been news. Everyone would have known immediately that she had broken it off because of Henry. So she would've had to deal with that embarrassment on top of no longer having that guaranteed comfort for the rest of her life.
So yeah, she's going to be miserable, but at least she'll be rich? And socially stable.
Lauren: Like 21st century trophy wives. It's, it's a choice that a lot of women are faced with, especially in that time. Like you need to, do you marry for status or for love? If you marry for status, like what other challenges do you have to face throughout the course of your marriage?
Emily: If I were a woman of Maria's position in the Regency era, I would probably have married for status too, like--
Lauren: Love does not put food on your table. This is backtracking just a little bit, but the very first thing I wrote down for this section was, 'the challenge right off the bat is liking Edmund.' got on my nerves in the first two pages when he's having this conversation with Fanny.
That was the first thing that I thought of in my recap, because it stuck out to me so much. Fanny is saying, you know, I really enjoy hearing my uncle talk about his time in the West Indies. And as she's saying that, she says, you know, "I could listen to him for an hour together. It entertains me more than many other things have done, but then I am [00:08:00] unlike other people I dare say."
And so Edmund interprets that as her fishing for compliments, which she, of course never does. And he says, "why should you dare say that? Do you want to be told that you are only unlike other people in being more wise and discreet? But when did you or anybody ever get a compliment for me? Fanny, go to my father if you want to be complimented, he will satisfy you."
And then Fanny is clearly confused and he says, "your uncle thinks you very pretty, dear Fanny. And that is the long and the short of the matter. Anybody but myself would've made something more of it and anybody but you would resent that you would not been thought very pretty before, but the truth is that your uncle never did admire you until now. And now he does. Your complexion is so improved and you have gained so much countenance and your figure-- nay, Fanny, do not turn away about it," because she's clearly, like, getting embarrassed because he's telling her like, yeah, your uncle thinks you're hot.
And then goes, "It is but an uncle. If you cannot bear an uncle's admiration, what is to become of you? You really must begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at. You must try not to mind growing up into a pretty woman." Edmund, please go away.
Emily: Please stop talking. Leave this poor girl alone. Did it sound a little bit? Not like other girls. Yes, but this is Fanny who we're talking about.
Lauren: Exactly. Exceptions can be made. She's never actually fishing for compliments. She's usually fishing for insults because she doesn't think that she deserves compliments. Like she's the last person to pull that on purpose.
And then he just continued making her uncomfortable. By... not even, he wouldn't even directly compliment her beauty, just saying that his dad thinks that she's really pretty now. It's just very odd. And then he transitions, of course, into singing the praises of Mary Crawford once again, which continues to make Fanny extremely uncomfortable.
So he's been making comments about how she looks, which she hates, and then he can't even continue complimenting her, which would at least relieve some of the sting for her, because we all know that [00:10:00] she lives for any kind of praise from Edmund. He turns it completely into talking about how wonderful Mary is. So she just has to sit there and be miserable.
Emily: I just need this man to shut up for a few minutes.
Lauren: That's it, just zip it.
Emily: So we get past that, we get through Maria's wedding and her and Mr. Rushworth and Julia all go into Brighton, which, as I said, always an excellent life decision in a Jane Austen novel, nothing could possibly go wrong.
Lauren: Nothing goes wrong in Brighton.
Emily: No, nothing. Never. And then we return to Fanny X Mary fanfic.
Lauren: Yeah, I have thoughts.
Emily: Mary has suddenly decided that Fanny is her best friend.
Lauren: We have all seen that kind of friendship of convenience, where the popular girls' friends are indisposed for whatever reason. And she suddenly turns to the loner who's usually without friends and goes, 'oh, we are now besties. You didn't know that I've liked you this whole time, even though we've only spoken five words to one another? Why don't you come hang out with me. It's not because I'm lonely, it's because I like you.'
Emily: But this comes with the extra flair of like Fanny is caught in a rainstorm, on a walk through the village, on an errand. And Mary insists that she has to come into the parsonage and gives her a change of clothes. And she has to stay until it stopped raining. And the whole time I was just like, head in my hands, like what is happening here?
Lauren: Take that scene out of context and drop it on AO3 and you have this beautiful, atmospheric opening to like this great Sapphic fanfiction.
Emily: I want to write it.
Lauren: And we also learned that one of the other challenges in this novel is Mary's understanding of Edmund. She clearly still does not really get his level of devotion to the church. I think it becomes apparent in these five chapters that she has a certain picture of him in her mind that she's been deepening affection for.
And then every time she's confronted with the reality of Edmund, she doesn't like it.
Emily: She thinks that she has a lot more [00:12:00] influence over Edmund than she actually does. She thinks that every time she expresses her opinion about the church, she's changing his mind a little bit, but that's not actually happening.
Lauren: That comes up in a conversation that they're having about money and what they aspire to do and all this other kind of stuff. And Mary says that," a large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. It certainly may secure all the myrtle and turkey part of it." And like, basically they were talking about material possessions and what they can and can't do and how much money they need to like live comfortably, whatever that means for them.
And Edmund says, you know, "you intend to be very rich," and Fanny catches that he has a serious look on his face. And Mary says, "to be sure. Do not you? Do not we all?" Like Mary. No, he doesn't. And you should know this by now. He does not intend to be a rich man. He wants to go live his quiet little life and go preach sermons.
Emily: Yeah. They go through this whole exchange as usual where they're just throwing their completely divergent opinions at one another. Like at the end of the page, I just wrote, 'y'all flirt weird' because they just do not understand each other at all. .
Lauren: They're speaking past one another. I think Edmund is starting to get a little bit of understanding or light into the way that Mary thinks, but he's pushing it away because he's, you know, totally head over heels for her.
So I think he's, he's starting to pick up on it, but he doesn't want to acknowledge it. Mary, at this point, she'll get it a little bit later, but right now she's still just like, what do you mean? You don't want to be rich?
Emily: They've each formed this image of one another that's like, just slightly to the left of what the reality is. And they fallen in love with that image, but they keep interacting with the reality and are jarred every time by the fact that the two don't line up. Like you're just, ugh, listen to one another! Please.
Lauren: And meanwhile, Fanny is watching this like a tennis match, just--
Emily: being miserable, of course, because she's in love with Edmund.
Lauren: As always.
Emily: But that very awkward exchange is [00:14:00] followed by Fanny's first invitation to dine out, which comes, as usual, with a lot of controversy, because nothing good can ever happen to Fanny.
Lauren: It should be such a simple thing. She's been invited to dinner, what, half a mile away? If that?
Emily: At the home of their village Parson, like it barely counts as out.
Lauren: Right. And people who are within their social circle, who they've been hanging out with for months!
Emily: All these people have dined in with Fanny. It's just that she has not been particularly invited out to dine anywhere else, because as we determined in what, like the first section, Fanny is not out yet.
Lauren: But this time she's been particularly invited by Mrs. Grant, who's Mary's sister, to actually come and dine with the party. And of course, as soon as she goes home to relay this information, Mrs. Norris and Lady Bertram have something to say about it because they just can't let Fanny have nice things. I mean, we have several words for Mrs. Norris, so I'm not going to say that right now, but for Lady Bertram specifically, I wrote, "Lady Bertram is tiresome. These characters are so annoying that liking them as a challenge."
Emily: It is, you're completely right. Especially when Mrs. Norris starts being downright nasty to Fanny when she she's been enlisted to come and have dinner with Lady Bertram on the appointed night to stand in for Fanny. And so she comes early before Fanny has left for dinner and shows up, as it says, "in a very ill humor and seemed intent only on lessening her niece's pleasure, both present and future, as much as possible."
And so she basically tells Fanny like, This is a fluke. You should never expect this again. Don't expect anybody to go out of their way for you. Like flat out tells her, you're going to have to walk both there and back because your uncle is not going to get the carriage out for you. And then he walks in and immediately offers her the carriage, which is hilarious.
Props for the comedic timing to shut [00:16:00] Mrs. Norris down on that point, but she's just so horrible to Fanny.
Lauren: And she still protests even when Sir Thomas comes and says like, Fanny, like what time would you like to have the carriage brought around? Because he's just assumed like, of course you'll take the carriage.
And Mrs. Norris is like, oh no, absolutely not. She doesn't have to, she can walk. She doesn't need the carriage. And he says, well, I've already offered it. So Fanny, what time would you like? Like why, Mrs. Norris, do you think that your opinion has any hold on what I'm going to do?
Emily: I have to wonder if there's an element of jealousy on the part of Mrs. Norris, because we saw at the very beginning Lady Bertram married up. So their family, those three sisters, would not have had all the advantages that now Fanny is being offered. And Fanny came from the lowliest of the three. So she's risen beyond what Mrs. Norris presumably assumes is her proper station and she's being given chances that Mrs. Norris never would have had as a girl. So I, honestly, I think that she's just jealous of her young niece for things that Fanny has never deserved in her life.
Lauren: I think you're spot on. And I think because she also clearly has a complex about being next to her sister who married up all the time and being reminded that they're in different social stations that she has to feel like she's above someone and if she feels like Fanny is rising above her, then who does she have to feel superior to? That means that she must be beneath everybody and she can't have that. So she always has to feel as though she's superior to someone. Otherwise she's just going to be spontaneously combusting every time she enters the house.
Emily: She's got a complex man. Everybody needs a therapist.
Lauren: Yes. Not a pastor, a therapist.
Emily: This dinner is also where we discover that Henry Crawford has returned unexpectedly.
Lauren: Dun, dun, dunnn. He's just rolling through as a young man, who's super rich [00:18:00] and doesn't have to work does. You know, has to fill his time somehow.
Emily: Yep. And he finds himself talking to Fanny and noticing her more because now she's the only young lady that he's unrelated to in the neighborhood.
Lauren: And he has a conversation with Mary about this too, where he basically tells her I'm going to go after Fanny, just for funsies. And Mary says, don't you dare, what is wrong with you? You cannot be serious. And he says, well, it's not gonna be, I'm not seriously going to pursue her. Like I'm not actually thinking that she's going to be a prospect for marriage.
Like, I'm not that dumb. However, I am intrigued. I think this could be a fun challenge. Mary, because she does not realize how in love with Edmund Fanny is, is like, you are going to break that girl's heart, but whatever. And just kind of lets him, lets him go because she doesn't really have that much responsibility for Fanny.
And she does not try that hard to stop Henry from pursuing this path that would break the heart of like any other teenager as the narration says, because Fanny's 18, she's never really been pursued by a man before. So any other girl in her position when being paid attention by like this young, wealthy, good-looking man would fall for him and then be heartbroken as soon as it was clear that he never actually meant anything by it. And the only reason Fanny is somewhat protected from that is that she's completely in love with Edmund.
Emily: Henry Crawford is just such a dick.
Lauren: Yeah. I mean, he's going after Fanny because he likes a challenge.
It was again, like, a perfect encapsulation of what our theme is. It's the, this person isn't going to immediately fall in love with me, or I want to see how quickly I can get her to fall in love with me, because it'll be fun.
Emily: Yeah. The way the conversation starts is him saying, "how do you think I mean to amuse myself, Mary, on the days that I do not hunt?" She's like, "um, you're going to entertain me, right?" And he says, "well, no, that would still be recreation. It would still just be idle. And I do not like to eat the bread of idleness. No, my plan is to make Fanny [00:20:00] Price in love with me." Like, he's just looking for something to do. Get a hobby.
Lauren: I was very proud of 20 year old me. I still have like all the things that I wrote when I read this for the first time. And my marginalia for that was on the days he doesn't hunt game, he hunts affection.
Emily: Ooh. Snaps for 20 year old Lauren.
Lauren: Undergrad Lauren was so smart.
Emily: Another challenge appears to the ease of Henry gaining Fanny's affection though, because this is the chapter where her brother William comes to visit! William, precious and perfect, who's never done an incorrect thing in his life!
Lauren: We actually got some happiness!
Emily: Yes!
Lauren: The one character in this book who I like.
Emily: He's a good boy, but he's, he's here and he is taking up Fanny's attention and affection. As he should be because they haven't seen each other in like, seven years. And they've been writing the whole time he's been in the Navy and he's now the center of attention because he has so many interesting stories to tell. And he has all of these unexpected skills from being in the military.
So William is there to charm everyone, including with his slightly bumpkin manners, because you know, he's been a sailor. He hasn't been in refined company.
Lauren: Right. And even though his manners are, you know, not high society, he still clearly has like enough of a sense of propriety that even Sir Thomas is like, I like this guy. You know, like, do you know everything about being in high society? No, but nor would I expect you to, just given where you come from, but also you don't cross lines that shouldn't be crossed.
So like the cute little mistakes that you make can just be funny and not a personal affront.
Emily: But, of course it becomes a personal affront to Henry because Henry doesn't have any of these adventures to his name. And he says, "the glory of heroism, of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance, made his own habits of selfish indulgence appear in shameful contrast. And he wished he had been a William Price, distinguishing himself and working his way to fortune and consequence [00:22:00] with so much self-respect and happy ardor instead of what he was."
So he has a millisecond of self-awareness and then it's all washed away.
Lauren: Immediately.
Emily: Why would he want to be anything but a lazy carousing cad?
Lauren: As soon as he realizes what his money can pay for, then all of those thoughts disappear. He was so close to a revelation.
Emily: So close.
Lauren: He almost had a breakthrough like, oh mate, maybe I suck.
Emily: Maybe you do.
Lauren: And you would think that in his quest to hunt the affection of Fanny, that he would realize like, the person who commands her platonic or like filial love is somebody who is the complete opposite of me. Maybe there's a pattern to the people who she would hold in high esteem. But no, because who wouldn't fall in love with Henry Crawford? So clearly just by existing, she will fall in love with him because he's perfect. He's wonderful. No flaws.
Emily: He's listening to his own hype.
Lauren: So I think the last thing that's of note is they're having another dinner party now that William has joined them. And so they, you know, they're all gathered because again, like having social gatherings and dinners is the only thing that they have to do because none of them have any jobs except for William. And Henry is talking about how he got lost on one of his expeditions earlier. And he came across a town slash village that he just decided was Thornton Lacey.
And that's the village where Edmund is supposed to have his living as a pastor. So Henry is telling him, you know, I saw the house where you're going to live and you know, it's cute, but here are all the different interior design and exterior design improvements that I think you should make to this house.
And Mary is listening to this and listening to the images that Henry is spinning with his words and is going, " okay. All right. You know, I can see how this would be like, high class poor living. You know, like, it wouldn't be the level of wealth that I want, but it could be fashionable, you know, I can make this [00:24:00] work," and then Edmund shoots down all of it.
He goes, 'I don't know what kind of money you think I'm going to have. I'm going to have like 700 pounds a year and I'm making none of those changes, it will just be a nice, simple house and it'll be no big deal.' And they're also realizing how soon, relatively, that Edmund will be taking this living. And so shit gets real pretty much.
And it says that there's two people who are listening to this. Of course, Mary and Fanny. And it says, "one of whom having never before understood that Thornton was so soon and so completely to be his home was pondering with downcast eyes on what it would be not to see Edmund every day. And the other, startled from the agreeable fancy she'd previously been indulging on the strength of her brother's description, no longer able, in the picture she had been forming of a future Thornton, to shut out the church, sink the clergyman and see only the respectable, elegant, modernized, and occasional residence of a man of independent fortune."
So Mary has had the last, like dream construction of Edmund kind of yanked away from her because she had been clinging on to, like we said earlier, her idea of Edmund and this mirage of what a potential life with him could look like. And she's very unhappy.
Emily: Yeah. They're both sort of having expectations shot down. Fanny of course is not upset that Edmund is taking orders. That's what she's expected the entire time, but it means that he'll be moving away, basically. He'll only be a few miles away, but when you live in Regency England, that's a little further away than it is these days.
Lauren: He's not in the house.
Emily: Exactly. He's not in the house. He's not there every day to, you know, be the only person who talks to her in a civil way.
Lauren: We were sad when we no longer lived two blocks apart, so.
Emily: Okay. Yeah. So we can relate. But yeah, they're, they're both in a sense losing Edmund. Because once he takes orders, he will officially be beyond Mary's influence away from the church.
Lauren: And that's kind of how we end the section other than like a last little idle flirtation from Henry. [00:26:00] And that's all she wrote, folks. For now.
Emily: So little and yet so much happens. I guess because there wasn't the high drama of the last couple of sections it felt so much quieter, but there's a lot going on in the way of just events.
Lauren: There was a lot to actually cover.
Emily: We just didn't have the sisters Bertram to liven things up.
Lauren: I'm honestly not sad about it.
Emily: Me either. They were getting on my last nerve.
Lauren: Amen. I'm really curious to hear what your historical context is for today.
Emily: I am very excited about this one.
Lauren: Oh?
Emily: It comes from literally one passage where Fanny is dressed to go for her first dinner out and Edmund compliments her new dress. Finally, I get to indulge my special interest in textile history, because I want to talk about what her dress is likely made of, this cotton muslin.
Lauren: Ohhh, oh, your moment has come. All right, bring it on.
Emily: My moment has come. Yes. Okay. So for those of you who don't know, I'm, like, amateur interested in like textile history, especially preindustrial. I, I do the nerdiest job at the Ren Faire and I do educational demonstrations on like, spinning and weaving. So yeah, I'm, I've been waiting for this moment.
So what Fanny is most likely wearing, this nice white dress that she has been given upon the occasion of her cousin's wedding is probably made out of cotton muslin, which was all the rage during the Regency.
It was a product of British colonialism, unsurprisingly.
Lauren: Honestly, what wasn't?
Emily: Seriously, but the textile is this really beautiful, incredibly fine woven cotton that has been made in -- throughout south Asia for thousands of years. Like the ancient Greeks wrote about it. Highly prized, [00:28:00] extremely expensive, because it was very challenging to make.
So cotton is really difficult to work with in creating the actual textile. It's one of our most common natural fibers today because like, as a fabric it's really easy to work with. It's easy to sew, you can treat it so that it doesn't shrink and everything, but because of the way the actual fibers are when they come off the cotton plant, they're really challenging to spin into thread and then to weave into cloth.
Other fibers, like wool, if you've ever seen like a piece of hair under a microscope and it has kind of those scales all along the edges, wool also has that because it's animal hair. And so it's fairly easy to spin because those kind of grip together and hold the thread or the yarn.
Silk is a little trickier. It doesn't have those scales, so it's more slippery, but all of the individual fibers are really, really long and very individually strong. And so it's not terribly difficult to spin into thread. Cotton doesn't have any of those scales. The individual fibers are really, really short, like one to two inches short, sometimes not even that.
And they're very delicate as well. So it takes incredible skill to be able to spin cotton thread at all, especially to spin it as finely as you need to weave something like muslin. Historical muslin, the almost mythical muslin at this point, was able to be woven up to 1200 threads per inch. Which is absolutely insane.
I mean, I, I started weaving back in the fall and the most I've done is like 12 threads per inch.
Lauren: Okay, I needed that scale comparison cause I was like, I know that's impressive, but I don't know by how much.
Emily: No. So I, I'm going to have to [00:30:00] contextualize the history a little bit more for that. Okay. As I said, the skill of weaving this incredibly fine muslin has been practiced in South Asias for thousands of years. And it was very much a heritage craft. Like there were certain villages that specialized in like each step of the creation of this fabric. Of course, the British come bursting into India and are like, Hey, we want some of that. And so they started putting pressure on these local craftsmen to produce more and to produce more at lower prices and started wrecking the market that way.
And then they simply exported the skills to England. So then they had a local cotton production industry. And because it was so much cheaper that just absolutely killed the south Asian cotton industry.
Lauren: Dang.
Emily: Yeah. That leaves us now in like 2022, we have not been able to produce that quality of fabric in 200 years.
Lauren: Wow.
Emily: Yeah, just in the last decade, they've actually rediscovered and started cultivating again, the very specific cotton plant that they harvested those fibers from. They have had to take a very small number of volunteers from these heritage artisan communities who are willing to expand their skillset to make these almost invisible threads to weave these when there's such a, a threat of like breaking threads at every stage.
This is why it's so expensive. There were reports throughout history of like, oh, you could take a hundred yards of this and pass it through, like, the center of a woman's ring, because it was so finely woven. It was, y'know, worn by royalty throughout the world for thousands of years.
But I was coming back around to the thread count. So per reports, this muslin could [00:32:00] be woven somewhere between 800 and 1200 threads per inch. The greatest they've achieved in this sort of renaissance muslin campaign is 300 threads per inch.
Lauren: Oh, that's not even close.
Emily: No. And this is from people who've been working single-mindedly on this project for years.
Lauren: Wow.
Emily: Yeah.
Lauren: Okay. Now I understand why that was so important.
Emily: Yeah. So, I mean, yeah. British imperialism, just plodded in and said, ah, you're not doing capitalism well enough. So we're going to destroy thousands of years of knowledge and skill because we want more cotton fabric now. Please and thank you.
Lauren: Every day I learn about another thing that colonialism just destroyed.
Emily: Right?
Lauren: It makes me even more frustrated to know that there are even more things that one, I don't know. And two, we haven't even figured out yet because it was so completely wiped that we don't even know what we're missing.
Emily: Yeah. This isn't something like, you know, the, the Roman concrete that could withstand seawater where they just like, didn't write down the exact recipe because they assumed everyone knew it.
Lauren: Right.
Emily: This was thousands of years of craft maintained and handed down generation to generation, but it didn't make enough money for the East India Company. And so they just said to hell with it.
Lauren: I could tear my hair out right now.
Emily: Same.
Lauren: Oh my God.
Emily: Yeah. So the dress Fanny is wearing, whether or not that fabric would have been produced in India, I don't know. It could have been locally produced in Britain. They had a fairly prodigious industry by the end of the 18th century. But yeah, that's, that's the textile tradition that that white gown came out of.
Lauren: Wow. The more you know. . Thank you.
Emily: You're so welcome. I'm so glad that I finally got a chance to go on this tangent. I haven't even opened my notes for this because I've just been thinking about it for two days straight.
Lauren: Yeah. Emily literally texted me earlier today saying that they [00:34:00] couldn't focus on their actual work because they were so excited about their historical context for today. And so I was really excited to know what it was because it's apparently been distracting for two days.
Emily: Yes. There are, of course there are so many other layers of like how Fanny came to be wearing this particular dress that I could go into, but we'll leave it at muslin production for now.
Lauren: Beautiful. I love it. We'll save it for a different episode where you get to be like, my time has come.
Emily: Yes.
Lauren: Finally, I get to talk about the thing that I actually research for fun.
Emily: At last, my obsession with pre-industrial textile production has come to fruition!
Lauren: Who needs trivia nights when you have a podcast?
Emily: I know, right?
Lauren: Goodness.
Emily: So that's my history.
Lauren: I love it. I love it.
Emily: What, what do you have for us for pop culture today?
Lauren: So I was inspired by Henry pursuing Fanny and the initial similarities that it bears to things like The Taming of the Shrew or 10 Things I Hate About You. But what I want to talk about specifically is the enemies to lovers trope. And so for this, we need a little bit of audience participation and by audience, I mean, you.
Emily: Yeah!
Lauren: Emily, I would like to know what are some of your favorite enemies to lovers ships? Canon or not. They don't have to be canon.
Emily: You know, the first one that really comes to mind that I've actually like been invested in is not even, it's not even like a fandom thing. It's the song Genghis Kahn by Mike Snow.
Lauren: Okay. All right. Can you give more context?
Emily: Yes. Okay. So the, it's the music video for this song and it's basically a James Bond set up. So the villain is trying to psych himself up to kill the James Bond figure. Who of course is like, ruggedly handsome and everything. And then the villain goes home to his wife and kids, but [00:36:00] he's just, he's upset and thinking about Bond the whole time. And so he goes back the next day and he releases him and they dance together.
And then at the end of the video, like, James Bond has replaced the villain's wife and like they're, they're happy, like gay dads with the villain's kids.
Lauren: Oh my god.
Emily: Oh, Yes. So that's the first thing that comes to mind. It's so good. Anyone who has not watched that video, please go look up Genghis Khan by Mike Snow.
Lauren: I've never seen it and now I will definitely be watching it right after we record this.
Emily: I can't believe you haven't seen that.
Lauren: I have not.
Emily: It was all over Tumblr in like 2016. So, that's, that's what comes to my mind when I think of enemies to lovers.
Lauren: Love it. Okay. Great.
Emily: Do you want me to try and come up with others?
Lauren: No, I have a lot.
Emily: Okay.
Lauren: I'm always just interested to hear what other people's enemies to lovers ships are when they think of that. Like I think of like, Zuko and Katara in the Avatar fandom.
Emily: Oh, that is a good one.
Lauren: People ship that super hard. Dramione is one that's very controversial, but also is a huge ship in like, the Harry Potter fan fiction world. There's tens upon thousands of fanfictions like shipping Draco and Hermione together.
I have questions, but like, whatever. This is not official, but since it doesn't have to be cannon, Chad and Ryan from High School Musical.
Emily: I'm totally behind that one.
Lauren: I think that's enemies to lovers. Anyway. I wanted to, like, talk about examples because I think the big element of a good enemies to lovers trope or set up is that the two characters, although they're on opposite sides, have to at least somewhat view each other as equals.
They hate each other, but they have to be somewhat equal and be on equal footing.
Emily: Mutual respect.
Lauren: Exactly. Even if it's buried way down deep, because that also like, that hate that spurs the initial enemies part is inspired by some other deeper emotion, as we all know. Like, you've heard of crimes of passion. If you really don't care about somebody, you're just indifferent towards them. You're not fueled by a fiery hate.
Emily: This book I was reading [00:38:00] last week, this character was, thinking about the difference between loathing someone and hating someone. And basically came down to like, hate is just passion. And that's a little too close to lust or love.
Lauren: Yep. Exactly. That's exactly it. And the other thing that's important is that because they have to somewhat view each other as equals, that means that they can't be entirely dismissive or disdainful of the other person's humanity. You can hate all the other qualities about them, even if it's something like, oh, I think that he's a pompous asshole who thinks he's better than everybody else in this town, Elizabeth Bennet. But you don't completely disregard their humanity. Like Darcy can think that the whole Bennet family is beneath him socially because they are, but he never fails to see the Bennets as human.
There's just other qualities that he doesn't like. And that's an important distinction of enemies to lovers too. And when you can tell that something isn't going to work, it's because you set up the enemies to lovers in too much of an imbalanced fashion. So for example, please stop writing Nazi books where somebody falls in love with the Nazi. That does not work. That is not a good setup for enemies to lovers, because you have one person who does not believe in the core humanity of another. And that is not a romantic story. I don't want to read that.
Emily: Also Nazis don't deserve love.
Lauren: Like, can we not? Can we, can we think of something else, please? Literally anything else. You have all of human history to choose from and you choose Nazis? What are we doing?
Emily: Okay. Oh, I thought of another good one.
Lauren: Oh, good. Okay.
Emily: I know it's one that you haven't read, but it's extremely popular. Gideon and Harrow in the Locked Tomb.
Lauren: Okay. I will take your word for it that that's an excellent one because you're right, I haven't read it. But what I was thinking of was, this is why Henry and Fanny would not be a good setup for an enemies to lovers thing, because they're not on equal footing and that they don't view each other as equals. So it's one thing to be from different social standing, because you can have different social standings and still have like an excellent enemies to lovers set up.
But because Henry already immediately just does not see Fanny as a person. [00:40:00] It's not going to, that's not a good setup. It doesn't work.
Emily: She's prey. Like you said before, if he's not hunting foxes, he's hunting affection.
Lauren: Right. And usually if you see that kind of setup, it's always with... In a good setup, anyway, it's with like an author wink that this is what the character thinks that they're doing, but really they have ulterior motives.
So you might have the inner monologue of a character who's like, oh, I'm going to get one over on this person because it's going to be so funny. And there's like a narration wink of, but there was actually something else going on in this person's mind that is drawing them to the other protagonist.
And even in something like one of the quintessential teen rom coms of the nineties was like 10 Things I Hate About You that started off with a, a bet and a challenge of, I bet you can't get this ultimate shrew to like you because we love Shakespeare adaptations, but they're, like, intellectually equally matched. And they both see each other as people, which is why that works as a romcom. Here, with Henry and Fanny, not so much.
So I was thinking about what makes a good enemies to lovers story, because I think that sometimes people oversimplify it and then they don't understand why their story doesn't work. And there's certain elements that have to be in place characterization wise to write a good enemies to lovers story and have it work and have us be rooting for both of the characters and root for them to get together.
Instead of yelling at character B to run far away from character a because they're trash. At the root of any good enemies to lovers story is also like, a good challenge, because both of them are challenged to overcome whatever misconception they have about the other person in order to realize that they are actually really well suited for one another.
Or even that they just have some kind of common ground that they can relate to and not bicker about the entire time. And the challenge at the core of that kind of relationship and the tension throughout is what makes those so much fun to read. I just wanted to talk about [00:42:00] enemies to lovers today. That's really it.
Emily: I'm glad that we both took this, the opportunity of this episode to be like, all right, we, we've had downers the last couple of times, we, we want to have much more fun with our topics. But I really love that analysis about what works in enemies to lovers and ways that people fail to set that up properly.
And I definitely do not think Jane Austen is trying to set that up.
Lauren: No, she's not.
Emily: She's not signaling to us at all that like, this is going to be successful or that narratively, it should be successful because Henry doesn't deserve it.
Lauren: At all. And it it's very clear that Fanny's not interested. This is not going to be end game. It's a plot point. But we do see similar setups in other books or media. And so I think this was a perfect avenue to talk about what makes a good enemies to lovers story. I'll be fair. I was like ragging on Dramione fan fiction. I have read it. I just think that it's problematic.
Emily: Have we not all engaged with fan content that we find problematic?
Well, I enjoyed that connection very much.
Lauren: Thank you. I enjoyed thinking about it.
Emily: I'm glad we both had fun this time.
Lauren: And I think it was much needed.
Emily: Needed a little levity.
Lauren: Yeah. Especially given how epically we failed last time.
Emily: Yeah. That was downers all around.
Lauren: It really was. If that's all we got, I think it's time for our final takeaways.
Emily: I think you're right. Oh no, I have to go first.
Lauren: You do.
Emily: I think riffing off of Henry Crawford, my take away is going to be that you don't have to rise to a challenge just for the sake of the challenge.
Lauren: Okay. Just because the challenge is presented doesn't mean that you have to take it.
Emily: Yes.
Lauren: I think that... it doesn't encompass the entire section, but the first thing that came to mind was to see people as they are not as who you want them to be, because that would have saved several people in the section a lot of heartache.
Emily: Save us all some grief. I like it. That's good.
Lauren: All right. We get to pick a card!
Emily: With our takeaways done, [00:44:00] I think it's your turn to draw one.
Lauren: I think it is. Okay. We have the, we have the Jack of clubs.
Emily: Jack of clubs... the youngest Dashwood sister in Sense and Sensibility, Margaret is good humored and full of the energy of youth. So our theme for next episode is energy.
Lauren: Ooh. Oh, that could be interpreted so many different ways.
Emily: That's going to be a lot of fun, I think.
Lauren: Okay. I'm here for it.
Also, wow.
Emily: Somebody remembered Margaret.
Lauren: Thank you for joining us in this episode of Reclaiming Jane. Next time we'll be reading chapters 26 through 30 of Mansfield Park, with a focus on energy.
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, 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: We'll see you next time, nerds.
Emily: Once in high school, during like a spirit week, one of the theme days was to, like dress as your dream career. And I, I came dressed as a trophy wife. As, as a joke, but yeah.
Lauren: What, wait, what was your outfit?
Emily: I think it was just like stiletto heels and like a fitted dress or something. Yeah.
Lauren: I love it.
Emily: Yeah. Everybody else in my class thought it was hilarious because we were all, you know, huge nerds.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: Now look at me. I'm a grad student gremlin. I've utterly failed.