The Beautifull Cassandra/The Visit: “Science Fiction Double Feature”

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It's a two-for-one special! We're covering the bite-sized works "The Beautifull Cassandra" and "The Visit," while of course finding ways to talk about commerce and literary craft.

Thank you so much for your patience with the delay on this episode!

Transcript

Emily: This is Reclaiming Jane, an Austen podcast for fans on the margins.

Lauren: I'm Lauren Wethers.

Emily: And I'm Emily Davis-Hale.

Lauren: And today, we're reading "The Visit" and "The Beautifull Cassandra."

[intro music]

Emily: It's so weird to be doing two separate things in one episode. This is a Reclaiming Jane first.

Lauren: It is a first, but it didn't really make sense to focus on either The Visit or The Beautifull Cassandra because it would have been like a 15 minute little mini episode.

Emily: Yeah, there would have been no material to get through.

Lauren: Absolutely not.

Emily: Like, legitimately, we could read the entirety of The Beautiful Cassandra on air and not push our usual runtime at all.

Lauren: No, no. It's quite short. It's very short. And The Visit is slightly longer, but still, what, like, four or five pages? Yeah, it's um, they're cute little short stories and things that Jane Austen wrote for her family, and I really love it, because I certainly was not that nice to my sibling, so it's nice to see some sibling niceness.

Emily: Absolutely. So, because of our double feature today, we are both going to recap. One of us is taking each story. Do we want to recap them both at the same time, or recap one, go through one, recap the other, go through the other?

Lauren: Oh, that's a good question. We could, let's do the latter.

Emily: Okay. So I'll let you go first with The Visit.

Lauren: Okay. Oh, wait, is The Beautiful Cassandra not first in the book?

Emily: Oh, it is first.

Lauren: Please hold. Correct.

Emily: So I will go first with The Beautiful Cassandra.

Lauren: All right, Emily, you have 30 seconds to recap The Beautiful Cassandra, which is all of, like, four pages, so I have complete faith in you.

Emily: Thank you.

Lauren: Are you prepared?

Emily: Yes, it's probably not going to take a full 30 seconds.

Lauren: Okay. On your mark, get set, go!

Emily: Cassandra, the only daughter of a milliner, takes a bonnet from her mother's shop and heads out into the world. She meets a number of people and speaks to none of them, apparently. She eats six ice creams and takes a coach and manages not to pay for any of this. And then after seven hours, she returns home and decides that it was a day well spent.

Lauren: The end.

Emily: The end! That was what, ten seconds?

Lauren: You had nine seconds.

Emily: Oh, yeah.

Lauren: It was 21, to be precise. Still well within the time limit.

Emily: And the story itself is not much longer.

Lauren: No.

Emily: It's presented in twelve chapters, most of which are two sentences, if that?

Lauren: Just about. It honestly reminds me of when I was like six years old. I had a book that was, I think, the Book of, Book of Alyssa, or the Beautiful Alyssa, or something like that.

I don't know where I got the name Elissa from, but, each chapter was just her doing a different thing, like, Alyssa played outside. And I'd have my little six year old illustration of Alyssa, like, with a soccer ball. Alyssa went to school. And it reminds me of that same type of picture book, but elevated, because it's Jane Austen.

Emily: That's very cute.

Lauren: I'm sure my mom still has it squirreled away in a closet somewhere.

Emily: So yeah, The Beautiful Cassandra was written in 1788, so Jane Austen was about 12 years old, and it's dedicated to her older sister, Cassandra, Miss Austen.

Lauren: And that was, um, that was my margin note that I've never been this nice to my siblings. Because while we don't need to read the entire story, we can read the dedication, which is just so wonderful.

So it reads, "Madam, you are a phoenix. Your taste is refined, your sentiments are noble, and your virtues innumerable. Your person is lovely, your figure elegant, and your form majestic. Your manners are polished, your conversation is rational, and your appearance singular. If therefore the following tale will afford one moment's amusement to you, every wish will be gratified of your most obedient, humble servant, the author."

Emily: So cute.

Lauren: So sweet!

Emily: I do sometimes like my siblings that much.

Lauren: I would never actually, like, say it out loud, though.

Emily: [indignantly] I would!

Lauren: I do love my brother that much, but it's also, like, the difference between a brother-sister relationship and, like, a sister-sister relationship.

Emily: Very true.

Lauren: Like, the brother-sister relationship is like, I would jump in front of a car for you, but I'm not gonna tell you that you look good. [laughing] Like, I refuse. But Cassandra Elizabeth Austen is, of course, Jane's older sister. And I honestly have to wonder if Jane is assigning mischief to the fictional Cassandra that she sees in her sister, or if she's perfectly making her sister, like, extra naughty in this story.

Like, I'm going to give you this wonderful dedication, but I'm going to make your character somebody who steals ice cream, takes a coach ride and doesn't pay for it, just gives them the bonnet instead as payment for this seven hour round trip. I'm, I'm curious what the real Cassandra was like.

Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I know there's a decent amount of correspondence between Jane and Cassandra, but I'm not familiar with it.

Lauren: Nor am I, and I think the correspondence was from when they were adults, and so I don't know what the child Cassandra was like. Because we tend to make a lot of changes and shifts from childhood to adulthood, so adult Cassandra, who is represented in the letters, may not be the Cassandra that Jane was thinking of at this point in time.

Emily: But the fictional Cassandra is definitely something of a mischievous little character. We're introduced to her as the daughter and "the only daughter of a celebrated milliner in Bond Street. Her father was of noble birth, being the near relation of the Duchess of Something's butler." That's not what noble birth means, but sure.

Lauren: It is today.

Emily: And I have just read the entirety of chapter the first.

Lauren: Like we said, very short.

Emily: Yep.

Lauren: But Cassandra really, really, really, really wants a new bonnet. So she goes and she buys one.

Emily: No, she doesn't.

Lauren: Oh no, she steals it!

Emily: [laughing] Yes. She falls in love with an elegant bonnet that her mother has made on commission for a countess -

Lauren: and just takes it.

Emily: But just, Just takes it. Yep. Leaves to make her fortune, as it says.

Lauren: And this bespoke bonnet is what she later uses to pay for the coach ride that she evidently had no concept of having to pay for. Because she, as she goes on these adventures, she just thinks that everything's going to work out for her. And I can see why, because she faces no consequences.

Emily: Even after stealing six ices and knocks down the pastry cook.

Lauren: And just that particular chapter, quote unquote, which is really just a sentence, just reads like such a schoolyard bully. "She then proceeded to a pastry cook's where she devoured six ices, refused to pay for them, knocked down the pastry cook, and walked away." Like, what?

Emily: What are you gonna do about it?

Lauren: Nothing! Just leaves. And those were expensive, because keeping things cold was a lot more difficult and time consuming back then. So it's not like she stole, like, $2 ice creams from the ice cream truck. Those were, like, luxury desserts that she just ate six of, one after the other, knocked over the chef, and just said, Bye!

Emily: After the calculation of grand larceny in the last episode, I wonder how much they would have cost, and if this would have been a death penalty offense.

Lauren: Maybe. Maybe Cassandra's also on the lam.

Emily: Maybe.

Lauren: Maybe that's why her next thing is to go to a hackney coach.

Emily: She takes the coach to Hampstead, which is apparently about four miles from where she lives. Just takes the coach, gets out, looks around, and is like, all right, take me back.

Lauren: Like, ah, that was enough. Coachman's like, uh, okay? takes her back. And it's like, okay, well now you have to pay me. And Cassandra's like, ohh. No. And just puts the bonnet on his head and just leaves.

Emily: But after that incident, she runs into a couple of friends, Maria and then the widow, to whom she just sort of curtsies. Although when she meets Maria, turning a corner in Bloomsbury Square, "they trembled, blushed, turned pale, and passed each other in a mutual silence." What's the story there? What's up between Cassandra and Maria?

Lauren: I feel like they shared a beautiful moment together, and now they just can't talk about it. There's a backstory.

Emily: There's, there's a backstory there. There's some kind of intrigue.

Lauren: I don't know. Something went down at some kind of ball and I didn't really know what's happening.

Emily: We could spin out an entire new tale between these two from two sentences.

Lauren: This is what happens when you don't give me textual canon that I have to adhere to. My brain can go in so many different, beautiful, zany directions.

Emily: We both have the fanfiction writer's temperament.

Lauren: That's it. You give me an inch and I will take five miles.

Emily: Yes. 50, 000 words. That ain't nothing.

Lauren: Nothing. That's light work. I can write that in 30 days.

Emily: Mm hmm. But after seeing these two friends, Cassandra decides to return to her paternal roof in Bond Street, from which she had now been absent nearly seven hours.

Lauren: Full day. She goes, and she's pressed to her mother's bosom by that worthy woman, despite the fact that she stole the hat that she had made earlier that evening, or earlier that day, though I guess her mom doesn't know that she stole it. And "Cassandra smiled and whispered to herself, this is a day well spent."

Emily: Just what a silly, charming little tale written for her sister for featuring this character with her sister's name. Just like these are the things that I imagine you might get up to.

Lauren: Yeah. If you were to go and just let loose all your inhibitions, here's what you would do in London.

Emily: Release your inhibitions? Feel the rain on your skin?

Lauren: Mm hmm.

Emily: No one else can feel it for you.

[together] Only you can let it in.

Lauren: Go ahead, Cassandra, live your life.

Emily: Have your Natasha Bedingfield moment.

Lauren: You know, I think she's deserved it.

Emily: So yes, we have Cassandra's lovely little adventure where she goes around Bond Street, takes her coach to Hampstead, gets into her little mischievous activities and suffers no consequences whatsoever. It's just perfectly this little fantasy of childhood misadventure.

Lauren: A nice happy ending.

Emily: It was a day well spent.

Lauren: It was a day well spent, in Cassandra's words. All right, shall we move on to The Visit before we move on to our historical connection and pop culture connection?

Emily: Let's move on to The Visit. And I have to say, for this one, this is the first time that I feel like I've been completely lost reading something Jane Austen wrote.I had no idea what was happening in The Visit.

Lauren: I don't really 100 percent know, so I'm gonna do my best in this recap, but that's okay.

Emily: I believe in you. Alright, I've got 30 seconds on the clock. Are you ready?

Lauren: Ready.

Emily: On your mark, get set, go.

Lauren: Okay, fashionable people are gathering for a dinner party and, uh, it starts off somebody saying that they're apologizing for the grandmother who used to own the house because everything is like been made to her liking and her standard and she, everything else is uncomfortable.

That proceeds from everything to the beds to the number of seats, which is people are sitting in because people are sitting in laps because they're not enough chairs to the fact that they can't have their dessert because she's gotten rid of the dessert or like the dessert, whatever. The fruit. They get married at the end, and that's it.

Emily: Yeah, that's, that's about as much sense as I could make of this. It's, it's not a story either, it's a play, possibly written for sort of their family theatricals, but that does also mean that we're missing, you know, all of the usual little interstitial things that tell us nonverbal information about people's interactions.

Lauren: We're missing a lot. I, I did enjoy the mental image of Jane Austen writing this for her family. It was fun to picture them just kind of like acting out the silliness of the play that she wrote, but I did have to go back and read a couple of scenes over again. Cause I was like, who, who are we talking about? Who is this? I don't know what's going on. I know you were introduced to me five paragraphs ago and I've already forgotten.

Emily: Yeah, we even, we have the cast of characters written out and I still couldn't keep track of them.

Lauren: Nope.

Emily: Because the, we have the Dramatis Personae are Sir Arthur Hampton, Lord Fitzgerald, Stanley, Willoughby, Sir Arthur's nephew, Lady Hampton, Miss Fitzgerald, Sophie Hampton, and Chloe Willoughby.

Lauren: And yet they all appear and disappear so rapidly that I can't really keep track of who they are. Other than the fact that Miss Willoughby is apparently very pretty, and I seized onto the fact that she used Willoughby as someone's last name, like, very early on.

Emily: I did notice that.

Lauren: So we start, the scenes are in Lord Fitzgerald's house. He is the owner of the house where everybody is coming to gather, and is the one who begins by apologizing that Stanley, who is the first other person who we meet in this play, may not have had a good night's sleep, uh, because the bed was bought in the time of Lord Fitzgerald's grandmother. And "she was herself a very short woman and made a point of suiting all her beds to her own length, as she never wished to have any company in the house, on account of a very unfortunate impediment in her speech, which she was sensible of being very disagreeable to her inmates."

100%. She was like, I don't want people in my house. I doubt she actually cared about her speech impediment. She was like, I don't want you to come here. I'm going to make this as uncomfortable for you as possible and as comfortable for me. So nobody else comes to this house.

Emily: This grandmother gives me big Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss energy.

Lauren: And that's really, that's it. That's the first scene. There's only two acts. And that's the first scene.

Emily: That's the first scene.

Lauren: Fitzgerald saying, Oh, you're probably uncomfortable. I'm really sorry. Blame my grandmother. Stanley says, Oh, make no excuses. And Fitzgerald says, okay. "I will not distress you by too much civility."

There is no going back and forth, like, oh, I insist. As soon as Stanley says it's okay, Fitzgerald is like, great, I don't actually care. I'm not going back and forth with you about this. I'm going to go.

Emily: Yeah, I definitely get the sense that, despite... hmm, how do I want to phrase this? I definitely get the sense that this is, I mean, very clearly intended to be a comedic play, but, uh, very intentional juxtaposition of who these characters are supposed to be, you know, there's lords and ladies, there's people with titles, um, but they don't play the genteel games of manners that would be expected. And then we also see a lot more of this, uh, during the later dinner scene, which I was thankful for footnotes during.

Lauren: Agreed. Because I would have had no context for the food that they were eating. I would not have understood the jokes.

Emily: Absolutely. But the second scene in Act 1 is just Miss Fitzgerald telling Stanley who's going to come to dinner and them talking about the ladies being attractive and Miss Fitzgerald's brother being attached or not to Miss Hampton.

Lauren: Miss Fitzgerald says, "he admires her, I know, but I believe nothing more. Indeed I've heard him say that she was the most beautiful, pleasing and amiable girl in the world, and that of all others, he should prefer her for his wife, but it never went any farther I'm certain." Okay, like, at least you know, it is clear that he admires her after that whole speech about how she's the most wonderful person in the entire world. And that's the end of the first act.

Emily: Yeah, that's, that's it. Then for the second act, we are in the midst of The Visit, as it were.

Lauren: We enter into the drawing room. There are chairs set round so that people can have a little conversation. Except for there should be eight chairs for all eight guests, and there are only six. And so they just decide, it's okay, we'll just have a couple people sit in laps.

Emily: Wild choice.

Lauren: And the party seems to be okay with this.

Emily: Sir Arthur sits in his wife's lap. And, uh, young Mr. Fitzgerald sits in Sophie's lap, who is, yeah, Sophie is Miss Hampton, who the brother Fitzgerald is maybe or maybe not attached to. [laughing] I'm still, clearly I'm still puzzling through this.

Lauren: Sometimes I think we just have to say it out loud to really be able to get it. Um, but, you know, once again, we can blame the grandmother for this. And Miss Fitzgerald says, "I really am shocked at crowding you in such a manner, but my grandmother, who bought all the furniture of this room, as she never had a very large party, did not think it necessary to buy more chairs than were sufficient for her own family and two of her particular friends." But it's fine, because the brother Fitzgerald is very light, and so Sophie's not uncomfortable.

Emily: And in the meantime, as an aside, Stanley and Chloe, who is Miss Willoughby, uh, have a little admiration of each other, calling each other a cherub and a seraph.

Lauren: What an angel.

Emily: And then we move into the second scene of Act 2, where they're all at dinner.

Lauren: Yeah, luckily they're not uncomfortable and sitting in laps for very long, because after a little bit, a servant comes and tells him that dinner's ready and food is on the table. So, off they go.

Emily: Off they go to their very low class dinner.

Lauren: Yeah, like Emily and I said before, the footnotes really helped us here because the humor in this scene is all in the food that they're eating and that they share with one another. Because none of this would have actually appeared on a genteel table, especially not at a dinner when you're inviting friends over into your home and you want things to be a bit more elevated. Instead, they've gone for the most low class food that came to the Jane Austen mind.

Emily: They have cowheel and onion, they have suet pudding, they have tripe. To drink, they have elder wine, mead, warm ale with toast and nutmeg.

Lauren: And they don't have any dessert because the grandmother destroyed the hothouse, and they've never been able to raise a tolerable one. And without the hothouse, they can't possibly grow the fruit that's needed for dessert.

It's like - the cowheel and onion, I would have immediately known, like, this is not normal food. But I would not have realized that elder wine and mead were lower class items that weren't meant to be served. Like that would have, it wouldn't have stood out as different to me, so I was glad that I had that explanation.

Emily: Once again, shout out to the editors of this volume.

Lauren: Mm hmm. And we also have a little bit of reversal in that they pass a bottle of wine around the table at the end, which was usually an activity that was reserved for the men. Two of the men don't drink at all, whereas the women are lushes and they are knocking them back like nobody's business.

Emily: Young Jane Austen seems to appreciate - I don't know if appreciate is the right word, but she definitely has some little fascination with a woman who can hold her liquor. We, we had Alice in "Jack and Alice," and now all of the ladies of "The Visit."

Lauren: Yeah. It's again, funny to speculate because was this just like a child's idea of what you do when you get older, or was this behavior that she was seeing that she wanted to put into her stories? But Stanley, meanwhile, isn't drinking anything. He's merely drinking draughts of love from Chloe's eyes.

Emily: So, by the end of the scene, Lord Fitzgerald asks Sophie to marry him. Stanley asks Chloe to marry him. And then Miss Fitzgerald winds it all up with, "Since you, Willoughby, are the only one left, I cannot refuse your earnest solicitations. There is my hand."

Lauren: And Lady H says, "And may you all be happy."

Emily: Ta da!

Lauren: And what cracks me up is I feel like that's the impression that most people have of Jane Austen novels that don't read Jane Austen. Like, at the end, I don't know, you two go together, and you two go together, and now, kiss. The end. And that's what people think is the substance of a Jane Austen novel. Like. If you have not actually read Jane Austen, so it cracked me up, like, sure, this is a substance of a Jane Austen play, but she wrote it when she was a child, and it's clearly meant to be funny and not meant to be taken seriously.

Emily: I know that some of the charm of The Visit is lost on us just not having the full context of, you know, Jane Austen's life and the cultural nuances that she would have known, um, but, definitely we get the gist of the kind of farce, almost, of these, you know, nominally very high class people eating cowheel and onion and passing bottles of mead around the table.

Lauren: Like, the visual is funny, even if you don't understand all the rest of the humor.

Emily: Definitely. And I was trying to imagine as I was reading it what it would have been like staged, and hopefully they would have found it entertaining.

Lauren: Yeah, and I think the other part, too, of having, like, so and so come sit in your lap, it's, it's funny and easy to do when you're doing it with your siblings or your family, because you don't have to worry about, like, the impropriety that would come with that, because it's just your family, you're just hanging out. You know, if it's not something like Mansfield Park, where you have a father who's strictly against the theater, then, you know, you can have fun.

Emily: Clearly the Austens were doing that.

Lauren: Like clearly they were having a great time. And Jane Austen's older brother, who this is dedicated to, also really loved the theater. So there's a, there's a precedent there.

Emily: I love that.

Lauren: Yeah, that was, uh, it was a little bit confusing to parse through. And I was a little irritated with myself for having to go back and look at things again. I was like, this is not, this should not be hard. This is five pages.

Emily: It was so hard!

Lauren: I have been beaten.

Emily: Defeated by 12 year old Jane Austen.

Lauren: Defeated by a 12 year old Jane Austen, yes.

Emily: Well, do you have anything further to say about these two stories? There was so little in each of them that it feels difficult to draw out a discussion.

Lauren: Not particularly, because I feel like the plots are so short and straightforward that we would be drawing it out if we tried to say anything more. So I am happy to hear what your historical connection is for today.

Emily: Lovely. I'm finally breaking out of my gloom of the last few episodes.

Lauren: Oh good!

Emily: Because the first thing we learn about the beautiful Cassandra is that she's the daughter of a milliner, and her mother specifically is the milliner. So this is one of our very few working class heroines in Austen. I guess it could be argued that Fanny Price might be, but we don't have a good sense of what her parents do day to day necessarily. And of course, she's raised at Mansfield Park, et cetera, et cetera.

Um, but, a milliner's daughter is unequivocally working class. So, a milliner is the person who tackles all of the aspects of accessorizing your wardrobe. It's ribbons, it's fringes, it's cuffs, it's caps, it's bonnets. Um, the scene in Pride and Prejudice 2005, with all the ribbons, they're at a milliner's shop.

And millinery, millinery, millinery, I'm not going to find a consistent way to say it. I meant to look it up earlier and I can't remember. But this trade was particularly important because among all classes refashioning your clothes was ubiquitous. You didn't buy a new wardrobe every season, you redecorated what you had and clothes were only remade when it was absolutely necessary, like a silhouette drastically changed, and then you would take your dress to, like, a mantua-maker and they would pick apart all the seams and just remake the same thing into the new style.

They would have referenced fashion plates pretty heavily. They were very popular as reference for new styles, and milliners absolutely catered to those trends. They had their finger on the pulse of style.

And as I noted earlier, um, it's interesting that it's specifically Cassandra's mother who is a milliner. This wasn't by any means a male dominated trade. It was actually fairly evenly undertaken by men and women from the records that I've seen discussed. There were a large number of middle class women working in their own trades throughout the 18th century, including married women. There were also a lot of married women who were part of their husband's trade. But there were also independent craftswomen, businesswomen. They were really savvy to commerce and to the artistic styles of the time.

But women in trades also weren't necessarily protected by civic organizations the way men could be by joining guilds or trade societies. And of course, if they were married, as we've talked about before, their businesses, like a gentlewoman's assets, were still subject to their husband's property.

Lauren: Can't get away.

Emily: Can't get away.

Lauren: But I do love the introduction of women having actual professions and careers, because I think I think there's this flattening of history to the sense that women were always in the home, and that's just not the case.

Emily: It's absolutely untrue. Yeah, I, I found a really fascinating book about women in trades in the 18th century and read one chapter of it to pull out some of this information, but I want to go back and learn more about what middle class women were doing at this time, how they were also contributing to supporting their families, both in professional ways and in sort of under the table manners, occasionally.

Lauren: Girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.

Emily: Yeah.

Lauren: Awesome. Not doom and gloom.

Emily: Not doom and gloom! A little more of a fun aside.

Lauren: Yeah, I like that. Thank you.

Emily: Yeah. What do you have for pop culture today?

Lauren: Well, I was inspired by one of the other foods that they eat at this dinner because, during the dinner in The Visit, Willoughby says, "ah, madam, I can want for nothing while there are red herrings on table."

And I really loved seeing this mention of red herring actually as a food because the red herring phrase that is most often used is as a device or phrase that's used to kind of throw you off of the scent in a mystery or a different kind of narrative.

You usually see it in books like in Agatha Christie or in movies where you have something like a Knives Out or a Glass Onion. Something that makes you think this is going to be the villain or the murder weapon or what have you to throw you off, while meanwhile the actual villain or the actual culprit or weapon is hidden in plain sight.

But the term here, as Jane Austen is using it, is actually just to refer to the food red herring. The phrase red herring as a plot device wasn't actually popularized until 1807, so after she had written this little story.

Emily: We strive for accuracy here.

Lauren: Yeah, it was by English polemicist William Cobett, who told a story of having used a strong smelling smoked fish to divert and distract hounds from chasing a rabbit. And then it became used as red herring as like a plot device. So Jane Austen is not using it as like a cute little aside here. She actually just means that he's happy with fish. It's like a low class smoked fish again, but I wanted to use it to talk about the red herring device in popular culture, because I love when red herrings are done well.

They can be used intentionally to plant a false clue that misleads readers. One of the famous examples is in the Da Vinci Code. Uh, I'm really sorry if I'm going to spoil the Da Vinci Code for people, but also it's been 20 years, so, uh, not actually that sorry. But, the character of Bishop Aringarosa, and I'm not sure, I don't remember if that's actually how you say his last name, but, He's presented as though he's at the center of most of the mysteries and conspiracies of the church for most of the novel, except for eventually it's revealed that he's been fooled by the actual antagonist for the entire time.

And his name actually very, very loosely translates to "red herring" in Italian. Because Dan Brown knew what he was doing. So, rosa is pink, which is close to red, and very close to rossa, R O S S A, which is red. R O S A, rosa for pink. And then, aringa, I think, is fish. But it's a, it's a very, very loose translation of red herring because Dan Brown thought he was being funny. I mean, he was. [laughing]

And then my second one is kind of like a fun pop culture connection because one of the fun facts about me is that I was an extra in the movie 22 Jump Street, which is just full of meta humor because they knew that they were kind of pushing it by making a sequel. And so the entire movie is just jokes about making a sequel and having it be a cash grab and you don't actually have a reason to make a sequel.

The two main characters, who are played by Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill, have gone undercover at this college, and they're trying to find a drug dealer. And so, at the very beginning of the movie, Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill are studying a picture of a tattoo that they think belongs to this drug dealer. And the tattoo is a man firing a bazooka that's on the alleged drug dealer's arm. And the person who has a tattoo happens to be a man with a red mohawk who is aggressive and puts them off and just seems like he'd be the kind of person to be a stereotypical drug dealer. Except for later when he's in conversation with the two main characters, it's revealed that he has a tattoo of the mascot of his high school, and they were called the Plainview Red Herrings.

[laughing] And I, I honestly don't think enough people appreciated that joke in the movie. And so I wanted, I wanted to bring that up in our discussion of red herrings today because I think it's actually hilarious.

Emily: It is hilarious.

Lauren: But it is the perfect example of the red herring trope being used and also the writers just having fun and hopefully winking with the audience. Like, I hope you realized we weren't going to show you the villain this early in the movie. That would be too easy. We're also going to bring you in on the joke by saying, oh yeah, this is a tattoo of my high school mascot, the Plainview Red Herrings. We were pretty cool. Just in case it wasn't completely obvious before, here you go.

But I think any good mystery has red herrings done well. Sometimes red herrings aren't done well, and they're not believable. But without them, if you just have your villain too obvious early in the narrative and you don't get the same kind of narrative tension or excitement when the real villain or the real weapon or culprit is finally revealed at the end of the story.

And even if you were expecting a twist because you're familiar with the structure of a mystery, you still get the joy of the surprise of seeing a narrative really well structured and well done. You can expect a twist but still not know what the twist is going to be. And red herrings really help with that.

So that is my pop culture connection for today.

Emily: Love that. I always think, when I hear red herring, of my first encounter with the concept, or at least the name, was in A Series of Unfortunate Events. And I can't remember which book it is. It's one of the earlier ones, I think, um, where, yeah, there's, like, an auction, and one of the items is, like, is an actual, like, statue of a red herring, and that statue is the red herring? I'm probably misremembering that. It's been a really long time.

Lauren: But that also sounds like something Lemony Snicket would write, because he had that same kind of humor. I love that.

Emily: Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Lauren: You are so welcome.

Emily: That's, well, that was a, a pretty, uh, short and sweet - well, I say that now. I'm going to finish editing it, and it'll be like, this is the same length as everything else. But it felt short and sweet, because we got through two pieces!

Lauren: I mean, we used to have episodes where we had like 30 pages of dialogue to get to that was rich with intrigue and plot.

Emily: Yeah. That's all right. That's all right. We'll, we'll have some more meaty material to get into coming up. We've got novellas.

Lauren: All right, I don't know who we want to do final takeaways first because usually we do whoever recaps does final takeaways, but we both recap this time.

Emily: I also forgot about final takeaways. Do we have to do takeaways from these?

Lauren: I don't know. I don't know that we, I feel like we can skip takeaways. Honestly, we could do a takeaway from our recording rather than the actual episode. Or we can just skip it and say this was seven pages of material and they weren't meant to be taken that seriously.

Emily: I feel like that's justified, honestly. So sorry, sorry to anyone who lives for final takeaways, but there's, there's not much here.

Lauren: Yeah, they will make a return in a future episode. The final takeaway is the fun that we had along the way.

Emily: Ay yup!

[outro music]

Lauren: Thank you for joining us in this episode of Reclaiming Jane. Next time, we'll be reading "Love and Freindship."

Emily: To read our show notes and a transcript of this episode, check out our website, reclaimingjanepod.com, where you can also find the full back catalog and links to our social media.

Lauren: If you'd like to support us and gain access to exclusive content, you can join our Patreon at Reclaiming Jane Pod.

Emily: Reclaiming Jane is produced and co hosted by Lauren Wethers and Emily Davis-Hale. Our music is by LaTasha Bundy and our show art is by Emily Davis-Hale.

Lauren: We'll see you next time, nerds!

[music ends]

Emily: You know, I think I was the same age as Jane Austen when writing this, uh, when I had my summer long Natasha Bedingfield obsession, or at least my "Unwritten" obsession. I loved that song.

Lauren: Was this like an Easy A montage for you? Just like, oh no, that was "Pocket Full of Sunshine." Still Natasha Bedingfield, but wrong Natasha Bedingfield song. Just constantly singing "Pocket Full of Sunshine" on repeat until you get sick of it.

Emily: I also, I did that with a song literally yesterday. There was one that was just stuck in my head. It was like, I'm just, I guess I'm just going to listen to it until it works its way free.

Lauren: Sometimes it's what you have to do. Sometimes my brain just latches onto things. And it's a similar thing where it's like, I guess this is just a song that I'm listening to now. And that happened to me at the end of last year. And that song made it into the top five of my songs on Spotify, despite the fact that it hadn't come out until like October.

Emily: Oh my god.

Lauren: It was bad.

Emily: You know, sometimes that's just how it has to be.

Lauren: You know, I was like, well, um, you're welcome. Whoever that artist was, I have given you plenty of streams.