Pride and Prejudice 36-40: “Be Humble, Sit Down”
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In this episode, Lauren and Emily talk about humility and how it manifests – or doesn't – in these chapters. Also included: dictionary definitions, relatable celebrities, and some classic familial embarrassment.
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
The Reign of the "Relatable" Celebrity is Over
Show Notes
The title is a Kendrick Lamar reference and if you got it immediately we should be friends. That is all. Carry on.
Transcript
Reclaiming Jane S2E8 | Pride and Prejudice 36-40: “Be Humble, Sit Down”
Emily: [00:00:00] This is Reclaiming Jane, an Austen podcast for fans on the margins.
Lauren: I'm Lauren Wethers,
Emily: and I'm Emily Davis Hale.
Lauren: And today, we're reading chapters 36 to 40 of Pride and Prejudice with a focus on humility.
Emily: Humility is what we've been forced into a little bit today.
Lauren: Ooh, today the last couple of weeks, it has been a humbling beginning to September for us.
Emily: Truly. I am so glad that we are back though back on our regular schedule, back in our usual recording spot.
Lauren: Back in our homes.
Emily: Back in our homes. Oh my God. So glad to be back home.
Lauren: Thank you for being patient with us as we readjust from having to evacuate. And we hope that you enjoyed the little bonus content that we were able to put out two weeks ago in lieu of a usual episode. But we are really excited to be able to get back to our usual scheduled programming today.
Emily: Yeah, I mean we're well over halfway in pride and prejudice. And, you know, once we get to this point, it feels like we're just kind of steaming towards the end. Which is wild because how, how are we this far already?
Lauren: It goes so fast.
Emily: It really does.
Lauren: They grow up so fast.
Emily: Time just flies. Sunrise, sunset. Oh, but anyway, book time is not flying.
Lauren: No.
Emily: Ms. Austen is taking her time. So shall we go ahead and jump into recapping?
30-Second Recaps
Lauren: Yes.
Emily: So that we can discuss, yeah.
Lauren: Those thirty seconds go by quick.
Emily: They really do.
Lauren: All right. Maybe a little bit rusty.
Emily: Oh God. And we're starting with me. Who was always rusty.
Lauren: No. I believe you got this. Are you ready to, to recap [00:02:00] these past five chapters of pride and prejudice, 36 or 40 in 30 seconds?
Emily: Absolutely not, but I'm going to do my darnedest anyway.
Lauren: All right. In three, two, one, go.
Emily: Lizzie's having a lot of emotions in the fallout from receiving Darcy's letter. There's a lot to parse through. But she doesn't get a chance to see him again or to speak to Colonel Fitzwilliam because the next morning they are gone from Rosings.
And then at the end of the week, Lizzie and Maria also leave. They go and pick up Jane in London, stay for a couple of days, and then they're finally on their way back to Longbourne. They meet up with the other three Bennet sisters to have lunch, and then finally can catch up with the rest of the family.
Lauren: Nice.
Emily: Thank you. That felt way more competent than most of my other recaps. So that's nice.
Lauren: I told you you'd be fine.
Emily: I just, I needed a break. I'm not rusty. I just, I needed to recalibrate. That's what it was. All right, Lauren, are you ready to recap?
Lauren: Ready.
Emily: All right. In three, two, one, go.
Lauren: Okay. Elizabeth spends a lot of time mulling over Darcy's letter.
She has a realization that perhaps everything she ever thought about him was wrong, which was very difficult for her to deal with. Darcy and his cousin leave Elizabeth, eventually leaves Rosings Park after much ado from Mr. Collins, of course, and just a kind of casual goodbye from Lady Catherine. She picks up Jane, she goes back home. She tells Jane everything, except for the fact that Bingley was in love with her the entire time. She conveniently leaves that out. And Lydia is just terrible.
Emily: All right. We have recapped.
Lauren: I don't know why I decided I was going to end on just Lydia being terrible. She kinda was, though.
Humility (Or Lack Thereof) in Pride and Prejudice
Emily: She kind of was. Wow. There was so much, so much in these sections about humility, which is our theme for this episode. Just really coming out of the woodwork and we're just plunged right into that concept at the very beginning with Lizzie parsing through everything that she's learned in Darcy's letter and having to reevaluate [00:04:00] her own assumptions. And do some of that, that self-reflection, that introspection that is just really deeply uncomfortable.
Lauren: This is one of those times when growth hurts because you have to confront some perhaps ugly truths about yourself, but it also means that we get one of those rare instances where the word or at least part of the word shows up in the chapters that we're talking about for the theme that we're working with.
We could not have accidentally chosen a more perfect section.
Emily: I love when that happens --
Lauren: --to talk about humility, it was so spot on.
Emily: In terms of like that first chapter and finding humility in that, or finding, finding the theme, not humbling ourselves. Of course never.
Lauren: Why would we do that?
Emily: We would not do such a thing. But it, it crops up I think in, I want to say two main ways. First, Elizabeth, having to find the humility of recognizing that her initial assumptions were incorrect and that she just dove in based on her first impression, but then also her assessment of how Darcy is kind of failing at playing humility in, in his letter to her as well, because.
He never really apologizes. He apologizes for his role in potentially having hurt Jane and by extension Lizzie, but never like admits to having been wrong in what he did.
Lauren: I think we mentioned this a little bit last time, but we can see his tone kind of progressively change as he writes the letter. So clearly when he sat down to write it, he was still in his feelings.
He's still very upset and wasn't really attempting to be charitable in his language, which is why Elizabeth is also so angry when she first reads it, because one, she's still determined to dislike him. And so when she begins to read the letter, she's looking for reasons to continue hating him. And the tone that he uses is not exactly doing him any favors.
And then even though it becomes a little bit less harsh as the letter progresses, it's still not a humble. "I am so sorry. [00:06:00] I probably shouldn't have proposed to you in this way. I've done wrong to you and your sister and other ways," but kind of just a, 'yeah, I did separate Jane and Bingley, but I did what I thought was right. So I'm not actually sorry." So it's not recommending him to her.
Emily: Yeah. He's not humbling himself at all.
Lauren: No.
Emily: He's saying, well, I, I stand by my judgment, essentially. And it, it does say that Lizzie goes through and reads the letter multiple times. And as she goes back, as she goes from the story of what happened with Wickham and Georgiana, Back to the beginning, she kind of gains a little more understanding of where he's coming from and the causes of his indignation, basically. So it's, it's understandable, but also, yeah, I I'm I'm with you there and with Lizzie on the initial tone of the letter, that's like, "Hey, wait a minute. I'm right."
Lauren: And she's also struggling to humble herself the more times she reads the letter as well, because she first reads it when she's determined to hate him. And isn't really reading it very closely. And then the meaning of the potential truth of his story about Wickham begins to sink in and she goes back and she reads it again. And then she reads it again and she's slowly realizing, oh, I may have been wrong, but she still fights it.
Like, no, no, no. Like that can't be, she's still focusing on her own prejudices and misconceptions. Very slowly comes to the realization and says, "how humiliating is this discovery? Yet how just the humiliation!" And realizes, like, not that she wants to be humbled, but that she's been humiliated in her mistake, pretty much.
Emily: Yeah. And that's something that I want to come back to later, as well as that idea of humility and humiliation. But yeah, that's, that's funny that you mentioned the The range of emotions that she's going through kind of, because, I mean, I kind of got the sense that especially like the first read through and the first couple she's [00:08:00] just in her mind going, like what the F what the, what the, what is this, what is happening?
Lauren: "This must be false. This cannot be, this must be the grossest falsehood."
Emily: Yes.
Lauren: And then at first, when she reads it the first time she puts it away and goes, "I'm never looking at that ever again!"
Emily: And then immediately pulls it back out.
Lauren: Exactly that lasts all of about five minutes.
Emily: But even as she's rereading and trying to absorb just the contents of the letter, she's simultaneously thinking back not only to Darcy's behavior and how she had just extrapolated all of these things, but she's looking back at Wickham's behavior too, and realizing how she did exactly the same thing, but in the opposite direction.
So with Darcy, she took his initial hesitance to interact with anyone and decided that he was just a bastard. But Wickham was initially friendly and charming. And though she had no knowledge of any of his deeper character, she was flattered enough by his attentions and by his behavior to assume that it must be turtles all the way down.
Lauren: And she also realizes that one, he may have been actively trying to flatter her, and two, goes back and looks at those first interactions that she had with him in a different light and realizes, oh, it was actually really improper for him to spill all this information when we had known each other for maybe a day.
Like I, that should have been a red flag for me, but I didn't pick up on that at all. I was just flattered by the attention and didn't stop to think why is he divulging this life story to somebody who he barely knows?
Emily: Yeah. And I think we brought that up in the episode where we first covered their, their very initial meeting where they've known each other for like half an hour and he's just spilling his tragic life story.
But finally Elizabeth realizes in this section and I have the quote here where she says, "she was now [00:10:00] struck with the impropriety of such communications to a stranger and wondered it had escaped her before. She saw the indelicacy of putting himself forward as he had done and to the inconsistency of his professions with his conduct."
Yeah. So, you know, hindsight is 2020.
Lauren: Exactly. And for Elizabeth it's even more jarring being able to put the actions of both herself and others in a different light and having to reconcile those thoughts that she has clung on to. Almost like, she's almost cherished like those feelings of disgust for Darcy, because she's been given many opportunities to let them go.
And she won't because she's enjoying hating him too much.
Emily: I mean, we all have those people that we love to hate.
Lauren: Yeah. And so not only having to realize that she was wrong, but that she had actively encouraged being wrong for months.
Emily: Once we move on from Elizabeth's direct consideration of the letter, our next look at humility or the very apparent lack thereof is the next time they see Lady Catherine.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: Who has no sense of humility whatsoever.
Lauren: I don't believe she's ever heard or said the word in her life.
Emily: No, not at all.
Lauren: I noted that we open the next chapter with a character who feigns humility and is one of the most self-important, Mr. Collins. Is all, Lady Catherine is all condescension. She deigns to dine with somebody as lowly as me, but really thinks quite highly of himself. Just will never actually say it in those words. And then Lady Catherine, who just thinks she's the shit and...
Emily: oh yeah. Unabashedly.
Lauren: Yeah. And everyone else should just get on board with that perception of herself, because why would she ever need to humble herself? She's fantastic. She's being kind enough to grace them all with her presence.
Emily: Lady Catherine really embodies that double meaning of condescension where the sense that [00:12:00] we don't really use as much today is one that was much more prevalent during the period when Jane Austen was writing, that condescension in being almost, how would you describe it?
Like a charitable act. You condescend to interact with people lower than yourself as being equals, but then the sense that we know better today, condescension just kind of being stuck up.
Lauren: Yeah. Yeah. And I think because we, at least in the US we kind of pretend that class doesn't exist. And so you can't actually say that people of the upper-class would deign to be with people lower than them, because it's considered impolite to actually acknowledge that out loud.
Like you can't say the quiet part out loud. So you can't use that first meaning of condescension because it would imply that there's actually a hierarchy in place that we're all trying to just ignore.
Emily: But they, they don't have that exact hang up at this point. They are well aware and especially people of the higher classes, like Lady Catherine, are extremely invested in making sure that everyone knows where the class boundaries are.
But yeah, people like Mr. Collins contribute to that as well. And it was really, really interesting to me, his farewell to Elizabeth, this last conversation they have before she and Maria leave is that he's, you know, humbly thanking her for deigning to stay with them, saying we know how little there is to tempt anyone to our humble abode, but then continues on immediately after to brag about how much Lady Catherine likes his company. And there's that, that juxtaposition of this extremely false humility. So obviously false humility. Especially with Elizabeth, basically laying out, well, look what you're missing out on, you know, Charlotte has all of these things and gets to associate with someone as wonderful and high class as Lady Catherine.
Lauren: Yeah. And he even says at one point, "You may in fact, carry a very favorable report of [00:14:00] us into Hartfordshire my dear cousin, I flatter myself at least that you will be able to do so. Lady Catherine's great attentions to Mrs. Collins you have been in daily witness of, and altogether I trust it does not appear that your friend has drawn an unfortunate--" and then he cuts himself off and changes the subject.
So saying like, "I hope you don't think that your friend has drawn an unfortunate lot," pretty much, because he doesn't want to acknowledge that it Elizabeth might be happy that she has not married him because he's trying to spin this picture of, " look at how much you're missing out on," you know, like Lady Catherine gives us so much partial attention, you know, we've really just set up a wonderful household here.
We're living in domestic bliss and Elizabeth is trying to be polite and says, yes, you are, does not say that Charlotte is.
Emily: Being diplomatic.
Lauren: And she's still, you know, struggling with her feelings about this letter throughout the ending of their time at Rosings. Because being able to realize that your entire perception of a person has been wrong, doesn't just happen overnight.
So she's still processing and ruminating to the point where even Lady Catherine says, you know, like "Ms. Bennet doesn't appear to be in good spirits." And she's like, "because I'm not. Having a terrible time over here!"
Emily: Little preoccupied.
Lauren: I just want to go back to my room and brood. I don't want to be here with you people. I'm having a really bad day.
Emily: And it seems like. As much as Lady Catherine prides herself on knowing everything about everyone all the time. She is clueless about what happened with Georgiana and Wickham. So it's not just that Darcy has kept the information of that potential scandal away from the public, but it seems like it's really the five people who were directly involved. It's Georgiana, Wickham, Darcy, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and Mrs. Young, who was supposed to be Georgiana's caretaker. The five of them. No, no one else.
Lauren: And now Elizabeth.
Emily: And now Elizabeth.
Lauren: Yeah. And it's Lady Catherine's lack of humility that allows her to know or suspect nothing about this, because she mentioned that Georgiana went and traveled with this companion, [00:16:00] while she is telling Elizabeth why it's so important for her to have a servant traveling with her, not realizing that that person did a terrible job. Yeah. The things, the things that you miss when humility is not in your vocabulary.
Emily: Yeah. Because Lady Catherine has such a total lack of humility that I'm sure Darcy and Fitzwilliam are perfectly aware that knowledge of what happened to Georgiana would, I mean, crush her for... Maybe not out of direct concern for her niece, but because of the association with that kind of scandal. But also it would serve even further probably to ruin Georgiana, because you know, that she would immediately become one of those examples of what not to do in Lady Catherine's casual conversation.
Lauren: That lack of humility also means that she doesn't see what's going on between Darcy and Elizabeth, because Charlotte has noticed it. And granted, Charlotte spent more time around the both of them and so would have more opportunities to observe them and see how they interact with one another.
But Lady Catherine should have been able to notice like, Hmm. My nephew seems to make a point to speak to her at dinner. When she was sick, he went to go check on her. Both of them seem to be in a little bit of a funky mood. If she had bothered to look closer, she could have seen that there was something that had transpired.
Like you don't — wouldn't necessarily jump to proposal. But you would have been able to see that something has transpired between the two of them.
Emily: There's some sort of, maybe not attachment, but there's something going on that is not out in the open.
Lauren: Exactly.
Emily: But she does not have the level of humility to one pay attention to other people in, in that way. But also I'm sure she could never fathom that Darcy would demean himself enough to form an attachment to a woman of such class as Elizabeth Bennet.
Lauren: And that's the kicker right there.
Emily: Yep.
Lauren: Especially being surprised that her uncle can have a manservant. And like, she clearly [00:18:00] thinks that Elizabeth is just so far beneath them that one, she wouldn't even know that what the proper way to travel is, and two, no one in her family could possibly be able to afford a manservant to travel with them.
Emily: Oh, Lady Catherine, the, the antithesis of humility, truly. She and Mr. Collins are...
Lauren: Truly a match made in heaven.
Emily: Quite a pair. But finally Elizabeth and Maria are leaving Rosings and Elizabeth is going to have somebody to spill the tea with once they get to London and to Jane.
Lauren: Here we can see too, that when she's thinking about seeing Jane, she's thinking about like, oh, thank God. I'll finally be able to talk to her. And we can see that not all of her vanity has left. She's still like, okay, this was a really crappy situation, but "to know that she had the power of revealing, what would so exceedingly astonish Jane and must at the same time so highly gratify whatever of her own vanity she had not yet been able to reason away was such a temptation to openness as nothing could have caused." So basically similar to being able to tell your friends like, oh my gosh, this really hot guy asked me out and I turned him down. It's still fraught with pain, but there's a little bit of pride in like, look who I could have had if I had decided to say yes, and I turned him down.
Emily: And even without revealing the kind of introspection that presumably she's going to talk to Jane about. Just being able to say, oh, this guy who thinks he's so much better than all of us, I still got him.
Lauren: Exactly.
Emily: Or he wanted, he wanted it.
Lauren: I ensnared him and then I pushed him away.
Emily: But Jane presents us with yet another little case study of how humility manifests in various people. And I was thinking of it specifically in contrast to Mr. Collins and the idea of having sort of an overabundance of humility. Jane has sort of a genuine overabundance of humility, I think where she ends up devaluing her own judgments [00:20:00] in favor of trying to make everyone else fall in the best possible light. Whereas Mr. Collins has an overabundance of false humility.
And is always trying to make it seem like he's extremely humble when really he's the master of the humblebrag.
Lauren: Right. Is Jane's humility, a virtue or a fault? And can you be excessively humble? Because I think she is, I think that's the category that she falls into. Where we even see Elizabeth kind of checks her a little bit because even after telling her the full story of Wickham and the dastardly deeds that he's committed in the past, Jane is still trying to find a way to think highly of both Wickham and Darcy and Elizabeth has to tell her like, no one of them is going to have to be in a bad light. You can't have it both ways. You have to think ill of at least one of them. And then we actually hear from Elizabeth, I'm inclined to think highly of Mr. Darcy, not in those words specifically, but she basically says, I believe him over Wickham, which is a moment! We're making some progress here.
Emily: Yeah. It's observed on Jane's part "that most earnestly did she labor to prove the probability of error and seek to clear one without involving the other." And Elizabeth replies, 'you will never be able to make both of them good for anything. Take your choice, but you must be satisfied with only one. There is but such a quantity of merit between them just enough to make one good sort of man and of late, it has been shifting about pretty much. For my part, I am inclined to believe it all, Mr. Darcy's, but you shall do as you choose." Yeah. Elizabeth is basically saying, well, I don't think the the net goodness between the two of them has changed, but who possesses the majority? She now is inclined to say that actually of the two of them, Darcy might have the advantage.
And down the page. Lizzie perfectly sums it up, when she says one has got all the goodness and the other, all the appearance of it.
Lauren: Even that is like, I mean a fantastic assessment, but Jane also reminds her, [00:22:00] you were the one who thought that Mr. Darcy didn't have any appearance of goodness. I could kind of see it before. So she's still, she's getting there, but she's not quite where she needs to be yet.
Emily: Yeah, because Lizzie took one slight and inflated it beyond all reality. And decided to impose that judgment onto his outward appearance. So everybody else may have just seen that he's kind of withdrawn and like, not very friendly, but Lizzie's like, this is proof that he is terrible.
Lauren: Yeah. And she says herself, "I meant to be uncommonly clever in taking so decided a dislike to him without any reason." I thought I was being cute and smart. Hashtag girl boss, it didn't work. I may have girl bossed a bit too close to the sun.
That's my favorite--
Emily: Has everybody else watched LuLaRich already?
Lauren: Talk about lack of humility. Have you ever seen a narcissist, just talk about how wonderful they are for four hours on television, because that was part of the LuLaRich.
Speaking of people who don't have an ounce of humility in their entire body. I feel like we have to spend some time on Lydia and how self-centered she is as well. She shows up and pretty much sucks all the attention towards her immediately. Doesn't let anybody else speak. Doesn't let her sisters get a word in edgewise. She asks them, how was your trip? And then proceeds to tell them all about hers.
Doesn't even let them answer.
Emily: Says, oh, we're going to treat you to the nicest lunch. But actually we spent all of our money in the shop across the street. So you guys have to pay for it, but we're treating!
Lauren: It reminded me of the scene in Lilo and Stitch, where they go to buy stitch from the pound and Lilo's like, "I want to buy him! Can I have two dollars?"
Emily: But see, that was cute. This is not.
Yeah, prior to Lizzie going to visit Charlotte, I felt like Lydia might have gotten a little bit of, you know, some of that, the extension of Lizzie thinking in black and white terms, but here seeing a little more of her actual behavior and how, I mean, she [00:24:00] really just goes on and on and on.
And it's all about herself. It's all about her own interests. There doesn't seem to be any kind of deeper analysis of anything at all. I mean, she's, she is surface level shallow.
Lauren: No thoughts, head empty.
Emily: No thoughts, head empty, but head wearing a very pretty bonnet. Only once she's made over the ugly one that she bought, just because she had to.
She's so full of herself. So full of herself. In a very similar way to lady Catherine, I would say. Lydia has more of an appearance of being frivolous than Lady Catherine does, but I think they're on similar levels of, well, every decision I make must be objectively correct.
Lauren: Different environments, but I think very similar vanity.
Emily: Absolutely. It's their vanity that's identical. Honestly, Lady Catherine is older and of a higher class, but...
Lauren: It manifests differently.
Emily: Exactly. Oh, they have so much in common and I really hate it.
Lauren: Her language is also a lot coarser than Jane or Elizabeth. Which is not like a marker of bad character, but just the way that she's different from her two sisters and doesn't really care about propriety as much.
So when we hear Jane and Elizabeth speak most of the time, it's a lot more formal, you know, they even only drop like the Mr. From Wickham when they're speaking of him in , negative way. It's like one of the examples of that is. You know, they're talking about Mary King, because Lydia goes, oh, Lizzie, I have some news for you that you're going to think is fantastic.
While they're sitting to lunch. And so Jane and Lizzie look at each other and tell the waiter to, you know, you don't have to stay here. You can go, because they don't know what's going to come out of Lydia's mouth next. And they don't want any like gossip to form because servant gossip is powerful and it will get out sooner rather than later.
And Lydia is making fun of them. So [00:26:00] they're like, oh, you guys are always so cautious. That's so silly. You can just say whatever you want to, whenever you want to. And it's fine. And then she goes on to say, by the way, Wickham is safe because Mary King moved to the country. Blah, blah blah. And Elizabeth says, "then Mary King is safe from a connection imprudent as to fortune," and Jane goes, "oh, well, you know, I hope there's not a strong attachment on either side," you know, hoping that every, every party is happy still. And Lydia goes, "I'm sure there's not on his, I will answer for it he never cared three straws about her, who could about such a nasty little freckled thing." Like, okay, tell us how you really feel.
Emily: But then Elizabeth thinks for herself, "that however incapable of such coarseness of expression she was herself, the coarseness of the sentiment was little other than her own breast had formerly harbored and fancied liberal." So she's realizing, oh my God, I'm just as bad as them. I might not say it out loud, but... which is not a pleasant realization to have, but necessary for the development of her character.
Lauren: She's having another little private come to Jesus moment with herself. Like, oh shit...
Emily: there's so many of them in these chapters, like, oh, okay. Maybe I'm not as objective and fair. As I thought I was...
Lauren: Oh, no!
Emily: Honestly, she's what, 20, 21. That's a that's yeah. We're all having those realizations about that time.
Lauren: Right.
Emily: But when they finally get back to Longbourne and Lydia again is going on and on and talking to Mary, we get another little perfect bite of false humility and very, 'not like other girls' energy. When Mary says, in response to Lydia's description of all the fun they had that day, "far be it from me, my dear sister, to depreciate such pleasures. They would doubtless be congenial with the generality of female minds, but I confess they would have no charms for me. I should infinitely prefer a book." Like, [00:28:00] okay, get over yourself.
Lauren: And then it says, "but of this answer, Lydia heard not a word. She seldom listened to anybody for more than half a minute and never attended to Mary at all." she didn't even hear Mary's self-important, false humble, not like other girls speech. She's not even paying attention.
Emily: Oh, such a mess. They're all just such a mess. And Elizabeth of course, is sitting here looking at everybody to go like, oh my God, he was right. And she hates it, but he was right.
Lauren: Like oh, my family is kind of a mess. Oh no.
We Get Nerdy With Dictionary Definitions
Emily: Well, I think that about brings us up to speed. And we've already kind of talked about a lot of what I had made notes of in terms of humility and how that would be expressed in the period. But oh, I also, I did want to go back to that idea of humility and humiliation.
Lauren: Yes. Let's talk about it.
Emily: Yeah. So I think, pop in with any alternate thoughts that you have here. I think that humility and humiliation really comes down to an internal versus an external source of the feeling because humiliation is very much an imposed injury to one's pride. I think, whereas humility, assuming that it's genuine, has to be coming from some internal source of a sense of, I guess, inferiority in some way, not necessarily like an inferiority complex but recognition that you're not all that in, in one sense or another, what, what do you think?
Lauren: I think, yes. I think that humiliation is definitely external and I think there's an element of shame to it too. Like you're, you're being shamed when you're being humiliated, [00:30:00] because you can also say that you were humbled, that something humbled you, but that doesn't, it can carry the same connotation of shame, but not always. Where I feel as humiliation specifically, is somebody put you in your place, or your perceived place, with the intention of making you feel small and making you feel like you are less than.
And I struggled to put a finger on what like that internal sense of humility is. I don't know that inferior gets at it, but I also don't know what other word I would use.
Emily: That's exactly the struggle I was having, because inferior comes with that connotation of I'm not as good as somebody else.
Lauren: Right.
Emily: But humility is like, how do you explain it without using the word inferior? I need a thesaurus.
Lauren: I want to see. Okay. So I just want to see for reference, what--
Emily: are we going to see how the Oxford English dictionary defines humility?
Lauren: Yes. Okay. Modest, I guess is good.
Emily: Modesty is good.
Lauren: Yeah. So the, the dictionary definition is the quality or condition of being humble.
Thanks so much. Modest opinion or estimate of one's own importance, rank, et cetera. That's fine.
Emily: Yeah.
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: And it also, it reminds me of a concept in linguistics of the idea in conversation of face. So, face is your, your positive self image, basically. So we can see that in, in terms like saving face. And I think humility and humiliation maybe can sort of fit into that framework.
Humiliation is having your positive face attacked by someone else. Whereas humility, you're doing internal work to preserve that positive face.
Lauren: Oh I like that.
Emily: Yeah. And that's, that's not a great explanation because I hadn't thought of it before this moment or I would have prepared something to say, but yeah, that, that might be a better framework to think of. [00:32:00] As your, your sense of self and your sense of your place in the world and how you buoy that up internally versus what others impose on you.
Lauren: Yeah. I went down the rabbit hole. If you go to humble instead of humility, then it gets you like not proud or arrogant and modest, but then the second one is having a feeling of insignificance, inferiority, subservience, et cetera.
So we're kind of right.
Emily: Yeah. There's, there's levels.
Lauren: There's levels to it.
Emily: There's layers. Like an onion.
Lauren: Right. It's like Shrek. And then modest, I feel like is the, the quality that we're really getting at, where it's having or showing a moderate or humble again, estimate of one's merits importance.
But then the, the real thing is like free from vanity, egotism, boastfulness or great potential.
Emily: Yeah, so I think humility definitely encompasses a little more than just modesty does, but modesty I think is a really good starting point for that, especially in the specific context that we're looking at it here.
Lauren: Right.
Emily: Yeah. So I think that that about covers the thoughts that I had wanted to discuss. Is there anything that you wanted to bring up as well?
Lauren: No, I think as far as like what's in the text. I think that touched on all of my notes. I have my pop culture connection, but I don't think I have anything more for like things that purely live in the book.
Yeah.
Emily: Yeah. Awesome. Well, I think. That was great. I think we really touched on like all of the levels and all the expressions of humility and its various forms. Went to the dictionary, you know?
Lauren: Wow. Look what rest does for us. It's like we can form coherent thoughts when we haven't had to be at a hundred all the time.
Incredible. I don't know who could have predicted this outcome.
Pop Culture Connection: The Humble Celeb
Emily: I don't know. That's it's amazing. I mean, no one has ever had this revelation before. Speaking of revelations that people may not have had before. What's our pop culture connection? This is always, I'm always so [00:34:00] excited to get to this part because I want to know what Lauren's put together.
Lauren: So I have been thinking a lot about celebrity culture because we just had the Met Gala. We just had the VMAs, it's been New York fashion week. And so there's been lots of opportunities for celebrities to be in our face. And our TV screens, or on our phone screens, more likely.
And I was thinking about how humility does or doesn't come into play when it comes to celebrity culture, especially because I feel like in like the 2010s, especially, we saw like the rise of the relatable celebrity. So people like Jennifer Lawrence, especially in like 2012 to 2013, Jennifer Lawrence, where she was like the cool girl who just stumbled onto a red carpet and happened to be in the hunger games.
Especially-- we reference Tumblr a lot on this podcast-- but especially if you were on Tumblr in 2012, there were a lot of people who were like, wow, somebody from Tumblr just escaped and happened to make it as an actress.
Emily: She eats pizza, she's just like us.
Lauren: She's just like us. She's a cool girl. People like Jennifer Lawrence, Anna Kendrick, all of those celebrities whose main thing is, I'm just like you, except I'm not, but I'm going to try and downplay all the ways in which my life is very much not like yours because I want to be cool and relatable and have like that false sense of humility. By trying to overly relate to people who are just leading completely different lives than them.
You know, I think it was, there was a shift in there in that it was no longer as desirable to be the kind of like unattainable celebrity that we saw in years past where like the whole point was that you can't attain that level of wealth. You can't be that glamorous. You can't be whatever, it was like that aspirational kind of thing. And I think because we had social media where there was kind of a breakdown between celebrities feeling far away and unattainable, there was all this new pressure to then also be relatable.
We also found out that a lot of celebrities have nothing to say. [00:36:00] They should not have social media profiles. No, seriously. Air between those ears.
Emily: Head empty, really just a pretty face.
Lauren: Truly their publicist should not let them speak. But thinking about like, if you show your wealth and the things that directly set you apart. So if you decide I'm not going to be humble, I'm going to show all the things that I have attained in my life. So like custom couture for the met gala, for example, or, you know, going live on Instagram and being like, Hey, this is one of my kitchens in my giant LA mansion, you know, like little things that let people know that they're not as similar as they perhaps have claimed to be, it has to be with like this fake humility, if they do do that.
And they have to kind of be like bashful and surprise, like, "oh, this house, I don't even know how I found myself in it." Like, yes you do. Why are we pretending? It's a very odd balancing act that they do between appearing humble enough to still be relatable to the audience that they're trying to reach through Instagram or Twitter or whatever, their social media of choice is, but also still kind of keeping that level of aspiration that always comes with celebrity because honestly, that's part of the fun of celebrities is that we want to watch people have lives that aren't like ours.
I don't want you to be relatable. I have my life already.
Emily: I want to watch you in your infinity pool.
Lauren: I want to watch MTV cribs. I don't need you to be, if I wanted to see your relatable house, I would just go to my friends' houses. Like I don't need to watch TV for that. And also, I should say, not included in this are the people who have like built their reputation off of being ostentatious.
It's like the Kardashians do not count their whole point is like that traditional unattainable celebrity. Or like rappers whose point is showing off wealth, because that's part of the whole shtick that they have going on, where they can't be...
Emily: if you were relatable, you would lose everything that makes you [00:38:00] a celebrity.
Lauren: There's nothing there anymore. You have to show off the Lambo and like whatever. And a big place where we see this relate-ability kind of fall apart is with social media stars, especially. Who often are relatable when they start off, because they truly start off as normal people. But then as their platform gets bigger and as they gain more fame and celebrity, their lives slowly become less relatable.
And so their content suffers because they don't know what to say because they're struggling to appear relatable. It's a lot harder to relate to like somebody in Nebraska, when you've moved to LA and you're like hanging out at the VMAs red carpet, there's really nothing for you to talk about.
But I say all that to say, to preface where I think our Pride and Prejudice characters were to fall on that relatable celebrity scale, where they would be.
So thinking about our favorite narcissists, who we were talking about. So lady Catherine, I think, would be the unattainable wealth club. She has no humility whatsoever.
Emily: She's a Kardashian.
Lauren: She is. But like a classy one. She would be like how Americans idolize the Royal family kind of wealth because of who she is like status wise.
And because part of her unattainability is because of her class specifically. I think she would cling to that a lot more about why she's better than everyone. And it's that kind of wealth that you're born into. That's like an exclusive club that I think we see with how America. Like to follow, like the British Royal family.
We don't actually want to have any Royals because we, we literally fought a whole war.
Emily: Maybe not the actual Royal family, but like the super old money.
Lauren: Yes.
Emily: Like the Rockefellers.
Lauren: Yeah. That's a better comparison. Like the blue blood kind of celebrity where--
Emily: but still indulging in some good old ostentation.
Lauren: Exactly. Thank you.
Emily: That's because the Royals also like to do the sort of like [00:40:00] toned down, you know, that, that kind of thing where they're not really trying to be relatable, but also they want to have. That sort of proper image.
Lauren: If people realize how much wealth they actually have, they're all gonna revolt.
So you--
Emily: right--
Lauren: --have to downplay it. My other person who I put into celebrity culture was Lydia. Lydia would be the relatable YouTuber who then gets really big and wants to flex the Gucci and show everybody all the luxury items that she purchased. She would be doing like luxury hauls And showing people, all the stuff that she bought, just because she could.
Emily: Absolutely.
Lauren: She would basically be Tana Mongeau. Do you know who that is?
Emily: Yes. I was going to say Jeffree Star and I feel like they are similar.
Lauren: Yes. I think Tana is like same level of wild child as Lydia is, which is why I see the two of them as like good comparisons, I think, especially because Tana was the one who started off, I was like, I'm just going to like vlog in my bedroom.
And then managed to get herself like an MTV show and a super publicized fake wedding and all this stuff, or a real wedding that didn't la-- who knows.
Emily: I certainly don't know.
Lauren: Right. But--
Emily: I know who she is, but that's, it.
Lauren: The flash and the glitz and the glam and the--
Emily: the unapologetic-ness?
Lauren: Yes, the absolutely unapologeticness I think would be Lydia in celebrity culture 100%.
Emily: Don't hate me just because I'm successful.
Lauren: Yeah. And then the one wildcard who I threw in is I think that Bingley would be like a Shawn Mendes relatable celebrity. The one who's like genuinely kind, but still has a little bit of the element of like, I still recognize that I'm different than all of you, but I'm so nice and charming that you just forgive me for it. And it's fine.
Emily: Yeah.
Lauren: But yes, TLDR is that I think celebrity culture has been affected by this fake humility that most of them have had to put on. And it's interesting seeing the difference between the celebrities who decide to ignore that completely and just lean into how much [00:42:00] different their lives are from like the average Joe, and then the really delicate balancing act of the celebrities who are trying to relate to their audience and share things about their lives without giving away too much that then makes them seem completely unrelatable, even though they are.
Emily: It's interesting. They, they really have to rely on these micro instances to maintain that sense of relate-ability. It has to be like, oh, I eat potato chips too, too, haha, or I watch trash TV ignoring, you know, all of the systemic factors that affect how they engage with those kinds of things.
Lauren: And I think they rely on a lot of those parasocial relationships too, where, especially with people who cultivate like really passionate fan bases. Like it is fascinating to me that people feel as though, like Taylor Swift is their bestie. You know, and she's cultivated that really well in that like she'll interact with fans sparingly on social media then like genuinely tries to like, build that kind of trust in her fan base and tries to build as much of a relationship as possible as you can with literal millions of people.
But sometimes I think the way people talk about like their relationships with Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande's like, oh, we're besties. They don't know you exist.
Emily: You don't actually know who they are behind their very heavily PR'd persona.
Lauren: Yeah. Anyway, but I think celebrities rely on pair of social relationships to partially do the work of appearing humble because people will do the work for you in their heads because they think that you're friends.
Emily: Yeah. Because we want the people we admire to share the values that we hold ourselves. And of course we always want to believe that we extol our preferred virtues. So if you want to see yourself as humble, and you also want to believe that Taylor Swift is your bestie, then you want to [00:44:00] believe that Taylor swift is also humble.
Lauren: Yeah. I mean, just like Elizabeth was doing all the work for Wickham in her head about making him virtuous and wonderful. He didn't, he didn't have to, he just had to plant the seed and then she did the rest. Because his actual actions were not corresponding to the picture that she had in her head, but it didn't matter.
Emily: Because we do so much projecting as humans. Yep. Trying to create connections.
Lauren: Oh, that is me on my soapbox. That's all I got.
Final Takeaways
Emily: I think that's a good transition into our, our wind down. So Lauren, did you have a final takeaway from this section that you'd like to share with us?
Lauren: My final takeaway is that you have to find a healthy balance between humility and not putting yourself down too much, like not veering into vanity per se, but having enough self-worth and self-confidence to like, know yourself and who you are as a person, but enough humility to be able to admit when you're wrong, to be able to realize that your perception or your first thought might not have been the correct one, or even how everybody else sees it. Like trying to find that balance is important just for yourself, really, because having too much of either only hurts your relationships with other people and hurts you too.
Emily: You've got to find the middle ground between Jane and Lydia.
Lauren: Yeah. I was like, I feel like that's a cop out answer, but that's my takeaway. That's my cop out. What about you? What's your final takeaway?
Emily: Playing off of what you've said about parasociality, I think my final takeaway is about how challenging it is to make yourself aware of the ways that our own desires fill in missing information. So yeah, Lizzie was mildly offended by the way Darcy wasn't super friendly to her the first time they met. And [00:46:00] so she just projected onto him that he must hate me. So I'm going to hate him.
Lauren: Being aware when you're projecting.
Emily: Yes. Yes. And how impossible that can be sometimes if your assumptions are not directly confronted. Fortunately for Lizzie and her character development, she has been directly confronted.
Lauren: And now she can grow into the person she was always meant to be.
Emily: Yay, we're so proud of her.
Lauren: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Reclaiming Jane. Next time we'll look at chapters 41 through 45 of Pride and Prejudice through the lens of truth.
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, 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.
Emily: He was a skater boy. She said, see you later, boy.
Lauren: Why does that song kind of work?
Emily: I don't know!
Lauren: When you would reverse like the, the stuck up girl and the trampy guy.
Emily: She was a skater boy. He said, see you later boy? I had that stuck in my head the other day. And now I can't remember if it was before or after I read the section, but it was, it was appropriate.
Lauren: Yeah. A little bit of manipulation, but it could work.
Emily: Yeah. Thanks, Avril.